Poetry and Silence

Dear Friends, It’s the last day of Poetry Month!

When I was a young person, I wrote a lot of poetry. The first couple of years that I lived in New York, I wrote a ton. Everything was new to me and I looked for a way to process it. Having a job I could walk away from every day at 5:30 was a help.

I grew up with the language of poetry. My mother was a poet, and my father, an English professor, taught poetry, among other things.

I can’t remember when exactly I stopped writing poetry. I think it may have been a time when I was working full-time, as well as at a couple of part-time gigs to pay the rent, and I thought “something has got to go.” But that didn’t mean my brain stopped “thinking in poetry,” if you know what I mean? 

Poetry and Fiction

In recent years, I’ve turned to writing fiction, which I’ve found challenging. A poem is generally short, and you can do a bit of revision and be pleased with the final result. An 80,000-word novel is a different animal, and it seems it can be infinitely rewritten. With a poem, I used to discard or finish a poem, and then write another with the same theme.

Using some of the elements of poetry when writing fiction can be helpful, especially if you write in a “literary” style. I learned a bit about this secret prose sauce from Libbie Grant two years ago, when I attended her “How to Write a Bestseller” class at Historical Novel Society’s conference in San Antonio.

I recently dug up my “poetry folder” and found that, oddly, I pretty much could recite from memory many of the poems I’d written. And I recalled the satisfaction of repeating phrases in my head, phrases that I particularly liked, for example, “when the day stretches to a bottle that holds the little ship fast.” I’m not even sure what I was thinking of when I wrote this, but the imagery still resonates with me.

Silence

Of course, silence is helpful in writing poetry. I repeated my smartphone fast again this year, with many of the same results. You can read about my past fast here. The last week in Lent, I attempt to put my phone completely aside (alas, I am still online on my laptop, though not on social media!)

I find there is so much digital clutter in our daily lives that it’s easy not to think in metaphor, or simile, or iambic pentameter, or haiku. And even as a young person, I was often listening to music on my trusty Walkman. Music continues to be a distraction for me.

Traffic Light

I’ve recently been thinking about an old poem of mine, “Traffic Light.” I wrote it at a time long before smartphones and it described my impatience and distraction whenever I had to wait for the light to change in NYC so I could cross the street. While I had recalled the first couple of lines recently, my older self hardly recognizes, or even understands the rest of the poem. Anyway, here goes…

Traffic Light

There is a moment
When you can’t go in either direction.

You must pull a memory from the sidewalk
To place in front of your eyes,
To pass the time.

Your hand goes fluttering,
Pushing the others away.

You cannot dream with the old wishes
Of toy fortune scrolls
But of superb mountains
Divine trees:
My decorations for city life.

And you know the pine needle you once chewed on
Has become a part of your arm.
You see a bit of dirt on your pant cuff:
This part of your life has not died
You continue to give it birth.

Pausing,
Thinking in chilly rain,
Waiting above a stream grate.

Well, I might revise this if I were writing now, at least the muddy middle. But I am keeping these poems in my personal archive because they are a snapshot of the person I was, and I still love some of the imagery. Once I’ve sorted through my poetry a bit more, I might post a couple on my website. For now, discovering my old poetry has been an enjoyable journey back to my past writing days.

Have you written any poetry lately? Let me know! I confess to not reading much modern poetry, unless it’s by someone I know.

Happy Spring, Kate