I have been playing around with writing short poems that create whole worlds, a la Jean Valentine. This is a longer one of the short poems. Is there enough here?
GRACKLE
shining eye at my
this gratitude.
hoist it onto my back
one more day.
a woman walks
the hem
dusty and frayed
her husband, safe at home
eggplants at the market
further
and find it, nested
not dead and empty
but pulsing within
of bringing forth.
al-hamdu lillah (Arabic: الحَمْدُ ِلله' ) means "Praise be to God", sometimes translated as "Thank God!
Go Jean Valentine! I completely support that impulse, Claire :). And this poem does have a whole world in it. I love its compression and the leaps it makes from one section to the next. I definitely think there's enough here, and that the sections all speak to each other - they feel like parts of the whole. I thought of some suggestions, and here they are in no particular order; feel free to ignore any or all of them. In the first section, "gratitude" feels like such a heavy word - like it's informing the reader what the poem's about - I wonder about leaving it out. I'm guessing the poem would still feel as if it's about gratitude (among other things) - but it would leave some more space for the reader to make that discovery. In the second section, I love and am moved by the specifics: the Arabic phrase, the husband at home, the eggplant, the hem of the garment that is her life. There are a few places where the description feels more generalized: "war's hungry streets" (why not name the country?) and "ball-and-chain life" (again, a bit general - we don't know any specifics about these hardships, though we do know why she praises God - plus I love the dusty and frayed hem, which calls up a clear image in my mind). The third section to me is the least specific, and it was the hardest for me as a reader to enter. Is the day, which people tend to think of as dead once it's over, being compared to a star (pulsing and on the verge of bringing forth new life)? Should I understand the stanza as suggesting that the day, even when it's done, continues somehow into the next day and the next? The night sky imagery is lovely but feels not as sharp as the images in the first and second sections. I so much appreciate the delicacy of thought and feeling and image in this poem.
ReplyDeleteClaire, I love this direction that you're taking!I agree with much of what Kasey has noted. The first two sections are the strongest... the word 'gratitude' does take away from the mystery that your poem is alluding to in the last section. I actually like the combination of 'ball and chain life' and 'dusty and frayed' because it makes me imagine some sort of heavy desert dress, that is hobbling her. I do very much like the first line of this section- 'Hours ahead of here,' but it's true that 'war's hungry streets' while condensed, is almost too cursory for the true horrors that the poem is drawing our attention to. As for the last section, I feel that some sort of metaphor having to do with bird life could be substituted for ' verge/of bringing forth.' You are already suggesting this with the word 'nest,' so you're already moving in this direction. Thank you for this poem, Claire!
ReplyDeleteHi Claire, I agree that this poem/these sections are working really well. I have a very personal reaction (don't we always?) to these poems in that I find the image-driven moments to be the strongest. My favorite line is: "eggplants at the market." I'm able to conjure both a scene and an image, which I love. The phrases like "ball and chain life" seem a little bit more general to me and perhaps less tied to a particular mode of seeing? I wonder if instead of distilling these lines only into image, if you might play images off of equally specific statements (i.e. not ones that one often hears). Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteThank you all for your helpful comments! I agree, particularly about the word "gratitude" and the third section. I am letting things marinate and hope to revise at some point soon!!
ReplyDeleteChiming in here to agree with much of what has been said. I actually didn't mind "gratitude," and I struggled with the juxtaposition of "ball and chain" and "dusty and frayed," just because the visuals were hard for me to reconcile. I really love the idea that I think is being explored in the third stanza, or really the whole poem - following a single day as it zooms around the earth, and what happens to it after it leaves where we are. Beautiful thought and great subject for a poem. Though I generally agree that there is a little less sharpness in the third stanza, I love how it picks up on the day, the speaker's day and her imagination of its pasts and futures.
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