Zombies and Unicorns: Talking about Poetry
I’ve been fully vaccinated for about six weeks and I’ve made a kind of re-entry resolution for myself: to stop hedging around the question “so what do you do?”
In pre-Covid times, I often answered this question with “I’m a grad student” (I was back then; defending my PhD was one of my last in-person gatherings) or “I teach the first-year composition class at the university”. These were true answers, but they were also ways to avoid the little pause that tends to follow the statement “I’m a poet”. They were attempts to keep the rug and trap door securely in place over the wild creative void, to keep the conversation safely in the realm of small talk. Kind of silly, because I don’t particularly like small talk. But I also don’t like stirring things up or putting myself on the spot.
And saying the words, “I’m a poet and I teach creative writing” is like walking through the door with a unicorn. People react.
Some people react with “oh cool, what do you write about?” They are usually surprised when I say “submarines, time machines, telegraphs, and automobiles”, rather than “wildflowers and moonbeams”. But then we can have an interesting conversation about how I like to use poetry to ask big questions about how we live with technology, and about how poetry can be haunting as well as delightful. My unicorn is not all stardust and sparkles. It has sharp teeth. Sometimes it wants to eat your cellphone.
Other people react with “I don’t get poetry”. Or “poetry isn’t my thing”. Sometimes they say this resentfully. More often they say it wistfully, like what they really mean is “I wish I got poetry” (sometimes they even tell me how they struggled with “themes and metaphors and stuff” in high school English).
The truly resentful don’t like poetry because it can’t really be quantified and it isn’t exactly an MVP in our capitalist economy; they suspect poetry is full of uncertainty and deep feelings and they want nothing to do with it. There’s not much I can say to them except, “okay, I guess we view the world differently.” They don’t want to meet unicorns.
But the wistful break my heart a little. I think they know on some level that poetry would enrich their lives, but they feel cut off from the possibilities of playing with words or taking pleasure in sounds and images. Having learned to succeed in the world of standardized tests and business memos, they’ve stopped knowing themselves as creative beings. (Most kids don’t even have to think of themselves as creative, they simply imagine and create as modes of experiencing the world.) Maybe they had to write a thematic analysis paper in high school and picked up the idea that there is some correct method for understanding a poem—and the fear of ‘getting it wrong’ has gotten in the way of their ability to enjoy reading one. Maybe they find it a little scary to abandon the marked trail of logic and commonsense, even though they sense that great discoveries (maybe even their own unicorn) wait elsewhere in the woods. Whether a school-system or a workplace has slammed the door shut or whether they’ve shut it themselves, they’ve decided that the door to poetry is closed to them.
It isn’t locked though. As language-wielding animals, all of us ‘get’ poetry. We all have the capacity to play with words, to feel our way toward meaning or to speak our way toward feeling. In some ways, the pandemic has cracked the door by giving everyone a heaping dose of uncertainty and a mixed bag of emotions, forcing us to slow down and sit with all it. A lot of people have realized they want to make a little more space in their lives for joy and contemplation and creativity—all things that poetry can bring us, whether we are reading it or writing it.
So, in this moment of collective rediscovery, I’m not ducking the question “what do you do?”. When I meet new people, I’m introducing myself as a real live poet (and poetry coach) and starting conversations about poems, because I believe that poetry is for everyone, that everyone can get something out of poetry. I’m engaging this way because I want to live in a world with more words and more voices. (Also, this way I get to meet other people’s music and dance and photography unicorns.)
I’m trying to open the door wide for people who feel unsure about this whole poetry thing and for people who want to live a little more creatively. I’m trying to let in all the unicorns. I’m inviting people to try new poems (in case the Shakespeare they read in high school just wasn’t their favorite poetry flavor) and to try reading them aloud. I’m sharing poems I love, poems that remind me what poetry is for, and poems that might expand our ideas about what a poem is supposed to say.
Here are three poems that I’ve been sharing lately as invitations to the world of poetry:
Burlee Vang’s “To Live in the Zombie Apocalypse” (some poems double as survival guides)
Ada Limón’s “How to Triumph Like a Girl” (if I could time travel, I would go back and tape a copy in my high school locker)
January Gill O’Neill’s “How to Love” (for me, this one speaks powerfully to 2021, to the tenderness and challenge of relearning trust)
This is obviously a short list. I’d love to hear your favorite poetry recommendations—your old standbys and the ones you find yourself reaching for in this strange new moment.
Want my posts sent to your inbox? Sign up here.
Playing Your Cards
“Play the hand you’ve been dealt.”
I heard this one often while earning my MFA; it was one of Mike Madonick’s informal laws for the writing life, something he said at the beginning or end of workshop. It was one of those sayings that made us nod attentively—the way grad students do when they don’t want to admit that they aren’t sure what something means.
After a while, I began to understand it as a reminder to write from my own life, from the life I was actually living (with its routine errands and embarrassing mistakes), not from some hypothetically more interesting and writerly life that I wished to be living.
“Yes,” he said, when I was rear-ended and wrote a poem about it, “play the hand you’re dealt.” He nodded again when I brought in a poem about driving home alone and stopping at a four-way stop. The cards in my “hand” were whatever circumstances and experiences and lessons life threw at me, no matter how mundane or disruptive, and whatever words I could find for them.
I finished my MFA, moved to Utah, and completed my PhD, thinking that I understood this whole “play the hand you’ve been dealt” business. Then 2020 dealt us all a giant handful of wild cards. Last spring, I moved back in with my parents and wrote about how strange that felt. And I wrote about hand sanitizer and masks and social distancing and fear and uncertainty. Those were the cards I’d been dealt. But a lot of my writing felt stale and effortful at the time. It took me several weeks and a few games of cribbage to realize that I’d forgotten the most important word in the rule: “play”.
Cribbage is, it so happens, a great game for poets. Winning takes a balance of skill and luck. The math isn’t too complicated (you earn points through combinations of cards that add up to 15, through pairs, and through runs) and you get to use rhymes like “fifteen-four and say no more” as you count your cards. Like a poem, a hand of cribbage has a bit of ritual and surprise baked in; one person cuts the deck and the other turns the card over—if the card is a jack, the one who turns it over earns two points. For me, the game is also full of family history because my dad and I play on a board made to commemorate my grandfather’s 29 hand (the cribbage equivalent of a hole-in-one), which he achieved at age 93.
The whole give and take, call and response, nature of the game feeds my poet brain. What I really love about cribbage, though, and what really makes a round of cribbage like a poem, is that it requires me to pay two different kinds of attention in close sequence. First, I have to look at the six cards I’ve been dealt and decide which four I want to keep and which two I want to discard into crib (the extra hand that goes to the dealer). This process is like discerning what goes into the poem—which events and feelings I need to write about and how they are related; four-way stop + rain + windshield wipers à slow and careful loneliness, I might think to give myself a general direction as I sit down to write.
Second, as soon as the deck has been cut and the fifth card that will contribute to both players’ hands has been revealed, I have to immediately set aside any and all calculation about how many points my hand might contain in order to focus on pegging. During pegging, players take turns laying down their cards and adding them to a running tally; you can earn points by hitting 15 or 31, or by pairing your opponent’s card, or by creating a run of three or four cards. To peg well, I have to let go of what I think my hand adds up to and pay attention to each card as it lands on the table. This is like the part of writing a poem where I have to let go of what I intend for the poem to say and focus instead on how the words and sounds are fitting together—I sometimes think of this as shifting from brain-thinking to ear-guessing. In both cases, I have a goal in mind (to write a poem or to score points), but to reach that goal I have to focus on the process as it unfolds and respond spontaneously. I can’t just count cards and call them a hand or string images together and call them a poem. I have to play. We all do, whatever we find in our hands.
Sign up here to get my posts delivered to your inbox.
How to Revise a Poem
some thoughts on chicken broth
My dad’s cooking is easily the best perk to sharing a pandemic pod with my parents. He makes pretty much everything from scratch—including his own broths and stocks. Like writing a poem, this is a process requiring labor and patience.
The other night, we had a roast chicken dinner and he called for me to “save everything—all the scraps” as I cleared the table. Then we got down the stock pot and threw in the chicken carcass. And all the bones. And all the scraps of skin and gristle. (Full disclosure: I snuck my dog a chunk of dark meat because she was doing the Big Eyes.) And then my dad flung open the fridge and grabbed a bunch of parsley. He threw it in the pot. Then he threw in some leftover vegetables from dinner. And some freshly peeled carrots. A few ribs of celery. A withered apple, some red grapes. Anything he thought might add to the flavor. We poured in water and let it all on an extra-low simmer overnight.
And this, more often than not, is how I start a poem. I throw a bunch of scraps onto the page: the blue jay outside my window, a wise and funny thing my sister says, a fact I hear on NPR, some joy, some dread, a decades-old memory. I work fast at this stage, grabbing any available sound or image that I sense will add to the flavor of the poem. And then I leave everything to sit for a few days.
The broth simmered for hours and hours. My dog and I twitched our noses every time we walk past. Dad lifted the lid and stirred every so often, or poked the bones and vegetables around.
I open my notebook from time to time and stir the draft around. I doodle around the edges. I underline any phrases that I think are part of the poem’s essence. And I cross out words that don’t fit. I write myself questions in the margins (for some reason this helps even when I never come up with an answer to the question).
When the broth is finished cooking, it is fragrant and golden—and full of bones and clumps of vegetable. It smells good, but doesn’t look edible. It has to be strained first. It gets poured through a colander, and then through a fine sieve. Once all the bones and vegetables and parsley leaves—which give the broth so much flavor in the first place, but also keep it from becoming pure liquid—are strained out, we have an elixir far better than anything poured from a can.
It takes me a long time to properly stain a poem. I think of typing the poem, or transferring it from notebook to laptop, as running it through a colander. I catch the big stuff that doesn’t belong to the poem then. But it takes me months of reading aloud, and tinkering (sometimes you have to add salt and pepper to broth too), and setting aside, and reading again, and deleting a word, and fidgeting with punctuation, to run a poem through my revision sieve. But the poem is always deeper for it.
Nothing that goes in the pot or on the page gets wasted, only transmuted. Even the words and lines we ultimately discard help to shape and season the poem.
Want to receive my posts by email? Sign up here.