A man lies under a car half bare
a child plays bullfight with a torn cloth
hemlocks grieve in wraps of mist
a woman talks on the phone, looks in a mirror
fiddling with the metal pull of a drawer
She has seen her world wiped clean, the cloth
that wiped it disintegrate in mist
or dying breath on the skin of a mirror
She has felt her life close like a drawer
has awoken somewhere else, bare
He feels his skin as if it were mist
as if his face would show in no mirror
He needs some bolts he left in a vanished drawer
crawls out into the hemlocked world with his bare
hands, wipes his wrench on an oil-soaked cloth
stares at the woman talking into a mirror
who has shut the phone into the drawer
while over and over with a torn cloth
at the edge of hemlocks behind the bare
motel a child taunts a horned beast made from mist
Adrienne Rich will be at McNally Robinson here in New York on 9/26 to promote her new book "Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth.
If you're anywhere near NYC that night, you'd be crazy to miss it. If you're not in NYC, here's the link to Powells to buy it, or better yet, ask your library to buy a copy.
If you write novels, it's my fervent belief you should read poems.
I believe poems are the most elegant form of writing and teach us a lot about evocative language and images.
I read this poem "Behind the Motel" tonight coming home from a cocktail party. It took me a couple minutes to realize the pattern. Can you see it?
I started counting syllables and saying the words aloud.
That remains one of the most effective ways to clear space in a crowded subway car, second only to declaiming the gospel, preferably in tongues.
Adrienne Rich....amazing poetry AND crowd control.
6 comments:
"... the most elegant form of writing and teach us a lot about evocative language and images."
*pouts!* Just don't write with any of that elegant, evocative language or describe too many images because it will turn your prose purple, and the chance of ever getting the story published reduced to less than zero.
It's a sestina, with five lines instead of six! (Or maybe there's a different name for a poem like this one?)
Beyond that, though, it's a fantastic poem. I like how the focus kind of twists the way it does, from the child to the trees to the woman to the man and back again. I'm excited to know there's a new Rich book coming out.
The trick (IMO) is not to mimic a poetic style in your prose, but to pay attention to the moments, the details, that poetry focuses on. That's where prose is enriched and the writing comes alive--in the details, the observations of the characters, in whatever style or genre the author happens to write in.
Absolutely brilliant. What floors me is how it's not an empty exercise of words...each stanza repeats the ending words (bare, cloth, mist, mirror, drawer) but does so to build feeling and atmosphere. Wonderful!
Roses are red;
Violets are blue;
Pixies like poems,
And so should you.
This is very, very clever.
I'm just now starting to read poetry. My favorite poet so far is John Claire. His poem "I Am" is the most beautiful I've seen. I could have loved him, (sigh)....
I hate to post twice. But I had this on my blog last month, so it was an easy retrieval:
I Am by John Clare
I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am, and live with shadows tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest - that I loved the best -
Are strange - nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never trod,
A place where woman never smiled or wept;
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below - above the vaulted sky.
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