I have successfully posted on The Poet Projects nine days in a row now! Hooray for me!

I haven’t written a Vacillating Crudities blog in a long while so here are some thoughts on my recent poems. 

The Marla poems initially were going to be children’s poems, but then I went a different way. They don’t write themselves, but I don’t start out having any idea what Marla is going to do or in what twisted way they will wrap up. I have several more already written, varying from her parents buying her a chemistry set, the babysitter opening a box of Marla’s dreams, Marla’s Aunt Jessie visiting, and another with a battle between Marla and her second grade teacher. 

There is a bit of Matilda in the stories, especially the teacher battles, but they are actually rooted in my own second grade experience minus the dead souls. My own teacher was a wicked woman herself and the Marla poems are a way to explore that world and set some things right.

I am going to post the Marla poems on Mondays moving forward, calling that day, cleverly, “Marla Monday”.

The poem “The Poet” from yesterday, June 27th, came to me while I read Billy Collins’ book Sailing Alone Around the Room, which I often do in the morning. As I read Collins’ poems I sort of daydream and snippets of lines form in my head. When yesterday’s poem’s first line popped in my head I dropped the book and started writing. 

At no point did I expect to talk about a New Yorker cartoon nor to then create the cartoon mentioned in the poem. The idea of “the poet” sprouted from the poem I posted two days before, “Bitten”, in which a poet friend tries to give insight about what that last meaningful bite will be like, using the word, “numinous”. 

I like to think I know a lot of words, but numinous was not one of them. I found it on the bottom of the front cover of Billy Collins’ book, a review about the book from The New Yorker: “What Collins does best is turn an apparently simple phrase into a numinous moment.”

That word stuck in my head and there it appeared in the poem, a word a poet should know, a word with weight and precision. 

At the end of the poem though the author suggests that you “hand your poet friend a fall apple and tell her the better word is joyous”. Heavy words sometimes are too heavy.

And only as I read that quote did I realize that The New Yorker has been in my head since I saw that quote and then reappeared with the cartoon. That’s some detective work right there!

The poem “Planking” is full of my gym experience over the past four months. The conversation between the men about his wife not coming home actually happened in the locker room while the two men were showering. 

Part of the art of writing poetry about personal experiences is to distill the events and emotions and capture the parts that are poetic. Collins does this, allowing his poems to find a voice inside those moments. 

“Passengers” is a good example of this. The narrator explains at the start, “At the gate, I sit in a row of blue seats” which you realize in line four is the airport, “carry-on bags and paperbacks”. The narrator considers that this plane might crash and everyone might die, observing his fellow passengers in light of their possible mutual demise. 

My favorite lines here are in stanza 6: “when you consider the altitude,/the secret parts of the engines,/and all the hard water and the deep canyons below . . .” That’s it, isn’t it? A clear description of the plight of flying, the position of the plane in the air, the mysterious science that keeps the plane aloft, and the reality of the hard land below. So nice.

Every night I do chess puzzles right before I go to sleep. The chess app on my phone only allows me to do five puzzles for free, so that’s what I do. The app is unforgiving–when I make a poor decision, I lose points on my rating. At one point I was above 1850 and felt on top of the world. Now I’m less than 1700 and feel very mortal. 

The crossover from these puzzles to analyzing poetry is quite direct. With the puzzles, I can go into analysis mode and see what happens when I make different decisions, allowing me to experiment and immediately see why certain moves work and others don’t. I still lose the points, but I gain an incredible amount of insight.

With poetry, I can’t get the digital insight, but I can see the poem as moves that Collins made, contemplating alternate moves to see what happens. 

For instance, what if Collins said “deep water” instead of “hard water”? Of course the adjective for canyons would have to be changed, but “deep water” is more ominous to me, that the plane might end up at the bottom. Hard is more unexpected, though, and putting deep with canyons conjures a similar feeling but adds the slight disconnect. And we do have a concept of hard water, so it’s possible that Collins added a bit of the mundane to this stark reality.

My poem “Then” has more structure than many of my poems. The poem is about numbers, imagining going back to when humans didn’t use numbers and how we might think differently. For no formal reason, the line lengths of this poem are measured syllables, with three lines of three syllables, four lines of four syllables, etc. up to six of six, and then the last six lines counting down from six syllables to one.

The play was to contrast thinking of a world without numbers with a highly structured number pattern as the template for the poem. 

I didn’t want this to be too obvious, so I didn’t break up the poem into stanzas nor did I start with one and two syllable lines. It isn’t critical to the meaning and tone of the poem, and it’s fun to keep parts of the poem quiet, to let them work on their own, “the secret parts of the engines”.

And my work here is all about “daily experiments with form and effect” as it says at the top of each poem. So, I experiment.

As for the effect, it takes a long time for me to understand even my own poems, whether they work, what the meaning is versus what I meant it to be. My own engine is a secret to me.