Stanzas certainly give a poem the look of a poem. The shape should not matter, not much, but I always care about the shape of a poem, the way that it looks on the page, or in this case the screen.

Stanzas don’t make a poem a poem, but they certainly help, slowing the poem down, giving it structure and balance and affecting the way the reader hears the poem.

I layout all of my poems in Adobe InDesign, which gives me so much control over this appearance. The font is Adobe Jenson Pro. I’ve tried using other fonts and simply can’t stand how they look.

I messed around with HTML and formatting text on the webpage before deciding that the best answer was simply to make each poem an image, in this case a png file at what WordPress calls “full size”. If you are on a phone and you turn your phone sideways the image fills the screen horizontally, making the text larger.

Using an image instead of text changes the way that a bot reads my page. At this point, such bots don’t realize that it is text–they simply see that my pages have two pictures and few words on them.

That probably affects the traffic that gets directed to my poems from outside the world of WordPress. Which is fine with me right now–I am still experimenting with this format, getting to know what it feels like to send poems out into the world before they probably are publication ready.

That isn’t to say I don’t think they are ready–I wouldn’t post a poem if I wasn’t content with it. But I imagine that a poet grinds over words and breaks and lots of other details before they are willing to send a poem into a publisher to consider.

But maybe not. That’s the part of this world of poetry I have not explored in the past year and a half since I started this blog.

It is time though. I’ve done it before with some success in small presses. I am serious about writing poetry and am calling myself a poet. I need to take that next step.

As for this poem, Mrs. Bales was one of three teachers who turned me into a writer back in the early 1980’s when I was in high school in North Manchester, Indiana. Mrs. Bales, Mr. Gilbert and Mrs. Sponseller helped me want to write better, to care about the words that I used and how they fit together.

Now that I am retired from teaching I am even more amazed at the effect they had on the life that I live now.

Poetry gives me a way to express my appreciation for Mrs. Bales here in this poem that doesn’t, I hope, come across as sentimental.

I imagine what I might write in a card, “Thank you for all the time you spent with me and the joy you brought to the classroom everyday.”

Such cards are important and the thoughts they express are consequential and meaningful, but poetry can add nuance and depth, implying the appreciation and shining a light on the substance of that time for me.

I love the word lambent here, and while one word probably can’t make or break a poem, I feel like this one does. I spent the most time on that last stanza here, trying to connect the way Mrs. Bales guided me with the way the flashlight illuminates the woods at night.

And the word lambent showed up, changing the feeling of where the poem was drifting, grounding it, helping me tie down the metaphor from the start of the poem to the end, making it appear that I knew all along where the poem was headed.

Which I did not. Mrs. Bales showed up and I thought, “Well, hello, Jane. It’s good to talk to you again.”

And then, revising the poem this morning after writing it last night, I changed the last line from “as lambent as the patient trees” to “as lambent as the painted trees”. I think Mrs. Bales helped me see that. Both are meaningful. Both have the correct sound for the space.

But painted fits the grand metaphor of the poem while patient suggests something about the woods and the trees that I had not addressed in the poem in a significant way.

Painted also ties the imagery of a battlefield to the way soldiers can “paint” targets with lasers and also ties into the imagery of the moon dumping sun over the trees, as if sun was liquid and could be poured.

There is certainly more that can be tightened here–that plane shows up out of nowhere. The way I move back and forth between offering my work to Mrs. Bales for critique could be punctuated differently. I looked at different ways and am happy with this for now.

But there is always the opportunity for growth, especially for a poem that is actually a picture and is a mouse click away from silent revision, photons flashing down the fiber that connects my quiet house here in the woods to the universe.