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Five paragraph essay for Public School Poetry

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What a pleasure it is to encounter new poetry! It gives one a jolt of pleasure—a new voice, a fresh tone, possible new shapes of poems on the page, fresh syntax to listen to, and leaps and juxtapositions not encountered in the same way in the past. Let me begin with something perhaps mundane: Titles. I love the opportunities titles pose for reader and writer alike. Teaching creative writing over some thirty years, I was always surprised when students told me they skipped right over titles and didn’t read them. Whaaaatttt? How can you not read them? There it is and it’s the first thing you see. To me, titles are a great opportunity for a hook to grab the reader and pull her or him into reading the poem. And it’s also a way to signal a stance toward the world. I find the three titles here to be large, first of all, and they signal to me a boldness of vision that’s appealing. Good work, I want to say right off. Good going!

 

Diction is immediately another way of signaling to the reader what kind of world we’re entering with poems new to us. Is it a recognizable world? Is it a pop culture world of television and game shows, songs on the radio? Is it a more intellectual world with allusions and references I may need to look up? Perhaps it’s somewhere in between these worlds. I love moving, in the poem “Extraordinary Measures” between a memory-care faculty and a peach farm. I love the matter-of-factness of potato eaters and lists of vegetation: “the wild home of horseweed, / bee balm, bees, unpoisoned, / overwintering in brittle stems.” I feel located and drawn in, and I recognize some of these problems: bees getting poisoned, brittleness (of winter, of spirit?). Then a simple 'I' statement pops up: “I sit beside my mother lying / in her bed. In lucid days, she said / she wanted no extraordinary measures / taken when the times comes.”

 

Syntax/confidence/surprise. Why do we read poems? Readers are seeking something: nourishment, peace, clarification, or maybe Robert Frost’s “momentary stay against confusion.” We also hunger for surprise and being taken on a journey we didn’t expect and are not sure where it’ll end. Lovely here, then, that the speaker is suddenly reading Middle English to the mother from Canterbury Tales. I’m caught off guard, I’m intrigued, and as a reader I lean in: I want to be read to also. Somehow the reader has become the patient/the mother/the one being read to. And what’s the story? A dark wood, it seems, a world of goddesses and beasts and brides. The world was full or the world fell. And we with it, in fear. The mother/ the listener is listening, and even smiles. Yes, she says, read it again. She is comforted, oddly enough, as are we—with this old story, this comforting tale, It had just been autumn, the fall. The cycle is the normal one. The circle comes around again. Life, death. We rest easy, closing our eyes.

 

The second poem has a long, intriguing title: “A Part of Me Still Thinks That Koans Are Conundrums To Be Solved.” Again, see what a title can set up for a poem?. Instant tension, perhaps. Are koans NOT conundrums to be solved? What ARE koans? Attentive readers know that a koan is an object for meditation for novices in the Zen discipline. The poem’s title has signaled a meditative poem and the poem’s organic shape encourages us along that path. From “imitation-leather pants” we move to thinking about spiders, whether or not there is always one within range of us, ten feet or so. How odd and how weird is that? But as readers, we’re on for the ride. Sometimes as readers, it helps to do a little research. I looked up the fire sermon and some of its lessons about the tongue. The tongue as an image calls for examination and reflection of one’s speech and language. The tongue can be dangerous, flickering and wavering, fomenting wild speech. Here the poet finds liberation, not estrangement. The poem celebrates the “pilot light” with passion. It’s not fading, the passion, the intensity: it stays.

 

Lastly, the longest poem of the group, “The Hero’s Journey” with its nod, of course, to writer and mythologist Joseph Campbell, shows what I would call range. This poem has a wide scope and takes in a lot of the world. Within that range are various leaps and juxtapositions that keep a reader, this reader, alert and on edge. What will happen next? Prepare to be surprised when reading this writer’s work. We start with Joseph Campbell and a tale of a young man, an elephant, a near collision—but we end up in a backyard with a possible bird virus and a possibly ill grackle. By the end, the writer ties things together, not in a neat package (or I should say “overneat”) but in an enlargement of what the poem has traversed. Maybe cleaning and disinfecting bird feeders is enough, for now, for today. A momentary stay against confusion, against suffering, the merest enlightenment—but also enough.

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