I remembered!
Y’all, I have forgotten National Poetry month for like… mumble of the mumblemumble years I’ve worked with YeahWrite. You have no idea how excited I am that I remembered this year.
I thought about making this month a poetry free-for-all but then I remembered how many of us panic when faced with an infinite number of choices. So I’m narrowing your choices down. A lot. To thirteen.
It’s still a slam, though
We’re focusing on technique this year and April won’t be any different. This month’s featured poem takes a single subject and explores it in a prescribed number of ways. Thirteen, to be precise, if you can remember all the way back to the last full paragraph you read.
It’s Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, which is a subject near and dear to my heart because it’s spring where I am and the redwing blackbirds are all yelling “o-ka-leeeeee” at each other, which is blackbird for “hey girl heyyyy.” It’s not a long poem but it takes up a lot of space, so I’m going to drop it here behind one of those fancy expanding accordion things.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Copyright 1954 by Wallace Stevens.
So what’s the slam?
On a pure construction level, this poem is thirteen micropoems, each headed up by a roman numeral, and each containing the word “blackbird.”
So on a pure construction level, you should
- Write a poem in thirteen stanzas.
- Each stanza must be a complete micropoem of no more than 30 words each.
- Each stanza should start with a number or numeral, in order.
- And each stanza must contain (at least once) your chosen word.
Sounds easy, right? That’s why Thirteen Ways is one of the most commonly spoofed poems, right after those darn plums, which really are delicious, so sweet and so cold.
Let’s step it up
The reason that Thirteen Ways is such a successful poem isn’t that people love blackbirds. It’s that each stanza uses the blackbird image in a completely different way. Think about the difference between these stanzas:
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
In stanza II, the blackbird is a clear metaphor for the way decisions and images flit through the author’s mind. In stanza XII, however, the role of the blackbird is much less clear: it’s a harbinger of seasons, an indicator of something natural and external to the author and the author’s vision.
As you write your own poem, consider the shifting role of your chosen image. What does it mean in this stanza? What in that one?
If you’re feeling at a loss, you can try to duplicate what Stevens did in each stanza of Thirteen Ways. That is, if my chosen image was a bowl, I would write:
II
My mind was still
Like a table
On which a bowl sits, waiting
XII
The dog is seeking through the house;
The bowl must be empty
See how I’ve taken the general idea of each stanza and shaped it around my own image? You don’t have to duplicate Stevens exactly, but you can use him as a jumping-off point.
Ways you could mess this up
Sometimes when I write a prompt, I think about “how do I make this prompt bombproof?” That is, how do I write it so that writers responding give me what I’m asking for but not a few specific things I don’t want to see? This month, though, I think it makes more sense to talk about some obvious mistakes you might make in trying to explore this poem.
- Each stanza should stand alone. That means DON’T continue an idea or sentence between stanzas. Don’t. Just don’t. That’s a TS Eliot thing and I love Eliot and we’ll get to him later maybe, but not right now. If one of your stanzas got up and walked off, it should be able to get into a bar with its own ID as a complete poem. This poem is not 13 poems in a trenchcoat trying to get onto a rollercoaster. It’s 13 related individual complete poems.
- Pay attention to your line breaks. Don’t just hit enter wherever. Think about “It was snowing/and it was going to snow.” The line break in that sentence is just beautiful. It breaks up the ideas conceptually. Moving the line break would change the whole way you read that sentence. Make your line breaks IMPORTANT, you will be using a lot of them this month.
- Don’t be obvious all the time. Remember when we talked about unexpected metaphors? Here’s your chance to flex those muscles again. It’s fine if one or two or even half of your stanzas have easy, obvious metaphors. Or no metaphors at all. Sometimes the blackbird is just a blackbird. But sometimes it’s a mind, or a shadow, or “the edge/of one of many circles.”
OK, but about Poetry Month
Look, I don’t know who’s doing what this month, but I do know that a LOT of poets try to write a poem a day in April. So I tried to find something that’s going to stay fresh for you, that you could write again and again if you needed to, or fall back on if you were out of ideas one day. It’s pretty easy to use a random word generator to give you your seed word, if you need one.
What I’m saying is, the world’s hard enough right now without trying to break your brain writing a sestina or a villanelle. You’ve got this.
About the author:
Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.
