Anchors
When you think of an anchor, what does that mean to you? Is it an object that holds you back, or one that keeps you grounded and safe? Can it be both? In this month’s technique-focused poetry slam we’re going to explore how time and place are used as anchors in poetry. Whether it’s keeping you locked in a memory or pulling you forward to a fixed point, using an anchor is a great way to get “unstuck” if you’ve been having trouble coming up with an idea for a poem.
Let’s read a few poems that have time/place anchors first, and then talk about finding your own.
Content warning – the following poems discuss systemic oppression and the midcentury civil rights movement of the USA. Although generally not explicit, they will evoke different things for different readers. Because poetry is, well, poetry, I couldn’t predict well enough what specific memories they might evoke for any given person, hence the general CW.
Miscegenation
Devouring the Light, 1968
After Martin Luther King Jr.
The day they killed Martin
we could not return to New York City
our visiting senior class stuck in Huntsville
streets blazed with suffering in that small
Alabama town
in the dull shroud of morning
the whole world went crazy
devouring whatever light
that lit our half-cracked windows.
February 12, 1963
Sense memory
Each of those poems is anchored in a very specific time and place: a day, a state, the land and the rivers and people. (For more like them, check this link.) And each of those poems conveys the author’s sense of that space, that time and date, in a way that evokes it in the reader.
To do this yourself, you’ll want to choose a significant date or place. But it should be more than “significant” in isolation. It should be significant to you. You should have a sense of where you were, or where your identity is linked to that time, that place. Chooosing a historically significant date can be useful, because it gives the reader immediate context, like Lewis Turco’s November 22, 1963. But it can also be the date of your birth, or your marriage, or the day your marriage was legal (that one’s historically significant, I snuck it in on you), or the day your mom left her first husband to hook up with the guy who would be your dad. Just remember that if you pick a date that’s only significant to you or your family you’ll want to add some context. Similarly, you could pick a place: Birmingham, Alabama. Oxford, Mississippi. Cape Canaveral, Florida. Waitangi, New Zealand. The place could be famous, or just significant to you, or both (some really neat poetry has been written juxtaposing or contrasting authors’ personal experience with famous events that happened at the same time, or the same place – this is a great chance to break out your braided essay skills from the nonfiction grid).
Once you’ve found your anchor, hook your poem to it. Whether you use it as the title, or repeat it at the end of every couplet, take your reader to that place and time. Build the significance of it: add sensory details like the quality of light, the heat (or cold), the way things smelled. If you picked a famous place or time (or both), think about how your experience or link to it compares and contrasts to and with what’s “common knowledge” about that time or place.
And as always, consider adding appropriate content warnings to your poetry as well as your essays, so that your readers can fully engage with your writing when they have the energy to give your work the attention it deserves.
See you on the grid!
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.
