Roger. Copy that.
Let’s talk tech. Technique, that is. Technique is about more than just copying a poem’s form, although we’ve been having a lot of fun doing that and building muscle memory while we’re at it. Technique is the building blocks to make your own poetry, though, so for May we’re going to get back to those very basic basics. Instead of giving you a poem to duplicate, we’re giving you several very different poems and talking about what they have in common.
And the Old Man Speaks of Paradise: a Ghazal
Do not move. Let me speak of a river in paradise
A turquoise gift from fiery stars that is paradise
How do you measure a river’s weight, color, smell, touch?
How do you feel the veins of sand in a breathing paradise?
Eons of earth story, long before rocks, plants or bones
Bulging with flesh and blood in every corner of paradise
You call me Old Man, 12,000 years old, but really I’m a baby of
River Warren, swollen with glacier water flooding the paradise
My torso sloughed by old ice, two cities on sandstone bluffs
Headwaters of a 2350-mile road towards the gulf of paradise
A walk along the beach, a bag of rocks, fossils and agates
Each tells stories of the river, land & life—a kinship of paradise
Come to me at dawn or dusk, by foot, canoe or a single shell
To greet eagles, cranes, fox, trees…a ten-mile gorge of paradise
Gar, bass, goldeye, redhorse, bowfin, stoneroller, buffalo, drum, sunfish
Sickleback, darter, walleye, dace, mooneye…in the waves of paradise
The St. Anthony Fall that walked up 10 miles from Fort Snelling
Clams and shells in Kasota stones—layered history of paradise
Put your fingers into the bluff, and pull a handful of sand
From the Ordovician sea, each perfect to make a paradise
From time to time, I take you into the amniotic womb
A reminder of our origin from a black, red, white, blue paradise
Do not dam me. To move freely is to evolve is to live
Lock feeds fear feeds hate feeds violence to the base of paradise
The Mississippi, temple on earth, home of all living things
Would you tread with love, through the heart of paradise?
We are water—H2O—two hands under an open heart
Pulsing, dissolving, bonding the earth to a green paradise
Stop seeking before or after life, for a paradise
Already in us, in each cell of being that is paradise
Cherry blossoms
I went down to
mingle my breath
with the breath
of the cherry blossoms.
There were photographers:
Mothers arranging their
children against
gnarled old trees;
a couple, hugging,
asks a passerby
to snap them
like that,
so that their love
will always be caught
between two friendships:
ours & the friendship
of the cherry trees.
Oh Cherry,
why can’t my poems
be as beautiful?
A young woman in a fur-trimmed
coat sets a card table
with linens, candles,
a picnic basket & wine.
A father tips
a boy’s wheelchair back
so he can gaze
up at a branched
heaven.
All around us
the blossoms
flurry down
whispering,
Be patient
you have an ancient beauty.
Be patient,
you have an ancient beauty.
Things We Carry on the Sea
We carry tears in our eyes: good-bye father, good-bye mother
We carry soil in small bags: may home never fade in our hearts
We carry names, stories, memories of our villages, fields, boats
We carry scars from proxy wars of greed
We carry carnage of mining, droughts, floods, genocides
We carry dust of our families and neighbors incinerated in mushroom clouds
We carry our islands sinking under the sea
We carry our hands, feet, bones, hearts and best minds for a new life
We carry diplomas: medicine, engineer, nurse, education, math, poetry, even if they mean nothing to the other shore
We carry railroads, plantations, laundromats, bodegas, taco trucks, farms, factories, nursing homes, hospitals, schools, temples…built on our ancestors’ backs
We carry old homes along the spine, new dreams in our chests
We carry yesterday, today and tomorrow
We’re orphans of the wars forced upon us
We’re refugees of the sea rising from industrial wastes
And we carry our mother tongues
爱(ai)，حب (hubb), ליבע (libe), amor, love
平安 (ping’an), سلام ( salaam), shalom, paz, peace
希望 (xi’wang), أمل (’amal), hofenung, esperanza, hope, hope, hope
As we drift…in our rubber boats…from shore…to shore…to shore…
The Waste Land (fragment)
Zombie Blues Villanelle
There are days I believe there ain’ nothing to fear
I perk up for green lights, my engine on call
But it could be the zombies are already near
That sleep that we feed every day of the year
What’s up with your friends when they circle the mall?
There are nights when I think I have no one to fear
My Mom watches Oprah to brighten the drear
You can keep your eyes open, see nothing at all
But it might be the zombies are already near
You think life is s’posed to be lived in this gear?
I been askin’ that question till my brain has gone raw
Certain days I believed I had nothing to fear
I have dreams that I’m driving with no way to steer
You can growl like a cello; you can chat like a doll
Don’t it seem like the zombies are already here?
I think fear itself is a whole lot to fear
I have watched CNN till it made my skin crawl
I might be a zombie that’s already here
I been pounding this door but don’ nobody hear
You can drink till you think that you’re seven feet tall
There were midnights I danced without nothin’ to fear
You can fly through your days until time is a smear
Maybe blaze up the bong or blog out a blog
There’ll be days when it feels like there’s nothing to fear
But you could be a zombie that’s already here.
What do all these poems have in common?
This month’s technique: repetition. Each poem has at least one repeated word or phrase in it. But look how differently the authors used that repetition in their poetry.
Why use repetition?
There are some absolutely fantastic reasons to use repetition in your poetry. One of them is emphasis, which is what I just did there. Use repetition, repeated, so it sticks in your mind. That’s a way you can … use repetition … to sink your hook deeper into the reader’s consciousness. What are some other ways to use repetition?
- Refrains. Many forms of poetry, from villanelle to kyrielle to ballade, use repetition to create a refrain, a phrase that the poem returns to again and again and again.
- Perspective shifts. The triolet is a poetry form that mandates a perspective shift in a repeated line, but there’s nothing requiring you to only use that trick in a triolet. What words can you add between repeated lines to change the reader’s understanding?
- Emphasis. I talked about this before. I’m doing it again. Which is what I just did there. (Go re-read The Waste Land, ok?)
- Repetition can feel like internal rhyme. Placing a repeated word in the same (or a carefully selected different) position can give your poem structure even if you’re writing in free verse.
- Structure. In poetry like the sestina or its little sister the tritina, repeated words form the entire basis of the poem’s structure. You don’t have to write a poem in an existing prescribed format to use repetition, though: just pick out a scheme and go for it.
Finally, repetition doesn’t have to be the EXACT word or words. You can say feel, feeling, feels, fee, fear, and feeble, and it will still feel like repetition. In fact, it feels so much like repetition that I got bored even writing that sentence.
SLAM:
Write a poem using repetition deliberately.
You can use any form you like, but do use repetition to give your work something for the reader to hang onto long after they’ve finished reading.
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.
