Monday Poetry Post: Going Together
Wow, did it take me THIS LONG to bring up Regina Spektor in a poetry newsletter?
Hi, and thanks for reading! Today is Monday, so we’re going to talk about poetry.
Quick note before I get into our regular programming – my friend Matt had me on his podcast, Mattsplaining, to talk about poetry! It was a lot of fun. We talk about hats and I may or may not dunk on Jane Campion. Listen to it here.
If you want to go directly to the poetry exercise, and skip all this “recipe blog” backstory, scroll to the next subhead.
One of the other Substack newsletters I read is Maya C. Popa’s Poetry Today, where, in January, she shared 31 days of poetry-writing prompts. She includes excerpts from other writers, well-known and should-be-well-known poets, to serve as inspiration for each prompt.
One of the prompts included a fragment of May Sarton’s poem The Invocation to Kali; real Hattheads may remember I’ve recently started reading May Sarton’s journals and dabbling in her poetry. The fragment Popa uses is:
“Without darkness, nothing comes to birth,
as without light, nothing flowers.”
This instantly made me think of a Regina Spektor song. I mean, c’mon, it’s me, so…what doesn’t? Last year’s album Home, Before and After includes a song called What Might Have Been, which is rife with unexpected twists on these dark/light birthing/blooming comparisons:
Sickness and flowers go together
Bombing and shelters go together
Laughing and hurting go together
Finding and keeping go together
Spektor serves up plenty of other pairings: pirates and parrots, loving and leaving, business and crying, lies and believing. This was the first song on the album to make me cry during my first listen-through, because after writing lines like “canary yellow, mustard yellow/yellow tear stains on old pillows,” she threw in “yellow and sadness go together.” A targeted attack against me, a person whose favorite color is yellow, and who has experienced sadness!
Anyway. Maya C. Popa reminded me of May Sarton reminded me of Regina Spektor. Popa’s prompt for this excerpt was to explore the duality from Sarton’s excerpt in a series of eight couplets. We’re going to write a little more loosely, and I am going to leave the form up to you – and I’ll give some examples.
Exercise: The Power of Two
Pick a subject. Any subject. I mean it. Yourself, your spouse, your best friend, your worst enemy, the squirrel at the birdfeeder, the flower coming through dead leaves too early, a haunted doll you saw on Instagram, the weirdly hot mom from a soup commercial. I do not care. But you need *a* subject.
Set a timer for three minutes and just barf descriptions onto the page. They don’t need to make sense – if the squirrel outside has empty-mitten ears or a voice like an anxious train, great. Try not to stop writing, at all, over these three minutes, even if you don’t always feel like what you were writing is useful.
Take a moment to organize your list and make it legible. If you’re typing, maybe put your words into columns, or even go wild with a spreadsheet. If you’re writing by hand, make sure your words are discrete and easily readable.
Set a timer for three minutes, again. Using the list you just generated, create a new list – of opposites. Again, they don’t have to make sense! Let your brain get really loosey-goosey here. You’re going to tread into associations instead of opposites at times, and that’s fine. You can be a bitch, a lover, a child, a mother, a sinner, AND a saint without feeling ashamed.
Once you’ve generated your two lists, look at them side-by-side. Start creating new pairings. Now is the time to stop being literal. You might discover that, actually, scarlet smile has a much more evocative opposite than cerulean frown. Think again about your subject – which of these words and phrases feel the most connected to the person, place, thing, or event you wrote about?
Arrange these into a poem in a way that feels natural for you. Add in more language where necessary. You can do a series of couplets, like Popa suggested. You can simply say, “X and Y go together,” like Spektor did. Or you can put your ideas into columns, down a central “spine.” Maybe you even want them to make a shape.
Here is an older poem that I wrote several years ago. The format allows you to read this a few different ways. Are these two speakers talking over each other? Is it one person questioning their own voice? Or is it two people who are both asking questions of a person who isn’t there?
Just remember, a perfect bit of writing about opposites has already been created, set to music, and animated/choreographed. None of us will ever replicate or surpass it.
So the pressure is off – just have fun.
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See you all tomorrow with a new essay.