Monday Poetry Post: Visual Confirmation
You're gonna base this poem off your favorite piece of pasta
Hi, and thanks for reading! Today is Monday, so we’re going to talk about poetry.
If you want to go directly to the poetry exercise, and skip all this “recipe blog” backstory, scroll to the next subhead.
Confession: Sometimes, I remember the shape of a poem better than the poem itself. My apologies to every person who has ever spent more than fifteen minutes on a word choice or made any decisions solely on scansion – your efforts are not lost on me. It’s just that, occasionally, when I want to read a poem, I am not looking for a theme or a metric structure or a rhyme pattern. I am looking for…y’know.❄︎↘︎▷
In this excellent blog post, Mary Szybist talks about visual poetry. She uses a few examples. One is a rearrangement of the sonnet Prayer, by George Herbert, reconfigured into a sunburst by the poet Helen Vendler. The sonnet is reconfigured, in part, as part of a diagrammatic exercise in Vendler’s textbook. But it also amplifies the meaning of the poem – it doesn’t necessarily change it, but intensifies the parts that Vendler (and Szybist) found most moving. “The visual rearrangement enacts the suspended, verb-less world of the poem,” Szybist writes. “Everything has equal weight, everything is attached to prayer as if by an equals sign.”
I was thinking about this because I was thinking about Szybist’s poem How (Not) to Speak of God, from her book Incarnadine. I wasn’t thinking about the poem, exactly, but of its shape, that hollow center, the lines radiating out from it, and the question repeated in the middle. Who? Whose? Who?
The “shape” of this poem changes each time I look at it. This week, maybe because of the cold, it’s a snowflake. When I feel especially challenged, it’s a wheel, spinning on its axis and going nowhere. During times of great revelation, it’s a sunburst. Szybist intended as both image and object, a “meditative object,” actually, that one can enter from any “point” in the poem.
Today, I’d like to take some of our existing writing and whip it into shape. Haha. Ha.
Exercise: Get Into Shape
You can write something new for this exercise if you’d like to. But I actually recommend taking a piece of your existing writing and reconfiguring it.
An abandoned or unfinished poem would work well for this, and so would a snippet of prose writing you produced, and found lyrical/beautiful, but didn’t develop into a longer piece.
Take a look at your piece of writing. Think about what draws the lines together, thematically.
Is there a word that’s repeated, or conspicuously never stated? Does the presence or absence of a particular subject haunt your poem?On a sheet of paper, annotate your existing language. Are there any lines that are in opposition to each other – any ones that are obviously “neighbors” or “friends?” You may find some inspiration by looking for opposites, like in last week’s exercise, or by describing each line’s relationship to your central theme.
If you see any holes in your existing language, places where you think the poem could go farther or deeper with an idea, create a list of phrases and words that could fill those gaps. You might need them soon.
Now, think about a shape that suits this idea you’re exploring. A great way to start, without getting overwhelmed, is by relying on pasta shapes. We’ve got wagon wheels, obviously. Bow-tie pasta, an archway of macaroni, a twisting rotini or fusilli noodle. You can also think of other places in your everyday life where you see simple shapes – road signage and safety warnings are both great. Sketch a couple of light “frames” on a blank piece of paper.
Start constructing your poem by placing words where you’d like them to live on this frame. You can cut them out and move them around (a practice I personally detest – so messy!!! – but others love), or use a pencil if you want to erase them. Think about where you’d like to leave openings. Just like in poetry that follows a more traditional structure, blank spaces are rarely devoid of meaning.
If there are corners or “intersections” that can confound the meaning of your words, think about how you can best use them. What do you want to leave open to interpretation? What do you need to obscure?
Eventually, if you keep looking for visual poetry frameworks, you’ll start seeing them all over (because there are poems everywhere!). The writer Jen Fliss, who I am incredibly lucky to call a friend, published a nonfiction piece that is made to look like a Dr. Bronner’s soap label; now, I think of her every time I see these products at the grocery store. The more you practice this skill, the more, I hope, you see poems and language in everything around you, whether it’s soap or snowflakes, a clock or the sun.