Welcome to Poetry Friday!
Poetry Peeps! You’re invited to our challenge for the month of October! Here’s the scoop: As invited by Poetry Magazine, we’re composing burning haibun. Not regular old haibun, folks. These highlight the internal landscape of memory, and within them, something somewhere must BURN. Perhaps it’s your candle at both ends. The stub of wax in your jack-o-lantern. Perhaps it’s just your heartburn, or your indignation. We cannot wait to find out. As always, these poems will continue our theme of writing in conversation. Are you still in? You’ll have a month to craft your creation(s), then share your offering on OCTOBER 31st in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals. THIS is gonna be LIT (see what I did there?), so we hope you’ll join the fun!
Greetings, friends, and a glorious decorative gourd season to all. I have a bale of hay in the garage, and feel I am getting right into the spirit of things (technically, the bale of hay is for the Boy’s archery targets, and then the garden, but I can pretend it’s for autumn, yes? Yes).
Science – and my very own science experiment autoimmune disorder – has recently introduced me to the joys of descriptive disorder names. Had you ever heard of Multiple Evanescent White Dot Syndrome? Well, neither had I – but what a delightfully graphical designation. Joining such monikers as Alien Hand and Restless Leg syndromes, MEWDS rather less delightfully is an inflammation of the optic nerve and can temporarily occlude one’s sight in the eye affected. That is far less than fun, but *hand waves* details, right? At least it has a fun name.
It you may have guessed, it’s been A Month around here. And if you’ve also guessed that I have yet again missed the Poetry Sisters meet-up to discuss and strategize our monthly form experiment, you’d be right. Which was disappointing. I wanted to talk about this form. The tritina has such potential. I love Tamar Yoseloff’s description of it as the sestina’s square root, and an “instrument of discovery.” The repetition is intended to pull something out of the poet, to hold it up, and allow examination from all sides.
From Process…
I was aware that the villanelle and the sestina, the more familiar repetitious poetry forms, were written to be accompanied by music – thus the repeating refrains. I don’t think I really leaned in to the musical aspect of this as much as I wanted to – let’s blame my foggy brain, shall we? – but I had a song stuck in my head when I wrote it. Billy Joel’s 1989 classic, And So It Goes. To put me in the correct frame of mind (and because I can’t listen to actual music when I work), I read the lyrics before I began.
It’s such a… resigned song. It offers the listener an unvarnished self, all poor decisions and untethered past presented with open hands. Here I am, the song seems to say. “All this could be yours – bad gambles and all. I find it rather charming, if a little sad. Written by a man who stumbled from three marriages into his current fourth, his experiences haven’t seemed to leave him confident that this whole self will be accepted, though offered whole-heart. And… so it goes. Asi es la vida. That’s life.
I brainstormed longhand to arrive at a trio of words which sturdy enough to bear repetition. Originally I believe the Poetry Sisters had thought to use all the same word, but I don’t know if that thought fell apart or not. My words I drew from what was on my mind – what I was feeling about the news, my medical life, my work. The words were… grey-shaded. Exhaustion. Weariness. Depletion. Betrayal. Grief. Carrying. Forfeit. Weight. What on earth could anyone try and ‘discover’ from that?
…To Poetry
Those words felt… disagreeable but when I pulled a few I wanted out of the morass, ‘Undone’ and ‘Diminished’ spoke to me… Remember I said that villanelle and sestina were originally composed for music? These two words are musical. There’s a thing called a “diminished chord.” It’s described as sounding tense, unstable, and dissonant, often “spooky,” “sinister,” or “eerie.” What if instead of simply disagreeable and bad, something undone is diminished because it’s unresolved? So… here’s my beginning at playing with that thought. Note that this is the DRAFTIEST of drafts – I feel like “in conversation” vanished from this entirely – yet I like the feel and the wordplay of it, trying to wrest music from madness, and a note of triumph from an unfinished chord of defeat.
it weighs on me: what lies undone
in creased and wrinkled brain diminished?
No laurels wreath the unresolved.
Opaqued, the path lies unresolved.
Roads untaken drift, and, undone
shrink; a destiny diminished.
Atlases: obscured. Undiminished:
thirst for adventure. Re-resolved:
To leap. Not done can’t be undone.
Past comes undone: presently diminished lies our future, unresolved…
And so it goes.
This felt like it ought to have the title at the end, to add weight to the envoi. All of the uncertainty and ambiguity, holding up an idea, twisting and turning it, examining it in the light. Despite the desire for different, in some parts of our lives, we’ve lost our maps, we’re drifting, and we’re looking ahead at a future that seems… diminished. Distorted. But if we want a different present, we’ll have to tell ourselves a new story, to enact a future that is different from our past.
And so it goes. That’s just life.
Part of “just life” is also having a poem you’re not sure you like, which seems to be afflicting all of the Poetry Sisters this month. Nevertheless, Tricia’s take on the tritana can be found here. Cousin Mary Lee’s poem is here. Liz’s poem is here, and Laura’s tritina is hitting next month’s theme early here. Karen’s poem is here, and Michelle K’s art and tritina are here. Carol V’s poem is here. More Poetry Peeps may post throughout the day, so make sure you circle back at some point this weekend and find the links here.
Poetry Friday today is hosted at the delightful Poem Farm of Amy Ludwig VanDerwater. Thanks, Amy. It’s been a long, strange trip this month, but as always, there’s life on the other side of your screen. Please go outside. Don’t forget to appreciate the things that you have – beauty and peace, the signs of the changing season, favorite foods, decorative gourds. Touch grass. Hydrate. Reach out to friends. And remember, you are well-loved.
