{pf: poetry peeps are pen-pals with poetry}

Welcome to Poetry Friday!

Poetry Peeps! You’re invited to our challenge for the month of September! Here’s the scoop: We’re going to take up the challenge of tritina. Invented by poet Marie Ponsot, this less restrictive younger sibling of the sestina uses three repeated words to end three tercets. The order of word-endings for the tercets are 123, 312, 231, with a final line acting as the envoi, featuring all three words in the 1-2-3 order used in the first stanza. Additionally, we’ll continuing with our theme of poetry in conversation, in whatever way that is individually defined. Sound a little tricky? Maybe? Are you still in? You’ll have a month to craft your creation(s), then share your offering on September 26th in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals. We hope all of you will join the fun!

It hardly seems possible that the harvest season is here and that summer is slouching towards completion. The choral season has kicked off, and we were greeted the first night of rehearsal with bushels of cherry tomatoes from someone’s out-of-control indeterminate plant. From our own wildly out of control mini-orchard, we have picked two tree’s worth of pears, and three tree’s worth of apples, most of the mulberries and we’re just getting started on the table grapes that are turning a deep purple. We’re feeling particularly grateful to family and friends and have not yet stooped to midnight produce deliveries to strangers… but we’re getting close. (THIS is why we don’t grow zucchini anymore…) I feel my Depression-Era grandma’s memory peering over my shoulder as I chop out the wormy bits and bag apples for the freezer. (Ninety-six cups and counting. 🫣) To be honest, I am grateful for both the bounty and for the distraction – it widens my focus from the continuing heaviness of grief in the world, and helps me gain a little bit of perspective. Seedtime and harvest persists, in spite of the destruction of so many other reliable cycles.

Processes continuing was on my mind this month. Having missed yet another gathering of the Poetry Princesses, I was determined to make up for the loss of writing in community by really leaning in to the poet herself. I read a few Giovanni poems before circling back to this one, more to hear her voice than anything else. Then, I listened to the poet read this poem aloud – from a video of the first season of HBO’s Def Comedy Jam from 2001.

Writing in conversation with a narrative poem is tricky. I found I wanted to imitate the poem more have a discussion with it, or with the poet. After reading the questions in the poem, I realized that Giovanni’s interrogation asked questions only human beings could answer. In essence, where are we taking poetry? Where has it been seen? Is it lost, and useless, as many people suspect (I admit to still being annoyed that the NPR Books newsletter a few weeks ago asked, “Whatever happened to poetry?” with apparently no irony intended)? Have we forgotten what gifts the arts have given us which have carried us through to this current moment? Was what carried us poetry? Does it have a place, in this blues-making world? What will allow poetry, stories, art in general – emotion expressed in imagery, allegory, rhyme, or meter – to persist?

I’m not generally a person who likes to write poems about poetry, but that seemed to be the assignment. Though there are many other things Giovanni could be talking about or addressing her words to, I chose to take her words literally and look at poetry across the table. I dislike talking about poetry in general because I try to avoid making direct and sweeping statements about arts. I have Opinions – so many – about what I like in poetry, what I think is overdone, and what is definitively not to my taste, nor ever will be. Nikki Giovanni seems to have had opinions throughout her career, too – but here, she works to subvert both readers’ expectations and possibly her own by writing to poetry as if it is both audience and speaker, confessor and consort, both the discarded art and the callous deserter. I attempted to mimic the poet’s confiding tone and close, fron-porch-conversational vibe:

Sing With Me, Poem

After Nikki Giovanni’s “Talk to Me, Poem. I Think I Got the Blues.”

Sing with me, Poem.
A solo just now
feels like spotlight
and stage fright.

Have you crooned loss and lament, Poem?
A lot of poems serenade on setbacks,
hum the hundred thousand hymns
of ‘alone’ and being left,
of the broken and bereft.

Hear how melody marks your trail –
constructing cairns rife with rhythm.
Stanza beckons scansion,
Employing unexpected enjambment, as
Pas-de-deux, couplets kiss,
Alliterating the way to bliss.

I know: blank verse is more respected.
Too much rhyme’s mostly rejected
(Think Dickinson and “Yellow Rose -”
Some only stan a poet who loves prose.)
But… who sings the tune without a beat?
Meter sans rhyme seems incomplete.

So, what’s next for you, Poem?
You’ve done American idyll,
Been burnished on plinths,
brayed from pulpits, and
laureled by laureates. Even my socials
Sing your songs on Instagrammed posts
passed along.

…can we sing with you, Poem?
Even if we don’t have the words?
What makes a song enough to be heard?

Despite what all else Giovanni’s poem asks, I find the real question is, what will make poetry persist? I think the answer is… WE WILL. And we’re already doing it, right here in this community. Liz’s persistence is here. Tricia’s poem is here, and Michelle poem is here. More Poetry Peeps might swing by with their creative conversations with Nikki Giovanni’s poem, and I’ll round ’em up here by the end of the weekend. Meanwhile, coffee aficionado and all-round lovely person Karen Edmisten – sharing her own delightful poetic conversation – is our Poetry Friday hostess today. “>Thanks, Karen!

There’s a lot of moving parts in this world, and a lot of feelings and thoughts about that to process. As long as there’s emotion in need of expression, there will be poetry. As long as there are people, there will be emotions, and words. As long as there are circumstances which delight, confuse, infuriate, grieve, and annoy us (with things like too many apples), there will be a poem to illuminate, celebrate, or merely to elucidate. In the meantime, don’t forget to wash your hands – the creeping crud is surging yet again. Hydrate. Dress your bed with gorgeous sheets. Call your youngest family member and horrify them with your use of ‘stan.’ Live a little. Love a lot. And remember, your current circumstances won’t last forever. In this and every moment, you are well-loved.