Welcome to another Poetry Friday Adventure!
Poetry Peeps! You’re invited to join our August poetry challenge!
Here’s the scoop: this month, we’re doing haiku…sonnets. If your response is a baffled “What?” no worries. Basically four 3-line haiku plus a couplet of either 5 or 7 syllables equals the traditional 14 lines you’ll find in a sonnet. If you haven’t written a sonnet, or “little song” in a minute, Folger has a Shakespearean guide, while the Poetry Foundation has the deets on other forms. Are you in? Good! Start today so you can be ready to share August 28th in a blog post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals. See you then!
Our patron saint of poetry in potentia, Pádraig Ó Tuama, started Poetry Unbound listeners off this year with the materials with which to build a pantoum. Through his series of prompts, reflecting his own process upon waking at 3AM, we were meant to come away with enough lines to create the beginnings of this form, which uses simple statements repeated to build flow and certainty, and if one is lucky, a sense of emotion that sings like a lullaby. Of course that’s not what happened. When the Poetry Sisters gathered for our small Sunday salon, we discussed how closely we would stick to the rules – either the ones for pantoum or the prompts for this one in particular. The wiser of us came to the table with the word NOPE written all-caps and clutched firmly in our hands. Those smarter people proceeded to use the guidelines as a suggestion, which is perfectly within the scope of what St. Padraig suggested. As you may have guessed, I… was not one of those smarter people. And I wrote a poem which I absolutely hated. There were owls. Sighing wind. Poignancy. It was …a LOT, and it was so bad it made me laugh.
…I got something out of it at least? A good laugh isn’t nothing.
The eight prompts weren’t even the problem. The questions were all innocuous enough, and I answered every prompt and did what I was told… but did not make art. Which… honestly, I should have expected, since art isn’t all that much about rules, except in seeing where they don’t fit and leaving them on the floor.
As we left our digital salon, discussing with amusement our responses to our own work (there was a lot of “Meh” going on), Mary Lee made a comment on how Padraig centers the idea of wakefulness in connection with insomniac sleeplessness at 3AM – but who says our poem has to take place in the now? Who says that our waking from sleep only happens at night? Her throwaway thought gave me the space to release the reflex to follow all the rules so closely that there wasn’t room for me to move in my own poem. I was able to write again – still answering prompts, but the answers are either incomplete, or go so far into the question that they come out on the other side, in another province. I rearranged my responses and threw some of them completely under the bus. I answered a question that I’m not sure I was asking. And… it works for now.
The title and maybe the mood links to last week’s poem – Progressions. Migrations. Moving through changes, going places in different times in our lives, becoming different selves… I spent a lot of time as a child being awake in the car full of sleeping siblings on the long nights my parents drove us between where we lived and where we had lived; the lives we’d had, and a life in a place we now lived and weren’t sure of just yet. We did a lot of back-and-forth the first few years before we settled and stayed… It must have been hard for my parents to move us into suburbia from a city. They did it for their kids to have safety, but they left a lot of familiarity and friends and, frankly, probably adventure behind. Meanwhile, all we kids knew was that it meant a lot of time in the car.
Migrations
Limned by the headlight beams alone
the engine growls and grumbles. Sighs
as radios play quiet tones,
while stretched, time splits and multiplies.
The engine growls and rattles. Sighs
‘cross cattle guards while gravel groans,
time stretches, splits and multiplies
and absence yawns and megaphones.
Cross cattle guards, the gravel groans.
“Are we there yet?” preoccupies.
And absence yawns and megaphones
a past the present nullifies.
“Are we there yet?” Preoccupied,
miles stitch on miles. A road is sewn
while past and present notify:
some roads we only take alone.
Other Poetry Peeps have taken their own roads through to this pantoum. Mary Lee’s poem is here. Laura’s poem is here, and Tricia’s post is here. Liz’s poem slides in here. Summer is still having its way, and Sara is waving to us gently from a rainy green land, with plans to join us another day. Meanwhile, Michelle K’s is here. Patricia Franz’s poem is here. Denise’s pantoum is here, and Margaret’s poem is here. So happy to see so many Peeps joining the fun. More Peeps may pop in throughout the weekend to post their pantoum-ing, so check back for the full round-up, and I’ll post ’em as I find ’em. Meanwhile, Poetry Friday today is ably hosted by the one and only Tabatha, who personifies the opposite of indifference. Don’t forget to get the details on her anthology! Thanks, Tab!
Whether you’re back in another stretch of heat or in the throes of endless rainstorms and humidity, look for signs that the season is shifting, the light is shortening, the colors are deepening; the times, they are a-changin’. In some ways, it feels like we’ve been in this moment – this summer, this year? – forever, but in other ways, we’ll look back at this as a multihued smear of time. As we wait for better days – or perhaps just different ones – keep breathing. Keep listening. Keep spending the coin of your energy in deliberate attention and presence. Keep bearing witness; keep watch, and may joy find you. Remember, you are so, so loved.
I love that last line so very much.
Someday, I’d like a lesson on how to organize my thoughts and lines well enough to write a rhyming pantoum!!! Dang, you’re good! You and Liz!!
@Cousin MaryLee: For me, the rhyme is the easy part! Making the rhyme still make sense when I’ve rearranged the lines is somewhat more annoying, to the point where occasionally the end word changes to make the meaning I want stay put, but… I keep trying with pantoums because I love a poem with repetition, and this form is shorter than a villanelle and so I end up trying pantoums more often.
You always elegantly drop a word that makes me think/feel, “Oh! Yes! That word! Why haven’t I used *that* word lately?” Like “limned.” Perfect opening and I agree with everyone else about your rhyme taking it up a level. Thanks for sharing the process, as always. You make poetry look so easy and I always appreciate hearing about the times it *wasn’t* so easy. I’m so intimidated by the pantoum form — I didn’t have much time last week, but even if I had, I think I would’ve curled up in the corner and said, “Next form, please.” 😀
@Cousin Karen: I really use poetry as an excuse to use all of those “SAT words” that used to get me teased when I was a kid. A pantoum can sometimes be squirrelly – they only work for me about a third of the time. Some days I cannot make them gel but it’s always lovely when you’re here on a good day, cheering! And when you screw your courage to the sticking point and essay a pantoum of your own, I’ll be there to cheer for you. I think you’ll find you really like them…
Wow to all those wonderful noises, Tanita. Especially that groaning gravel–fantastic. And that last line, those roads you travel alone, that so perfectly captures for me the feeling of insomnia. Of being awake and feeling like there’s nobody else in the world but you. Or even when it’s not insomnia but you’re up with a baby or something in the middle of the night and it’s such an alone feeling even if it’s not lonely. It’s somehow so bittersweet. This is just lovely.
@laurasalas: It happened so frequently – my sisters would sleep, my mother would sleep, and my father and I would be the only ones awake in a silent car… an unwilling fellowship…
After a long ride in the car yesterday, I’m so happy to sit down today to read everyone’s poems.
I adore these lines:
time stretches, splits and multiplies
and absence yawns and megaphones
I feel them in my heart. There is so much truth in them.
And the addition of rhyme? You’ve outdone us all.
@MissRumphius: ♥ Thank you… the sense of time dislocation, of time passing, stretching along an endless dark corridor while absence yawns is really the feeling of insomnia for me.
The coin of attention…OK, that’s an image that I can really relate to. Wonderful. Your pantoum invites all kinds of listening…that groaning gravel, the bump, bump, bump of the cattle guard, yawning absence. All great personifications in your migrations. Thanks for the scoop on the August challenge!
@Linda Mitchell: I am learning something these days about bearing witness; I’m paying attention to spending my scant coins where they count… ♥
Tanita, thank you for rounding up all the pantoums. No wonder my pantoum was about sleeplessness. I love that you (and Mary Lee) tweaked the rules and wrote about the other side. I love the crossing cattle guards and “miles stitch on miles”
@Denise Krebs: Being awake whenever everyone else is asleep creates such a sense of displacement – where does the wakeful one even belong in all of that? Which is why I so love how your ‘colliding past and present’ mix and meld with my ‘a past the present nullifies.’
PS also love your poems graphics, the shooting star and stars. Reminds me of being in the Music Box Movie theatre, in Chicago. It’s a very old movie theatre and the ceiling is lit up through your movie with tiny stars. Just saw The Odyssey there last night guided along with the stars…
@Michelle Kogan: That sounds just gorgeous.
Such an intriguing poem Tanita, love the images it’s conjuring up and taking us, and the sounds rolling around as you read it aloud! This passage,
“‘cross cattle guards while gravel groans, feels dark and foreboding
time stretches, splits and multiplies. splits in trees, relationships,
and absence yawns and megaphones.” Yes, Yawn, but now we have megaphones, spreading the news…
Thanks for your interesting journey here!
Tanita — This is next-level pantouming! The rhyme?!?! It really adds a whole other layer to the form’s repetition. I love that you have put time and gravel, radio and miles all into conversation with one another. Makes me giggle thinking of my kids whining their way over a long trip…I never stopped to wonder how the road or the car feels! — Patricia
@pjnunz: I love how many ways people understand this poem! I wasn’t actually thinking about the road as such, but indeed, the growling, groaning, sighing – all of the inanimate objects are taking the voice part of the one awake child, discontented and feeling distance as the car takes them somewhere they’re maybe not sure they wanted to go…