Craft Corner: The Myriad Faces of Love No. 8

What poetry by Adrienne Rich, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Gerald Stern can teach us about our own hearts and the ways we love. 

By Nathan Fako

Scrapbook hearts collage created digitally via Canva featuring poets meantioned in piece

When we think about poetry, our minds probably go to high school Language Arts classes. We get a flash of a Shakespearean sonnet, we feel again the deafening silence as the class struggles to “get” the poem. Or perhaps we think of Neruda, Rumi, or Billy Collins. Mary Oliver. The truth is, I think, that most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry. Poetry doesn’t pay the water bill or change a diaper. But there are moments in life when poetry becomes the only appropriate food for the heart and soul–falling in love, for example. How do you express the way someone makes your heart explode? Say you’re a teenager again. Maybe you make them a mixtape, or a Spotify playlist. Maybe you even venture to write them a love poem.  

Some of the first poetry I wrote to show to others was in the form of love poems for my first girlfriend. I still remember vividly the feeling of pouring myself into those poems–just as vividly as I remember her telling me the poem I gave her didn’t really say what it was trying to, and that I should “try again.” Well, at least she gave me another chance. 

So what separates strong love poetry from weak love poetry? We know love is one of the great themes. These are well-tread waters. Think of the bright-eyed Romantics or the ravings of Allen Ginsberg. Everyone, hopefully, has been or will be in love at some point in their lives. And what about platonic love? Love poems of brotherhood, sisterhood, love for the community, the city… the list of types of love could be endless. Gwendolyn Brooks said real art is that which endures, or something to that effect. A poet, I think, is one particularly suited to discuss love. To question it and its many faces. So here are three poems, by three different poets, and a bit of explication on the ways in which they have loved. 

Adrienne Rich’s Twenty One Love Poems 

“What kind of beast would turn its life into words?” So begins the seventh of Adrienne Rich’s Twenty One Love Poems. This is a series of poems I believe everyone should read for themselves, as they are visceral, full of longing, and intensely crafted. Broadly, Rich uses these poems to invent and examine a type of love that could exist “openly together”–she was gay, fighting for liberation–in a city, among others, where the lovers could be “like trees.” Inevitable. Natural. Throughout the poems Rich’s speaker examines a kind of love “where grief and laughter sleep together.” But let’s go back to the seventh poem.  

Poem “VII” utilizes a form I have come to know as the interrogation form. Every statement in the poem takes the pose of a question. When we think of love poetry we think of pouring out the pitcher of the heart. Not here! Rich’s speaker turns against their own heart and its actions as though they were enemies. She questions herself, her right to language, and her battle for gay liberation. She writes, of her lover:  

or, when away from you I try to create you in words,  

am I simply using you, like a river or a war? 

Through this speaker’s interrogation of the self, of the writing self to be more specific, we see the marionette love and language make of us. So while this is a poem about love, in a collection of poems about love, Rich has done something original and enduring. She turns to the self and interrogates it. How dare I turn the subject of my love into an object of my language, she seems to ask. In so doing, Rich brings us into close proximity with the speaker’s psyche. This is the true magic of the poem, and why her collection succeeds where others might fail. Rich’s poems pull us forcefully into a space that is lived in and inhabited entirely by the experience of being in love, with all of its messy questions and ruminations. Here are love poems that don’t proclaim to be the most in love of all, or the most moving. But they command their singularity. So let your love poems take a new shape. Turn a question towards your own heart and follow the poem into a “country that has no language,” a poem totally your own, “heroic in its ordinariness.” 

Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Anodyne” 

Another approach to love we may be more familiar with is the consideration of the body. Oh how many young hours spent thinking of nothing but the touch of another’s hand in your hand! But what about self-love? In this poem, Komunyakaa, like Rich, turns the lens towards the self. This is a poem which is widely available on the internet–go listen to him read it.  

Komunyakaa has spoken about “a poetics of the body” and this is tangible here in “Anodyne.” The lens of the poem moves slowly over the speaker’s body, proclaiming love along its path. He says: 

I love my crooked feet 

shaped by vanity & work 

shoes made to outlast 

belief. The hardness 

This poem is in free-verse, and the short lines propel us down along the language. Komunyakaa’s speaker takes his time in consideration of the body, the “quick motor of each breath,” the “big hands,” and the place it has come from, “the deep smell / of fish & water hyacinth.”  

So as we enter the season of love, Komunyakaa’s piece invites us to extend some of that heart power towards our own bodies. What might that look like, a love letter to yourself?  

Gerald Stern’s “Let Me Please Look Into My Window” 

Finally, we get to Gerald Stern’s short poem. This is another poem that you can find easily online through a quick search, and it is only ten lines long. While I won’t quote the poem here, I’ll summarize so that I can highlight two devices that it employs for effect. In this poem the speaker longs to return to a time when they lived in New York. They want to look into their window, to take a walk down Broadway and pass sights with which they are familiar.  

The first device Stern uses is anaphora, the repetition of a phrase. In this poem it occurs at the beginning of a sentence. You may think of the chorus of a song, or a spiritual. The anaphora in Stern’s poem is the phrase “Let me.” This phrase also contains the second device, which I would call a speech act, and that speech act is the appeal. The speaker is repeatedly appealing to someone, in this case the god of memory in their own head or some higher power, saying please let me go back. Let me have that time once more. At the root of an appeal is a desire. In this poem, the desire is fueled by nostalgia for a time past. But the subject of love, interestingly, is not just the past but the city as well.  

What might a love poem to a place look like? A neighborhood park you once idled away hours in with your friends after school, a certain booth in the family restaurant where you babysat while your parents worked… go write the love poem! 

Craft Corner: Digging With a Golden Shovel No. 7

Image displaying golden shovel over a rainbow over beige background

By Melayna Pongratz

Photo Caption: Terrence Hayes, Poet, inventor of Golden Shovel poetry form.https://www.flickr.com/photos/ptenb/49977718682

pencil drawn image of terrence hayes

With a name that conjures a fairytale-like image, how could you not be curious about the golden shovel? If you haven’t heard of this form before, that’s because it is relatively new: it takes its name from the poem “The Golden Shovel” by Terrance Hayes, which was published in 2010. Hayes’ piece is written after Gwendolyn Brooks, and it contains the entirety of her poem “We Real Cool” as the end of its lines. As such, it establishes the rules of the form. The procedure is as follows:

Step 1: Identify a line of poetry you’d like to work with. We’ll call this your source material.

Step 2: Write a poem in which each word of your source material appears as the ending word of your own line. Be sure to keep the words in order.

Step 3: Credit the poet who wrote your source material.

And that’s it! But while the rules are pretty straightforward, a golden shovel is tricky to write… which is all the more reason to try your hand at it. You don’t have to be as ambitious as Terrance Hayes; after all, “The Golden Shovel” set an incredibly high standard for both craft and creativity. Instead of trying to write a poem that perfectly compliments a piece you love, you can start by using the golden shovel as an invention exercise: write one that uses a line or lines from your own poetry. Write one that adheres to the theme of the original work, then one that goes in a completely different direction— bonus points if you use the same line for both. Rather than using a line of verse, incorporate song lyrics, sentences from a work of prose, or dialogue from your favorite TV show.

This all begs the question: why build one poem from another? What’s the point of making another poet’s lines the backbone of your own piece rather than simply including an epigraph? One answer is that this form makes inspiration into something concrete: the golden shovel only exists when you construct it around another’s precise arrangement of words. You can write a poem with the same message, inspired by the same lines, but then you wouldn’t have to reckon with the same impositions on your language. Additionally, this form constrains you as both a writer and a reader. You can probably identify who and what influences your art, but writing a golden shovel will take your understanding of your inspirations to another level. When choosing a line to use in your own work, you have to know what makes you want to preserve it while you adapt it. Moreover, you need to know how much of that art to preserve: will you keep its meaning intact, or will you change it entirely? 

Regardless of the direction you take with this form, it will alter how you use art to converse with others. After you’ve experimented with digging up and repurposing your favorite lines, you can use the golden shovel to create a polished piece. Or, you can simply keep this form in your back pocket as a tool for investigation and invention.

Craft Corner: Art in Conversation with Itself: On Bob Dylan, T.C. Cannon and Joy Harjo No. 6

By Nathan Fako

Photo Caption: All the Tired Horses in the Sun by T. C. Cannon (painted between 1971-1972)

two horses (one red, one blue) are standing on a green prairie under a n abstract yellow background with white blobs which mimics a very bright sky with clouds

T. C. Cannon Fair Use

In 1970, Bob Dylan released Self Portrait, his tenth studio album. It was met with poor reviews and disdain from fans, the long history of which is well-documented online. Curiously, Dylan made a choice that alienated fans, whether intentional or not. The opening track, “All the Tired Horses,” does not feature vocals from Dylan at all. Where had the dynamo gone? Where was the “Rolling Stone,” the Dylan of “Corrina, Corrina,” the young man “Blowin’ in the Wind?” What did he mean, foregrounding a voice, a choir of voices, that didn’t belong to him? 

Around the time Dylan’s song was released, a young Kiowa-Caddo man named Tommy Cannon–popularly known as T.C. Cannon–returned from the Vietnam War and painted two horses under an ochre sky. One red horse, one blue. He named the piece All the Tired Horses in the Sun. Cannon tragically died eight years later, just a few months before his big opening show at the Aberbach Gallery in New York. While his life was short, Cannon was a prolific artist, known as both a painter and a poet. Was his painting a response to Dylan’s song? Inspired by it, surely, but carrying the message forward somehow? Transforming it? 

Finally, in 2018, a year before being named United States Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo was commissioned to write a piece for a book about Cannon. She wrote “All the Tired Horses in the Sun.” The piece has to do with Harjo’s Mvskoke identity and issues faced by Indigenous communities; perhaps, the piece has something to do with not just Cannon’s painting, but Dylan’s as well. 

Artists respond to the world around them; the world is filled with artists. How do we make sense of intertextual connections like those presented here? I don’t have an answer. We engage with art, think about it, are moved by it, and in some cases, make art in response. We keep our minds open. One avenue of entry that often proves to be interesting, if even as basic exploration, is the use of one work to frame another work. This is sometimes called a lens. So let’s use the Harjo poem as a lens for viewing the Cannon painting, and then listening to the Dylan song. 

First: Harjo. 

The poem begins with “Forever.” Harjo creates a landscape with anaphora and end-stopped lines. Readers have the sense of a weary propulsion. A tired procession of family, “my cousin. Auntie. Uncle. / Another cousin.” The poem opens in the center, and the subject is complexified. Up to this point, we are given context through the title, made to think of family members like horses in the sun, and then: “Vending machines and pop. / Chips, candy, and not enough clean water.” So we are handed food insecurity. Harjo’s choices are very intentional. The harshness of the end-stopped lines, the word choices having to do with junk food, and the absence of enough clean water paint a picture of a landscape that is difficult; it is hot, dry, “waiting and tired.” The final line of the poem is a call to action: “Go water the horses.” We the readers have the ability to positively impact our communities.  

Applied to the Cannon painting, Harjo’s poem provides the figures with further meaning. The two animal shapes are so close to one another that they touch. The blue from the horse’s coat is echoed in the lighter-toned saddle of the red horse. Their heads are down, likely to indicate that they are grazing. This is a family, pressed down under the weight of a sky that takes up two-thirds of the canvas, a hot ochre with marshmallow clouds. The saddles indicate these are working animals. It wouldn’t be a stretch to link a working horse conceptually to the grim reality of Indigenous dispossession in our American history. So we have the sense of hot work, with one’s family, in an open landscape with no space for shelter.  

To my eye, the Dylan song–stay with me, I know it’s odd to go backward–ties the three works together. Making a lens of the poem makes the song quite simple, and in my opinion, poignant. There are only two lines of lyric in the song: 

“All the tired horses in the sun, / how’m I supposed to get any ridin’ done? Hmm.” 

If we apply the connotative landscape we have built by working backward, we have a picture of the horses in our minds. They are family members, moving through life under a hot sun, without enough clean water. Our families are working, the sun can be oppressive, and there is not enough. There is never enough. How can an artist–existing in a political landscape like the one inhabited by Dylan and Cannon in the 70s, the one Harjo has inhabited throughout her long career–rationalize the act of making art? How do you unpack the choice to be creative when there are so many practical problems in the world that need fixing? And how do you grapple with becoming a symbol–as Dylan was–for something you may not want to stand for?  

Simple: you focus on what you have to. You make the art. There’s no sense in hand-wringing.  

You go water the horses. 

Craft Corner: The Art of Diversion in Fiction No. 5

We’ve all heard the phrase, “Life is not a straight line.” This holds true not just for our own experiences, but also for the types of stories and lives of characters we encounter in stories. Yet, in fiction, the temptation often exists to create linear journeys, with heroes marching steadfastly towards their goals. But what about the detours, the unexpected turns, the moments where characters veer off course? These diversions, often dismissed as mere plot twists, can be the very essence of a character’s arc. 

To many writers, diversion is the creation of a surprise in a narrative, and the thrill of that surprise is what keeps the reader involved in the story. The word “diversion” has its first recorded use in England in the early 1600s.  It is believed that the concept of diversion bore some similarities with some elements of writing discussed in the treatise “On the Sublime” by the Greek philosopher, Longinus, but it became popularized by eighteenth-century writers who employed digression as a form of diversion. For Longinus, diversion, as a crucial literary device, suspends the reader’s sense of disbelief. Generally, in literature, it refers to the practice of including stories within the main story. The stories within the story are usually very brief and are often used to expound on a particular element of the main story. As Peter Selgin notes, by its very essence, a story is “an exercise in controlling information.” Writers must skillfully dole out knowledge to create patches of unknowledge – i.e., suspense – and keep the reader interested. Such diversion, in the form of well-timed revelations and withheld information, does not happen solely according to the creative strategy of the individual writer but adheres to a tradition as old as the stories themselves. The main purpose of a diversion is to create a sense of anticipation or to build enough suspense to keep the readers interested in the main story. A writer could also use this technique to provide the reader with some necessary background information that cannot be included in the main story or to help set up a climax. By using the different stories within the main story, the writer has a chance to provide a much wider view of the world. The reader gets various perspectives on different elements of the overall story. This can serve to make even the most fantastical of stories seem more real because it is demonstrated that different characters have different, opposing views and so on. Also, by giving the reader ‘breaks’ in the main plot where they get to read other smaller, self-contained stories, the writing becomes a lot more accessible and targeted to all kinds of readers.  

In simple terms, diversion in fiction, like other forms of display, seeks to do more than to decorate or to entertain the audience. When one witness in a court trial declares that, for example, defendant A did not break into a house, it is so easy for the audience to keep making wild, imaginary scenarios of how the burglary took place. However, the narrative, fabricated in their minds, is abruptly cut when the same witness suggests that in fact, the burglary did not even take place on the previous night as he claims to know, but on the night in question. By offering new, surprising twists to an on-going temporal narrative and deconstructing the audience’s version of the known events, the narrative gets a boost. Through diversion, we see the writer cleverly creating situations in which the reader’s anticipation is crafted to naturally expect a certain chain of events. This then allows the writer to break this chain and surprise the audience.  

It is of course important that writers should discern when to use diversion as a literary device in such that subplots, creation of cliffhangers at the end of chapters, adding in unexpected twists, deceptions, strategic revelation of information, and creating an open ending, all contribute to keeping the reader diverted. The reader feels smart when they catch the hints and forms expectations on how the story will unfold. At the same time, they become curious to find out whether the predictions are accurate as the plot progresses. In turn, by being engaged in the reading, emotions are evoked as the story takes the reader through different methods of diversion, making the reader experience the special and stunningly galvanized into plot and characters. For example, a well-timed twist can suggest hidden correlatives and themes. Or it can inject an unexpected viewpoint that might add a fresh sight or serve to emphasize thematic elements. Well-disciplined use of diversion often profound the reading. Readers may continue to explore to find out what each new turning and twist may uncover and can be delighted by success at prediction or stunned by a wily and subtle deception. This act of provocation is a delight to many readers who find the discovery and unraveling of solutions highly satisfying. In this manner, diversion enables the reader to be active on a metaphysical and emotional level. 

Again, when we think of how diversion can become a shrapnel for crafting the character arc, it becomes clear that characters are not robots programmed towards a predetermined conclusion. They are complex beings shaped by choices, experiences, and the unforeseen twists and turns of life. Through diversions, the writer can add depth, nuance, and a touch of the unpredictable to their journeys.  

Why does there need to be a twist in the plot in every story, you may ask? It is an interesting point to focus on, the real thing is that if one diverts someone’s attention, and then that other person will most probably be focused on other things, instead of finding out the truth. So, the reader will not try to discover the writer’s true opinion or where the story is set if it is made clear. If a writer is telling a story directly, then diversion would be in the form of flashbacks and maybe the introduction of more than one small puzzle, maybe a few more than two! It is remarkably interesting because if you take the definition out onto the internet or open books, you will find that diversion covers many different parts of stories, from characterizations to distinct types of diversion. 

It is important to consider some real-life examples of how diversion works. Fans of this literature will find various examples of distraction at work in short stories across the ages that have been written by a range of authors as well. A great example to start with is “The Purloined Letter,” written by Edgar Allan Poe and first published over 150 years ago. This classic short story is about the amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin as he attempts to retrieve an incriminating letter that is being used for blackmail. Throughout the story, there is a sense of deliberate, misleading information that is being given to the reader, which distracts from reality and makes it more difficult to discover the truth. This kind of diversion could further be used to create suspense within the reader as one avenue is explored after the other, each with its own sense of partial logic and progress. Another prominent example of diversion in short stories can be found in the work of Shirley Jackson and her famous short story called “The Lottery.” This tale of a small town that commits human sacrifice as part of the harvest ritual was first published in 1948, with some readers dismissing it as being nothing more than mere sensationalist horror. However, when looking deeply at the themes within the story, it becomes clear that Jackson has intentionally used diversion to guide the reader towards shock and distaste for the characters and society within the story. The use of detail to distract from the grotesque occurrences of the “lottery” and to prepare the reader for something entirely different is a key strategy; the fact that the ending comes as it does shows that diversion has been used effectively in this piece. Through exploring these examples of diversion in short stories, the message of how this works to create interesting and absorbing literature becomes clearer.  

While the town is small and it seems everyone knows each other, the truth is that it is completely isolated. The village serves as a dehumanizing environment that is resulting in a change in society. First, we can observe the irony of the town’s and the lottery’s name, as the lottery is commonly known to be a good thing to win and be a part of, but in this situation, the ‘prize’ is death. The first mention of tradition comes when the boys see each other and make a pile of stones. Soon after, the parents, especially the dad, are with the boys. He’s reminding the boy of how to arrange the stones and Jackson writes, “Bobby Martin has already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones…” (Jackson, 2009). The author wanted to clearly show how even the youngest of the village knew what they were doing, what is the underlying meaning of this ritual, and how to bring the evil of the event to its success. This creates an atmosphere of horror as even the audience becomes aware that a successful prize of winning is death, as they see that everyone, children and adults, had taken part in organizing the lottery and preparing for it for the past few weeks. Finally, when the victims gain a voice after the winner has been selected and is going to die, they use ‘it isn’t fair, it isn’t right.’ It is a reminder that people and society do have the power to change things and that they’re not losing their voice to fear. 

-Aishat Babatunde, Mid-American Review 

Craft Corner: Collaborative Writing Exercises

A massive ugly face sits on a long neck, attached to a mess of tentacles for arms and the skinny legs of a flamingo. You might see a drawing like this on the walls of an art classroom: an exquisite corpse. Most of us remember this activity from our childhood. You begin by folding a piece of paper into three pieces. First, you draw the head, then fold it over and pass it to the next person to draw the body. It’s passed again and the last person draws the legs. Until the paper is unfolded, no one sees what the ‘exquisite corpse’ will be. This collaborative art game teaches children about creative thinking. What can it teach us about writing? 

Writing is a collaborative process. It’s cooperative not only in how we learn to write from others, but in how we create feedback, workshop our work, and read and understand literature. Collaborative writing exercises can teach us creative thinking and help us flex our writing muscles because it forces us to think outside ourselves about how our writing looks to others. 

When you adapt the exquisite corpse for writing, the exercise can work in a few different ways. You might start a story and pass it to the next person to finish. You could continue passing a story amongst a group of people, allowing each to add a page. Or, you can try to write a single narrative amongst a group, with each person given only the last section of writing to work with.  

These collaborative exercises can look like a party game or a serious exercise, but either way, they have more value than social entertainment. They may have basic practical value, such as the challenge to write to time and length constraints. Focusing on writing games could be methods to break out of routine and help conquer writer’s block. Collaborative writing forces people to write out of their comfort zones and develop essential skills.  

First, collaborative writing teaches us to look at our writing through another’s eyes and understand how our audience reads and interprets our work. When writing for another writer, you’re under a different kind of pressure from your audience. You have to read through the eyes of your audience and the writer who follows you. You have to consider what information is necessary and what is significant: What does the next person need to know to continue writing?  

You must also be adaptable. When responding to another’s writing, you are met with the creative challenge to match their style. Their tone, style, and the rhythm of their writing voice may not match your own. To continue other authors’ narratives, you have to be flexible. You might try to replicate their voice or find a way to explain the shift. By examining your own style in comparison to others’, you learn more about your own work. 

Collaborative writing also makes us incredibly vulnerable. The actual writing of writing can be the least collaborative part of the process, often practiced alone in the safety of your own space and mind. When you give part of that process to someone else, you are opening yourself up to possibilities and being vulnerable.  

We may be beyond our childhood art’s exquisite corpses, but we aren’t done learning how to be creative thinkers. It’s important to remember why collaboration is key in writing: it helps us to grow.  

— Sarah Urbank, Mid-American Review