Craft Essay: "Clarity, Mystery" (Part 1)

When Poems Compel Through Concrete Image and Visceral Action

Today, we are sharing Part One of a craft talk I gave at our first Holy Gossip gathering.

The first part of this essay reflects on the varying success of metaphors. I was curious to determine why I personally reject some metaphors for their lack of precision, but am drawn to others that are illusive to the point of being hermetic. I will move on to discuss poems that illustrate my rationales in Part Two.

Here’s Part One of “Clarity, Mystery”!

(some porcelain)

A poem can fly. A poem can rise out of a crushed soda can like a genie. A poem can live inside a leaf, sleepy in the sun. I write this in the sun at the beach. I write at the edge of a lake. It is a place, a place I have visited in my poems. A place is action. The beach is leisure. For some. For me, as a white lady. I am joining in with others in the activity of relaxation. I can position my speaker at the beach, lying face down on a towel, unconscious in the sun. And this can represent any number of things: passivity, slumber, succumbing to dream, refusing to exchange with others (a withdrawal), and, or course, death. Just the presentation of this action sets forth numerous possibilities for how my speaker will be understood by her reader.  Once, teaching Forche’s “The Colonel,” my student (a recalcitrant, older New York man) claimed that “a moon can’t swing from a cord.” The moon, I argued, can most certainly swing from a cord in a poem. One thing I love about that particular image is how it refuses to be a simile.