Category: poetry (Page 2 of 3)

She’d said she wanted to go back to Naples one more time.

She’d said FDR would always be her president.

She’d said things about my Uncle Leonard

that I didn’t quite understand.

At her death, I was home, the football game on TV.

They’d said she had died.

I’d said something unremarkable because

that was all my lips could say.

It came out all wrong.

It was like the salt sea waters had choked me,

the waves crashing the shoreline of Ischia,

and gray water and rocks.

[This poem came from a writing exercise that we did in the Exeter Humanities Institute online pilot program that I’m participating in. We started with a poem written by someone else, and then after reading it aloud several times, each of us taking turns with a line or a phrase or a sentence, we had to choose one line or one fragment of a line and make it the start of our own poem. I took the simple fragment of a line: “she’d said.”

The original poem had been about an aunt, so then I thought about my own great-aunt. I had been thinking about her earlier in the day, while showing a film to my students. It was an old movie — 1934’s Imitation of Life — and the movie famously ends with a funeral procession. During the film, I had been thinking about — and regretting — that I have often been absent from the deathbeds of my family members. As the day wore on, however, my mind moved on to other things: grading papers, making dinner, getting the kids ready for their sleepover at Grandma’s.

I knew I had this online class to attend, but I hadn’t been thinking about Imitation of Life or my great-aunt or anything beforehand. And then we read the original poem together, which really had nothing to do with my own aunt, but it triggered memories for me. It helped, I think, that we had to go around the Zoom at the beginning of class and name our race, ethnicity, and heritage. I named my heritage as being, in part, Italian, and that must have started my brain thinking again about my great-aunt.

When the poem was read over and over, the simple line — “she’d said” — stuck out to me. The things we say can seem unimportant, just off-hand remarks, but other times, those same remarks can have a kind of resonance. They can take on new importance when we hear them again, or think of them again. It was with all of this swirling around in my mind that I began my own poem, the result of which is above.]

Some words I thought of:

phosphorescent, lyrical, helter skelter, whimsical, dandelion, zoo, languid, poof, timpani, hullabaloo, chunk, sour, Brett, write/right, outside, car, irksome, pissant.

Why did I think of these words? I was preparing to lead a discussion in one of my classes about beautiful-sounding and ugly-sounding words. I wanted to brainstorm my list of “most beautiful” and “ugliest.”

Funny thing is: I’m not sure if any of these words sound ugly. I tried to think of some, but it was a struggle. I don’t love the name “Brett,” but is it really ugly? “Car” is a weird word, especially if you say it over and over again. It’s like there’s something stuck in the back of your mouth. But is it ugly? “Sour” also has a funny mouth-feel; it’s hard for me to say, to get the diphthong just right. But it’s not really ugly, just weird. In a lot of ways, saying the ugly-sounding words out loud can be almost as fun as saying the beautiful-sounding words.

The only truly ugly-sounding words I can think of are hateful pejoratives, but that raises the question: Do I find them ugly because they SOUND ugly, or because I know what they mean and I can’t ignore their hateful meanings? Is their ugly sound a result of the baggage and connotations they carry with them, or do the actual sounds offend my ears and lips?

I’m in love with language not just for its communicative powers, but also for its sounds. I like feeling words come through my lips and off my tongue. I like enunciating. I like hearing words strung together in beautiful and interesting ways. This is one of the reasons modernist and avant-garde poetry has never bugged me; I don’t care what the dang thing means, I just like the sound of it.

Maybe the lesson isn’t that words are “beautiful” or “ugly” sounding, but simply that language is more than just meaning. It’s also sound. It’s also speech. We can’t remove meaning entirely — nor would I want to — but there can be a lot of fun in playing around with the sounds of language. That’s one of the joys of nursery rhymes, in fact. “Higgledy-piggledy, my black hen,”‘ and all that. It’s nonsense, but it’s also not. There’s a sense in the sounds, and those sounds can be pleasurable, playful, and powerful. (See what I did there? ;D)

A sound poem:

The phosphorescent shelter held a languid hullabaloo in the zoo.

Brett, wet and sour, bent to hear the lyrical dandelion timpani,

When right outside, the car went on an irksome helter skelter,

Crying out a whimsical chunk of nothing: a pissant and a poof.