Poetry of Place

This poem is a response to prompt #2. 

The Seventh Most Populous City
The concept of one out of over
One hundred seven billion, six hundred two million, seven hundred seven thousand, seven hundred ninety one
Lives that have ever blinked on this planet
Hits me hard as I close the taxi's yellow door
And face the endless stream of Beijing on a sultry afternoon. 
How can one teenage girl
Become anything more than average
In a pool so vast? 
The sunless skies and the ads on the streets
Engulf the city 
Until even the crowds have diminished
To short breaths in eternity
And the impact of the
Squat, smoky noodle shop on the corner of
Two redundant streets
Is the same as the impact of me.

Note: 107,602,707,791 is the number of people who have ever been born according to this article here. Beijing is the seventh most populous city in the world according to this.

A Wannabe Sonnet Before... and After... and After...

Latest Draft of the Wannabe Sonnet:
First Semester

The imitation of sunsets on leaves

Warms the cautious chill of autumn’s breeze.

As the night extends and the sunshine grieves,

Persephone sparks nature’s own disease.

When the curl of old petals cannot last

And the light chatter of the woods must pause,

The evenings, blanched like photos of the past,

Accent the aging of silhouette claws.

Summer’s hellish heart winter’s cold greed stole

Snatching the air amid autumn’s brief show.

The morning, blue like a departed soul,

Drowns the gentle white of yesterday’s snow.

Shivers run deep outside the tired school,

Where there cabin fever is no less cruel. 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Before
The imitation of sunsets on leaves Warm the cautious chill of autumn’s breeze. As the night extends and the sunshine grieves, Persephone sparks nature’s own disease. Summer’s hellish heart winter’s cold greed stole Snatching the air amid autumn’s brief show. The morning, blue like a departed soul, Drowns the gentle white of yesterday’s snow. The evenings, blanched like photos of the past, Accent the aging of silhouette claws. Aw no my friend these old rhymes cannot last ‘Cause a couplet remains ‘fore I may pause.
My creativity’s drained, help me please, What rhymes with please, cheddar cheese or chemise?

1st Time After

The imitation of sunsets on leaves

Warm the cautious chill of autumn’s breeze.

As the night extends and the sunshine grieves,

Persephone sparks nature’s own disease.

Summer’s hellish heart winter’s cold greed stole

Snatching the air amid autumn’s brief show.

The morning, blue like a departed soul,

Drowns the gentle white of yesterday’s snow.

When the curl of old petals cannot last

And the light chatter of the woods must pause,

The evenings, blanched like photos of the past,

Accent the aging of silhouette claws.

Though shivers run deep outside my abode

Closer we huddle la dee da la –ode AHHHHH.

Joyce Sutphen Visit Preparation

Death Becomes Me
by Joyce Sutphen

Death has been checking me out,
making himself at home in my body,
as if he needed to know his way
through the skin, faintly rippling
over the cheekbone to the hollow
beneath my eyes, loosening
the tightly wound ligaments
in the arm, the leg,
infirming the muscle
with his subtle caress,
traveling along the nerve,
leaping from one synapse
to the next, weaving his dark threads
into the chord that holds me tall.
Death is counting my hair,
figuring out the linear equation
of my veins and arteries,
the raised power
of a million capillaries,
acquainting himself with the
calculus of my heart,
accessing the archives
of memory, reading them
forward and backward,
finding his name everywhere.
Death comes to rest in my womb,
slaking away the rich velvet
of those walls, silently halting
the descending pearls,
as if he could burrow in
and make himself my mother,
as if he could bare my bones
and bring me to that other birth.

Source can be found here. 

This poem stood out from the rest mostly because it shares the same topic as the “Death Inc.” poem posted on the class blog. However, it assigns Death a very different personality. Mr. Wensman wrote in his response that the two poems create Death as a “familiar and close” character (apostrophe!), but really, the tone in “Death Becomes Me” sounds too threatening to really contain any comfort that familiarity or regularity should bring. Spotting Death browsing through the Star Tribune at a bus stop lacks the creepiness of having him turn around and begin “checking me out, / making himself at home in my body.” Death crawling under one’s skin inspires as much appeal as a burglar taking the time to feed the dog before fleeing, even if Sutphen softens the poem down with words like “caress” and “rest” to describe Death’s actions. The detail with which Death proceeds while inhabiting the narrator makes it so that Death understands the narrator better than the narrator understands him/herself. In a way, Death acts like a secretary on the surface, but as he becomes more involved with the narrator’s more sacred parts, such as the heart and memory, he transforms into someone capable of playing as the puppeteer. At the end of the poem,  he “brings me to the other birth,” forming an image of Death acting the dominant role in the narrator’s later steps. The lack of traditional capitalization at the beginning of each line allows the reader to focus on Death as the sole beginning of each idea, perhaps reflecting the way the narrator has centered her mind and body around him. 

My initial reaction to reading “Death Becomes Me” led a Wikipedia search of Elizabeth I. A quick scroll to the bottom of the page reveals a unforgettable painting of the queen that fits perfectly with my interpretation of Sutphen’s poem.  (Here is a link to the painting.) The dark hues and Elizabeth’s bony face suggest Death has already seeped into the queen, calculating her blood cells and whatnot.

Reading several of Sutphen’s other poems astonished me because she writes about a variety of topics, ranging from natural subjects like “A Bird in County Clare” to advice for readers in “How to Listen.” Do poets write with certain trends in certain years, like the painter Picasso with his Blue Period, Rose Period, etc? Or do they scatter themes across decades of work? Also, why did Sutphen choose “How to Listen” and “Just for the Record” as the two poems for her website? 

Poem of the Day

The Red Wheelbarrow
by William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

__________________________________________________________

Why I chose this poem:

I remembered this poem way before my day to present the Poem of the Day and was too excited to wait to post it on my blog. I read this poem for the first time when I read Sharon Creech's book Love That Dog back in elementary school. I like this poem mostly because when spoken out loud, it "sounds" like a solid, firm staircase. Each line falls into the next without much complexity and the scene that the poem paints is very serene. I also like this poem because it raises the question of "What depends on this wheelbarrow with its rainwater and chickens?" Maybe I could write a poem response to that...
(Also it must be weird to have William Williams as your name.)

The farmers who didn't farm

Willows curve over the streets

Humming

With flies from the open air markets.

T-shirts on the kids and plastic tricycles in the crumbling courtyard

Are symptoms of the West

Leaking into the East.

The old farmers with their decayed teeth

Sit on the steps outside their doors

And guard the village from the skyscrapers

Bursting

Out of Beijing.

The teens who trudged down aisles of grain

Now study in musty classrooms with cracked walls.

Accents thick in their English, they leave for the capital

Seeking

Blinking lights and shopping malls

Instead of the gravel roads of home.

The advice on form and imagery stood out to me in the “Voice and Style” chapter. I never really know when to start a new line when writing poems, so in the first poem that I published on my blog, I experimented with isolating some words in their own line. In future poems I hope to keep in mind the discussion of abstract statements versus images, since I feel that I can describe an image pretty well but lack the depth in using statements to connect those images back to a general concept. Highlighted ideas from the reading included the perspective twist utilized in “Skinhead” by Patricia Smith. I will probably look back at the list of possible questions to ask during revision in “The Energy of Revision” whenever writer’s block hits me. 

Update: So when I was little they hadn't gotten a newfangled plastic trike for me... :(