What Sparks Poetry

This poem’s genius lies in its sharp, patient storytelling; deft vernacular; its indisputable dignity and lack of judgment rendering the sistuh; and its collective consciousness.

"Always a walker in woods and hills, observer of birds, weather, and ways, I was immediately drawn to the lived, practical, right here moments in the book’s three sections, 'Logging,' 'Hunting,' and 'Burning.'"
—Susan Tichy

The experience sent me off into the stacks to read for myself some of the poems I had heard Angelou read. Rereading I realized I could begin to rehear the music I had heard in person; following the lines, as I read out-loud, I felt my own voice approximate the same sounds. This was thrilling and utterly new.

 The premise of “When You Go Away,” is familiar: when the lover is separated from the beloved, the order of the world changes. Given the limits of this conventional subject, how did Merwin make a thing both faithful to its convention and new? I found an answer to my question in the complexity of the poem’s final lines: “my words are the garment of what I shall never be / Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.”

At first blush, I was equally confused and excited. It’s a sonnet! Case closed. But the rhyme scheme is off, and it has both a volta and a parting couplet, elements of Petrarchan and Elizabethan sonnet traditions. It’s a hybrid, a fused form, it dances between two worlds, two traditions.