What Sparks Poetry

If stanza is taken in its literal translation, “room,” then the rhymed lines of a stanza in terza rima (1 & 3) might be imagined as forming that room’s walled enclosure while the middle line, barreling ahead into the next stanza, presents in turn something of a door—such that the poem figures a sequence of interconnected rooms, with doors that don’t quite open and don’t quite close.

The asthmatic cough is a chorus, a repetition machine. One cough anticipates the next.

Having endured frequent lung imaging, the lung has emerged for me as a primary image. This poem began there: the lung as a bundle of cut flowers in a vase. Repetition and chiasmus allows me to defamiliarize, and even reject, that simple equivalency.

All I know is that I drafted “Rehearsal,” soon after my trip to the park, in a rush of longing that quickly morphed into a sense of wonder at the strange, tender impulse to make anything at all, and at the transience of whatever is made, and about the impossibility, really, of making it alone. Even something as tiny and self-contained and seemingly solitary as a poem.

While various cognitive disabilities have probably existed as long as humans have, the language to frame and see them as distinct embodiments and identities has not. Plath is a natural choice, since, in her own words, she sought to express “what it is like to be alive in this body-mind.” Islam belongs to a growing number of poets who are recognizing what this means: that until recently, neurodivergent poets sometimes only found each other by chance or by intuition, but now we can trace and celebrate our connections.

Yet, as with each of the blackout poems I wrote for our Missing Department project (twenty-five in all), there were always more resonant and unexpected meanings to explore beyond any words the two texts happened to share. Although I might have been initially pleased to make a connection between the mother’s address in Klamath Falls and the story’s descriptions of a river that ran through the center of its fictional town, for instance, the presence of moving water ended up affording me the poem’s core metaphor.

For me, though, the most special type of repetition is where the language undergoes a transformation: When a word, phrase, or line comes back around, the denotation has changed; or when a symbol comes back around, the referent has changed. This type of repetition is where I think you can judge the level of honesty in a pantoum.

Together, bound by our bodies and being with each other as bodies, there might be something better than “the fibrous needs of the heavens.” Perhaps, out here, in beetle mouth, amoeba, in the sugar water suckle of a hummingbird. A bruised blue so beautiful, and dusted.

In exceeding the frame of visual description, ekphrasis in the expanded field refuses to dwell only on the surface experience of visual art – or film or dance or music. Going outside of the frame and beneath the surface, it engages with another art by reconceptualizing and recontextualizing it: in its historical and cultural and subcultural contexts, its critical reception, its making and materials, the artist’s biography, the poet’s autobiography, the creative process of ekphrasis itself, or any other framework that seems relevant.

“Home Ward (Seoul, Korea, 2012)” approximates the physical layout of a room. My memory of the real room, one of the last where my grandfather stayed, is marked by the concentration of patient beds in a rectangular space that, if empty, I would have considered a wide hallway.

I have long favored the idea that poetry is a kind of sheet music the composer creates for somebody else to perform across time and space, rather than a mode of self-expression.

What will fascinate me most is the way the poem’s ending gestures toward my own potential complicity, which seems a much more nuanced and realistic engagement of power as a subject. In the end, the poem’s language and form are vehicles used in an attempt to absorb my own terror and the reader’s terror—though the story of the poem and the story of the country—is far from complete.

I usually only email poems to people so soon after writing them when it feels like I didn’t write them at all but copied them down from wherever they already existed, taking them down from the air.

The bowl she fills in the wake of his failure is an artifact fused with hurt and irony. The rose petals—perennial symbols of love and romance—obscure a collection of dead pollinators: no honey is about to be made by this meeting of flower and bee, at this hive of an art colony. As with most arresting images, the arrival of the bowl re-angles how I consider parts of the poem already read: in this case, setting, which is now made ironic: art colonies intend cross-pollination, fertilization, and bloom, not sting and death. The bowl of rose-covered dead bees is a clear, precise expression of rebuke delivered straight to the composer’s front door: intimate and elegant, a painter’s speech-without-saying.

Every public persona implies a negotiation between the facts of biography and the imperatives of form.

I had been ready to give up on the whole enterprise as well, I told her—for an alarmingly long time, nothing I picked up seemed able to penetrate or point the way, a demoralizing experience indeed for someone who’s always balanced a great deal of himself on an abiding faith in literature. But then I happened to revisit Philip Levine’s What Work Is.