The Poems of Others
What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems.
In the series The Poems of Others, we’ve invited poets to pay homage to a poem that first sparked poetry in them—a poem they read that gave them permission to write poetry or the idea that they might write it—a poem that led them down the path to becoming a poet.
“Explore What Sparks Poetry” is made possible with funding from The Virginia Commission for the Arts.
To further encourage our students, we always write to the prompt along with them. After writing, we ask our students to take another risk: if they feel comfortable enough, we give everyone that chance to share their work aloud with the class. To get the ball rolling, we most often have the instructors be the first to share; we want, as much as possible, to make our classroom a non-hierarchical, non-punitive place. Sometimes, the students ask us to read their work privately, or to be their readers aloud to the group—these acts of bravery and vulnerability from the students are exactly what our lessons aim to protect and encourage.
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This vision of desire—to become the thing we love, to be remade in its image, to gradually take on its form—is the site of this poem, the mercurial “thing-that-is-struggling-into-existence” at its heart. In a 2015 article whose title contains its plea, its manifesto and its thesis—WE FILL PRE-EXISTING FORMS AND WHEN WE FILL THEM WE CHANGE THEM AND ARE CHANGED—Bidart describes the process of writing poetry in terms of being “gripped by something that struggle[s] to find existence through the medium of language, but whose source [is] not language”.
If I did not take from Larkin his skepticism and lack of faith, I took, and still take, however subsumed, his neo-formal poetic forms, unfussy, concentrated, a modest musical tone playing on half rhymes and perhaps above all, the finely detailed and close, film-like observation of the world around him, physical, natural, and emotional.
I think part of my draw to “Still Life with Turkey” is the refusal to see the father in his casket, the processing of that decision, the decision to not look at death. In my writing, I look at death all the time. But when it came time to watch my sister die, that was impossible.
Exaltation and praise is fertile land in poetry. To be the subject of a poem means a person, moment, or thing is significant to the poet, so they in turn write lines worthy enough to be called poetry, lifting up that beauty, finding its truth.
The first two lines, with their insistent, promised inevitability of “must triumph,” veer closely in tone to a government propaganda film while even at this late date still also sounding patriotically stirring.
Her situation was real, she worked to a set of constraints, but as she did so was remaking what she found. She wasn’t pretending she didn’t live in a real circumstance, but nor was she under any illusion that her circumstance was enough.
While many African American poets, from Langston Hughes on, have read their work with or over musical accompaniment, Cortez is relatively unusual in the degree to which she understood her voice as one instrument among the others in the band.
I encountered bpNichol’s First Screening in the unsystematic way that many of us happen across the most profoundly life-altering works: in a moment of the least expectation and, simultaneously, intense desperation.
“Salmon,” by Jorie Graham, is one of those poems, miracle-sharp in its vision, that came along at a vital moment and opened up my mind to contemporary poetry: before that, I'd basically only been reading poets who were no longer living, and I suppose I had liked that—the dramatic séance of it all; the sense, a touch thrilling, that only the dead could teach us to live.
The English comma seemed more about attitude than grammar. Will you wear that shirt, Lord? Will you be prodigal, though inverted?
This was a poem about sexual politics of a particular order and one with which I could, by my early thirties, completely relate. Suddenly the last two lines ramified: “a friend suggested she sell it/she’s into that process now.” Maybe this wasn’t a tale about giving away one’s power in order to stay relationally “fit”—maybe this was a tale about deciding to publish, frightened men be damned.
I loved how the first half of the poem painted a picture by negation, like a puzzle, and how it wrenched me from the cold, lonely reaches of outer space down to the grounded, intimate moment of laying one’s head on a lover’s breast and hearing the quiet of her breathing: all made equally sacred in the poem’s grand equation.
Because as a dancer I’d devoted myself to linearity—the ballets I grew up on were mostly narrative, and even the semi-abstract pieces I performed had clear emotional arcs (beginnings, middles, ends)—one of poetry’s first appeals was its ability to refute temporal order.
And so it was there, in my bakery, in one corner of which I had a horrid shaggy green armchair I’d scavenged, that I first chanced upon Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “All Wild Animals Were Once Called Deer” (BAP 1995). What, exactly, was it doing? How did it mean?
All I knew, as I stood in my bakery that night, and the nights that followed, reading and rereading Kelly’s poem, was that I wanted that. In my life. Right now. It was worth changing my life for. That. That was the what that I wanted.
All I knew, as I stood in my bakery that night, and the nights that followed, reading and rereading Kelly’s poem, was that I wanted that. In my life. Right now. It was worth changing my life for. That. That was the what that I wanted.
The drama of the “The Fish,” and in many of Bishop’s poems, is the drama of observation.
