Object Lessons
What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems.
In our current series, Object Lessons, we’re thinking about the relationship between the experienced and imagined world. We have asked our editors and invited poets to present one of their own poems in combination with the object that inspired it, and to meditate on the magical journey from object to poem.
Each essay is accompanied by a writing prompt which we hope you will find useful in your own writing practice or in the classroom.
“Explore What Sparks Poetry” is made possible with funding from The Virginia Commission for the Arts.
This is an essay on revising a poem that has no value to anyone. I have no advice to give. You cannot keep your friend alive in your poems. You can grieve your friend in poems and find your way back to certain feelings, and so, momentarily, grief might stand side by side with elation and longing. Isn’t there an ashtray suddenly there? I read the poem recently during a classroom visit, a student had requested it, and what I felt as I read was not the return I so wanted when first drafting the poem but a vast and gaping absence blooming inside my body.
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When I was younger, I began to frighten before the inferno ahead—the one waiting at the finish line of my life—my fate for a lack of faith. A childhood regimented under religious indoctrination left me involuntarily preoccupied with superstition and with sin: unduly concerned with the haram and heresy.
There are five things enclosed in gauzy nets, each hanging between the spikes of some kind of desert plant. They are the only things blushed with color in a drab and dusty dreamscape. At the same time that I wondered when they would break free, I also wondered how they might survive in such an arid world.
I remember how my father would explain how the moon and yes, satellites, stayed in orbit without falling out of the sky—I also learned that the moon is a natural satellite, although different from the human-made satellites which beamed information to and from earth, or vice versa.
The plum and the plum tree, then, became a philosophical center for me. Or, if not center, a lily pad of poetic thought, leading me to reflect on what exactly it meant for such fruition, such overabundance, to result in death, rot, and souring. And how, in a number of ways, these stages of growth remarked upon the trends of capitalism, (over)production and exploitation in Western society.
When I think of my own hearing loss, I think of irreparability, a loss that runs only one way, converting my skull to a locked vault, a cave. I like to be alone there, to study how it susurrates. Sonority, that tideline's arrival, retreat. Other losses are more acute, and I bear them bitterly. Like the constellations in the dark night of Greek thinking, the night sky overwritten with predators and prey. Washed with milk, they sink away to hide behind the sun.
One last thing: this poem was drafted on Atlas Peak, above Napa Valley. I was staying in a cabin owned by my friend, the poet Jane Mead, a gift of time and space she had often given me in the years between 2007 and 2009, precarious years during which I lost my father, my full-time job, and my health.
In my poems and in my poems’ engagement with things, I have tried to get at this “absolute reality.” What’s the right verb trying to do that? Document? Capture? There isn’t a good verb for it other than “live”; in my poems and in my poems’ engagement with things, I have tried to live this absolute reality. I’m not sure what success could really look like here, but the poem I’m sharing “Closed on Three Sides, Open on One” meets my basic intuitive requirements.
Not all poems have memorable origin stories, but this one’s birth is so clear I can still feel in my body the moment of its arrival, see the sharp light, the falling away of everything else but its shape forming.
For me, Virgil’s Aeneid is partly about continuity and repetition, a setting out over and over again. Likewise, David Ferry’s deep intertextual approach to writing—especially in Bewilderment, which includes his translations of Virgil, Catullus, and others, alongside his original poems—is also about continuity and iteration.
The object I'm considering is a landscape, which includes recognizing myself as part of any landscape that I'm engaging, whether I'm looking at it, remembering it, imagining it, or writing about it, and whether that landscape is the rolling hills of California, a painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner, a video by Zenib Sedira, or an argument for public parks by Fredrick Law Olmsted. And just as I am a part of the landscape that I'm writing about, the writing is a part of it, too.
“The Wake of Maria De Jesus Martinez” was one attempt to write, as form, a casta-like poem, where each section of the lyric was itself of a different time and space, yet, linked through repeating phrases. As the lyric progressed, the work began to be less “pictorial” and relied more and more on sound: the emotional labor of the poem was performed/rendered through its music.
A poem, too, is a series of intersections. To be like a mountain, a poem must be in ever-motion, unclosed and unfinished. To be like a mountain, a poem must/might be its own metamorphic conglomerate, swallowing fragments of what came before—texts, body memories, images—transforming them by pressure and heat into some new thing.
Most of all, however, Curt was interested in cement, its powerful malleability. Cement could allow you to fashion new things never before seen on the landscape, or it could just as well slink back to imitate the forms that were already there. I, on the other hand, was not a ready fan of this material. I couldn’t deny that it disgusted me, had always disgusted me, but now especially, when the hum of construction was all-present in Indian cities as to never stop. Cement was simply a mainstay in the air we breathed;
When I first saw the bandelette in the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaisme, in Paris’s Marais district, I immediately experienced one of those Rilkean “bursts,” for here was an object, that in its ornate yet near-transparent being, invoked so much of the social, cultural and historic struggles of the Jews which are writ large across and infuse the whole of Western culture from earliest times through the rise of Christianity and the Church fathers, on up to the Shoah.
I’m not that old, but I’ve lived long enough to know that the lion’s share of my life is behind me. I know there are relationships I can’t hold on to, and places I can’t return to. I’m just beginning to see “real time,” the arc of almost half a century, and how the generational waves, both violent and beautiful, define our species.
