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.
What I found in the violin-echo of my own beating heart, was grief, a grief not only for my friends who had not made it out alive, but a grief for this world in which we are none of us good.
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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.
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.
The island I called Hag Island in this poem isn’t, after the ten or so years since I wrote “Local History,” an island anymore, not even at full high tide. What was island has become something more like a hump in the marsh.
Mysteriously, the speaker and the friend, and you and I, might become one mind in the poem; we could intuit something illegible but true, together. The energy of our consciousness is trying to make itself known by and against the energy of everything incomprehensible outside it.
Is there a moment—in its fresh-cast-ness or in its emptying—when the Buddha is more wholly Buddha? My poem attempts, I hope, to confront these questions, not answer them.
