Reprise
What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems.
In the occasional series, Reprise, we republish some of the most loved essays from What Sparks Poetry’s archives.
“Explore What Sparks Poetry” is made possible with funding from The Virginia Commission for the Arts.
One Poetry Daily that struck a resonant chord was May 31, 2024’s "Sad Rollercoaster" by Jared Harél. The poem chronicles the summer in which his daughter came to understand Death. In second grade, I wrote a dirge contemplating the black void of nothingness. This prompted a meeting with my teacher, parents, and principal. I explained the poem as an attempt to wrap my head around the notion of Death, rather than as a call for help. The second-grade mind is hard to decipher, and the bleak existential tone didn’t help. Now, as both a parent and an educator, I appreciate the additional check into authorial intent. Teaching high school kids sometimes elicits flights of fancy that raise eyebrows and might be a similar cause for concern. Yet the poet in me understands the need to explore thought into poetry with no regrets too. Harél’s poem awakened these vivid memories and relevant thoughts.
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Another generative bit of language emerged (and reproduced itself at different moments in the poem) when I found myself looking for a phrase to indicate the numerical “opposite” of one vote (“a flock of votes”? “a pride of votes”? “a murder of votes”?). The evocative collective nouns that have developed for groups of animals began leaping to mind and helped me punningly suggest a few ways that a large number of votes together might be understood, depending on one’s perspective.
Persona offered a path through the unimaginable. Throughout my first book, Theophanies, I wield persona to trace a foremother’s face in the dark—Sarah, Hajar, Eve, Maryam. I cannot know them, but in the absence of definitive knowledge, I can speculate. Through speculation, through the assumption of another’s voice, I can clarify my own. Using Sarah-as-foremother as a mouthpiece doesn’t reveal anything true about her. Rather, it illuminates my own inclinations, biases, and assumptions, long-obscured and buried. However frightening, however troubling. By braiding together multiple voices in a contrapuntal, I can better locate my own.
Each of us enters Johnson’s book through that singular, seemingly never settled and always unsettling noun, holding a small flat object labeled Inheritance. A thing made and possessed by another, and now — is it really yours? A thing given, but was it freely chosen?
Make him come back, she said,
her voice like something brought up intact
from the cold center of a lake.
her voice like something brought up intact
from the cold center of a lake.
In order to understand that all living beings are alike, no matter how dissimilar we may seem, we must transform our relationship with nature and assume a new stance; we must situate ourselves neither above nor below the other creatures on Earth, but beside them.
