What Sparks Poetry

Language as Form

In our series Language as Form, we’ve invited poets to write about poetic language as patterned language—how words as sound, voice, sentence, and song become elements of form.

Soham Patel on “Place Names Aren’t Done”

I can gaze at horizons or the ground with admiration like I do with certain paintings or at the people I love. I could stand in place for hours taking it in almost as a lyric subject if ever I’d have the time. At the same time, I recognize that while I stand in place in my room in Southwest Virginia, I also exist in Florida where I’ve sent my mother flowers, and in Pittsburgh where I’ve just texted my friend Luke. Technology and commerce cast all of us across the globe because place is no longer coherent or homogenous. Place is a process with past(s), present(s), and future(s), that according to geographer Doreen Massey can be fragmented, dislocated, forgotten and reformed. Massey’s thinking through place in this era of super speedy space-time compression helps shape my sense of a poem’s ability to attend to place as an unending yet impermanent entity. A poem is a place where space-time compression must occur, and why place in all its durations inspires me.

A poem, like the book, is a structure with a site of entry, the poet’s voice. The stanzas form the house and its rooms. For me a contrapuntal like “Place Names Aren’t Done” forms three texts standing on two columns. The poem’s running title operates as an argument for durational study as it reminds place names aren’t singular or finished and become vulgar. They hold multiple tenses, aren’t set in stone, and are powerful enough to cause erasure. Movement in this form operates as cyclical time here rather than linear.

The first offering in this poem for me of course is the left call before the right response, in other words, reading the poem conventionally, across its lines, left to right, taking the space in the middle of each line as a kind of pause: “PLACE NAMES AREN’T DONE in grasslands /.” A second read could be just the left lines from “PLACE NAMES AREN’T DONE/by my ancestors or anyone” down to “on the floor/I don’t fall through” (admittedly ignoring what’s on the right of the page). Number three is the airy, spare right column down “in grasslands//with migration…” Other orders are possible; the reading I propose here isn’t immovable; rather it illustrates how the contrapuntal form reanimates place. In any instance the speaker might descend vertically down into somewhere new in the end.

Besides place, language’s musical properties also spark me to poetry. The intersection of those two qualities manifest in Tyehimba Jess’s Leadbelly, the book that first brought me to the contrapuntal form. I admire how Jess constructs retellings of history, repurposing language from correspondences between the blues musician Huddie Ledbetter and the folklorist John Lomax who collected his music. The poems continually offer me reentry into the subject: I hear what I hadn’t heard somehow during my first, second, or third encounter with the work, the call and response offering more than one place for the poem’s music to go.

Writing Prompt

Access the histories (real, imagined, transcribed) of the place(s) you’re in. Write them all in conversation with each other.

—Soham Patel

Share This Post

Print This Post

Headshot of Soham Patel

Soham Patel

Soham Patel is the author of all one in the end—/water (Delete Press, 2023), ever really hear it (Subito Press, 2018), winner of the Subito Prize, and to afar from afar (The Accomplices, 2018). Their next poetry collection, The Daughter Industry, will be published by Nightboat Books in 2026.