We are well into the season of light here in the Interior. Everywhere, the sun intensifies the whiteness of snow, or gleams off the slick patches of ice still on the road since November’s ice storm. The air is warm during the day–or warm for us, in the 40s. On the south-facing sides of snowbanks, the light is carving away the packed snow into the shape of a wave, arching and crashing slowly, in one-frame-at-a-time stop animation, into summer still months away.
Today I heard MFA student Eddie Kim present his poetry thesis and thought about how his poems both invited the reader, like the March sun does, and kept the reader at a distance, like the ice patches, or the below zero nights. A poem lures us in then pushes us back, surprises us, or challenges us. Do we make the meaning for the reader? Is the meaning only in what the reader brings to the poem? Or like sun on snow, do we carve a new shape, a new vision for the reader so imperceptibly that he or she is moved without even knowing why or how?
Write about something that moves you and something that pushes you back. Write about something beautiful in something unlovely. Write about the profound in the ordinary.
Post it as a comment and I’ll add it to this post.
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Here’s a poem from Greg at 21st Romantic:
Makeup
She paints herself
in long lines
and short punctuations of color, swings
open drawers, blasts
the hairdryer through her
thick black hair, hair as heavy
as night, not like
the light fluff
of shadows. Her lancing–so
purposeful, so
crafted, as if
appearance could be everything
in Art–pricks a
question: how much
does appearance matter
to an Artist? Is she
like a cook
protecting a secret ingredient?
The same ingredient mothers
stir in potatoes? And so what
more could he offer her, then? As he
drapes his arms over her
shoulders like two long, white locks
of hair, curling; both faces
reflect in her vanity
mirror, smiling. What was the man guarding
when he instructed her, “look at the us that we
will never be”?
Mattie's Pillow 