OctPoWriMo Day 8. Window // Clock // Teacup [Three 6x6 Lewis Carroll Squares]

OctPoWriMo Day 8. It Seems So Alive

In poetry objects often come alive. Objects are given human characteristics, emotions and actions which is called personification.

Example Poem: “Field of Skulls” by Mary Karr from Poetry Foundation.

Field of Skulls

Stare hard enough at the fabric of night,
and if you’re predisposed to dark—let’s say
the window you’ve picked is a black
postage stamp you spend hours at,
sleepless, drinking gin after the I Love
Lucy reruns have gone off—stare

like your eyes have force, and behind
any night’s taut scrim will come the forms
you expect pressing from the other side.
For you: a field of skulls, angled jaws
and eye-sockets, a zillion scooped-out crania.
They’re plain once you think to look.

You know such fields exist, for criminals
roam your very block, and even history lists
monsters like Adolf and Uncle Joe
who stalk the earth’s orb, plus minor baby-eaters
unidentified, probably in your very midst. Perhaps
that disgruntled mail clerk from your job

has already scratched your name on a bullet—that’s him
rustling in the azaleas. You caress the thought,
or it proves there’s no better spot for you
than here, your square-yard of chintz sofa, hearing
the bad news piped steady from your head. The night
is black. You stare and furious stare,

confident there are no gods out there. In this way,
you’re blind to your own eye’s intricate machine
and to the light it sees by, to the luck of birth and all
your remembered loves. If the skulls are there—
let’s say they do press toward you
against night’s scrim—could they not stare
with slack jawed envy at the fine flesh
that covers your scalp, the numbered hairs,
at the force your hands hold?

~ Mary Karr

How does the poet use personification to bring inanimate objects to life?

Prompt: Write a poem about the life of an inanimate object. You could write from the objects point of view, or use the cube exercise to explore the object from many different points of view.

Possible form: The Lewis Carroll Square Poem. This six line poem of six words per line, reads the same across as it does down.

~

A note before you read: On the example (Mary Karr), she turns “night” into a membrane with “forms… pressing from the other side,” then lets “skulls” stare back with “slack jawed envy,” so the gaze isn’t just human; the objects do the looking, envying, and implying threat. Personification flips agency: the world watches you, not the other way around. That’s the engine I leaned on above, that is, letting the window and the clock and the teacup learn, argue, keep, breathe.

Poem 1. Window

Window learns weather like stubborn prayer
learns slowly fingerprints quiet passing seasons
weather fingerprints argue with sleepless neighbors
like quiet with keeps house breathing
stubborn passing sleepless house inside softly
prayer seasons neighbors breathing softly kept

Poem 2. Clock

Clock counts pulse rooms waiting still
counts patiently metal keep promises thin
pulse metal faithful for small mercies
rooms keep for listening of breath
waiting promises small of hunger between
still thin mercies breath between awake

Poem 3. Teacup

Teacup listens steam gathers morning secrets
listens politely to lipprints from softly
steam to fragile rises through stories
gathers lipprints rises hearthborn old spoon
morning from through old porcelain sugar
secrets softly stories spoon sugar loyal

~ Oizys.