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.

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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.

OctPoWriMo Day 7. “spine & ribs” // “BACKBONE”

OctPoWriMo Day 7. The Core of Our Beings

In poetry, the skeleton of your poem can be its poetic form or shape on the page. It can be the through line of the poem: a mood, a color, a theme, or extended metaphor. It can also be an emotional arc and/or a narrative structure.

Example Poem: “Sleeping with One Eye Open” by Mark Strand from Voetica.

Sleeping With One Eye Open

Unmoved by what the wind does,
The windows
Are not rattled, nor do the various
Areas
Of the house make their usual racket–
Creak at
The joints, trusses, and studs.
Instead,
They are still.
And the maples,
Able
At times to raise havoc,
Evoke
Not a sound from their branches
Clutches.
It’s my night to be rattled,
Saddled
With spooks. Even the half-moon
(Half-man,
Half dark), on the horizon,
Lies on
Its side casting a fishy light
Which alights
On my Floor, lavishly lording
Its morbid
Look over me. Oh I feel dead,
Folded
Away in my blankets for good, and
Forgotten.
My room is clammy and cold,
Moonhandled
And weird. The shivers
Wash over
Me, shaking my bones, my loose ends
Loosen,
And I lie sleeping with one eye open,
Hoping
That nothing, nothing will happen.
~Mark Strand

How does the structure of this poem help to convey the meaning?

Prompt: Write a poem about a skeleton of any kind. Use sensory details from at least three senses, and a personal experience of one of the fears from your list. Use your line breaks to give your poem an interesting skeleton.

Possible form: Mesostic. The Mesostic was created by John Cage. You may choose to use the Mesostic Poem Generator to generate many different Mesostics until you find your favorite.

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A note before you read: I tried understanding Strand's poem as I found it super interesting. Strand’s poem builds a rattled music out of short stepped lines and internal rhyme (“maples / able,” “rattled / saddled / handled”), making a house that should creak stay eerily still while the speaker absorbs the disturbance and form enacts anxiety. The abrupt line breaks (often on prepositions/articles) create micro-stutters; the repeated two-beat tail-rhyme mimics the half-moon’s off-kilter light; and the final couplet’s neat closure (“open / hoping”) ironically seals the dread. So, net: structure = symptom. The OctPoWriMo Day 7 prompt asked for a poem about a skeleton, with at least three senses, a personal fear, and line breaks that are a skeleton. Here are two versions: a free-verse “spine & ribs” layout, and a mesostic (John Cage's "What you say. . ."–style) whose vertical word is BACKBONE (I mark the vertical letters in Caps inside the lines). (For mesostic background: vertical phrase intersecting mid-line, unlike acrostics.)

Poem 1. “spine & ribs”
(Free-verse;
Fear: the latch that won’t open; 

Senses: sound, touch, smell, taste, sight)

the night is
a thin spine
    of doors

I put my ear to the vertebrae—
  k—k—click (no give)
the metal’s breath tastes
  like a coin held too long—
copper on the tongue,
    palms damp as peeled fruit.

under paint:
  the musk of old wood, rain-leaked,
a faint mold note rising—my mother once said
    the house keeps receipts.

I count each rib of the corridor—
  frame, jamb, latch, bolt—
as if touching the names could hold the world still.

behind me, the air’s cool hand
  slides my hair aside;
in front, the keyhole is a pin-eye sun,
  sting bright, useless.

“open,” I say, softly, to the bones of the door.
the hinges remember their rust and answer
  with a powder-dry sigh.
I press the whole map of my body to wood—
  grain against skin,
    fear against frame—
until the house and I share one cautious heartbeat.

somewhere a kettle begins to think;
somewhere a street dog shakes rain from its coat;
and something inside me—
    the small animal that hates to be seen—
climbs back into its cage of ribs,
  lays down,
    and listens to my breath
find its old, honest measure.

Poem 2. “BACKBONE”
(Vertical letters down the center spell BACKBONE;
Senses used: taste/metal, touch/sweat-grain-heat, smell/varnish-rain-gas, sound/kettle-brake-tags, sight/moonlight.)

Brittle moonlight sips the keyhole; I taste metal on my tongue, a
hAnd on the knob, slick with a kitchen-salt sweat—
the Corridor holds itsself together by smell: old varnish, rain, a thread of gas—
the locK thinks about other careers again.
Beneath my palm the door’s grain BuRns a faint path—
mOrse from another room: kettle / bus-brake / a dog’s tags—
the Night leans its ribs against mine;
and i End the count at one word that fits in any latch: here.

~ Oizys.