I’m often asked, when did you begin to write poetry?
I started writing poetry in elementary school when my teacher announced to our sixth-grade class that her students would begin to compose poems. All of us eleven-year-old were skeptical.
This wonderful teacher showed us how to create a cinquain, an unrhymed, five-line, twenty-two-syllable poem. The form begins with a two-syllable first line (with four syllables for the second, six for the third, eight for the fourth and back to two syllables in the final line). We counted; we wrote. We tried to keep our language spare: to capture a moment, an image or a single emotion. (I went more for a description of a place.)
I knew that cinq means five in French and truly believed I was creating a poem in a French poetic style, or form. This was mind-boggling stuff (me — writing a poem in a French mode!), and very seductive.
It took me many (many) years to find out that the cinquain is actually an American, not French, invention — and devised by a woman.
Here's how to write this popular, and simple, form: you can use syllables (2, 4, 6, 8, 2) or, at its easiest, words:
• The first line (frequently the same as the title) is 1 word.
• The second line uses 2 adjectives (often describing the title).
• The third line contains 3 words, usually gerunds (ending in “ing”) that show action and/or tell the reader more about the poem’s subject.
• The fourth line has 4 words that can show emotions about the subject and may be individual words or a phrase — or they may make a complete sentence.
• The fifth, and last, line is 1 word that’s a synonym of the title or similar to it.
Try you hand at this delightful poetic form.
I heard about Terry Spohn and his poetry long before I had a chance to read any of his poems. Mutual friends in a longstanding and ongoing poetry workshop in California kept raving about this poet, new to the workshop, and his high-energy poems. When I finally read a poem or two of Terry’s, I understood about all the buzz.
Terry’s had a career as a book editor and, for several years now, he’s been one of the regional editor of San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s a baseball enthusiast who not only listens to major-league baseball on his car radio but also plays competitive ball on a community (and regional) team. In person, Terry always is ready to contribute his quick wit and thoughtful kindness.
Terry Spohn holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa and lives in Escondido, California. His short fiction, prose poems and poetry have appeared in Rattle, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Mobius: the Magazine of Social Change, Ascent, Mississippi Review, North American Review, Oyster Boy Review, numerous anthologies, and other places.
Here are two of his published poems:
SHELF LIFE
And I asked myself about the present:
how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
—Kurt Vonnegut
I was making a movie in a suburb
in a grocery store in a housewife’s dream
I was holding a cardboard megaphone and a clipboard
somewhere an empty chair was waiting
the housewife had known me once
long ago, better than I had known myself
she pushed her cart down the condiment aisle
one front wheel fidgeting
like an idiot prince at his birthday party
on the tasting table Barwell’s Pickled Beets
the color of Grandfather’s lung
sat untouched in their delicate paper cups
the housewife kept a list
clenched tightly in her fist
if it fell and unrolled
it could reach all the way into her next marriage
the canned vegetable aisle was veined
with cables and heavy plugs wrapped in black tape
like the ground at church carnivals
this was as close as the woman
had been to me in years
she moved up and down the narrowing aisles
while the cart filled up with children
I could almost touch her in her sleep
could almost wake her
I had memorized the script
that could almost free her
but I was busy changing it
the movie would run backwards, all right
all the children disappearing
creamed corn bursting from cans
and flowing back through factories
and into the sun, and we would all soon begin
to forget, as we came out of the theater
squinting in the startling daylight
who, exactly, we had come here with
and which of these bright, new cars was ours
Terry Spohn –from Rattle #35, Summer 2011
Leaving Hugo
her hair a nest built by mourning doves
Grandma took the coat money from the humidor
I don't know why it is
there's always a problem in families
in a cinder-block building in Hugo, Minnesota
a single mother in a purple sweatshirt
coils springs for cluster bombs
children fall like leaves behind the water tower
it's time to forgive ourselves
we can't sleep through the night anymore
time to pluck that taut wire beside the heart
beneath the smokestacks of silence
our unbeautiful dead keep mum in the trees
eyes like cold lanterns adrift on a vast black river
while our fancies ply their dismal trade
on the far side of the mountain
none of us will return from anywhere
none of us has set down the glass and thought
this is what I have to do right now
smoke's been rising from the peat bog
another war bangs away just out of sight
young girls in their pleated skirts
learn to kiss beside the bike path
practicing on one another
Terry Spohn
-from Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Vol. 23, #1
And here are two unpublished poems by Terry Spohn
(Because of the long lines, and to keep the line breaks, "Goodbye, Ohio, Illinois" is printed in smaller type):
Goodbye, Ohio, Illinois
Substitutes
Can let you down
Quicker than a
Strapless gown
--Burma Shave, Highway 30, east of Dixon, Illinois
Those strange men like me in rental cars with out-of-state plates
come back for a funeral and one last look, they're here for you.
You know how it is, Ohio. Either your children go down
the Cherry mine and never come home, or they come back from college
with funny ideas, or from Mendota with a bad marriage and a black eye,
and you wonder why they left in the first place. Then the Burlington Dinky
disappears, tracks and all, the way a dead skunk does--bit by bit,
but the grandfather clocks keep ticking, keep ticking, ticking,
and the grandfathers with their gold-rimmed front teeth
and White Owl cigars rock on the porches, spitting,
listening to the White Sox on their two-knob Crosley radios,
and Doc O'Malley's oxygen tent makes the rounds up so many
flights of creaky stairs, while Grandmother sits in the parlor
watching Queen For a Day and all that self-cleaning country
light in your rippled windows spills onto the doilies.
Or, it's 1929 and your streets are oiled to keep down the dust clouds
when here comes the Graf Zeppelin with its 12-cylinder Maybach pushers
yawing high above you on its way around the world, and while everyone
is looking up at the future with their hands shading their eyes
Marilyn stops cleaving and Elvis leaves the house
and Pete Maravich--Pete Maravich for Chrissake!--drops
dead in a gym in Pasadena, but Keith Richards lives
and keeps on living, and plays his Fender Telecasters in open G
until few of us can listen any more to that hawkish tweedle
that says this is how it is at the end of things.
And when the big German gasbag is out of sight and hands come down
from foreheads, the screens sag and rust and paint bubbles off fascia.
Van Buren Street crumbles like peanut brittle. Even the boards
in the boarded-up windows rot, and Spohn Grocery slumps on Main Street
in full view of nobody, the name etched above the broken windows
like a tombstone for the whole family, and wind shushes the library next door.
Your job's done Ohio, done with Christmas snow clumped in the black oaks,
done with ankle-deep mud beneath the yellowjacket-ridden pear trees,
and the suffering out there in your canning cellars, the belt-whippings
in your summer kitchens, while dust motes nest on the mute piano.
How much more could you do for us than you already have?
All those sturdy Republicans gone down the road to glory,
those children of yours who climbed a tree that led right to us--
young grandchildren from the big city lying on our backs
in the yard to watch the northern lights or the Milky Way.
Just forget the Gugartys, Ohio, and the Friels, and Doc O'Malley.
Leave the dress patterns and Clabber Girl and Big Lee overalls
and while you're at it, the curtains don't matter any more, either.
It's okay to let the front door stand open.
It's okay to let the chickens run off to the fields
between Maytown and the Green River bridge,
where rain drums its jaded fingers on the mud.
The car doors down in the cemetery, they're slamming for you.
You're having every good mother's nightmare--children gone to the city
for money or California for love or Sulawesi to find themselves.
They rise like Zeppelins on their uncertain journeys.
You can still see them if you're lucky,
if you shade your eyes and the wind's right,
if you're lying in a backyard against the ground
with its hidden bones swimming away from one another,
and far beneath that, the fire that wants to break every last thing apart
because it's a hot July afternoon in the middle of a summer
that seems like it'll never end.
by Terry Spohn
midnight radio
when you drive past the moon
Earth's rotation changes stations
radio clear as the Mingun bell
Tokyo trance to throat-sung
punk from Tuva, twisting away
because things that turn
envy those that rise
emptiness is your highway
there's no speed limit now
open up the Acura to see
what it'll really do
don't check the blind spots
know the way a tree knows soil
you're alone in spite
of the stars' steady gaze
and those drifty Tuareg anzads
that whisper through the radio
straight into your ears
as if you were really here
by Terry Spohn
Happy Father’s Day: June 16!
Here are three poems on the ordinary/extraordinary care fathers, often without a word, bestow:
THOSE WINTER DAYS
by Robert Hayden
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
(from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, Liveright Publishing Corp., 1966)
THE GIFT
by Li-Young Lee
To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.
I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.
Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.
Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when given something to keep.
I kissed my father.
(from Rose by Li-Young Lee, published by BOA Editions, Ltd., 1986)
THE YEARS WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING
by Bruce Weigl
My father did not read to me,
he would not quote anything or anyone,
he never alluded
as we are wont to say in my world
to poems or stories
to make a point or to teach me
some lesson about the life
beyond the slag heaps of our steel city
dying upon our dying lake.
And what you teach someone
with a belt across his back
is belts,
or I missed the point of those beatings
which were not so bad—
the loud voice in the hallway, then the belt
flashing
then the kisses on his lap.
If I could bring the words to you
as though from him,
clear as the air off this bay
you would see—
he is home from the foundry,
younger than I am now, the black
dust from the mill like a mask
and he is bending down to me
in the dusk where I waited
on the steps of the bar
for his bus
and the cathedral
he makes with his fingers
opens to a silver dime
he twists before me
and lays down into my hands
for being good he says.
(from What Saves Us by Bruce Weigl, published by TriQuaterly Books/Northwestern University, 1992)
David Letterman isn’t the only one with a top-10 list. I’ve looked at writers speaking about writing and here are my ten favorite quotes:
“It’s silly to suggest the writing of poetry as something ethereal, as a sort of soul-crashing emotional experience that wrings you. I have no fancy ideas about poetry. It doesn’t come to you on the wings of a dove. It’s something you work hard at.”
Louise Bogan
“Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.”
Robert Frost
“Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.”
Marianne Moore
“Writers, if they are worthy of that jealous designation, do not write for other writers. They write to give reality to experience.”
Archibald Macleish
“Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.”
Stephen Spender
“The difference between the right word and the nearly right word is the same as that between lightning and the lightning bug.”
Mark Twain
“Not gods, nor men, nor even booksellers have put up with poets being second-rate.”
Horace
“A good title should be like a good metaphor: It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.”
Walker Percy
“You don’t have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.”
John Ciardi
“I’ve had it with those cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.”
Kenneth Rexroth
Do you have a favorite quote from a writer on the subject of writing?
Happy Mother’s Day!
Here are three poems on motherhood — at different times and from different perspectives:
NOTES FROM THE DELIVERY ROOM
by Linda Pastan
Strapped down,
victim in an old comic book,
I have been here before,
this place where pain winces
off the walls
like too bright light.
Bear down a doctor says,
foreman to sweating laborer,
but this work, this forcing
of one life from another
is something that I signed for
at a moment when I would have signed anything.
Babies should grow in fields;
common as beets or turnips
they should be picked and held
root end up, soil spilling
from between their toes—
and how much easier it would be later,
returning them to earth.
Bear up … bear down … the audience
grows restive, and I’m a new magician
who can’t produce the rabbit
from my swollen hat.
She’s crowning, someone says,
but there is no royal here,
just me, quite barefoot,
greeting my barefoot child.
from A Perfect Circle of Sun, 1971.
HISTORY OF MEDICINE
by Sharon Olds
Finally I fondly remember even Benylin,
Robitussin, Actifed,
Tedral, erythromycin,
penicillin, E.E.S., I can
see the tidy open mouth
and the spoon’s regular journey toward it,
the bowl almost convex with its shuddering
load of blackish maroon.
Time slowed down as the spoon went in, I can
still feel the thrum, in the handle,
that little tug like nursing, and then
the pulling of the spoon out of the mouth,
ampicillin, ipecac, St.
Joseph’s, tetracycline, my body
tuned to the four-hour intervals—we made
one being, the bottle and the child and I,
I remember with longing. Even the ear-drops,
lice-shampoo, wart-glaze,
even the time our son would not take
his Tedral, he was standing in his crib
and spat it out and I gently jammed another
dose through his teeth and he spat it out
until the bars and cruising rail
were splattered with dots of heavy syrup and he
understood I cared about the matter
even more than he.
As I cleaned him up with a damp cloth
I told him the germs were strong, we had to
staunchly fight them—I can hear my voice,
calm and cheerful. I can see myself,
a young woman with an orderly array of
bottles behind her, she is struggling to be good, to be healed.
from The Wellspring, 1996.
WHAT I LEARNED FROM MY MOTHER
by Julia Kasdorf
I learned from my mother how to love
the living, to have plenty of vases on hand
in case you have to rush to the hospital
with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants
still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars
large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole
grieving household, to cube home-canned pears
and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins
and flick out the sexual seed with a knife point.
I learned to attend viewings even if I didn’t know
the deceased, to press moist hands
of the living, to look in their eyes and offer
sympathy, as though I understood loss even then.
I learned that whatever we say means nothing,
what anyone will remember is that we came.
I learned to believe I had the power to ease
awful pains materially like an angel.
Like a doctor, I learned to create
from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once
you know how to do this, you can never refuse.
To every house you enter, you must offer
healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself,
the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.
from Sleeping Preacher, 1992.
Oriana Ivy is the winner of the New Women’s Voices Prize in Poetry 2011 from Finishing Line Press, which published her winning chapbook manuscript, April Snow, last year.
Oriana, born in Poland and who came to the U. S. when she was 17, is a well-known poet and frequent reader in the San Diego, California area (where I recently heard her read poems from April Snow and other poems). In addition to being published in The Best American Poetry 1992 (her poem chosen by Charles Simic, guest editor, with David Lehman, series editor), her poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod and many other journals and anthologies. Oriana leads the San Diego Poetry Salon, teaches poetry workshops and writes an outstanding poetry-and-culture blog (http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com).
Oriana writes deeply absorbing poems, rich in images that startle with their steely exactness. In her new chapbook, April Snow, poems mainly inhabit the Central Europe of her memory, the post-war Poland of her girlhood. Here are keenly observed moments rendered with abiding warmth (toward family, loves and nature) and honesty (about history and her own past). Her language, at once elegant and nimble, amplifies the craftsmanship of these poems.
Here are my two favorite poems from April Snow:
GRANDMOTHER’S LAUGHTER
One day in the street my grandmother
stops before another grandmother.
Both stammer: "It’s you –
you – in Auschwitz – "
Turning to me: "She and I shared
the same blanket. Every night she said,
'You’ve got more than I'
and pulled, and I pulled back,
and so we’d tug across the bunk – "
And the two grandmothers laugh.
In the middle of a crowded
sidewalk, in old women’s dusk,
widows’ browns and grays,
they are laughing like two schoolgirls –
tears rain down the cracked
winter of their cheeks.
On Piotrkowska Avenue,
on the busiest street,
they are tugging that thin blanket.
They are pulling back.
CATERPILLAR OF SMOKE
Sudety Mountains, Silesia
Mornings glittered like panes of ice.
Near a villa that legend whispered
Hitler gave to Eva Braun,
I found, abandoned in the dormitory,
a book of poems that didn’t rhyme.
Sun flamed the long candelabras
of icicles about to crash. I copied
phrases: a caterpillar of smoke.
My cousin Ewa astonished everyone,
solving math problems for fun.
Arms locked, slipping on the ice-glazed road,
we walked past the villa of Eva Braun,
high-school virgins secretly wondering
what it was like to be Hitler’s mistress.
I had another secret:
alone in the white forest I knew
the poem of winter had no words
unless they were crows,
stitching the mountains with crooked seams.
I was fourteen. The future flashed
as though a careless angel
opened the wrong door in time.
Later, thousands of miles of clouds
away from Warsaw, I found it
again – poetry after Auschwitz.
With a murderer’s hands
I caressed a woman’s breasts –
One could say anything, then:
beauty didn’t have to be beautiful –
news to me who grew up with
rhyme of silence and meter of lies.
When does the future begin –
a caterpillar of smoke
slanting white winter sky –
the spruce lost in stars of frost,
snow deeper and deeper snow.
previously published in Quarterly West
Click to see book on Amazon.
April is National Poetry Month. This celebration of poetry began in 1996. (In Great Britain, since 2000, National Poetry Month is observed in October.)
It’s a month-long celebration of poetry readings, podcasts and just plain reading poems on your own each day.
One of our past feature readers, Gail Dendy from South Africa, shares two of her poems online, as an audio recording.
Click to hear Gail Dendy's poems
Also of note is Poem in Your Pocket Day, April 18, 2013. The Academy of American Poets suggests that, on Poem in Your Pocket Day, you select a poem you love, carry it with you and share it with others throughout the day.
Here are some easy ways to celebrate:
— Hand out poems in your school or workplace.
— Start a street team to pass out poems in your community.
— Add a poem to your email footer.
— Mail a poem to a friend.
— Post a poem on your blog or social networking page.
Here is one of the poems I love and one of the candidates for the poem in my pocket this year:
THE SUITOR
We lie back to back. Curtains
lift and fall,
like the chest of someone sleeping.
Wind moves the leaves of the box elder;
they show their light undersides,
turning all at once
like a school of fish.
Suddenly I understand that I am happy.
For months this feeling
has been coming closer, stopping
for short visits, like a timid suitor.
Jane Kenyon
