Last Monday night a group of poets gathered to read poems and explore how to find guidance to write our own new poems. And then how to re-enter a draft and discover what might have been hidden from you in your writing process, until now? Here's one technique I've played with to discover the heart of a poem in revision. Sometimes the poem branches into two poems.
“I’d propose that…intense involvement in rich,
descriptive speech also creates another subject,
which is the character of the perceiver. It’s
a kind of perceptual signature, a record of a way of an individual way of
seeing. This is one of the central things which poetry is: a vessel of
individuality, a distillation of the way one
person experiences the world, knows herself in time
and in place.” - Mark Doty, “Speaking in Figures,”
Poets.org
Automatic writing: Surrealism originated in the late 1910s and
early '20s as a literary movement that experimented with a new mode of
expression called automatic writing, or automatism, which sought to release the
unbridled imagination of the subconscious, influenced by the psychological
theories and dream studies of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and the political ideas
of Karl Marx (1818–1883). Using Freudian methods of free association, their
poetry and prose drew upon the private world of the mind, traditionally
restricted by reason and societal limitations, to produce surprising,
unexpected imagery. The cerebral and irrational tenets of Surrealism find their
ancestry in the clever and whimsical disregard for tradition fostered by
Dadaism a decade earlier.
Prompt: Write an antonymic translation of your poem draft. Notice how the process requires you to define each word as you mean it before you then have to choose from an impossibility an opposite word. What words are the hardest to translate? What do you discover about what your poem is about through this translation?
Antonymic Translation – write the opposite of each of the nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs OR by
each general idea. For example:
· To
be or not to be: that is the question
· To
not be and to be: this was an answer
· We
had more important things to worry about than suicide
A Display of
Mackerel (by Mark Doty - just the first few sentences)
They lie in
parallel rows,
on ice, head to
tail,
each a foot of
luminosity
barred with black
bands,
which divide the
scales'
radiant sections
like seams of
lead
in a Tiffany
window.
Iridescent,
watery
prismatics: think
abalone,
the wildly
rainbowed
mirror of a
soapbubble sphere,
think sun on
gasoline.
Here is my translation of the first few sentences of Mark Doty's amazing poem A Display of Mackerel:
Antonymic
Translation (my own)
I
stand myself a column
Under
fire, foot nor navel,
Not
an inch of matte dark-
Solid,
a lighted hole
Undivided,
and skin
Invisibled
Not
any indication
Of
my making.
Gravity,
dirt,
Inward:
know tubor,
Domestic
celery
Bulb
buried within itself,
Know
moon and cheese.
Explore your poem by listing some images that stand out from your antonymic translation or your poem you have written. What are the possibilities they create?
· Study these details you have written.
“…they aren't "neutral," though they might pretend to be, but instead
suggest a point of view, a stance toward what is being seen”
· Inquire
what this stance or place of viewing within an image or world could be?
