Where would we be without resolutions? Accomplishments would be only accidents, stories incidents just strung along, music mere unending notes, and poetry but a jumble of words. Resolution puts all the pieces together like a completed puzzle.

John Milton’s famous sonnet, “On his blindness,” begins in puzzlement. The speaker (the poem is autobiographical; perhaps we dare say the poet) is pondering the account he will give when he stands before his God for the use he has made of his time and talents. But how unjust! He has suffered the loss of his eyesight—before even half his life is over!—and this God who will hold him to account is the one who wrested away the very tool of his trade—his vision. Understandably, the poet’s mood quickly worsens in the first half of the poem from puzzlement to dismay, even anger…

On His Blindness

by John Milton

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide,
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

The poem is a Petrarchan sonnet, a form consisting of an octave followed by a sestet; the octave presents the problem, and the sestet offers the resolution. The situation, as we’ve seen, is quite clear. What’s striking, though, is that the problem is presented in only seven (not eight) lines, not quite in accordance with the rules of the form. What happens in the last line of the octave?

The first half of line 8 declares that the poet asks his question “fondly.” In the seventeenth century, “fond” still retained its original meaning of “foolish.” Thus the poet acknowledges that his query is mere foolishness. Then, mid-line, a new sentence begins, offering the response to the poet’s imploration, given by “Patience,” personified. Patience’s answer, provided in the sestet, is essentially this: God doesn’t need your works. The entire world is under his authority, and countless others are accomplishing his business, but you, too, can serve “who only stand and wait.”

What a dramatic resolution! One of the greatest poets who ever lived worries that his poetry is not good enough to justify his life. Not only is he offered the reassurance that sometimes simply waiting—with Patience—is enough, but that reassurance comes “soon.”

If we recall rules of the form and go back to that break that is supposed to occur at the beginning of the sestet, in line 9, we find that the resolution starts, not there, but earlier in line 8. The resolution begins with Patience’s reply—or perhaps even with the speaker’s admission of his own foolishness. The expression of the problem is cut short according to the expectations of the sonnet form when the God of the poet breaks the rules in order to bring about resolution. With all the pieces of the puzzle in place, the picture is finally clear, and the poem resolves into a sense of peaceful assurance.

Post by Karen Swallow Prior.
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Further Resources, for Teachers or Writer’s Groups:

Subscribe to Every Day Poems— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In January we’re exploring the theme Resolutions.

In Night of the Republic: Poems, poet Alan Shapiro loads his minds-eye camera with film (or, these days, a disk) and takes a series of detailed, rather stark photographs. His subjects are the common, everyday things we notice only when we need them but generally ignore: a car dealership, a gas station restroom, a park bench, a dry cleaner, a swimming pool, a museum, a doorbell, a funeral home.

Shapiro’s poetic photographs are sharp and clear; we’re not left guessing the subject. But they often lead in an unexpected direction, as common, everyday things can do. Consider “Barbershop,” which becomes a meditation on eternity:

Eternity is the spiral up the poles
spiraling to its endless end.
Time is the vitrine
of antiquated gels,
conditioners, restoratives,
stray sections from yesterday’s Today
all over the table
in the waiting area where
Eternity is waiting…

These are poems to be read two and three times, and then two or three times more, like photographs that need to be reexamined to see how new angles or shades or colors can change the created whole. In “Stone Church,” for example, the emphasis on the stone construction gives way to what happens inside:

…At night, high
over the tiny
galaxy of candles
guttering down
in dark chapels
all along the nave,
there’s greater
gravity inside
the grace that’s risen
highest into rib
vaults and flying
buttresses, where
each stone is another
stone’s resistance to
the heaven far
beneath it…

These photograph-like poems, or poetic photographs, are filled with quiet wonder. And like fine photographs, their meanings can keep changing. Night of the Republic is a stellar collection of poetry.

Shapiro, who has won several poetry awards, is a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is also publishing his first novel, Broadway Baby, in January.

Some of the most powerful stories in the Bible are about women – Eve, Sarah, Deborah, Ruth, Esther, Mary, Mary Magdalene, the woman at the well, and the woman who touched Jesus’s clothes, to mention a few of the more obvious ones. Their stories are stories of sin, disbelief, leadership, faithfulness, courage, faith and steadfastness. These stories speak to both men and women, and most likely because they are most of all human stories, things we recognize and understand.

In poetry, these stories can become our stories. That’s what poet Tania Runyan accomplishes in A Thousand Vessels: Poems – to write both poems about Biblical characters and non-Biblical characters and situations, to help see the connections to the stories in the Bible and how they apply to us. From “Beach Walk:”

I wore my leopard bikini like the mannequin
at Bullock’s: shoulders back, breasts out,
fingertips light on my hips. Dina swiveled
her buttocks in a fuchsia French-cut
that pointed like an arrow between her thighs…

Poems about Dinah (the sister of the 12 sons of Jacob) and her rape are paired with a poem about child sex offenders. Poems about the woman at the well in the gospel of St. John are paired with a poem about the sins committed by a child against another child. Poems about Esther are grouped with a poem about walking on a beach. The stories of Jairus’s daughter are matched to a poem about children who nearly die. In “Children of Near-Death,” Runyan describes the near death of a 10-year-old named Edward:

…I dove. No more stuttering in Class. No more stinky
dodgeball courts, the cool kids lobbing
at my face. I swam deeper

a million pounds of water behind me. Kelp waved at me
like a crowd gathered in the grandstand.
Wrapped around my arms and legs

till I couldn’t get loose. Darkness…

These are not all dark poems. To the contrary, these are hopeful poems, not the least for the biblical characters represented and described. But what the addition of the non-Biblical poems does is to make the Biblical characters recognizable and contemporary – the woman who makes a terrible mistake, the woman who scoffs, the woman who assumes a leadership role, the woman who is faithful and caring even when no one expected her to be.

In that sense, A Thousand Vessels becomes a contemporary application of the Biblical stories. It’s a wonderful collection, full of faith, hope and truth.

Quick: name a contemporary love poem.

Hard, right? In contemporary poetry, one doesn’t find much about love – the emotion, the feeling, the condition that is so characteristics of a considerable body of poetry from earliest times to the 20th century. Think Song of Solomon, the Greeks and Romans. Think of Boccaccio, the Elizabethans (those sonnets!) and the Cavalier poets, the Romantics and even the Victorians.

But something happened in the century just past. Perhaps two world wars, a major depression, the rise of the media and the dominance of Freudian psychology pushed love poetry into a forgotten corner. I’ve even heard that feminism made love poetry a dangerous occupation. Whatever the cause or causes, love poetry isn’t what it has been in times before ours.

Which makes Dave Malone’s book of poetry Under the Sycamore all the more remarkable. Malone, the author of several books of poetry and a university professor, first published the book in 2003. It is a volume of 100 poems, all untitled and all short (the longest is eight lines). And they are all poems about love – love yearned for, love found, love lost, love regained – almost a story of a relationship that happens over an entire lifetime.

He begins:

Looking at the stars,
I have one thought
where I’m holding you
until they disappear.

And then this:

The moonlight on your face
through the open window
is actually my breath.

These short poems are filled with longing and passion, the self- and shared knowledge of two lovers, along with emptiness, loss and then reconciliation.

I lost my way in the snow
until I heard your voice
in the swirling wind.

To read these poems (and to read them aloud) is to sit in a well-lit, under-furnished room, watching the object of your love, who is unaware of being observed. Under the Sycamore is a beautiful volume of love poems. We need more of them.

And of course we want you there with us

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Resolution. Determination to follow some sort of action. Firmness of purpose or intent. The act of resolving, of transforming by a process, of disintegrating, of progressing from dissonance to consonance. In other words, poetry.

Every semester, I meet aspiring teenage writers in my creative writing class. Young writers who have stories to tell, poems to write, lives to change. And then they turn in their first poem, like a child bringing his mother a bouquet of dandelions. We read it together, evaluating technique, style, and form. Many of these beginning writers have a hard time seeing that their poems aren’t very poetic. They think if it’s intended to be a poem, and it looks like a poem, then it must be a poem. So what’s the problem?

A poem must have resolve, be resolute. A poem must have what one poet-friend calls a through-line, an overarching purpose or direction that provides enough bread crumbs for the reader to work his way through. A poem must be intentional in style, technique, sound, and rhythm. It must be crafted (not blurted), readable (not scan-able). Most importantly, a poem should make both you and me care–about the poem, the situation, our mutability, our journeys intersecting in this moment of the poem. A poem must hold enough mystery to make me reread it, enough imagery to keep me afloat in its own poetic ocean.

After hearing this, my students react one of two ways. There are those who steadfastly write and revise, eventually producing a semblance of a meaningful poem. These students sigh about the challenge the poem presented, and they didn’t think they had it in them. Then there are the dandelion poets, whose eyes gloss over, mumbling through disheartened lips about how they never realized how hard it was to write a poem. They rewrite by changing punctuation and line endings. Sadly, the poem dries up and blows away in the wind.

Maybe it’s not just a poem that must have resolve, but the poet as well. Because the poet holds the power to illuminate and the power to suffocate. As a poem begins to take form, the poet walks a fine line of crafting and allowing the poem to craft itself. It takes determination not to force your way or your answer into a poem; it takes humility to let the poem breathe and bloom. It takes staying power to plant a poem, water it, weed it, mow it, and water it again. Especially in the throes of winter.

I remember applying to an MFA program many years ago, and I was confident that my portfolio would stand out from the crowd, that I would be lauded with accolades, scholarships, and recognition. The form rejection letter crushed me, the dandelion poet. I didn’t write for months, and avoided poetry (reading and writing) for a year. I was too fragile. But the frostbite eventually thawed. I committed to hone my craft, to be a young writer and a wise writer, to create art rather than ego, to learn the art of poetry, the art of life.

And the poems? They’re still resolving.

Post by Joel Jacobson, of A Poetic Matter.

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Subscribe to Every Day Poems— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In January we’re exploring the theme Resolutions.

It was another TweetSpeak poetry jam, and this one started with a few rumors. All of the prompts were taken from Rumors of Water by L.L. Barkat. And it’s rumored that quite a number of poems emerged during the jam. We’ll have to wait and see what develops. You can’t be too careful about rumors.

Here are first seven poems from the jam.

Rumors of a Blue Geography

By @llbarkat, @Doallas, @kellysauer, @pathoftreasure, @amberleepb, @RachelleEaton, @divyaasachdeva and @shewhodid. Retweets by @wichmans, @cathiejoy, @shellartistree, @KChavda, @Skookum86, @kruss984, @LaundryLineDiv, @EscapeIntoLife, @umeshnrao, and @CarlyRocks. Edited by @gyoung9751.

Rumors of girls in white dresses

I’ve heard there are rumors
of girls in white dresses
and a woman behind a lens
and a boat with no dress.
Float at your own pace,
fingers dangling,
catching the current.
If I tread the water,
will it weep?
And what of the woman
and the white dress asleep?
How will I write
the white dresses
and the boat
and the fingers.
Oh, I want to write
the fingers…
White moon in a white dress
and me wishing for the next dance.
Can a dress dance
alone?
And a dress:
can it have wings?

How will I write?

How will I write
how the color of your eyes
falls at dusk,
lighting my way?
If life has no symmetry
but the water has waves
the color of your eyes,
perhaps that is symmetry
enough?

She follows the moon

She follows the moon
and dances with the stars;
her fingers disrupt,
catch a wrong chord,
cause disharmony.

She says:
Catch me without disharmony
catch me at the chord
to the left of the little hollow
at the base of my neck.
Catch me alone
or with a purple moth.
I really don’t care
how you catch me
with or without cause
with or without story.

She says:
There will be a purple moth
in every chapter
wings bent as a page
where the story waits to be
picked up again.
At the base of my neck
you’ll find the point
where our story
once began.

The fingers are playing

The fingers are playing
with keys and with strings
and silk faerie strands,
the touch light,
as the moth’s wings
the shivery slide of a nail
against skin
leaving me
rumors of water,
or the touch
that echoes the wing
the memory of lightness
Nails, skin
again storying my dress
and its whiteness.

Pan does laundry, too

Pan could play a laundry cup;
he still knows how to play.
The flute is in the movement;
I will follow Pan,
play his notes again
to echo your message written
inside this laundry-soap cap
you twist and turn with no effort
Shivery slide,
caps glide,
a twist, a turn
you’ll learn my message:
that Pan might make music
to woo us
into the lightness of a bubble
ascending.
The cap flies, spilling words
on the white-winged dress.
In the bubbles
we could rise and
see the world
through rainbow eyes.
A stroke it will be
dear lady
to make laundry of our love;
Just don’t leave me
rumors of laundry.

Spilling words

Spilling words
spilling wings
all this spilling
and I am ascending.
Pool the letters into hands;
pour them into words;
drink them down.
Pool the letters
into my mouth
and my lips will
spill them sweet
to you again

Laundry love

Love is tangled shirts
the hem of a skirt
caught in the brass button
of your jeans.
We hang it out
to dry,
a line of words
glimmering
like those rumors
rising among night whispers.

Ascend to the moon, dear love,
ascend to the moon;
follow the eyes
leading the way.
Let them fly
snapping in the wind.
Laundry love on a line
Ascend to the moon
on a brass button;
ascend the hem
on a line of thread.

With apologies to Robert Browning, Marianne Moore,
Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Mother
Goose, and my readers

I, too, dislike the villanelle,
redundant song that tasks one’s reason,
its circuit subtle as the Bronx El.

To write (or read) one hurts like hell.
It matters not which hour or season.
So I disdain the villanelle.

Though I’m not one to kiss and tell
I do confess my poet’s treason
(that 3rd line’s always your Bronx El).

So I cajole, try to compel
other readers: How it frees one!
Let’s just forget the villanelle!

I do concede it weaves a spell,
shows poet’s grief, the drugs she’s on.
(Stand back—here comes that damnéd El!)

But even so, it’s just as well
to let this snoring form sleep on.
I so despise the villanelle
relentless (listen!) as the Bronx El.

As this piece of homage (pottage? triage? collage?) would suggest, I have mixed feelings about the villanelle.

I admire a well-executed villanelle in the same way I admire a Baroque Tromp-l’oeil ceiling—the kind that conceals corners and suggests roundness where all is square, until you stare (and stare) long enough to see the trick. Unhappily, once the eye discovers this, it can’t be fooled any more. But what fun the before-hand fooling is!

Most villanelles (let’s face it) are not well-executed. They are heavy-handed, mechanical pieces. Granted, the machinery may be tight, functioning properly, clicking right along. But the poem is just that—a machine (albeit an ingenious one)—and, therefore, dead on the page.

These are the kinds of villanelles I write—dead ones—and I don’t know how to stop. What do Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke, and Elizabeth Bishop possess that I don’t, I wonder—besides talent, a finely developed ear and eye, and impeccable technique?

Here, I fear, is the root of the problem. The villanelle, alas, is not for everyone. In fact, given the paucity of successful villanelles that exist in English—relative to successful sonnets, let’s say—it’s barely for anyone at all.

If poets were obstetricians, the villanelle would be their forceps—an instrument one carries in one’s bag of tricks but rarely, if ever, uses, as the results of employing it are nearly always disastrous and sometimes even fatal.

The villanelle should be used only under the most extreme circumstances. Notice how nearly all of the villanelles universally admired portray terrible loss and utter and intractable grief: “Do not go gentle into that good night,” Thomas begs; “I wake to sleep and take my waking slow,” Roethke recites, automaton-like in his benumbed, post-traumatic-stress-induced state; “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” lies Bishop’s brave and brilliant poem, which proves not only that it is hard to master losing, it is impossible. These poets and their poems are alembics of agony. They fairly bleed.

If villanelles could be bought in a package, the warning on the side might read:

“Highly combustible! Do not use near open hea(r)t!”
or
“For professional use only. Do not try this at home.”
or
“In the case of accidental composing, review repeating lines 1 and 3. If they bore you, amputate immediately.”

So what is an average poet (i.e., a non-genius) like myself to do? If a serious, heart-rending, spectacularly-executed Villanelle For The Ages lies outside my range and repertoire, what of it? Sure, I can keep practicing at home, in private, in the dark, for the fun of it. (As with my singing, a corollary activity, that won’t harm anyone so long as it is done in the shower with the door of the bathroom firmly closed.)

Just as I don’t expect to write a great villanelle, I confess, I don’t expect to read many more of them in the course of my lifetime. But if and when I do meet one, as I have on a few very memorable occasions, I’ll be ready. As poet Robert Hass once wrote, when one encounters a huge and magnificent monster, there is only one proper response: “I think I’ll praise it.”

Post by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, author of Saint Sinatra and Other Poems

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Subscribe to Every Day Poems— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In December we’re exploring the theme The Villanelle.

She’s listening for sounds and trying to see them with her camera. You are invited to take what she sees (or what you see) and turn it to sounds.

The villanelle is a perfect form for sound-capturing, as it mimics a song. Will you join us in this writing/photoing project?

Post your villanelle and/or photos by Wednesday, December 28, for links and possible feature at The High Calling, here, or at Every Day Poems.

Photo by Kelly Sauer.

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Subscribe to Every Day Poems— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In December we’re exploring the theme The Villanelle.