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

It was another Twitter Poetry party, 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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Buy a year of 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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Buy a year of Every Day Poems— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In December we’re exploring the theme The Villanelle.

Glynn Young, a contributing editor here at Tweetspeak, is the author of a newly published novel, Dancing Priest. A professional writer with a background in journalism, speechwriting, and public relations and marketing, Glynn began blogging in 2009. It was at Faith, Fiction, Friends, where Glynn posted a poem for the first time, that I first found his work; since then, he’s become a friend whose writing trajectory I’ve watched with interest and admiration. To learn about Glynn’s writing life generally, see my interview at The High Calling: A Man of Many Good Words.

MD: You’ve written* that your first and every subsequent hearing of the song Luna Rossa [translated as “Blushing Moon” or “Red Moon”] evoked an image of a priest dancing on a beach, and that it was this image that gave way to your story idea. The song’s lyrics address “playing the part of love” and include the lines “. . . forgive me, Luna Rossa / For the vows I made tonight that are untrue. . . .” Given a priest as central character, those lyrics hold double meaning, making your story line seem especially promising for its inherent tensions; we might even say it was “received” inspiration. How conscious were you of the meaning of the lyrics while writing the novel?

GY: I don’t speak or read Italian. I had no idea what the lyrics meant. And I can’t explain why the song evoked that image. It just did. The priest was never [in my mind] a Catholic priest. For some reason, I knew he was Episcopal or Anglican.

MD: What about that song accounts for its continued strong hold on you?

GY: I think it’s the beat. I probably should mention that I love to dance. My wife gets embarrassed when we dance together. She says, “You don’t dance; you perform.”

MD: Does music have a role in the novel or otherwise help in some way to frame the story?

GY: In two scenes, one early and one late. The early scene involves the two lead characters, Michael Kent and Sarah Hughes, doing a tango. The later scene involves a youth group at the Church to which Michael is assigned; the former discover they have a dancing priest and name him that.

MD: Who is the novel’s audience? Did you specifically and consciously write for that audience?

GY: I didn’t write with an audience in mind. I wrote the entire novel, and a lot more, in my head over a three-year period. I didn’t really think about who was going to read it; for the three years I thought it was just a story in my head. After I started the writing process, I thought about audience, but by then the story itself was in control.

MD: What is the significance of the locale of your novel? Why the United Kingdom?

GY: The story is told in six parts; the first and third are in the UK, the second in Greece, and the last three in California. I’m not exactly sure when it happened but, at some point early on, my dancing priest on a beach in Italy became a theology student in Scotland. The story moved to the UK because the priest was Anglican.

MD: Interestingly, as you note, you always envisioned the priest Michael as Anglican (Episcopalian in America), a faith, unlike Catholicism, that allows priests to be married and so, for purposes of your story, allows for the possibility of flesh-and-blood romance. How deliberate was your choice of faith for the protagonist?

GY: It was very deliberate. I knew, even when the novel was all in my head, that this was going to be about a romance, a romance that moves forward in spite of a gap of shared belief. It can go only so far before it breaks down.

MD: To what extent, if at all, does your own personal faith journey echo in your conception and realization of the story and its main characters?

GY: The story of Sarah’s journey toward faith is based almost entirely on my own, including many of the specific details.

MD: You give several interesting twists to Michael, making him English-born but raised by Scottish guardians, a man studying for the priesthood at a university not a seminary, and a contender for an Olympic cycling team. Any one of these aspects would seem to offer myriad possibilities for character and story development; yet, you employ all three as tests of witness, faith, and love. What did introduction of the sporting competition allow you to show that you could not have achieved for your character otherwise? What’s the character’s greatest or most important test?

GY: Michael is not who anyone would think of if asked to imagine an Anglican priest. I deliberately drew him that way. Participation in the Olympics tests him in two ways: first with a jealous teammate and, second, with tragedy. Without any aspiration toward the heroic, he finds himself thrust into the position [of having to respond heroically]. He will never think of himself as a hero but as someone having to do what he was there to do, the instrument used to do it. He returns to Britain a hero not because he wins gold, which he does, but because of his actions in the face of a terrible tragedy.

MD: The story’s romantic interest is Sarah Hughes. What did you find most difficult in writing a female character in whom you endow similarly tested traits?

GY: Michael was a more difficult character for me than Sarah, likely because I shaped Sarah’s search for faith along the lines of my own experience in college. There’s a scene where Michael’s guardian mother tells Sarah that Michael has always been confident about his faith—has faith enough for three people. Not so Sarah, mirroring my own experience.

Both characters take on lives of their own after a while, doing things I didn’t expect them to do but that, in my hindsight, make sense.

MD: Does Sarah function as Michael’s missing side, and he as hers; that is, are both what the other needs to discover about him- or herself to become whole?

GY: Michael knows from the beginning that he and Sarah are meant to be one. She has glimpses of that but pushes the thought away. Faith scares her; she thinks people with faith are scary, wacko. Michael confounds that notion, and that’s what Sarah struggles with.

MD: How much from your own life did you draw on in creating your characters? For example, you introduce Hughes to Kent early, in Chapter 2; by Chapter 4, they’ve kissed. While the details are different, the description reminds me of what I know of how you met your wife. In Chapter 4, you put the characters together at a concert with a tenor, which somewhat echoes your experience of hearing “Luna Rossa” and becoming enthralled. Are readers who know you apt to find other such real-life parallels in the novel?

GY: [Glynn laughs.] You mean the fact that my wife and I talked about getting married after knowing each other for three weeks? There are some parallels but surprisingly few. I ride a bicycle but, unlike Michael, I don’t compete. Like Michael, I like to dance. The character of Jenny (introduced later in the book) is a composite of several people I’ve known.

MD: For nearly three years, you “wrote” and carried Dancing Priest entirely in your head, committing no first words to paper until the summer of 2005. How did you keep this “mental writing,” which you did at night, in check, so that it did not spill over into your day job? What, if any, techniques other than remarkable memory did you use to retain all the details, especially as you mentally reworked them in developing your story?

GY: I blocked the story. Those six parts [I mentioned] are the original six blocks. I had a prologue, a fairly lengthy one, explaining how Michael’s parents met. I shortened that into the conversation his guardian mother has with Sarah. By setting the narrative into blocks, I could work on each one independently, and not during my day job.

Once I started writing, things got much more complicated, because you can imagine faster than you can write and when you write, you have to be conscious of the entire story.

MD: What are some of the details you had to research to ensure the story’s credibility, and how did you undertake the research?

GY: A friend at work who’s reading the novel asked how many times I’d been to Scotland. I told the truth: zero. She was shocked, because she had been there many times and loves Edinburgh; she found the setting in the book so familiar. The publisher, a native Scot, had the same reaction.

While I’ve never been to Scotland, I feel like I have lived there, albeit virtually, for almost a decade. I looked at all kinds of sources, including sermons by John Knox (I make slight reference to him in the novel). I read history and travel books, and popular Scottish authors like Ian Rankin; I explored the region online; I subscribed to magazines; I studied the application process for University of Edinburgh, and the university’s curriculum. I took virtual tours and walked virtual streets.

MD: How did you determine when you’d done sufficient research?

GY: I never did feel that I had done enough. I kept at it, even after the manuscript was “finished.” I’m still doing research.

MD: How did you fold your research into the story?

GY: Very subtly. I tried to avoid being obvious about it. Readers will be hard-pressed to find many specific details but the sense of Scotland, I think, permeates the novel, especially its first part.

MD: What helped you the most to keep track of your characters and where, when, and under what circumstances they interacted?

GY: Constant rereading and rewriting. I didn’t have a story map, or at least one that was written down. The mental process I went through for three years fundamentally shaped the writing. When I started writing, I knew where I was going, I knew where the story was going.

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* Glynn has written a series of short blog posts about his novel:

The Best Laid Plans
‘Dancing Priest’: The Writing Process
‘Dancing Priest’: The Inspiration

The novel is available for Kindle and Nook. It will be published in paperback in January 2012.

Post by Maureen Doallas, author of Neruda’s Memoirs: Poems.
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Buy a year of Every Day Poems— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In December we’re exploring the theme The Villanelle.

If you are trying to be a better poet, you know that writing poetry is only half the work. Reading good poetry is the other half. It is what informs your sensibilities, introduces you to new techniques, makes you jealous (in a good way) so you work even harder to find just the right images, sounds, rhythms.

I read a lot of poetry, because it helps me become a better poet. It also makes me a better writer in general. I also read poetry just because. For me, it is a source of enchantment, a kind of hope, a place to dream.

There is so much to choose from in the world of poetry, but here are a few ideas for you or a friend, this holiday season…

1. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. This is an excellent resource book and includes a lot of great classic poems, grouped by form. It’s the book my daughter Sara once stole away; she later returned with poems of her own: sonnets, pantoums, villanelles, sestinas.

2. Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words is a fun little book that will get you playing with words in new ways.

3. The Butterfly’s Burden. This collection, by a Palestinian poet, never fails to make me swoon. Take this little untitled poem for instance: The fog is darkness, thick white darkness/peeled by an orange and a promising woman.

4. Of course we recommend any of our titles. Beauty, style, unique ways of seeing the world, real voices. That’s what you can expect from a T. S. title.

5. How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry. Hirsch says poetry is “a secret that can no longer be kept a secret.” If you’ve wondered why and how you should read poetry, this book will give you some unexpected and delightful answers, so that maybe you’ll find yourself saying, like he does, “It always carries me away.”

6. Nine Horses: Poems. One quiet Sunday, I read this entire book of poetry to my kids. They loved it. Collins is pure grown-up, but he’s accessible at many levels. One of our favorites was about the neurotic fear of a mouse who might burn the whole house down by accidentally striking a match in the walls.

7. The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems. Neruda will teach you the power of the image. Abstract language takes a back seat to poppies, a green knife, footsteps light as flour dust. I am particularly enamored with the love poetry. Here’s an excerpt from “Twenty Love Poems, 7″: Leaning into the evenings I toss my sad nets/to that sea which stirs your ocean eyes.

8. The Anthologist is one of the funniest books I’ve read. Part fictional memoir of character ‘Paul Chowder,’ part terrific insight into the inner workings of poetry. The running story of Sara Teasdale is both fun and poignant, as is the character’s own failed love-life with Roz.

9. The Art of Recklessness. Not an easy read, but somehow I can’t put it down. The force of Young’s voice, the liveliness and depth of his observations, and sometimes the surprisingly simple interjections (no one can ruin poetry by trying to write it!) make for a profound and sometimes winsome read.

10. Every Day Poems. One of the best things I ever did for my poetry writing was to start reading a poem a day. This daily poetry delivery (weekends excluded) makes it simple, and gives me joy in the morning.

Post by L.L. Barkat. Visit L.L. at Seedlings in Stone, for more on writing, poetry, art and life.

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

Like most poetry built on refrains, the villanelle steers away from narrative ideals, away from conversation and linear exchange. Instead, the villanelle circles, like carrion fowl. And like the buzzard, no one really likes the villanelle. (Go ahead, gasp.) They aren’t fun to write; they aren’t exactly lucid morsels to inhale, unless you’re reading Elizabeth Bishop, W.H. Auden, or some other dead poet.

There’s a reason only a handful of villanelles are actually famous, and even so, few of those keep to the strict form like Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night”: The villanelle is, perhaps universally, the most difficult form of poetry.

You write the first line, and you’re stuck with it until the end. You pick up momentum, but then that third line keeps popping up, too, like Presidential debates.

By the time you reach the second stanza, you might be wondering if the endeavor is worth continuing.

Something you’ll notice about Elizabeth Bishop, in “One Art,” and Dylan Thomas, in “Do not go gentle…,” is the imperative. Each poem reads as instructions, commands, with an understood you. When a line omits its subject, it becomes versatile, mutable, easier for the poet to work with.

Notice it most as Thomas develops a litany of wise men, good men, wild men, et al. who “rage against the dying of the light,” who “do not go gentle into that good night.” While the poem is presumably a plea to his father in the face of death—the understood you of the first stanza—the refrain lines act as predicates to simple, declarative sentences in subsequent stanzas, elaborating on the hall of fame with whom Thomas, the elder, might soon enter cahoots.

While Thomas and Bishop, along with Auden, Roethke, and others, take more somber tones to their villanelles (as have I in the past, with “Sunday Morning Bread” and “Prayers for Friends”) I’ve always thought the strict repetition of lines created something of a Gong Show within the poem. An idea is begun, only to have another supersede it. Just when we gain a new rhythm, the first returns to center-stage with the self-importance of a five-year-old. The second returns soon enough, like the first, and when there is an understood you, you cannot help but play along.

The two lines come and go, chasing one another (and you) through the poem until they’ve twined themselves into a couplet at the end. Given that premise, my recent viewings of Cabaret and The Muppets, and the irresistible fusion of the words in question, inspiration has driven composition of this—my VaudeVillanelle:

Kick and dance onto the stage—
as the piano man bangs a ditty—
rush behind the theater drapes

Do you enjoy the wild old cabaret?
Do you like how the young ladies
kick and dance onto the stage?

But don’t blush or try saving face
while you watch our brand of comedy
rush behind the theater drapes

because champing right at its tail
a new bit or gag, and something witty
kick and dance onto the stage.

Lacing dialog in the one-act play
the satire will get a mite snippy,
rush behind the theater drapes,

and tweak it up with shadow shapes.
Then comes the closing routine:
kick and dance onto the stage,
rush behind the theater drapes.

Post by David K. Wheeler, author of Contingency Plans: 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