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:

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

I confessed in my last post that I am a teacher of Poetry. I should also confess that I am a poet, for this condition allows me a second perspective from which to see poems—as writer and reader, as giver and receiver, both.

This means that several times a week I sit down with a blank piece of paper and play at making poems. I use the word play instead of work as it conveys the paradox of poetry as the exercise of freedom in the face of constraint.

Play suggests the challenge of discovering ways to subvert the rules of the game, even as we observe them—to figure out how to use limitations to our advantage.

Work, on the other hand, connotes duty, dullness, and drudgery—none of which has anything to do with poetry. (The final—fabulous—lines of Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill” describe and enact the dynamic of poetry-as-serious-play better than any I know. They also serve as his epitaph: “Time held me green and dying / though I sang in my chains like the sea.”)

Though I’m sure there are writers who make poems in solitude and silence, I don’t. In fact, I’m talking most of the time. I do this, partly, so I can hear what the poems are saying and whether or not they sing. I also do this to remind myself that when I write I am with someone.

W. H. Auden once said that poetry is a way of “breaking bread with the dead,” and he’s right. All of the poems I’ve ever fallen in love with—and all of the poets who wrote them, dead and alive—are in the room with me as I write. They are informing the language I choose to use, the music of my lines, and the timbre of my voice, even as they stretch the limits of my vision. They are the Company I keep, and in return for their long and good companionship, I offer them my own poems.

Finally, speaking, singing, and listening to my own poems serves to remind me of the constant, yet invisible, presence of The Reader, whoever he or she may be. Just as surely as there are readers who fall in love with poetry, there are poets writing poems with the specific purpose of wooing them. I know this because I am one of them.

Robert Frost once said of the process of writing poetry, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” He might also have added, “No love in the writer, no love in the reader.” Within this dynamic, poetry becomes a gesture, a set of signs and symbols expressing the shared humanity of reader and writer—concepts expressed through the material substances of book and ink, paper and pen—and so aspires to the condition of sacrament.

Any effort to define Poetry (with a capital “P”) in an exhaustive way is doomed to fall short, and this brief essay is no exception to that mighty rule. One reason for this inevitable incompleteness is that Poetry (like Love) is an abstraction, whereas true poetry (like true love) is found in the flesh-and-breath experience of it. Given this, it somehow seems fitting that I must finally resort to poetry to elucidate Poetry, and close this meditation with a poem I wrote some years ago when asked to define what Poetry meant to me.

Mille Grazie, Dear Reader, & Buon Appetito!

Poet’s Heresy

“I feel that the Godhead is broken up like bread at the supper,
and we are the pieces.” –Melville, Letter to Hawthorne, Nov 17, 1851

I’m a Sicilan woman
and my poems say mangia!

I want to feed you
bread and wine, fruit and feast,

blessed and broken words
to chew, chew, chew.

I want you to eat them
purely for pleasure,

to put your lips around p,
crack k’s with your crowns,
roll l’ s across your taste-budded tongue,

to swallow sweet & easy
the meal of your life.

For it is what your body craves,
your heart sorely wants,
what your gut loves.

It is lies & truth, death & life,
sweet/sour, adazzle/dim,

what you have always
and have never known.

It is itself and you besides,
every thing & no thing at all.

It stuffs you full and leaves you
heavy, hungry, starved for more.

It makes you glad.
It troubles your sleep.

It is my body & my blood.
Here. Take. Eat.

Post by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, author of Saint Sinatra and Other Poems. Image by Claire Burge. Used with permission.
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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 September we’re exploring the question “What is Poetry?”

It is a book on writing. But it is also more. Somebody said that somewhere. I think it may have been Deidra Riggs.

She is right. There are probably a few “mores” that Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing is about. But one that compelled me with an odd urgency was this: trying to deal with coming-of-age.

The struggle to grow up, to find one’s place in a world that has both beauty and suffering, is something I deal with a lot at my house. On the one hand, my Eldest is always telling me, “I don’t want to grow up.” On the other hand, my Littlest is always asking me, “What’s it like to be a grown-up?”

So for my Eldest I am always trying to coax her into courage, and for my Youngest I am always trying to hold her back, if only a little.

My dual nature is best captured in a poem I ran the other day in Every Day Poems: The Stolen Child. (The excerpt of the poem, below, is also fittingly the epigraph for Rumors of Water.)

Now I put it out here for you. Can you see how the poem embodies a struggle to grow up? Can you see how a parent might play either role: the faeries or the oatmeal chest? The poem is also, in its way, about Imagination versus Reality. Interestingly, they share certain qualities, both inspiring and frightening.

How about you? What does The Stolen Child evoke? Something more?

The Stolen Child

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Read the rest of The Stolen Child

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

Subscribe to Every Day Poems— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In September we’re exploring the question “What is Poetry?”

Remember Angela? Her original Glass Slipper post had a different opening, which I trimmed out for the sake of space. But I kept it, because it was so cheeky I just knew I’d want to be sharing it with you eventually. Today’s the day. [You're on, Angela ]

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So you want to be a sonneteer?

To prove yourself mistress of wit and master of sass?

To cultivate your inborn ability to think up, slap down, and grand slam fourteen-liners like it’s nobody’s business—and live to tell the tale?

Call a sonnet anything, but don’t call it subtle. The sonnet’s aim is plain: to woo them and wow them, to take no prisoners, to claim and keep her readers’ hearts with nothing but big sound and a little sense. She’s a diva, and as with every soprano joke you’ve ever heard, what she wants is all of everyone’s attention.

The sonnet is small, despite its big voice, and its diminutive size may make it seem fragile. But the sonnet is a shoe your feet would kill to fill, so why not?—try one on for size, walk the floor, dance a two-step, and see how it feels. My guess is that once you break it in, one sonnet won’t be enough—you’ll find yourself morphing into the Imelda Marcos of poets, the pages of your notebook lined with sonnets of every hue and make—Petrarchan, Shakespearian, Spenserian, Miltonic, Versace (okay, there’s no Versace Sonnet)—yet each of them bearing your signature stride and strut.

— Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
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As it turns out, I struggled to wear the sonnet, but it didn’t quite fit my feet. My younger daughter shared my pain, while my older daughter wooed and wowed us at high-speed, composing sonnets like they were some kind of oversized Lego-blocks project: so easy that any three year old could do it.

While I think it’s important to discipline myself to try on the shoes of various poem forms, I understand that personality and brain-wiring somehow play a part. I may be sassy, but I’m no sonnet master, and I suspect I never will be.

However, that doesn’t exempt me from joining the effort. So, here’s my glass slipper sonnet. Complete with the “ouch” I felt while trying to compose. It must be said that the gracious James Cummins gave me some advice about punctuation, which slowed the sonnet down and turned the final line (which he also suggested I rewrite) into a statement. The sonnet is better for it. (Thanks, James )

Upon Learning that Fur Was Lost in Translation
(and then learning that it wasn’t, but too late for this sonnet)

What did fine French Cinder elles wear besides
glass, what high class did they hope to flaunt to
the ball, what gall muster towards, “I do”?
Did they eat ash, secret, pretend inside,
ache for privilege to take midnight steed ride
to prince, to price, to prove flamed thoughts, undo
braided tresses, guesses? Did they have clues
about the way ever-after collides

in fives, in tens, muttered end lines tight shut,
a fight to rise between odd hours ticking,
tripping like a da-dum tapped short, slight cut
into small rooms, I am‘s that jam, turning
coated slippers towards spondee minutes?
Where we pace time’s seconds on silk shirred string.

Post by L.L. Barkat. Visit L.L. at Seedlings in Stone, for more on writing, poetry, art and life.
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Subscribe to Every Day Poems— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In August we’re exploring sonnets.

This morning, Megan Willome wrote to me about today’s Every Day Poems selection.

“An ode to fly fishing, perhaps?” she asked, and finished by saying she knew there was more to the poem but these were the lines that drew her.

I have been thinking about this all morning. I began by writing back to Megan, to say that somehow I had focused on the fishing when I first read the poem, but today, receiving it in my inbox, I had seen the sleep instead. I also said that I was compelled by “the thought that maybe it was Mare who was fishing, or the poet herself.”

This did not come on the first reading, or the second, or the third… and so on. I think I must have read the poem ten times before saying this to Megan.

Now, writing this, I am struck by the word “lines” in the poem and in fact am more convinced than ever that the piece is about poets as much as it is about Mare’s lover.

Or maybe the poem is about the reader. After all, who does the poet catch with her line, but you and me, while we are unsuspecting? And who does the poet draw, but us, sleeping? When we finally wake, we become the trout, caught and compelled.

Megan wrote back to me and said, “A good poem does that—offers multiple gifts upon multiple readings.” Yes.

Poem by Anne M. Doe Overstreet. From her new collection, Delicate Machinery Suspended.
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Subscribe to Every Day Poems? Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In July we’re exploring sestinas. Upcoming months’ themes include resolutions, the color red, and roses. But in August we’re exploring sonnets!

Lately, I’ve been writing hard, more professionally than years past, which means also a bit more mechanically. Some words are needed, so I crank them out.

GoodWordEditing is one of my few places where I can still play. Play is so important.

I’ve thought of posts I could write this week: about the 22-30 rule of engaging readers, about the scene and plot things I’m learning in my own writing, about how to carve out writing time when you have a family and a career and a church and dogs that need someone to throw the frisbee, about how to use Twitter as a method of social note taking, even a spiritual analysis of Battlestar Galactica Resistance clips showing where that series does a good job of opening the door to think about faith and religion.

Except for Battlestar Galactica, those things don’t feel much like play to me. Even Battlestar doesn’t feel as playful when I’m analyzing it for scene structure, character motivation, and theme.

But poetry is so useless, it’s only good for play. The movement of a poem isn’t going to take me anywhere in particular. I’m just here swinging with the words. Up and back. Up and back. Or maybe kayaking around Serenity Island at one of our city parks. (Yes, I live in heaven.)

And earlier this morning, I finally found this poem. Or I should say it found me. People kept sending it to me. Quoting it back to me. And I realized it was time to climb on the swing, time to get in the boat again.

You can hear me read the poem out loud here.

Sometimes

Sometimes
images are
too intimate,
too desperate,
too honest.
Sometimes
reading is
a little death.
Sometimes
writing is too.

This post is a modified reprint from GoodWordEditing, the blog of Marcus Goodyear, author of Barbies at Communion: and Other Poems.

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Further Resources, for Teachers and Writer’s Groups:

On Plato’s Thoughts About the Dangers of Poetry
Why Poetry?