Poet-a-Day: Meet Maureen E. Doallas
Maureen E. Doallas is a tireless supporter of literature and the arts—celebrating, blogging about, and sharing with her wide audience, work and news from countless artists and writers. I’ve always been impressed by how authentically she carries out the lifestyle of literary citizenship. And she’s an impressive poet herself. So I’m thrilled to have her pantoum “Breath-Sound While Meditating” in How to Write a Form Poem.
Here are the first few stanzas to mesmerize and delight you; you can catch the rest in the book!
Breath-Sound While Meditating (excerpt)
The sea retracts its breath-sound,
gathering into itself the voice resisting.
Inhalation’s held within each Om.
Mist piles up as clouds. Zeus wheezes.
Gathering into itself, the voice, resisting
sea’s mouth, swallows noise. Undulating Oms
in the mist pile up in clouds. Zeus wheezes,
his cry an alarm and joyous and thin.
Sea’s mouth swallows noise. Undulating Oms,
lungs sound their hunger for air. In exhalation
his cry — an alarm and joyous and thin.
The becoming full in the letting go. It rains.
—Maureen E. Doallas
Tania Runyan (TR): Tell me a little about the origin story of “Breath-Sound While Meditating” and your decision to write it as a pantoum:
Maureen E. Doallas (MED): As I recall, Tweetspeak Poetry had made the pantoum a theme-of-the-month offering, and I decided to try the form again, not having used it since college. At the same time, I was practicing meditation (my practice is a bit more fitful now), and so began thinking about breathing control and breath sounds and then how the sea ebbs and flows, comes in and goes out, just as our lungs.
The movement of waves has a visual aspect as well as an aural aspect that I like, and so I decided on the “breathing” of the sea as my poem’s subject. Once I had my first line, I was off and running with this sense of the sea as alive and breathing, moving forward but also always going back, mimicking the steps in meditation. Everything worked surprisingly well, and I was happy with the result. I have to admit that most of the time when I write, I just write, or start with a line that has come to me; I don’t always have a subject until that first line. I very rarely “think out” the full scope of a poem, as I did with this pantoum, and many times, inexplicably, my poems write themselves. In fact, the poems I don’t “plan” seem to be my best.
I fell in love with this form after trying it again, and ended up writing at least a half-dozen pantoums over that theme month.
TR: What do you hope poets can learn from a book like How to Write a Form Poem?
MED: One of the things I think we all eventually learn is that it is only after you master the rules of an art that you can justify breaking them. That’s freeing. Writing according to form helps make us better poetry writers. It teaches us discipline with its requirements; shows us new ways to create poems with the qualities of image, sound, and other essential elements that give our listeners and readers delight; and enlarges our understanding of other cultures’ “tools of the trade.” By their examples, form poems help us think about how to think about poetry and its uses. They also, I believe, give us opportunities to experiment with what we write about and how we write it.
The better we understand the latter, the more fun we can have writing poetry.
About Maureen E. Doallas
Maureen E. Doallas has published poems in Poets Reading the News, Rattle Poets Respond, Every Day Poems, Broadsided Press, Silver Birch Press, Escape Into Life, The Found Poetry Review, and other online and print periodicals. Her work has been anthologized most recently in The Dreamers Anthology, A Constellation of Kisses, Is It Hot In Here, Or Is It Just Me?, and Alice in Wonderland Anthology. Her debut poetry collection is Neruda’s Memoirs. Doallas is the editor of the Artist Watch column for the international online arts magazine Escape Into Life.
Photo by Joe Hayhurst, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Tania Runyan.
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Bethany Rohde says
I’m always impressed with both Maureen’s poetry and her consistency in highlighting other artists. Such a generous artist.
“I very rarely ‘think out’ the full scope of a poem, as I did with this pantoum, and many times, inexplicably, my poems write themselves. In fact, the poems I don’t ‘plan’ seem to be my best.”
It’s fun to see how writing within form meshes with the free-whirling creation process.
Maureen says
Thank you, Bethany.
I do think that my best approach is not overthinking a poem, whether it’s a form or freestyle. I will note, however, that I do revise; it’s the rare poem I don’t re-touch.
I did not know this was coming out today: a lovely surprise.
Laurie Klein says
“… it is only after you master the rules of an art that you can justify breaking them. That’s freeing.”
This makes me think of tidal rhythms for some reason, surge and ebb tide. Maybe writing in forms resembles exploring a tide pool? All those strange, bright little beings brought together beneath a glassy expanse of breathing sea.
I wonder. Might there be a corollary with meditation in these words as well? Dunno, as I’m not very good at it, mostly a wannabe contemplative. : )
Maureen, you are a curator/linker—images, words, concepts, artists and audiences, events—thank you!
Tania, you are persuading me toward diving in . . .
Maureen says
Thank you, Laurie. All a matter of doing what I love, what brings me joy and something of beauty.
Tania Runyan says
I love these conversations—so rich as we explore the mystery of the creative process. Laurie, you are definitely ready to dive in!
Laurie Klein says
Tania, thank you for envisioning and creating the book and for spurring these conversations!
Form: feels like a high dive, my arthritic toes gripping the board . . . I should interrogate this (gently, with chocolate in hand)
Monica Sharman says
Maureen, this was especially beautiful to me because I love watching and listening to the waves.
Your answer to the second question reminded me of my favorite Dave Brubeck quote: “Jazz has something that all people need in order to succeed: freedom from within tremendous discipline.”
Megan Willome says
I had planned to read Tania’s pantoum chapter today, and then I found this post and your pantoum. It was very helpful to me in writing my own, for a poetry who friend who recently passed away. She loved writing pantoum because she said she couldn’t rhyme.
Robert McDowell says
Maureen Doallas is a lighthouse–spiritually, artistically, too. She’s waving grass and the waves themselves. She is a total eclipse of the heart. She brings the sun and moon to the table and invite us in for the conversation.