Tag W.H. Auden

* Sylvia Plath, boarded trains & the friday influence

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

Metaphors – Sylvia Plath

I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.
I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there’s no getting off.

***

This week on the Influence: Sylvia Plath!

Much is made about the life of Plath, to the point that much of her work is overlooked outside of a handful of poems.  Personally, my favorite poems of hers are the ones where she shows off how much of a poetry geek she was (and by poetry geek I mean poetic virtuoso!).

This poem in particular is a marvel.  I was stumped as to what it meant or what it was doing the first few times I read it years ago.  It says nothing big, really, (not in the classroom/dig up the meaning kind of way) but in figuring out how to read it, I learned much about what a poem could do.

I read and reread the poem, and it wasn’t until I took the first line to heart – a riddle in nine syllables – that I started to see nine everywhere – nine letters in the word “Metaphors”, nine syllables per line, nine lines in the whole poem.  Which only leads into the concept of the poem – pregnancy and its nine months of effort.

Through syllabics and form, Plath is able to express several (nine!) of the facets of her experience with impending motherhood.

The poem endears itself to the poet in me that likes to work out extra layers in a poem as part of the process and overall meaning.  The cinquain tributes from a previous post are an example of this side.

here – this train’s a’coming…

In other happenings, the construction at our house has stirred some inner soul construction – specifically the decision to pursue a PhD in Creative Writing.  More on this front as it develops.  For now, I have – as the lady said – Boarded the train there’s no getting off.

Happy training!

J

* a focus and a start

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

(winter morning by the Sandia Mountains)

in the distance

the peaks

speak

                          (J)

*****

The phrase sensitivity to language that I have used in previous posts stems from an interview with Charles Simic in which, discussing the practice of writing everyday, he notes that by doing so one maintains “a certain sensitivity to language.”

Reading these words was a paradigm-shifting moment.  As a writer, one reads in order to see what is possible, to see what others have and have not done.  One also reads for permission.  I have for years now made writing a daily activity, but reading Simic point out this one aspect of it gave me a renewed sense of purpose.

Another such moment was reading W.H. Auden talk about what he takes to be signs of a possible poet: if the writer writes because he feels he has something to say, let him go into journalism or politics, but he will never be a poet.  If the writer takes pleasure in putting two words side by side and seeing what happens, seeing how they interact, then, maybe, they have some chance of turning out a poet.

With these two thoughts as a guide – sensitivity to language and putting words side by side – I propose to make future posts that focus on short lyric poems.  The lyric poem, which I will define for my purposes as usually short and personal in nature, has the ability to pack a lot of life into a few lines.  This concentration is what I want to study here.  The lyric also has a history spanning centuries and countries.  I want to include this too.

In doing this kind of close reading and sharing, it is inevitable that my obsessions will show.  In today’s short poem, for example, you have a simple enough observation.  Yet, what got me going was not simply the mountains but the way you can get ‘speak’ out of ‘peaks’ by moving the letters around.  I am a geek for anagrams and often keep them at hand to thrown into a poem.  I love that the same letters can be recycled, the same sounds rolling over themselves and creating new meaning.  Which is what poetry is all about – all the words are out there in the world: how do you mean them?

***

I shared the above poem with a friend of mine in a letter, complete with explanation.  I share it here in the same spirit of friendship and shared fascination with words.

J