In Carl Phillips’s “Hymn,” he writes, “When I think of desire, / it is in the same way that I do / God: as parable, any steep / and blue water, things that are always / there, they only wait / to be sounded.”
In Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Ninth Duino Elegy,” he writes, “Perhaps we are here in order to say: house, / bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window— / at most: column, tower… But to say them, you must understand, / oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves / ever dreamed of existing.”1
In this class, we focused primarily on how poetry can intensely say or sound something. Like a gong gets sounded; how our naming, our writing the poem, sounds it. We thought about how sounding something recognizes/illuminates/magnetizes the divinity in it and about the power of celebrating the profane in poetry. This discussion was guided by reading and discussing secular hymns and poems with a focus on/celebration of the tangible world.
The poems we discussed included:
- “Hymn” by Carl Phillips
- “May You Always be the Darling of Fortune” by Jane Miller
- “Footnote to Howl” by Allen Ginsberg
- “Little Furnace” by Brenda Hillman
- “my dream about the second coming” by Lucille Clifton
- “Ninth Duino Elegy” by Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. Stephen Mitchell)
- “What the Living Do” by Marie Howe
And were we to be simply flush with time, I’d have added:
- “The Flea” by John Donne
- “A Hymn to Ra” translated/recreated by Samson Allal and his note about it
- “Short Lecture on Prayer” by Mary Ruefle (from Madness, Rack, and Honey)
Throughout our discussion, we wrote three communal poems—two hymns and one celebration of Things.
For the hymns, we independently wrote as many lines beginning “May you …” as we could in five minutes, and then highlighted two lines that interested us most/called to us in some way. We each chose one of our two lines to begin and went around in a circle, reading ours out loud one after the other and in doing so collectively built a hymn. For the second highlighted line, as this was an online class, we each typed it into the chat and then pressed enter at the same time so the poem appeared all at once.
For our Things poem we simply took one minute to write down as many things as we could and then highlighted one thing from that list. We each typed our one thing into the chat and pressed enter at the same time. A classic in poetry is how the abstract gets more powerful when grounded in the tangible world (“hope is the thing with feathers”). But the tangible world even without the abstract is so loaded with mystery and association for us that even on its own “the thing with feathers” is exciting and strange. This class’s Things poem was a wonderful testament to that.
Side note: I think one of the great ways to achieve balance in a poem is through communal writing. We organically get the abstract and the tangible, all these different textures happening, this balance living in the poem that builds itself through the multiplicity of our voices. I always have students in a class write a poem collectively on the first day because I think it introduces us right away to the transcendent place poetry can go—how the poem can and should move beyond us!
After our discussion and communal poem writing, I provided participants with an interactive, generative writing packet I created called something like “this is the foil packet of spices then boom you’ve got some soup,” which is why the word broth is in the title of this class, if you were wondering. While I can’t provide that packet here, I can say that it’s so easy to build one for yourself. Here’s how to do it:
Put together 5–10 pages with a prompt on the top of each page. This could look like “eat a peppermint. Describe everything you sense about it” or “what is something you wish you could tell your younger self?” or “what do you think is holy?” or a photo of something happening in outer space with the instruction “what is this???” You want there to be a balance in your prompts between the tangible and the abstract or conceptual, the sensory and the world of memory. When you’re done assembling this packet, print it out. Now get a pen or pencil and you’re ready. Here is what you do: Set a timer for yourself—I’d recommend 2–5 minutes per page—and write “automatically” (nonstop, to the best of your ability, without overthinking what you’re writing down, just go for it) until you finish the last page. Then, go back to the beginning and use a highlighter to highlight the words, phrases, sentences, and sections where you see the power living/where there’s resonance/where you are interested/surprised. The final step is to transcribe onto a separate piece of paper the highlighted sections, writing any connective words as you want/see fit during the transcription. In this way, you’ve built a first draft of a poem that has a lot of different textures, levels, movements in it and you can take it from there.
Chessy Normile (she/her/hers) is a writer from New York currently living in Madison, Wisconsin as the 2022-23 Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She received a BA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA in poetry from The Michener Center for Writers at University of Texas at Austin, where she was awarded an Academy of American Poets University Prize...