Making dragons out of maps: How to use research in poetry

What I didn’t know before reading Ada Limón’s What I Didn’t Know Before is where research—scientific, philosophical, historical, or any other kind—belongs in the poetry writing process.

What I learned after reading Limón’s poem is the crucial role research can play in enhancing poetic tools such as metaphors, similes, personification, etc.

Limón writes a love poem and incidentally teaches her readers about how horses are born. What I didn’t know before reading the poem is what she (seemingly) didn’t know before she wrote the poem.

This prompted me to use such research in my own poems. I was inspired by Limón to write a poem that would not only be a piece of art, but also something that would teach my reader something factual. My poems usually arrive at their own pace, when I’m directly inspired by something, someone or some element around me. So it’s challenging for me to write when I am uninspired. This changed in the year 2021, when I was commissioned to produce poems for TV series All Arts TV and HBO’s Take Out with Lisa Ling.

I felt an immense weight of writer’s block as there wasn’t any direct inspiration nor prompt: just a topic to write about. I found myself resorting to research in order to exercise my creative muscle. For a poetry series about the first 20 years of America, I wanted to build on a line that had arrived on my page: “We put a flower in the mouth of the war.”

To me, the line arrived as a metaphor but I couldn’t figure out how to move forward with the sentence. While this originated in the form of an ekphrastic poem, in response to photographs by Thalith Nasir and Jonathan Bachman (referred below), I felt stuck in the metaphor, not realizing that the door into the next phase was research.

I remembered Limón’s poem and all that she taught her readers about horses through the metaphor. I decided to do the same and looked into the process in which flowers bloom.

For this exercise, it’s important to identify the two (or more) main elements: what you need a metaphor for, and what the metaphor is.

For the line “We put a flower in the mouth of the war,” my main element that needed a metaphor is “peace” or “resistance” and the metaphor for that was “flower.” The inspiration for element of “peace” and “resistance” is from a photo taken at a Black Lives Matter protest where a protester offered peace to the officers in riot gear; the “flower” metaphor is from a photo series “Only Way Out Is Through” by photographer Thalith Nasir.

I realized the metaphor doesn’t (and cannot) exist in a vacuum of “flower” merely symbolizing “peace.” I wanted to dig deeper, and looked into the scientific process in which a flower blooms in order to equate it to the process in which we arrive at peace or resistance.

A sample from the poem, forthcoming in the All Arts First Twenty series:

All it takes is for a seed to be buried & then take in water & then
explode into a kind of formation that would then
offer this world both beauty and life, let this be a reminder
that not all explosions drop dead bodies
Let this be a reminder
that not all explosions take limbs or leave residues of notebooks & shoes, 
Let this be a reminder that some explosions bring in roots

Suggested readings:

• What I Didn’t Know Before by Ada Limón
• Castnet Seafood by Karisma Price
• A Small Needful Fact by Ross Gay
• Amanda Gorman Makes Space for Poetry in Sociology by Preeti Vasishtha

It’s important to note there are different kinds of research: scientific, historical, legal, etc. There is also what I refer to as “personal research,” which includes interviews and/or personal facts about people’s lives—an example is Gay’s poem about Eric Garner and his life.

Activity:

Identify a phrase/concept you’d like to use as a metaphor. Look up: what are its characteristics, how does it move/travel, how does it sound? How does this enhance your metaphor and, by extension, the piece of writing?

The sample below was created during a workshop, and reflects suggestions from various participants.

Fact: A cloud can weigh around a million pounds.

Core meaning: Something that appears to be soft but has a heavy weight—unexpected, unimaginable weight/impact.

What are some things this can be a metaphor for? 

• Parenthood
• Childhood
• Time: how effortlessly it passes on its own, but the weight of time can vary depending on who/where you are and depending on the circumstances
• Time: weightless as a concept, but it can have a lot of weight/impact
• Mental health/depression + fog around, the weight of that heaviness, not easily seen from the surface
• Grief
• Water: light, but can drown you
• Words