Open Your Mouth

Hi. Happy Poetry Month. Thanks for reading.

My instinct is to try and give you some theme that frames my thoughts about poets and poetry lately. Here are some things I’ve been thinking about: the presence of the poet in the lyric mode; standards of craft; poetic techniques that rely on the subliminal; politics of temperament in poems; convention and expectation. So maybe those are connected.

I’d like to see how I can weave my curiosities this month; maybe the way I encourage my students to write—through investigation.

Begin, I tell them. Begin with a question.

I think if there is some larger question on my mind, it might be this: What does the poet have to do with the poem? This seems so basic. Maybe it helps if I say I’m having existential feelings.

In his discussion of his painting process and recent book and postcard project as fundraiser for Copper Canyon, Richard Siken talks about one of the last poems he wrote for Crush which becomes, he says, “a dialogue between the person I was when I started the book and the person that I was when I finished the book.”

I’ll talk about that poem in another post, but what stays with me is his notion of discourse—the poet’s lyric voice can move between speaker and addressee and both (all?) of those voices can actually be the poet. The poet pairs himself with himself in order to investigate poem.

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Since it’s poetry month, maybe it is best to begin with the poet’s voice emerging in a poem as declaration about the word. At the beginning of the academic year, I was houseless, between gigs, and staying in a seasonal, no-frills, campus cabin, near the lake. I was waiting for a spot in faculty housing to open. Waiting for my job to begin. Waiting to become a fulltime teacher of high school arts academy students. A first in all those ways.

There was no internet, no heat for the chilly, summer nights. Maybe—being a city girl and all—it was this brief stay near the water, and being very aware of the temperature, sound and cycle of the shore, that drew me in to the seaside setting in “The Beatitudes of Malibu,” by Rowan Ricardo Phillips. Whatever brought me in though, it was the poet’s preoccupation with the lexicon of poetry that took hold.

In the first two lines, the poet says Jupiter is “big as the butt of a pen” in the sky. From the beginning, Phillips uses the vocabulary of poetry to drive his figurative moves. The Pacific Ocean moves in a “not-quite- / Anapestic song of sea and air.” And each ensuing section makes reference to some particular aspect of the poet’s craft.

In the second section, he writes “A poem is a view of the Pacific,” and by the fifth line, the view “(Just like that: as though there’s no Pacific) / Ends.” The phrasing makes me think of how we talk about line ending, and of how poems end.

But this poem doesn’t end here. Subsequent actions in the poem are likened to “marginalia,” “enjambments.” In the first line of the fifth stanza, Phillips writes that “Arun’s car carried us like metaphor, / In a poem or painting: moving meaning; / moving the current.” In the final section: “Tiny boats and rising lace-fringed sea swells / No chunk of haiku could think to charter.”

Is this a poet’s poem, then? If these beatitudes are for Malibu (or Jupiter, or the Pacific) they seem also to be for the act of poetry. The beatitudes are ours. The reader of the poem, blessed with how poetry’s movements inform our understanding of the movement of the sea, of our orbit around these bodies, of water, of planet.

There is only one section in Phillips’ poem that doesn’t involve poetic terminology. In the third section, Phillips begins “I’m about to get this all wrong, I know:” and spends the stanza describing his surroundings as he understands them—essentially locating himself. Grounding himself in the way a reader can understand, could find him. But it is the speaker, after all, who knows something truer. “Sadly, in my mind it’s always snowing; / Which is beautiful but austere, unlike here.”

Some might argue this is Ars Poetica. But mostly, I think, it has to be a poem about a speaker who is invested in words. And that’s different, it seems to me. It seems less concerned with how to make a poem, than how the poem makes the poet. That’s not about the ars of poetics, it’s about the lingua, the tongue. The word. The way in which and the trouble in which, things are said. Ars lingua? Lingua poetica? The poet attempting to reconcile poem, with craft, with authorial position, with the sea. It’s the poet’s preoccupation with how language moves the world that is central to this poem.

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Any time I am preparing to teach, I find myself wrestling with the notion of how to teach the lyric mode. Because I am a firm believer in craft, individual expression is not the way I begin my classes. I do use prompts early and often, but they are seldom very personal or emotional in nature. I try to use prompts that make my students think differently—about language, about connections and sound. I want them to think about the technical aspects before they think about "saying things." To some extent, this depends on the body of students I’m working with. But I generally steer things this way. Later in the semester, we get more personal. By the time I might ask them to, say, write about family or home, or childhood, I expect they have some elements of craft to use while doing it.

Of course, that’s my theory, one approach. Sometimes, maybe I also wonder how you really teach poetry. And I mean, how do you teach the relationship of the poet to the poem? To the speaker in the poem?

Now that we are further along, again, in the semester, I am turning to the private. The personal. It coincides with my own voice. Emerging from the depth of the snows. Lit by the April sun, blazing the trees.

I like this idea of opening your mouth to speak, and out comes, your poet.