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Love Poem (Tangentially) Inspired By Federer’s Defeat

September 14, 2009

This is a poem I wrote the last time (or at least ONE time, one of the few other times) that  Federer lost an important match.  In that case, it was to Nadal at one of the French Opens, which because they are played on clay, appear on a bright orange surface, when televised.  (If you have read any of my posts re writing block, you will notice that it also centers on the trials of trying to come up with a writing exercise on one’s own.)

Would-be Poet

I, who must be purposeful at every minute,
even when lying in bed miles away, call to ask you
for a prompt, something to write about, something
outside of myself.
You are watching tennis.  You’ve taken the phone into
the TV room, but, far
from its home cradle, it emits a steady cackle.
Earlier, out of love for me, you left the TV, but this is
the second call of the morning, and Federer, the champion for umpteen
seasons, is being trounced.  In my mind, I see your leg
ticcing with compressed intensity as you sit
on the edge of the bed in that far room, eyes glazed by the brilliant orange
of the beamed clay surface.
But Federer is never his best
on clay!  I want to shout.
Don’t you know that already?  Doesn’t the world?

You speak slowly, squeezing words
out of the small part of you not glued to the screen.
I think of ‘static’ not as in the phone line, or even
our relationship,  but the electrified ash of my own TV growing up,
my brother sitting in the only good
chair, his huge bare foot blocking my view, his
big toe like a weird fleshy centerpiece on a table meant
to be intimate.  Crazy-making.  But in my image,
my brother and I are still, complaints and taunts
temporarily silenced by the buzz of the Emergency Broadcast System,
ninety seconds in which we were both awed
and irritated by something other.
How about ‘Photosynthesis?’ you say.

You are not a poet; you don’t pretend to be a poet; why
do I even ask you, a non-poet, for such help?
I groan.
Wait, you say. How about ‘ love and photosynthesis?’
I groan again.
‘Asparagus’ then, you laugh, making some inane
remark about how it’s like your love for me, endlessly growing.

I am so jealous suddenly, of the clay, the ball, the trounced Federer, but most of all, of your ability to just sit there and watch,
guiltlessly, lovingly, full
of bright orange beams.

(All rights reserved, Karin Gustafson)

Categories: poetry, Roger Federer
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Last Villanelle for a While Re Aftermath of 9/11

September 11, 2009

Anyone who reads this blog is probably heartily sick of villanelles.  Sorry!  But here’s one more–re the aftermath of 9/11.   (

Sorry, sorry, sorry.

I do write non-villanelles.   And, while this is not the last villanelle I’ll post, I promise that it will be the last for a while.  (Future posts will also be more cheerful!)

Shattering

The shattering of lives should take some time.
It shouldn’t come in flashes, clods of dirt,
no moment for altered course, for change of mind.

The actual choice ahead should be well-signed,
the frailty of good luck, a blood-soaked shirt;
the shattering of lives should take some time.

He knew that road was risky, heard a whine,
but in the end those warnings were too curt,
no moment for altered course, for change of mind.

Hard to foresee your own true body lined
with metal plates and plastic tubes of hurt;
the shattering of lives should take some time.

So many hours after to refine
what happened in that second’s blinding lurch,
no moment for altered course or change of mind.

Or was it fate?  A studied path, not whim?
His heart tried hard to measure out the worth
of shattering lives.  It would take some time,
without moment for altering course or mind.

(All rights reserved.  Karin Gustafson)

Categories: 9/11, poetry, Uncategorized, villanelle
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9/11 (Villanelle)

September 11, 2009

9/11  (Villanelle)

The burning buildings woke me from a sleep
of what I thought important, nothing now.
I ran hard down the smoking, crumbling street,

praying that my child was mine to keep,
dear god oh please dear god I whispered loud;
the burning buildings woke me from a sleep.

Some stopped to stare, all of us to weep
as eyes replayed the towers’ brutal bow.
I ran hard down the smoking, crumbling street.

North sky a startling blue, the south a heap
of man-wrought cloud; I pushed against the crowd;
the burning buildings woke me from a sleep.

I’d never complain again, never treat
with trivial despair–or so I vowed.
I ran hard down the smoking, crumbling street.

I’d change, give thanks—I saw them leap—
and begged for all the grace God would allow.
The burning buildings woke me from a sleep;
I ran hard down the smoking, crumbling street.

(All rights reserved.  Karin Gustafson)

P.S. This is an old post, and an older poem, written shortly after 9/11/01 – but I am linking it to Victoria C. Slotto’s writing blog liv2write2day .

Categories: 9/11, poetry, villanelle
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Villain-elle (With Elephants)

September 9, 2009

Villain-elle

#1A

2A

3A

4A

5A

6A

7A

8A

Here’s what the poem looks like in unillustrated (stanzaic – is that a word?) form:

Villain-elle

He twirled his ‘stache when he thought no one could see
and kept away from rope and railroad track,
for a cartoon villain was not what he would be–

what he sought was originality.
Wearing a hat that was not quite white, nor black,
he twirled his ‘stache when he thought no one could see.

Until the day he met that Miss Bonnee
whose single smile made all his knees go slack.
Though a cartoon villain was not what he would be,

she steered him to a classic robbery,
a bank heist with a gun, a car out back.
He twirled his ‘stache when he thought no one could see,

but see they could, if only digitally.
She whispered, as she relieved him of the sack,
that a cartoon villain was not what he would be.

‘My hero’, she sighed, and other fiddle-dee.
Then his bent head received a good hard whack.
She twirled her stash when she thought no one could see.
A cartoon villain was not what she would be.

(@ Karin Gustafson, 2009)

If you are interested in more Villanellia, check out prior posts re how to write them.

If you are interested in elephants, check out 1 Mississippi at link above.

Categories: children's illustration, elephants, poetry
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Sticking To Villanelles (For Today) – How To Write Them

September 8, 2009

A lot of things seem to be a bit stuck right now (at least to me) or moving in molasses motion, i.e. health care reform, opposition to Obama’s verbal waylaying of U.S. school children (ridiculous!), even the ever reliable Derek Jeter.   People running in the Democratic primary in New York are calling me every other minute, and I can’t rouse the energy to even listen to their messages.  (Not even the one from Ed Koch!)

Yesterday, I promised to continue to blog about villanelles, but frankly, this stuckness made the prospect about such an arcane, “out-of-the-loop” subject seem trivial.   Surely, I thought, there had to be something more exciting I could come up with.

Then, I walked home past Ground Zero—I live in downtown Manhattan—through all the barricades that are already set up in preparation for Friday, stepping between the policemen, already manning those barricades, past the cranes and lights and dirt pit, and, suddenly, blogging about something as possibly boring as how to write a villanelle really didn’t seem so terrible to me.

I also believe in keeping promises.

So:

How to Write a Villanelle:

The most important tip I can give to anyone writing any formal verse is to feel free to cheat.  For example, if rhyme is required, don’t worry about not being able to come up with perfect ones.  Use “almost rhymes” or “slant rhymes”  (that is, “not quite rhymes”).  Besides giving you more words to choose from, this will keep the poem from being so sing-songy.

If repeated lines are called for, as in the case of the villanelle, don’t worry if you have to vary them a bit, that is, if your repeating lines don’t in fact exactly repeat.   Remember that meaning always trumps form.

It’s helpful to think of the form as a kind of a map, a means to music.  It’s useful to have all the streets laid out, but occasionally, when you want your poem to actually reach a destination, you have to cut through some back yards.

The only place where I think cheating can truly backfire is with rhythm.  Your lines don’t have to scan exactly, but if they are really off, the poem just won’t sound well.  Respecting rhythm does not mean that you have to be stick to iambic pentameter, but some attention to line length, numbers of feet or syllables, should be paid.

All that said, you can’t cheat till you know the rules.  Here are the basics:

A villanelle is a seven stanza poem, that works with rhyme, meter and repeated lines.  There are two lines that repeat through the poem;  they also rhyme with each other.  For notation purposes, I call the first repeated line “A1” (like the steak sauce) and the second repeated line “A2” (not to be confused with the Pakistani mountain).   (Under rules of poetic notation, these are both referred to as “A” lines because they rhyme with each other, the “A” rhyme.)

Other lines which rhyme with A1 and A2, but which are not the repeated lines, are denoted below as just plain “A”.

The remaining lines of the poem, which do not rhyme with the A lines, but which rhyme with each other, are denoted as “B”.

Here’s the basic form:

A1
B
A2

A
B
A1

A
B
A2

A
B
A1

A
B
A2

A
B
A1
A2

An “easy” way to remember the form is that the all the stanzas. except the last one, have three lines.  The first one begins with your A1 line and ends with your A2 line;  the next four stanzas are in a kind of order with the first ending with A1, the second A2, the next A1, the next A2 again.  (It’s sort of like shampooing your hair—”wash, rinse, repeat.”)  The B lines intersect each stanza (sort of like a basting stitch.)

The last stanza has four lines, ending with a couplet made up of A1 and A2.

It sounds a lot more complicated than it is.  As mentioned in yesterday’s blog re Villanelles and Banana Pudding, the great thing about writing a Villanelle is that you really don’t need to come up with all that many lines.  You do need to think through your repeating lines though—to make sure that they are flexible, and also that they work as a couplet.

Ideally, you also want the meaning of the repeated lines to shift as the poem progresses, and not to simply repeat in a rote manner.  You do not want the repetition to feel formulaic, but somehow illuminating.

Punctuation can help here—it can be useful, for example, for the repeated lines to sometimes feed directly into the following line or stanza and not to always end with the pause of period or comma.

And of course,  cheating can be invaluable.  Shifting the words slightly, for example, so that the lines sound almost the same, but are a teensy bit different, can help your poem actually mean something.

If this is your first villanelle, pick relatively easy rhymes.  I also find it useful to list on a separate page, all the A rhymes and B rhymes that I can think of before I move on too far with poem.  I make the list in a completely dumb way, writing down every single rhyme or near rhyme I can come up with, without regard to the poem’s subject, simply to accumulate choices.  This sounds very “unheartfelt”, but such lists can really open up your thinking, helping you to come up with much more creative and meaningful combinations than you otherwise would.

Which brings up a final point.  Yes, the form is constraining, but the constraints force you out of your typical ruts.  To write a villanelle (or any formal poem), you have to work with something other than your normal brain patterns.   This seems, to me at least (Manic-D-Daily)  invaluable.)

Here’s another one of mine:

Burned Soldier (A Mask For Face)

He tried to smile but found that skin would balk;
a mask for face was not what he had planned.
Right action should give rise to right result,

saving the day as it called on God to halt
all burn and bite of bomb as if by wand;
he tried to smile but found that skin would balk.

When they talked of graft, he always thought of molt,
as if his flesh held feathers that could span
right action, then give rise to right result—

cheeks that were smooth but rough, but loose but taut—
it all had been so easy as a man.
He tried to smile but found that skin would balk.

Hate helped at times; to think it was their fault.
But how could “they” be numbered? Like grains of sand,
like actions that give rise to like result,

like eyes that fit in lids not white as salt.
This lead white face was not what he had planned.
He tried to smile but found that skin would balk;
right action should give rise to right result.

(All rights reserved, Karin Gustafson)

Categories: poetry, Uncategorized, villanelle, writing
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Villanelles – Banana Pudding

September 7, 2009

I love formal poetry, particularly villanelles.  I will write about the exact form (a traditionally French embrace of repeating lines and rhymes) tomorrow.  (I hope.)

Today, I’ll just say that the form itself generally ensures a villanelle a certain amount of built-in music and irony.

The form is a bit complicated, however.   So getting your villanelle to more or less follow the rules, and also to make sense, is often about all you can hope for. Profundity must be left to the sidelines. (Traditionally French, remember?)

My view is, well, who really cares that much about profundity when you’ve got built-in music and irony? (I don’t. But remember that I’m also someone who has spent a not insignificant amount of time blogging about Robert Pattinson.  See e.g. posts re same. )

Another reason I like writing villanelles (besides their music) is that I am fundamentally (or perhaps I should just say, mentally) lazy. This makes a villanelle kind of perfect for me because (a) as mentioned above, profundity is often left at the sidelines, and (b) the whole poem revolves around two repeating lines.  Which means that once you get your repeating lines right, you don’t have to come up with all that much else.

The poem also involves only two different sets of rhymes: the rhyme of your repeating lines and the rhyme for the intersecting lines.   This limited rhyme scheme definitely narrows your options, a great benefit for someone like me:  a narrowed field of choices means fewer places to get lost, side-tracked.

As I was thinking about all this on the subway this morning (hungry),  I realized that the seeming complexity (but actual simplicity) of the villanelle is very much like Magnolia Bakery’s Banana Pudding.

Although the dessert, a layered concoction of creamy custard, banana slices, vanilla wafers, and whipped cream, seems very elaborate, it is in fact made with a relatively small number of ingredients, several of which are prepackaged (as in the vanilla wafers and the bananas).  What the recipe does require, however, is planning;  i.e. your pudding needs time to set, your bananas must be more or less uniformly sliced (and not too soon before assembly); your cream whipped, your wafers unboxed.  Without that planning, the whole concoction is flat, runny.

Which is amazingly like writing a villanelle.  Because you really do need to spend a bit of time getting your repeating lines right, and choosing flexible rhymes. Otherwise it will just collapse.

But once you have your base ingredients ready, the assembly is really quite fun.

Unfortunately, villanelles, like many poetic forms, seem to have fallen from fashion in modern poetry. (I’m guessing it’s the whole profundity thing.) Some critics might even say that villanelles, like Banana Pudding, are essentially a Trifle. (As in an English confection of sherry-soaked cake, fruit, custard, cream.)

All I can say is that Trifle, like Banana Pudding, is pretty terrific stuff.

*                   *                   *

Despite the similarities to Banana Pudding, most of my villanelles are not particularly light and fluffy. As a result, I am re-posting one that I posted several weeks ago simply because it is one of my more cheerful, and suits the end of summer. I’ll put some different ones up later in the week.

The two repeating lines are “our palms grew pale as paws in northern climes” and “in summers past, how brightly water shines.”  Rhymes are based on climes/shines and skin.


Swimming in Summer


Our palms grew pale as paws in northern climes
as water soaked right through our outer skin.
In summers past, how brightly water shines,

its surface sparked by countless solar mimes,
an aurora only fragmented by limb.
Our palms grew pale as paws in northern climes

as we played hide and seek with sunken dimes,
diving beneath the waves of echoed din;
in summers past, how brightly water shines.

My mother sat at poolside with the Times’
Sunday magazine; I swam by her shin,
my palms as pale as paws in northern climes,

sculpting her ivory leg, the only signs
of life the hair strands barely there, so prim
in summers past. How brightly water shines

in that lost pool; and all that filled our minds
frozen now, the glimmer petrified within
palms grown pale as paws in northern climes.
In summers past, how brightly water shines.

Copyright 2008, Karin Gustafson, All rights reserved.

If you like elephants swimming, please check out 1 Mississippi at the link above or on Amazon.

For more on Villanelles and how to write them, click here.

Categories: poetry, Uncategorized, villanelle
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For Labor Day Weekend – Busy

September 4, 2009

Years ago, I was lucky enough to do field work in India studying Indian trade unions.   (More about that some other time.)   This is a poem about a wonderful trade union leader, who very kindly took me under his wing, allowing me to travel with him to various union headquarters around the state of Gujerat.

Have I learned anything?

Ah this is better.
This is sitting down.
This is getting some tea.
This is biting into an orange peel, just slightly, before peeling.
This is biting into the orange.
I think about the labor leader I knew in Ahmadabad.
How they would bring him his coffee
in the morning, me my tea.
He had given up tea, he said,
when Gandhi said to, and ever since,
taking a hot slurp,
he had never drunk it.
Because of the British.

In the same way, in the car,
he took out all his toiletries, one by one, handing
them to me for examination:
a small soap still wrapped in its green labeled paper,
collected from an Indian hotel,
his razor, his comb—he combed
his close cropped hair before handing it to me as if
to show its use—a small towel–
he really didn’t have very much–a small
scissors.  His feet were up
on the seat.  Now
he brought one to his knee, shifting
his white cloth dhoti, and
clipped the toe nails quickly, first
one foot then the other.
He collected as he clipped
the small white crusts of nail, then
opened the window a bit wider
to toss them out.

“You see how I am always busy,” he said.  “Never
a moment idle, wasted.  I am busy all the time,
you see how I am doing it.”
He took the toiletries back from me.

I finish my breakfast slowly,
just sitting.

(For a different side of Labor Day weekend, i.e. the very sad end of vacation side, check out the Last Voyage of the Summer, below.   And, as always, check out 1 Mississippi (Karin Gustafson) at link above.)

<!–[if !mso]> <! st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } –>

Have I learned anything?

Ah this is better.

This is sitting down.

This is getting some tea.

This is biting into an orange peel, just slightly, before peeling.

This is biting into the orange.

I think about the labor leader I knew in Ahmadabad.

How they would bring him his coffee

in the morning, me my tea.

He had given up tea, he said,

when Gandhi said to, and ever since,

taking a hot slurp,

he had never drunk it.

Because of the British.

In the same way, in the car,

he took out all his toiletries, one by one, handing

them to me for examination:

a small soap still wrapped in its green labeled paper,

collected from an Indian hotel,

his razor, his comb—he combed

his close cropped hair before handing it to me as if

to show its use—a small towel–

he really didn’t have very much–a small

scissors. His feet were up

on the seat. Now

he brought one to his knee, shifting

his white cloth dhoti, and

clipped the toe nails quickly, first

one foot then the other.

He collected as he clipped

the small white crusts of nail, then

opened the window a bit wider

to toss them out.

“You see how I am always busy,” he said. “Never

a moment idle, wasted. I am busy all the time,

you see

how I am doing it.”

He took the toiletries back from me.

I finish my breakfast slowly,

just sitting.

Categories: poetry, Uncategorized
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Anniversary

August 22, 2009
Catskill Mountain Wedding With Elephants

Catskill Mountain Wedding With Elephants

Mist

Mist rises over lake like fish jumping
like heart wishing like eye
blinking like memory crying like fir boughs
sighing like awe inspiring, like hope
dying (not needed, not even considered), like
dawn breaking like
love making like
water curling in its fall,
like head on lap on
lips on lips on hips
on you on me, like
fingers fingering,
brushing against a nipple,
or being brushed
like something somewhere
sure of joy,
like the thing itself.

All rights reserved.

Categories: elephants, poetry, Uncategorized
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Going On Somewhere

August 21, 2009

Porch

The porch pulled them to its side,
invited nestling upon shaded planks,
recalled cool soft times, clover in fields,
the day she cut his hair, and then they picked
out smooth flat stones
and lined them along its surface, thick with
years of knobby deck paint.  Against it,
the stones shone like perfect moons to plant upon
winter table tops, reminders
that nights sown by fireflies
were going on somewhere, some time.

All rights reserved.

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Person Blocks – “Pretending”

August 17, 2009

Thinking today of blocks other than writer’s block.  A person block is a big one;  the force that keep one from putting one’s true self into the world, that keeps one from being publicly one’s self.

When I say “being publicly” one’s self, I’m not referring to celebrity.  (Although, weirdly, the subject makes me wonder again about my fascination with Robert Pattinson.  If there is anyone who has a hard time being himself in public, it would seem to be him.  See e.g.  screaming girls and clicking paparazzi.)

But I wasn’t really thinking about Robert Pattinson.  I was thinking more about people like me, perhaps you too.  How hard it is for me (us) to take actions that might make us vulnerable to criticism.  How difficult it is to show openly the parts of ourselves which do not fit so well into a mold of other’s expectations.  (Or really, one’s expectations of other’s expectations.)

These kinds of pretenses are deeply ingrained, at least for me.  Even as a little kid—I was not an especially hip one—I felt the need to pretend I knew all kinds of rock bands that I’d never heard of.   For years afterward, a more complex camouflauge seemed to be called for.  I won’t go into the specifics.  I’m sure most of you know the types of things I mean.

What seems strange is that we actually live in a fairly tolerant society.  I compare my situation with my mother’s, for example.  A teacher, she happened to move shortly after I was born to a county where women teachers were only entitled to substitute’s pay (about 50% of the scale) during the full school year following the birth of a child.  It was a rule apparently motivated either by (a) a wish to keep mothers of infants at home; or (b) an assumption that mothers of infants would be at home, whether working full-time or not  (i.e. an assumption that women with young children were inherently unreliable.)

My mom, both reliable and unwilling to take a pay cut, spent the whole first year of my life pretending I didn’t exist.

My mother had a concrete reason for hiding a fairly big part of her life.  But for many people (me at least), the reason for the camouflauge boils down to the simple fear that if others really knew me better,  I would be deemed very very imperfect.  (Not just imperfect, downright faulty.)

Unfortunately, however, a failure to be openly one’s self can doom one to being less than one’s self.    (Even less perfect!  And much less happy.)

My ex- husband, an artist, gave me some good lessons in this area (though I am only beginning to follow them.)  He is a master of carrying out what sometimes seems to border on the silly.  (I admit, carrying out the silly is a whole lot easier in the art world than in the average professional arena.)

In an early performance piece, he played a violin with a loaf of Italian bread.  He does not play the violin.  His lack of expertise with the instrument wasn’t important, however, since the violin he used was broken.   Besides, the bread, though shellacked, wasn’t a great bow.

You can probably immediately intuit the piece’s potential silliness.  In fact, it was truly magical.

I am not extolling performance pieces.  Many are self-indulgent, and full full full of pretense.  (One reason my ex-husband’s violin playing was so powerful, I think, is that it was not a piece about himself, but about Paul Klee during the World War II.)

I’m not extolling confessional art either.  (Remember, you may someday wish to talk to your friends and family again.)

What I’m urging, I guess, is not to be afraid to risk some silliness.  The unabashed showing of ignorance.  (Sure, ignorance isn’t something to be proud of, but pretended knowledge is way worse.)  A lack of hipness.  To be, in short, more openly yourself.

Here’s a sonnet (unfortunately not terribly silly) about the long-term price of protective coloration:

Pretending

After years, pretending to be what you’re not
becomes a nature;  a second skin
coating you like a heavy make-up, caught
in your pores, nestled in your grooves, a twin
of features, caked, you need not reapply.
But habits, faces, fail; pretense wears thin,
until, worn through, you can hardly try
anymore.  Too wary, weary–the word
“cagey” describes so much of what you’ve been,
the opposite of free-flying bird,
while unheard, and hardly there within,
is all you’ve been saving, what you hid, why
you did this, what wasn’t supposed to die.

All rights reserved.

Categories: Perfectionism, poetry, writer's block
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