Poetry Week #001: Poem within a poem!

          Time for some poetry! A poem can contain a great amount of meaning in a small space; it’s what separates us from the rest of the animals, someone once told me. And while I enjoy spoken word poetry, especially when it’s well done, there are some things you can do on a piece of paper that you just can’t show through spoken word. Take a look at my award-winning poem, “Silver Anniversary”:

SILVER ANNIVERSARY

Does the water wonder about us? It must—

the way it slides over stones,

an ancient memory smoothing rough edges

Over time

the tide tugs and releases our arms, like an impatient

child—not wild, just playful

and curious, the actions of one who needs to know

the secrets

the flow of feelings. A gull’s screech of surprise

startles the strangers who wade

into a world where even the weave of seaweed

can’t wall us away

As the water wanders about us—as it must—

we feel the ebb and flow

working overtime, pulling us from certain safety

to eddies that swirl below

The undertow doesn’t draw us down—we go

willingly, and answer the echo,

words waking between us, those waves of

memory, smoothing over time.

          One of the judges who gave that poem the $1000 prize in the SIWC poetry contest, Bernice Lever, said to me at the conference, “At first look, it seemed a simple poem with straightforward imagery. But then I looked and saw the poem within the poem, how those bolded lines made their own poem, and how they acted almost as mini-headlines for what came next to them.” In the contest booklet where it was published, she wrote “A lovely lyric with its sustaining and enriching metaphor of water and memory in simple images that mask its depth of knowledge….”

          You can see how the poem LOOKS on the page. There’s a symmetry inside the three-line stanzas–longer line, shorter line, longer line–and for the poem within a poem, the bolded lines get longer as the poem moves down the page:

Over time

the secrets

can’t wall us away

to eddies that swirl below

memory, smoothing over time.

                    There’s also a connection between the title, “SILVER ANNIVERSARY,” and the last line, “memory, smoothing over time.” You can see all this (and other connections) if you read and reread the poem on the page. It’s tough to do that with spoken word.

Try this:

     Write a five-line poem, a simple image like the one I wrote in bold. Then build a poem and an image AROUND those lines. See what you can come up with! It’s a fun experiment that lets you play with STRUCTURE.

Coming tomorrow: Have you ever heard of a CASCADE poem? I’ll show you how to write one tomorrow, on fighttowrite.com !