I was introduced to Diane Lockward’s poetry as a member of a Yahoo group dedicated to poets helping one another publicize their work. I read and very much enjoyed her collection What Feeds Us. A 2006 Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize winner, the volume is as witty as it is heartbreaking. Diane’s poems draw her readers in as they transform visits to the hair dresser, eating pickles as a child, wanting more out of a marriage as a husband brings in cold pizza on a snowy night, being stung by a bee and tended to lovingly, looking at blueberries in her kitchen, noticing an announcement about a coming test, or having an MRI and dreading the results into moments of revelation and introspection. Diane’s gift for melding observations of food she prepares, activities in her life, and notions of her own and others with her deepest longings and fears reaches fully into the heart. In addition, the lyric strategies she uses as she moves from the tangible objects before her to personal associations and exploration will inspire Writing It Real readers to try their hand at associating from their surroundings to their deepest experiences, whether in free verse, poetry in form or lyric prose. 

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Toward the end of Part One in her collection, Diane treats readers to a ghazal, “Love Test: A Ghazal.” This form that involves two-line stanzas is ancient, as described on Poets.org:

Traditionally invoking melancholy, love, longing, and metaphysical questions, ghazals are often sung by Iranian, Indian, and Pakistani musicians. The form has roots in seventh-century Arabia, and gained prominence in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century thanks to such Persian poets as Rumi and Hafiz. In the eighteenth-century, the ghazal was used by poets writing in Urdu, a mix of the medieval languages of Northern India, including Persian.

The site goes on to say that the form includes five to fifteen couplets and the first couplet of the poem has two rhyming lines and the following couplets’ all have second lines that rhyme with those two as well …the final couplet usually includes the poet’s signature, referring to the author in the first or third person, and frequently including the poet’s own name or a derivation of its meaning.”

After you read Diane’s poem by following the link and become acquainted with the ghazal as a form, I’d like to call your attention to the way Diane uses her craft to formulate a witty poem on a subject that seems to have eluded her:

The sign on the wall read: Test on Love
Coming Soon. “My God,” I thought, “a test on love!”

In the following 14 stanzas, Diane imagines herself in the situation of taking a test on love, and she imagines the variations of the test’s possible format, each time thinking of her downfall, how she knew she’d have no correct answers.

What if the teacher called me in front of the class
And made this request: “on love

Please speak extemporaneously”?
I’d look like a fool when I confessed, “On love

I can’t speak at all.” Or worse, an essay question
Demanding some new twist on love!”

Ultimately, Diane follows the ghazal form exactly when she ends, “Diane, once again, you’ve received an F in love.”

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In “Blueberry,” which has been read on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Diane takes on a favorite fruit and in doing so conjures memories of her mother, whose life we know from previous poems in the collection was not easy, whose abandonment of her daughter due to mental illness is something the poet has worked and worked at forgiving. The poem begins:

Deep-blue hue of the body, silvery bloom
On its skin. Undersized runt of a fruit,
Like something that failed to thrive, dented top
A fontanel. Lopsided globe. A temperate zone.
Tiny paradox, tart and sweet, homely
But elegant afloat in sugar and cream,
Baked in a pie, a cobbler, a muffin.

At the bottom of the next stanza she writes:

Be a glutton and stuff in a handful, your tongue,
lips, chin dyed blue, as if feasting on indigo.
Fruit of the state of New Jersey.
Favorite fruit of my mother.

From here she remembers something lovely about blueberries and her mother, that her mother scooped them into the pancake batter on Sundays, the way the circles of batter looked on the hot greased griddle.

Next, the poet achieves what all fine poetry is after — she moves seamlessly from the tangible image to the private moment, the very reason for having an emotional charge while looking at the “deep-blue hue” of the berry, at the “silvery bloom on its skin.” The poet wants to recall not “failure to thrive” as she describes the undersized fruit but sweet times — what she calls later in her poem “that kitchen, that table” of the happy Sunday mornings, the blueberries as “blue stars in the sky,” making a “universe in reverse,” where the poet and her mother are happy eating the treat of blueberry pancakes.

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In another moving and powerful poem, “Idiosyncrasies of the Body,” Diane opens with these lines:

I’m the kind of woman
Who never skips a meal,
Who always takes the end seat
Closest to the door.
I raise rashes on my skin,
Searching imaginary itches.
I’ve got one right now
Behind my fleshy arm.
The speaker addresses us directly, letting us know her fears of not having enough to eat, of not being able to escape, of her body plagued with itches. That she and we are in the now of her moment — there is one itch right now.

The speaker goes on in a second stanza to inform the reader that she always locks the door when she bathes even if no one else is home, that she has terrible dreams and fantasies that involve men asking her to take her clothes off or suffer dire consequences.

In the third stanza, we learn that her dead father is one of them:

Last night my father returned
from being dead. Once more he entered
the bedroom at the lake house, slipped
through the door like Zeus,
And pulled off my towel.
He’s seen hundreds of naked women, he said,
my father who for years
every time I passed him opened
my blouse — his right
to see how things were growing,
and I was a cold fish, just like my mother.

What she envies is women who can undress in front of strangers at a sauna, who can walk naked before a husband or lover, who know:

how it feels to be a goddess
in front of a man,
how to bring him to his knees.

Diane’s strategies for exploring and exorcising the demons and ghosts in life and the crippling and sad effects of damaged parents can encourage any of us who write to use lyric strategies and to delve into our life concerns. Taking Diane’s lead, we can become inspired to use poetic form (in this case the use of persona) for describing those aspects of life that worry us, that have left their mark, that seek to be seen and put into forms outside of our hearts and minds.

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I hope you’ll investigate Diane’s poetry and find her book useful for yourself as a writer as well as for any with an interest in contemporary women’s poetry. To get started using Diane’s work as a guide for eliciting some of your own, here are ideas borrowed from the three poems I’ve discussed:

Try This: A Ghazal

1) Consider again the requirements of a ghazal: It includes five to fifteen couplets. The first couplet of the poem has two rhyming lines and the following couplets’ all have second lines that rhyme with those two as well. Remember that the final couplet “usually includes the poet’s signature, referring to the author in the first or third person, and frequently including the poet’s own name or a derivation of its meaning.”

2) Think about what you know you fail at (so there will be an undercurrent of yearning as the form requires). That could be making soup, gardening, writing, being a good citizen, being a good wife or child, successful dieting, dressing well, or being a good friend. Or maybe you have something smaller to write about like not being good at opening jars, not being able to ever get your Thanksgiving Turkey out to be carved before everyone has waited hours to eat or not finding your way in places new to you.

3) Select one of the areas you have thought of and try your hand at writing a ghazal about it.

This kind of exercise can help you realize that you don’t need to be stuck when it comes to what to write about; forms pull words from you and you can then refine them. Write whatever you can to merely do the exercise. When you go back and look at what you’ve written, you may find a topic you’d like to explore in more writing, whether that means abandoning the ghazal that got you somewhere else, or tweaking and adding stanzas to it for more power.

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Try This: Associating from Fruit

If you start describing a fruit with wit (reread Diane’s marvelous comparisons), your unconscious will most likely deliver a subtext — something about a relationship with someone in your life that can be considered by describing the fruit you have chosen and the memories you associate with it. Choose one. What does it look like? Who does it make you think of? What memories come with that association? What do you wish for?

I did this exercise by beginning with the fruit that was in my kitchen:

The bunch of bananas hangs in the wire basket,
forgotten and speckled, six of them blackening
into a swamp, becoming clay that won’t harden.
Sweeter each day but sickeningly so.

Afraid to throw them out, I think of the sweet
bread I can make but the trouble of the sticky bowls.
I realized that for some reason that idea of the sweet bananas and sticky bowl made me think of a friendship that makes me think I am sinking further and further into a swamp with every favor, every gift I receive. As I wrote about that, I realized I was also thinking about a woman who was very sweet to me while unbeknownst to me she was courting the man I was living with. That was the person I wanted to write about!

Try This: Creating a Persona Who Speaks Directly

Diane opens her poem “Idiosyncrasies of the Body” with the phrase, “I am the kind of woman…” Try using this sentence structure to get started allowing yourself to say something you’ve hidden from the world. Your persona may be a child, an adult, a person with responsibilities like a pilot, soldier, or teacher. Use Diane’s approach giving specifics about what the persona never does, always does, dreams about, and remembers. You will be well on your way to creating writing that strikes an emotional chord.

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If you visit Diane’s website, you will find information about her books (a new one entitled Temptation By Water has followed What Feeds Us) and some of her poems, which you can read and download. There are also links to interviews and reviews of her work as well as to her blog (Blogalicious

) with interesting and assessable notes on poetry, poets, and books.