As I continue to mentor Kathy Lockwood, who attends Alaska Pacific College in Anchorage, I grow and learn by considering her poems and her readings of the published poems she studies. Just as I did in April of this year (Working With Mentors Both Near and Far), I am publishing another of our exchanges for those of you interested in reading poetry and in shaping your own poems.

Thanks to Kathy’s close reading of Ordinary Genius, Kim Addonizio’s instructional book on writing poetry, this article will get you thinking about poetry’s structure and how you can apply what you know when you are writing and revising your own poems or reading the work of others.

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Hello Kathy,

I am always excited to find out more about how your work is progressing. Reading how you apply the words of poets on their craft to your own work, I learn from the poets you report on and from you as you work with the information you are assimilating and applying.

Below is your letter to me with my responses to your thoughts and questions indented and in italics.

Sheila,

I hope you are enjoying your summer. It has been cooler than normal and very cloudy here. We had a wonderful spring though. Summer is always a hit or miss when it comes to weather, we seem to be in a cycle of cool and rain these last couple of years. I do get tired of wearing a jacket in June and July though.

Kathy, I think we are experiencing some of the same weather you talk about. We had 29 days without rain, all of them warm and sunny and everyone felt as if summer were here. Then the cycle came to an end, and although there hasn’t been a lot of rain every day, the temperatures are cooler — high fifties — and the skies are grey. It seems to me that almost every July 4th has been an iffy one weather-wise — will going to the fireworks feel good or is it just too cold? Will there be a cloud cover keeping us from seeing the dazzling lights? The memory of many July 4ths past hover around each new Independence Day: my aunt, now deceased, and her grandsons Nathan and Lucas waving flags in my newly landscaped front yard, the bushes so small I didn’t know if they would make it over the summer draught time, and before that my own two children tired out from the long wait in a traffic jam to exit Seattle’s waterfront after the fireworks finished, the pleasures of coming home to silence. Just thinking about the weather this time of year brings up occasions for poetry.

 It looks like things may be changing for me soon, as my husband has applied for a job in Kansas City and if that falls through he will also apply for a job in Dallas, TX. We’ll move from Alaska but I will still finish out my last semester here at Alaska Pacific University.

I would like to continue my education, either a MFA or PH.D. The University of Kansas has a program that would be great to get into. If I were to pursue a MFA, I could do a low residency that offers a teaching component. I feel that I am lacking in the area of teaching, especially if I want to teach at a community college or a University. I am not sure my Masters of Arts will get me into a teaching position if I haven’t been in the class room as a teaching assistant. Have you any thoughts on which degree is a better choice or how to go about making myself marketable for teaching at either a college or community based outreach. I have taught a couple of small workshops, here in my community but have not done any teaching with the schools. I would love to teach workshops, classes, and conferences like you have been able to do, and maybe some online classes as well. What advice could you give me on getting into any or all of these venues? Also, how do you juggle your writing time with your teaching time?

Change is good for writing poetry. If you leave Alaska for Kansas or Texas, you will remember the landscape you left with intense vividness. You will be amazed at how something little in your environment will cause you to write about the home you left, the landscape that filled your senses. I don’t know where your new granddaughter lives, but wherever that is, you will be inspired to write by thinking about her and the family she comes from and what you hope for her.

About graduate education — if it is possible to take an MFA at the same time as you study for teacher certification that would be very good, I think. To teach at community colleges you need a Master’s degree. University’s require that PhD of course. Sometimes they still accept the MFA as a terminal degree in Creative Writing, but there are more and more PhD programs so they might be trying more and more to hire those candidates.

I think that publication is also important for your resume. Read journals about writing and studying writing and teaching writing, online and in print, and see if you have something to add to the conversation. If you do, write it up and submit it — you can say you are a student immersed in an independent study of poetry and reveal what you have found useful for gaining knowledge and understanding, for testing your wings in writing poems of your own.

You are already published in Writing It Real and you can mention that in your letters of inquiry about whether the journals would like to see an essay by you. You should also make a plan to send your poems out for publication. It’s time consuming work, but rewarding after a while (remember you can expect many rejections usually before an acceptance, but you just keep sending out.) Visit my blog under publishing opportunities to see current calls for submissions. Also, you’ll find a long list of online magazines that accept poetry in that same section of my blog.

As for giving workshops — design a course that you wish you had had the opportunity to take and go with it by asking a library or bookstore if you can teach there; a community center program is also a good place as are senior centers and retirement living settings. Even if you work for very little or even for free, you are building your experience. You might design a class that utilizes Kim Addonizio’s book — you can lead others through the book the way you have led yourself. I think classes are exciting when they offer the students something that has been very important to the teacher. I think offering to facilitate a group in reading and workshopping poems using the structure that has helped you allows for learning along with your students, and you don’t have to feel like an expert to get this kind of group going. From facilitating it, you will gain valuable experience for future offerings and your offerings will grow as you grow as a writer.

Juggling writing time and teaching time: When I was teaching on a school schedule I did most of my writing over the weekends and holidays and summers. I also remember that one quarter when I was teaching at three different schools, two courses at each one, with a car full of compositions to grade, I also wrote a lot of poems. I kept a notebook in my car. I arrived at the next school always a little bit early for the classes and spent some time in my car writing. I actually wrote a lot that term and amazed myself. So, it became a habit for me to drive to a park, park at a scenic spot and write. For a while this worked well. Then I would combine writing and bicycling, as I needed exercise. Now I am so in the habit of switching back and forth and considering my instructional writing my writing, that I am chained to my desk — but the view out the window is good and reminds me of the times I sat by Greenlake in Seattle or Elliot Bay, the times I watched people and seals, seagulls and raindrops and wrote the poems that shaped my life. When I get up from my desk now, it is to walk with a friend or use the equipment at a gym. My inspiration comes when my fingers are at the keyboard and I am looking out the window over Discovery Bay — a name I am always delighted to say and to write — that I am looking out over Discovery Bay and writing myself to new insights and discoveries is where I want to be.

For this packet I have been continuing my study with Kim Addonizio’s Ordinary Genius. I have worked some of the exercises and have learned from her checklist for “getting at what a poem is up to” how to go deeper into poems in order to see how they work. Here is the quick version of her checklist:

1) The heart — what is the thing that drives the poem, its reason for being.

Yes, how wonderful that this is first on the list. We can’t start to revise and re-see our poems without finding this out.

2) The tone of voice — there may be more than one voice. Diction or word choice is the key to the poems voice(s).

And isn’t the tone of voice part of the heart? I think these two go hand-in-hand. When you recognize the heart you can start to hear where the tone changes, where it is in tone and out of tone, where the ego, so afraid of the mess the poem might be getting into in its vulnerability, has thumped in with some directive or other, some summary or esoteric sounding stuff to protect the heart.

3) The skeleton — what is the structure of the piece? How does it begin and end, outward or circle back to an image or idea. What are the turns it takes or does it stick close and dive deeper into the subject. Repeated images, ideas or phrases — how they contribute to the poem.

Yes, yes, after listening to the draft to hear its heart and find out where the tone is in support of that heart, how good to see its joints and bones and know how to give it a shape in the world.

4) The body — matters of craft and technique: line breaks, imagery, metaphor, rhythms and the pacing of the poem.

These are important and in the end make the poem stronger, just like minerals and vitamins and exercise keep the body’s skeleton working and not breaking. It’s also so good that Addonizio put this fourth — we must start with the heart and not the bones when we are looking into what we have written to find what it is about and how to best manifest that in the world.

5) The syntax — how do the sentences open, where do they go, and how do they get there? What is the relationship of long to short sentences or sentences to fragments? What are the characteristics of a number of poems from the writer.

Yes, the wording of the sentences and their variety are more of the craft and another way to help a poem have impact. The order and length of clauses and phrases inside sentences creates tone; they offer insight into the poem’s personality. Does the poet wander or dig in deep quickly? Lead us against our expectations or keep us in suspense not knowing how a phrase will end?

I have used this checklist to understand what is going on in Molly Peacock’s poem “The Cup”.

 The Cup
by Molly Peacock

Unable to quell a sudden urge for neatness,
I reached to put away my Summerhouse cup,
Lifting up a wire shelf insert by mistake,
Rolling a whole stack of china toward me,
Barefoot in my nightgown on a step stool,
Dropping the precious cup, which smashed
As I pushed both my hands to save the rest
— and did.

I tried not to make too much

Of the one I’d never lift to my lips,
Throwing the pieces out immediately.

It’s only a cup,
You saved the rest.

Oh yes, I did, but just as in a classroom
Where all the pupils quietly work but one who refuses,
My mind roves to an unlearning I mourn
Even as I see the stacks
Of all that has been accomplished — and saved.
Why couldn’t I have just had breakfast
Before I started my tasks?

Because he was a flushed and violent boy
I had not thought of in twenty years
Until his mother wrote me he had died,
not saying the cause,
and I cannot say the boy was the cause of my urge,
a sweaty boy caught hanging the shorter kids
up by their collars on the high coatroom hooks
and whose ruddy face looked so little like porcelain.

The heart of the poem is about loss and what must go on or has been saved. It makes me think about how we as a society praise what has been saved or accomplished and we go on to ignore or forget about the broken, weaker or lost causes. Peacock shows the writer’s grief over the cup and a young boy, while trying to push past the lost and focus on the saved/ accomplishments that have endured.

I guess I read the heart a little differently: She has broken a cup out of her too aggressive urge to make things neat — she hasn’t allowed herself to settle into her morning before she tries to straighten up. And then she thinks about how she could look at the happy fact that she has saved all the rest of the china from breaking. But she can’t, just like she can’t stop focusing on the one student who isn’t learning in a bunch of students. And this boy, whose death she has learned about had a face that looked rough, not like porcelain He had been mean to others. His violence seems to me to be what she is channeling and stopping — the one cup broken, the others saved just like in her classroom. I see this as a grim poem. The info the mother gave her brought her back to that violence, to the way that one student kept others from feeling safe.

The tone of voice for the poem is remorseful and matter-of-fact, it wavers between the logical and emotional. There is only one voice in the poem — the writers.

I agree that the tone or voice is consistent. It does seem very every day in its speech, like we are listening in on the thoughts of someone recounting how she went wrong in her morning and reprimanding herself in almost non-poetic or a-poetic lines, until she leaps from

Why couldn’t I have just had breakfast
Before I started my tasks?

to:

Because he was a flushed and violent boy
I had not thought of in twenty years
Until his mother wrote me he had died…

In this leap, the tone changes from an everyday self-reprimand to something with more significance than the trivial act of breaking a cup. Do you hear the change? The difference between the sound of “Because he was a flushed and violent boy” and the sound of “Why couldn’t I have just had breakfast…?”

The skeleton or structure of the poem begins with an urge for neatness, and then a mistake happens causing loss and brokenness, which leads to mourning and then full circle to the urge for neatness. The writer brings the image of the china back into the readers mind with the last line. The writer takes the reader from the summerhouse kitchen to a classroom of kids — one who refuses to work quietly and then back out to kitchen again reminiscing about the letter from the boy’s mother. Then the writer moves the reader back into the classroom coat closet to end with the image of the boy “whose ruddy face looked so little like porcelain.”

For me, the skeleton works like this: We are told about the speaker standing on a stepstool to put a treasured cup away and in her haste, upsetting a whole shelf. We can see her saving the rest of the china and then we find out how she likens mourning this one broken cup to her way of focusing on the students she hasn’t helped. And then we find out she has heard news of one of these students, one who isn’t a delicate tea cup like the others, but someone much rougher that she been unable to help. The skeleton also seems to be one of speaking out after having had an aha moment and wanting to relive it, articulate it and make it certain. The cup accident has happened and she must have been asking herself why, why didn’t I wait till after breakfast, why was I hasty and then gotten her answer. The news has unsettled her because it reminds her of the violence the kid perpetrated in the classroom and it makes her think about how she is powerless to reach some students. That is what is important to her, not the cause of his death.

In simpler terms, we are off the stool remembering the cup incident and then into deeper psychological waters as the poet articulates what is preoccupying her right now. She is remembering an image that is something like putting the cup away — students hung by their colors. The act of doing something that is visually like that horrible memory prompts the poem, the understanding of her shakiness.

The body of the poem is written in short lines, varying in syllables and five stanzas. The use of details takes the reader into the poem, allowing the reader to experience the scene with the broken cup. Phrases like: summerhouse cup, wire shelf, stack of china, barefoot in my nightgown, step stool, pushed both hands, lift to my lips, throwing the pieces out immediately, pupils quietly work but one who refuses, stacks of all that has been accomplished, breakfast, flushed and violent boy, mother wrote me he had died, sweaty boy, hanging the shorter kid up by their shirt collars, ruddy face. These phrases give images to the reader as the writer goes deeper into the story of the poem, taking the reader into the emotional depths of the story. Craft of detail gives the reader a chance to pause and absorb the experience, to contemplate what is happening within the story.

Yes! What happens because of the short lines — do we get pensive, do we get anxious, do we feel like we’ve hit on meaning? How do the line lengths imitate the emotional experience of the poem?

In the body of the poem are lines I am not sure about: My mind roves to an unlearning I mourn, and then the line about breakfast- Why couldn’t I have just had breakfast/ Before I started my tasks? I am wondering why the reader took us back to breakfast (or summerhouse implied) when we are in the classroom with the pupils?

I think the unlearning is either her own unlearning to care about the one that isn’t learning or doing well amidst all that are or it means the boy who has died was unlearning what she had taught so he could remain his violent self. I am not clear on which, but actually, I think both can be true with no problem. The layers of poetry! I think she starts at breakfast because she has figured out why she was clumsy and caused the cup to break. She had mourned that she didn’t wait till she was steadier, more awake from eating breakfast, as if that might have helped. But she has also hit on the real reason for her shaky hands and for writing the poems: the emotions that were her focus and causing her not to pay attention to her actions of putting the cup away. And then the cup becomes a way to leap to the image the kids hanging by their colors.

The last point of the checklist is the syntax. This is where I also need help. What is the relationship of long to short sentences? How do I find characteristic syntax among a writer’s work, looking at a collection of one writer’s work I can’t find a pattern of how the writer writes. I don’t understand how to define what makes a poem like others written by the same poet. In the case of Molly Peacock, what would I look for within her poetry as her “trademark” so to speak, that would help me see her lines, sentences as being of a certain manner? Addonizio makes a point of saying she fell in love with C.K. Williams sentences. I picked up a collection of his work at the library and read several poems, looking for what she may have been talking about. I find the sentences to be written the same for most of his poems. His work looks like a lot of one sentence paragraphs the way they layout on the page. This is very different from Molly Peacocks work. I could see how his poems would stand out and form a pattern. When a poet doesn’t have a specific pattern or writes in various line lengths, where does one look for a pattern?

If you can’t find variety in one particular poem, you might look for variety among poems. You will find out if the poet is addressing different emotions or finding her way into her emotions in different ways — different tones, different patterns of breathing. The breath a poem makes you take, the rhythm of that breathing is part of the investigation the poem is making into experience. It can be excited and anxious, meditative, story telling, staccato and angry or dancing, for instance. Think about how the lines make you breathe, as if you were walking along, or running along, or stopping and sitting or punching a wall. Do the patterns vary according to subject and insight and what does that mean in her body of work?

So here is one of her poems I found online at Poets.org, a great site for reading contemporary American poetry:

Couple Sharing a Peach
by Molly Peacock

It’s not the first time
we’ve bitten into a peach.
But now at the same time
it splits — half for each.
Our “then” is inside its “now,”
its halved pit unfleshed —

what was refreshed.
Two happinesses unfold
from one joy, folioed.

In a hotel room
our moment lies
with its ode inside,
a red tinge,
with a hinge.

For me to understand this poem best, I had to look up the word folioed to refresh myself about what it means: “A large sheet of paper folded once in the middle, making two leaves or four pages of a book or manuscript.” (The Free Dictionary online). Then I feel very happy moving from the moment with the peach to the metaphor she sees in the peach splitting apart — the multiplication of pages of happiness — the ode inside, like the fruit’s stone, the think that holds the peach, the couple, together and the thing that allows each to have their own side, their own fruit, their own pages.

In this poem, Molly Peacock reminds me of John Donne and his famous compass metaphor in “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning“. The conceit is very abstract but somehow works to deepen my appreciation of an aspect of love.

Now for the pattern of the line compared to the patterns in the poem about the teacup: these lines are shorter, more even, less variation, although they do get shorter and shorter as the poem moves to its ending, to its focus on the single stone inside the fruit. I realize that in the other poem, the shortest lines are in the center when she says:

It’s only a cup,
You saved the rest.

It seems that when she is feeling definite her lines get shorter. In the second poem she feels definite at the ending. In the other poem she seems more definite about her rational thinking than her emotional thinking.

Well, that’s one sample of how you might look for patterns among poems that seem to vary. What becomes most important, I think, when you develop this kind of analytical process is being able to look inside your own poems for patterns to see if you are using the words and syntax skillfully or falling back on some sound that has worked in the past and you are accustomed to doing. Sometimes there is a pattern we get into that imitates found wisdom but isn’t quite the sound of what we have been searching for in the poem. It’s as if the syntax has stopped us short instead of serving us in our seeing.

After reading and rereading “The Cup” and now writing about it, I find I am amazed even more by the way that Molly Peacock used details that took me in and out of specific places in her poem. It moved me to see each moment of her experiences. I became aware of how craft builds the story and pushes it forward.

Addonizio opened my eyes to the inner workings of poems. I have learned to do a close reading of a poem and also to write with more detail. I know that the details need to be specific and lead toward the core of the poem. She also says to listen to the rhythm of a poem, to mark stresses on the page. This is another area I am struggling with. Molly Peacock writes, ” the line always means rhythm and sometimes means rhyme. … the line’s music gives us our instinctive understanding of a poem, even when we can’t articulate it. Can you explain more of how I am to listen to the rhythm of a poem? I am not sure if it is just the syllables of the line or the sound of the words?

It is always both — the syllables affect the rhythm and the consonants and vowels affect the voice: is it plaintive and crying (the vowels)? Is it soft or angry (the consonants)?

Addonizio also gives great advice on revision, which is what I will be looking at for some of my work for the next packet. I have found that reading Ordinary Genius has deepened my understanding of close readings, poem making and revision, but I also feel that I am still very much a beginner when it comes to poem making. The skills I have learned need to be honed and applied to many more poems and to my own work.

Yes, it is a lifetime of work — and luckily those of us who do it, love doing it.

I wanted to talk about my thesis work now. I am struggling with how to go about the project. I need the academic portion to show what I have learned and how I got there, so I was wondering if I should do an outline and follow it or if there is another form I should follow. I did a “black book” for my B. A. degree where I focused on my learning of craft and the process of writing and how it played into each of the essays I wrote. I envision something of the same manner for the thesis. What do you think? My title is: Why poetry matters: a Soulful Look at Poetry and the Writing Life. If you think I should change the title feel free to give some ideas. I am really not sure how to go about all of this part. I will also have a portion of the thesis that will contain my poems and I am not sure yet how many are suppose to be presented. I have a quick 15 minute presentation at the beginning of fall semester to inform my peers and advisor of my project and then at the end of semester I will have a 45 minute presentation of the thesis and will present three copies to the panel for defense of the thesis. I am feeling unsure of how I go about the writing of the thesis so please advise.

Overall, I feel I still have so much to learn in a very short period of time. I am afraid that everything I have learned and read so far isn’t enough to carry me through the next phase and especially into teaching poetry.

I am going to work on my annotated bib and continue to revise my work as well as doing close reading for the next packet. I would like to have an outline or plan for my thesis writing. I will also have my study plan ready for next fall in the next packet. Thank you for your time and advice, I am really glad I have you to help me through all of this.

Yours,

Kathy

Kathy, my thesis was a collection of my poems. I did have a reading list and I had to talk to my committee about what I’d learned from the poets I read but I didn’t have to write about it. How will you link the two parts of the thesis or can they be independent?

Jay Parini is known for his book called Why Poetry Matters, so if you are going to call your thesis by that title, you’ll have to read his book and be sure to discuss his work. You might call the book by another title and subtitle it “Why Poetry Matters to Me.” Perhaps it has a title like “Making Verse in the 21st Century: Why Poetry Matters to Me.” You can discuss what writing and studying poetry have meant to you and you can bounce off of Parini’s experience and quote from him and others you have read and interviewed.

Perhaps you can use some of your poems and discuss how writing and rewriting the poem helped you grow, how it mattered. You can talk about a poem you have taken into yourself and talk about how that mattered. You can read about the poet laureates and how their projects have mattered. I think it would make for a good thesis that would have meaning to you as you write it.

I look forward to helping you with that project, and as always, I’m happy to read of your commitment to poetry.

Sheila