PoetryBootCamp

Summer is on the downhill slide here in the East. Already the leaves have lost their luster. I can almost smell fall in the morning as I run. And school’s about to start – my son and I headed out yesterday to get supplies — binders, notebooks, loose leaf paper. All that great stuff! And of course I couldn’t resist a spiral notebook for myself. September is a good month to start a new notebook.

Do you know Jean Valentine’s work? I’m reading her collected poems, Door in the Mountain, trying to understand how she uses so few words, yet is so evocative. This is something that interests me because I tend to at least begin with thickly laid on sentences or phrases.
So I’m reading Valentine and as I do I almost feel as if I’m peering into her dream space – that’s the quality of her language. Spare. Most of her poems are short, with short lines and not many words on a line. And the words seem like simple words – and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. I once studied with a poet who said one shouldn’t use words with too many syllables.
And again this dream quality. As if she were meditating and allowing the images to enter and not worrying too much about story. Her poems don’t seem to be about narrative. More about images. Perhaps she does record her dreams and this is one starting place. There’s certainly an associative quality in her work – meaning that the images seem to accrue from line to line, building on each other in some cases. I wonder if she does much revision. I suppose I might use one of her poems as a model. Like copying a visual work of art. Or perhaps I’ll take a poem that I’m revising and strip it to see if I can get a feel for her technique.   

So here are 2 of her poems from collected works. I can’t make the line breaks and stanzas the right way as she has them but…see what you think. And happy almost September.

Home

Breath entering, leaving the leaf,

the lion tense on the branch luxuriant,

the ten-foot drop to

the water-hole, the God-taste

–that’s what lights it up,

Nature, and Art: your skin feather to feather

scale to scale to my skin

and the airy sleep, like wine…

two soft old children’s books

with the red and blue and green crayons still warm on us.

Listening

My whole life I was swimming listening

beside the daylight world like a dolphin beside a boat

–no, swallowed up, young, like Jonah,

sitting like Jonah in the red room

behind that curving smile from the other side

but kept, not spat out,

kept, for love,

not for anything I did, or had,

I had nothing but our inside-

outside smile-skin…

my paper and pen…

but I was made for this: listening:

“Lightness wouldn’t last if it wasn’t used up on the lyre.”

Best — Pam