Poetry is Alchemy
how words create new possibilities & an announcement
You can listen to an audio version of this newsletter above. Please note that this is unedited and I’m recording in my home office, so you may hear some meows, raindrops, or traffic in the background.
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When I planned out this week’s post I meant to talk about Venn Diagrams.
I delight in discovering the ways ideas intersect through language and Venn Diagrams seemed like the way to get there. But the more I wrote, the more I was drawn to talk about poetry (the Venn Diagram piece will be coming next week).
It didn’t surprise me that my mind sees poetry as one step over from Venn Diagrams. I’m fascinated with meaning-making, and all the better if that meaning comes from cross-pollinating ideas to see what grows.
My two favorite words are profusely and alchemy.
These favorite words are why I love creative writing: what happens when we tag the adverb profusely to an unexpected action? Instead of bleeding profusely (how I usually hear it used), what if we’re crying profusely, dancing profusely, lecturing profusely, dreaming profusely? Invoking magicians smelting common metals in hope of striking gold, alchemy speaks for itself as a word of creation.
I love to take sentences apart like watches and put them back together to make them tick in curious ways. I penned my undergrad senior seminar paper on Virginia Woolf’s use of punctuation, the thesis of which (if I’m remembering correctly) was that she used semicolons and parentheses to create secret meanings beyond the actual clauses we read on the page. I spent my MFA learning about feminist and queer poets, writing poems about birds, domestic violence, patriarchy, or a combo of the three.
When I started my Masters and PhD programs, poetry books were replaced by books on rhetoric, queer theory, and historiography, but half my bookshelves remain home to cherished, dogeared books of poetry.
My favorite book of poetry is Bucolics by Maurice Manning. When I first read it in college, I put it down after a few pages. I was a 20-year-old lesbian punk with armpit hair who was experiencing riot grrrl and anti-capitalism for the first time. I refused to slow down to read a book written by a white cis-dude whose main character is a male farmer speaking to a God-character called Boss. Years later I picked up the book again and was gobsmacked by its beauty.
I know that sounds dramatic. I saw Manning do a public reading once in the Midwest, but I have never studied with him or met him. I don’t know if he’s a great guy, or if our politics align, and I’m certain he isn’t the first poet to write a book without punctuation, building a natural cadence without the aid of a comma and coordinating conjunctions. But the book remains dear to my heart and I feel in awe when I read it.
Here’s a poem from Bucolics, and you can read seven more here in the 2004 Virginia Quarterly Review.
the light inside the shadow how
it hovers there it’s like an owl song
a quiver hoot it shakes a little Boss
I think your face is in that flicker
is your neck a candle wick your face
a flame on top you’re almost always
going out so dim sometimes bright Boss
not for the life of me can I put
my finger on it the way it comes
it also goes which is quickly Boss
if you would just sit still I’d carve
your face into a stick then I
could look at you Boss a hundred times
a day you could listen for the owl
if he let out a hoot I’d turn
your wooden ear into the wind
Maybe you also find it beautiful, or maybe you yawned, or rushed through it, or skipped it entirely! Maybe, like me, you’ll return to it later and experience it more deeply. I find it most enjoyable to read multiple Bucolics poems (or the whole book) in one go, so I encourage you to check it out or request it from your local library.
I’ll leave you with one of my own poems, There I Was Unrequited, which was first published in Jellyfish Magazine and then published in the collection Please Excuse this Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation, edited by Brett Fletcher Lauer and Lynn Melnick. I wrote it a decade ago during a rainstorm.
There I Was Unrequited
Your door
is like a
war plunked
haphazardly
between us.
It is true
and horrid,
it gets in
my vision
of you
so tell me,
don't you
agree you
never look
mucked up.
Tell me
what you're
reading in there,
baby.
I want to hear
your sweet
throat tell me
what's on
every page.
I want to hear
your train voice
surrender.
You get me there
like a single
night of rain.
There are
birds out here
forever and we
will wait
while you lick
your fingertips.
I promise
I will never stop
writing poems
outside your door
and making
everything up.
So I guess
I am your
necessary
pause.
Before there
was rain
everywhere,
I started off
blasé feminist but
I grew prouder of my
writing you
your door treaty.
I have less
clothes now
and it never
rains more than
when I want
to hurt near you
and share that
with you.
Sometimes
I hope for
pauses
in your breath
because
pauses are
your lips.
You are
the sexiest
bird I have ever
stood outside.
You get me
on a wet page.
I need to
hear you
say it. Press
your naked
little bones
to the other side
and tell me
these birds and
rain and pages
are war.
If you made it this far in the letter, thank you! I hope you enjoyed getting to know another side of Dr. Kate, scholar of rhetoric and words. If you have other poetry recommendations for me, please share them in the comments.
Curiosities
This section of my letters is for things that made me say “hmmm” or “wow!” recently.
While I was waiting for the final book in RF Kuang’s The Poppy War Trilogy to come in on interlibrary loan I finished Elif Batuman’s The Idiot. I’d seen it on a few bookstagram accounts and was intrigued by the cover (a rock against a pretty pink background). I enjoyed that it was set in 1995 when email was a new, sparkly thing, but the narrator’s “will they or won’t they” with her crush also made me feel a bit down or slightly on edge. If you read it, let me know what you thought!
Once the temperature hits 70 degrees Fahrenheit (21 Celsius), my go-to lunch is a platter of raw vegetables, sliced fruit, cured meat, cheese, and bread, savored outside on our patio couch under the awning. Today I had my first official lunch outside and it was delectable.
Video games with “parties,” which means instead of playing as a single character you select a group of people who all adventure and fight as a team. Kris and I are replaying “Dragon Age: Inquisition” and we have been strategically bringing two characters on quests in an effort to matchmake them. (If you’re one of the .05% of folks who know this game, the characters we’re shipping are Dorian and Iron Bull.)
For Your Consideration
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xo,
Dr. Kate
Beautiful poems, thank you for sharing 🥰