Daily Archives: April 10, 2004

The Process of Poetry

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This is going to be a long post. If you’re not interested in how a poem gets written, revised, rewritten and “de-scaffolded”, you probably should move on.
I’m struggling to complete an assignment that we in Eamon Grennon’s advanced poetry workshop were given to complete by this Thursday. And I do mean struggling. It’s our second assignment.
Our first assignment was to write three possible first stanzas based on this Vermeer painting. Each stanza had to be 11 lines long, and each line had to have between 9 and thirteen syllables. At the first workshop meeting, each of us 12 “advanced poets” read his/her three versions, and the group, including Grennon, reached a decision about which version was the “best.” Interestingly enough, we all tended to agree.
These are the three I wrote: (Notice that the first version was just something I had to get out of my personal system; the second was based on my doing a little historical research about the era in which the painting was executed; the third was my stretch to come up with a novel angle on the scene.)
#1
You can be sure that picking up a pen,
already dripping virulent ink,
will bring an old woman rapping at the door
armed with a burned pot and dented memory;
or maybe a mad cat clawing at the sleeve
of the rich wrap you threw on against
the chill of an exigent morning held at bay.
You yearn for moments between dawn and day,
for the silence sought by a rhymed mind.
You hunt the lines that pulled your smile from sleep,
and learn to expect interruptions.
#2
How she resents the power of such darkness

When we kill our own…

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You can’t have a war without people getting killed. You kill them. They kill you. But in this modern era of smart bombs that are really not that smart at all, we too often wind up killing our own.
My friend and former therapist, Ed Tick, has a letter to the editor in today’s paper that begins:
David Morris’ March 26 commentary on fratricide summarizes several incidents in both the first and present Iraq wars in which American and coalition ground troops were killed by our own A-10 attack jets. These American deaths due to friendly fire underscore an ignored but persistent problem of modern war.
I have worked with a grunt who was the only survivor when our own forces dropped a bomb on his sleeping squad, a spotter pilot almost shot down by our side, a Gulf War veteran trapped in a firefight in which both the enemy and our own forces tried to destroy him because his tiny position was in the way of their big fight. The pain, outrage and sense of betrayal caused by incidents like these do not disappear over time. These are but a few recent examples from local veterans of a much larger problem endemic to modern warfare.
Ed now works primarily with Veterans who have Post Traumatic Stress. The stories he tells about what this country’s whoring [sic] has put our military men and women through are enough to turn anyone but the most war-mongering into pacifists.
I have never understood why we just don’t send those who want war INTO the war to do the actual fighting. You want it? You should bear the brunt of it.