Tag: poetry

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Origins, Lucifer Falls

This first appeared in JMWW 2013

Origins: Amy Nawrocki talks about the inspiration for her poem “Lucifer Falls, New York,” which appears in the summer 2013 issue of jmww:

Lucifer Falls, New York


Like war planes, a crowd
of raptors scull through the blank
and cloudless sky. One
after another, they stream
over the open paddock
of midsummer green, advance
toward a still and speechless
line of trees. Their portents

reach the forest’s door; needles
of pine brace between hard clay
and treachery. The bone black jaw
of a red-bellied snake ruins
a toad’s last chance for escape.
He is in the middle of it now,
like the fawn whose femur lay
furloughed in the gorge,
trespassing on the slick ink
of river-smoothed black rocks.

Three months before the wedding, my husband and found my wedding band in a jewelry story in Ocean City, repacked the car and headed north to the Finger Lakes of New York state, country of Riesling and pungent artisanal cheeses.  The campsite was crowded, bright and hot, but at night we roasted corn on the cob, popped toasted marshmallows with raspberries into our mouths and sipped on cream sherry. Eric and I are avid hikers, so in between wine tasting and lake cruises, we strapped on the boots and took to the gorges and waterfalls outside Ithaca.

The hike took us in and out of pine forests, to the top of the falls, a look out to the valley below. Though elsewhere the waterfalls were in full bloom, the August heat had dried up much of the gorge. Coming down from a high causeway, we slipped into the riverbed, full of downed trees and glossy rocks. And bones. My foot was acting up, deciding for no reason at all to drag and clench awkwardly; and the clumsiness of my gait was frustrating, heartbreaking and incomprehensibly scary.  There were tears. I wasn’t used to feeling vulnerable and unsteady. Perhaps something of that came to mind at Lucifer Falls.

I have always seen the beauty in witnessing what the natural world seems to do so flawlessly: go on. Insects go about the business of laying eggs and feeding on plants. Skies turn gray, then black, then back to blue. Water ekes out of gorges a little at a time; the deluge masking the exactness of liquid carving water through dense stone over centuries. Space makes us forget the tactile and the immediate: gravel beneath feet, the whisper of pine needles; lightning scars and burls on mighty trees. A snake swallowing a frog, its feet twitching in the finality of a meal. Bones recently part of a muscular beast, now driftwood.

The raptors circling are on the lookout for something good to eat. There’s no reason to think their meals are destructive, sad, hateful or evil. In the poem, I wanted to capture the eeriness, signal something like warning, to tap into the alertness of those birds. Animals are all about awareness. I think it’s good to remind ourselves of that. The fawn bones trouble us (or I imagined they would trouble a reader) because we impose our own wishes to stave off the end.  We want the little deer to grow up big and strong, lead a happy life. We root for the underdog; maybe the frog will escape. Maybe my foot will doom me. We turn our fears on the landscape and see omens, not beauty.

I wish I could say that I dreamt up the title as a comment on the poem’s meaning, but in fact Lucifer Falls really exists, one of the best gorges outside Ithaca in the heart of the Finger Lakes. There’s something to that authenticity, that somebody else saw the expanse and contrasts in the landscape and thought, somehow, of fallen angels.

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Pickling

. . . everything springs from the deeply plural earth

The pickle exists through the simple act 
of preservation. Ever searching for the sea,
we mimic its salinity with a generous dousing 
of sodium chloride dissolved in scalding water 
and turn the whole thing over to vinegar, 
to the chemical beauty of mingling molecules 
agitating the turmoil of fermentation. 
Whether the tucked leaves of a cabbage head
suck the masala pungency from the brine,
or thin moon slices of magenta beets bleed 
from the sting of salt, whether mushroom caps, 
round and fortunate, or carrots accosted 
with the sweet spice of ginger root savor 
the brackishness, everything springs 
from the deeply plural earth. We store 
the marinated concoction and thus safeguard
our futures, stave off our own rotting, 
preserve all that is ancient and worthwhile 
into one crisp bite of vegetable love.
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One Hundred Degrees of Plum

Two Poems for My Veins

Infusion

If I had to choose
between snakes’ fangs
and tigers’ claws
to name the needle
piercing my flesh
I select the cat
whose stripes burrow
all the way to skin
because this hunt—
dangerous as an open wound—
leads the seeker
to my blood
and the venom
is already present.

from Mouthbrooders, Homebound Publication, 2019

Generous Bruises

At the bank the teller catches me
counting on my fingers—the same feeling
I had chasing my sister’s bike down
the unpaved road. She would fall before
I could catch her. As the road curved
I was thinking how little I have
to rely on; I should run faster.


Caught in the act of failing, used up again
dwelling in those Hopper paintings
where nothing vacillates, nothing
is weak, and all the women wear black pumps.
Their isolation—so original, it makes them
efficient, but keeps them separate.


But consider this: a crystal’s structure
appears only when cracked. We experience
the same self when the I cracks
and our breath runs out. We earn
the favor of being by breaking
revealing a symmetry so generous it bleeds.
Watching a bruise heal from the inside out
it’s the color that matters:
never black nor blue, but shades of yellow
and one hundred degrees of plum.

from Four Blue Eggs, Homebound Publications, 2017

Hotel Window, 1955 by Edward Hopper, courtesy of http://www.EdwardHopper.net
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Of Kites and Cohen

Amy Nawrocki reading “A Kite is a Victim” by Leonard Cohen, published in The Spice-Box of Earth, 1961

I recently led a discussion about the poetry and lyrics of Leonard Cohen at the Bethel, CT, Public Library. The program was sponsored by Bethel Poet Laureate Cortney Davis. In the talk, I centered on intimacy and audience in Cohen’s work, how in poetry and song he can draw his readers (and listeners) in through both a literary voice as well as a his “reedy baritone” singing voice. In the case of his poetry, I found intimacy was created through imagery, organization of stanzas and lines, and point of view. Cohen often addresses the reader directly (not an uncommon practice of second person), but doing so seems to grant him authority (“A kite is a victim you can be sure of”) even as the speaker struggles with the surety of this: “A kite is the last poem you’ve written/ so you give it to the wind.” The “you” in the poem is both the speaker and the reader, and thus confirms this “contract of glory / that must be made with the sun” through us, the reader.

We weren’t able to get to all the poems I had selected to talk about. So “A Kite is a Victim” is for everyone who attended yesterday’s discussion who helped me release Leonard Cohen’s kite, finding it among friends in “the fields / the river, and the wind.” Perhaps now I too will be “lyric, and worthy, and pure.”

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Words, words, words

Sestina for Words Taken and Left Behind: an experiment in sound

The poem began as a class exercise. My students were experimenting with fixed and traditional form poems. I gave them the option of trying a villanelle or a sestina. Some had trouble getting started, so I offered a few images that they could pool from. We had discussed the form and how repetition functions differently in each of these forms. The sestina incorporates repeated end words–words at the end of the line–in a pattern of six line stanzas. A “map” or chart is helpful, and I gave them handouts and examples to follow. As they worked, I asked each student for one word–my aim was to use their words, fixed in a pattern of the sestina. I also had in mind a debate about whether or not a pattern can overwhelm a poem and another debate about how meaning functions in the realm of pattern. Big questions for a 75 minute class.

In the end, I had about 20 words, which I wrote down in order, then supplemented to create six word lines which I then formed into six line stanzas. The exercise challenged me to see how word choice leads pretty naturally to syntax and a need to find meaning not only in words, but in phrases. Beyond that, the challenge was to vary the lines enough so that the repetition (already expected in the sestina form) wouldn’t overwhelm or underwhelm the poem. As I wrote, the fun was in rearranging in interesting ways for sound, then meaning. As I read and recorded the poem, the fun was in managing my voice, the cadence, the pronunciation and articulation of each word and each line. This made me think more about punctuation choices as well as line breaks (enjambing and endstopping–or not).

Whether the poem has logic or “meaning” is now up to the listener. For me, I enjoyed the practice, but I mostly enjoyed that the words were given by my students, and in a way, it’s their poem.

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Explicating the Poetic Process

“My writing process saves a fair percentage of time
for self-doubt and lack of artistic confidence.”

It starts with an encounter. There is a notarized mammal, a dead serpent, and a preserved misspelling. Then a mythical flash of inspiration, the grabbing for tool and template, and the clumsy yet magical act of documentation. Just like the muses prophesized. Read more:

More often than not, the process begins with a mistake.

This feature appeared in the May 14 2018 issue of Woven Tail Press‘s website.