Tra-La! I’m A Word Processor!
The first verse from Kenneth Goldsmith’s poem, I Look to Theory Only When I Realize That Somebody has Dedicated Their Entire Life to a Question I Have Only Fleetingly Considered (yes, that’s the title) begins: “I used to be an artist; then I became a poet; then a writer. Now when asked, I simply refer to myself as a word processor.” (Poetry Magazine, April 2015.)
Kenneth’s poem is over twelve pages. I stopped at the identity of “word processor.” Is that I? Is it all right to be a “word processor?” You know something, I AM a word processor. I savor alliterations, internal rhyme, onomatopoeia, meter in poetry and prose. Yes. Prose.
When I read Annie Dillard, Esther De Waal, Eudora Welty, Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, or Thomas Rain Crowe, I’m reading poetic prose. This is as good as it gets.
Here’s Annie from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:
“Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then shadow sweeps it away. You know you’re alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet’s roundness arc between your feet.”
This paragraph is one of those Prose = Poetry delights that set me off! Off to where? Glad you asked. Off into the wild blue yonder, one without air craft or drones, only clouds, moon rise, sunrise, red-tailed hawks or eagles catching wind currents. Here are two of my favorite bird poems.
blake
saw them glittering in the trees,
their quills erect among the leaves,
angels everywhere. we need new words
for what this is, this hunger entering our
loneliness like birds, stunning our eyes into rays
of hope. we need the flutter that can save
us, something that will swirl across the face
of what we have become and bring us grace.
back north, i sit again in my own home
dreaming of blake, searching the trances
for just one poem.
~ lucille clifton
Another favorite is John Updike’s, The Great Scarf of Birds:
The Great Scarf of Birds
Playing golf on Cape Ann in October
I saw something to remember.
Ripe apples were caught like red fish
in the nets of their branches.
The maples were colored like apples,
part orange and red, part green.
The elms, already transparent trees,
seemed swaying in vases full of sky.
The sky was dramatic with great straggling
V’s of geese streaming south,
mare’s-tails above them.
Their trumpeting made us look up and around.
The course sloped into salt marshes,
and this seemed to cause the abundance of birds.
As if out of the Bible or science fiction,
a cloud appeared, a cloud of dots
like iron filings which a magnet
underneath the paper undulates.
It dartingly darkened in spots,
paled, pulsed compressed, distended, yet
held an identity firm: a flock of starlings,
as much one this as a rock.
One will moved about the trees
the liquid and hesitant drift.
Come nearer, it became less marvelous,
more legible, and merely huge.
“I never saw so many birds!” my friend exclaimed.
We returned our eyes to the game.
Later, as Lot’s wife must have done,
in a pause of walking, not thinking
of calling down a consequence,
I lazily looked around.
The rise of the fairway above us was tinted,
so evenly tinted I might not have noticed
but that at the rim of the delicate shadow
the starlings were thicker
and outlined the flock
as an inkstain in drying pronounces its edges.
The gradual rise of green was vastly covered;
I had thought nothing but nature could be
so broad but grass.
And as I watched, one bird,
prompted by accident or will to lead,
ceased resting; and, lifting in a casual billow,
the flock ascended as a lady’s scarf,
transparent, or gray, might be twitched
by one corner, drawn upward and then,
decided against, negligently tossed
toward a chair:
the southward cloud withdrew into the air.
Long had it been since my heart
had been lifted as it was by the lifting
of that great scarf.
~ John Updike
“TRA-LA! It’s May,” the lusty month of May, the vigorous, dynamic, vivacious, impetuous month of May. Stop. Look. Look up! Listen. Write. Read.
Mother’s Day is May 10th. Write a poem about yours. If she’s here, send it. If she’s elsewhere, read it aloud on a day of sun and wind. She’ll hear.
Resources
- Poetry USA: 105 American poems, edited by Paul Molloy, Scholastic Book Services. Nov. 1972
- the terrible stories, lucille clifton, BOA Editions Limited, 1996
- The Annie Dillard Reader, Annie Dillard, Harper Perennial, 1995.