Close Readings of Poems in the Singing School

I was rereading parts of Robert Pinsky's Singing School: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters. The "singing school" of his title comes from Yeats' poem "Sailing to Byzantium" 

Can you learn to be a poet by studying poems? It might help, but no. But you can certainly learn about poetry and how to read poems.

The collection takes an unconventional approach to the art of poetry. Instead of rules, theories, or recipes, Pinsky emphasizes ways to learn from great work. There are 80 poems and Pinsky's introductions to each section take a writer’s view of specific works.

This is the close study of poems, which I have done in workshops. He notes William Carlos Williams’s “Fine Work with Pitch and Copper” for its intense verbal music. Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” for its wild imagination in matter-of-fact language. He directs us to Robert Southwell’s “The Burning Babe” for "surrealist aplomb." Observe the subtle meter in Wallace Stevens’s “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm.” 

Robert Pinsky is a fellow Jersey boy and Rutgers alum. His books include At the Foundling Hospital, a best-selling translation of The Inferno of Dante, and in prose The Life of David, on the Biblical figure, and his Selected Poems. His autobiography is Jersey Breaks.

Robert Pinsky’s first two terms as United States Poet Laureate met such enthusiastic national response that he was appointed to an unprecedented third term. As Laureate, Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of American readers, of varying backgrounds, ages, and regions, read their favorite poems. The videos at favoritepoem.org show that poetry has a vigorous presence in American culture. 

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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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Prompt: Island

"No man is an island" was originally "No man is an Iland" and is a famous line from John Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, a 1624 prose work. It was the 17th devotion, Meditation XVII. When you see this a s a poem, it is that Donne's punctuation becomes line breaks. The poem also includes the line "...for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."

That prose work as a whole is considered similar to 17th-century devotional writing generally, and particularly to Donne's Holy Sonnets. It might surprise you that Donne's early career was also notable for his erotic poetry, especially his elegies, in which he employed unconventional metaphor. In "The Flea," a flea biting two lovers is compared to sex.

Donne is considered to be a "Metaphysical poet" which was coined by the critic Samuel Johnson to describe a loose group of 17th-century English poets whose work was characterized by the inventive use of conceits, and by a greater emphasis on the spoken rather than lyrical quality of their verse. Modern critics often say that "baroque poets" may be more accurate as Donne and other don't fit our more common philosophical use of metaphysical as meaning the study of reality and existence.

If you read any of Donne in school, it was probably "No Man Is An Island" or "Death Be Not Proud," but not  "To His Mistress Going to Bed" or "The Flea." 

"No Man Is an Island" is a poem that explores the interconnectedness of humanity and the impact of loss. The speaker asserts that no individual is isolated, but rather an integral part of the broader human collective. The poem uses the metaphor of comparing humankind to a continent, with each person being a "piece" or "part" of the whole.

Loss appears as the erosion of land by the sea. Donne suggests that the death of even one person diminishes the entire human race. This idea is emphasized by the shift from the hypothetical ("If a clod be washed away") to the personal ("As well as if a manor of thy friend's/Or of thine own were").

The poem's concluding lines, "And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; / It tolls for thee," encapsulate the theme of shared mortality and emphasize the inevitability of death for all.

For this month's call for submissions, we invite poems that consider the island metaphor, our shared world, or the inevitability of death. Donne loved metaphors and that should be a starting place for you. Perhaps, an island suggests other metaphors to you. In Shakespeare's The Tempest, the island is a metaphor with multiple layers as it represents isolation, both physically and psychologically, away from the regular world where the characters are stranded. 

SUBMISSION DEADLINE March 31, 2025

Some Donne allusions trivia:

•  No Man Is an Island is also a 1955 book by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton.
• "For whom the bell tolls" was used by Ernest Hemingway as the title of his 1940 novel. Hemingway uses it as a metaphor for the Spanish Civil War, implying that people in America or other countries should care about what was happening there, and not ignore it because it was happening far away.    
• The band Jefferson Airplane inserts between the track "A Small Package Of Value Will Come To You Shortly" and the song "Young Girl Sunday Blues," this Donne joke "No man is an island! He's a peninsula."

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John Donne (1572-1631) was an English poet, scholar, and soldier who later became a cleric in the Church of England as Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London.

Despite his great education and poetic talents, Donne lived in poverty for several years, relying heavily on wealthy friends. He spent much of the money that he inherited during and after his education on womanizing, literature, pastimes and travel.

In 1601, Donne secretly married Anne More, with whom he had twelve children. In 1615 he was ordained Anglican deacon and then priest, although he did not want to take holy orders and only did so because the king ordered it. He served as a member of Parliament.

Donne died on 31 March 1631. He was buried in old St Paul's Cathedral.

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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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Poets Online Discussion and Sharing

PoetsOnline.org is the main site for our monthly online poetry magazine where we offer you the opportunity to write a poem to a monthly writing prompt for possible publication. 

We also have a Facebook group that is open and a place to share your poems, books, things you are reading, events and all things poetic - especially when they are online. We welcome your participation.

We also have an "official" Facebook page where monthly updates on new prompts and submission deadlines appear. and additional links to poetry news. We hope to will follow us at both places.

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Prompt: Cemetery

A cemetery seems to be a rather grim place and sad prompt, but I find cemeteries preferable to hospitals. I certainly don't spend very much time visiting cemeteries these days but as a youth I made pilgrimages to several poets grave sites in my New Jersey. I visited Stephen Crane buried at Evergreen Cemetery in Hillside, Allen Ginsberg at B'Nai Israel Cemetery in Newark, Walt Whitman at Harleigh Cemetery in Camden and William Carlos Williams buried at Hillside Cemetery in Lyndhurst,

What did I expect to find besides a headstone and grass or flowers?  I'm not sure. Perhaps a ghostly presence? Some inspiration? There were no supernatural presences, but I did write about the visits.

I looking for poems for this call for submissions and found many poems about cemeteries. The poet Billy Collins said, "Oh, you're majoring in English? So then you're majoring in death." There is some truth in that humorous line, but the range of approaches to the subject by poets is wide. Not all poems about cemeteries are about death.

 In "The Mountain Cemetery" by Edgar Bowers, we find this description:
With their harsh leaves old rhododendrons fill
The crevices in grave plots’ broken stones.
The bees renew the blossoms they destroy,
While in the burning air the pines rise still,
Commemorating long forgotten biers.
Their roots replace the semblance of these bones...

"Oak Grove Cemetery" by Don Thompson, opens with a bit of hope.
Just enough rain an hour ago
to give the wispy dry grass some hope,
turning it green instantly.

In Key West, the living surround the dead,
who are the best neighbors
silent and agreeable as well-swept porches...
writes Jacqueline Allen Trimble in "Walking Beside the Cemetery, Olivia Street, Key West"  

 
Madeline Tiger

While assembling this prompt, I received word that a poet friend, Madeline Tiger, had died in December. Madeline was the first Dodge Foundation poet I had as an instructor for their poetry workshops for teachers back in the 1980s. She was a gentle soul and a knowledgeable poet and we stayed in touch for decades when she lived nearby in New Jersey. I lost touch with her in this century as she had moved away, but I continued to read her poetry. 

A friend posted her poem, "The Mockingbird in May" from her book, The Atheist's Prayer, online with a notice about her passing and so I felt the universe was telling me to use it this month. Jim Haba, who started the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Program and created its biannual poetry festival (and who was my first literature professor at Rutgers) often said that reading a poet's work is a way we keep them alive.

Madi's poem made me think of "At a Jewish Cemetery in Pittsburgh" by Peter Oresick.
...I set down my son
and he crawls in the dimness,
pulling himself up on the headstone.
How delicately he fingers the marble.
Quickly he rounds its corner. Vanishes.
I’m thinking: grass, stone, quiet–
then babbling from another world.

Another poet, Thomas Lux, taught that what you see in your mind when you hear a word like "cemetery" is not what anyone else sees. We all have personal associations with words based on our experiences and knowledge.

What images does "cemetery" create in your mind? Negative, positive, sad, peaceful, nostalgic, or angry images? Is it a place of death or a peaceful, quiet, green parkland?

In general, people don't visit cemeteries as much as they did a century ago. Being buried in the ground isn't even as common as it once had been.  "Tree Cemetery" by Wu Sheng is a poem that addresses alternatives.  
Plant a tree in place of a grave
Plant a patch of trees in place of a cemetery
Put a flowerbed around each tree
Lay the ashes of the deceased to rest by the stump

For our March issue, we ask you to write a poem inspired by the word cemetery. Your poem does not have to be set in that location, but it might be a real place that is now only a memory.

Here is Madeline's poem:

The Mockingbird in May

A mockingbird sings near my son's grave
He is out of sight, one of many in the great oak trees,
but the song is intensely clear,

coming through the wind and the leaves.
The evening empties.  Nothing here
but rustle and song and gusty breeze.

Unseasonably cold after the hard
rain, Sunday ends with bright sky
to the east, over there where

a woodpecker rattles an undertow.
Another echoes it higher,
louder against a dark tree.

All I know are the sparrows,
the dove call, the mocking,
the low staccato roll, the caw of crows--

the descent, the pebbles placed in a
row on the tombstone to represent
the mourner who came
and those others who didn't come.

I like the way the poet has used birds throughout the poem to signal shifts - the mockingbird, unseen,  that is only known by its song, the woodpecker heard as an undertow and echo, and the others in the trees, until our gaze lands on the grave.

Madeline Tiger was born in New York City in 1934. Her family moved to Hewlett,NY on Long Island when she was 3 and then moved again to South Orange, New Jersey where she graduated from Columbia High School.

She graduated from Wellesley College, and received the Master of Arts in Teaching English from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1957. That summer, she began doctoral studies at Columbia University, but stopped when she began teaching high school English in the fall.

Madeline was the mother of five children. Her son Homer died in 1989, when he was 22, in a kayak accident in New Zealand.

"The Mockingbird in May" is from her book, The Atheist's Prayer. Her Birds of Sorrow and Joy: New and Selected Poems was published in 2003.

Madeline died on December 6, 2024 just weeks after her 90th birthday. 

 

Submission deadline: February 28, 2025

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org