Now Once: An Ekphrastic Poem

This past summer, I was selected to participate in a writing workshop that used dance and movement as the prompt for writing poems.

Writing poetry about the arts - paintings, sculpture, photography, music, dance, etc. - is called ekphrasic poetry. It is a vivid, often dramatic, verbal description of a visual work of art, either real or imagined. Famous examples include "The Shield of Achilles" by Homer, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats, "The Starry Night" by Anne Sexton and one I have written about, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" by William Carlos Williams.

This workshop was sponsored by Arts By The People, a New Jersey nonprofit organization with a mission to establish, operate, promote, and conduct educational programs, opportunities, classes, and sessions in the creative arts for the public. With the support of The Santiago Abut Foundation, this project and all parts of The Writing LAB are free and open to the public.

The participants' writing collected in like waves through flesh represents the work of the 3rd annual Writing LAB Summer Residency. This year's ekphrasis workshop included a unique collaboration between Arts by the People and students from the dance graduate program at The Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. Photographic stills from, and QR code links to, the dancers’ films are printed in the anthology alongside each writer's final creation.

During the full-day workshop, the participants went through a series of writing exercises as well as movement exercises. The writing portion was led by poet Michelle Ortega. The movement portion of the program was led by dancer Oksana Horban. Paul Rabinowitz is the Founder and Executive Director of ARTS By The People.

Watching the dancer's video that I selected to write about, I initially had a difficult time finding a center. After several attempts, I realized what I was focusing on was the setting - a stone ground and wall that looked like a desert. Because the dancers were from Jerusalem, I decided to research what kind of stone it would be. It turns out that "Jerusalem stone" is what it is called and it was used for many buildings in the city being that it could be quarried from the surrounding land.

Realizing that the stone was once a sea floor, I became fascinated by the idea that this modern man was moving upon this ancient sea floor that had become a desert, but that life was still embedded in that stone.

The best thing about writing workshops and writing prompts is often that they get you to go in directions that you would not have tried on your own. My poem is quite different from most of my poetry which tends to be narrative and more personal. "Now Once" is more focused on language and place.

NOW ONCE
Once a sea, then a lake, now
evaporated to limestone, dolomite, broken into blocks
to make a road, or a wall
one allowing movement, one to prevent it
once coral, mollusks, a swan, a ship,

a lone shadowless figure moving on what
was once deep water, animated and overflowing,
now sedimentary, fossilized, unable to move
waiting to be resurrected by winglike movements
that lift million-year-old memories from the stone.

Can you see it? Look closely with
ancient eyes, this wall of Jerusalem stone,
life preserved below, life renewed upon it,
the figure unfolds, like an oyster or
a swan – but no, a man, hearing

a carnival of animals from deep within.
Can you hear it? The voices begin,
andantino grazioso, slow and graceful, the vibrations
sound like waves through flesh and time
what is now and what was once.

To view the video that inspired the poem,
scan the QR code below.

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Oscar Wilde: Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

Oscar Wilde, 1882, by Napoleon Sarony

I came across this quote from Oscar Wilde: "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling." I believe Wilde meant that all poetry - "good" or "bad" - comes out of something genuine emotionally. (If you have another interpretation, please comment on this post below.)

Though Oscar Wilde is better known for his plays and novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his poetry remains an important part of his body of work, showcasing his talent for lyrical beauty and deep emotional resonance.

He began his literary career as a poet and published several collections, with Poems (1881) being one of his earliest works. Wilde's poetry often focused on themes of beauty, love, and human suffering, reflecting his fascination with the aesthetic movement and the idea of "art for art's sake."

The most anthologized of his poems are these four. "Requiescat" – A tender and sorrowful poem about his sister, who died young. "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" – Written after Wilde served time in prison, this longer narrative poem explores themes of justice, suffering, and compassion for the oppressed. "Her Voice" and "Helas!" are examples of Wilde’s reflective, lyrical style.

Despite his fame, Wilde had a difficult life because of his sexuality. Born in Dublin in 1854, he was already a successful playwright when he fell into a love affair with the young aristocrat Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde was married with two children at the time, and the affair ruined his reputation in society. 

Despite being married and having two sons, Wilde’s primary romantic attractions and relationships appear to have been with men. While his love for his wife, Constance, was genuine, it’s generally accepted that Wilde was primarily homosexual, though some might see him as bisexual given his marriage and family. His life and work remain emblematic of the challenges faced by LGBTQ+ individuals in an era of strict societal repression.

His intense relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, often called “Bosie,” eventually led to his downfall. Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, accused Wilde of "posing as a sodomite." Wilde sued for libel but lost, and during the trial, evidence of his relationships with men surfaced, leading to his conviction for "gross indecency" and imprisonment."I curse myself night and day for my folly in allowing him to dominate my life," Wilde later wrote.

He did not hide his life. One of his most famous quotes is "Be yourself; everyone else is already taken." 

He wrote three plays in two years about people leading double lives, including A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895). What is considered to be his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), is about two men who use an imaginary person named Earnest to get themselves out of all kinds of situations, until their invented stories and identities get so complicated that everything is revealed. The play was a big success but, that same year was when Wilde was accused of sodomy by Douglas's father and his suit for libel failed and he was sentenced to two years of hard labor. 

His plays continued to be produced on the stage while he was in prison, but his name was removed from all the programs. He was released from prison in 1897 and died three years later in a cheap Paris hotel.

Requiescat

Tread lightly, she is near

    Under the snow,

Speak gently, she can hear

    The daisies grow.

All her bright golden hair

    Tarnished with rust,

She that was young and fair

    Fallen to dust.

Lily-like, white as snow,

    She hardly knew

She was a woman, so

    Sweetly she grew.

Coffin-board, heavy stone,

    Lie on her breast,

I vex my heart alone

    She is at rest.

Peace, Peace, she cannot hear

    Lyre or sonnet,

All my life’s buried here,

    Heap earth upon it.

Complete Works

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Prompt: Line Breaks

I was reading an anthology of short poems and was paying attention not only to their brevity but to their line breaks.

In Rae Armantrout’s poem “Unbidden," her use of short lines in conjunction with enjambment contribute to a sense of disjointedness.

The ghosts swarm
They speak as one
person. Each
loves you. Each
has left something
undone

Line breaks are one of the main things that separate prose and poetry. They give poems their slim who-cares-about-margins appearance.(We will pass on talking about prose poems for the moment.)

Enjambment is where the poet deliberately breaks a sentence across multiple lines before its natural finishing point. End-stops are the opposite of enjambed lines in that an end-stopped line contains complete thoughts, phrases, or sentences.You can usually tell a poetic line is end-stopped if there is punctuation at the end. The punctuation could be internal (e.g. comma, semi-colon, colon, em dashes), or external (e.g. period, exclamation mark, question mark).These lines give the reader logical moments to pause at the line break. It is used in many traditional poems and it supports poetic forms using rhyme and meter.

William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" is a modernist poem orriginally published without a title. It was designated "XXII" in Williams' 1923 book Spring and All, a hybrid collection that incorporated alternating selections of free verse and prose

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Notice that to maintain his very short, two-line stanzas Williams breaks two words that could be together - wheelbarrow and rainwater.

Line breaks create white space in the text and are one way that poets can exercise a greater degree of control over the speed and rhythm that you read. It is unlike our everyday language and unlike prose literature.

Personally, I find it annoying when poems have breaks that seem to be used simply to keep line lengths the same - almost like a margin. It is possible a poet will do that in order to create a shape for the poem. There are good reasons to break a line. There is no rule book but consideration should be given to the first and last words: Avoid having weak words at the beginning or end of lines. For example, action verbs and nouns tend to be strong.

"Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost has strong end words: fire, ice, desire,twice, hate, great, suffice. (Although I find that breaking a line on "ice" - "To say that for destruction ice / Is also great" - seems more in service of the rhyme than the line break. Sorry, Robert).

"Dreams" by Langston Hughes is a good example of end-stopped lines that each contain a complete thoughts, phrases or sentences.

Our two model poems by two very different poets are both 9 lines / 8 line breaks. This month's call for submissions is for a 9-line poem on any topic of your choosing. Stanza breaks are another consideration - one stanza, 4X2, 3X3 or any combination. The key here is for you (and the editors) to pay special attention this month to line breaks. Whether enjambed or end-stopped, each of your 8 breaks should be logical and pushing us to read in a particular way with a particular attention. Sounds easy. It is not.

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Birthdays and Sailing to Byzantium

It was my birthday last weekend  I think most people are curious about with whom they share a birthday. My October 20 is shared with Mickey Mantle, Bela Lugosi, Kamala Harris, Viggo Mortensen, John Krasinki, Snoop Dogg, and Tom Petty. I did play baseball as a kid, but I was no Mantle. I do play guitar, but I'm no Petty. The birthdays that I most connect to are two poets. 

Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet known for his transgressive and surreal themes and for his influence on modern literature and arts, prefiguring surrealism. I've read his poetry and about his life and I don't feel we are similar in either our lives or writing. It did connect with me that at a point he just stopped writing and the reason seems to be that he had lost hope of being heard. I know that feeling.

My strongest connection is to the poet Robert Pinsky. I've met him several times at readings and shared our connections. He was also born in New Jersey (Long Branch, down the Jersey shore). In high school he played the saxophone and it was his "first experience of art, or the joy in making art." Like me, he was the first person in his family to go to college and we both attended Rutgers. In his freshman poetry class, he encountered "Sailing to Byzantium" by W.B. Yeats. He said: "It was the speed with which he covered the ground. Wow: 'artifice of eternity'!'' Pinsky typed up "Sailing to Byzantium" and hung it on his dorm room wall, and decided to become a poet himself. Pinsky was the first poet laureate consultant in poetry to serve three consecutive one-year terms.

In my freshman year, I discovered T.S. Eliot and his poetry took me to a very different place from the poetry I had been writing in high school.

William Butler Yeats is considered one of the greatest poets of the English language. He received the 1923 Nobel Prize for Literature. His work was greatly influenced by the heritage and politics of Ireland.

I reread that poem which I'm pretty sure I had read in high school (when I naively thought Yeats and Keats rhymed) and again in college, but it wasn't the epiphany that Pinsky had with the words. Rereading it five decades later, it is opening and closing lines that hits me hardest: "That is no country for old men... Of what is past, or passing, or to come."

I was too young for this poem when I first read it. It is about mortality and the frailty of the human body as we age. Yeats wrote this poem when he was 62 and beginning to address old age - though he would live another 11 years.

Yeats chose Byzantium as the setting for his poem because it represented a mythical, timeless realm of spiritual beauty and artistic excellence. It was at least a symbolic escape from the aging process and the material world of his own time. Byzantium's rich history in art, particularly its gold mosaics, further contributed to this idealization of a place where the soul could transcend mortality through creative expression.

The Byzantine Empire is long gone, but the legacy of the empire and its capital city, Byzantium, can still be seen today. The former capital of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople, is now known as Istanbul, Turkey. The city is still considered a crossroads between Europe and Asia.

The poem still reads to me like the kind of poem I would never write. It feels old. I don't write poems that are very similar to Pinsky, though I am closer in style to him than Yeats. 

Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats (1865 –1939)

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another’s arms, birds in the trees

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God’s holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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