"A poem that
does its work must stand on the knife edge of yes and no. The last line of a
poem should have both the yes and the no in it, that's what makes it
complex." Dorianne Laux - The Kansas City Star - January 28, 2001
Reading these words
from Dorianne Laux spoke to my partiality for poetry that encompasses dissonance; that grand internal conflict. To me, this is the richest poetry of all.
As I indicated in an earlier post I've chosen Wednesday to call to the attention of others poems that I've found this week that Knock My Socks Off.
The first one is a poem titled FAST GAS by Dorianne Laux. I actually heard this on a podcast from New Letters on the Air before finding it in print. The title threw me because the poem is not what first came to my mind. No, Laux was not writing about flatulence
but first love. A powerful poem worth reading - so very well crafted.
Another poem I was exposed to this week that really did it for me was IF I MUST PAINT YOU A PICTURE by Joannie Stangeland. The subtle turn in this poem left not only kept my interest to the end but also sent me back to read over several times just to appreciate her effective write.
If you have not read either of these poems I recommend you check them out.
See you next Wednesday when I'll tell you what poems left my feet bare.
Getting back to duende, The Poet’s Companion by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux has a chapter in it called The Shadow. In it they relate what the psychologist Carl Jung describes as our pleasant self with which we identify and our hidden self which we try to deny or reject altogether.
They go on to correlate this to what the poet Robert Bly refers to as the shadow. Our shadow is presumably a long beg we drag behind us throughout life. As we learn what others / society doesn’t like, we start “bag stuffing” or discarding into the bag what we do not wish others to see. By the time we are adults there is just this thin slice of us visible and the rest we’ve stashed in the bag we drag around.
Addonizio and Laux have pieced this altogether with Lorca’s duende (see yesterday’s post) and it is certainly easy to see where this other part of us comes from. Without committing anything to a page, one can see how our lives alone reflect this conflict. If we can dip into this bag as we write, our writing can reveal a part of us that offers a genuine picture of humanity that we do not normally identify with, yet, is very real.
I know from personal experience how hard it is to get away from self censorship. If we subconsciously withhold a grater part of ourselves in day to day life, how easy can it be to peel back the cover and let light expose that which we work so hard to deny.
My challenge is to go to that bag when I write and try my best to reach into it like I were drawing a letter while playing scrabble and just accept what comes out to incorporate it into my poetry.
