Journal

719 posts

UPDATES ON A FREE VERSE LIFE

Inspired by Water: One If By Lake, Two If By Sea

poetry reading poetry writing inspiration writing poetry

Vacation. For students, its special meaning lies in summer, the granddaddy of all vacations. For adults, however, it’s more narrow. Most full-time workers enjoy but 2 to 4 weeks of paid vacation each year. Compared to the nine-week wonder of childhood, slim provisions indeed.

Conjuring vacations of your childhood is sure to bring back a host of disparate memories. You’ll remember some close to home. You’ll recall a few long-distance car rides. And, if you’re lucky, you might reminisce about a certain long flight to some exotic location.

As fodder for writing, vacations are fertile ground. Water figures largely. Melville-like, we are drawn to the sea (it says so in Moby-Dick, after all). And E.B. White-like, we are drawn to the lakes (check out his beautiful essay, “Once More to the Lake”).

Marge Piercy uses lake vacations for material in her aptly-titled poem below. You can, too, by writing down the memories and the imagery that come to mind when you think of a childhood vacation. Once that’s done, you reach the “If you write it, they will come” phase, wherein metaphors come marching out of the water to give your draft some substance.

Here’s inspiration, Piercy’s last draft:

 

The Rented Lakes of My Childhood
Marge Piercy

I remember the lakes of my Michigan
childhood. Here they are called ponds.
Lakes belonged to summer, two-week
vacations that my father was granted by
Westinghouse when we rented some cabin.

Never mind the dishes with spiderweb
cracks, the crooked aluminum sauce
pans, the crusted black frying pans.
Never mind the mattresses shaped
like the letter V. Old jangling springs.

Moldy bathrooms. Low ceilings
that leaked. The lakes were mysteries
of sand and filmy weeds and minnows
flickering through my fingers. I rowed
into freedom. Alone on the water

that freckled into small ripples,
that raised its hackles in storms,
that lay glassy at twilight reflecting
the sunset then sucking up the dark,
I was unobserved as the quiet doe

coming with her fauns to drink
on the opposite shore. I let the row-
boat drift as the current pleased, lying
faceup like a photographer’s plate
the rising moon turned to a ghost.

And though the voices called me
back to the rented space we shared
I was sure I left my real self there—
a tiny black pupil in the immense
eye of a silver pool of silence.

 

I’m sure the Michigan lakes of Piercy lore are the same as the New Hampshire and Maine lakes of Craft lore. Lake or ocean, water is unique yet universal, a perfect brew for the inspiration-sipping writer.

Notice the imagery Piercy uses in stanzas 2 through 5, some of them indoor images, others outdoor. Notice, too, how it sets up the grand finale at the end. Like Fourth of July fireworks, endings often riff off concrete goods to offer an abstract bang. Here it comes in the form of metaphor, the narrator as a pupil (double meaning!) in the “eye of a silver pool of silence.”

So nice. So lake-like. A meditation compliments of the silently-lovely past.

Waiting for Ideas (vs. Godot)

poetry

spaniel

Sometimes waiting for an idea for a poem is like waiting for Godot–some kind of existential joke. You can see Beckett and Camus laughing in the barn. Or Sartre’s mirthful eyes through his thick glasses. Or angst from the corner of your wary eye. But after a while, you grow impatient, and if there’s one thing poets need as much as doctors, it’s patience. (See what I did there?)

So I flipped open good old Ted Kooser’s good old how-to book, The Poetry Home Repair Manual, to the section titled “But How Do You Come Up With Ideas?”  A reading, then, chapter and verse:

“The poet Jane Hirshfield wrote: ‘A work of art defines itself into being, when we awaken into it and by it, when we are moved, altered, stirred. It feels as if we have done nothing, only given it a little time, a little space; some hairline-narrow crack opens in the self, and there it is.’ She goes on to quote Kafka: ‘You do not even have to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, remain still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you unasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.'”

A lovely image, that. The world rolling at your feet like a submissive spaniel. An idea fetching you a stick called “brilliant poem.” And all because you waited, because you said to the Muse, “Sit!” then “Stay!” and finally, just to show off, “Heel!”

See how easy? You may now begin writing. About spaniels. About advice. About white space being eaten up by letters like homework being eaten by the dog. And so forth.

The Hidden Thoreau in Anton Chekhov

blathering comma mine Ken Craft opinion poetry The Indifferent World updates on a free-verse life

If you come to an Anton Chekhov short story looking for a plot, you’ve come to the wrong place. If you read Chekhov and fret that nothing ever happens, you’d best reconsider your definition of “nothing.”

These thoughts reoccurred to me while rereading some stories in the Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky translation of Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov. I found it good medicine, especially for a poet, to swim in the Russian master’s pool.

Chekhov is a perfect example of my pet theory about literature: almost all of it is a riff on Henry David Thoreau’s famous line, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” I even used Henry’s line as an epigraph to my first poetry collection, The Indifferent World.

Less literary but surely related to Thoreau’s line from Essays on Civil Disobedience is a title from the Irish band U2’s song: “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” To my mind, they go hand in hand. Man searches as if there is something — some source of happiness in life — missing, but it is always somewhere ahead of him, just out of reach. It is, in fact, the source of his quiet desperation.

This afflicts even the characters we least expect it from. Contemporary story writer Peter Orner considers “The Bishop” to be Chekhov’s best story, and it is the penultimate tale in the collection I just finished.

And yes, even the bishop, a respected and revered figure in the Russian Orthodox Church, is visited by doubt in the night. Even the bishop is bedeviled by both the past and the future while musing on the present.

It seems we can find a paragraph like the one below in most any Chekhov short story. The moment of truth. Let’s jump into the mind of the bishop, who is listening from his sickbed to the singing of monks in the church. As notes to the story explain, the songs he hears are “words from hymns sung during the services known as ‘Bridegroom services’ celebrated on the first three days of Holy Week.”

 

In the evening the monks sang harmoniously, inspiredly, the office was celebrated by a young hieromonk with a black beard; and the bishop, listening to the verses about the Bridegroom who cometh at midnight and about the chamber that is adorned, felt, not repentance for his sins, not sorrow, but inner peace, silence, and was carried in his thoughts into the distant past, into his childhood and youth, when they had also sung about the Bridegroom and the chamber, and now that past appeared alive, beautiful, joyful, as it probably never had been. And perhaps in the other world, in the other life, we shall remember the distant past, our life here, with the same feelings. Who knows? The bishop sat in the sanctuary, it was dark there. Tears flowed down his face. He was thinking that here he had achieved everything possible for a man in his position, he had faith, and yet not everything was clear, something was still lacking, he did not want to die; and it still seemed that there was some most important thing which he did not have, of which he had once vaguely dreamed, and in the present he was stirred by the same hope for the future that he had had in childhood, and in the academy, and abroad.

“They’re singing so well today!” he thought, listening to the choir. “So well!”

 

I love how the abstract musings are bookended by the actual moment of singing. And how Chekhov hits on our habit of laundering our own pasts of all its ills until childhood seems like the perfect world it surely wasn’t. And how a man of faith in a high office is left, like the rest of us, with stark questions about the afterlife and the purpose of our existence.

In short, this bishop still hasn’t found what he’s looking for and never will, because that, Chekhov seems to say, is what life is all about. That is the quiet desperation we each inherit and wrestle with when we dare engage our thoughts with such thoughts.

You might be tempted to brand Chekhov a downer and say all these desperate characters are the products of a decidedly cynical man, and yet story after story provides glimpses of life’s beauty (see above, where moments from childhood are called “alive, beautiful, joyful”).

And then the ends of the stories come, often with inconsequential, quotidian observations about the setting or with a banal point about goings on around the character. Life goes on, Chekhov tells us, but neat endings and bow-tied resolutions are rarities.

And yes, we will be forgotten soon after we’re gone. And yes, others will experience the same joys and moments of quiet desperation we did, but how many would trade the journey away?

For Chekhov, ultimately, life is worth its tribulations. We readers should know — it was the wellspring of his art.

The Child of Your Rainy Sundays

poetry poetry books reading poetry

When you pick up a novel you read years ago, threads of narrative fabric stand out, looking somewhat familiar to you. Not so the poetry collection. If you’ve read it once, a year ago or more, chances are it will feel new to you as you read it again. A gift, then! Further testament to the mysteries of poetry.

Yesterday I pulled Simic’s That Little Something from the shelf as a tonic after watching a little too much of the evening news featuring our Leader, Pinocchio (what a dummy!). Effects were remarkable, swift, and salubrious!

Reinvigorated, I enjoyed the tranquil poem “To Boredom.” (Ah, for the good old days, when one could afford to be less vigilant about democracy being stolen from under your feet!)

 

To Boredom
by Charles Simic

I’m the child of your rainy Sundays.
I watched time crawl
Over the ceiling
Like a wounded fly.

A day would last forever,
Making pellets of bread,
Waiting for a branch
On a bare tree to move.

The silence would deepen,
The sky would darken,
As Grandmother knitted
With a ball of black yarn.

Heaven is like that.
In eternity’s classrooms,
The angels sit like bored children
With their heads bowed.

 

As former students, I’m sure we can all relate to “eternity’s classrooms,” especially in a poem called “To Boredom.” Few classrooms, after all, were capable of escaping so swift a predator as eternity. (We’ll see for ourselves some day, I assure you!)

 

“I Love So Many Things I Have Never Touched”

poetry books reading poetry

In her collection Obit, Victoria Chang takes the journalistic standard we call an obituary and puts it through some poetic paces. For most of the book, each poem looks like a column in a newspaper, forgoing stanzas for one tall rectangular block. And while the starting point may be the stroke and death of her father followed by the death of her mother, her poems take matters a step further.

How? The Table of Contents foreshadows how: Title-less poems commemorate her father’s frontal lobe, voice mail, language, future, civility, privacy, and her mother’s lungs, teeth, friendships, gait, optimism, ambition, memory, tears, etc. Some of the poems are repeat-obits, including ones for Victoria Chang, the author herself, who feels beleaguered and fundamentally transformed by grief and its effects.

To give the reader occasional breathers, Chang includes a series of tankas throughout. Then there is Section II: “I Am a Miner. The Light Burns Blue,” where she forsakes the middle tower spaces of the page used for obits and writes poems that expand to the entire page, using white spaces between single words or small clumps of words, forcing the reader to slow down and carefully pick through the wreckage death scatters like so much flotsam and jetsam.

For this to work (and it does), the poet has to be both confident (check) and accomplished (check) with personification. Let’s look, for instance, at Chang’s obituary for Approval:

 

Approval – died on August 3, 2015
at the age of 44. It died at 7:07 a.m.
How much money will you get was my
mother’s response to everything. She
used to wrap muffins in a napkin at
the buffet and put them in her purse.
I never saw the muffins again. What I
would do to see those muffins again,
the thin moist thread as she pulled the
muffin apart. A photo shows my mother
holding my hand. I was nine. I never
touched her hand again. Until the day
before she died. I love so many things I
have never touched: the moon, a shiver,
my mother’s heart. Her fingers felt like
rough branches covered with plastic. I
trimmed her nails one by one while the
morphine kept her asleep. Her nails
weren’t small moons or golden doors
to somewhere, but ten last words I was
cutting off.

 

As Chang writes obituaries for abstract things like approval, it gives her time to explore all the feelings that overwhelm her, first while her parents are ill and then while they die, not to mention her grief in the days and months after they die. In that sense, this collection is one long obituary for both her parents and the familiar way of life she had grown accustomed to.

The form suits Chang’s talents well. It also challenges the reader to consider all the little “deaths” we experience each day, how they change us in big and small ways, and what we notice about them if we take a moment to think. People change, that’s well understood. But seen through this lens, we come to realize that change in life is nothing but a series of little deaths, some planned or expected, many more spontaneous and surprising. Like this book!

Mean Poems

poetry poetry books reading poetry

mean

Poetry, often something we uphold for its beauty and its dalliances with love and nature, sometimes has a reputation to downhold as well. In poetry, Tony Hoagland tells us, meanness can work. That’s right, vinegar instead of honey for your readers. As any misbehaving child will tell you, negative attention can be as good as positive.

Hoagland serves up some examples in the final chapter of his book of essays, Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft (but not Ken Craft). It shouldn’t surprise us. Have we not learned that the pen is mightier than the sword? Have we not realized the power of words as weapons?

Certainly as kids we quickly learn the lie in the little ditty, “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” What bull. Words will always hurt us! If they didn’t, we wouldn’t feel the need to protect ourselves with silly little chants in hopes of magically feeling better.

For starters, Hoagland gives us the plain simple plain of William Carlos Williams–a poem that will red wheelbarrow right over your heart, if you love grandmas.

 

The Last Words of My English Grandmother

There were some dirty plates
and a glass of milk
beside her on a small table
near the rank, disheveled bed—

Wrinkled and nearly blind
she lay and snored
rousing with anger in her tones
to cry for food,

Gimme something to eat—
They’re starving me—
I’m all right I won’t go
to the hospital. No, no, no

Give me something to eat
Let me take you
to the hospital, I said
and after you are well

you can do as you please.
She smiled, Yes
you do what you please first
then I can do what I please—

Oh, oh, oh! she cried
as the ambulance men lifted
her to the stretcher—
Is this what you call

making me comfortable?
By now her mind was clear—
Oh you think you’re smart
you young people,

she said, but I’ll tell you
you don’t know anything.
Then we started.
On the way

we passed a long row
of elms. She looked at them
awhile out of
the ambulance window and said,

What are all those
fuzzy-looking things out there?
Trees? Well, I’m tired
of them and rolled her head away.

 

Ouch. But it hits you in the not-so-sweet spot. Grandparents aren’t always paid to behave like the sweet old grandparents of yore. Sometimes they grow gruffer with time. Sometimes our final memories of them are best overlooked and forgotten. And sometimes that becomes an impossibility. Instead, it becomes a poem.

Or what about Louise Gluck’s “Circe’s Power,” wherein she pulls a Jonathan Swift and looks at the whole damn human race as pig-like. Thus does Circe’s act become more metaphor than magic:

 

Circe’s Power

I never turned anyone into a pig.
Some people are pigs; I make them
Look like pigs.

I’m sick of your world
That lets the outside disguise the inside. Your men weren’t bad men;
Undisciplined life
Did that to them. As pigs,

Under the care of
Me and my ladies, they
Sweetened right up.

Then I reversed the spell, showing you my goodness
As well as my power. I saw

We could be happy here,
As men and women are
When their needs are simple. In the same breath,

I foresaw your departure,
Your men with my help braving
The crying and pounding sea. You think

A few tears upset me? My friend,
Every sorceress is
A pragmatist at heart; nobody sees essence who can’t
Face limitation. If I wanted only to hold you

I could hold you prisoner.

 

And one more from Tony H., this one to the tune of “Mommy Dearest.” It’s Stephanie Brown’s poem, “Mommy Is a Scary Narcissist,” which includes the scary word, blepharoplasty (plastic surgery of the eyelids, thank you).

 

Mommy Is a Scary Narcissist

C’mon, I shouldn’t need to mention blepharoplasty.
Her mauled face is a part of the shared horizon.
I don’t need to mention the lift, the tuck, the lipo.
(A Trinity.)

The smile-ever-smiling is a part of the position.
This is Mommy’s supposition:
Sexy. Sexy. Sexy. Everlasting and in high-tonus stance
Decisions
Belong to dads, men, boyfriends, bartenders, chance.

Mommy looks good when she prays in the chapel.
(ferns, lush foliage, candles, rose petals, and flattering paints)
Harder than the other mommies. No one stays.
(She looks into the baptismal font deeply, passionately, and
long.)

Mommy tries to love, Mommy tries to get a job.
Not very hard, the outside world knows that, but Mommy
doesn’t.

 

Enough already? Ready to cry, “Uncle?” If the world is driving you nuts, you have two creative choices: one, you can write escapist poems for people who want to escape to Pollyanna poesy, or two, you can write with vim and vitriol. Let it all out. Get even. Poetically, of course.

Some readers out there just might appreciate it and thank you from the hidden dark and sinister of their hearts.

We Hold These Truths To Be Self-Evident…Once You Read Them

poetry poetry books reading poetry writing poetry

One of the most famous lines in Thomas Jefferson’s start-the-presses Declaration of Independence is “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

OK, let’s not get political and note any ironies about what follows (“…that all men are created equal”) because you know and I know that inequality is as big in this Age of American Oligarchs as it was in the Age of TJ (a slaveowner himself).

Instead, let’s consider the role of truth in poetry. Truths are as important to good poets as they are to enlightened philosophers. If a reader reads your poem and has an aha moment that goes something like this: “Yes! I recognize that truth, and I loved the new way you uncovered it!” then you are onto something. Something we call the essence of good poetry (like gold cobbled from mongrel minerals, a rarity that will delight more than alchemists).

Ellen Bass’s collection, Like a Beggar, includes a batch of Pablo Neruda-like odes, which are a lot more fun than Ancient Greek-like odes. Here’s an example of a “little truth” that Bass uncovers in her own creative way. It’s called “Ode to Invisibility,” and it touches on the way older people become more and more “invisible” in a youth-worshiping world because… because what do wrinkles and oversized sunglasses matter, anyway?

If you’re older, you can read it and say, “Aha, I recognize this feeling!” and if you’re younger, you can read it and say, “Oh, yeah. Old people? I think I noticed one last year….”

 

Ode to Invisibility
by Ellen Bass

O loveliness. O lucky beauty.
I wanted it and I couldn’t bear it.
When I was a girl, before self-serve gas,
as the attendant leaned over my windshield,
I didn’t know where to look.
I could feel his damp rag rubbing the glass
between us. Or walking from the subway,
even in my work boots and woolen babushka,
all those slouched men plastered to the brick walls
around the South End of Boston—
I could feel them quicken, their mouths
opening like baby birds. I was too beautiful.
and never beautiful enough.
Ironing my frizzy hair on the kitchen table.
All the dark and bright creams to sculpt my cheekbones,
musk dotted on my hot pulses,
and that pink angora bikini that itched like desire
as I laid myself down under the gold of a key we didn’t yet fear.
Hello, my pretty. Your ankles were elegant,
your breasts such splendor
men were blinded by their solar flare.
These days, I’m more like my dog,
who doesn’t peruse himself in the mirror,
doesn’t notice the gray at his temples, though I think
it makes him look a little like Cary Grant in Charade.
I can trot along the shallow surf of Delray Beach
in my mother-in-law’s oversize swimsuit,
metallic bronze and stretched-out so it bulges like ginger root.
On one side, that raucous ocean surging and plunging,
on the other, the bathers gleaming with lotions and oils.
I can be a friend to them all, even the magnificent young,
their bodies fluid as the curl of a wave.
I can wander up to any gilded boy, touch
his gaudy biceps, lean in confidentially. I’m invisible
as a star at noon, a grain of clear sand.
It’s a grand time of life: not so close to the end
that I can’t walk for miles along the pulpy shore,
and not so far away that I can’t bear
the splendid ugliness of this disguise.

 

 

The poem turns nicely on the line “These days, I’m more like my dog” and really gets down to the self-evident (but hard to express) truth with the line “I’m invisible / as a star at noon, a grain of clear sand.”

The good news? For women who once had to endure wolf whistles from men on city streets, invisibility is a blessing. But also a harbinger.

Just thank god that you can still walk miles along the pulpy shore, Ellen tells us. It’s a consolation, and consolation, they say, was the penultimate thing out of Pandora’s box.

April Is the Cruller Month

poetry

No, wait. That can’t be right. “April is the cruellest month,” according to T.S. Eliot (with “cruelest” misspelled).

Or maybe it’s a case of Brit-spell, which we fought a war over. I still remember the peace treaty at Yorktown, where George Washington proclaimed that, heretofore, “colour” would be spelled “color.” Huzzah (and all that)! Strike up “Yankee Doodle” and let’s get some lunch.

But back to Eliot. It’s a great line about April (which debuts today). A humdinger of a line. One everyone remembers, even people who consider poetry as foreign as Neptune. To stretch it out a bit, the first four lines of “The Waste Land” go like so:

 

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

 

The line works especially well in New England, where new life can be coaxed out of the earth only to be slammed with a late-season frost or a “whoops” snowstorm. Cruel.

The bigger point here, though, is great lines. All of us write them (by “us” I mean poets not quite as well-known as old Thomas Stearns Eliot), it’s just the company they keep. That is, when we create an awesome line that makes us proud, we have trouble drumming up players to go out on the field or court with it.

Poetry, you see, is a team sport outfitted with players called words and lines and stanzas. Given that, a great line cannot stand alone. It is not an orchestra unto itself. It requires other lines to help it resonate, make sense, fill the room with music. You can put a star on a basketball team, for instance, but if the other four players are mediocre at best, good luck.

Some poetry “how-to” books advise a collection of your best lines, shoehorning them into one poem. To me, that’s a cheat sure to fail.

What? My best lines from five poems forced to play together, even if they treat on different subjects? Just imagine the egos of five superstars on that basketball court with no practice as a cohesive unit. Ball hogs. Hot doggers. Ma, look-at-me’s.

No, no, no. That will not do. That would be cruelly unkind and one mess of a poem.

Think of that next time you try to devise ways to make one of your favorite lines famous. I recommend starting from scratch. Build a team around your great line. It’s not easy, but whoever said poetry was? Not this guy. So pass the crullers, poor a coffee, and get to work.

Writing Prompts: They Hide in the Wide Open

poetry

Traci K. Smith divides her anthology, American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, into five sections: “The Small Town of My Youth,” “Something Shines Out From Every Darkness,” “Words Tangled in Debris,” “Here, the Sentence Will Be Respected,” and “One Singing Thing.”

Think about it. Each of those section titles would make a great prompt. Five stirrers for your daily writing cocktail. The first opens up memoir-like possibilities from your past and the town you grew up in.

The second offers a study in contrasts where you can use the rhetorical device of antithesis to explore one small phoenix that poked out from the ashes.

The third? Play with words and see how even tangled debris can take on significance.

Looking at the fourth title, I think of how the word “sentence” can be taken two ways, one if my diction and two if by the judge’s gavel.

And finally, the wonder, the shout, the ode of “one singing thing.”

So much for “I have no ideas.”

As an example of a poem Smith chose for the first section, “The Small Town of My Youth,” here is a poem by Oliver de la Paz:

 

In Defense of Small Towns
by Oliver de la Paz

When I look at it, it’s simple, really. I hated life there. September,
once filled with animal deaths and toughened hay. And the smells

 

of fall were boiled-down beets and potatoes
or the farmhands’ breeches smeared with oil and diesel

 

as they rode into town, dusty and pissed. The radio station
split time between metal and Tejano, and the only action

 

happened on Friday nights where the high school football team
gave everyone a chance at forgiveness. The town left no room

 

for novelty or change. The sheriff knew everyone’s son and despite that,
we’d cruise up and down the avenues, switching between

 

brake and gearshift. We’d fight and spit chew into Big Gulp cups
and have our hearts broken nightly. In that town I learned

 

to fire a shotgun at nine and wring a chicken’s neck
with one hand by twirling the bird and whipping it straight like a towel.

 

But I loved the place once. Everything was blonde and cracked
and the irrigation ditches stretched to the end of the earth. You could

 

ride on a bicycle and see clearly the outline of every leaf
or catch on the streets each word of a neighbor’s argument.

 

Nothing could happen there and if I willed it, the place would have me
slipping over its rocks into the river with the sugar plant’s steam

 

or signing papers at a storefront army desk, buttoned up
with medallions and a crew cut, eyeing the next recruits.

 

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I could be anywhere,
staring at a hunk of asphalt or listening to the clap of billiard balls

 

against each other in a bar and hear my name. Indifference now?
Some. I shook loose, but that isn’t the whole story. The fact is

 

I’m still in love. And when I wake up, I watch my son yawn,
and my mind turns his upswept hair into cornstalks

 

at the edge of a field. Stillness is an acre, and his body
idles, deep like heavy machinery. I want to take him back there,

 

to the small town of my youth and hold the book of wildflowers
open for him, and look. I want him to know the colors of horses,

 

to run with a cattail in his hand and watch as its seeds
fly weightless as though nothing mattered, as though

 

the little things we tell ourselves about our pasts stay there,
rising slightly and just out of reach.

Writing (vs. Fighting) Like Cats and Dogs

poetry reading poetry

I have oft written of dog poems because I am a dog guy. That’s why I disapprove of such crazy commandments as the 11th, “Thou shalt not write a poem about dogs.”

But what about cats? As I have little patience for their kind, I feel more sympathetic toward “no cat” rules. After all, cat pics clutter Internet feeds like cholesterol clogged King Henry VIII’s arteries. Said pics can be found in the dictionary under “clichés” as opposed to “cute.”

Still, I’d be foolish and inconsistent to rule in dogs’ favor while wishing cats their tenth lives. And so it is that I advise writers who love one or the other or both to go forth and multiply in your creative efforts (the 12th Commandment).

No less a poet than Marge Piercy leads the way (see below and meet me at the bend):

 

A Republic of Cats
Marge Piercy

Nobody rules. They all
take turns. I can never
tell who will chase who
playing war over the couch

and chairs, round and
round again until suddenly
they stop as if a whistle
blew in their heads.

Five of them, aged fifteen
to two. Who will curl
together making one cushion
of patchwork fur? Who

will painstakingly lick
a friend, washing and
cuddling. Who will growl
at their friend of last hour?

The one rule is where each
sleeps at night, their spot
in the bed and with whom.
It is written in bone.

 

Writing about pets starts with scientific observation. With that data, the writer turns to more creatively figurative ideas and goes for it. The writer must! Dogs and cats are too well known not to.

For me, all credit in this poem goes to the start (“Nobody rules.”) and the end (“It is written in bone.”). Hook the reader from the start, lest you lose that impatient-as-all-get-out customer (and think of it—no two words better capture “cat-dom” than those).

Then comes the end. Your poem depends on a final flourish. Something memorable. Something with panache. If sleeping spots are as important to cats as lunchroom table spots are to middle schoolers, then say it in style: The rule “is written in bone.”

Now go watch your cats and dogs with a notebook, why don’t you. Take notes. Then make like clumsy Moses and break some commandments.