Quick attempt at a dance poem

Wretch
that you are
watchman
of botched steps,
the dogged eyes-
down dancer: Where

is your con-
nection? Insecure,
your graces
effloresce
like gypsum.
Transgress

your trellis,
my delicate, with no
apologies. Palm
to palm, confess
our perigee
palpable. Let’s

be like straw-
berry plants: Arms
a stolon between us.
Once aerial, now
sink into this
ground, into
this beat.

Someday
wallflowers
may fall
at your feet.

Transcribing Equations from Non-Poetry Sources

In my last post, I discussed finding equations in poems. Here’s a fun way to construct equations for a poem: take a nonwriting discipline, preferably a physical activity, or a kind of animal, or art form, and adapt its principles to a poem form.

For example, I really want to develop (and have tried so far unsuccessfully) a sonnet variation called “the Arctic Tern.” Mainly because I think it would be hilarious to make the sonnet’s “turn” (also called a “volta”) into the world’s farthest traveling bird. As I mentioned before, a good rule of thumb for poetry is that form should follow subject matter. The sonnet/tern combination would work well here because both the form and the bird wander a long way down one path, mental for the poem, physical for the bird, and then make a turn. The Arctic Tern equation would then also involve other aspects of tern life. Some possible rules in the equation:

                                                                The Arctic Tern Sonnet
1. The poem must be about the Arctic Tern
2. The poem must start in a cold place, pass through a warm place, and return to a cold place (up to your interpretation what that means)
3. Midway through the poem should be a place of feasting
4. The poem must proceed incredibly far in one direction, and then somehow return right back to where it came from.
5. As the bird returns from feeding to procreate, the poem should end in a generative act or statement, with the couplet functioning as the coupling of the two birds
Another area of the world once can raid for equations is dance and music. Music is obvious, and for a lot of history music has gone hand in hand with poetry. So take a dance form. I’ve been learning to dance West Coast Swing over the summer, a dance whose execution depends on a unique tension between two partners who stretch and compress. Poetry also depends on the use of tension, so I think West Coast could provide both apt subject matter and a relevant equation. Here’s how I might transcribe the equation:

                                                                  The West Coast Swing Poem

1. WCS: Has (normally) two dancers, a lead and a follow
    Poem: In couplets, or two subjects of the poem, or an aspect of the poem that leads and an aspect that follows, like one image following another in the train of thought.

2.  WCS: Dancers walk One, Two, Tri-Ple-Step, Tri-Ple-Step-- or “One, Two, Three And Four, Five And Six,”
     Poem: Perhaps make lines/words (long, long, short short short, short short short) or each stanza has ratio of 3(pause)/3(pause)/1/1/1(pause) /1/1/1(pause)

3. WCS: On the fourth beat, dancers “post,” or pull back slightly to half of full stretch, which is the leader signaling to the follower to stop traveling.
   Poem: A shorter fourth line, or a fourth line where tension is introduced

4. WCS: On the 6th beat, dancers reach full tension/stretch.
    Poem: Make the sixth line very tense, or bring one thing farthest away from another thing, like if you’ve made the poem about two subjects, show them at their farthest apart in stanza six, and then pull them back close together by stanza nine (that is, the third beat of a new sequence)

5. WCS: Dancers dance up and down a “slot,” with the follower going straight one way and then back the other way, and the leader stepping in and out of the slot to make way for them.
   Poem: Make the poem linear, but have it reverse directions now and then (when there is tension, which pulls it in the other direction!), have an aspect of the poem that steps out of the way for another aspect of the poem to pass.

6. WCS: Dancers roll their feet into the floor as they walk so they glide smoothly instead of flat footed
   Poem: Create a rolling meter, sounds that glide down the line and enjamb over, rather than full stops or hard consonants.

7. Ideal form: join the above form-based-on-WCS with a subject matter that IS about WCS dancing.

Now go out there and pick another hobby you love or a critter you think is cool and apply it to a poem equation!

Equations in Poems

Writing poems has often felt like working out a math problem to me; intuiting where a sound should go or how many words per line gives my brain the same workout as solving for x. Every poem follows an equation. If you work in a traditional form, the equation is super simple like addition or multiplication, for example, the sonnet: ABAB, CDCD, EFEF GG in iambic pentameter. But contemporary free verse poetry ranges from calculus to quantum mechanics.

Equations can involve elements of sound, number of syllables, words per line, parallels and juxtaposition, chiasm, number of stanzas, metaphor, reiteration and chorus, etc. A good poem builds an equation out of the subject matter. For example, Robin Coste Lewis’ poem, “Summer”:

Summer

Last summer, two discrete young snakes left their skin
on my small porch, two mornings in a row. Being

postmodern now, I pretended as if I did not see
them, nor understand what I knew to be circling

inside me. Instead, every hour I told my son
to stop with his incessant back-chat. I peeled

a banana. And cursed God—His arrogance,
His gall—to still expect our devotion

after creating love. And mosquitoes. I showed
my son the papery dead skins so he could

know, too, what it feels like when something shows up
at your door—twice—telling you what you already know.

--

At its most basic level, this poem is about two snakes, so the equation for the poem calls for 2-line (couplet) stanzas. Among other things, the equations calls for:

1. Both lines of first and last stanza have variation of the word “two” in them: “two,” “two,” “too,” “twice.”
2. The two snakes are paralleled by two human characters
3. Six sentences across six stanzas.
4. The first line of the penultimate stanza encompasses three sentences, with one full-stopped sentence in the middle.
5. After this short sentence, a long sentence follows to end the poem.
6. Enjambment of all lines.
7. In the fourth stanza, first line ends with “His ____” and second line begins “His ____”

And so on. You can lift this equation from the poem and write a new poem based on it, that will likely be pretty decent. Why? Because every good poem has a good equation behind it. The subject matter and vocabulary complete a poem, but the equation performs a lot of the heavy lifting. Compare Mark Doty’s “A Display of Mackerel" with my poem using aspects of its equation: “Bruises”. I think “Bruises” is better than most of my poems on this blog, and while I did contribute my own vocabulary to create images that are not Doty’s, the poem’s success is because it’s build on Doty’s master equation.

At our novice level, I recommend finding poems you like and trying to break them down into their equations, then writing poems using those equations. The as you grow aware of equations and their interlocking parts, you internalize them, and can later build your own.

Experiment

I would like to be simple

  a puddle of polymer 

  pink muddling in a vial

so you could clasp me

  up to the light

  after a baptism

 in silvery

  superchilled nitrogen

  as if offering

me to some deity

  in a purple latex-

  gloved petition

and find answers

  or applications

  in my love, or hints.

I would like to be one

  of your experiments

  as you have been

one of mine

  superconducting

  signs and wonders

I can align with words

    and power a city

  in the psyche

your mere moving

  through the world

stirring images

for me to siphon

  and arrange 

  in poemed pages

but I am an organic compound

                whose application
                is purely theoretical-
unstable scraps 
                   useful for something
                   not yet invented
                                         perhaps.