Tag: Poetry

‘Of the Seasons’: a closer look

I had great fun last year working on this poem, ‘Of the Seasons‘. It was an idea I’d started before, but it came time to submit work for uni so, naturally, time to dig up (and develop) old work.

The key idea is that each stanza correlates to a season, and each season has a ‘sound profile’. In writing metalanguage, the tool I worked with is called the sonic chain. Seamus Heaney referred to it as the ‘earscape’ of a poem. Each of the four seasons has the same line count and structure, with the final two lines of each five really hammering home the earscape.

Here’s the first stanza, Summer. Here, it is the /ɒ/ in ‘hot’ that creates that link, using the extension of that vowel sound to suggest lethargy and breathlessness.

The dry sun-sapped air forces even
the most brave of creatures back
to our air-conditioned cocoons.
Too hot to think, too hot to bother
Too hot that we’re all hot and bothered.

Here’s the poem, give it a read and then see if you can hear the sound of the season (yes, this may require reading out loud).

In the second stanza, autumn, it is the gentle, gliding vowel sound /iːv/ that brings on the image of gentle breezes and falling leaves that is iconic of autumn. For winter, the third stanza, the biting /ɒst/ sound, akin to gale force winds, is what creates an additional layer of texture and meaning on top of the words themselves. Finally, spring is where nature and the fourth stanza boom back into life with bold colours and sounds, something I achieved audibly with /aʊd/. What I succeeded in achieving in each of these examples is what Hutcheon (2006, p. 61) calls “a derivation that is not derivative—a work that is second but not secondary.” The poem succeeds standing alone, but is enriched when transformed into a performed, audible work.

Hutcheon, L 2006, A theory of adaptation, Routledge, New York

13 ways

For uni last year, I was given the challenge to mirror the poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens. The challenge was to change the subject but keep the same energy and line count.

I created my poem, ‘13 ways of beholding the cross‘, in response. It was a great challenge and took a lot of focus, but most of all the challenge was in how directly I wanted to describe my subject — and the extent to which I managed to avoid doing so.

Here’s an example.

VI (blackbird)
Icicles filled the long window   
With barbaric glass.   
The shadow of the blackbird   
Crossed it, to and fro.   
The mood   
Traced in the shadow   
An indecipherable cause.
VI (cross)
Thunderclouds bellow rolling fury,
Cast saturating needles.
Down the splintering spine
Blood, sweat and water mingle.
Every darkness
Piled upon misery
An asphyxiated sentence.

This stanza is sharp and full of colourful, charged words. I noticed where the line runs on and where the line ends in a full stop. My main focus, however, lay on the last three lines. ‘The mood / traced in the shadow / an indecipherable cause’. It could mean ‘the mood, which was itself traced in the shadow, has a cause which is indecipherable’. On the other hand, it could be read ‘the mood, which had an indecipherable cause, traced something in the shadow’. The point is, the grammatical relationship between lines 1, 2 and 3 were ambigious, which enriched the reading.

I attempted to mirror that with my lines ‘Every darkness / Piled upon misery / An asphyxiated sentence.’ The first line could be the subject or the object of the second line, the verb clause. Either way, the third line stands up.

I encourage you to read Stevens’ poem and mine side-by-side, and see if you notice more similarities throughout.