Addonizio Stuff

Let's start with... Story time!

While it's entirely up to you in terms of how you begin your own poems, the approach you take in the first stanza often (if not always) sets the tone for what's to follow and establishes the subconscious expectations of the reader.  Then, it's a matter of deciding whether you'll give the reader what they more or less expect or risk steering the poem in an entirely different direction.  Kim Addonizio is a great poet to study in this regard because her poems have a performance-like energy but instead of being too general (a common criticism of performance pieces), she still maintains a strong level of emotional resonance.  Let's take a closer look at a few poems from Lucifer at the Starlite.

In "The Burning," p. 27, Addonizio begins with Dante put the philosophers in Limbo.  How would it change the poem if she started with something like, My brother told my father to go to hell?

In "Where Childhood Went," p. 35, imagine The teeth sold to the fairies / are tombstones in the graveyard of the fireflies replaced with something more direct and personal: My parents are showing signs of rot.  

In "Crossing" and "Weaponry," pp. 61-62, how would it change the poems if the "I" were shifted to "He/She" or "You"?

Other questions:

1) Take a look at Section II (Jukebox).  The first few poems (especially "Snow White: the Huntsman's Story" and "Dream-Pig") seem to be persona poems; how does that go with the title of the section?

2) Addonizio uses quite a bit of anaphora in her poems: "You" on p.31, "Forms of Love" on p. 47, and to some degree, the before-mentioned Snow White poem that often starts sentences with "I."  Any other examples?  What are the benefits and risks of that approach?

3)  Especially in a poem like "November 11," p. 17, what's the risk?  What's the payoff?  What's her approach to political subject matter here?

4) Let's take a closer look at the organization of these poems, plus the titles of the sections.  Do you see a progression of theme here?

Activity: take a look at "The Matter" (p. 59), another example of anaphora.  This can be good because the repetition gives some extra grounding to the author and the audience, alike.  (Side note: this is also reminiscent of what Albert Goldbarth does in "Library," using a somewhat consistent structure as an inversely liberating imaginative device).  Taking the same (or a similar) structure, write a "Some...." poem of your own.

Reinvention Exercise

Hopefully, you've grasped by now the necessity of toiling over every word and line break; that writing good poetry takes passion and energy and it should be fun, yes, but it also takes some sweat and dedication.  Especially when we spend a great deal of time crafting our individual lines, though, it can be very easy to get tunnel vision.  That means we end up tinkering with a few syllables when the hard truth is that the poem might require something more radical.

One way to get around that and simultaneously develop a deeper sense for your own turns and rhythm is to basically rewrite your poem backwards, starting with your last line and ending with your first.  Then, tinker with the punctuation, grammar, and word choice to clear up any syntactical disasters that can result from something like this.  When you're done, put the two drafts side by side.  Which do you like better?

Incidentally, this doesn't just have to be a tool for radical revision; you can also use this as an invention exercise and produce a whole new piece, inspired by a certain line or imaginative leap you might not have otherwise made.

A still more difficult (but damn impressive) exercise is to write a poem that can be read (more or less) in either direction. The most famous example of this (which is probably familiar) is Read This Poem from the Bottom Up by Ruth Porritt.


Read This Poem from the Bottom Up
by Ruth Porritt

This simple cathedral of praise.
How you made, from the bottom up,
Is for you to remember
of Andromeda. What remains

Until you meet the ancient light
With your sight you can keep ascending
Its final transformation into space.
And uphold

The horizon's urge to sculpt the sky
Puts into relief
Your family's mountain land
Upon the rising air. In the distance

A windward falcon is open high and steady
Far above the tallest tree
Just beyond your height.
You see a young pine lifting its green spire

By raising your eyes
Out onto the roof deck.
You pass through sliding glass doors
And up to where the stairway ends.

To the top of the penultimate stanza
Past the second story,
But now you're going the other way,
Line by line, to the bottom of the page.

A force that usually pulls you down,
Of moving against the gravity of habit,
While trying not to notice the effort
And feel what it's like to climb stairs.