There is an intriguing tension in what Antonia Clark describes as her poetry writing practice of many years.
On the one hand, she is perfectly willing, accustomed, and happy to sit down to write with no idea of what she might create, or where it’s going to go. On the other, she is drawn, at least as often as not, to complex poetic forms that demand the discipline of carefully crafted and arranged lines, rhythms, and rhymes.
Clark is confident that she could write triolets in her sleep, and that’s no mean feat. The traditional French eight-liners call for repetition and rhyme in a tightly defined pattern that might give another poet pause.
And that’s just one of the many forms of poetry she has internalized through a decades-long daily writing practice (and an affinity for form), a community college teaching background and, notably, her role as an administrator and active participant at the multi-faceted online poetry workshop The Waters, since 2007.
None of which, perhaps, has a direct bearing on her poem “Love Poem for November” featured here today. But all of which serves to inform her writing even when she opts for a looser, improvised structure, as she does in this case. (Back to that in a moment.) Overall, her work provides a fascinating look at the ways poetry traditions can remain in spirited conversation with contemporary verse.
If a mention of today’s poetry most often brings to mind free verse, it would be a mistake to overlook the large and influential body of formal work many contemporary poets are exploring, whether through long-established forms or newly minted ones. For Clark, and her work with The Waters, that can mean a commitment to writing seven poems in seven days or thirty in thirty days, across a broad range of forms from cultures and traditions that span the globe.
“I guess you could say I’m pretty much a poetry ‘pantser,’” she says. “I sit down at the keyboard and write something, anything, and see where it leads.”
“Where it leads” might be to a villanelle, a sonnet, a pantoum or a ghazal, for just a few examples, or to an invented form all her own to serve only the poem at hand. Beyond that initial draft, she typically does little or no revision, and that is a process that works well for her, as indicated by her track record of placing her work in highly competitive journals, and in her two full-length poetry collections (see her bio, below).
“In a 30-in-30 challenge, I usually end up with several poems good enough to keep and maybe submit,” she said.
Sometimes those poems may result from available prompts on the site, or perhaps from her unique use of haiku, when she just starts by writing haiku on a theme to get something going.
“Sometimes, these result in a haiku sequence. But sometimes, I just string them together in some other form,” she said.
Most often, however, Clark said it’s the pantser approach that yields results. And then there’s “Love Poem for November,” which doesn’t break all the rules but does have its own origin story, and one at odds with Clark’s favored open approach.
Most significantly, it is a poem with a purpose, right from inception. Clark recalls a particularly bleak November several years ago that had everyone—from her fellow poets at The Waters to her husband, who deemed the eleventh month of the year the worst of months—grousing about the weather and the gloom. Her response? Look for all that’s great in those unloved gray days.
But is “Love Poem for November” broke the mold in setting out to make a statement, it still hews closely to others of Clark’s poetic priorities. It’s not strictly metered, but it is organized in quatrains that give it a formal feel, and—like much of her poetry—it pays close attention to sound, in part through its subtle rhyme scheme.
Rather than adhere to conventional patterns of rhyme, Clark mixes things up a bit, relying on a dance between internal rhyme nesting somewhere in the second line of a stanza and an end-rhyme at the stanza’s final line: slow and snow or sadness and madness or, in the third stanza a curveball of sorts with two end rhymes.
Here then is the poem.
Love Poem for November I love the way you come to us— tentative, slow, in your threadbare dress, muted, undone, hands cold, eyes warning of snow. I love your dwindling, the whisper of sadness in your passing. You give us pause, brief stillness, respite before madness. I love your hymns and pilgrims, your frost moon, high and fair. Your mackerel skies. Morning rime. The winter in your hair. I love your ballots and flags, rows of white crosses. A clasping of hands, every bowed head thankful, despite our losses. I love your wet gravel, bare branches, damp bark. The last chrysanthemum. The gathering dark. Hot chocolate, toddies, cider, rum. I’m frazzled and ragged. You’re woodsmoke and rain. Welcome home, old friend. Sit here a while. Wrap me in your soft gray coat again.
—Antonia Clark
BIO:
I’ve worked most of my life as a medical writer and editor in academic, corporate, and professional settings. A lifelong reader and writer of poetry and fiction, I've taught both in community college and adult education programs. I also co-administer an online poetry forum, The Waters, and two-thirds of my college degrees are in English lit, not science.
Over the years, I’ve published in many print and online journals, including 2River View, Cortland Review, Dodging the Rain, Eclectica, Halfway Down the Stairs, Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Missouri Review, The Pedestal Magazine, and Rattle. I’ve also published two full-length poetry collections, Chameleon Moon and. Dance Craze.
Besides reading and writing, my other passions include painting (abstract landscapes), travel (especially France), and playing French café music on a sparkly purple accordion.
On April 1, How to Grow a Poem will mark its first anniversary!
Of course, April 1 is not only “How to Grow a Poem’s” first birthday, it’s also the first day of National Poetry Month in the U.S.
So, here’s a gift for you, to thank you for reading How to Grow a Poem!
From Monday, April 1 through Friday, April 5, the Kindle edition of my book The Last Jazz Fan and Other Poems will be available for free on Amazon. Mark your calendars!
Find it here.
Praise for The Last Jazz Fan and Other Poems:
“Salzmann is a rare poet who can draft excellent and moving poems about nature and politics, about love and place, about old age, spirituality and friendship. You can feel in the poems the intelligence of the mind that created them and the compassion and wit of the poet.”
--Marge Piercy, author of Made in Detroit
“Here is a mind unfairly comfortable with paradox, be it intellectual, emotional or spiritual -- and a heart-breaking voice that is up to the task.”
--Lucia Nevai, author of Salvation
“The Last Jazz Fan invites us to travel through life’s earthy landscapes, corporeal and ethereal, as we fall under its rhythmic spell. And we find we are eager for this journey that speaks in the universal tongue of our shared humanity. Whether the keenly crafted lines of his found poem “The Great American Songbook,” echoing the golden voices of that era, the wry humor of the patient who seeks a doctor who has read Macbeth, or Whitman’s butterfly that pollinates the pages of other poets, Salzmann’s expansive lust for beauty carries us somewhere deep inside where melody and marrow meet—where home is home in any language.”
Diane DeCillis, author of Strings Attached
"’Like a dry martini on a summer/afternoon, a saxophone glides,’ writes Kenneth Salzmann, in poem after musical poem. He's looking for ‘the exact moment rhythm/left the room,’ something I think all poets aspire to find. He takes compost made up of ‘the insistent decay of daily lives rich/ in unread newspapers, orange rinds/eggshells’ and uses it to make poems that bloom and bloom and bloom.”
--Barbara Crooker, author of Les Fauves and Barbara Crooker: Selected Poems
What a perfect and beautiful poem. I love it.