Inquest by Poetry
Warning: Due to copyright rules, links are provided for reading the four poems selected below in their entirety. If you should skip this step, you will be required to read complete books by each of the poets selected here and choose from their poems yourselves to create your own questions for arriving at an accurate profile of who you are.
1. In his prose poem “Paperweight,” Ryan Teitman evokes the state of solitude and reflection he loves to enter. “Every few months or so,” he writes, “I turn into a rock.”
“When I’m a rock, I appreciate so many things I don’t otherwise notice. Silence so intricate it sounds like music. A breeze moving through the room like a dancer stretching her limbs.”
What state of being is important to you? What inanimate object or material might you feel like when you enter this state you cherish? Once in it, how do you experience the world differently than usual? Don’t tell us; show us what you hear and see, perhaps taste and touch and smell.
2. In “While the Bathtub is Filling,” Lana Hechtman Ayers sees herself in a mirror noting she is beginning to look like her mother and remembers:
“that time I went into her bedroom without knocking,
saw her breasts: two weighted-down plastic bags”
She “decided right then to die at eighteen/ in the prime of perkiness and elasticity.” Years later, her mother shows her the scar from a left breast mastectomy and the poet sees more deeply:
“It looked as if a red snake slithered
out of her heart and hid his head
in the brush of her armpit.”
Ever after, Ayers will believe:
“Nothing about nakedness was ever that lovely.
My mother’s survived this halving.”
What daily activity do you perform-watering plants, cooking or baking, finding yourself stopped in traffic, attending a child’s school concert, watching a movie — when a memory of who you were pops up and then a glimpse of who you have become?
3. In “What are the Odds,” Michael Mark recounts taking his elderly mother to a casino in Atlantic City by listing events of the trip. Here is a selection from his lines:
“That she’ll leave her purse in the ladies’ room, the car, the buffet, the coffee shop
That they’ll find her purse each time
That it will still contain her wallet, which he will empty except for $10 and a copy of her license.”
And the poem ends here:
“That this will be their last time in Atlantic City
That they’ll come home winners”
What 20-item list might you make of events during a difficult trip or visit when someone close to you needed your help and companionship?
4. In “Things You Will Learn About Me After It’s Too Late,” Lana Hechtman Ayars makes a list poem, too.
She starts out:
“As soon as I could hold a crayon I wrote
poems, one about a bunny who had no tail.
I trip over words, especially goodbye.
I fell into Mathematics as a major
in college and am still solving for x.”
Perhaps this is a poem about learning about someone’s quirks after you have fallen in love and committed to them.
What things have those close to you learned about you after you entered the relationship? Use images from memories that show your uniqueness.
If you have completed the four assignments, you have learned a lot about yourself.
Now, one last question: Is poetry ever too late? Please write your answer as a list of times that poetry, by you or others, arrived just on time.
