How a Poem Moves: A Field Guide for Readers of Poetry - Softcover

Sol, Adam

9781770414563: How a Poem Moves: A Field Guide for Readers of Poetry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1770414568 ISBN 13: 9781770414563

Verlag: ECW PR, 2019

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A collection of playfully elucidating essays to help reluctant poetry readers become well-versed in verse

Developed from Adam Sol's popular blog, How a Poem Moves is a collection of 35 short essays that walks readers through an array of contemporary poems. Sol is a dynamic teacher, and in these essays, he has captured the humor and engaging intelligence for which he is known in the classroom. With a breezy style, Sol delivers essays that are perfect for a quick read or to be grouped together as a curriculum.

Though How a Poem Moves is not a textbook, it demonstrates poetry's range and pleasures through encounters with individual poems that span traditions, techniques, and ambitions. This illuminating book is for readers who are afraid they "don't get" poetry but who believe that, with a welcoming guide, they might conquer their fear and cultivate a new appreciation.

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�ber die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Adam Sol is an award-winning poet, writer, and teacher. He has published four collections of poetry, including Crowd of Sounds, which won Ontario's Trillium Book Award. He lives in Toronto, Ontario, with his wife, Rabbi Yael Splansky, and their three sons.

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"How a Poem Moves is the perfect antidote to the condition commonly known as Fear of Poetry. And Adam Sol is the perfect companion on this tour of the sounds, sights, and emotional delights of poetry. As someone who's spent most of her life reading and writing poems, I'm thrilled by Sol's ability to describe what he loves in a way that teaches me to see it too." --Tracy K. Smith, U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Life on Mars

"Adam Sol approaches poetry with a unique sensitivity; one that illustrates, with exceptional clarity and insight, just how a poem moves." -- Scott Griffin, founder of the Griffin Poetry Prize

"With an eye to poets of diverse backgrounds and aesthetic modes, and featuring impromptu asides on rhythm and meter, How a Poem Moves is just as at home in the university classroom as the doctor's waiting room. Sol is a thoughtful and affable guide to ignite -- or reignite -- a love of poetry." -- Cassidy McFadzean, award-winning author of Hacker Packer

"There is in our wounded world a great need for the balm and challenge poetry can provide. These beautiful, rich, and often surprising meditations get the reader excited about the gift that poems contain... This is a book I will pass out like religious tracts to my friends. I am grateful for it." -- Shelagh Rogers, host and producer at The Next Chapter, CBC Radio One

Developed from Adam Sol's popular blog, How a Poem Moves walks readers through an array of contemporary poems. Always compassionate and engaging, Sol delivers a collection of thirty-five short essays that are perfect for a quick read or grouped together as a curriculum, demonstrating poetry's range and pleasures through encounters with individual poems that span traditions, techniques, and ambitions. This illuminating book is for readers who are afraid they "don't get" poetry but who believe that, with a welcoming guide, they might conquer their fear and cultivate an appreciation for the form.

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How a Poem Moves

A Field Guide for Readers of Poetry

By Adam Sol

ECW PRESS

Introduction, 
How a Poem Puts Skin on a Mystery Philip Levine, "Making Light of It", 
How a Poem Shapes Memory Deborah Digges, "Stealing Lilacs in the Cemetery", 
How a Poem Articulates a Feeling C.K. Williams, "Love: Beginnings", 
How a Poem Crystalizes an Image Yusef Komunyakaa, "Yellowjackets", 
How a Poem Makes Meaning with Music Elise Partridge, "Domestic Interior: Child Watching Mother", 
How a Poem Snapshots a Moment of Drama Tiphanie Yanique, "My brother comes to me", 
How a Poem Seduces Us with Outlandishness Diane Seuss, "Free beer", 
How a Poem Cooks Up Dark Insight Philip Metres, "Recipe from the Abbasid", 
How a Poem Pushes Us Away and Beckons Us Closer Marilyn Dumont, "How to Make Pemmican", 
How a Poem Wrestles with Its Inheritance Rahat Kurd: "Ghazal: In the Persian", 
How a Poem Lives Between Languages Natalia Toledo, translated by Clare Sullivan, "Flower That Drops Its Petals", 
How a Poem Invites Us to Praise Ross Gay, "Ode to Drinking Water from My Hands", 
How a Poem Answers Some Questions but Not Others Amber McMillan, "The Light I've Seen in Your Hair I Have Found in My Own Hands", 
How a Poem Clarifies Its Blur Jeff Latosik, "Aubade Photoshop", 
How a Poem Changes As We Read Ali Blythe, "Shattered", 
How a Poem Will (Not) Save Us Raoul Fernandes, "Life with Tigers", 
How a Poem Loves a Misunderstanding Richard Siken, "Dots Everywhere", 
How a Poem Mistrusts Its Idols Cassidy McFadzean, "You Be the Skipper, I'll Be the Sea", 
How a Poem Doesn't Dish Damian Rogers, "Ode to a Rolling Blackout", 
How a Poem Impersonates a Tomato Oliver Bendorf, "Queer Facts about Vegetables", 
How a Poem Seeks New Models Shannon Maguire, "[The most visible ants are]", 
How a Poem Makes Itself Out of Unusual Materials Madhur Anand, "Especially in a Time", 
How a Poem Chooses the Apocalypse Behind Curtain #3 Jennifer L. Knox, "The New Let's Make a Deal", 
How a Poem Assembles a Smashed Record for Posterity George Murray, from "#DaydreamBereaver", 
How a Poem Tries to Connect Us, Despite the Obstacles Donna Stonecipher's "Model City [4]", 
How a Poem Welcomes Us to the Neighbourhood Bren Simmers, "[Night of nesting dolls]", 
How a Poem Evokes Wonder Sarah Holland-Batt, "Botany", 
How a Poem Reaches for Transcendence Eric Pankey, "Ash", 
How a Poem Mourns Don Paterson, "Mercies", 
How a Poem Confronts the Limitations of Our Empathy Soraya Peerbaye, "Trials", 
How a Poem Tries to Get into It Rowan Ricardo Phillips, "Little Song", 
How a Poem Chattily Wonders about Life's Purpose Ulrikka S. Gernes, "On H.C. Andersen Boulevard During Rush Hour", 
How a Poem Transforms a Stroll into a Ceremony Joy Harjo, "Walk", 
How a Poem Imperfectly Reconciles Complexity Liz Howard, "A Wake", 
How a Poem Haunts Norman Dubie, "Lines for Little Mila", 
Conclusion: A Few Hopes, 
Notes on Permissions, 
Acknowledgements, 
About the Author, 
Copyright,

CHAPTER 1

How a Poem Puts Skin on a Mystery

Philip Levine, "Making Light of It"

I was only seventeen when I started as an undergraduate at Tufts University, outside of Boston, but I already knew that I had literary ambitions. Hearing this, an upperclassman said to me, "You should take Levine's class, 'The Poem.' It's not supposed to be for freshmen, but he doesn't care. Come to a few classes and he'll sign you in."

So my friend Risa and I gamely attended while this gruff, brilliant, wiry man with a ferocious moustache brilliantly opened poems to us, interspersed with terrifying workshops and occasional rants about the Tufts administration, American politics, and dogs. "Levine" was Philip Levine, whose hard-nosed lyric poems earned him an international reputation, a cartload of awards, and a post as the Poet Laureate of the United States.

His class was a life-changing experience — he challenged and motivated me, a privileged kid from rural Connecticut, and opened a door to contemporary poetry that started me on a journey that I'm still on. I've saved an essay I wrote for him on which his sole comment was, "Some of this is quite sharp. Some dull."

This was the fall of 1987, so he must have been putting the finishing touches on A Walk with Tom Jefferson, which came out the following year and includes this poem:

Making Light of It

I call out a secret name, the name
of the angel who guards my sleep,
and light grows in the east, a new light
like no other, as soft as the petals
of the blown rose of late summer.
Yes, it is late summer in the West.
Even the grasses climbing the Sierras
reach for the next outcropping of rock
with tough, burned fingers. The thistle
sheds its royal robes and quivers
awake in the hot winds off the sun.
A cloudless sky fills my room, the room
I was born in and where my father sleeps
his long dark sleep guarding the name
he shared with me. I can follow the day
to the black rags and corners it will
scatter to because someone always
goes ahead burning the little candle
of his breath, making light of it all.

— from A Walk with Tom Jefferson (Knopf, 1988)

Levine's popular reputation is largely based on the hyperrealistic poems he wrote about factory work in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book What Work Is, but he always had a streak of surrealism in him too, built on a love of the Spanish poets from the period around the Spanish Revolution in the 1930s. This isn't the venue for a full exploration of Lorca, Vallejo, or Jorge Guill�n, but when I return to "Making Light of It," it strikes me how Levine manages to switch back and forth between a gritty, no-nonsense portrait of the Sierras in California and something deeper, darker, and more mysterious.

We begin with a speaker calling out a "secret name," but before we can wonder why he's calling, or who the angel is, Levine steers us into a clear-eyed description of the environment, landing us with the beautiful and perfectly tangible image of the dried out, wind-blown rose petals of late summer. "Yes, it is late summer in the West" helps to firmly locate us geographically but also serves as a helpful pause after the long, complex sentence that preceded it. Meanwhile, the relevance of the "secret name" hangs in the background — who is this angel who guards his sleep? Why does the speaker need to call to it? Is the call an acknowledgement or an entreaty?

I want to point out a bit of music here that is one of Levine's unsung talents. Listen to the open sounds that happen as this first sentence comes together: the blOwn rOse links back to the light (like nO other) grOwing in the east, and later with the rOyal rObes shed by the thistle. As well, I count a full nine Ls in that first sentence and a trio of Es (sEcret, slEEp, East). All of this alliteration and assonance, for me, adds to a ceremonial aspect of the poem — it is consciously composed, almost formal despite the plain language, and moves at a stately pace.

The lines that follow "Yes, it is late summer in the West," are all rich descriptions of the landscape — the tough, burnt fingers of the grasses, the royal robes of the thistle. The mystical import of the first line...

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