Ah, Poetry

Last week, Randy asked the class to write poetry. I walked away feeling cheated--I don't write poetry! Its not that I'm allergic to the writing of a poem or that I don't appreciate it. I love poems--I just don't write one.

In the creative writing arena, I find affinity with essays because they're direct and they (sometimes) don't need metaphors and the likes. Poetry requires too much structure--word counts, verse counts, rhythm, pulse, etcetera-etcetera. But that's probably just my excuse. The truth is, I make lousy poems.There, now you know why I just post other people's poems and never my own in this blog.

A few days ago, however, the feeling shifted. I now do poetry. I kinda like doing it, as a means of releasing tension of many forms. (I won't necessarily share them, though. That's a different story.) I have no idea what kind of magic or sorcery or alchemy Randy used, but I ended up appreciating my poetry. (I think reading a poem with a group of beginners helped--a lot.)

Or he simply loves the craft, too much that, by osmosis, I learn to love it as well. Anyway, the good thing with Randy is that he focuses on the strengths of the poem than on the weaknesses. More on the imagery it evokes and the sensations it triggers than on the technicalities.

Most of the attendees did free form, based on writing exercises he handed out on the first day of class. I worked with a long word list of 39 words but only used 15, which became 12 after I edited the first draft. And the poem went like this:

A Scene at a Potter’s Studio 

The wheel turns between her legs
Her hands circle a mound of clay,
Spooling it like thread. And to her fingers,
it yields, like her eyes, returning to him.
A few feet away on the tabletop, he sits,
framed by jars and pots and cups.
His eyes on a draft. He doesn’t notice.
She plunges a thumb, gently opening the piece of earth,
fingering the edges before lifting the silt.
Her pupils rise, expectantly. She waits.
Silence sprawls between them.
Magnified by the mud pulsing in her palms,
The wheel churning, drilling, drowning
every brush of lead on paper,
every hitch of breath,
every slopping sweat behind her lobe.
The clay wobbles, and to the unseen weight,
Collapses between pall fingers.
She covers the resin, and never looked up again.
This time, he does. Gives one last glimpse,
before finishing his drawing
Of a girl on a wheel, making
A jar or a pot or a cup.

Honestly, I find it too elementary, something written out of rush. Randy, however, liked a certain line in the poem and said this was "intriguingly intimate". As for how, I have no idea why. - 2/22/2014