Where Is the Poetry?
I am always looking for poetry that transcends the flatness of everyday speech merely cut into lines. What is it that lifts a poem off the page?
1. It awakens multiple senses with imagery, as in from “Autumn” by P. K. Page:
Its stain is everywhere.
The sharpening air
of late afternoon
is now the colour of tea.
Once-glycerined green leaves
burned by a summer sun
are brittle and ochre.
Night enters day like a thief.
And children fear that the beautiful daylight has gone.
2. It moves my body through rhythm, rhyme, or repetition, as in from “Song for Naomi” by Irving Layton:
Who is that in the tall gasses singing
By herself, near the water?
I can not see her
But can it be her
Than whom the grasses so tall
Are taller,
My daughter,
My lovely daughter?
3. It texturizes language, whether honed to precise simplicity, as in from “Hortense” by W.J. Keith:
And Hortense?
I love the oval emptiness
of her face,
reminding me always
of the fragile, shy mask
I wear myself.
or rich with verbal jewellery, as in from “Lake Song” by Anne Wilkinson:
Willow weep, let the lake lap up your green trickled tears.
Water, love, lip the hot roots, cradle the leaf;
Turn a new moon on your tongue, water, lick the deaf rocks,
With silk of your pebble-pitched song, water, wimple the beach;
Water, wash over the feet of the summer-bowed trees,
Wash age from the face of the stone.
4. It makes me reflect, as in from “Prayer Still Praying Itself into Being” by Sandy Coomer, Juniper, Volume 7, Issue 3:
Perhaps, this is prayer then—the certainty
that every day is uncertain, even as morning
overcomes darkness and with night,
is itself overcome. Perhaps, prayer
has no words, but waits with me, rising
toward the unfailing, unflinching light.
5. It transports me to somewhere else, either inner or outer, as in from “The White Horse” by Gwendolyn MacEwen:
This is the first horse to come into the world;
It heaved itself out of the sea to stand now
In a field of dizzy sunlight,
Its eyes huge with joy and wisdom,
Its head turned towards you, wondering
why you are wondering
In short, beyond my brain deciphering letters on a page, in the poetry I seek something happens.