Blue, Red, and White

I wrote this last night, before seeing Dave's recent link to "welcome to haikunaut", with its description of modern haiku. The most narrow definition, I guess, would restrict the form to lines of 5-7-5 syllables and insist that the content be drawn from the observation of nature. I liked the broader range of expressions the author, David G. Lanoue, describes, and they certainly allowed room to put my own short-form poetic explorations into a more inclusive container still known as haiku.

Short poems like this are something I've occasionally written for years, usually but not always inspired by nature. Over the last couple of weeks of experimentation with poems of 140-characters-or-less, I've realized that I'm intrigued with writing poems that are not strictly natural, but still try to contain the flashes of insight, surprise, freshness and connection that are characteristics of good naturalistic haiku. My work has always been inspired by nature - but I thought it might be interesting to look within this urban location, where I'm surrounded by technology, people, foreign languages, buildings, traffic and other man-made distractions and projections, for source material. 

I'm also interested in following my own thought process as a poem evolves. Walking is where I often get ideas, and sometimes I'll come back from a walk with a poem, or a blog post, pretty much all written in my head. Often it takes a longer time of letting the material steep, like tea, until it develops the color and flavor it was meant to have. Dave recently stated his opinion that "a poem that needs explaining isn't a good poem." In general I agree with that, but I'm not willing to throw out T.S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Osip Mandelstam, Hafiz, and many other great poets just because their work contains layers of meaning that require some thinking or even some work. (see Dave's further explanation of what he meant in the comments, below.) My own opinion is that a poem should be quickly accessible to the reader at ground-level, so to speak, but I do like poems that contain other layers too, even if those layers are mostly clues to the writer's own thought-processes, and not necessary to understand fully in order to appreciate and enjoy the finished poem. So I hope the following is interesting - a poetic version, maybe, of Natalie's recent series on the evolution of a painted self-portrait.

---

This afternoon I went out for a walk, ostensibly to do errands but also in search of an idea for a micro-poem. I'd planned to go a different way, but turned on Rue Chambord and walked along the rows of apartment buildings with their lace curtains and front gardens where tulips and crocuses pushed their brown and yellow points toward the light. Nothing much that excited my attention, though, until I saw a child's blue plastic snow-shovel leaning against the wall of a porch which had been painted a fairly bright red over the original bricks.

I tossed that image around until I got to the health food store, where I bought some decaf green tea and perused a new display of chocolate, in the place where the olive oils used to be, finally choosing a bar of dark Ecuadorian chocolate, the first I've allowed myself to buy after four months of dieting. The girl at the caisse was having trouble with the card machine; she tried to replace the print paper roll but it kept tearing, and finally, apologetic and frustrated, she called a colleague who came over and deftly cut triangles from the sides of the end of the roll, then fed it successfully into the rollers. All the while this was going on I was watching the first girl, no more than 18 years old but very self-contained, polite, composed, even though the line behind me was getting longer. But no one was fussing; we all waited patiently and sympathetically; she was trying her best, and after all, this is Canada. The girl was so pretty, and so French, with perfect skin touched by a little pink; her dark hair in rounded bangs over her forehead and the rest pulled back into a soft chignon; she was wearing a dark blue knit pullover with narrow stripes of a lighter powdery blue, and a necklace of bright red hearts strung closely together. "I'm so sorry," she said, in English, and I replied in French that it didn't matter at all.

Blue shovel, green tea, red  wall, black chocolate. From there I went to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription, and sat waiting for a little while in the chairs arranged along a wall, absent-mindedly reading the titles of health-advice books like "Etre une femme a 40" and single-sheet pamphlets on a swiveling stand about different conditions: "La Constipation" made me laugh, it was such a turnaround from the American appropriation of "la" to make any word that followed it seem elegant. Then the pharmacist called out my very English-sounding name, and I went to the window for the consultation.

I meandered through the cosmetics, and checked to see if the store had gotten a new shipment of sunglasses - mine had just broken - which they hadn't. By the time I left the pharmacy, I'd decided on "a child's blue plastic snow-shovel," though I wasn't sure I wanted all those adjectives, and tentatively on "porch" or "wall", but wasn't sure if it wanted to be made of "painted red-brick" or "red painted-brick," or not painted at all, even though it was and seemed somehow important and redder that way. Then I began casting through verbs: standing, leaning, propped? The shovel, I realized, represented an absent person who had suspended their activity, and needed a human-sounding verb - probably "leaning" would do it. The poem also had to be in the present tense, and active voice, therefore: "leans." Rounding the corner, I headed back toward home. The French girl at the health food store kept coming back into my mind. Red. Blue. Only white was missing for the tricolor that embodied our French neighborhood, but also me, the American...and the white, of course the white was the snow that had so recently departed. A block later I had this much:

A child’s blue plastic snow-shovel leans against a painted red-brick porch, waiting for white.

Too many adjectives, and still too obscure; what season was it? Should I use the crocuses? How? The point was that the snow was pretty much gone, spring was here, but the child's shovel still felt expectant, ready and waiting for a task that might yet need to be done. This could represent much in life, but how to say that?

Back at home I checked email, wrote a letter, and got in the bathtub with a book. Half an hour later I started thinking again, cutting words. The three colors had to form the core of the poem, so I felt like I needed to prune everything around them that might detract from their centrality. The extra adjectives went away. And, maybe rising from some subconscious thoughts -- I'd just finished a book on the American Revolution and the part played in it by the French, who soon began a revolution of their own, I kept coming back to the idea of those flags and upheaval, and young workers armed with shovels and pick-axes. Many American readers wouldn't make the leap from red-white-blue to the French flag, or vice-versa, but it seemed worth trying to hint at.

A child’s blue snow-shovel leans against a red-brick porch, waiting for white.

Too lean now; the image needed to stand on its own, but I was searching for a way to express a more complex idea through it too, leaving some ambiguity for the reader, and also some way of fixing the poem in time or season. I got out of the tub and dried my hair. J. made us a thin-crust pizza for dinner; I helped him decorate it with red peppers, fresh mozzarella, anchovies. But it wasn't until I was doing the dishes that a solution came to me: to date the image phrase with "March:" or "Mid-March" - was there any other way of talking about where we were in the calendar? Yes! It came to me all of a sudden: "The Ides of March" - the day Julius Caesar was cut down by his fellow senators, revolting against what they felt was the tyranny of one man's overarching power. That would create the idea-bridge I'd been after; readers could stay on the surface or think deeper, perhaps making my associations, or their own. And we could all have our own ideas about what "white" represents in the poem.

A child’s blue snow-shovel leans against a red-brick porch, waiting for white on the Ides of March.

I wrote it out that way and studied the words on the page, then switched "On the Ides of March" to the beginning, and published the poem. Ten minutes later I deleted it and rewrote, adding the word "still" in front of waiting. It was the best I could do tonight with this collection of images and ideas; good enough, I hoped, to let it go.

On the Ides of March, a child’s blue snow-shovel leans against a red-brick porch, still waiting for white.

Comments

[dale]

What a lovely account! And I like the poem very much.

[Pica]

Beth: what a superb post, taking us through your walk. I feel as though we've just had a long cup of tea together, which is a lovely idea, and I like your poem very much. And the the health-food-store-girl who didn't quite make it in -- It's like picking flowers. (Or chocolate.) This one, yes; this one -- maybe tomorrow.

[Marja-Leena]

A walk into the mind of a writer... lovely, Beth!

[Natalie]

Beth, I love your investigation into the process that went into this poem, how seeing flowed into thinking, into word-making, into editing and, finally, into blogging. It's your *seeing* that triggers it all, a very painterly, intuitive seeing and then choosing the words to express and condense that vision. Wonderful.

[Dave]

Dave recently stated his opinion that "a poem that needs explaining isn't a good poem."
Geez, if even you misunderstood my meaning, I guess I'll take it as a sign to resume my general avoidance of talking about poetry! I like many "difficult" poems. I simply feel that if a poem can't function without a critical apparatus, it may be an interesting intellectual exercise, but it's not really a poem. If there's a better (which will not necessarily be a clearer) way of saying what the poem says, then that needs to be in the poem.

[Dave]

The final change I think is crucial to the effectiveness of the poem, and illustrates I think how the pressure of online self-publication can spur us to better writing. A lovely account overall. Thanks for sharing.

[Deb]

It's delightful to read about you, your day, your process, and how a lovely piece of writing, a poem, came to be.

[Kaycie]

I love the little peek into your mind's workings.

[Marvin]

Thank you for this glimpse inside your head.

[Lorianne]

Wonderful. I wonder if William Carlos Williams did this with his red wheelbarrow? It's the pruning that makes the magic. If you're aware of every last character, you keep only the best. It's like taking 100 pictures and keeping only 10.

I remember reading once that many of WCW's poems were short because he jotted them on prescription pads during the day as he sat in his office. The size of the paper limited the length of his poems. I guess the 140-character limit works in a similar way: you pare things down to their essentials.

[Peter]

My favorite lit crit is by the writer of the examined work. This delightful exercise reminds me of Poem, Revised, a very good recent collection of fifty-four essays by poets, each of whom discusses the evolution of one of his or her poems.

[FrScott]

Anchovy pizza, mozarella cheese on top, cyberspace tease-frustration!

:)

[Anne Gibert]

This wonderful post makes me want to write poetry again. You have reminded me of how much pleasure can be derived from playing with words, adding, subtracting, reordering them until they please. I think there are more poems in that account: the lace curtained apartments and nascent tulips, the French girl and the paper tape, the bath and pizza. What riches.

[Kris]

Thanks for this Cassandra. The essay itself is a little gem of observation in itself, and the glimpse of your poetic process is fascinating.