Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Recently, I facilitated an online course on the celebrated American poet Galway Kinnell. In addition to being a phenomenal poet, he was also an impactful teacher of poetry. Like so much of what our teachers share as advice about our writing, today’s poem can also be applied to our life off the page.

Dry Spell
by Lisa Sewell

after Eileen Tabios and Joe Brainard and in memory of Galway Kinnell 

Afterwards, I remembered some poems mistake the moment they are beginning for the end. 

I remembered being among the first humans on earth to see that the end of civilization and 
humans and other species and of eternity will come. 

I remembered Tuckerman, the first American poet to lament the destruction of our continent. 

I remembered poems tipping to the right-hand side of the page because of punchy verbs, no 
adjectives, and nouns and verbs that force the ninth or tenth syllable to do a lot of the heavy 
lifting. 

I remembered the quest to find what gives the line integrity. 

I remembered metaphor is wish fulfillment and simile is insight, that there is a resemblance that 
words control and a resemblance that words cannot bear. 

I took my form and meter from other animals and the natural world, which abounds in forms. 

I remembered DH Lawrence and Muriel Rukeyser who praised the squeamish things in life. 

I tried to get away from flatness.

* 

I remembered that rhyme and meter help light and shadow move across the page and poetry as 
a kind of singing that raises language up. 

I remembered meter raises the flaccid aspect of prose into poetry that otherwise would just be 
talk. 

I remembered that stanza means little room, that form helps light and shadow move across the 
page. 

I remembered the final syllable in a line carries power because it’s the only one that doesn’t 
have a word that follows. 

I remembered the hermit thrush’s pure vowels, the wolf’s emotional cry of isolation, the 
humpback whale’s jazz — that the gopher frog sings entirely out of consonants, all edge. 

I remembered Williams’s language becoming much more iambic when he was stirred and 
Stevens using iambs to produce a singing that can’t be found in formal verse. 

I remembered each singer has a repetitive way of speaking. 

I tried to attach myself to a tradition of chant and to find an unpredictable formality — to register 
the rhythms of my response to experience. 

I believed that free verse gives us a homemade world of our own. 

I remembered praising poems that were just talk. 

* 

I remembered rhyme is like an inch-worm that prays itself forward with inspection and faith 
and is given to those who believe. 

I remembered circularity and the melody of vowels. 

I remembered the word order we use in speech is so fixed in its rules that certain kinds of 
rhyme are impossible, and certain rhythms are illegal. 

I remembered Dylan Thomas’s worksheets always had a list of possible rhymes. 

I remembered the greatest poems achieve the simultaneous production of sound and 
meaning without straining.

I remembered that voice brings music to a poem but the music must remain in the words after 
the voice has broken. 

I remembered the music of poetry creates an opening of the self and giving away of the self to 
the other. 

*

I remembered Whitman’s love of bodily life and Thoreau’s unhappy reserve.

I remembered a word is a sound that means.

I remembered that language must be brought out of the self like lumps of physicality. 

I remembered Osip Mandalstam who is hard to translate because he was so intelligent. 

I remembered Rilke and Christopher Smart, Delmore Schwartz and Berryman, Creeley and 
Allen Ginsberg and William Stafford who in his poem thought hard for us all. 

I remembered Gwendolyn Brooks and Muriel Rukeyser and very few other women whose 
poems made their way into that marbled inner sanctum. 

I remembered the problem with some poets’ work may be that they write with the affections. 

I remembered that everything that uses language is humanized. 

I remembered Paul Celan and the names that whispered to me down the years and my own 
hands keeping silent. 

I remembered writing with the affections. 

* 

I remembered the basic criteria for good poetry depends on a degree of sympathy, kinship, and 
respect. 

I remembered that song and poetry connect us to the other creatures who also sing. 

I remembered sending the poem to the next stomach like a ruminating animal until it tasted 
most of myself — 

and to put the right noises in the right order, like any good mammal. 

I remembered to make the poem unfold in consciousness. 

I remembered to address myself to everybody though no one was listening. 

I remembered to project emotion into time with the maximum amount of flexibility. 

I remembered fatigue is what makes cowards of us all and cowardice can sometimes be 
mistaken for fatigue. 

I remembered the marathoner who knows to pass through the 21-mile-wall and go beyond it. 

I remembered that even anaphora has its limitations.
And I remembered days wandering: wondering, what, anyway, was that sticky infusion, 

that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived.

"Dry Spell" by Lisa Sewell. Used by permission of the poet.