TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

I know this is a podcast — a podcast in which I read you a poem, and you listen to that poem — so what I’m about to say may sound a little strange: When I can’t see the poems I’m hearing, I feel like I’m missing out! I want to see what the poem looks like. I want to know the shape of it on the page: the lines, the stanzas, the way the poet uses the field of the page.

Sometimes I swear I can hear the form of a poem if I listen carefully. I might notice the repeating end words of a sestina or the repeated phrase of a ghazal. But often I’m left to imagine the layout when I don’t have the text in front of me, especially when it’s a free verse poem. My ideal reading experience is to hear a poem being read to me while looking at it and following along. (And thanks to the Slowdown newsletter and the transcripts being available online, you can do just that!)

Poems are meant to live in the air, to be read aloud, but I also know that form follows function. I want to see the choices the poet made when crafting the piece. Is the poem in couplets, tercets, or sturdy quatrains? Is it in one unbroken stanza with no white space? When I read a poem, knowing that form has the opportunity to enact, or at least reinforce, the content, I learn from the poet’s choices. The stanza shape and length is an opportunity to embody something in the poem, so what did the poet go with? Maybe they chose couplets for a poem about two lovers or a parent and child. Or a prose poem for a piece that is more narrative and casually spoken. Or maybe the poem “explodes” across the field of the page, fragmented and uncontained.

Today’s poem does just that, using the field of the page in an exciting way. I wonder if you’ll be able to intuit the shape by listening alone. Either way, I encourage you to also look at the text of the poem online.

This is a poem by Purvi Shah

You believed only a girl born of dandelion can be ferocious –
by Purvi Shah

                                                        as wind which tenders
                       astonishment – propulsion that beckons


                                                                                      sojourn
                                        through skies, convocations
                                                           of indispensable       sisterhoods.


She hears your stray summons:                   Because
                I could not touch                     my seed, I held it up


                                                                                                                                                    forged a sun
                                                                                                                                    stroked a pistil
                                                                                                                   as a robin’s throat
                                                                   offered advent of lust & dusk 
                                                    as rekilned light or as we say:
                                                                   time, which needs seasons
                                                                                                                   to be understood,
                                                                                                                                     as a girl needs 
                                                                                                                                                           gentle soil


                             (and sometimes shared breath) to be revealed. Within hush, your whirl

unsticks you from the pinned-down planes of earth – x-axis of social rules,
                                                           this y-axis of material conditions – a young woman turns

into cartwheels – – 

                                              aspirations too vast to be held in the hand, to be diagrammed
                             as predictable science, to be shattered even when blown away.