I’ve been thinking about how the shapes we live in change us. Including the shapes poems live in. Last Saturday I taught a 3-hour Zoom workshop on this. We looked at some poems, then we looked at them again, changed into different forms: couplets, prose poems, ragged lines, etc. “I didn’t realize how much the meaning of the poem is altered by its shape,” one student said.
I’ve also been thinking about this because in a month or so, we’ll be moving to what I fondly call our elder- commune, the “Residential Club” at the far end of our huge building. We’ll be selling our 2000 sq ft condo with the soaring ceilings, storing much of our furniture and books, and camping out in a tiny little apartment for maybe as much as a year until a good-sized two bedroom one comes open.
I am obsessed with spaces and arrangements, with both poems and apartments. I wake up trying to fit more furniture into the space we’ll have. To make matters worse, we’re not entirely sure which unit we’ll get! We have one reserved, but we could get a slightly better one. I incessantly see apartments in my mind’s eye! They float there, shapeshifting, merging. And where will we put X? Can we get along without Y?
I have so much stuff because I almost never lose an earring. Some of these I’ve had for 30 years. And I rarely wear earrings these days!
Poems, I tend to write short and tight and expand afterward. I like the feeling of pressure in the poem. Think Hopkins. Think Dickinson. There I am, in the small bedroom I shared with my sister for a number of years. The dresser had three middle drawers. The top one, I put a cardboard divider down the middle. Did I really put a piece of tape down the middle of the room to show whose side was whose? If I didn’t, I thought about it. So many reasons I like things contained, small (think my beloved Prius, now owned by my grandson). You could psychoanalyze me all day. I ordered a set of three jewelry holders that can fit in the bathroom cabinet we’ll take with us. “You’re having so much fun,” Jerry said, watching me arrange earrings.
I guess I should be sad, leaving this glorious space. But honestly, I am feeling good about giving up a lot of stuff. It feels heavy, owning things. The time when I moved from the house I’d spent so much energy improving into an apartment, I did feel pain, for sure, a pain all tangled up with the pain of the divorce. But once I got settled, there was a lightness. I didn’t need very much after all.
But the question remains, how does the shape people and poems live in change them? Is it the same poem, or person, if it’s in a different container? Or, really is there any such thing as a container, or are the outer walls simply a manifestation of the inner?
My astrological container. Cancer. Self-protective as a crab. Check. Highly sensitive to my environment. Check. Weaving seamlessly between emotional and material realms. Probably. Domestically oriented. Check. Love to create cozy, safe spaces that serve as their personal sanctuaries, then spend lots of time in them. Check. Care deeply about their families and are quick to adopt caregiver roles. Check.
Poems in general: their very nature is contained, self-protective. Otherwise, wouldn’t they decide to be short stories, novels? They pretty much explore inwardly, downwardly, like a microscope. When they sprawl, there is a breathlessness involved. Take Ginsburg, take C.D. Wright, take A.R. Ammons, etc. There’s a sense of transgressing, of emotional risk. it feels that way to me.
Poem as electron microscope—a stream of electrons is accelerated toward the specimen. This stream is confined and focused using metal apertures and magnetic lenses into a thin, focused, monochromatic beam. Key words: confined, focused. That’s how you see what can’t be seen on the surface.
Poems and lives are rubber-bands. They seem to adjust to what’s spoken deeply, under the words, under the actions.
I’ll keep reporting on this as our space shrinks. Maybe my voice will get very small.