Poems that Hook

The Ancient Mariner by Gustave Dore
in the public domain

 

Sometimes it is a particular poem that draws a child—or youth or adult--into the world of poetry. It grabs the reader’s attention, sparks imagination, pulls at the heart or mind and they are hooked. Something about the narrative, or the cadence, or the musicality of the poem speaks to them and they are changed in some way. They become avid readers—and sometimes writers—of poetry. Here are two accounts of such experiences.

A Tale of Penance

A 1797 British poem did what no other poem could do for me. I was a sophomore at Los Angeles High School and only slightly open to poetic expressions, but when Mrs. Edwards assigned Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, little did she know what lasting influence it would have on my life. This narrative poem starts simply with a sailor returning from a long sea voyage who stops a guest on his way to a wedding in order to tell him a tale, which the listener cannot tear himself away from. The tale is at once a confession, a psychological study, penance, and a warning.

As a sophomore I hadn’t thought too deeply about these matters. Looking back, I see how many life lessons I gained while reading this. I couldn’t go at the slow pace of the nightly assigned pages which limited us, so I gulped down the entire poem in one night. The poem grabbed me by the throat and squeezed so hard it made me bleed so many emotions and empathy over the pages and into my heart. As the sailor was forced to tell his tale over and over, I became his advocate, doing the same for the poem itself.

The content alone took hold of me, but along with it, I learned the techniques of personification, repetition, rhyme, alliteration, building suspense, and inviting the reader to suspend disbelief, techniques I still use.

When others ask me to tell them my origin story, I warn them they are about to become my “wedding guest.” I still talk about getting “rid of the albatross around my neck,” and at every opportunity I quote the lines:

“Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, every where,
nd the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.”

This poetic experience taught me how to keep my readers’ attention and imbue feelings into my poetry. Having been a teacher myself, I am aware that I may never know the influence of something I taught on my students.

My last time in a bookstore, I found an illustrated copy of the poem and bought it for my granddaughters, but then found I couldn’t part with it and kept it for myself.

~ Evie Groch

About this piece, Groch says, “Research shows that things we learn in the first twenty years of our lives, our most impressionable years, carry their influence over us forever. Of course we can change, but a foundation is laid on which we build and the values we hold dear. After having done research on the generations and their unique profiles, I find this to be more and more true. Many things I learned early on in life still serve me well today, like the lessons I took away from an assignment from Mrs. Edwards.”

 

Tyson West records his experience with a poem that was one of my favorites as a child. Groch says she often quotes words from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” I have often quoted a few lines of “Little Orphant Annie” (sometimes spelled “Little Orphan Annie” as well as Henry Wadsworth’s poem, “The Children’s Hour.”

 

From Project Gutenberg

If You Don’t Watch Out

My old home town wedged in the last Appalachian wrinkle
before land leveled west to the Hoosier State
a good Ohio away
left empty my longing for a tornado to twist my boredom to Oz.
Save dread of atom bomb fallout
we slept safe from Jets rumbling Sharks, hurricanes, and heroin.
I ambled through A Child's Garden of Verse
to learn only God can make a tree,
until on the first day of April,
alone, alone, seated on a large flat stone
in tween hunger green among Jell-O salad,
Appian Way pizza, and all
the Disney I could dream
Little Orphant Annie came to stay.
She cleaned my rhyme and meter up,
and shooed the boredom off the porch,
then opened wide my wardrobe’s portal
pulling me deep into poesy’s carnivorous blossom
where two great big Black Things snatched me,
charmed, and cursed my foolish and forever dance.
Annie lost her parents’ love while I spun
with the planet of my clan’s private mythos
orbiting the black hole of mom
and dad’s immigrant never enough.
Though teachers baked sports
as red, white, and blue American pie
I never clutzed the gridiron or B ball court
let alone reached rarified
STATE WRESTLING CHAMPION.
Still mom and dad pardoned
my passion for patterning sounds—
after all I huddled at home studying and they could see
my eyes followed the shape of girls.
Annie addicted my soft soul to the needle of verse—
yes, she and her goblins got me
and taught there were other rhythms for me
and a story sails true only
through the way its words are trimmed.

~ Tyson West

Did you know that James Whitcomb Riley first published “Little Orphant Annie” in the Indianapolis Journal, under tit title, “The Elf Child”? According to Wikipedia,  Riley changed the title to “Little Orphant Allie.” Allie was the nickname of Mary Alice Smith, an orphan who lived and worked in the Riley household while James was a child. The poem later inspired the comic strip, “Little Orphan Annie,” and the Broadway musical, as well as several movies and other spin-offs.

 

What brought you to your love of poetry? A poem? A poet? A teacher or mentor? A member of your family? It is not too late to submit your story (in prose or poetry or a combination of both). Just go back to the guidelines posted April 1.

 

Bios: 

Evie Groch’s opinion pieces, humor, poems, short stories, word challenges, and other articles have been widely published in the New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Contra Costa Times, Games Magazine, anthologies, and many online venues. Her short stories, poems, and memoir pieces have won her recognition and awards. erTravel, language, and immigration are special themes for her work.

Tyson West has published speculative fiction and poetry in free verse, form verse and haiku distilled from his mystical relationship with noxious weeds and magpies in Eastern Washington. He has no plans to quit his day job in real estate. He was the featured USA poet at Muse Pie Press from December 2019 through December 2022. 

 

 

February 2023 Winners: Beach Poems

 

 

Dunes by the Sea, 1648
by Jacob van Ruisdael
National Gallery of Art, DC

There were a number of excellent poems submitted for the February Poetry Challenge. A lot of people have good memories of time spent at the beach or have a yearning to find out what a day on the beach would be like. The judge, Linda Wallin, former president of Poets & Patrons of Chicago, selected Bonnie Proudfoot’s poem as the winner.

Behind the Dunes

And here we are again, on this hot blanket
on this scorching sand, under this scorching sun,
while the surf rolls in, rolls in, in silken curls,
each swell rising, rising up the shoreline,
and we’ve set the large umbrella to shade
our mother’s small frame, her silken curls,
her brown arms as thin as driftwood.

She moves slowly now, as if she has
so much time, solar time, the span of the arc
of all these sunlit days, of all of us
in her orbit, drawn to her side. We watch
her eyes close, see that she is, for the moment,
at peace with all the many defeats.
She used to do it all, bike to the beach,
powerwalk the shoreline, swim laps,
everyone had to race to keep up. 

These days she relies on our arms
or a cane, and I question the effort it takes
to get her to this blanket near the shore.
Still, we ease her into her chair,
tote the ice chest, food she can barely digest.
We are here, then, when the wind brings
the dank musk of seaweed, when other families pack up.
Their blankets drag trails on the sand, and their laughter
and calls fade into the flap and cry of the gulls.

Off shore, schools of spearing leap,
a sailboat bobs beside a buoy, dark surf
froths along a rocky jetty, but here she is,
under the fluttering umbrella,
the sun melting behind the dunes,
the crook of her fingers holding fast,
and why wouldn’t we stay until
all the shadows lengthen, why shouldn’t
this last day last long into the night?

~ Bonnie Proudfoot

Proudfoot’s poem has a lot of “s” sounds which seem to echo the sound of the water, and a lot of other alliteration—not enough to call attention to itself but enough to make the poem sing. It is a beach poem, a poem about aging, a poem about the family and the role of the mother, a poem about a strong woman nearing the end of her life. It is the poignancy of the poem that especially impressed Wallin as she judged the poems.

“Behind the Dunes” appeared Proudfoot’s chapbook of poems, Household Gods, published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in September 2022.

 

For second place, Wallin selected a poem reflecting on a particular day in 2020:

Ocean Beach San Francisco March 4, 2020

You begged and I promised to leave you
along the landing strip of sand
where once the unwrinkled less reliable characters
in our prequel rolled brave and tender
words between the ocean breeze over slaps
of great waves breaking from the west.
You call this place the end
of land while in my ken here begins
ocean―point A on the whale road to Asia.
For hours we wove fancies between flotsam
and jetsam of a comfortable cottage among dens
of the wealthy. Still we paused to pity unlucky
jellyfish caught in wind and wave
who could control no more than we.
Or we would admire harbor seals bouncing across the littoral
into fish rich upswell moving kelp forests under seabird wheels.
The tide ebbs and the tide flows
whether or not we cuddle hands to watch it.
A lucky wind blew us our daughter and
cold waves tumored your essence
leaving us scattering your sand
to accompany that of the intertidal zone and mine to come
where one day we will loop when rip tide
or typhoon remnants
see fit to ouroboros us
together for an end and
beginning.

~ Tyson West

West’s poem also takes us on a poignant journey, while pushing us to think philosophically. Is the shore (or beach) the end of the land or the beginning of the ocean, “point A on the whale road to Asia”? And what can any of us control, anyway? Wallin also liked how the poet included such a beautiful picture of the beach within what is really a love poem.

 

These poets retain copyright on their own poems.

 

Honorable Mentions selected by the judge:

“Beaches Are for Baby Feet” by Thomas Hemminger
“Kovalam Call and Response” by Lee Conger
“Chatterbox” by Joe Cottonwood
“Memories Made from the Impossible” by Angela Hoffman
and an untitled poem by Joan Leotta

 

Bios:

Lee Conger is a community organizer, native habitat restorer, and amateur opera singer in Los Angeles, California. He makes money as a Narrative Therapist and teacher of Integral Qigong and Tai Chi. Lee boosts his own microbiome diversity with homemade lactofermented ketchup.

Joe Cottonwood has repaired hundreds of houses to support his writing habit in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. His latest book of poetry is Random Saints.

Thomas Hemminger is an elementary music teacher living in Dallas, Texas with his wife and son. He writes many poems and songs for his classroom. His personal and professional hero is Mr. Fred Rogers, the creator and host of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. Being the son of an English Language Arts teacher, Thomas grew up surrounded by prose and poetry. Furthermore, his mother’s love of verse, and her own talented pen, impressed a deep love for the art within him. He recently started having poems published online through the Wilda Morris Poetry Challenge, and through texaspoetryassignment.org.

Angela Hoffman’s poetry collections include Resurrection Lily (Kelsay Books, 2022) and Olly Olly Oxen Free (forthcoming, Kelsay Books, 2023). She placed third in the WFOP Kay Saunders Memorial Emerging Poet in 2022. Her poems have been published internationally. She has written a poem a day since the start of the pandemic. Angela lives in rural Wisconsin.

Joan Leotta plays with words on page and stage. She performs tales of food, family, strong women. Internationally published, she’s a 2021 and 2022 Pushcart nominee, Best of the Net 2022 nominee, and  2022 runner-up in Robert Frost Competition. Her essays, poems, and fiction appear in Ekphrastic Review, The Lake, and more. Her new chapbook, Feathers on Stone is out from Main Street Rag.

Bonnie Proudfoot's debut chapbook of poems, Household Gods, was published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in September 2022. Her novel, Goshen Road (2020, OU Swallow Press) was Long-listed for the PEN/Hemingway, and awarded the 2022 WCONA Book of the Year. She's published fiction, essays, and poetry. Bonnie lives outside of Athens, Ohio.

Linda Wallin found out late in life that all of her degrees did not help one bit when it came to writing poetry. She continues to write down what bubbles up and is grateful for friends who encourage her. You can read some of her poems on http://www.dwna.net/, Wallin's Wave at http://wallinswave.blogspot.com/,  and Living with Geniuses at https://lwallin.wordpress.com/. 

Tyson West has published speculative fiction and poetry in free verse, form verse and haiku distilled from his mystical relationship with noxious weeds and magpies in Eastern Washington. He has no plans to quit his day job in real estate. He was the featured USA poet at Muse Pie Press from December 2019 through December 2022.

 

Tune in on March 1 for a new Poetry Challenge.  

 

© Wilda Morris