Today I have a simple assignment for us: a poem of domesticity.
There are many aspects of home upon which we could focus. Depending on your origin, your home might be rural, or in the city. Your hometown, where you grew up, may be far away, perhaps even in another country. Inside your current home, it may be full of excited chaos, replete with children; or it could be more laid-back and serene, a real bungalow. Maybe you’re a student and live in a box-like shape; perhaps even you’re in transition, sleeping on someone’s couch. Where is home, and what does it mean to you?
A couple of poems that call out to me are very different in voice and in feel, and they recall very separate things. I hope that they, in their separateness, give you an idea of how and where you can reach.
First is Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sestina”. (To learn more about the form, you can visit here; the form is not the exercise, though.)
Sestina
September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.
She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,
It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac
on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.
It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.
But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.
Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.
Contrast that cozy, nostalgic feeling with what James Wright conveys in his “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”:
Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
This poem is absent any hint of domesticity. Still, it contains a sense of longing (pining) for the past, and of contemplation for how the speaker of the poem got to where he is now. The poem is situated in a very specific time and space, yet the speaker is located outside of it; he like the hawk seeks a return to the familiar.
In “My Papa’s Waltz,” Theodore Roethke invites the reader into an impromptu dance.
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
Spoken from the viewpoint of a man looking back through the eyes of his boyhood self, this poem features the kitchen, a room commonly invoked in poetry to represent the warmth and security of hearth and home. (“Sestina” does this as well.) Further, Roethke’s piece is a love poem, a calling back to a time of simplicity where a person has no cares but that to love one’s father, or mother (in this poem a witness in the background).
Point in fact, today’s prompt from Rita Dove (in The Practice of Poetry, p. 89) is called “Your Mother’s Kitchen.”
Write a poem about your mother’s kitchen. (It helps if you actually draw the kitchen first, with crayons!) Put the oven in it, and also something green, and something dead. You are not in this poem, but some female relation—aunt, sister, close friend—must walk into the kitchen during the course of the poem.
In one class, I [Dove] first made the students clear their desks, as an elementary school teacher would do. Then I passed out computer paper, perforations attached, one sheet per student, broke out a brand new packet of one hundred Crayola crayons—certainly one of the symbols of pleasurable magic in our age—and told them to pick a crayon, pass the carton on, and continue passing the box around in the manner until it was empty. And then? Why, draw the place that immediately came to mind at the mention of the word home. After they had colored for about fifteen minutes, exchanging crayons, cursing the perforated edges (which I refused to let them remove), and asking for extra paper in order to start over (which I also refused), I told them to turn the paper over, take a deep breath, and draw the place they were living in now. This took about five minutes. The final leg of the assignment was to take the drawing home and live with it for a week. The poems that emerged from this assignment were varied and significant, even though they often did not mention the drawings.
I am not requiring anyone to draw anything! (Partly because I know some people, like me, lack a visual imagination. But if it helps you, go for it!) Just take twenty minutes or so to do a continuous freewrite, where you begin writing and do not stop for any reason (if you get stuck, write something to that effect—“I am stuck right now, my pen is moving across the page”—until you get back on track). Or you can write in actual verse for a similar amount of time, twenty to thirty minutes.
Remember, this is just an exercise to get the mind moving and to tap into those long buried feelings and images that might work to evoke a mirror feeling in the reader. Happy writing!
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