Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Apostrophe and other literary addresses (1.31.18)

Wednesdays@One began the new year with a type of poem called an apostrophe, a subgenre of literary address.  Look for poems with titles beginning with the word "To" to find literary apostrophes, though of course they might be odes, too.  The difference between an apostrophe and an ode is one of length and depth--the ode being longer, more in-depth--and occasion, where the ode is celebratory and more of a public utterance.  Apostrophe addresses some person (deceased, often famous) or thing (animal, object, idea, impulse, feeling) as if alive and sentient and able to understand what is said.  It personifies.  And it is often personal.

How does apostrophe work? Well, for one thing, it establishes point of view and audience very quickly, and a very specific audience.  A poem written in the apostrophic mode is "spoken to" a particular (dead) person, a left foot, a cloud, a mood, a time of day, an idea, another poem, an ideology . . . the figure is limited only by your imagination.

Writing in this mode is actually quite liberating.  I've found that the process frees my mind from more standard notions of audience while at the same time focusing my imagination on a very particular audience.  (It's next to impossible to write anything particular when your poem addresses no one or thing in particular.)

Wednesdays@One contributors found that writing apostrophes helped them come up with new things to say in a poem and new ways to say those things.  They also found that the apostrophe can generate intensely personal language and feeling, perhaps because no matter who or what your poem addresses, in the end, it speaks to you, the poet.

To help them get started, I shared a few poems written as apostrophes . . .


To the Evening Star
                                                ─William Blake (1783)


Thou fair-hair’d angel of the evening,
Now, while the sun rests on the mountains, light
Thy bright torch of love; thy radiant crown
Put on, and smile upon our evening bed!
Smile on our loves; and, while thou drawest the
Blue curtains of the sky, scatter thy silver dew
On every flower that shuts its sweet eyes
In timely sleep. Let thy wet wind sleep on
The lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes,
And wash the dusk with silver. Soon, full soon,
Dost thou withdraw; then the wolf rages wide,
And the lion glares thro’ the dun forest:
The fleeces of our flocks are cover’d with
Thy sacred dew: protect them with thine influence.




Bright Star, Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art
                                                                                       ─John Keats (1838)

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
   Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
   Like nature’s patient, sleepless eremite,
The moving waters at their preistlike task
   Of pure ablution round the earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
   Of snow upon the mountains and the moors;
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
   Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,
   Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
   And so live ever—or else swoon to death.



To a Snail
                                                      ─Marianne Moore (1924)

If “compression is the first grace of style,”
you have it. Contractility is a virtue
as modesty is a virtue.
It is not the acquisition of any one thing
that is able to adorn,
or the incidental quality that occurs
as a concomitant of something well said,
that we value in style,
but the principle that is hid:
in the absence of feet, “a method of conclusions”;
“a knowledge of principles,”
In the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn.



To My Heart at the Close of Day
                                                                   ─Kenneth Koch (2000)

At dusk light you come to bat
As George Trakl might put it. How are you doing
Aside from that, aside from the fact
That you are at bat? What balls are you going to hit
Into the outfield, what runs will you score,
And do you think you ever will, eventually,
Bat one out of the park? That would be a thrill
To you and your contemporaries! Your mighty posture
Takes its stand in my chest and swing swing swing
You warm up, then you take a great step
Forward as the ball comes smashing toward you, home
Plate. And suddenly it is evening.