riffing with Lucille Clifton

The world lost Lucille Clifton last week. A respected children’s author and poet, she was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, won a National Book Award and the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize.

I have been reading some of her poems. They are spare but they bulge with wisdom and emotion. Through her poem “won’t you celebrate with me,” I learned riffing applies to poetry as well as to music.

Listen to Clifton read her poem here. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=181377

Clifton refers to and echoes poems by Whitman and Keats in her poem. Whitman, who gave us free verse, confidently states “I celebrate myself” in “Song of Myself.” Clifton’s speaker tentatively invites us to celebrate a “kind of life” before discovering the reason for celebration.

Clifton’s speaker is suspended “between starshine and clay.” It’s an echo of Keats’s line “Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay” in “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again.”

Riffing requires that one be well-read, have a good memory and sense the timeless connections between ideas! Thank you, Lucille Clifton.

ekphrastic poetry

William Carlos Williams must have loved exploring Bruegel's art. He interpreted a number of the paintings in his poems. His ekphrastic poems inspired me to complete a poem based on a sketch of artist Jamie Wyeth's COMET.

SENTRIES
after COMET, a painting by Jamie Wyeth

Two sentries
stand rooted to Monhegan stone.
Do they take shifts watching?

Lens polished, one waits
for moonless nights. The other, eyes
shut, listens for turning tides.

The light flashes code.
Comet,
sea tosses up.

Time to
glut your gullet.
Open your eyes.

The sky darkens.
Clouds with purple tints
hint of weather.

Who will sound our alarm,
pry our eyes open
to behold the bruised sky?

What is worth sounding the alarm
in our century?
- Joyce Ray

ekphrasis

A recent visit to my favorite serendipity bookstore (New England Mobile Book Fair in Newton Highlands, MA) did not disappoint. I came away with Linda Sue Park’s Tap Dancing on the Roof: Sijo Poems, Side by Side edited by Jan Greenberg and a gem called Poetry As Spiritual Practice by Robert McDowell.

All these will feed my poetry workshops which begin today. We will use a method to “unpack” poems I learned from Baron Wormser (poet and co-author of A Surge of Language, Teaching Poetry Day by Day.)

The first exercise will explore ekphrasis - writing poetry from art. I love to search for a painting that calls to me on a museum visit. First, I do a “naive poet’s sketch” in pencil (guards approach you if you take out a pen), then jot down thoughts and impressions on the spot. Later, the notes and sketch lead to a poem. Postcard art will be our workshop inspiration.