Love Your (Poetry) Moves

Oh no, the gargoyle sez, not dis too?

Elisa Gabbert brought this to my attention first, with a list of tricks (many/some/all) poets use in writing their masterpieces. At first I thought it was funny, then I looked in my poems folder. Urgh. Most of these quoted gaffes are actually pretty usable, I think, if you know what you're doing, which is after all how it's done: if you can get away with it, it works. Full list at HTMLGiant. Be sure to check it out, but in case you don't, here's a few to strop your razor with. Mike Young is writing--

Well, I thought that sounded like a terrific idea. So here it is, our stab at cataloging 41 popular moves in “contemporary poetry,” an exercise that’s fraught with peril, what with the competing definitions, camps, roles, and processes of “contemporary poetry,” the nebulousness of calling something a “move,” the inevitable non-definitiveness of such a list, and so on, but hey: dancing is fraught with peril too, and no one’s managed to stop me from doing that. So here we go. 41 moves. With mildly related pictures! In no particular order! Please argue and add in the comments. Many thanks to Elisa Gabbert for the bulk of the work on this list.

1) Exposed revision
Example: Alice Fulton’s “About Face“:

At least embarrassment is not an imitation.
It’s intimacy for beginners,
the orgasm no one cares to fake.
I almost admire it. I almost wrote despise.

1b) Variation: Revision by way of “I mean”

Example: “Confession” by Suzanne Wise:

I can only imagine
how hard it must be for you
to believe me. I mean, to hold
blame. I mean, to be you.

2) Starting a line with the final clause from a previous line’s sentence and finishing it with a single short and often fragmentary sentence.

Example: Jack Gilbert’s “Searching for Pittsburgh”:

The rusting mills sprawled gigantically
along three rivers. The authority of them.

3) Abstract epistolary: Using “Dear [abstraction or common object]” in the title or first line.

Examples: Countless. Dear Body: by Dan Machlin, “Dear Final Journey,” by Lynn Emanuel, which begins, “Dear Noose, Dear Necktie, Dear Cravat”

4) The “blank of blank” construction

Examples: From “Marriage Proposal” by Sarah Messer: “I want to be trapped by the cage of your ribs”

From “Synchronized Swimming” by Angela Sorby: “How did decay work its way into the theater of water”

From “I want you to see me” by Kate Greenstreet: “Red and blue and the white of my transparency”

5) Use of “etc.”

Examples:

From “Mezzotint for A” by Ben Lerner: “My better half had left me so I wrote her hemi- / stiches in the half-light of my halfway house, etc.” Jessica Fjeld’s On Animate Life: Its Profligacy, Organ Meats, Etc.

Fun stuff. Watch this space later on next week. I have some muddling-about ideas on Hayden Carruth that I'm going to put up here.

David Oliver Cranmer

Not Just Another Playlist Often, I sit in my swivel chair looking out the window, while jazz, country, or rock music plays. This pleasure goes on for many hours a mystic trance of sorts streaming—the glue maintaining my soul. I turn the best songs into playlists (once we called them mix tapes) puzzling over the perfect order. Does Satchmo’s “What a Wonderful World” kick off my latest list or make it the big soulful closer? And does “Mack the Knife” go higher in the set than “Summertime?” That’s an Ella Fitzgerald duet! “Foolishness? No, it’s not” whether you are climbing a tree to count all the leaves or tapping to beats. These are the joys that bring inner peace and balance (to a cold universe) lifting spirits skyward. David Oliver Cranmer ’s poems, short stories, articles, and essays have appeared in publications such as Punk Noir Magazine , The Five-Two: Crime Poetry Weekly , Needle: A Magazine of Noir , LitReactor , Macmillan’s Criminal Element , and

Corey Mesler

I think of you tonight, my Beats I think of you tonight, my Beats, and I am grateful. I walked the narrow lanes of Academia and never felt at home. There were men and women in the flowerbeds, their heads full of theorems and poems. There were teachers who could lift their own weight in prose. I was lonely. I was too loose. I was a lad from the faraway country of Smarting. But I had you as so many before me. I had you and I knew secret things. I could count on you like a percussion. And now I want to say: I love you. If not for you, what? I want to say. If Allen Ginsberg did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. COREY MESLER has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South . He has published over 25 books of fiction and poetry. His newest novel, The Diminishment of Charlie Cain , is from Livingston Press. He also wrote the screenplay for We Go On , which won The Me

Amy Holman

My mother made herself the deer with a broken leg We saw a deer through the pane into someone else’s yard. The leg moved like a tube sock pinned to the hip and half filled with sticks. I did not like to see it suffer, either. She was upset —my mother —that no one helped the doe. Was it a mother, too? As if we were the first to observe the scene. We weren’t. All had been told to let her be. My mother had suffered a destruction of the self, a divorce, and no one cared. That wasn’t true. We were grown, on our own. I agree it was hard. Yet in those moments of a cold November day, we watched a doe, disabled and enduring, walk across a yard and eat a hedge. I wish she could have seen it like that. Amy Holman is the author of the collection, Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window (Somondoco Press, 2010) and four chapbooks, including the prizewinning Wait for Me, I’m Gone (Dream Horse Press, 2005). Recent poems have been in or accepted by Blueline,

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