In our modern age we hear confession as telling a secret, exposing an unflattering reality, or exposing an action that has caused pain. So how can a pastoral poem, an ode, or an ekphrastic poem be confessional?

By the very fact a poet has chosen to write about something shows what that person is passionate about - passion I mean - willing to suffer for… willing to sit in uncomfortableness for.

This in and of itself is confession. Maybe not a confession of guilt or shame or fear, but a confession of who you are. As the etymology suggests, confession comes from the Latin root confiteri, meaning “to acknowledge”. Every choice we make as poets about what goes and what stays on the page is an acknowledgement of who we are and where we are— what we value, how we see, what we want to say as writers. The topic, the form, the syntax, the vocabulary, the line length, the double meanings entwined within the enjambments, they are all painting an experience that is a

fragment of our experience whether or not it is through a metaphor or an extended imagination. The fact is, if you thought of it, it is part of who you are. That acknowledgement is a confession.

People are afraid to put themselves on the page, but love it when others do because it creates connection. The process of it is the “emotional labour” that writer Mahtem Shiferraw speaks about. It is the stage in writing a poem between inspiration/notes and crafting it into a polished piece. The stage of emotional labour is when the “stake” is revealed to us. The stake is what the heart of the poem is, the risk, the confession of where you are. Often coming through as fragments of writing, then listening, writing then listening; listening to identify what is the difference between what you are thinking you are saying, and what is on the page. Asking over and over “What are you really saying. What are you afraid to say?” is more of an internal process than one on the page. This emotional labour is what bridges the gap. This bridge is the bridge of confession, mapped in your heart, sweat and tears, and constructed with the timbers of craft. It is the very thing the reader walks across to get from the words on the page to the experience the poem embodies.

Śivani

GET MY DETAILED HANDOUT FOR CLOSE READING AS A WRITER - All paid subscribers on my substack can receive my handout detailing the steps to close reading and breaking down a poem from a writers perspective by clicking here.

Subscribe now

This weeks poetry tips and considerations…

1. New Echos… This week was our third, and final week of New Echos, our deep dive into poetry that honours, quotes, creates conversation with, and is inspired by other poet’s published work. Celebrating Leila Chatti’s latest collection “Wilderness Before Something Sublime” this week we explored how to honour a poem by recreating the skeleton of an existing poem. This in no way plagiarizes what is written, but the pattern of the poem. For example, if the poem you are working with starts with an image, is followed by a statement and then a clarifying statement, then you start your poem with an image, followed by a statement and then a clarifying statement etc. This is a great way to use the skeleton of a poem you know works to explore how through your own muse and syntax you can create something. Think of it how in music many songs are created using the same chord progression, yet rhythm, tempo, lyrics, and tone can be completely different creating a unique song. Yet, at the heart of it, the chord progression is the same.

2. Which brings us to the biggest wrench in our writers toolbox: our ability to close-read other peoples work. I find a lot of writing fatigue or writer’s block comes from believing it all has to come from us; that we need all the answers all the time. Exhausted, we are writing from a lack of capacity, which is to say, we have stopped breathing. The reality is, writing is the exhale, and reading is the inhale. You can’t do one without the other. By reading broadly and often, the kernels of inspiration and poetic tools, including what craft skeleton a poem is built upon, stay at the forefront as we encounter challenges in our own writing . If there is a poem coming through you that deals with a specific tone or challenge (abuse, heartbreak, grief) seek out poems that write in this tone or to this topic successfully and then map out the skeleton of how the poem is laid out. It take’s a lot of the heavy lifting out of the equation and allows you to enjoy the exploration of birthing your poem.

GET MY DETAILED HANDOUT FOR CLOSE READING AS A WRITER - All paid subscribers on my substack will receive my handout detailing the steps to close reading and breaking down a poem from a writer’s perspective here.

If you enjoy these tips, please consider supporting my work by becoming a free or paid subscriber

Subscribe now

3. The final technique we explored in our New Echo’s workshop was another form that Chatti has brought forth which is that of Divining. This technique is to quickly flip through a piece of written work or collection, and without focusing or actively reading, let your eye catch a word or two on each page. Jot these words down as you go, thus creating a word bank for you to write your own piece from. This is a great way to loosen up and play, especially after you have been doing a stint of writing that has been intense emotional labour. These poems create new and fantastical syntax, surprising juxtapositions and works that are playful, but the most important aspect of them is that they keep the energy flowing in you, they keep the conversation going, and you writing.

Happy Writing everyone!

Śivani

GET MY DETAILED HANDOUT FOR CLOSE READING AS A WRITER - All paid subscribers on my substack can receive my handout detailing the steps to close reading and breaking down a poem from a writers perspective by clicking here.

Share

Recently I was sitting with a cuppa trying to trace back to the first time I ever felt love for language. Without too much effort I pinpointed it to the beginning of fourth form, or in American terms, my sophomore year, when I was placed in an English class that was about to do a deep dive into sentence structure and advanced grammar. I was on cloud nine. There was a spark in me that ignited, and the seed of maybe I was put on this world to write was planted. The rush of learning what makes a story a world to enter had me reared up and ready to devour anything and everything in the subject of literature.

Then, the next day, during said English class, I was removed in front of my peers from

the class and inserted into a lower level class for people not as intelligent: people who would never be taught sentence structure. Funny looking at it now, how quickly my love of language got scabbed over with a core memory of shame. To learn grammar was to first experience shame, and so I vowed to never know what a verb was. (I have rectified this more recently than I’m willing to admit here.)

It would be almost thirty years until I allowed myself to entertain the idea that maybe I could write, that maybe my voice had value.

It’s these experiences of internalized dualism that fascinate me. How our beliefs become our reality, how, to a school administrator, an insignificant reshuffling became, to me, a silent scab over something beautiful, resulting in something that lit me up at a core level, something I loved (yes i was reading Flowers in the Attic and the Duncton Wood Series), being gatekept by a memory of pain. And how writing into that can create more beauty because of the depth of shadow it is born from.

“There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” Leonard Cohen

I think this is why writing into the shadow in our poetry is so powerful. Because by writing into the wound, by acknowledging it, by naming it, we are lifting the scab that has covered something beautifully delicate within us. Writing through the wound allows us to see what is beneath it, the hope, the love. And this creates powerful poetry. Poetry that at once bares the soul, not to shame but to let the love beneath the shame, the Oneness, the interconnectedness beneath be experienced.

Śivani

GET MY DETAILED HANDOUT FOR CLOSE READING AS A WRITER - All paid subscribers on my substack can receive my handout detailing the steps to close reading and breaking down a poem from a writers perspective by clicking here.

Subscribe now

This weeks poetry tips and considerations…

1. New Echos… This week was our second of deep diving into the forms of poetry that honour, quote, are in conversation with, and are inspired by other poet’s published work. Celebrating Leila Chatti’s latest collection “Wilderness Before Something Sublime” this week we first looked at poems that honour the found, through borrowing a line, golden shovels, golden hinges (a technique Chatti coined herself). Noting how by using a borrowed line from another poet (when cited appropriately) can continue a conversation. It is advised to have your poem start with your borrowed line, or have it appear in the middle of your poem, while having your borrowed line at the end of your poem is ill advised as we want the creation of a poem to be a discovery. If your final line is already pre destined then there is no place for the poem to show you what it wants to be. This however, is not the same as using a quote from another writer as a way of holding an ending out of sentimentality. As in this case, the quoted line is never pre destined… it is always part of this discovery as can be seen in Melissa McKinstry’s brilliant Showering My Son.

2. A second technique we examined was honouring a poem by borrowing the final word from each line and writing your own poem into each word. For example one of our community members, Kathy Sullivan, worked with Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice”

   1. Some say the world will end in fire,

      Some say in ice.

      From what I’ve tasted of desire

      I hold with those who favor fire.

      But if it had to perish twice,

      I think I know enough of hate

      To say that for destruction ice

      Is also great

      And would suffice.

Kathy then borrowed each of the final words from Frost’s poem and wrote her own way into a poem that both honoured Frost and created something uniquely her.

1. Fire and Ice

   - after Robert Frost

   Tonight we gathered by the fire

   with drinks on ice.

   The evening sparkled with desire,

   we turned marshmallows into fire.

   If this affair should happen twice

   and longing smiles turned into hate

   I think your heart enrobed in ice

   would burn so great

   I’d not suffice.

By Kathy Sullivan (Versed Community Member)

This technique is particually helpful for students who want to play with writing traditional forms such as Sonnets and Villanelles.

GET MY DETAILED HANDOUT FOR CLOSE READING AS A WRITER - All paid subscribers on my substack will receive my handout detailing the steps to close reading and breaking down a poem from a writer’s perspective here.

If you enjoy these tips, please consider supporting my work by becoming a free or paid subscriber

Subscribe now

3. The final take away from this class was how by honouring another poet’s work in these ways, or as we say “by calling in the lineage” of the poets who came before, this opens up more space for the reader’s schema to come into the reader. This creates another layer of understanding, perspective, and another layer of context and conversation within the poem. Such as beautifully demonstrated by John Murillo’s poem Variation on a Theme by Elizabeth Bishop.

Happy Writing everyone!

Śivani

GET MY DETAILED HANDOUT FOR CLOSE READING AS A WRITER - All paid subscribers on my substack can receive my handout detailing the steps to close reading and breaking down a poem from a writers perspective by clicking here.

Share

This weeks poetry tips and considerations…

1. New Echos… This week we started a three week session that is deep diving into the forms of poetry that honour, quote, are in conversation with, and are inspired by other poet’s published work. Celebrating Leila Chatti’s latest collection “Wilderness Before Something Sublime” we took at look at poems created from ‘word banks’ and ‘antipodes’ or opposite poems. Firstly, from “Wilderness…” we close read one of Chatti’s poems “The Thirtieth Year” (20) which is a word-bank poem that she created from the vocabulary used by Lucille Clifton’s poem “My Thirty Eighth Year”, and secondly, we close read an antipode (opposite) poem where Chatti write into the opposite of Sylvia Plath’s “Three Women” to create her own “One Woman” (6). One of the take aways from this class was a conversation around debunking plagiarism. How by properly citing, crediting in the notes, and/or using “after…” as an epigraph gives the reader the proper awareness on how the poem they are reading is in conversation, through form or a borrowed line, with an original by another poet. Transparency is key. With a limitation guideline being to only “borrow” or quote a single line/phrase from a poem, that way it becomes an honouring and not an act of stealing or plagiarism.

2. A second take away from this class was looking at the antipode poem (or an opposite poem) and how we engage with it. Do we write the opposite word by word, line by line, or phrase by phrase? How does this change your poem? It was also interesting to discuss the level of close reading and analysis required to write an antipode that “works”, and by works I mean stands on it’s own as a poem. Sometimes when we come across poems that we don’t relate two, or don’t resonate with we reject it with a dismissive “it’s not for me”, but by challenging oneself to write an antipode of this poem we have to come into a much deeper understanding and appreciation for the original in order to write something (the opposite) that does resonate with you. By spending this much focused time with a poem that would have previously been dismissed, we are rewiring our readers brain to explore the art on the page and not just how it stands in relation to ourselves.

GET MY DETAILED HANDOUT FOR CLOSE READING AS A WRITER - All paid subscribers on my substack will receive my handout detailing the steps to close reading and breaking down a poem from a writer’s perspective here.

If you enjoy these tips, please consider supporting my work by becoming a free or paid subscriber

Subscribe now

3. The final take away from this class came out of a discussion from the word-bank homework assignment. This was to write a poem using a word-bank of Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”. To see a poem that has such an emotional connection for so many, a poem so rich in imagery and meaning being broken down into 5 x ‘and’, 2 x ‘over’, and 2 x ‘wild’ etc shows just how powerful syntax, line length, form, and our unique voice is. There are no ‘fancy’ words in the poem. The magic, the thing that stays with us is purely in the craft used by the poet. It is in us to create lines that heal, that change, that are cherished we “only have to let the soft animal of your body/ love what it loves.”

Happy Writing everyone!

Śivani

GET MY DETAILED HANDOUT FOR CLOSE READING AS A WRITER - All paid subscribers on my substack can receive my handout detailing the steps to close reading and breaking down a poem from a writers perspective by clicking here.

Share

This weeks poetry tips and considerations…

1. Through the Looking Glass… This week was our fourth and final week of our workshop on revision: “Into the Looking Glass”. One of the main points that came up this week was the importance of bringing yourself to the page, which is to say, not omitting yourself, the speaker, from the poem. This does not always mean you are writing poems with a speaker centric orientation, but more that when the emotional pull of what you are writing is not clear in yourself we will often try and avoid bringing ourselves to the page because of fear or shame. From this we ‘write other things’, we write around things, we look at 180 degrees and write something beautiful in our absence. But the reality is, the fact we are writing it means we are present. And this needs to be acknowledged, even internally, and in the drafts, so that even if it lays in the whitespace of a poem, the vulnerability of the writer is still present.

2. Another point that we covered in class was that it is OK for the first draft of a poem to not have conscious craft elements. Sometimes these come through in the notes, or the way a line organically forms has a craft element it from the start. I find that enjambments are often one craft element that sometimes comes through early in my writing process, but in the first draft of a poem what is more important is understanding the stake (where the risk/ the vulnerability is), the emotional pull, and where the tension is, because it is these aspects that the craft in a poem scaffolds or supports.

GET MY DETAILED HANDOUT FOR CLOSE READING AS A WRITER - All paid subscribers on my substack will receive my handout detailing the steps to close reading and breaking down a poem from a writer’s perspective here.

If you enjoy these tips, please consider supporting my work by becoming a free or paid subscriber

Subscribe now

3. The last point that I wanted to share about this week was a quote from one of our community members Shruti where she shared some thoughts on the process of one of my poems “here no Bellbird sings” that I shared from initial dictated notes from my phone, to the final poem that is being published by as part of the LemonLight Prize’s Anthology in September 2026. “[one of the] biggest takeaways was just seeing the sheer number of revisions, the amount of time between them, and the many changes that take place from version to version. As readers we normally don’t get to see that, and it was really motivating to see the hard work between a poems’ conception and it’s published version”

I’m taking the next week off from teaching, but will be back with a 3 week sandbox playtime called “Echos” where we will explore different ways of honouring and writing with exsisting lines and poems.

Happy Writing everyone!

Śivani

GET MY DETAILED HANDOUT FOR CLOSE READING AS A WRITER - All paid subscribers on my substack can receive my handout detailing the steps to close reading and breaking down a poem from a writers perspective by clicking here.

Share

This weeks poetry tips and considerations…

1. Through the Looking Glass… This week was our third week of our four week workshop on revision: “Into the Looking Glass”. One of the main points that came up this week was, as part of the importance of naming the stake of your poem, is to understand the emotion of that stake. If you are not clear as to the emotion (energy in motion) that you are seeding into the poem, it makes it more chellenging to know what imagery, syntax and other craft choices to make. If we are clear on the emotion, and by association the opposite of that emotion, we can start to understand how the tension is crafted into the poem.

2. Another point that we covered in class was the different ways readers/workshoping can be used in the revision process. The chellenge is, that readers need to be engaging with the poem AFTER you are clear on the stake (can you answer in one sentence “what do you want this poem to be about?”) if you are presenting it as a finished draft, or, if you are not yet clear on the stake then stating that to your reader that this as the stage this poem is at. When we present finished drafts in workshop but are not yet clear on what the stake is in the poem, then often feedback from fellow workshopers or readers can lead us a stray, for in the absense of clarity around what the stake is, the reader will naturally insert their own from their own schema as you have left this aspect of the poem to be a wide open window with a freshly baked pie on the sill for the taking.

   ---

   • GET MY DETAILED HANDOUT FOR CLOSE READING AS A WRITER - All paid subscribers on my substack will receive my handout detailing the steps to close reading and breaking down a poem from a writers perspective here.

   If you enjoy these tips, please consider supporting my work by becoming a free or paid subscriber

3. The last point that I wanted to share about this week was how I personally have found a practice of writing parallel when finding myself stuck, or paralyzed around the process of revision. On a recent poem I had workshoped I had recieved some feedback that was in part enlightening, and in part derailing of both the poem and myself as a writer. I found that when I went to revise that poem into it’s next draft I was too anxious to “make a mistake” or “get it wrong”. So one thing I did was opened up a separate screen on my computer so the poem’s revision was on the left, and my blank page was on the right, and then i wrote a messy draft about my experiance of being scared to write wrongly. When all that energy was dissapated, I looked at my poem with fresher eyes and got to work. After a little while I started to doubt myself again in the revision process, so I turned back to my right screen and continued to “work” on a poem about being paralized with shame and fear. I went back and forth this way until I ended up with two complete drafts of two different poems. By doing this I was able to move the energy of my fear without tainting that fear into the new draft.

Happy Writing and revising everyone!

Śivani

Share

This weeks poetry tips and considerations…

1. Through the Looking Glass… This week was our second week of our four week workshop on revision: “Into the Looking Glass”. One of the main takeaways from this class was how after the “stake” of the poem or the emotional vulnerability has been clearly identified then the revision process through “craft” is the vehicle that ferries the poem from something that is very personal to the poet into something that can stand alone out in the world where the reader will have their own experience of the poem. Which is to say, it is the craft in the revision process that transmutes the raw emotion that has come through in the notes into a draft that the reader can feel through their own lens.

2. Another aspect that we covered in this class was the concept of tension between outer and inner realities and how it is this tension that allows the poem to stand up, come alive. When the situation of the poem is clear, then the tension comes when the emotion has an ambiguous or conflicting tone. When the situation has a dreamlike, or vague ambiguous feel, then to balance that the emotional or inner reality needs to be crisp and defined. When both situation and emotion canvas are both ambiguous then the poem deflates into vagueness with nothing for the reader to hold on to, no doors or windows properly formed for their schema to enter. Similarly when both the situation and emotional canvas are clearly defined the poem takes on the tone of forcing an experience, or telling the reader what to experience rather than creating space for them to enter the poem.

   ---

   • GET MY DETAILED HANDOUT FOR CLOSE READING AS A WRITER - All paid subscribers on my substack will receive my handout detailing the steps to close reading and breaking down a poem from a writers perspective here.

   If you enjoy these tips, please consider supporting my work by becoming a free or paid subscriber

3. The last point that I wanted to share about this week was the importance of reading the poem out loud: to yourself, to your cat/dog/tree friend. Very quickly you will hear points in the poem where the momentum, musicality, rhythm, sonic structure, scansion all flow, and when they do not. Sometimes our eyes don’t pick up rhyme or slant rhyme in quite the same way our tongue does. Then recorded it in a voice note to send to a trusted reader. You will be surprised at how you hear the poem differently on the recording when there is a chance of another human is going to experience it.

Happy Writing and deep listening everyone!

Śivani

Share

“I write because I cannot paint.”

For me, this collection resonated alongside collections such as Kate Durbin’s 2021 Horders, or Maggie Nelson’s 2009 Bluets. There are writers who take words and make them into art, and there are writers like Kapil, who make art with words. As someone who feels they sit in the ‘take words and make them into art’ category, this collection pushed me into seeing in a new way. A way that reminded me of Art school in the early 2000’s when I first came across Jackson Pollock’s Number One, 1950 (Lavender Mist). There were two types of people who interacted with the work. Those who stood in front of it, hold it separate from themselves and demanded to see what was in there, what it meant, or revealed, as though it was a autostereogram of the ‘90’s and all that was required was to soften your gaze and let the ‘image’ appear, and there were those who brought the work ‘into’ them and saw the art not for what was seen on the outside, but what was revealed inside themselves while they experienced or interacting with it. It is the latter of these experiences that I feel that Kapil’s collection holds its magic.

“Number One, 1950 (Lavender Mist) by Jackson Pollock.”

From a craft perspective, one of the most beautiful aspects of this collection was the fierce feminine voice as a collective, rather than a individual speaker, and because of this centering how, refreshingly, the males featured sat in a place of support character that instigated or opened the door for statements brutally honest or considered taboo in most cultural circles. “The tangles of my menstrual hair. The swell of my lower body.// I can smell myself. “I knew this woman,” he said, “Her vagina smelled/ of flowers. Have you ever considered using a douche?” (91)

Then there was the ‘poem’ on page 72, Tell me what you know about dismemberment. Which simply said “I miss your bones.” At first glance, if I’m honest, I disregarded the single statement that took up the whole page, and moved on. But then, I found myself returning to it like an abstract work of art, and felt in myself run a full gambit of experience from those four words. Dismissal, avoidance, intellectualizing, grief from the simple word ‘miss’, which then carved itself into the marrow of me as though ‘bones’ was an instruction. And from those four words I cried for a feeling with no one name and no one narrative. It reminded me of Tyree Daye’s poem that came alive for me as performance art with the names on the stones (53) in his collection A Little Bump in the Earth, where Daye invites the reader to “say their names/ like they will walk from the next room/ with their eyes kissed onto you…” (52) and then finishing the list with “exit here but take what you’ve felt with you” (55). Here, Kapil poem’s simple statement in quotation marks, requires the reader to ‘say’ and thus identify with the statement, again taking four words on the page and creating an experience from them.

This was a collection that dangled obscure vocabulary like diamond droplet earings with words like peristaltic, aqueous, vampirical, alveoli, and isthmus, and created tension by having using opposites in the text or between the text and titles, such as “Have you prepare(d) for your death?// Her first memory…” (66), “Describe a morning… [...] I threw it out the window last winter, at night, when the bone stars/ were rising in the trees.” (58) or “I dream in HTML. [...] I wake in terror.” (82).

But the consistent thread woven throughout this collection was Kapil’s lyrical prowess.

With lines like “She has been sleeping for a long time. Brown crystals, like sugar, in the corners of her eyes.” (50) or “The politics of the membrane: there are pathways from the outside to the inside, and back again. The delirious spaces between atoms.” (52) or a favourite “As if our responsibilities to each other end at the border of our countries, or at our cities, or half-way across our cities, or at our backdoors, or at our skins. No.” (33)

For me, this collection is a Pollock in words. Something that bypasses the mind, and speaks directly to the soul. Something that whispers in collective echos of the feminine transcending time and space. It truly is a work of art.

Works Cited

Kapil, Bhanu . The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers. Kelsey St. Press : [Distributed by Small Press Distribution], 2001.

“Flash Briefing: Bhanu Kapil’s Intro: ‘The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers’ by The Poetry Vlog (TPV): A Poetry, Arts, & Social Justice Teaching Channel.” Spotify for Creators, https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/thepoetryvlog/episodes/Flash-Briefing-Bhanu-Kapils-Intro-The-Vertical-Interrogation-of-Strangers-e2dlie. Accessed 21 Aug. 2025.

Durbin, Kate. Hoarders. Wave Books, 2021.

Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. Wave Books, 2009.

Daye, Tyree. A Little Bump in the Earth. Copper Canyon Press, 2024.

“Number One, 1950 (Lavender Mist) by Jackson Pollock.” Jackson Pollock, https://www.jackson-pollock.org/lavender-mist.jsp. Accessed 21 Aug. 2025.

This weeks poetry tips and considerations…

1. Through the Looking Glass… This week we had our first of four sessions on revision with our workshop “Through the Looking Glass”. In this class we did a deep dive not into the revision process, but what happens BEFORE the revision process. This is the deep listening process. A step that is often skipped over, engaged with as a means only to an end, or at best only resides in the semi conscious part of our writing experiance. This stage comes after a free-write or notes, and before the revision process starts. It’s when we listen for the stake of the poem; the “why” this poem is needed; identify the narrative and the emotional vulnerability of the poem; feel and then write into risk of it. It’s here we come into clarity about what the poem wants to be about, not what we want the poem to be about. This “emotional labour” as Mahtem Shifferaw calls it, is needed to bring the stake into clarity in order to birth the poem; a process that can take hours, days, even sometimes years.

2. The second tip for consideration that came out of this class was that you can’t revise something until you know what it is about. Before you get out your revision goggles it is often important to ask yourself “can i say what this poem wants to be about?”. To do this many writers, myself included, try, or have tried, to use the revision/crafting process as a way of finding out, or excavating what the poem is about; crafting it into clarity. This is akin to pruning the first leaves off a tomato before you know what varient of tomato you are growing: Brandywine’s have a different structure and purpose to water-falling cherry tomatoes. You can’t shape something you don’t understand the purpose of.

   ---

   • GET MY DETAILED HANDOUT FOR CLOSE READING AS A WRITER - All paid subscribers on my substack will receive my handout detailing the steps to close reading and breaking down a poem from a writers perspective here.

   If you enjoy these tips, please consider supporting my work by becoming a free or paid subscriber

3. The last tip I want to leave here that came up in this session was how metaphors work best when they are used to reveal not conceal. Using metaphors early on in the revision process can sometimes, ok––often, show us where we are hiding from clarity. (See my post Let Me Make Myself Clear) Sometimes when we are writing something challenging, raw, vulnerable, our conscious mind will bring us to the page through a metaphor, but, it is so important to clear away these layers into absolute clarity before setting a metaphor in concrete. We do this by asking ourselves, “does the clarity of the message stand without the metaphor? Does the metaphor do the heavy lifting of the point? Or, does it reveal deeper layers or accessibility to the point? This way, you will be able to see how the metaphor is being used, wether it reveals deeper layers of what you are really saying or obscuring honesty behind ornate fear.

Happy Writing and deep listening everyone!

Śivani

Share

Reference. From How I Write: Ada Limón & Joy Harjo: Everything I Learned From The World’s Greatest Poets | How I Write, Sep 17, 2025

“Isn’t it enough to offer this confusion in its own chalice, for all it’s worth?”

Night of a Thousand Blossoms (2004), the fourth poetry collection released by Gaspar, is an unassuming book, with a bold, warm palleted, yet simple cover of a white blossom, the moon, and a monarch butterfly. I say unassuming because it is only 45 poems––it’s fairly thin, split into three sections, but, with the opening quotes being from Novalis and Frank O’Hara, and the entrance to each section donning a quote by Kabir, Flannery O’Connor and Hart Crane respectively, I should have clued in that this book is not a big portion, but leaves you hungry, offering. Its a collection where each poem is a condensed, rich entree paired with a fine wine you don’t dare drink: you swirl, smell, sip and savour––every line, every choice of word, every craft decision. The flavours are complex and hard to pin down, which could leave one frustrated if the assignment was to produce a recipe for recreation. (which as a writer––it always is.) But if the point is to enjoy the meal, it’s delicious.

One of the overwhelming crafting aspects of this collection, found in almost every poem that I have not seen explored to this extent before, was Gaspar’s use of the question. Where in most collections I see the question used as a way of engaging the reader in self contemplation, or a false humbling on the speaker’s part to appear not to have the answer already, Gaspar’s use of the question appears to be a way of deepening the speaker’s wonder at the ineffable, creating a wormhole to the mystery that the speaker has no intention of demystifying. Such as in, For the Womb is a Great World (38) where the epigraph is a quote from the Gnostic Gospels, and the poem explores holy books and the different worlds that they seem to inhabit compared to our modern day interpretations with unanswerable questions “How to fathom the minds of the Gnostics? And why? How to grasp/ that the anus is the first mouth? How to understand the instruction/ concerning erections, concerning the right way to release the seed, and/ what do they mean by being orderly in the act?”. Subsequently in If I Looked for the One Art (49) we find that as soon as the poem’s opening statement is established the speaker asks “If I looked for the one art,/ where would I find it? How would I know it? If you were/ my brother in this struggle, how would you stand by me? If/ you were my sister in these vanities, how would you direct me?” Many of the questions posed in the poems seemed to be rhetorical as a way to give the speaker purpose to keep going, to keep writing, dare I say, to keep living, so long as the questions aren’t resolved. Repeatedly, this technique seemed to be used to create a bigger container for the poem, rather than being worried about reader engagement. It was as though the speaker was a muttering old man trying to tease out sense from half a riddle, and the result was an intimacy with the speaker that at once made my inner world feel seen.

Another crafting aspect that created a really unique linking quality to seemingly different threads of a braid was found in One Thousand Blossoms (5) where the speaker starts by talking about Krishna’s teaching on right action, by using the word ‘obscured’ and then continues to link this word with ‘blanket’, ‘dampness that sits like velvet’ and ‘covered’. Each use, connecting to a different thread, but linking them together masterfully. “Didn’t he say a fire is obscured by smoke? You can’t see far/ into the city on a night like this, the blanket, the cool smell/ of the seat, the dampness that sits like velvet on the rose bushes/ and the African lilies and the fenders of the neighbour’s truck./ You don’t want less love––this ground has been covered before––”

The last crafting aspect I’d like to shine a light on is, ironically, Gaspar’s beginnings to his poems. While each poem has a human speaker, and is speaking outwardly, whether it’s to the reader, a god, or the higher self is often not as clear, rarely did the poem start with the ego, or ‘I’ orientation. More often than not it made a statement that was equally anchored and obscure demonstrating something Gaspar said to me in a workshop recently - and I quote loosely, “If the speaker demands you believe the first statement, the poem can create it’s own cosmos.” Some examples of this for me were “Surely it is too late to ponder this widening of the heart,/ for the hour is uncertain, and sleep, that lost art, offers’ no map.” (12) or, “Now there is complete madness under the spring stars of Gemini,/ for something is breaking the darkness into a thousand greedy songs./ It is a thousand crickets chirping and a thousand frogs peeping,/ making up another swarm of stars.” (37) and one of my favourites, “The problem is being a fragment trying to live out a whole life./ From this, everything follows. Or the problem is being/ fractured and preoccupied with one’s own mending, which/ lasts as long as you do and comes with its legion of distractions.” (56)

While on the first read, I may not have immediately found the poems to make easy/logical ‘sense’, I could always ‘sense’ them. They were honest in a way that is rare, and from a writer’s perspective, humbling. Each poem captures the nuance, complexity, and absurdity of the human experience, while simultaneously holding it as sacred: full of moments worthy of the writer’s, and the reader’s, time. Poems that make no apology, ask for no flattering light; simply bear witness to the unique, but shared experience, the way only the wise can. And in the eternal words of Mary Oliver offered on the back cover “I felt in his voice no attempt to persuade me of anything. I felt only the abiding imperative to get it right. Which is, of course, what real writing is all about.”

Works Cited

Gaspar, Frank. Night of a Thousand Blossoms. Alice James Books, 2004.

Image: Georges Braque, 1911-12, Man with a Guitar

“This is not a lamentation, damn it./ This is a love song./ This is a love song.”

Abani’s 2010 Sanctificum is a book-length sequence of 18 linked poems. From the short seven line letter with Dear Yusef Komunyakaa: (86) to the 12 segment poem Pilgrimidge (57) every line reads as a meticulous masterpiece in craft that paints poems with hues of juxtaposition and linked abstraction, mixed in with incredible vulnerability woven through with the speaker’s past, family and experiences of the world.

From the very first poem OM (3) I was fascinated by Abani’s use of syntax and line. With the precision of a scalpel he seemed to utilize varied line structure through lyrical image, directive/action, experience of a secondary sense, statement - explanation - clarification, speech, confession/complicity and question. In the first segment alone Abani moves from image to a statement that introduces the sense of hearing, to clarification using pattern. “There is no sea. But only sea.” Moving then to current observation, then memory, through a confession and into a reciting of a Latin prayer and then directive. This section is contained through the linking the opening line, “The hills of my childhood are purple with dusk and wings––/ guinea fowl launched like a prayer to the still forming moon.” to the final thought through the concept of prayer “I never told anyone that every sliver of an orange I ate/ was preceded by words from high mass./ per omnia saecula saeculorum./ Spit out pit. Amen./ Juice. Amen. Flesh.”

Another interesting pattern I noted within this first poem OM (3) was how each segment swapped between stating a speaker identification or “I” in the poem with segments that did not have this and were written with a more omnipresent tone. It was as though Abani was straddling dimensions between human identification and oneness with each segment, and thus asking the reader to do the same, as supported by the poem’s title “OM” - which is the primordial sound of all creation and transcends duality.

One of the aspects that seemed to cushion Abani’s use of abstract leaps and juxtapositions was an exquisite anchoring of the lyrical imagery. From Divination - segment 1 (19). “In Bean’s voice, Aygi returns as a girl/ slender with olive in her eyes and a smile––/ and snow, again snow, the cadence soft, falling.” Here the line starts with imagery using the word “Olive” which links to the mention of “Palestinian” in line 3, and then moves into, repetition “snow, again snow” creating a deepening into lulled quiet/maybe even peace, “cadence soft” and movement “falling” this line held so much energy. Further down the segment is another line of beautiful lyricism, “Things wear the musk of elegy./ and maybe even a ghost. A double/ rising like light from a wet road.” In this segment as a whole, the juxtaposed lines are linked through “grave” “dead” “mourns” “returns” “ghost” “skeleton” “death” and “merciful”. To have a section of a poem start with talking about the “Palestinian dead”, to bombs, to taking a flight and landing, to a woman on an “African roadside”, but having these seemingly different ‘topics’ held together by the same key, the same pallet was truly delicious.

Another striking aspect of this collection was Abani’s powerful use of confession and complicity such as in Pilgrimage - segment 1. (60) “Christ! Mercy! Jesus!/ This is my cry, too. I have seen, but I am still lost. / The fog will not part no matter how long I strike/ my staff against stone./ There are slavers in my ancestry, slaves too./ Some nights I wake with the bitter of rusty chains/ on my tongue, a whip in my hand.”. Another example of Abani’s rich lyricism punctuated with confession/complicity is in Histories segment 8 (85) where the speaker opens with “When you first see a man die/ from a machete cut or a bullet,/ which is to say, when you first confront / the astonishment of blood and feel it/ creep over your skin like a sugary sludge…” and sidles into a statement of contradiction “you feel sick in ways you thought not possible./ A deep and wonderful bile/ that can never leaves your stomach.” then concludes with “After that, people can die around you day and night/ and you go on without notice./ My capacity for it scares me.”

This collection I found to be a masterclass on craft at a level that, before now, I have not been able to start to comprehend, and the thing I am most excited about, is that I freely admit that the majority of its craft and artistry I still don’t comprehend––yet. It is a collection that, like Man with a Guitar, I want to have open and accessible in the house so I can interact with it often, let it marinate, let it grow on me, or more accurately, hold space for me to grow into it.

Works Cited

Abani, Christopher. Sanctificum. Copper Canyon Press, 2010.

“File:Georges Braque, 1911-12, Man with a Guitar (Figure, L’homme à La Guitare), Oil on Canvas, 116.2 x 80.9 Cm (45.75 x 31.9 in), Museum of Modern Art, New York.Jpg.” Wikipedia, 2 Feb. 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Georges_Braque,_1911-12,_Man_with_a_Guitar_(Figure,_L%E2%80%99homme_%C3%A0_la_guitare),_oil_on_canvas,_116.2_x_80.9_cm_(45.75_x_31.9_in),_Museum_of_Modern_Art,_New_York.jpg&oldid=1069405378.

“Black marks/ On paper/ Or parchment, / Painted/ On bark./ What magic/ At work here?”

Concerning the Book That is the Body of the Beloved, first published in 2005, Orr’s ninth poetry collection, consists of five sections and a total of 174 poems. Each titleless poem starts with a simple graphic of a three-lobed leaf, and each poem is so precise and condense, all but a handful fit onto one page. And even though the poems were ‘short’, they were so deep and intricate I couldn’t read more than a dozen at a time before I needed to take a break and absorb what had been offered.

Orr’s voice, or tone in this collection is extremally consistent. It does not waiver into playing, or experimenting, with form or content, more so, each poem comes across so secure in who he is and what wants to be written through him, it is as though he started each poem first with “Let me tell you…”, and then erased the line as a final step of completion. Each poem has something to share, but not preach, something internal to explore, but not flaunt. It is comes across to me as a record of a life well lived, experienced to the marrow in both love and loss.

From a craft perspective, I found it fascinating how Orr established an understanding for the reader, in the first dozen or so poems, of the interchangeable terms or ingredients or perhaps a Russian Doll aspect of his perception of the Beloved that then became a thread of light sewn into any poem where if he mentioned one of these words, all of the others were mentally recited (even if just energetically) in a single heartbeat. For example, offered on the page before section one starts it reads “Resurrection of the body of the beloved,/ Which is the world./ Which is the poem/ of the world, the poem of the body.” Thus linking the words beloved, world, poem, and body. Then in the first poem, he adds the term book to his ingredients list that is then woven throughout the collection. “As an anthologist might collect/ All the poems that matter/ Into a single book, a book/ Which is the body of the beloved,/ Which is the world.” (9). I feel that this subtally, and simply, created a tangible distillation of the Kosha’s (sheaths of perception) from the ineffable Beloved (Divine), into the all inclusive world (reality), capturing or honoring the experience of the body (human) into the poem (word/language) held in the book (Akashic records).

A craft aspect that Orr employs, that I have written about before, but feel bears repeating in brief here, is how he never delineates the beloved in a poem as masculine or feminine but always both. He does this by lyrically speaking of the beloved as both he and she in the same poem. Such as “Those dreams in which a phantom/ Of the beloved appears: those/ Are a true haunting. A trick/ Of the mind to make you think/ She’s lost, that he will never/ Come again.” (34)

I also enjoyed the way Orr includes harks back to poets of old. Perhaps as a way of honouring lineage: as a way of bringing the light of these poets back into center stage, showing how they too wrote in the book that is the Beloved. Such as his poem that speaks of Sappho, a 6th Century BCE Greek poet “When Sappho wrote:/ “Whatever one loves most/ Is beautiful,” she began/ The poems, of the hear’s praise/ That comprise the Book/ Of the body of the beloved/ Which is the world.” In this same style Orr also included Wordsworth: “As Wordsworth said, remove/ “The dust of custom” so things/ Shine again” (98), Dickinson “How did Emily/ Dicinson/ Write those poems?// The beloved must/ Have stood/ Beside her, / Handing her words/ Like spears.” (123) and Keats “Therefore (as Keats put it),/ “On every morrow/ Are we wreathing/ Flower bands/ To bind us to the earth.”// Which is to say:...” (190).

The last aspect of craft I want to mention here is Orr’s ability to instruct without giving instruction through his prowess of the lyric and movement. Offered in both an objective way as with his poem “You went to the reading/ Eager to hear the poet’s voice,/ Believing the feeling/ Would be there as well/ As in the words themselves.// How disappointing it was/ Reading as if half asleep himself,/ As if she couldn’t care less.” (168) or a self explorative way, with his poem that also employs anaphora to create momentum “The poem didn’t express/ Emotion; it was emotion. / And so was I/ As I became the poem,/ As I read it aloud,/ As I rose from my daily grave.” (171) This poem also has that lovely last line with movement both up, with the word rose that works doubly as a point of beauty/love, and down with grave which is both finite, and eternal - as is the poem, which is the body of the beloved, which is…

I make no secret that I am in love with the writings of Gregory Orr. He is the closest writer, since Rumi, that I have found that conjures in his poetry the perfect combination of revealing the Divine/Beloved and honouring the human experience in language that is accessible––bordering on simple. This book, a quiet book: what I would go so far as to describe as a holy book (being that in reading it, you experience a transmission of the Divine presence), reveals the beloved to the reader, poem, by poem, line by line, word by light-filled word, or as Orr himself writes “And so I come to the Book,/ Which is also the body/ Of the beloved. And so/ I come to the poem./ The poem is the world/ Scattered by passion, then/ Gathered together again/ So that we may have hope.” (10)

Works Cited

Orr, Gregory. Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved. Copper Canyon Press, 2012.

There were three things that stood out to me about my time there—patterns, from simplicity comes abundance, and family stories.

Firstly, I was taken by the patterns used on the walls and on the floors. In those times, using patterns that stood out was (and still is) a way of diverting the eyes from any structural imperfections in the house. But these patterns did more than that in Emily’s house. Whether it was the circular patterns in the foyer that contrasted with an almost blood red pattern on the oil floor (similar or an ancestor of linoleum), to the pink roses in Emily’s bedroom, each room vibrated with a story, a tone, or a demeanour of intentional juxtaposition. They ask the inhabitant to hold a tension between a welcoming space, such as a foyer or parlour, and pattern. I found the bold blood red and creme floors set against a busy wall pattern in the foyer did not invite lingering. The rooms work in an almost disorienting way, inviting simultaneous expansion and constriction, flow and stuckness, much like Emily’s poems that use juxtaposition to blur the boundaries between internal and external realities such as #J640. “I cannot live with You –/ It would be Life –/ And Life is over there –/ Behind the Shelf”

Which brings me to the next aspect of the tour that stood out for me– how abundance comes from simplicity, as I observed while standing in the bedroom of our dear Emily and knowing that, in this space, she wrote over 1700 poems (with only 10 or so published in her lifetime anonymously and, we think, without her consent). Emily’s bedroom, while of a good size, was modest in its simple furnishings: her single bed, wooden dresser, and ewer and basin for washing. But what took me was the size of her writing desk. It was no more than 18” square. Simple, wooden. Barely big enough to hold a lamp. But this is where she crafted the poems we still marvel at today. This simplicity, this lack of grandeur, echoed for me Wordsworth’s simple wooden table in Dove Cottage. Great writing isn’t necessarily aided by external support, but can be done with very little space or time, and while the Dickinsons were considerably more ‘wealthy’ than the Wordsworths, no matter how much luxury you had, the 19th century was not a logistically easy life for anyone.

The final thing I took away from my time in Amherst was realising that family stories and dramas haven’t changed all that much. They were then, as they are now, full of illness and tragedy, betrayal, adultery and forbidden love. They walk the tightrope of familial obligations & expectations, and freedom of individual expression, and bribes framed as incentives. There are caretakers with burnout, as with Emily who helped to look after her Mother who had a stroke, and recluses that yearn for connection—Emily was known to bake cookies and lower the basket out of her room below to visiting children.

In the end, being able to spend a day touring the Dickinson Homestead reinforced for me that writers are going to write… we are going to find a way, we are going to prioritize it, write on scraps of paper, on envelopes, in between emptying bed pans if need be, and never, never wear a dress without a pocket big enough for pen and paper.

References.

https://poets.org/poem/i-cannot-live-you-640

This weeks poetry tips and considerations…

1. The Art of Close Reading… This week we had our second and final session of “The Art of Close Reading” workshop. The three poems we close read this week were “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” by Ocean Vuong, “Evening” by Dorianne Laux and “Nomenclatures of Invisibility” by Mahtem Shifferaw. Each chosen for their diversity in voice and mastery of craft. We talked about how readers can only meet a poem, on an emotional and experiential level, where they have met themselves. But regardless of which depth or breadth a reader can meet a poem it begs the question more to if the writer has put it all out there on the page? Has the writer explored a depth and precision of craft that a reader can then grow into as they lean into their knowledge of the craft. By knowing how to break down a poem into its many layer of craft: form, stake, spine, tools, symbology etc we can start to understand when and how to implement these layers of awareness into our own writing.

2. We also listened to a soundbite of Jo Harjo in her joint interview with Ada Limon on David Perell’s podcast How I Write where she says “That’s what I always tell students. …if in elementary school, if the teacher… would have said, just listen to this poem the way you listen to a song….Just listen to it like that. Now, what do you hear? And now listen to it again. Just like you would get more out of listening to, and I always use Hotel California, like, who knows what that means? And who cares? …It’s really about the experience, the experience of it, because we put words together. If we wanted to make exact literal logic sense, we wouldn’t be writing poetry.” This once again emphasises that knowing the craft of a poem is only one side, for in the end, the poem is a living experiance that is something that is brought alive through the utterance of the poem, which is a meeting point of the words on the page and the reader. An experiance that can change with every reader, and with every reading, making the poem an event rather than an inanimate gesture.

   ---

   • GET MY DETAILED HANDOUT FOR CLOSE READING AS A WRITER - All paid subscribers on my substack will receive my handout detailing the steps to close reading and breaking down a poem from a writers perspective here.

   If you enjoy these tips, please consider supporting my work by becoming a free or paid subscriber

3. Lastly, one of our amazing community members reached out with one of her key take aways from the class. In it she shared “Close reading as a writer is slightly different than as a reader, because we are honed in on the craft elements used and the effects they create. This fine tunes our sense for poetry in dozens of ways, and makes us better writers because we have developed our eye for beauty beyond vague impressions into detailed appreciation. It doesn’t take away from the magic, but rather adds to our appreciation for it.” -

Im heading to my MFA residency for the next couple of weeks and will return to Versed in July for “Through the Looking Glass” a four week of workshop on revision.

Happy Writing (and close reading) everyone!

Śivani

Share

Reference. From How I Write: Ada Limón & Joy Harjo: Everything I Learned From The World’s Greatest Poets | How I Write, Sep 17, 2025

As promised in my #6 Tips and Considerations I have created a Close Reading Handout with a step by step guide to building your close reading muscle which I am offering to all my paid subscribers.

This will give you the map and skills not just close read as a reader, but to identify the building blocks so you can reverse engineer the poem as a writer.

"The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name." — Jane Kenyon

To download your Art of Close Reading handout please consider becoming a paid subscriber, ($8/month or $80/year) or if you already are a paid subscriber you will see the handout link below.

With tremendous love and thank you for being here.

In gratitude

Śivani

Read more

“Because galaxies can be treacherous,/ and I don’t really like the song// we’ve been dancing to/ till it ends”

This collection shone in lyrical stunningness. “I imagine/ those early years full of daggers and dandelions:/ sharp cuts that separate and drift/ into the air of me when i touch them.” It dug deep into shadows and wounds of being human, and with equal prowess played tenderly with different forms such as using a Haibun in A Miseducation (46) a Golden Shovel in As the Nurse Fills Out the Intake Form, the Ocean Speaks Your Name (66) and the fragmented form Breastless (29) that emphasizes the experience of omission––the disjointed reality created by amputation.

One of the poems I felt was beautifully crafted was a list poem, Father Weaver (35). In this poem Baldwin starts by writing into the negative with “If he wasn’t janitor he’d be gravel artist, he’d be glitter farmer…” This first tercet stanza, to me, anchors the poem in a way that tells the reader that the speaker is not creating an “other” of the father by using couplets, but is leaving space for the unknown, calling on truth, while leaving space for grace, perhaps compassion by using the tercet form. This unknown/grace/magic space is emphasized by the way the speaker gives opportunity to the father to do whimsical things such as “he’d turn his knit cap upside down to catch fire//flies, load them into pitching machine, point upwards and shoot stars into sky.” This line, that bridges the first and second stanzas, gives almost a false sense of security which makes the next line, the heart of the second stanza even more potent. “If he hadn’t been liquor undertaker, booze regulator, drunk-gambling-wish denier…” The poem see-saws between ‘if he hadn’t been… he might have…’ letting the muse flesh out into being more than the narrow experience the speaker had of them. The stanza’s journey from occupation (janitor) to personal shadow (liquor undertaker) and arrive at the third stanza into the role in relation to his daughter. “If he hadn’t been vodka/ foreman he might have used strands of daughter hair to draw maps of blackness/ onto his back. I might have…” at this point the poem makes its final turn to the speaker’s orientation of what they would do, moving from the past, into the wishful thinking future where the speaker had some power over the experience with their father. One where they would “I’d path/ follow and lost get and around turn, around turn till I center reach and undead him.” I particularly enjoyed the syntax of this last line and how it reversed the verbs but still kept a strong scansion ending on an experience the reader could feel that the speaker’s reality, for this happy ending to occur, would have to have been turned on its head.

Another poem I devoured the craft and form of was the narrative surrealist poem offered in two sections Like a Soft Horn (55). One of the crafting aspects of this poem was the loop back. Starting with “I saw through the evening, a purple light./ the light held a sound./ I kept squinting at it trying to hear its octaves,/ but all I heard were birds and so/ I tried my wings, straightened my back/ the way one does when attempting good posture/ and did a little shimmy/ to loosen them, but they wouldn’t budge.”, and ending on “And my body that is not me would turn, // a blinding purple.” Linking both the body and the purple of the first stanza. Another craft aspect was the turn where Baldwin took a sharp left from whimsical colours and growing wings to her mothers shadowy hunger of devouring a goat’s liver in front of fellow college students. “It was painful/ to hear the birds so full of flight and song,/ but as I stood there// I thought about my mother’s hunger / all those years ago.” The second section, to me, seems to try and reconcile the two polarizing images offered in the first section. Starting with “I want many things/ and sometimes it’s hard to hold/ all this desire in one body.” It continues to explore how to hold polarization, reacting and compounding into the frequency of desire while recognizing it is something too big for one body to handle and thus she splits herself “If I had another body/ that could store my desire… There would be more depth to it./ A wateriness./Rustling water. Yes. Dry and wet, then/ a chiming somewhere in the distance… but also full of silence./ A horn chime full of silence. ” until it resolves itself in the last line as mentioned above.

Reading this poetry collection to me was like trying to pin down an enigma. Perhaps because I was travelling at the time of reading it and therefore wasn’t pinned down myself. As I journeyed from one poem to the next I felt Baldwin’s magic, slowly, and sometimes reluctantly, grow on me as I moved through themes often close to my heart: experiencing cancer and parental realities that have needed work to resolve into compassion. But, I worked my way through it and when I got to the end I realized–– I loved it. Which echoes Baldwin’s sentiments exactly, “Because galaxies can be treacherous,/ and I don’t really like the song// we’ve been dancing to/ till it ends” (50)

Works Cited

Baldwin, Jamaica. Bone Language. YesYes Books, 2023.

This weeks poetry tips and considerations…

1. The Art of Close Reading… This week we had our first of two sessions on the art of close reading from a writer’s perspective. This takes the academic close reading–– of reading to understand the poem, and takes it one step further into reverse engineering the craft of the poem, and breaking it down into the building blocks that can be reimagined in our own writing. The four poems we close read this week were “Facing It” by Yusef Komunyakaa, “One Day” by Joseph Millar, “In Mystic” by Jo Harjo, and “Transubstantiation” by Susan Firer, chosen for their diversity in voice, and mastery of craft. By knowing how to break down a poem into its many layer of craft: form, stake, spine, tools, symbology etc we can start to understand when and how to implement these layers of awareness into our own writing.

   ---

   • GET MY DETAILED HANDOUT FOR CLOSE READING AS A WRITER - All paid subscribers on my substack (by next friday the 12th June 2026) will receive my handout detailing the steps to close reading and breaking down a poem from a writers perspective.

   If you enjoy these tips, please consider supporting my work by becoming a free or paid subscriber and get my detailed close reading handout.

2. We also discussed the difference between close reading with a workshopping or editor’s eye vs close reading with a reader’s eye. Which is to say that when a poem is ‘finished’ or ‘polished/published’ we can put on that hat that the poet knows what they are doing and that every word choice, enjambment, stanza length etc has been questioned and consciously kept. Therefore when we bump up against the poem in someway we can look at it as an opportunity to readjust our lens and understanding, rather than when we have the workshopping/editors hat on where we look at these places as possible places for suggested revisions.

3. The last point from last night’s class that I wanted to share here, was the importance of reading a wide variety of voices, especially voices that are very different to your own, in life experiance, perspective, and in poetic form. If you lean to writing narrative poems, make sure you dabble in some deep imagery such as James Wright, if you love short, juxtaposed poems that create quick images such as Jean Valentine, try close reading some Elizabeth Bishop, or Joy Harjo. This will widen your pallet and expand the depth of your own writing. In other words, having a strong close reading muscle is one of the most important tools in a writers toolbox.

   I close this post with a few words from one of our class members from last night. "I can’t say exactly why, but I felt very calm and internally at ease for the whole rest of the evening after today’s Close Reading session. Something about all the different voices—both the poets and the participants—interacting in a way that made a whole much greater than the sum of its—our—parts. There was mutuality, respect and an ‘allowing to be’ that felt so warm and welcoming and also full of vitality and intelligence.

   I told you I couldn’t say exactly why, but it was good and it was real and I’m grateful.

   A fractious and fragmented world could do with more of this.” - Patrick L

What is your favourite aspect of close reading? Have you ever close read something in a group setting?

Happy Writing (and close reading) everyone!

Śivani

Share

“She’s telling me that when you love the world you hear celestial music:”

The Art of Losing (2013) is an anthology split into six sections. Reckoning, Retreat, Remembrance, Ritual, Recovery, and Redemption. While the collection primarily focuses on the modern elegy, featuring poets such as Mark Doty, Mary Oliver, Dylan Thomas, Joy Harjo, Jane Kenyon to name a few, there are also sprinkled delights throughout such as Rumi, Theodore Roethke, Robert Frost and W.S. Merwin.

In learning about the history and modernisation of the elegy I thought it was interesting that in Young’s forward he states that “one key aspect of contemporary elegy is the desire to represent the experience, to re-experience it through language––to evoke, that is, and not just describe, the pain of passing.” (xvi) This to me aligns with creating poems as capsules of light, or capsules of experience that the reader then can entrain to––in this instance, a natural but nuanced human experience that ‘most’ people don’t experience often yet creates an important part of a rich life. He goes on to say “In doing so, these poems focus less on the often formal process of mourning and instead on the personal and often bewildering process of grief.”(xvi) I loved how he posited that “the music of the modern elegy has no set form”(xvi) that it was about the writer’s ability to capture the layered honesty of the moment without cultural conditioning and expectations on how that should look.

It was this honesty that was one of the most interesting things I got out of this collection. How people captured the reality of duality: that people are not all good, or all bad, that family relationships are messy––and that’s not a failure, and sentimentality is not honoring, it’s skirting the moment, it’s playing polite. But the honesty can be done in a way that is classy… such as Ted Kooser’s poem Father (245). This poem skillfully starts with “Today you would have been ninety-seven/ if you had lived, and we would all be/ miserable, you and your children,/ driving from clinic to clinic,/ an ancient, a fearful hypochondriac/ and his fretful son and daughter.” By placing this in the future tense “and we would all be miserable” softens the blow to the reader of the reality of the speaker’s perspective of his father and siblings while he was alive. As the reader, I don’t believe for a minute the future made them more miserable to be around. By line nine we have the turn… “But with your dignity intact/ you have been gone for twenty years,/ and I am glad for all of us, although/ I miss you every day…” It is the “and I am glad for all of us” that anchors the hypothetical reality that the poem opens with but then quickly balances the harsh reality with the kindness of “I miss you every day”. The poem goes on to list the thing about his father the speaker misses and then an early memory the father had of his own mother. “at the moment of your birth/ your mother glanced out the window/ and saw lilacs in bloom”. This line encapsulates the breadth of the father’s life from birth, like a sweeping arm to catch all the messy bits that make a person and then ends with a gentleness to counter the harsh start, “Well, today/ lilacs are blooming in the side yards/ all over Iowa, still welcoming you.” Kooser’s ability to take the messy, the honest, and still package it in a mature kindness lets all the parts of the poem, and by extension the memory of the father live on, without a sickly sentimentality, but in love.

There were so many craft aspects represented in this anthology by the different writers that mapping them became almost overwhelming. But some of the things that stood out was the emotional punch in Simon Armitage’s The Shout (62) where in memory it is not the boy “with the name and face I don’t remember” but the experience of them testing the range of the human voice and the knowledge that “he left town, went on to be twenty years dead/ with a gunshot hole/ in the roof of his mouth”. The gunshot in his mouth, linking to the memory of the boys using their voice to test how far they could be heard, hit home in the last line “you can stop shouting now, I can still hear you.” Paring this with the ending to Gregory Orr’s Litany (68) where he relays his experience of accidentally fatally shooting his brother but concludes with the mundane as a way of anchoring the poem and staring away from sentimentality “I remember toward evening someone came with soup./ I slurped it down, unable to look up./ In the bowl, among the vegetable chunks,/ pale shapes of the alphabet bobbed at random/ or lay in the shallow spoon.”

The process of collating this book I imagine was deeply cathartic. It brought home to me the teaching that ‘only when we live a life that embraces death do we finally live’, and had me contemplating at 2am on a Tuesday, can perfecting the art of writing a modern elegy become an act of love for life?

Works Cited

Young, Kevin. The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2013.

quote: Celestial Music - Louise Glück. (Pg 191)

This weeks poetry tips and considerations…

1. The long and the short of juxtaposition— This week we dove into the life teeming waters of juxtaposition and explored poems that not just used this craft tool in imagery, or syntactically, but also structurally, and sometimes between the title and the poem as with Natasha Trethewey’s Myth. We explored the reasons a writer may employ juxtaposition in their work with some examples being:

   • Invites the reader to sit with the space between two contrasting forces.

   • Can create tension, or friction for the reader.

   • Can gives the reader a larger lens/ or context by highlighting the opposite.

   • Can creates a portal into a new perspective/ creates pause for the reader. (Neutralising duality)

   • Can create instability by see-sawing between two different images, or can creates a 3rd imagined image.

   • Creates pause or contemplation in the reader if they can’t seem to reconcile the juxtaposition.

   • Moves the energy of a poem in a surprising way for the reader creating tighter engagement.

   If you enjoy these tips, please consider supporting my work by becoming a free or paid subscriber.

2. Another aspect of juxtaposition we looked at was the importance of having a single spine of the poem that the juxtapositional elements can spiral around. This spine or single point of reference or object that can be returned to gives a reassuring place for the reader and thus creates the trust for the reader to extend out into the two juxtaposed aspects that are asking to be held. For this discussion we close-read one of my favourite poems, Margaret Atwood’s [you fit into me].

3. Lastly, we close-read section 9 from Chris Abani’s poem Pilgrimage from his collection Sanctificum. This poem stimulated a lively discussion about the differences between opposition and juxtaposition. Where opposition is pinning things against each other, while juxtaposition is more a tool that is asking to hold different things at the same time, sometimes separately, and sometimes to simulate the imagination of the reader to create a unique third image that lays between them. Doing this activates the reader’s own schema, or life experiences, which brings a deeper emotional investment and connection to the poem.

Do you have a favourite poem that uses craft of juxtaposition?

Happy Writing everyone!

Śivani

Share