Listen to poetry professor Stephen Cavitt read “Fire Comes from a Place Beyond this World” and discuss prose poems.
Contains sexual themes
Stephen’s poetry collection Noctis Terrores is available now on Kindle Unlimited and in print at major online booksellers.
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Read the transcript below.
Intro:
Welcome to the Poetry Professor Podcast with Stephen Cavitt, where every week I read you an original poem and and then we talk about its key technique. We don’t talk about the way I say poem, which I know is weird for all of y’all.
In today’s episode, you’ll hear “Fire Comes from a Place Beyond this World” from my book Noctis Terrores, and we’ll talk about little precise moves in poetry. Here’s…
Fires Comes from a Place Beyond this World
Her voice husky, her hands kindling the darkness, she’d say, I’m the lucky one,
and I’d say, No, I’m the lucky one, and it went on that way for a while.
Growing up, I’d build fires in the hills and listen to the coals crack and sizzle.
I’d sit on the bone-cold ground, and the sticks would flare up, shiver
like something holy’d touched them, and then fall down. Kissing me,
she’d pull back, look me in the eyes, and whisper, This is a good thing,
and I’d smile. Even if I knew what was coming, I’d have said it back.
Twenty years of strange lips, bitter phone calls, women disappearing
like new moons, and then she snuggled into my palms and I thought
I was home. I thought I deserved her, those hips delicate as finches.
The coals, just before they burned out, would hum and whistle
like they’d learned some secret from the fire too late to tell,
and then winter would rise up again from the curves of the grass.
Discuss:
Today, let’s talk about precise moves in poetry. You can get away with some vague descriptions or even some almost cliches in a novel, because it’s just so big. But in a poem like this, I’ve only got 26 lines, so everything needs to be in place. Everything needs to be precise and deliberate.
And I’m also looking for little ways that I can put my own stamp on the language, like an unexpected turn of phrase, or maybe something in the sounds of the syllables themselves. A word that you didn’t see coming. Something that gets that little extra oomph into the poem.
So let’s walk through this poem together, and I’ll point out a few precise moves that I’m making that I hope are bringing extra impact into the poem.
In the first line, we have this phrase, “Her hands kindling the darkness.” You’ve heard dozens, probably, of love songs saying something like, We were on fire for each other, or we burned all night. Set me on fire. We don’t want to repeat that exact saying because it’s not original. It’s not going to shock the reader awake, which is what a poem is supposed to do. So I’m looking for my own way to go a little bit past what we’ve already heard and be unexpected.
In the second stanza, it’s the precise sounds of the words themselves, so we’re looking at the actual musical sounds of the consonants and the vowels. We’ve got, “Growing up, I’d build fires in the hills and listen to the coals crack and sizzle. I’d sit on the bone cold ground…”
We have some nice repeated c sounds there in line 6 with “coals crack.” You’ve got the c at the start of coal’s, the c at the start of crack, and then that ck similar sound at the end of crack. And in sizzle, we’ve got that sz pairing, the s and z sounds of sizzle.
Something similar happens, but with our vowel sounds, in “bone cold ground” in line 7. So we’ve got that repeated long o in bone and cold, and then that kind of cousin ow sound in ground. Bone. Cold. Ground.
Unless you went off and spent 30 grand on a poetry MFA like I did, or you’re just an English nerd like I am, you probably didn’t read or hear those lines and think, Oh my gosh, that’s an example of assonance!, which is repeated vowel sounds, or, Yes! He got in some consonance, which is repeated consonant sounds. But it’s happening in your body all the same.
You know, we’ve learned since childhood with our nursery rhymes to kind of feel the rhythm. It’s almost like the drumbeat that’s happening in the background of a poem or a nursery rhyme. So we’re getting that extra oomph from interestingly repeated consonant and vowel sounds, even if our reader isn’t consciously scribbling in the margins like I might be, going, Ooh, look, repeated o sounds! It’s still working.
In the end of stanza two and moving into stanza three, that precise move or something more is a shift in who’s doing the action. So we’ve got, “the sticks would flare up, shiver like something wholly touched them, and then fall down.”
So far, the actors in the poem have mostly been the man and the woman or the man himself. So, she would do this, she would say this. Growing up, I’d build these fires, and I would listen to the sounds of the coals. I’d sit on the ground.
And now we have this shift into, “the sticks would flare up, shiver like something holy, touch them, and then fall down.” The sticks themselves are going through a little bit of ecstasy, just like the lovers are with that use of the word holy.
So we don’t want to be heavy handed with our symbolism or our making meaning of something, but there’s a little parallel action happening there that I think is just unexpected enough to, again, keep the reader’s mind awake. And that’s partly what we’re doing, right? We’re partly keeping the reader’s brain just shocked awake enough to keep him or her reading and enjoying the poem.
Then in stanza four, we have a precise list or a montage. We’ve got, “twenty years of strange lips, bitter phone calls, women disappearing like new moons.” A precise list like this is a lot more unique than just saying, Boy, it was a string of bad luck, right? Or having our speaker say, Man, I was lonely for a long time before I met her.
We’ve got the exact number of years, and then that montage of kind of carefully selected representative things: “strange lips, bitter phone calls, women disappearing like new moons.”
We’re also keeping consistent with our nature imagery here, so we’ve tied it back into nature through comparing the disappearing women to new moons. We do want to be pretty consistent. If we started with nature imagery, we don’t want to veer off into, you know, city imagery or something.
There’s another example of staying consistent with imagery in stanza five. So here’s a precise choice: “I thought I deserved her, those hips delicate as finches.” And then in our last two lines we have, “Then winter would rise up again from the curves of the grass.”
That pairing of the curves of her body to the curves of the grass ties a nice little bow around the imagery. And maybe around the two kinds of collapse, the fire and the relationship.
So while we usually look at just a single technique in each episode, we’ve looked at several different kinds of precision, or precise choices, and I hope that helps you, in your own work, to go line by line and think, Alright, how can I tighten this up a little here? How can I do something a little unexpected, or a little more, or a little more consistent? so that each line of the poem–because there aren’t that many lines–is really stunning.
Let’s hear “Fire Comes from a Place Beyond this World” one more time, and you can listen for any other precise moves that we haven’t talked about here.
Fires Comes from a Place Beyond this World
Her voice husky, her hands kindling the darkness, she’d say, I’m the lucky one,
and I’d say, No, I’m the lucky one, and it went on that way for a while.
Growing up, I’d build fires in the hills and listen to the coals crack and sizzle.
I’d sit on the bone-cold ground, and the sticks would flare up, shiver
like something holy’d touched them, and then fall down. Kissing me,
she’d pull back, look me in the eyes, and whisper, This is a good thing,
and I’d smile. Even if I knew what was coming, I’d have said it back.
Twenty years of strange lips, bitter phone calls, women disappearing
like new moons, and then she snuggled into my palms and I thought
I was home. I thought I deserved her, those hips delicate as finches.
The coals, just before they burned out, would hum and whistle
like they’d learned some secret from the fire too late to tell,
and then winter would rise up again from the curves of the grass.
Prompt:
If you’re writing along with me, pick a poem that you’re still working on. See where you can make some similar, precise moves. Describe something in a way that we don’t expect. Listen to the sounds of the syllables themselves and how they fit together. Think about precise lists. Make your imagery consistent, or something else that puts your unique and deliberate spin on the language and on this poem.
Outro:
Thanks so much for listening to the Poetry Professor podcast. Today, you heard “Fire Comes from a Place Beyond this World” from my book Noctis Terrores.
It’s available now on Kindle Unlimited and in print at major online booksellers. I’ll read you the whole thing here for free, but if you’re enjoying the poems, I’d love it if you picked up a copy.
I’ll see you next week.