Intro
Welcome to the Poetry Professor Podcast with Stephen Cavitt, where every week I read you an original poem and then we talk about its key technique. This season, you’ll hear poems from my book Noctis Terrores.
Today, ladies and gentlemen, you’ll hear three poems for the price of one. That’s right–step right up and get three poems for the incredible low price of free!
This is definitely not because they are all tiny little poems and we had more to talk about if we put them all together. Today you’ll hear “South of Missoula”, “Quapaw Ridge”, and “Usumacinta Blues”.
South of Missoula
In this other life, I’m a sheriff in a small Montana town.
I have three horses—one limps from a gopher hole
but I won’t shoot him—and a Dodge Ram from the 80s
with rust under the rocker panels. The same dog brindled
under a Pendleton blanket on the front seat.
I fly fish on the weekends to hear the voice of the Lord.
When I walk out of my office, I lean on tiptoes
to touch the yellowing flag. Yea though I walk
through the valley of the Bitterroot, in the shadow
of America, I will fear no evil and no love.
Quapaw Ridge
For a moment, I’m raising calves in Ozark, Arkansas. My wife calls them her babies, but she knows where they’re headed. Even the yellow jackets that spill out when I burn the old gourds are beautiful: the way time slows down before the sting. And the coyotes, lean and long-legged on the ridge? She rolls against me and bites my neck when their howls rip the black sky open. The voice of the river isn’t gospel, but it’s close enough.
Usumacinta Blues
In this one, I’m a raft guide who got a Palenque girl pregnant,
my favorite mistake. Children with black hair and tire sandals.
Cast-iron bacon. Dragonflies dipping their slender ends
in the water. My hair grays like winter breath, and then it’s gone.
The raft still bucks at Chainsaw Rapids, but it’s just an old joke
between me and the river. We’ve been working this skit for a while.
Discuss:
We’ve got some serious topics in this book, Noctis Terrores. So far, we’ve talked about:
- night terrors
- thoughts of suicide
- loneliness
- religion
- lost love
- sexual and/or physical abuse
- exes who just want to hook up
- and some little glimmers of ghosts and violence.
In the last two poems before today’s episode, a mother discourages her son from talking about childhood abuse and a guy watches his friend fall apart in middle age. Now, it hasn’t all been bad news: nature is everywhere in the book. Rivers, canyons, forests, dogs–God bless ’em. But we could use a breather, and that’s what these three simple poems all in a row are doing.
We’re about halfway through the book, and these three cute little poems in a row are kind of like a wooden bench that the Boy Scouts have built on a mountain trail where you can stop and catch your breath and take in the view. There’s a little bit of escapism, a little daydreaming, a little What if? that gives us a reprieve.
There are different speakers in this book. The speaker is just what we call the narrator in poetry, the person who’s telling us the poem. So different characters are narrating the poems to you, but because it’s a collection, it feels like they all add up to a composite self, a kind of perceived speaker.
The book moves in a particular direction, like a life. Here, we’ve had all these glimpses of disappointment and suffering and finding solace in nature. We’re getting into some pretty tough stuff again with those last couple poems. You can see how the composite speaker, that implied “I” of the collection, might want to disassociate or daydream for a minute and imagine a different life. That’s one of the possible things that the brain does as a response to hard times. Let’s give our collective speaker a chance to do that with these three simple poems, to daydream that he’s a sheriff or a farmer or a raft guide, and then we’ll dive back into the more complex points.
Today’s topic, although I think I forgot to announce it at the beginning, is how to structure a poetry collection. And here’s the real truth: every collection is different. Every book has its own pulse. You want to think about how the collection moves. In a novel, it’s kind of easy. It has a plot, a series of events, and crises, and attempts to fix those problems that bring us toward a climax and a resolution, some kind of transformation.
Poetry’s different; poems are standalone events. They don’t necessarily have to really converse with each other or fit together, but then when you put them into a book, you create a conversation. You have to think about where to stack them: Who’s going to get along with who? Who’s going to fight? The movement in the book creates meaning on top of the individual meanings of the poems themselves, and that makes it really fun to put one together.
Let’s hear today’s three poems one more time, and if you’ve been following along this season, or if you bought the book and are reading along with me, think about how they fit into the collection, the structure of this collection, and what they’re doing in this place. Here’s…
South of Missoula
In this other life, I’m a sheriff in a small Montana town.
I have three horses—one limps from a gopher hole
but I won’t shoot him—and a Dodge Ram from the 80s
with rust under the rocker panels. The same dog brindled
under a Pendleton blanket on the front seat.
I fly fish on the weekends to hear the voice of the Lord.
When I walk out of my office, I lean on tiptoes
to touch the yellowing flag. Yea though I walk
through the valley of the Bitterroot, in the shadow
of America, I will fear no evil and no love.
Quapaw Ridge
For a moment, I’m raising calves in Ozark, Arkansas. My wife calls them her babies, but she knows where they’re headed. Even the yellow jackets that spill out when I burn the old gourds are beautiful: the way time slows down before the sting. And the coyotes, lean and long-legged on the ridge? She rolls against me and bites my neck when their howls rip the black sky open. The voice of the river isn’t gospel, but it’s close enough.
Usumacinta Blues
In this one, I’m a raft guide who got a Palenque girl pregnant,
my favorite mistake. Children with black hair and tire sandals.
Cast-iron bacon. Dragonflies dipping their slender ends
in the water. My hair grays like winter breath, and then it’s gone.
The raft still bucks at Chainsaw Rapids, but it’s just an old joke
between me and the river. We’ve been working this skit for a while.
Prompt
If you’re writing along with me, pick up a book of poems. It could be this one, Noctis Terrores, which would be awesome. It could be any other book of poems from your bookshelf. Or this could be an excuse to go to your local library or your local bookstore or a nearby thrift shop. Those one-dollar-fifty-cent and those two dollar paperbacks from thrift stores are some of my greatest luxuries.
Whichever book you choose, spend a couple days reading it first and get to know the poems as individuals. Then think about the structure of the collection. Take a look at the titles, and see if the titles create any kind of flow or relationships.
Then think about the key idea in each poem; you can read each one and scribble a little summary phrase or sentence at the bottom or in the margins. Or if you hate the idea of marking up your books, just do it on another sheet of paper or on post-it notes. And when you have the key idea for each poem, look at them.
How do they flow one after the other? Is there any kind of plot progression or change in thought that happens? Do some of the titles refer back to each other or create any kind of movement? See how the poet has structured the book physically. Are there sections–if so, how many poems are in each section? Do the sections have subtitles or numbers or what?
And then finally, what does it all add up to? Is there some kind of felt plot or a composite speaker or a central conflict that many of the poems are dealing with, and does that tension get resolved inside of this book? You don’t have to answer all those questions today to get the gold star, but those are all some ways you can tackle the idea of structure and how the book is organized.
Then take a look at some of your own poems. If you were to put them together into a chap-book of 15 or 20 poems, or a full poetry collection of 50 pages, or maybe daily Instagram posts, or even a podcast like this, how would you structure them to create meaning and to create flow?
Outro
Thanks so much for listening to the Poetry Professor Podcast with Stephen Cavitt. This season I’m reading poems from my book Noctis Terrores. It’s available now on Kindle Unlimited and in print at major online booksellers, and there’s a link in the episode description. You can support the show by picking up a copy.
I’ll see you next week.