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 you’ll hear “Ghost Story,” or perhaps even spookier “Ghoooost~ Story,” and we’ll talk about keeping a slush fund. Here’s…
Ghost Story
Her bare feet drifted inches above the pine boards,
the hem of her shift muddy, her eyes like Luna moths,
pale, unearthly green. I remember her hand on my shoulder,
how it passed through bone. Some old sorrow rose to meet it.
The hound shuddered in his sleep. I was a boy. I was in love.
I don’t know if she was ghost, angel, the wind turned over
and over into a body like winter grasses, slim and hushed,
but I would do anything to make her happy, and knew I’d fail.
She stepped through plaster, through two by fours,
through cedar siding–love is always this way–
the space between the barn light and the moon.
Discuss:
Keep your old poems, even if you’re not sure about them, or even if they don’t seem to fit this collection that you’re working on. That’s today’s theme. In one of my writing groups, we call this sending it to the farm, like when your parents send a problem dog up to live with your aunt and uncle in the country, you still get to see it on holidays. You know it’s out there somewhere living its best life.
I wrote “Ghost Story” back in grad school. It was in my scrap pile, and I pulled it out a few years ago when I was putting together my first book of poems. It’s really the first poem that has my middle aged voice in it, the voice that I grew into in my forties. It has these lines: “I would do anything to make her happy and knew I’d fail” and “love is always this way.” It took some living and some disappointment to make it to those lines.
That first book that I put this poem in didn’t get accepted anywhere, but I loved it so much that I moved it over to Noctis Terrores, where it sits now and where it fits, and it’s also been published since in the tiny journal.
So today’s lesson is: keep your not-so-sure poems. Put them in a folder in your cloud storage or your hard drive. Or if they’re handwritten, put them in a manila folder shoved in the back of a desk drawer somewhere. Send them upstate to live on the farm. Let them run around a little. They might come back home to you at some point.
Let’s hear “Ghost Story” one more time with a big thank you to the awesome folks at the tiny journal, where this poem appeared.
Ghost Story
Her bare feet drifted inches above the pine boards,
the hem of her shift muddy, her eyes like Luna moths,
pale, unearthly green. I remember her hand on my shoulder,
how it passed through bone. Some old sorrow rose to meet it.
The hound shuddered in his sleep. I was a boy. I was in love.
I don’t know if she was ghost, angel, the wind turned over
and over into a body like winter grasses, slim and hushed,
but I would do anything to make her happy, and knew I’d fail.
She stepped through plaster, through two by fours,
through cedar siding–love is always this way–
the space between the barn light and the moon.
Prompt
If you’re writing along with me, dig up a poem you haven’t quite finished, maybe one you haven’t worked on in a while, and choose one of these two prompts.
Option one: if you’re just really done with it and it feels like it’s never going to work, pick one line or one sentence from this poem. Copy it over onto a new page, and use that as the starting point for a new poem. Let it be version 2.0.
Or, option two: if this whole poem still has potential, don’t give up on it yet. Read it out loud to yourself. Listen for any place you stumble, any place that just doesn’t feel right in your gut, and mark that spot or those spots for revision. Play with it in a new draft, so you still have both versions and you can compare them to each other.
And whichever option you choose, after you’ve worked on it a bit, take this final step: print it out or hand write it and tape it to your wall where you can see it as you go in and out of your house or in and out of your bedroom.
Alice Friman taught us this trick at Georgia College in my MFA, and it’s lovely. It helps you to see the poem at different times of day when you’re in a different mood or a different mindset and can help kind of break things open in your revision.
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.
Link