The Poetry Professor Season 1, Episode 17

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.

In today’s episode, you’ll hear “Florida Nights” and we’ll talk about small deliberate choices in poetry. Here’s…

Florida Nights

The great dog follows Orion over the palm trees, his lone eye

the brightest star in the sky. Thirteen years ago, I learned to point out

his midnight legs to schoolkids in the Appalachians. I woke then

to birds singing their names across the valley: phoebe, phoebe,

the intermittent cough of the kingfisher, his long blue wing over the creek.

I don’t know what I’m doing now in this flatland scrubbed by storms,

clear cut and paved over. Without you, stars are the only familiar.

Our first night walking the gulf beach, you told me, “Take me dancing,

and I’ll show you what these hips are made for.” Your hair wiry with salt,

your freckles new constellations. My thumbs found little creases

above your hipbones. The small curves of you circled in my palms.

In the headlights on mountain nights, do Luna moths still flutter

higher and higher, a slim green surprise? In the mornings,

do their pale bodies still glimmer in the grass?

Discuss:

I often talk about big picture stuff: sensory imagery, statement structure, titles. But today, let’s talk about tiny little improvements we can make as we work the language or work the imagery, and I’ll show you a few deliberate choices that I made in writing and revising this one.

In the first stanza, we’ve got, “I learned to point out his midnight legs.” I could just say, I learned to point him out or I learned to point out the constellation Canis Major. But that’s boring. I want to find my own way to say it. That’s at least half of what poetry is. Something about “point out his midnight legs” adds a sense of place for me. It takes me back to standing out in a dark field with a group of kids and pointing to the sky.

And then in the next couple lines, we have, “I woke then to birds singing their names across the valley: phoebe, phoebe.” I could have said the phoebes singing across the valley, but it’s fascinating that the bird is named after the sound it makes, and that sound is one of my clearest memories from living in a little valley outside Dahlonegha, Georgia, and teaching at a nature center. So I want to point out how cool that name is, but I also want you to hear it like you’re in the valley. I want to recreate the sensory experience for the reader.

Then in the middle stanza, we’ve got, “I don’t know what I’m doing now in this flat land scrubbed by storms, clear cut and paved over. Without you, stars are the only familiar.” The normal sentence would be, Without you, stars are the only familiar thing. Familiar usually functions as the adjective, but I’ve cut out that word “thing,” so it’s just “stars are the only familiar.” We’ve made familiar the noun, so there’s a little nod toward the witch’s familiar. That’s the only other time I’m aware of when we turn that into a noun.

It also does something else that I try to do whenever I can, which is to find a more condensed way, a tighter way to say the thing. I learned that from the poet Martin Lamon, who was the head of my MFA program. He taught us to snip wherever we could, maybe an article here, in this case a noun, to just really keep the language tight and keep it distilled.

So far, we’ve looked at a few different ways to work the language or work the imagery. We’ve got finding our own way to say things, creating almost an onomatopoeia, so the words put you into the sensory experience of the scene and now condensing wherever possible. The last thing that I want to show you is another imagery choice, and it happens in that same middle stanza. We have, “Your hair wiry with salt, your freckles new constellations.”

This metaphor is a little nod back toward the constellations that we’ve already talked about so much in the poem, so there’s consistent imagery. It’s always good to be consistent with your imagery within the same poem, and we’ll talk more about that in a couple episodes when we look at “Summer in San Carlos.”

Let’s listen to “Florida Nights” one more time and notice any little deliberate choices I’m making as I work the language and work the imagery. Here’s…