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, I’ll read “Summer in San Carlos” and we’ll talk about consistent imagery. Here’s…
Summer in San Carlos
Every afternoon, thunderheads breach like gray whales,
splashing lightning across the sky. Two o’clock, three o’clock.
The Gulf hardens greenblack. Wave after wave pelts the sand,
then quiets. Rainbows glisten in the oil slicks on the highway.
Soon the colors will bleed into the canals, the mullet,
the delicate veins crisscrossing the blue bodies of the herons.
Everyone’s always losing something. That first summer,
I listened to rain moan its migratory songs across the sky
and thought of the miles growing between us: Orlando,
then Ann Arbor, the current of your life carrying you north.
It’s summer again. Rainclouds roll and glisten.
I’m still wearing the red bracelet I bought us both
in Cambodia. The tarnished clasp still reads, love.
Discuss:
Let’s talk consistent imagery, the progression of images in the poem and how they all match up.
We open with this line: ”Every afternoon, thunderheads breach like gray whales, splashing lightning across the sky.” So I’ve committed here to ocean imagery or water imagery. Now we’ve got to stick to that for the rest of the poem: “Two o’clock, three o’clock. The Gulf hardens green black. Wave after wave pelts the sand…” So that’s all consistent so far.
Next, we’ll step away just a little bit from the actual coast, and we have, “Rainbows glisten in the oil slicks on the highway,” but we’re going to tie it back into the waterways pretty soon. So the next line: “Soon the colors”–that oil–“will bleed into the canals, the mullet, the delicate veins crisscrossing the blue bodies of the herons.” If you don’t fish or live in southwest Florida, you may not know that mullet is not just a questionable hairstyle choice; it’s also a fish.
We have a statement here then that isn’t really directly tied into water: “Everyone’s always losing something.” And then we’re going to move back into water imagery and ocean imagery: “That first summer I listened to rain moan its migratory songs across the sky…” Then, we’ll step away for a second–“…and thought of the miles growing between us: Orlando, then Ann Arbor”– and we’ll tie it back into water with this closing part of the line; “the current of your life carrying you north.”
We’ll close out with some more water imagery–“It’s summer again. Rainclouds roll and glisten”–some more clouds acting like whales. Our least two watery lines are the last two lines to the poem, but there’s still a bit of humidity in them, and they go; “I’m still wearing the red bracelet I bought us both in Cambodia.” That tarnished clasp of brass or fake brass is the kind of chemical reaction that might happen near the coast in that salt water air with high humidity.
I am not trying to be heavy handed with my imagery, and especially not heavy handed with symbolism. So I am using some metaphors here, right? The clouds have been turned into whales, but I’m not hitting you over the head with it. What we do want though is to commit to an overall corner of imagery.
So if I’ve opened with ocean and water imagery here, I don’t want to suddenly switch to airplanes. I don’t want to switch to baseball metaphors. I don’t want to necessarily take you deep into urban imagery because we’ve committed to that coastal imagery, and this helps with the suspension of disbelief in any type of writing. We’re asking the reader to step into the imagined world and to live there for a little while.
So if we’ve set up this expectation, even if it’s unconscious in the mind of the reader–okay, I’m in a coastal scene, right? I’m dealing with water imagery–we don’t want to shock the reader’s mind back to the real world, right, so that he or she notices, Oh wait, this is just a writer that’s suddenly yanking me over into the city or suddenly yanking me into that baseball imagery. We want the reader to be able to live in that consistent world for a little while, whatever world you’ve chosen to put him or her into.
Let’s hear “Summer in San Carlos” one more time, and notice what the imagery is doing and how it stays consistent. Here’s “Summer in San Carlos” again, named for the San Carlos Park neighborhood of Fort Myers, Florida.
Summer in San Carlos
Every afternoon, thunderheads breach like gray whales,
splashing lightning across the sky. Two o’clock, three o’clock.
The Gulf hardens greenblack. Wave after wave pelts the sand,
then quiets. Rainbows glisten in the oil slicks on the highway.
Soon the colors will bleed into the canals, the mullet,
the delicate veins crisscrossing the blue bodies of the herons.
Everyone’s always losing something. That first summer,
I listened to rain moan its migratory songs across the sky
and thought of the miles growing between us: Orlando,
then Ann Arbor, the current of your life carrying you north.
It’s summer again. Rainclouds roll and glisten.
I’m still wearing the red bracelet I bought us both
in Cambodia. The tarnished clasp still reads, love.
Prompt
If you’re writing along with me, write a poem that has local knowledge in it. For this poem, I had to have been through some summer storms in San Carlos Park. You learn over a year or two what time of day the rains come, what the Gulf looks like, what’s going on with environmental issues. Write a poem from your place or a place that you know well, and nudge the imagery until it’s all consistent, until it’s all of a piece. Put that reader into one place in the world and keep him or her there.
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.