​​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 “Notes from a Grocery Store Psychic”, and we’ll talk about logical leaps in prose poems. Here’s…

Notes from a Grocery Store Psychic

I haven’t found a star like your smile in years of looking. Most meteorites burn up before they touch the ground. Tonight, some brunette and a dog beach, doors off my Jeep, wind whistling its slow tune. Everything happens for a reason, said my mother. And when I told her about my father, his hands in the dark? Don’t tell. It’ll kill him if anyone knows. A grocery store psychic told her it was a past life. Not this life at all. October dusk pushes sandbars deeper into the Gulf. Remember our coral cottage on Blackjack Mountain’s bluff? Stars drifted on thermal updrafts like hawks. Forty yards from nothing, I knelt on river pebbles with my hand on silver Chevy paint, asking you not to drive away again. A past life. Not this life at all.

Discuss: Prose poems and logical leaps

One of my favorite things about prose poems like this one–and a prose poem is a poem that just looks like a paragraph; it’s one big chunk without carefully structured line breaks. The line ends wherever it hits the margin–one of my favorite things about them is they encourage a jump in logic between the lines. There’s a stream of consciousness that permits these disjointed or loosely joined statements.

So let’s see how this one flows. We open with a line about lost love: “I haven’t found a star like your smile in years of looking.” It’s already a little bit lyrical, right? It doesn’t say, I haven’t found a smile like yours, but I haven’t found a star like your smile. 

That second line, “Most meteorites burn up before they touch the ground”, is still talking about the lost love, but it’s even more loose or lyrical in its metaphor.

And then we jump all the way to the present moment: “Tonight, some brunette, and a dog beach, doors off my Jeep, wind whistling its slow tune.” 

Then without any transition phrases, the older, deeper trauma jumps up: “Everything happens for a reason, said my mother. And when I told her about my father, his hands in the dark? Don’t tell. It’ll kill him if anyone knows.”

Then we come back to the present moment for just one line: “October dusk pushes sandbars deeper into the Gulf. Remember our coral cottage on Blackjack Mountain’s bluff? Stars drifted on thermal updrafts like hawks. Forty yards from nothing, I knelt on river pebbles with my hand on silver Chevy paint, asking you not to drive away again.”

And we close with that refrain that kind of ties all the pieces together: “A past life. Not this life at all.” 

There really aren’t transition statements between the different sections or times in the speaker’s memory. He just launches into them. That’s often how trauma works. I worked for years in natural medicine, and some of my clients, many of my clients, had emotional or mental distress.

We tend to spill that in bits and pieces, backtracking to add parts we left out. We’ll say, “Oh, I forgot that’s the knee I injured in marching band” or “Oh yeah, I guess that wasn’t the first boyfriend with that kind of behavior”.

Now listen, I’m not a therapist. You don’t have to trust what I say about trauma–probably shouldn’t. Disclaimer to ask a psychologist. I’m just a poetry professor who used to work as a bodyworker, but I love the prose poem form here because it gives me a chance to build the speaker’s revelation the way I think it would happen in real life, the way people tend to spill their hurts.

Even that refrain that pops up once in the middle and once at the end, “A past life. Not this laugh at all”, mirrors how people break down.

I forget which comedian said this on stage, but when you have a really good cry, if you’re really hurting, you probably repeat one phrase over and over. In the middle of bawling your eyes out, you might be saying, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” right?

Or, “It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault.”

“I just want her back.”

Whatever it is, right? Sometimes there’s that one line that lodges itself in our voice box as we’re crying, and here it’s that refrain, “A past life. Not this life at all.” 

Many of my prose poems tend to have logical jumps like this one, but I think it works really well for this particular subject matter of trauma or loss. I’m always looking for a technical edge when the poem is about tough stuff. A way to make it not just therapy or private sentiment, but a public product, something bigger than just the speaker’s experience or the poet, if it’s a personal or confessional poem. The logical jumps here are one way for me to create a container, as this speaker talks about his history of abuse and his lost love. 

We’ve looked at a couple other techniques for tackling tough topics in previous episodes. In Episode 8 of Season 1, we looked at sentence length and how we can use it to create a little rest point here and there after big revelations. In Episode 9 of this season, season one, we looked at the couplet form, or tiny little two-line stanzas, as a way of dealing with some really difficult topics in “The Ghost of Fremont Canyon”, and we’ll talk about some other techniques and upcoming episodes as well.

Let’s hear the poem one more time, and listen for these logical leaps and perhaps even the hidden threads that tie them together. Here’s…

Notes from a Grocery Store Psychic

I haven’t found a star like your smile in years of looking. Most meteorites burn up before they touch the ground. Tonight, some brunette and a dog beach, doors off my Jeep, wind whistling its slow tune. Everything happens for a reason, said my mother. And when I told her about my father, his hands in the dark? Don’t tell. It’ll kill him if anyone knows. A grocery store psychic told her it was a past life. Not this life at all. October dusk pushes sandbars deeper into the Gulf. Remember our coral cottage on Signal Mountain’s bluff? Stars drifted on thermal updrafts like hawks. Forty yards from nothing, I knelt on river pebbles with my hand on silver Chevy paint, asking you not to drive away again. A past life. Not this life at all.

Prompt

If you’re writing along with me, write a poem that uses stream of consciousness or jumps in logic. Don’t spell it all out. It doesn’t have to have noticeable transition phrases or transition sentences. It doesn’t have to be a prose poem…but it could.

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.