Poetry uses forms and conventions to suggest differential interpretation to words, or to evoke emotive responses. Devices such as assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia and rhythm are sometimes used to achieve musical or incantation effects.
National Poetry Month is the largest literary celebration in the world, with tens of millions of readers, students, K-12 teachers, librarians, booksellers, literary events curators, publishers, bloggers, and, of course, poets marking poetry’s important place in our culture and our lives every April.
The Academy of American Poets established National Poetry Month in 1996. Along the way we enlisted a variety of government agencies and officials, educational leaders, publishers, sponsors, poets, and arts organizations to help. National Poetry Month is a registered trademark of the Academy of American Poets.
In coordination with poets, booksellers, librarians, and teachers, April was chosen was chosen as the best time within the year to turn attention toward the art of poetry.
While I've never met William Woolfitt in person, I'm a fan of his poetry, especially his devotion to evocative detail, for example his recent poems in HEArt, an online journal that promotes the role of artists as human rights activists. I'm glad to have a chance to review his second book of poetry Charles of the Desert: A Life in Verse. —Nancy Chen Long
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William Woolfitt is the author of three poetry collections: Beauty Strip (2014), Charles of the Desert (2016), and Spring Up Everlasting (Paraclete Press, forthcoming). His fiction chapbook The Boy with Fire in His Mouth(2014) won the Epiphany Editions contest judged by Darin Strauss. His poems and short stories have appeared in Blackbird, Image, Tin House, The Threepenny Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, Epoch, Spiritus, and other journals. He is the recipient of the Howard Nemerov Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Denny C. Plattner Award from Appalachian Heritage.
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Charles of the Desert by William Woolfitt brims with beautiful writing. In the book, Woolfitt tells us the story of Charles de Foucauld, a Frenchman born in 1858 to a wealthy Catholic family who, after a youthful season of debauchery, experienced a religious conversion in 1886. Charles subsequently rededicated himself to Catholicism, becoming a monk and then an ordained priest. A searcher, both spiritually and physically, his travels took him from France to Algeria, Morocco, Syria, the Holy Land, and then back to central Sahara where he lived as a man of the region in a commitment of solidarity with the local people. Charles was killed at the age of 58, some say by thieves searching for weapons and gold, some say by rebels. He had few converts while living. His influence came primarily after death, as others learned of his life and writing. The order called the Little Brothers and Little Sisters of Jesus was inspired by the example of Charles' life. He is perhaps most known for the Prayer of Abandonment and was beatified by the Catholic Church in 2005. Charles of the Desert isn't divided into sections like most poetry books. It flows from beginning to end as a biography, one enriched through Woolfitt's exquisite imagination. The poems in the book are each marked with a year and location, except for the final poem, which depicts Charles' assassination. To give an overview of the entirety of Charles' life, Woolfitt also provides both a synopsis and a chronology at the end of the book. All of the poems in the book are told in the first person, with Charles de Foucauld as the speaker. The first three poems concern Charles when he was a young boy, six-ish, while his parents were still alive. The first poem "My Father as Weather Formation," introduces Woolfitt's fine attention to detail that carries throughout the book. For example, in one stanza, Charles described his father veering from tree to tree after they arrive in the woods after a family drive: He presses his hand to the bark, rips a leaf, scribbles, picks a thread from his tweed coat (its sleeve scours my cheek, becomes burlap in memory), bites a spotted plum in half, exposing the stone that glistens like the pig hearts I saw, on tiptoe, at the butchery. The five poems that come after the ones in which Charles' parents are still alive touch on his life with his grandfather, his teenage years and early twenties, and his service as a soldier in military. The remainder of the book—the bulk of it—is dedicated to Charles' search for meaning, his subsequent conversion and embrace of the Catholic church, and his life as a monk, hermit, and ordained priest. The poems in Charles of the Desert range from highly narrative to tightly compressed lyric. An example of a poem that leans more narrative is "Tether," in which Charles tells us how he spent the day while in living in a monastery in Ardèche, France, " After high mass, I turn / to chores: I pull thistles, rub the brass .. // ... In my free hour, I read the breviary." An example of a more lyrical poem is "Meditation on the Hands of the Ex-Slave," set in Algeria in 1903. After Charles became a monk, he returned to Algeria, having served there earlier in his life as cavalry officer. Returning as a religious, Charles secured the freedom of slaves by paying for their ransom. In "Meditation on the Hands of the Ex-Slave," Charles studies the hands of a slave whose freedom he has purchased. This poem does a great deal of heavy lifting with few words. Looking at one stanza as an example, Charles us "He clenches them / like tree buds—never open, / always spring." One possible reading of the poem is through synecdoche, in which the slave's hands represent the whole of the man. Aristotle wrote in "On the Soul" that "the soul is analogous to the hand." If hands are a stand-in for the person, then the comparison of the ex-slave's scarred and weathered clenched fists to tree buds that never open leads to sorrow and a sense of choked promise. Those feelings are amplified in the next line, "always spring," which confronts the reader with the open-wound in the soul of the man, a wound inflicted by slavery: At first blush, one would assume the slave's freedom would be a kind of spring and that the idea of it being "always spring" might be a good thing. However, for this reader at least, I felt the opposite—that the fullness of the ex-slave's life, the unfolding of his soul here in this world, might never flower into its summer, instead remaining hidden and stifled, always tight in the bud. Woolfitt is brilliant at balancing both the lyric and narrative in one poem, an example of which can be seen in the "Gold Eater," set in Pont-à-Mousson, France during Charles' early twenties, when he was a womanizer and given to excess:
Gold Eater
Give me fruits, spoils, fats, touches, tastes. The buds of my tongue cry for mushrooms, pungent cheese, magic foods charmed from the dark, delights slurped or torn with teeth. I take, and take, and take. I take from the bent man who crept the cellar stairs each day to riddle the champagne bottle an eighth of a turn, nudging it upside down to settle the cloud of dead yeast cells in its wired neck. And from a goose in a wooden crate (so small, she could not move); she ate forced portions, never saw the sun. Augers slid into an airhole (drilled in the crate’s lid), slid into her beak and craw; then kernels slid down the auger’s grooves, to stuff her gut, and pillow her liver in golden fat. And hats, brooches, furs, these I strip from the merchant’s rack for Violette, who ripped her hem the first June night she flitted over my sill, laughing and moon-gilt. Violette poses while I sketch her. I like her soft and naked as a bud. I thumb the fat of her arm, count the time before my mark fades. When she bores me, I try horse races, quail, grouse, and buntings by the brace, card games, and imported cigars. Violette rigs a beggar costume that I will don to sneak away from officer duties. We shutter the windows, stuff scarves under the door-crack to banish the coming day. We stagger, topple two chairs, our bodies prodigal and blind, my hand reading her face. (first published in Saint Katherine Review) In addition to free verse poems, there are sonnets, as well as poems that follow a patterned rhyme scheme, for example one intriguing poem, "Desert Bath at Sunset." It employs the same end word using the repetition pattern of a pantoum: ABCD BEDF EGFH and so on. In addition, prose poems and epistolary poems are positioned throughout. Several of the epistles are written to a possibly fictionalized sister named Beatrix. (Biographies of Charles indicate he had one sister, whose name was Marie.) The epistolary and prose poems read like flash fiction, fleshing out the story, for example the prose poem "The Rope Maker," a version of which you can read here on page 20 under the title "Metamorphosis." The book also has a sense of immediacy to it. Woolfitt makes frequent use of the present tense, giving the story a freshness, a feeling that is just happened. This can be seen in the final poem of the book, "Someone Knocks," shown below. It's unlike the other poems in the book, with its use of white space to impact the pacing of the poem and its lack of punctuation. It leaves the reader seeing Charles' pages of translated Tuareg poetry flying with the wind, and perhaps analogously, his spirit as well scattering with those pages when he was killed. The lack of punctuation and final image render the story open-ended, suggesting that Charles lives on, which he does in a way, inspiring the Catholic faithful and others even today.
Charles of the Desert is a beautifully written biography-in-verse that holds a reader's attention from the first poem until the end. Woolfitt's imagination and gift with detail bring Charles de Foucauld to life in a compelling and fresh way. Woolfitt wrote in the book's Preface that, after much research and what seemed like a stepping away from his previous autobiographical poems, "I may have made a version of Charles in my own image." Indeed, the Charles de Foucauld depicted by Woolfitt is highly personal. Perhaps that's because we can feel the heart and soul of the poet in each poem. It's a book worth reading more than once.
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Someone Knocks by William Woolfitt and I fling open my door it isn't the man who brings my mail but men with guns my neighbors Haratin and Tuareg joined in a fellagha rezzou they wrench and tie my arms slam me against the wall ransack my little fort unbind and fling my Tuareg dictionary my sheaves of Tuareg poetry drag Jean from supper and his wife tie him beside me tear the cross the heart from my robe my chest is puny white as glue my ribs like my mother's fan my spirit an egret my belly a roost I feel the breath and the burn as my lips form the word I choose and my pages scatter in the wind
Nancy Chen Long is a National Endowment of the Arts creative-writing fellow. She is the author of Light Into Bodies (Tampa University Press, 2017), which won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, and Clouds as Inkblots for the Warprone (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013). You'll find her recent and forthcoming work in Prairie Schooner, Ninth Letter, Alaska Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Zone 3, Briar Cliff Review, Bat City Review, and elsewhere. Nancy received a BS in Electrical Engineering Technology and an MBA, worked as an electrical engineer, software consultant, and project manager, and more recently earned her MFA. As a volunteer for the local Writers Guild, she coordinates a reading series and works with other poets to offer poetry workshops. She lives in south-central Indiana and works at Indiana University.
This past Sunday a group of poets whose poems appear in The Doll Collection anthology met at the Albert Wisner Library in Warwick, NY, to read selections from the book. Arranged and hosted by contributor Mary Makofske, the reading was a wonderful event. The library, selected as the Best Small Library in America, is lovely. The librarian had arranged for a display of dolls in wall cases. Additional dolls were brought by the poets and audience members.
We had a total of eight poets. Each poet read her own poem, plus one more by a different poet in the book, so we had lots of variety. Although I do not have a poem in the book, I had the pleasure of reading Susan Rich's poem "Potato Head." Here are some pictures from the day.
Kim Bridgford read her poem "Chewed-On Barbie." Her second poem was "Playing Drunks at Age 7" by Kyle Potvin from Massachusetts.
Jessica de Koninck read her poem "The Golem." Her second poem was "The Pregnant Doll" by Nicole Cooley who also wrote the book's wonderful Introduction.
Jane Ebihara read her poem "In the Milk House." She then read "Broken Doll" by Susan Terris
from California.
Mary Makofske read her poem "Bambi." Her second poem was "Operation Teddy Bear" by Jeffrey Harrison from Massachusetts.
Charlotte Mandel read her poem "After Torrential Rain." She then read "The Family" by Chana Bloch from California.
Susanna Rich read her own "This Child Left" and then "Paper Doll" by Susan Laughter Meyers from South Carolina.
Hayden Saunier displayed a flip doll, then read her poem "Flip Doll: Red Riding Hood." Her second poem was "Secrets" by Elaine Terranova from Pennsylvania.
I am on my penultimate day of five weeks at the Hermitage Artist Retreat in Manasota Key. The house that is the heart of the Hermitage space is over a century old; if you stand in the right spot you can see the Gulf out of one window, and the bay out of another. I've overlapped with a drummer, a novelist, a composer, a photographer, a clarinetist, two playwrights, and a visual artist who is working on a memoir.
Residencies are a chance to flex your wingspan. No one is pressuring you to get dressed, eat, or sleep at a certain hour. You might go a week without driving a car. The point isn't to take a break from working; the point is to privilege work you care about, that might live beyond you as art. If you're like me, you sit down with a piece of paper and literally reinvent what a day can look like.
I came down to Florida to work on my next nonfiction book. I came down here with an idea. But it was the long beach walks that gave me a title, solidified the outline, and fueled the drafting of opening chapters. The funny thing about an "idea" for nonfiction is that it's like an egg; perfect in concept. But you have to expose the inherent fragilities in your idea in order to overcome them. Here, the egg has been cracked. The real work begins. Because I'm in the midst of writing nonfiction, I've been feasting on nonfiction. These are the books I read or re-read while I was here...
On Looking: Essays, by Lia Purport
Tell Me If You're Lying: Essays, by Sarah Sweeney
Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family, edited by Joy Castro
All Grown Up: A Novel, by Jami Attenberg
Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953, by Elizabeth Winder
I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place, by Howard Norman
Self-Portrait with Dogwood, by Christopher Merrill
This is Running for Your Life: Essays, by Michelle Orange
Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System, by Sonya Huber
Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, by Sarah Manguso
The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood, by Richard Blanco
Riverine: A Memoir from Anywhere But Here, by Angela Palm
In particular, I've been thinking a lot about the variegated ways one can construct longform creative nonfiction. Several of these books very delicately tread the line between essays and memoir. One factor is the brevity or lyricism of the chapters at hand; another is the decision to recycle key narrative moments or factual contexts from one essay to the next.
In addition to book-work, I served as the Annette Dignam Writer in Residence to the State Colleges of Florida, Manatee-Sarasota (SCF). I took over seven classes taught by four different professors, and I gave a reading. My final event was spending an hour with the "Swampscribes" (the creative writing club), talking about persona poetry. On one hand, using exercises and readings I've used before is key to making this a privilege rather than a burden. On the other hand, I like being spurred to create new lessons, and I came up with one on public speaking that I will use going forward. We talked about eye contact, projection, and defining your "batter's box"; we looked at how to annotate a text for emphasis, interpretation, and dramatic pause. Though this wasn't a literature course, I wanted to bring poetry to the table. So I de-lineated and made anonymous poems by William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lucille Clifton, in order to give us "raw texts" for discussion (revealing, only at the end, their actual forms and authors), During a partnering exercise, I got to circulate and listen to the music of four students--four corners of the classroom--each simultaneously delivering Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
SCF has graduated 47,000 students in the sixty+ years it has been open. They have four campuses and the Venice campus is cozy and bright, with a nature preserve at the edge. Each day I took ten minutes to walk the perimeter, listening to birds and looking for alligators. They were to be found--and one time, a little too close to my toes for comfort.
Back at home, there has been snow falling on bewildered cherry blossoms. Here, we had a tornado on a Monday night, which took out power to the lower half of the island; many afternoons get windy. But my sun-loving heart has been lightened by being here. I've taken over two hundred photos. I'll share a few with you here.
The first night, you do a lot of standing around and gawking
...which Howard C. Tibbals spent his life completing
Into the "Pathless Woods"
Ghost of the girl who just ran through
Another girl running through
Central silence, and then out again
Courtyard of the Ringing Museum of Art
Michelangelo's David: Sarasota edition
Scotch with two rocks, please
Field trip to the Selby Botanic Gardens
I need more bromeliads in my life
Marc Chagall-inspired stained glass throughout
Orchids, orchids everywhere
Thursday afternoon in March
Thursday afternoon in March--just ten minutes later
Time to go home. But I'll be dreaming about this place for months to come.
DC folks, see you soon! I'll be hosting a National Poetry Month celebration at theArts Club of Washington on Tuesday, April 4--with two featured readers, Claudia Cortese and Francisco Aragon, plus an open mic. Angela Maria Spring will be on hand to talk about Duende District, a new bookstore initiative that will emphasize multicultural literary community. 7 PM start time, doors opening at 6:30 PM for the open mic sign-ups; free and open to the public. Full details are on the Facebook event page.
William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850) is a well known poet who promoted “common speech” within poems and argued against the poetic biases of the period. He wrote some of the most influential poetry in Western literature, including his most famous work, The Prelude, which is often considered to be the crowning achievement of English romanticism.
Not as well known is his sister, poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth. She was for many years pretty much dismissed as simply her brother’s assistant. She did write out his poems for him, but she also wrote every day in her journals and wrote her own poetry.
Studies of those diaries show that William actually cribbed some of his most famous lines for some poems from his sister’s writings.
One of those poems is “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (sometimes called "The Daffodils") which begins:
I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze...
The Wordsworth parents died when she and William were children and they were sent to live with various relatives. After being reunited, she and William never left each other again.
The inspiration for the poem came from a walk Wordsworth took with his sister around Glencoyne Bay, Ullswater, in the Lake District. Dorothy's journal entry describes the walk:
"When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side, we fancied that the lake had floated the seed ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up – But as we went along there were more and yet more and at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever dancing ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot and a few stragglers a few yards higher up but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity and unity and life of that one busy highway – We rested again and again. The Bays were stormy and we heard the waves at different distances and in the middle of the water like the Sea." — Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journal Thursday, 15 April 1802
William wrote his poem inspired by the walk and also by Dorothy's journal.
I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the Milky Way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced, but they Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: A Poet could not but be gay, In such a jocund company: I gazed—and gazed—but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils.
William Wordsworth wrote the poem while living with his wife, Mary Hutchinson, and Dorothy at Town End in Grasmere in England's Lake District. His wife contributed what Wordsworth later said were the two best lines in the poem, recalling the "tranquil restoration" of Tintern Abbey:
They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude
All this is not to say that that William was a plagiarist. He noted his inspirations himself in his prose, and seems to have been fine with using lines and suggestions from these two women in his life.
But as the daffodils open on another spring season, perhaps we can put some breath back into Dorothy's poems too.
World Poetry Day is celebrated on March 21 each year. UNESCO sponsors this day to recognize the moving spirit of poetry and its transformative effect on culture.
When was the last time you bought a poetry collection or read poetry by a poet from outside your own country?
Some teachers will incorporate the day into a lesson, but for most of us not in school, we will need to find our own world poetry.
It could be the very popular Chilean poet Pablo Neruda reading some of his poems at the United Nations during an homage to his accomplishments: Listen here.
Most American readers are likely to have read world poets in English, but even listening to poets from other cultures and languages might be a new experience.
UNESCO's Director-General, Irina Bokova, wrote in her message on the event:
The poet Pablo Neruda wrote, “poetry is an act of peace.” Poetry is unique in its ability to speak across time, space and culture, to reach directly the hearts of people everywhere. This is a wellspring for dialogue and understanding – this has always been a force to challenge injustice and advance freedom. As UNESCO’s new Goodwill Ambassador for Artistic Freedom and Creativity, Deeyah Khan, has said, all art, including poetry, “has the extraordinary capacity to express resistance and rebellion, protest and hope.”
Poetry is not a luxury. It lies at the heart of who we are as women and men, living together today, drawing on the heritage of past generations, custodians of the world for our children and grandchildren. By celebrating poetry today, we celebrate our ability to join together, in a spirit of solidarity, to scale and climb “the cloudy summits of our time.” We need this to take forward the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, to implement the Paris Climate Agreement, to ensure no woman or man is left behind.
Here is a video example of Al-Taghrooda, traditional Bedouin chanted poetry, which is composed and recited by men travelling on camelback through desert areas of the United Arab Emirates and Oman. Short poems are improvised and repeated between two groups of riders often as antiphonal singing. The most important aspect is the social bonding during the oral exchange of verses. Al-Taghrooda is also chanted at weddings and other festivities, particularly camel races. Its themes range from romantic love, friendship, praise of tribal ties, aspirations to the settlement of disputes and contemporary themes.
