Occasions: When Audience Trumps Poet

May and June and July are jammed with occasions.

o   Mother’s and Father’s Days.

o   Memorial and Flag and Independence Days.

o   Graduation and Wedding and many other types of days.

For poets seeking an audience, these occasions offer multiple opportunities to practice craft.

Poetic Occasions: 2 Chief Reminders

1] For a poet writing an occasional poem, the most important remembrance is that the audience controls the writing.  Occasions require poets to stretch their abilities without causing deliberate offense to the audience.

2] The poet also needs to remember the 4 Requirements of Song. The writing must be heartfelt without being smarmy.  Powerful lines and strong imagery must keep the audience engaged:  a listening-only audience will break attention faster than a reading one.  Rhetorical devices that emphasize points are especially necessary as they help the audience “hear” the ideas through repetition and climactic ordering.

Maya Angelou’s inaugural “On the Pulse of the Morning” and Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright” are perfect examples (one long and sprawling free verse, the other 16 tightly constructed lines).

Here are 2 + 1 poems for Mother’s Day (the 1 is a “just because”) with the reasons they work so well.

Of course, you can always fall back on a greeting card.

Li-Young Lee & the Water of Time

In “I Ask My Mother to Sing”, Li-Young Lee presents the connection of the past to present to future, something mothers do for their children almost unconsciously.

I Ask my Mother to Sing

Mothers ground their children with who they are and who they come from even as they encourage who they will become.

Lee celebrates this ability.  The women’s joy comes across in the second line—then Lee sidesteps the typical encounter of a poem with a mother in it—much as Langston Hughes did with “Mother to Son”.  The second stanza has the readers wishing that they knew this song.

It’s the third stanza, however, that contains the most power:  waterlilies like a bamboo fountain.  Soothing serenity.

And then Lee has done something wonderful with the title, usually only glanced at, here it is a necessary part, pouring us into the poem, just as the waterlilies into the next and the next and then pour us out of the poem.

Three stanzas, unrhymed, with very little tying the poem together—yet still with a tranquility that draws us back and back.

George Barker’s Occasion for his Mother

Sonnet, Barker announces in the title, and most of us wouldn’t have noticed if he had not announced it.

The first line sounds like the Mother’s Day greeting card.  Surprise comes in the third line.  No woman wants to be described “as huge as Asia”.  “Seismic with laughter”, yes.  Barker gives us the reality of his mother.  He doesn’t gild the lily, for it is not the pretty image that makes up the mother he loves:  a woman who helps the weak and hurt, brash but alluring, fascinating and courageous.

She has her weaknesses, but he bolsters her with “all my love” and a reminder of “all her faith” as she copes with a devastating death, punned into the last line.

By now we are studying the poem, re-reading portions, nodding to ourselves as we picture the woman he describes.  And closer examination tells us that his rhyming is as atypical as the woman herself.

Surprising poems like Barkers draw us back and back—and isn’t that what we want with our poetry?  Readers returning over and again.

Judith Viorst

My plus-1 occasion poem, which actually fits all occasions:  Mothers are known for their advice.  Teenagers think it’s nagging, but young adults have a comprehension of the wisdom that flows from the mother, advice oft-repeated because we do not understand the simplicity of the truth.

Some Advice from a Mother to her Married Son

The answer to do you love me isn’t, I married you, didn’t I?

Or, Can’t we discuss this after the ballgame is through?

It isn’t, Well that all depends on what you mean by ‘love’.

Or even, Come to bed and I’ll prove that I do.

The answer isn’t, How can I talk about love when

the bacon is burned and the house is an absolute mess and

the children are screaming their heads off and

I’m going to miss my bus?

The answer is yes.

The answer is yes.

The answer is yes.

Wrapping It Up

Join us on the 25^th, just in time for Memorial Day and then Flag Day, to look at poems on patriotic occasions.