On April Fool’s Day, which marks the opening of both “the cruelest month” (T. S. Eliot) and, since 1996, National Poetry Month, I reviewed the previous week’s entries with some wonderment. The prompt I’d proposed on March 24— to write a “coded dialogue poem,” in which the words memory, dream, and affair appear in code—was even more difficult than I had anticipated, in no small part because I had not been sufficiently precise in my instructions.
But poetic logic has it that the more difficult the task, the greater the opportunity for a poet to conceive of an ingenious poem—not from a lightning strike of inspiration, but from truly exercising the imagination, solving a puzzle of the sublime.
In composing “The Aftermath,” Christine Rhein explained that she “was inspired by the story and soundtrack of a movie I watched on a flight home last week.” Her code words were overture (affair), sweetness (memory), and melody (dream).
She told me about the overture, how the score
she’d composed was finished now—the pages
crumpled and burned, as if I needed to imagine
her abandoning the whole ballet, the sweetness
of the violins, bright boldness of the brass,
and the suave conductor—his arms coaxing
out the melody, weaving whispers into thunder.I lied, of course, about the overture, begged him
to believe it was nothing but a whim, pretended
I’d been the one to end those afternoons of music,
so that he might forgive the melody, the notes
I fear will echo on, fill the silence of our kitchen,
our living room, our bedroom—the sweetness
of our years, a dance I crumpled and burned.
To identify a love affair with the “overture” of an opera or musical is elegant, and “The Overture” may be a better title (as Michael C. Rush suggests). I agree with critic-of-the week Millicent Caliban that Christine’s “development of the code words into an extended musical metaphor creates a very powerful poem from what would otherwise read as a rather tawdry tale of an adulterous affair.”
One secret of this poem’s success is that a single word, “sweetness,” accentuates the musical metaphor that lends grace to what in other hands might be “tawdry.” The “sweetness / of the violins, bright boldness of the brass, / and the suave conductor” bring the reader right into the philharmonic hall where, perhaps, Leonard Bernstein conducts Schubert’s Rosamunde overture or Lenny’s own overture for Candide.
Millicent Caliban solved the puzzle of the prompt by retelling a story told by Apuleius, that of “Psyche and Cupid”:
What we share, let us call it our darkness.
I dare not glimpse your beauty in the light.
Within me deep, I hold a conjuration
that I may keep forever in my hoard.
Inside our darkness, I can sense your glory,
cherished abode, to which I will return
night after night. Predawn, I must arise
to leave you with the savor on our lips.
“I dare not glimpse your beauty in the light” exemplifies the virtues of the iambic pentameter line while stating the truth about Psyche’s plight: she will enjoy her lover on the condition that she never sees his face. Cupid’s response ends with the taste of a kiss in blank verse.
It may be that all poetry is a kind of code, consisting of truths told by a jester employed for the sharpness of his wit. Like Millicent, Greg Chaimov used the prompt as the point of departure for a dialogue based on ancient myth—in this case, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Here is “At the Entrance to the Via degli Scalpellini”:
He:
The light, slant as in the Monte Ceceri
on that late autumn afternoon when we,
worn from the climb, found beneath cypress
and evergreen oaks, wooden benches
placed as if someone expected us there,
flares for you once more when I dare
to reach through the years to confess
a love for that light above all others.She:
No. Even then, the view from the bench,
clouds edging out the sun, had cinched
what we already knew: we’d not meet another day.
You may think I want to make my way
back to the Monte Ceceri, but, to return,
I’d have to face that awful climb again.
Greg explains that the “Parco di Monte Ceceri is in Fiesole, Italy. The path to the benches starts at the Via degli Scalpellini.” He adds that the “code words are light (memory), Monte Ceceri (dream), and climb (affair).” This information adds an extra layer to our appreciation of a poem in a familiar genre, that of American travelers encountering each other at a memorable site in Europe. The elaborate syntax of Greg’s opening stanza conceals what the second stanza reveals with its emphatic “No.” Greg’s Eurydice surprises us by being both more defiant and more defeatist than expected.
Diana Ferraro’s “Feed” charms with its apparent simplicity:
The sky is over the roof
Not so blue, but leaden
Not so calm but stormy.
Are you still there?In your miraculous garden
New apples blossom
According to season
No dread of starving!What have I done?
I dream this sad affair vanished,
Memory and incompetence erased.
My one suggestion: drop the last two lines; let the reader arrive at the conclusion without your needing to spell it out. “What have I done?” is a great question—a fine way to conclude a poem.
“Yes, all words are codes, you are right,” Diana replied insightfully to a thoughtful comment from Emily, “but somehow I got stubbornly stuck on the specific need of using a code to hide a meaning from someone. The cheater’s wife, the jail censor, the enemy in a war, and so on. I see with joy all the beautiful posted poems that simply use ‘code’ as a playful prompt of clever and deft substitution without caring about the why. I can’t, the sense of mystery and danger overpowers me!”
Diana makes an important point. Some of us make jubilant use of code words not so much to disguise a story as to multiply its possible referents. Angela Ball exemplifies this tendency in a whimsical poem that ends:
for “memory” read “swizzle stick”
for “dream” “drowned baseball”
for “affair” “seaside watermelon”
for “secret” “vacuum cleaner”
A late entry from Michael C. Rush struck me as a clever example of the poetry of bickering, the battle of the sexes that might appear in a screwball comedy like The Awful Truth with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. I think Michael can find a better title than “Memory, Dream, Affair” for this dialogue of spouses:
I shall commission expensive portraits
of each of your mistresses, husband.
What would I not put you through
to have you with me?
My love language is lying and bickering.
Love is (obviously) a carbohydrate.
Hate is salt (as many have said).
I shall smoke a cigar
with each of your lovers, wife.
Leave me my dry-eyed pride
in my extensive collection of
all that I never wanted.
I will always root for the mischievous
over the devious.
What I enjoy the most, besides the cigars and portraits, is the proposed equation between hate and salt—and the classification of love as a carbohydrate. The rhyme of “devious” and “mischievous” ends the poem on the right note. Michael, if you’re willing to revise, you have lines three to five in the first stanza to play with.
In my own efforts to make a poem out of the prompt, I felt a strong tension between the impulse to let the words have their way and the antithetical impulse to mystify “the cheater’s wife, the jail censor, the enemy in a war.” This is the best that I could come up with. My aim in “The Former Lovers” was a dialogue that only the couple would understand:
“What has management done to our battle?
I didn’t think it could happen, but after
running the last paces to meet a bus
whose doors have already shut, I knew
you had won my heart.”
“It was no ballet,
though we danced, ballroom style, drained
the bottle, conjoined baguette and jam.
It was just as I had planned it. The damsel in the garden
is the secret agent of the dream, pursuing her prey
with her butterfly net. The delirium
ended the memory, but until then we lived as lovers.”
For next time, a new prompt: I call it “the ironic title.” Take the title of an existing work of art, make it your title, and write a poem (or prose poem) that veers as far away as possible from the work of art you are raiding. For example, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain may refer to an amusement park north of Los Angeles, and The Magnificent Seven may head a piece about last year’s high-flying tech stocks
Here are some titles that strike me as promising:
- “The Lottery”
- Persuasion
- “The Necklace”
- The Wings of the Dove
- Under the Volcano
- Light in August
- Beyond the Pleasure Principle
- The Beautiful and Damned
But, of course, feel free to choose one of your own.
Ideally your poem should have nothing to do—except perhaps obliquely—with the work whose title you have appropriated. Incorporate just one formal device, be it a rhyme scheme, a metrical line, an acrostic, or even a repeated word or phrase. If you run out of inspiration, go to a favorite book, open it at random, pick out a phrase, and remember what T. S. Eliot said: “Immature poets imitate. Mature poets steal.”
Deadline: Ten days from the day this post goes up. Thanks, everyone.
