Halfway through a poetry reading in a Greenwich Village bar where Bob Dylan used to perform, a peculiar trend emerged.
The word “whale” was slipping out of the mouth of every other
poet.
In a workshop a few days later, another whale swam
into the room. After class, I flipped through a poetry collection only to find more blubber. There were blue whales, gray whales, humpbacks and orcas. Sperm whales, bottlenoses, delugas and fins.
What was up with poets and whales?
I was a newcomer to New York and to poetry, and like the village
outsider, I saw the place with fresh eyes.
Yet the more readings I attended and the more poets I befriended, the more I felt the pull of poetry clichés. My vision grew cloudy.
At the height of this blindness, I wrote a dreadful note to myself:
Write a poem about how
when you first entered the poetry world, you found they were all obsessed with
whales. Comical. End poem on a note about whales and their mysterious beauty.
Praise Whitman, I never wrote that poem.
I don't mean to pick on whales or anyone who has written about them, myself included! I mean to ask, how do we resist the poetry cliché? I'll tell you what I do, and I hope you'll share what works for you.
*Make a list of banned diction. This is a good bar game to play
with poets–everyone shouts out words like moon and sycamore,
someone makes a list, and you agree to exclude them from your next round of work. This is like when Top
Chef contestants cook with one hand tied behind their backs and stun the
judges with creative dishes.
*Take notes during your day job. I can’t tell you how many
times I’ve wished to make a living just
writing poetry. But if that wish came true, my poems would suffer. Working
in another field gives you access to an orphanage of language just waiting to be adopted by poetic parents.
Rescue words wherever you can! While editing a business magazine, for example, I open a Word document and copy all of the unusual language I come across. I
met the term hot-swappable that way.
*Use the language of your hobbies. David Lehman taps his knowledge
of Jewish composers to lively effect in his poems. My friend Amanda Smeltz makes sonnets out of
hip-hop lyrics. Julie Sheehan introduced us to the language of cocktails, and
Louise Glück to the language of flowers. I'm thankful for them.
*Watch old films from the '40s and '50s. In
The Philadelphia Story, Katharine
Hepburn defines the archaic word “yare.” It’s wonderful.
("It means, oh what does it mean? Easy to handle, quick to the helm, fast, bright — everything a boat should be.")
The only time I’ve read this word is in The Tempest, and I can't find it in my Webster's dictionary. Classic films are time capsules for dated phrases, transatlantic
accents and sing-songy cadences that no one, save Kelsey Grammer, uses anymore. Resurrecting old clichés is fair game.
*Lastly, read Middle and Old English. I know, I know, it
sounds masochistic! But once you start, it’s intuitive, and you
pick up all kinds of awesome words. A professor at Cambridge made our class perform an entire play in Old English, and I'm still grateful for the experience.
Along those lines, I use Forgotten English Knowledge Cards as prompts. Some gems include:
gimlet-eyed: A sharp-sighted, inquisitive person in the nineteenth century.
gander-moon: The month of
recovery after a woman gives birth. A husband who took interest in other women
during this time was called a gander-mooner, in reference to a gander who
wanders off while his mate hatches eggs.
fixfax: A wooden device
with holes for the necks and wrists of people accused of
fortune-telling and sales fraud in Scotland and America. They were fixfaxed in the public square, where
people pelted them with “humiliating projectiles.”
bankrupture: Variant of
bankruptcy. Fourteenth-century Italian moneylenders worked outside on
wooden benches called bancas. If a banker ran out of cash, his bench would
be destroyed. Bankrupture = broken bench.
So go out! Go yarely! Leave the village to collect a pail of
shiny words and bring them back for us to enjoy.
***
Your daily prompt: Find a word you’ve never written before, and use it in a poem.
Image by Brandon Cole via Encyclopedia Britannica.