Putting two things in the viewfinder
A poetry prompt on metaphor (and more inspiration from Sister Corita Kent)
Note: This content was originally written for a craft talk, which I shared a couple of weekends ago for a poetry workshop here in OKC. It ends with a poetry prompt (included below) for which I brought along several random household objects. We all took 20 minutes to write, and the prompt generated the most interesting and surprisingly poignant poems. Every single person in the workshop shared their work, and I felt absolutely lifted and delighted by how this prompt worked its magic.
So. If you’re poetry-curious or stuck in a writing rut, read on.
Also: My last Substack post explored Sister Corita Kent’s uniquely feminine form of resistance. You can read that post here, if you’d like a bit more background on her art and life.
Rebel Nun and screenprint artist Corita Kent became known for one art assignment, which she regularly gave her students. It involved cutting a small window into a piece of paper and asking her students to look through it as a viewfinder. Whatever fell within the small square’s view was to be the subject of their next artistic work.
She spoke of it this way: “You have to look at the world [in] small pieces at a time. Look at it. Just a small part of the world.”
Elsewhere, she said this: ‘Assignments [like this] allow you to do something instead of everything… you are free not to do everything.’
As poets, we are often tempted by the desire to write about everything. We want to pen universal truths, give voice to philosophical ideas, and grasp at sweeping statements about what it means to be human. Of course, we do. We want this because we have all, at one time or another, experienced that ringing and resounding knock of the universal within us when we read a favorite poem or novel. We’ve seen ourselves in the words of another, and so we want to create something that has a similar effect.
But the best way we can get there is by trying to do something instead of trying to do everything. The universal is in the particular, as James Joyce said.
In its very nature, a poem is a limited thing—whether it’s limited by meter, form, or simply by controlling image, there can and should be borders around our work as poets. For the purpose of this exercise, we’re going to think about the ways we can limit our vision—or, in other words, drill down very deep into the particular—to a very small viewfinder frame.
But before we do that, I want to start with an exploration of what a poem is, because that will inform what goes inside that frame, what we look at, and what we do with it.
I’m a little bit of a collector of poetry definitions. Here are a few of my favorites:
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” - Emily Dickinson
“Poetry is the spontaneous outflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquillity” - William Wordsworth
“Poetry makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange.” - Novalis, German poet
“To look closely and long.” - Jane Hirshfield
“Saying one thing in terms of another.” - Robert Frost1
This last definition is bolded, not because it’s the best definition, but because it’s very useful in defining metaphor and the way it works in poetry. Saying one thing, but not really, explicitly saying that thing—that’s what a poem does. Saying it sideways, from the back door, or as Dickinson’s poem says, telling the truth but telling it slant.
Two Things in the Viewfinder
If we think about Sister Corita’s viewfinder example and apply it to writing poetry in a very literal sense, then we might end up with a poem that is just one thing. Something like this:
Red chair
concrete floor
the chair meets the floor and casts
a long shadow
That is a miniature vignette I wrote at the time when I was preparing this talk, based on what was directly in front of me. But is this a poem? I guess that could be argued. Maybe it is to some. But to me, what it’s missing is a controlling metaphor. It’s only saying one thing, rather than saying one thing in terms of another.
Let’s look at how I might do that differently:
Right where the red chair meets the concrete floor—
a small circle of contact. And from that small center,
a shadow lengthens.
So the brushing of our lives together, however brief,
casts on and out, beyond us.
This second version is equally brief, and equally particular. But now, I’ve taken what was in the viewfinder (what was right in front of me), and I’ve expanded it by means of metaphor. I’ve taken one very particular, mundane, and honestly quite boring still-life scene and blown it out to mean something else.
This is what some of my favorite poems do. I want to share some examples.
Mother to Son
Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
This poem describes a staircase. But, of course, it is not merely about a staircase. The staircase is the metaphor Hughes’s speaker uses to get the message across: I’ve had to walk a hard path. Lots of things conspired against me. But I kept walking.
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
I just adore this poem, for so many reasons. The onomatopoeia of it all, the way a writer finds his connection to his ancestors’ work. But when you know this poem is about a man searching to continue his family’s legacy, you can read the whole poem, not as a poem about digging, but about writing. The squelch and slap of soggy peat can be about dredging up an idea for a poem or a story, the good labor of giving it shape.
Dusk, Tracy K. Smith
I included the poem above, too, but for sake of space here, I’m linking instead of transcribing. This poem is about a daughter’s body language at breakfast. But it’s not just about that. It’s also about a mother who’s facing the dusk of her life while her daughter is at the very dawn of her own, with her “narrow untouched hips. The shoulders / Still so naïve as to stand squared, erect, / Impervious facing the window…”
It’s about a daughter eating breakfast. But it’s also about aging and tension and time.
Prompt
Find a few household objects. (In the workshop, I brought a film camera, a small wooden cup, a taper candle, a rubber duck, a spool of thread, and a teapot. Feel free to borrow any of these if you want as a starting point.)
Some of these objects are odd, and some are odd only because of their ordinariness. Here is the task: Write about one of these objects in as much particularity and artistry as you can. And then, once you’ve described it, observed it, named it, and really looked at it, you can expand it out and draw a line between this single thing and something else.
This second part is where we get to lean into those poetic tendencies toward the philosophical and existential. The meaning or idea you connect to the physical object you’re describing can be anything. It can be your last memory of your mom, the feeling of falling in love, the way you felt when you saw the Sistine Chapel for the first time, or the sensation of being watched by a deer out your bedroom window.
My only stipulation here is that the metaphor has to make sense.
I like to think of metaphors like a drawbridge between two cliff faces. If you’re going to draw those lines of logic and connection between one thing and another, you have to make sure it can get you all the way across; the logic has to hold once your reader puts her weight on it and starts walking that path with you.
As a reader, I won’t necessarily buy a metaphor like this: You are like a water cup. Pretty and cold.
Well ok, maybe one water cup is pretty and cold, but they’re not always either one of those things, sometimes they’re neither of them. Further, being pretty and cold are not the most essential or elemental things about a water cup, so they ask more of a reader as she tries to connect the two cliff faces of the metaphor. I’d be much more likely to believe a metaphor that centered itself on the cup’s empty center but its ability to hold a source of life, or the possibility that it’s either always in reach or always just out of reach. These are more universal and logical ways to use the water cup as an opening into a metaphor.
This is, again, a silly example, but you can see what I’m saying. Once you know where you’re trying to connect your metaphor, make sure it makes sense all the way through to the very end. Think of it from your reader’s perspective, who will have only the context you give her. If it’s important to your poem that the water cup is pretty, then you have to create that pretty water cup out of thin air, and you’d better describe it fully.
So that’s the prompt: Flesh out the particular of an everyday object, and then zoom us out toward the personal or universal in some way.
I need to give credit to my poetry mentor, Bob Cording, here. He introduced me to this definition of poetry and is the one who encouraged me to see and write poetry this way.
This was such a helpful post and has my creative wheels turning! Thank you!!