Prelude to a Poetry Workshop
by MVWG Member Mary Alexander
Several years ago, after reading Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ poetry book, Red Clay Suite, for a poetry course and thinking about the annotation I would need to write, I realized just how like a music composition her book was. I even titled my annotation, “Southern Lament, A Sonata Cantata.” Jeffers borrowed a musical structure for her book of poetry and applied it beautifully. There was a rhythmic feel to her poems and throughout her composition she used words reminiscent of the musicality of her piece, such as “suite… tune…wails… hymn… song… singing… blues.”
Poetry is a work of art that comes in many forms, as do other types of art, such as painting, music, sculpture, etc. For most forms of poetry there is an infrastructure. For example one form may utilize a particular rhyming scheme, have a particular number of lines to a stanza or a certain number of stanzas to the completed piece. Poetry also employs a variety of tropes such as figurative language, stanza length, alliteration, rhyme and other types of repetition, to enhance imagery, speed or pressure of reading and rhythm. Other art forms have similar devices that are part of their own infrastructures. Often there are correlations between the infrastructure of one art form, say music, and another, perhaps poetry, as I found in Jeffers’ Red Clay Suite.
Poetry, painting, music, performance, sculpture, etc. are all expressions of art. As with poetry, other fields of art have a number of forms, whether fixed or fluid, and all depend on particular elements for their creation. The perception of each work of art is dependent on how each individual experiences it. Have you ever been carried away by a work of instrumental music even though you didn’t know the name of the piece or the composer? Or maybe you have been moved to dance wildly to a live band, really felt the rhythm and the beat even while the singer’s words were lost in the din. There is so much to enjoy in all types of art and I would argue that it is not necessary to completely understand everything about a piece in order to gain pleasure from it. I love going to museums and immersing myself in the visual arts. I find I like some pieces due to the way light is utilized or because of the technique used to apply color.
I believe it is possible to discover a variety of pathways to the interior beauty of a work of art. Recognizing poetry as art and finding pleasure in its form and elements can only enhance the joy of both reading and writing it. I am certainly no connoisseur of paintings but that does not keep me from enjoying them. However, we can’t ignore the other side of this coin either. While I believe that there is beauty to be experienced in art without a complete understanding, I would also argue that the more we know about how a piece of art comes together, the more pleasure we might find in the viewing … or the reading … or the listening.
I am planning a Zoom workshop for March 28 at 6:30 pm, to explore a variety of forms and elements of poetry, and their correlations with other types of art. It is open to both readers and writers of poetry and will be, I hope, part-instruction and part-discussion.
Join us at Mary’s Poetry Workshop! Learn more and register here!
Presenter/poet bio: Mary Alexander is a retired school psychologist. For much of her life she had only dipped her digits in the puddles of poetry until she finally understood that she really wanted to just dive in, to swim and body surf in the lakes and oceans of poetry. In 2012 she graduated from Goddard College in Plainfield, VT with a M.F.A. degree in Creative Writing. Mary feels her most important roles, in which she has both flourished and faltered, have been daughter, sister, mother, grandmother, godmother and friend. She lived in Japan for two years and has traveled to South Korea, Mexico, Finland, Norway, Scotland, England and France. Until 2018, she lived in the southeastern United States. La Crescent, Minnesota is now her home.