Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh, and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.
I’m going to talk about two things today, Imagery and enumeration. Both are very common in poetry, as a vehicle for conveying ideas, emotions, memories, and metaphors. As a way to give emphasis, and to define, in example bits and pieces, those things that are often difficult to describe in their entirety.
And let's add a third topic - repetition. Poets, like songwriters, often return to the same words or phrasing repeatedly for emphasis. Sometimes they do this with rhyme or rhythm, and sometimes by repeating the same or similar words again and again.
As the basis for this discussion, I’ve chosen the poem Bedtime Reading for the Unborn Child by Libyan-American poet and translator Khaled Mattawa. He was Born in Benghazi and came to the U.S. as a teen in 1979. He studied and taught at several universities, receiving his PhD from Duke, and currently teaches at the University of Michigan.
The text of the poem is online at the Poetry Foundation (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54258/bedtime-reading-for-the-unborn-child) and Mattawa does all of these things I mentioned above, and does them beautifully. He begins by setting the scene, and the mood, and then introducing us to the title character, or maybe to his dreams for her:
Long after the sun falls into the sea
and twilight slips off the horizon like a velvet sheet
and the air gets soaked in blackness;
long after clouds hover above like boulders
and stars crawl up and stud the sky;
long after bodies tangle, dance, and falter
and fatigue blows in and bends them
and sleep unloads its dreams and kneads them
and sleepers dive into the rivers inside them,
a girl unlatches a window,
walks shoeless into a forest,
her dark hair a flag rippling in darkness.
So of course your first reaction should be an appreciative Wow at the use of language, at the velvet sheet of the horizon and clouds like boulders and crawling stars and dark hair like a rippling flag. Like I said, Wow.
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