National Poetry Month #1: The Story of the Body

 Hi folks! I'm baaack!

So it's been about a year since I've last posted to this blog. I know, too long. My year's been good. I had back surgery, moved, wrote. Nothing terribly exciting. I had a new poetry book published, Prairie Madness, from North Dakota State University Press. 

I've been writing, but I'd like to be writing more. Alas. But now it's April, and it's a perfect time for me to get back into the writing practice. So here I am, back for another round of 30/30. I'm going to post my poems, of course, but I'm also going to post a few thoughts on other people's poems when I can. For the past, oh, maybe year and a half, I've been reading a poem a day and using it as a springboard into my own writing. It's helped me to come up with new ideas and stretch my writing in unexpected ways. Fortuantely, the NAPO site seems particularly condusive to this practice this year, since they're posting a journal a day plus a prompt. Today's post focused on prose poems. I hate prose poems, but I thought I'd try to put such a prejudice aside for a short poeming session. I'm glad I did. 

The poem I admired today was Jose Hernandez Diaz's poem "The Conformist" . I'm actually facebook friends with the author, so that added a neat extra layer of appreciation for the poem. I enjoyed this poem a lot. I think it speaks to a sentiment a lot of people, especially young but aging adults, have. This tension between youth and middle age, immaturity and maturity. In “The Conformist,” the speaker sees maturity as someone conforming into the humdrum of life. I guess that’s not super original, but it’s presented in a specific and powerful way here, and it speaks to me. 

So what’s going on in the poem? A man in Neil Young & Crazy Horse shirt gets up early, dreams of his childhood while gazing out the window. “Sweet memories,” the speaker tells us. The man goes to the gym, which he doesn’t want to do. He comes home to watch football and eat a bland sandwich. Blah. The last sentence is what elevates the poem for me: “He was conforming very well to society; he was living the dream.” 

Boom. So that’s what “the dream” is—it’s being a conformist, bending to society’s pressures to be ordinary and comfortable and boring. The only rebellion this man has is his shirt, maybe, and the sweet memories of a having a Doberman Pincher as a child. I think the dog represents the animal within, something he loved as a child, but it seems like this is now just a distant, pleasant memory.

Today’s prompt is to write a prose poem that’s a “story about the body.” The poem should contain an encounter between two people, some dialogue, and at least one crisp VISUAL image. I’m going to write about a visit to the gynecologist. 

NAPO 1: 

A Story of the Body

The woman, nearing middle age, lies back on the bed, her feet in stirrups. All she can think about is how cold this room is, how fortunate it is that she remembered to wear socks this morning, as she dressed, hurriedly, for this morning’s appointment. She feels the pressure of the wand inside her, sliding as the ultrasound technician moves it left, then right, while explaining what she’s gazing into now and then—an ovary, the womb. She never looks her patient in the eye. It’s all too much, perhaps, the reality of flesh and fate. The technician is peeking into the future. She reads the shapes and the sizes of the deepest parts of this nervous woman. With every passing second, she knows more about the way a stranger’s future will unfold. “How does everything look?” the woman asks, her eyes fixated on streams of morning sunlight beaming through the blinds. The technician smiles, or maybe she doesn’t, the woman doesn’t see. The technician gazes at the screen as though it were a vista full of falling stars. 

I'm thinking of returning to this poem and adding line breaks in the coming weeks, but I'll give it a little time to live as a prose poem to at least see if this is a form I can work with/live with. It's just so DIFFERENT for me! I'm a metrical poet, a formal poet. Even some of those sentences scan iambically :) I can't help myself. But challenging myself and trying new things is growth. To growth. To maturity. To the wildness deep within us all.

Peace,

K.