A Poetry Soulstice

 A Poetry Soulstice

Danielle Beazer Dubrasky (Guest column for Iron County Today)

  At a time when the arts struggle for validation, advocacy, and funding, why would anyone devote decades to reading, writing, or teaching poetry? The medium poets use is words—those intangible lenses that shape our perceptions. When we tell frustrated toddlers, “Use your words,” we are actually training them to become poets. Because that is what poets do—we use our words from our inner worlds to create a linguistic work of art, often inspired by the exterior world.
  I teach poetry, and the first assignment I give is a “Cyclical Haiku.” Students write a series of haikus, one each day at set times: dawn, mid-morning, noon, afternoon, twilight. I did have one student protest, “But I’ve never seen the dawn.” To dispel any ideas that haikus are trite or limited to only a 5-7-5 syllable count, we study The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, translations of ancient Japanese haiku by Robert Hass. The haiku distills observations of the natural world to only three lines that describe an image, with a “turn” in the third line. This technique shows up in these examples from the poet Issa: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50983/selected-haiku-by-issa.
Two of my favorites:  

The snow is melting
and the village is flooded
with children.

Mosquito at my ear—
does he think   
I’m deaf?   

  Full confession: I have written many poems, but not my own assignment in a long time. I struggle with insomnia and, like my student, I rarely see the dawn. But last week of summer solstice was different. On June 21 I awoke at 5:30 and drove up to Leigh Hill to watch the sun emerge from behind Cedar Mountain. Its glow rose in a crevice between two peaks–-my own Stonehenge—and gradually spread over the neatly platted roads, leafy trees, church steeples and sleeping houses of Cedar City. I took amateur photos on my phone at intervals. One image captured two rays balanced across the town, just as the day and night are balanced at the solstice moment. I didn’t write a poem but found one by poet Tess Tayler, called “Solstice” with the line: “Our grove slips past the sun’s long kiss.” https://poets.org/poem/solstice-0
Next evening, the sun radiated as a deep red sphere in the western mountain range through smoke from the first days of a fire in neighboring Nevada. I again took a picture. The sun burned, a molten eye beneath a clouded lid with three forged lashes—its own haiku.
  Both pictures remind me to pay attention to stunning natural phenomena, though I didn’t know the smoke dramatizing the sunset would portend such a catastrophic fire. Spending an hour each day watching the emergence or recession of sunlight wasn’t very efficient. But poets are used to different perspectives of time. When words show up to describe resonant moments, we stop, listen, write them down, read them, change them, listen again, and write—again, and read—again. Then listen—again. It may take years for the poem to be finished. When you read a poem, you are reading the diamond of the poet’s imagination—and that is priceless. 

Danielle Beazer Dubrasky is the author of Drift Migration and teaches poetry writing at Southern Utah University