April 29: poem #5
You must praise the mutilated world.
I’ve been thinking about joy, and the need to reach for wonder in our poems, and in our lives. There was a time when I would have thought that too simple, or outside the world of serious poetry. I can imagine a younger Nancy, with her eyebrow ring and her spiky short hair, slightly sneering: who needs a happy poem?
Well, it turns out I do.
Thinking about joy led me back to this Adam Zagajewski poem, Try to Praise the Mutilated World. (I am who I am.) The poem begins
Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
What I love about this poem, in this moment, is how it holds beauty against the horrors of the world and insists on praise, even when things are awful.
Today, let’s write a poem that looks for things to praise.
poem #5: odes and songs of praise
Scan your writing from the last several days. You’re looking in particular for images and concrete nouns. (Think of the specific, ordinary objects Zagajewski calls out attention to in “Try to Praise the Mutilated World.”) The exercises since our last poem are here:
Once you’ve identified a subject for your poem, or a collection of interesting nouns, gather your fragments and do some freewriting.
If it helps, you might think of your poem as an encomium, the rhetorical term for a song of praise. Encomia are similar to odes; one difference, for our purposes is that an ode is written as an address to the person or thing being praised, and an encomium is public praise for a person. The encomium was a key part of classical rhetorical education. I know this isn’t quite what those ancient Greeks were thinking, but it pleases me to think about praise as a core part of pedagogy.
You could use one of your questions or answers from April 23: no more small talk as your title.
a note of welcome
If you’re just joining us, welcome! I’m so happy you’re here.
We’re nearing the end of our month of daily writing exercises, but you can go back through the archives to find more prompts and suggestions. Many of the exercises are recognizable writing exercises (facts about the moon, find a line and follow it), while others (go look at a bird, a restorative wander) might feel goofy and entirely unrelated to writing. I hope you’ll try out a little bit of both. One big idea underpinning this series—and the newsletter more generally—is that writing isn’t just about words on a page. It’s also about attunement to the world around us and making space in our brains to let language grow.
If you’re looking for even more writing exercises, there’s a whole month of daily writing prompts from April 2021, starting with this post.
I’d love to hear from you. You can always reply to this email, comment below, or find me on twitter (@nancy_reddy) and instagram (@nancy.o.reddy).
Went to the park today. Felt the mud between my toes after a rain. My kitty just had surgery. Her eyes were infected, and they had to he removed. Something about healing mud and eyes for this poem I’m working on.
I believe that verse is where the drinking expression, “here’s mud in your eye,” comes from. As in the liquor is the mud that heals us and allows us to see.