Best of Our Community Poetry

Last month, Books & Culture offered a challenge to its online readers to create a poem about culture. Every artist’s role is to cultivate, we explained, to culture the world around us. In fact, God placed Adam in the Garden of Eden to do exactly that, to culture the garden and take care of it.

So we challenged readers to write poems and help us think about what it means to cultivate. Best of all, we shared these poems with each other online, adding a little bit of meaning to the noise of the net. I enjoyed spending two weeks mulling over your poems, leaving comments on your blogs and Facebook notes, and playing with some of you on Twitter.

Sadly, we don’t have time to talk about all 27 responses here at Books & Culture, but I want to highlight six poems.

Patricia Spreng’s poem “Jes Lemme Sang” shares a glimpse into culture-creation with a light, lyrical touch. Reading it, I began to think of the poem as lyrics to a song—and greatly wished to hear the music that would accompany the words. Spreng opens with a series of concrete images that made me smile. She writes,

Mice in the kitchen
Momma be unstrung
work a little hectic
dog just rolled in dung

How do artists find time to create anything at all with so much chaos around us?

Vanessa Frisinger’s “Desert Cultivation” spoke to me in part because I live in the very dry climate of central Texas, similar to the setting she describes. I have myself planted the trumpet flowers that open the poem. In the second stanza, Frisinger surprises the reader. Rather than moving from modern life to a natural image, Frisinger does the opposite. The movement of the flowers and branches in the speaker’s backyard garden are

like when abuela stripped the vinyl table
of its ancient lace and stood on the porch, heirloom
in both hands, shaking loose the dust.

Dan Haase of Wheaton College shared two short poems, one haiku and one four-line poem titled “Cultivate.” Also, Haase shared a drawing to accompany “Cultivate.” As I explained on his website, I’m a sucker for good light verse, and I couldn’t resist highlighting this fun poem, reminiscent of Shel Silverstein or Jack Prelutsky:

Jimmy’s in his jammies
traveling to and fro
cultivating beauty
with all the seeds he sows

Finally, I have to mention two poets that I referenced in the previous article. L. L. Barkat and Glynn Young are both powerful forces of encouragement in online poetry communities. Both of them come at poetry from outside the academic establishment, and I find their voices to be refreshing.

In “Cultivating Autobiography,” Young walks us through a radically abbreviated personal history, including

New Orleans
gumbo mulch cooked
by river floods, swamp-basted

Young’s poem concludes with a strong statement about the gift of all work and art: “I plant the seed / someone else bought.”

In contrast, Barkat’s sestina “Petit a Petit L’Oiseaux Fait Son Nid” claims not to be autobiographical, but concedes that poetry and art must be mined from the artist herself. She writes,

Rumor spreads: inside the earth is red,
molten, thrusting gold like mine
into the sun

The poem I returned to most often was Stephen Hague’s “Deficit in Several Parts.” In online comments, Hague has explained that the poem came from his attempts “to continue engaging with our world, to interpret it accurately despite the gradual and frustrating loss of hearing. To misunderstand others and to be misunderstood has been the most difficult aspect of the loss.” Because the poem attempts to cultivate fragments, it captures both the spirit and the problem of our emerging online culture. The noise of the internet has made all of us deaf to varying degrees.

Hague describes himself as “an apprentice of parts.” The fragments of meaning that he finds in the world are “fractured bones of pericopes.” His deep desire is that you “know how much / I did not choose to miss your meaning.” The language of the poem is rich and tight, but best of all is the poet’s sheer perseverance.

Deficit in Several Parts

I reconstruct worlds,
a contractor of words,
piecing together particles.
Deaf I sometimes sit
to the whole,
an apprentice of parts,
reorganizing spaces,
empty air, broken sounds.
A word-forger,
clutching fragments of discourse,
fractured bones of pericopes,
hands, limbs, face, and hair,
floor, walls, windows.

Sometimes I sit deaf to the whole,
hearing parts and pieces,
stops and starts,
shuffling lines and wrinkles,
light pulsing from teeth, pupil, tongue,
phonemes rolled up tightly
in a montage of timbre and spaces
across your face.
I squint, staring up at the edifice,
facade of towering air and shattered phrases,
wanting you to know how much
I did not choose to miss your meaning,
this poor phrase-monger of fragile lines
and acts, scenes, and interludes,
architect of empires and lost poems.

Words lost,
links to other worlds,
as penetrating insights,
resolves of cosmic proportions,
or unwritten poems
perish in the scattering debris
upon waking up at empirical borderlines.