Isn’t she
beautiful? A kernel of corn subjected to high heat, bursting forth—even more
unique among other popped kernels than a snow flake is to another snowflake,
for snowflakes are hexagonal. One
popcorn is not even so related to another.
Onto a
serving plate, I measured out one popcorn for each of twenty students (plus a
few). Come and choose your special
piece, I said, And don’t eat it. Each student filed past, intent on
finding the piece that sang out to her or him, and picked it up with a pair of
tongs I had provided. (Sanitation, and all that.)
Study your popcorn in
detail. Name it. I will gather all of them back, and you will
have to retrieve them. One student
asked, But what if someone takes mine before I get to it? Already, students
were bonding with their new treasures. The stakes were high. Back at
their desks, students began their study of these small beings.
Focus. Eyes widening. Turning to
see 360 degrees of each pop—this way, that. The room silent. Were we all holding our breaths? Fingertips becoming
as finely tuned as a safecracker’s. Noticing color gradations, textures,
patterns, shine versus matte surfaces—individual markings. Were we using all our senses? How about sound? I invited them to listen to
their pops, rub them by their ears (person’s—we were in corn mode, corn comes on
ears). Like Styrofoam, they said.
And remember, I said, name your popcorn.
Then the
letting go—final looks, tiny noddings as each person sealed in last(ing)
impressions. I swirled the popcorn
around on the plate. Now come
retrieve yours. If you’re not certain, wait. All but two knew instantly—and those two had
no trouble choosing when others were readopted.
What was
your experience? I asked, and wrote these responses on the board:
How
quickly I can focus.
Full of
anticipation
Kinda
like happy
Nostalgic—what
if I lost my popcorn
Imaginative
A
feeling of ownership
Something
that seemed unimportant became really important
I
actually felt nervous
Creative
I was
able to connect to something real.
An
appreciation for the identity of every thing—big or little—in the world
It was
an experience of creating meaning.
We then had
a lively discussion of how much communing with a single popcorn was like communing
with a poem, in all the ways cited just above this paragraph. Ultimately, as Shanique Christian eloquently
put it, Poetry is a full-body experience. It brings us back to our senses as that
single piece of popcorn does—we focus, anticipate an experience, we take
ownership of our experience of the words, we connect to something real, we
create meaning—we get kinda like happy.
A piece of
popcorn is a full-body experience, for, as William Butler Yeats put it, Art
is the fountain jetting from all the hopes, memories, and sensations of the
body. Some poems provide that experience more than others. And this is where coming back to our senses,
and noticing which poems uniquely identify body experiences—and to what extent.
Here’s the
beginning of Rudy Francisco’s popular poem “Love Poem Medley” for us to
consider. The highlighted passages appeal to the body. Except for the image of the air-brushed super
model, a visual reference, Francisco favors bodily sensations and kinesthetic (motion)
imagery. The rest of this excerpt appeals
only to the mind, sometimes relying on clichéd ideas, and does not invite us
into the whole-body experience of poetry.
In a writing poetry workshop, we would invite Francisco to use his
considerable talents to focus his writing more on imagery rather than thoughts.
I want you to bite my lip until
I can no longer speak
And then suck my ex-girlfriend’s
name out of my mouth just to make sure she never
comes
up in our conversations
I’m going
to be honest, I’m not really a love poet
In fact,
every time I try to write
about love my hands cramp…just to show me how painful love can be
And
sometimes my pencils break,
just to prove to me that every now and then love
takes a little more work than you planned.
See I hear
that love is blind so, I
write all my poems in Braille
And my poems are never actually
finished because true love is endless
I
always believed that real love
is kind of like a super model before she’s air
brushed.
It’s
pure and imperfect, just the way that God intended
See I’m
going to be honest, I’m not a love poet.
But if I was to wake up tomorrow morning and decide that I really wanted to write about love I swear that my first poem…
But if I was to wake up tomorrow morning and decide that I really wanted to write about love I swear that my first poem…
It would be about you…
Francisco’s poem pops with meaning where the images are. It
wouldn’t be long before we forgot his thoughts which aren’t unique and don’t
get lodged in our bodies, as readers. And, truly, since there is no imagery
about the woman he is addressing in the poem, it’s more about what’s left of
the old girlfriend. So, his claim that he would be writing a first love poem
about the new love, is just not happening so far in this poem.
But we would certainly remember the searing image of his
first two lines. Because they are of the body, because they focus us
and make us kinda happy, because they give our bodies something
with which to connect, we would readily identify those lines of poetry on a
serving plate—and own them.
Take a look at a favorite poem and identify where it brings
you back to your senses—where it pops—and where it retreats into
thoughts.
Reply here as to how this perspective might
change your experience of reading poetry.
Works Cited
Six Senses Image: https://twitter.com/stylepsychology/status/914822348972453889
Francisco, Rudy: https://genius.com/Rudy-francisco-love-poem-medley-annotated
