Popcorn: Coming Back to Our Senses

 

            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…

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