Course:A Wake' by Liz Howard
| CRWR 501P 003 |
|---|
 |
| Advanced Writing of Poetry |
|
| Important Course Pages |
| Categories |
'A Wake' is a non-traditional villanelle from Liz Howard's book of poetry Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent, written in response to the death of her father, from whom she had been estranged.
Having recently attempted my first villanelle, I'm inspired by how Liz Howard creates such movement within the restriction of the form. I think a lot of this is accomplished through the adaptive potential of the first line, fragmented and dangling as it is: "Your eyes open the night's slow static at a loss..." In it's varied repetition, it allows the third lines of the second and fourth stanzas to enjamb, spilling into the next stanzas and creating a sense of twisting and intertwining which mirrors the content:
I've lived in rooms with others, of no place and no mind
trying to bind a self inside the contagion of words while
your eyes open the night's slow static. At a loss
to understand all that I cannot say, as if you came
upon the infinite simply by thinking and it was
a shore of broken cedar twisting in a wake of fog."
The repetition also twists and transforms meaning, activating the poetic potential of the villanelle form. The question of meaning is central to the poem; the speaker's repeated inability to articulate all that they cannot say in the face of eternity creates and sustains tension. The finite and infinite seem to curl around each other like the broken cedar and the fog.
On a technical level, I'm inspired by the poem's perfect synthesis of form and content. I have also noted a habit in my writing of using line-breaks to do the work of punctuation. Here, Howard uses them to do something completely different and I find it really compelling. The enjambment urges the reader on but also keeps us in a state of suspension. I can't wait to experiment further with this in my writing.
On a personal level, reading this poem brought me back to my mother's deathbed, and the profound presence of the unsayable. I know that there are many elements of Liz Howard's experience of the loss of her father (discussed in this interview) that I can't possibly understand, but 'A Wake' resonated deeply with my grief, and also with my memory of having been "doubled from without and within" by my mom's embrace. I hope someday to be able to write about my foundational experiences with this kind of emotional clarity.