REVERSO POEMS

Marilyn Singer was recently named the winner of the 2015 NCTE Excellence in Poetry for Children Award.

As soon as I heard the news, I thought about the reverso, a poetic form to which I was introduced through Singer's Mirror Mirror: A Book of Reverso Poems.

Each reverso in this collection  turns a familiar fairy tale upside down--literally.  We are forced to look at the tale from different angles and perspectives.

Portraits of well-known characters shed new light on their stories, relationships, and motives.

Reading down and then up again, changes our tales in surprising ways.  We are given many reasons to pause, puzzle, ponder... and smile.

If these poems delight us, we can enjoy more in Singer's second and most recent offering, Follow Follow: A Book of Reverso Poems. This one also focuses on traditional tales.



Singer explains how she created the reverso in response to her own question:

We read most poems down the page.  But what if we read them up? That's the question I asked myself when I created the reverso.  When you read a reverso down. it is one poem. When you read it up, with changes allowed only in punctuation and capitalization it is a different poem. 

According to her author's note, her first reverso was about her cat.

A cat
without
a chair:
Incomplete.

Incomplete:
A chair
without
a cat. 

Singer's reversos deal with fairy tales, reversing our familiar fictional worlds, creating topsy-turvy reflections.

Reversos, however, don't have to be fun and flirty.  They can just as easily, powerfully, and effectively turn serious, sad, or current issues on their ends.

After my father died last year, I was drawn to poems on grief.  I discovered Myth by Natasha Trethewey in The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing edited by Kevin Young.

Trethewey's Native Guard: Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007, also contains this poem, as well as others examining grief, but I don't remember noticing the reversible structure when I initially read this poem in this collection. Perhaps because, as yet, I had no name for it.


As I researched reversible poetry, I discovered much interest and many variations on the structure.

Reversible, mirror, or palindrome poems can be created by reversing each line, each word, or even more challenging, each letter.

A quick search online results in varied instructions and many samples.

A challenge to try writing a reverso is  issued on the Miss Rumphius Effect Blog's Poetry Stretch.

Amy Ludwig VanDerwater has written on reverso each day since she was introduced to the form.

Read PJ Perry's reVerse Poems: A Reversible Poetry Collection.  His reVersed poems reverse word by word, which is a little more challenging.

 No consideration of reversible poetry would be complete without considering two internet favorites: Our Generation by 14-year-old Jordan Nichols and Lost Generation by Jonathan Reed.

 And finally, here is my first attempt at writing  a reverso, Baltimore April 2015, my way of processing recent events.

Today's Deeper Writing Possibilities

Read several sample reversos or other forms of reversible poetry.

What makes this structure a powerful form? What are hindrances of this form?

As you try your own, what do you find comes easily and naturally?  What proved difficult for you?

KENYON AND OTHER WRITING PLACES AND SPACES

We can write anywhere.

When we get an idea, no matter where we are, we can capture it on a napkin, the back of a business card, or a scrap of paper from our pocket.  

Or we can text, email, or voice message the raw kernel to ourselves.

We can write any place--in a restaurant, on a park bench, in our car, on a plane.
We can write any time-- while waiting for a friend,  before a meeting begins-- whenever we are early or others are late.

We can write any time, any where.

But.... there are some places that inherently inspire writing.

Angels on Middle Path

As soon as we arrive in that place or space, we are filled with words and phrases and  incisive insights that begin to arrange themselves in poetic lines or precise prose.

Writing pours so fast from our well of imagination and ideas flood our minds so quickly in these spaces that we can't find the paper fast enough, our fingers are not nimble enough to capture them all.

Pieces arrive in their entirety; we only need to be their conduit and scribe.




For me, one of those places is the campus of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.

Old Kenyon Hall

Each time my car ascends the hill to enter the campus (OH- 308/Wiggins St.) and then turns onto Gaskins Avenue, I feel like I have come home.  As I pass the Kenyon Inn,  the Village Inn pub and the wonderful Book Store, my mind exhales, knowing in the next inhaled breath writing possibilities will begin to flow.

Kenyon's beauty, history and aura foster what Donald Graves called a constant state of composition.

Cross at Kenyon Hall

The Church of the Holy Spirit

There, I have done some of my best writing. Several poems of which I most proud arrived as gifts,  while sitting in front of the Market on Gaskins, the dining hall at Peirce, at the small desk in my room, or in the choir pews of the beautiful Church of the Holy Spirit.


Many writers have special places in which they write best or that inspire much of their writing.

We are introduced to the beauty, the mysteries and the power of the nature, as Mary Oliver  walks us around her backyard, guides us though a  nearby woods, or forces us to look differently at a particular tree. She eloquently guides us through the marshland  and along the coast line of Provincetown, Massechusetts in A Thousand Mornings.


We look  back to the Middle East with Naomi Shihab Nye as she explores that world of her father from her Arab-American standpoint. She is constantly inspired by the land, the language, the people and the experiences that change her there. We can be inspired along with her in 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East.


Natasha Trethewey, 2007  winner of the Pulitzer Prize and current United State Poet Laureate, explores the Louisiana past of her grandmother, dwelling there in the  haunting visions she sees through her grandmother's eyes. She offers us and chance to  revisit this place and time in Native Guard.

And each time I read  poems from The Blessing of Rain and Other Poems by Tregenza A. Roach, I am transported back to the Caribbean to walk the streets with him of his native St. Kitts  and I remember my times in his current home in St.Thomas, another special writing place for me.  I have a series of ocean/island poems written during several stays.

Where are the places that inspire your writing?





What space  allows you to enter into a writing frame of mind. 
What places hand you ideas, in tact, simply asking you to write them down?

Today's Deeper Writing Possibilities

Where are the places that inspire you to write?

List the places in which you feel you have done extraordinary writing.

What is it about these places that inspire you to write?

You may want to photograph your favorite writing place for further inspiration.

How can you recreate those things  in a different locations such as your home?

Write a narrative, essay or poem about your special writing place.

POETRY: A PLACE TO STAND

We live our lives and in the living we learn and become.

Whether we make note of the learning,  whether we notice or not, as we journey on our path we are gathering extra bits of wisdom and knowledge .  

Whether we record the intuitive and passing observations or not, we come to know stuff—as we talk, as we read, as we interact and experience the world. 

We come to know facts and understandings about the world, the creatures therein, and the phenomena  of our existence.  And ultimately, we come to know our place in  the world, or as Jimmy Santiago Baca experienced it and  named it, a place to stand.

In A Place to Stand, Baca declares:

...poetry helped make me the person I am today awakening creative elements that had long lain dormant in me, opening my mind to ideas, and enabling my intellect to nourish itself on alternative ways. Poetry enhanced my self-respect.  It provided me with a path for exploring possibilities for my life’s enrichments that I follow to this day   

Our current US poet laureate, Natasha Trethewey identifies just such a place to stand in the beginning of the title poem in Native Guard.  This collection is civil war poetry, which we may not often consider lyrical and poetic. 

In telling her mother’s story and her own, however, intertwined with the stories of the Deep South where the first black regiments, the Louisiana Native Guards, were called into service during the civil war, Trethewey achieves poetic and lyrical power.

Excerpts and more about the poem can be found  by clicking here.

What do we know? 
How do we know? 
How did we come to know? 

Many would tell us that poetry is the answer to all three questions. 

Poetry affords us a way to think about our life experiences, to process the events, the

relationships, and unknowns in our lives and in the world.  

Poetry can save us in uncertain times and poetry can light a fire in our lives and in our worlds that we cannot --dare not put out.

Naomi Shihab Nye expresses our need for poetry in speaking about poetry and 9/11 in the

introduction to 19 Varieties of Gazelle:

Writers, believers in words, could not give up words when the going got rough.  I found myself, as millions did, turning to poetry.  Why should it be any surprise that people find solace in the most intimate literary genre?  Poetry slows us down, cherishes small details. A large disaster erases those details.  We need poetry for nourishment and for noticing, for the way language and imagery reach comfortably into experience, holding and connecting it more successfully than any news channel we could name.

I  found  recent wars, with the numbers and statistics and the daily  routineness of the media 

reporting became quickly  both too big and unreal.  It  became real to me only through the small 

details and the personal experiences of my friend's son. The following excerpt  is from a longer

poem I wrote about and for her.

She ate her salad calmly

and we silently remembered

how many boys had died

in the last operation.

Operation with names

like Matador and Sword

She spoke of the operation Dagger

and how her child had to fire

a machine gun

for forty eight hours

to keep his life

We did not ask questions yet.

She ate her salad

and told us how her family

had watched the special

hosted by Oliver North

that followed the LIMA unit

She hesitated between bites

and told how at the end

they showed the standing rifles

capped with the helmets

of the dead boys.

Kneeling on one knee

beside the rifle and helmet

bare head bowed

in honor of his friend

was her son.

So we use the poetry-- we read poetry, we write poetry--to name our experiences, to measure and analyze, to record and remember, to inspire and raise up, to bring to awareness, and to sing out both our deepest sorrows and gladdest celebrations. 

And poetry has the power to make us change us, nourish us and show us new possibilities, new ways to live.

June Jordan attributes agentive powers to poetry:

And so poetry is not a shopping list, a casual disquisition on the colors of the sky, a soporific daydream, or bumper sticker sloganeering.  Poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism, the lyrical invention, that telling the truth makes possible.  Poetry means taking control of the language of your life.  Good poems can interdict a suicide, rescue a love affair, and build a revolution in which speaking and listening to somebody becomes the first and last purpose to every social encounter.  Why should power and language coalesce in poetry?  Because poetry is the medium for telling the truth, and because a poem is antithetical to lies/evasions and superficiality…

(Illuminations: Great Writers on Writing edited by Christina Davis and Christopher Edgar. )

And so we speak and listen to each other in poetry

And so we tell the truth with poems.  
And sometimes that truth surprises us.

Today's Deeper Writing Possiblity

 April is National Poetry Month.

Remember a time when poetry or words made you look at life, or a particular life’s event./situation/reality/relationship differently.

Are there uncertain times in which you turned to poetry—or poetry was given to you?

What are glad times when poetry was where you turned or was given to you?
Reflect on recent changes or possilibities you have been seeing, pondering or recently been introduced to in your life.

What is your truth? What truth are you coming to realize in your life?  What truth do you want to tell about your life?  

Write a poem :

•  expressing your truth.
•  about a time poetry saved you.
•  about your place to stand.
•  about what you have learned in  this life ( or a particular time in your life), how you know you know and how you came to know.

Write a poem or narrative or essay about change and new possibilities you see for your life.