A Occasional Poem
If you’re a poet, you already know how to write a poem. There are about two thousand methods, and you’ve been using at least five of them. There’s the wake-up-at-3-a.m. method, when either a poem pulls you right out of bed or some bodily function wakes you and then the poem attacks.
- Occasional poetry is poetry composed for a particular occasion. In the history of literature, it is often studied in connection with orality, performance, and patronage. Goethe said that ' Occasional Poetry is the highest kind' ( Goethe in the Roman Campagna, 1786).
- The composition of a poem to mark a great occasion is a very old tradition, probably what got poetry going in the first place. Stretching back to pre-literate times when a poem really was the only way to carry on the particulars of an event into the future.
There’s the pull-over-into-the-next-gas station/rest stop/vista point method, when for some reason the act of driving prompts your brain to begin stacking lines.
The occasional poet February 25, 2020 Carolina’s new writer-in-residence talks about her poetry and what she hopes to accomplish on campus. Poet Nikky Finney (photo by Forest Clonts).
Then there’s the Nike-just-do-it technique, where you plant yourself in a chair, car seat, restaurant booth, or on a rock by the Yuba River and don’t get up until you have a poem on the page.
South Fork, Yuba River, Nevada County, California [half a photo by Nikiya Schwarz]
This last is my preferred method, if I get to have a choice, and one thing that’s true about occasional poems is that we choose them. When someone — your local county librarian, say — needs a poem about the new amphitheater attached to the library’s main branch, you don’t normally reach down into your soul for the right words.You might, though, as I did two weeks ago over breakfast at a local coffee shop, poke around on Google to remind yourself what amphitheaters look like. Here’s the one cited as the beginning and best example: the Coliseum in Rome.
Kind of stupendous, isn’t it? And not small. I don’t think I want to know everything that happened in there, Christians, lions, bull fights, what have you… But certainly there was oratory, as there will be at my library’s amphitheater. This next one is in Greece, on the Acropolis, and still used today. The Odeon of Herodes Atticus. You can see that many fannies would fit in those curved rows of seats, perhaps a couple of thousand.
At the café I did what I often do, which is start to write before having looked at the terrain. I was one of those children who, when asked to read the instructions all the way to the end, couldn’t bear it. I always started to fill in answers although the last sentence clearly stated “Now put your pencils down and wait for your teacher to tell you the next step.” Year after year, I fell for this, it’s just in my nature.
The other thing one can say about occasional poems is that because your soul is usually not involved, they tend not to be as wonderful as the other kind of poems, the ones you write at 3 a.m. at vista points overlooking the Sierra Buttes. However, this time I lucked out. Due to the fact that I brought in lots of landmarks and local flora and fauna, things my soul loves, this poem about the amphitheater wasn’t half bad. There was only one slight problem.
Size. I drove over to look at it right after I finished the poem. The library’s new amphitheater is approximately the size of a Ford F150 half-ton pick-up.
There are five benches, which seat, comfortably, 20 people.
Or, if you’re young and flexible, you can sit on the edge of the stage. Those 13 sweet children almost double the potential audience. I’m exaggerating, of course, which is also in my nature. But I mean, really. You can see that this does not even vaguely compare to the Roman Coliseum.
Describe A Occasional Poem
I went back and reread the poem. It actually didn’t say anything about size. It was a bit grandiose, a bit larger-than-life, shall we say, in its description of where the sound went after it left the amphitheater. But that sort of matched both the idea of the Coliseum and the point of an occasional poem, which is to commemorate something important. It amplified the idea of an amphitheater, in fact, a bit theatrically, but not offensively.
I read the poem in public the next day, after the ribbon-cutting ceremony and a couple of speeches, to an audience of donors, readers, library friends, and school children. Fifty-eight, by my count. My voice rang out, and the words kept going, “sound borne on the wind/…/now echoing so faintly only/the earth’s bones and the closest stars can hear it.”
You can read the whole poem here, if you like. Think of Marian Gallaher as you do, to whom this tiny outdoor echo chamber is dedicated. It is actually perfect: right-sized for our library and our county, all of whose inhabitants would fit into the Roman Coliseum, and then some.
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May 18, 2020
Wanda Balzano, associate professor of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies, wrote an occasional poem dedicated to Wake Forest University students who finished the spring semester remotely amidst the coronavirus pandemic. The University is honoring graduates with a Virtual Conferring of Degrees today, May 18 and with an on-campus commencement ceremony on October 31, 2020.
“The Quarantine’s Other Heroes”
To my Wake Forest Students
Every day, face to face with a monitor:
Computer, tablet, phone.
Not everyone is the same,
For how many members are in a family,
How many rooms are in a house,
Helping their parents
Make ends meet, perhaps,
Or helping siblings
On their homework.
Kneading voices into sleep, from the East and the West,
Pens and books on their desks, beds, or laps;
Wearing sweaters over pajamas,
Hair combed, or not,
Make-up on their faces, or not,
Or darkened screens to hide it all,
When lessons begin.
Losing connections at times
Every so often they say
Their ritual “good morning” or “good night”
In Winston, in Seattle, or Korea.
In step with programs, counting days,
To put humanity back in the word
For ‘school’—the flesh of an active noun and verb
That smells of fresh chalk or dry eraser on the board
Mixed with take-out choices,
And free-reining hormones.
Days go by, one by one,
Labeling trips untaken
Parties not attended
Celebrations unlived.
Who is going to requite
Such emotions of year’s end
To these young scholars?
The night before the exams,
With the anxiety, and relief,
That feeling of shared
Destinies with peers,
Where is that restitution?
A self-crowned microbe
Is cruel and a tyrant, but will not win.
So many of them
Have learned the ways of champions
In a suspended time.
They have a life to journey through,
And they are learning in short order
Not to be presumptive – that
Nothing ought to be for granted.
Rather, some of them
Carrying Anchises on their backs,
Will wait out of danger and go back and run,
And color again the streets,
The schools, and life
On our earth, by and by.
Categories: Faculty News, Guest Post, Inside WFU
Tags: COVID-19, Graduation, Virtual Conferring of Degrees, Wanda Balzano