← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
How To Read/Write Poetry
00:24:50
This Poetry Month, we want to explore poetry as a process, which consists of both writing, and reading poetry.
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WNYC Announcer
For 140 years, MultiCare has been in Washington prioritizing long term solutions, partnering with local communities and expanding access to care. Together, we're building a healthier future. Learn more@mycare.org.
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Uche Nduka
If your small business is booming, you might say Cha Ching.
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Kusha Navadar
But you should say, like a good.
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Uche Nduka
Neighbor, State Farm is there. And we'll help your growing business. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
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Kusha Navadar
This is all of it. I'm Kusha Navadar in for Alison Stewart. It's Poetry Month, so let's explore the art of the poem, how to make the most of reading poetry, how to write it. If you're feeling inspired, because you can't really read poetry the same way you'd read a restaurant menu or a social media post. With poetry, you want to be looking out for things like rhythm, cadence, rhymes. But you also have to look inward at something intangible. When these particular words are used in this particular combination, what does it evoke in your head, in your heart? Joining us now to help us understand how to read and write poetry, please welcome Uche Dukka, poet and instructor at the New School. His most recent book of poems is called Bainbridge Island Notebook. Uche, welcome to.
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Uche Nduka
Thank you so much.
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Kusha Navadar
So, Uche, is there a frame of mind or a mode that you find it's helpful to enter, to take in poetry?
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Uche Nduka
I would say a psychic openness, definitely. You have to be, you have to be ready to be surprised, you know, you don't have to put up guards, you know, or allow any sort of preconceptions, cover your perceptions. It's very, very necessary that you open, completely open and, you know, in a mood to discover. Because part of what poetry does is that poetry keeps surprise alive. It keeps us from getting jaded as individuals at times. We see things, we feel things, and we just feel we know it all. And I think that's a sign of death, not a sign of life. If you wake up every morning and you just feel, oh, I've done it all, I've seen it all, what are you waking up to do? So art, the art of poetry, like any other major art form, what it does is that it keeps us fresh, it rejuvenates us, it makes us willing to just feel that life is an adventure and curiosity.
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Kusha Navadar
Sounds like it's a huge part, that sense of going and ready to discover.
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Uche Nduka
Yes, yes.
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Kusha Navadar
You teach a class called Experiments with Poetic Forms.
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Uche Nduka
Yes.
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Kusha Navadar
Before we get into some of the forms themselves, help me understand what is poetic form and how do you tell them Apart.
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Uche Nduka
Well, you simply look at form as containers in which you pour something. You know, forms are just structures. They're almost like the way you build up a house. When you're building up a house, you have scaffolds to hold up stuff first so that, you know, then you start erecting stuff. Those are that sort of stuff, you know, you just have this stuff given to poets and to writers, meaning sonnets, for instance, Haku's, for instance, free verse, villanelle. All these are various kind of poems, you know, shant like poems and all those kind of forms that you have. It's almost like you've been given something to make something out of. So what we try to do, particularly for us in that is to do what to tweak the nose of those forms. Not just to, you know, to return it as we are giving, but instead of have some kind of variation, jazz it up a little bit, you know, and then put that freshness into that form. And that's, you know, part of why I find exciting about having a class like that filled up with very creative people.
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Kusha Navadar
I'm excited to maybe hear some poetry right now. Let's do a little reading. Uche, you recently tweeted that poetry is architecture. What are. So I. What I would love to do is hear some of poetry from the former US Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo. What are some of the architectural features we should look out for as we listen to this poem you're about to share?
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Uche Nduka
Well, definitely things like repetition. You, you know, in terms if you're building a block, you know, you have to be repeating, you know, and then varying the heights, the depth and the height of what you are building. And that's what goes on within the work itself, despite its repetitive. She Had Some Horses, which is the title of the poem itself, and also the title of A Book of Hearts that came out in 2000, republished in 2008. You know, it's just that kind of variation that's in this case because it's almost like a chant. Yes. It just goes on and on and on. And I will actually do an extra abbreviated version of it because it's a bit extra long. She had some horses. She had horses who were bodies of sand. She had horses who were maps drawn of blood. She had horses who were skeins of ocean water. She had horses who were the blue air of sky. She had horses who were fur and teeth. She had horses who were clay and would break. She had horses who were splintered red cliff. She had horses. She had some Horses. She had horses with long pointed breasts she had horses with full brown ties she had horses who laughed too much she had horses who threw rocks at glass houses she had horses who licked razor blades she had some horses. She had horses who danced in their mother's arm she had horses who thought they were the sun and their bodies shone and burned like stars she had horses who waltzed nightly on the moon she had horses who were much too shy and kept quiet in stores of their own making she had some horses.
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Kusha Navadar
This is all of it on wnyc. We're talking to Uche Nduka, who is a poet and instructor at the New School and listened. That was a poem by Joy Harjo, the US Poet Laureate. She Had Some Horses. It's Poetry Month in April and we're talking about how to read poetry and if you're in feeling inspired, how to write poetry that moves you and Uche that moved me.
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Uche Nduka
Thank you.
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Kusha Navadar
Good job.
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Uche Nduka
We thank Joy for that.
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Kusha Navadar
Yeah, we thank Joy for that.
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Uche Nduka
What a gift.
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Kusha Navadar
Rhythm is obviously an important part of the poetry. You can't miss it when listening to you perform. And is there an analog in poetry to what melody and harmony are in music? In other words, what are the features of a poem you'd consider to be particularly melodic, particularly harmonious?
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Uche Nduka
Particularly. We can say the sounds of words. You see, we tend to forget that poetry, actually, before we started publishing them as books and on screens, they were just words that were uttered by other human beings to each other. Before the Gothenburg revolution of discovering the printing presses. Poetries are just things that people chanted and every culture had it, so it wasn't actually something to intellectualize about. They are just things that you do. In other words, you surrender to a rhythm that comes naturally. And words have natural rhythms. If you see the way we talk, we actually articulate with variations with. If almost every Alphabet itself is surrounded by sound. And we tend to forget that because we just used all it and you just wake up, you start blabbing, right? But when it comes to the art form of poetry, which is a conscious art form, both conscious and unconscious, of course, if we come to define it, it's something that you just feel that you can't avoid the music of words. And you can't avoid not just the melodic aspect of it, but some other, even on hard silences, you see, there is a contrast which I think is the tension that sustains a poem. A poem needs silence. Those stanzas in between, those spaces in between stanzas, those silences are important.
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Kusha Navadar
So do you think it's absolutely necessary to read a poem aloud in order to truly understand it?
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Uche Nduka
Absolutely, absolutely. For me, my own kind of practice, I definitely feel poetry is made alive when we mouth it.
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Kusha Navadar
You know, I spent a lot of my career before this as a speechwriter. And I had to keep a lot of these elements like rhythm and melody and emotion in mind when I was writing a speech. What do you think it means about the power of language that these same sort of musical features can be used not just to express, but actually to persuade?
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Uche Nduka
I don't know. We can't get into the mystical sphere now, but there is something to do with prayer, incantations and those things we mortar to unseen spirits. That seems to even just be human again. It doesn't even just seem to be whatever it is the theorists and philosophers, you know, are talking about. It seems to be there something intrinsically human about sounding, you know, about trying to voice something in a way that almost becomes like an ul relation, you know, ululate. The way people relate even when they are mourning. Or the way. Or what we can call. You can actually, you know, add that to the. What we call the groans of passion. You know, when people are in the realm of passion, those sounds we make, which come what, wordless. There are no words to it, but they intensely mean something. That's, again, the thing we have to look out in poetry. There are certain kind of sounds we can't just put words to, but still they mean something. And that is the kind of thing that makes people be moved by music. For instance, you can hear some sounds, either a cello or a violin or a drum or whatever. There is something in you that is packed. There is something in you that is somehow aroused. You become alive to something you can't articulate. The same happens in poetry. Even when a poet is writing, you are completely in a sort of a trance in a way. You surrender to the spirits that bring those words. You surrender to the inspiration. Some people will call it like a trance. Some other people will call it like you fell into a state whereby you become very, very less self conscious. The moment you are writing, you are somebody else. Yeah.
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Kusha Navadar
And form is a big part of what gives us kind of rules to enter that space. Right. Some forms have particular rhyme schemes. Other are more about stresses and syllable counts. Some forms are about the content and what's arranged thematically. Do you find any forms that you gravitate towards more than others in your own work?
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Uche Nduka
Yeah, I would say I call the free willing kind of form. In other words, I don't overemphasize rhyme, but the rhymes still come in in between words. It's like what I call the alliteration, the consonants, the musicality of words themselves when you're writing. But I don't like, sit down the while we say Shakespeare, for instance, did when he wrote his sonnets. And every two lines have to rhyme. And then you have the two completing couplets which must rhyme and resolve the argument or whatever came before. No, I think as a contemporary poet, I feel more free in the way I deal with the words. Sometimes I submit, sometimes I resist. And then so in between submission and resistance, that's where the art takes place for me, you know, and it's something that again, is very, very humbling. You can't, I don't think you can order a poem around. The poem visits when it likes. If you're writing an essay, you can say, you know what, I'm going to finish this essay tonight. Tell that to a poem. You just laugh in your face.
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Kusha Navadar
The inspiration just has to come.
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Uche Nduka
It comes when it comes. Yes, it comes when it comes. You know, you are simply a servant to this stuff.
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Kusha Navadar
Listeners, we're talking to Uche Nduka, who's a poet and instructor at the New School. Because it's Poetry Month, we're celebrating how to read. And in a second we're going to go into how to write poetry. This is all of it. We're gonna go into that and hear some more poetry by Uche right after this. This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Kusha Navadar and we're back with our Poetry Month lesson with Uche Nduka, a poet and instructor at the New School. Before the break, we were talking about how to read a poem. Now we'll pivot to the act of poetry and how to think about that process before you put pen to paper or when you're putting pen to paper. And listeners, we want to know, do you have any questions about the craft of poetry? Are you looking to take your verses to the next level? Or maybe you feel like you've got a poem inside you and you need help rendering it into words. Give us a call at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692 with your questions or tips on writing poetry with our guest poet and new school instructor u. Now, Uche, can we start this part of the conversation with something else from your Twitter account? It's your pinned tweet from 2014 you said a poem is a moving target. What did you mean by that? And how can that lesson serve us when we're writing poetry?
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Uche Nduka
Beautiful question. It's a moving target because as if when you start writing a poem, you might have an idea of what you want to do and then in the process you are thrown out of perhaps that part. The poem decides on the path he wants to follow. So it's not quite what you as a writer of the poem, prepares for the poem, that the poem will do, what will obey. The poem is very rebellious. It's almost like a wild animal that has to take its own path. So your own work as a poetry, simply to be what? Vigilant and to be able to know when it's almost like moving or zigzagging and just go along. Because if you don't go along, nothing's gonna work. So in other words, you can't preempt a poem.
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Kusha Navadar
So then how, in the moment that you wanna write, can you evoke a poem? What can you do? If you wanna create something memorable and you are waiting and it's maybe not showing up or you want it to show up faster, what can you do?
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Uche Nduka
Well, be attentive. You know, you just have to do a sort of an inner deep listening to what is coming. It's almost like you have to listen to the footsteps of your own thoughts, almost like the reference and the chorus is being thrown up by the poem. And then almost like a secretary, you start writing them down. It's not you engineering, you know, willy nilly. Those words, of course you can revise after you through that runs. But the first call of duty is that you're going to be what? Very vigilant and attentive to what is happening, not just in terms of your mind, but what you're seeing developing on the page.
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Kusha Navadar
And be non judgmental. I hear you saying, like, let it come to you, edit later.
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Uche Nduka
Yes.
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Kusha Navadar
Is that fair to say?
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Uche Nduka
Yes. Yes. It has to come to you. You know, you don't rush it. That's what I'm trying to say. In other words. Yes, you don't. At least my own way. Whatever I'm saying here is my own practice. So I'm not saying that's general for every poet has his, her, their own format of doing it. But for me, definitely, I tend to surrender to the magic that is unfolding in front of me.
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Rudolph
Yeah.
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Kusha Navadar
You know, in prose writing there's a rule of thumb that goes show, don't tell. As in don't tell the reader your Character is angry. You describe their clenched fists. Right. Does that kind of advice manifest differently when you're talking about writing poems?
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Uche Nduka
I don't think so. You know, I think, to be honest, when it comes to writing poetry, we say is a sort of a lawless state because each poem comes with his own cargo, so to say, its own baggage and then its own redemptive qualities, you know, so that's the. That's the whole thing about it. And this is part of why what Whitman says something about. About not about the person. He says, do I contradict myself? Says, yes, I contradict myself. I contain multitudes. Those are the lines of Whitman. And that says a lot to me as a poet and as an artist. In other words, it's not about. You are trying to be consistent with what the poem is trying to, you know, to do in your own head. What you call your preconception of what a poem is or your preconception of the building. Just like an architecture. No, it's like you show up there and said, okay, what is happening? Where are we going?
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Kusha Navadar
Yeah, you know, well, so. And sorry, go ahead.
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Uche Nduka
I interrupted. Yeah, yeah. So it's about you, yourself being ready to be swept up into that zone and realm where you don't know the hell what's quite happening. You have to find out, you know.
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Kusha Navadar
What I was gonna say, you think about that house metaphor. What are you actually gonna put in the house? You're gonna put in words. Some poems draw on a unique vocabulary, and others use more simple language. How much or how big of a vocabulary do you have if you want to write poetry?
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Uche Nduka
Well, I would just say average. Practically, it's average. You don't need to have high falutin words or trying to sound abstract or trying to sound too smart or brutal. It's not about actually trying to impress anyone, not even yourself. It's simply about once you are articulate. Put it this way, if you are articulate, you are familiar in terms of usage of words and so on. You just don't need any particular words. The poems will throw up the words that they need. You know, as you are writing a poem, the poem attracts what it needs in terms of words, sound, rhythm, shape. All those attributes of poetry in terms of form, as a form and as what. The thematic trust of the poem, even. You don't even know the subject matter until they appear in front of you. Most of the times I just finish writing poem and I'm like, what was that? After I've read what I've written, that's when I clearly discover, oh, perhaps this is what the poem is saying. Because meanwhile, the poem, to me is always on a state of suggestiveness. It's not about absolutism. I don't think the poem. I don't see the poem as a dictatorial emblem. No, it's very, very, very, very ambivalent. Most of the times. It's ambiguous, it's contradictory. This is part of why there is what the word I use always is eternal vigilance as a writer of poetry.
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Kusha Navadar
We're talking to Uche Duka about writing and reading poetry. We have a caller, Rudolph from West Babylon. Hi, Rudolph. Welcome to the show.
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Rudolph
Thank you so much for taking my call. Uche, my brother, thank you so much for what you've been talking about today. I really appreciate that. My question for you is you talk about the spirits that. That inspires.
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Uche Nduka
Yes.
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Rudolph
And. And in. In my language, it's called spirit.
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Uche Nduka
Oh, that's Igbo. You are Igbo.
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Rudolph
Yeah, yeah, I'm good.
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Uche Nduka
Oh, all right. All right. I know the name. That's the writer. Oh, yeah. Thank you for calling in. All right. I didn't quite. I didn't get the other. I didn't get the surname.
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Rudolph
Okay. I've been listening to you. It's amazing. You're doing very well. Now. The question I have is, how was spirit? How does that apply to you? Do you have it in you? Is it a good spirit? Is he a bad one? How do you know the difference? And I wanted to address the issue of African writers like Christopher Cuboi. Do you feel that the world is cheating themselves by not reading most of our writers? Because we tend to read them when we are in Africa. Read the Shakespeare, they read the American poets, but they don't read us. Are they short changing themselves?
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Uche Nduka
Yes, yes. Those are very brilliant questions. Just too. I would say definitely I'm a servant of awu. It's, you know, it's a spirit that, for me, I see it actually as a benevolent spirit, because the spirit of creativity, even though it has some mischievous aspects, but creativity itself has some mischievous aspects. You know, it's not about purity. AGU is an impure spirit in his ways. He carries, you know, the way he carries his activities. Just like in the Yoruba, you have the Eshu echo. That's the counterpart spirit in Yoruba is echo, you know, to awu D boys. And so for me, definitely, like I said, AWU is part of my. What I call my toolbox and part of those who inspire me towards working. And then to the second question about the African writers and their readers, I would simply say perhaps it's just the turn of the world. You see, you have to, you know, do something from where you are sitting. For instance, yes, I teach in New school. I teach Okibo in New School. You see, I teach and I teach Okibo in Queens College.
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Kusha Navadar
And Rudolph, I just want to say thanks so much. I'm looking at the clock. We have just enough time for a poem. Could you share a poem with us quickly, Uche, please?
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Uche Nduka
Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Thank you, bro.
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Kusha Navadar
So this is from Bainbridge island notebook, right?
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Uche Nduka
Yes, yes, you and the Buzard were one and did not belabor the dedication to craft. Not craft counting, but the texture of sex. And what if a poem is a room that has been widely lived in block by block, fugues gnaw at a wet street. What then remains to be done in this felicitous and beautiful darkness? Bring the hula, bring the circus. There is no place apart. I am unbalanced as the unbalanced world or the heart beneath which a cactus waits. Just for a while I am here. Oblivion is implacable. But no one can stop the sky from walking into this room now. And self punishment wasn't found in the rooting trays of you this road cut this ticket, this downhill glide into cabin wall a leaned on by a shello hot mess of a hard pass.
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Kusha Navadar
We're talking to Uche Duka, a poet and instructor at the New school, about how to read and write poetry. Uche, in the time we got left. Could you just say what that poem means to you? And some things that you. You think folks should. Should have list things that you're especially proud of.
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Uche Nduka
I would say is a mixture, a marriage of the corporeal and the cerebral is very, very important. We should never separate the body and the spirit. They both go into one. I don't believe in the cartesian divide, that the body is outside there, the spirit is outside there. I believe that they are actually one entity and it's left to us to be able to react and be able to go ahead with whatever it is they're pointing us to.
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Kusha Navadar
Thank you so much for coming and for joining us. We were talking to Uche Duca, poet and instructor at the New School. Uche, thank you so much.
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Uche Nduka
Thank you, thank you. If your small business has a problem, you could say, ugh, just my luck.
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Kusha Navadar
But you should say like a good neighbor.
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Uche Nduka
State farm is there and we'll help get you back in business. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
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