Hello, poets.

By way of catch-up/reminder: I’m Merrill Lee, a poet who poets 5 days a week and blogs about it RIGHT HERE. Welcome!  

I have no “goals,” no grand artistic vision, no manuscript (ok fine I have a manuscript, but we don’t have to talk about it). Every day I show up to the page and scribble at least a sonnet’s worth of material. In so doing, I intend to play, imagine, bend a line or two, make some word-music, and rewire my brain a little.

How’s it going, you ask?

The first day of this writing discipline (Jan. 2), I was gazing out the window of a bakery in New Orleans as I contemplated the first poem of the year. What will I write about for my inaugural lyric? I thought. Across the street was a Yamaha store with two promotional banners strung along the brick facade. So I wrote “13 Ways of Looking at a Jet Ski.” And sent my MFA back from whence it came.  

I like the “13 Ways of Looking at [X]” format—invented by Wallace Stevens, imitated by infinity highs school students—because it gives you 13 tiny, strange boxes to pour your ideas into. Even if the ideas are bad (see: jet ski [someone could make that good though, right? I may try again]). (I suppose it could even apply to Shunn manuscript format.)

In imitating the iconic poem, I’m performing a fairly simple task: writing about a person, place, or thing in a poem of 13 sections. No need for a certain amount of lines per section or a particular line length. Thirteen is more than enough sections for your brain to start doing somersaults about your chosen subject. I mean, I know JACK about jet skis and had to stretch pretty far come section 8 or 9.

But the jet ski is involved in what I know.

“13 Ways of Looking” also helps me relish the thinginess of things without compulsively projecting myself onto them. Stevens’ poem describes the blackbirdiness of the blackbird perfectly, nonliteral as it might be.  

VI

Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

For my money, that’s about as blackbirdy as you can get. The trick is you still know it’s Stevens doing the looking. How?

I’m not sure I can answer that right now. Also I don’t want to. Suffice it to say, the “13 Ways” form, if we can call it that, allows for boundless play. The thing you’re looking at can do anything, be anywhere, exist in any time. What thing can you place your blackbird beside, behind, above, inside? What is revealed as you move your blackbird around the objects, places, people in your imagination?

I think I got the hang of it way more as I wrote “13 Ways of Looking at Queen Vashti” several days later.

Vashti is a character from the Biblical book of Esther. King Xerxes, drunk and feasting with his buddies, asks Queen Vashti to come show everyone at the party how pretty she is. Vashti refuses, and Xerxes banishes her for her disobedience. He then sets out to find a new and gorgeous virgin to be queen.

In my “13 Ways of Looking at Queen Vashti,” one section was set at a beauty pageant. KEEP IN MIND THIS IS ALL FROM A FIRST DRAFT.

IV.

the pageant stage is empty
the girls gone home with their cosmetic trunks
in tow

Next, I thought about Xerxes’ response.

V.

Get the ugly chick in here
she’ll dance for me

I seemed to fasten onto the dancing thing.

VII.

she throws clay jars at a brick wall
turns, sees the men gawk
Which one of you wants to dance?

By section X, my brain searching for associations, I made a swipe at Melania Trump (which is not worth re-typing; not because it’s mean but because it’s just bad).

I couldn’t seem to manage as many lines per section as Stevens, both because I was tired and because I kind of dig a fragment-based approach. But I think a revision could milk more from the fragments I wrote, create images that feel more complete.

I’m no Stevens, but on both forays into his world I had fun! Which is its own reward.

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