poetry Archives - Notes of Oak

Ishigaki Rin’s Poetry Shines in ‘This Overflowing Light’

12/10/202202/24/2023
by Hannah Huff

A BOOK REVIEW OF THIS OVERFLOWING LIGHT: SELECTED POEMS BY RIN ISHIGAKI (ISOBAR PRESS, 2022)

Translation tests a poem’s mettle. In the odyssey between two languages, words can grow strewed and cloudy, drifting far from their intended meaning. But in other cases, the poem may arrive filled with new music and light, and resonant with the essence of the distant poet’s voice. And what a beautiful thing that is: two poems now exist in the world, both the same and different. In the case of This Overflowing Light: Selected Poems by Rin Ishigaki, translated and with an introduction by Janine Beichman (Tokyo and London: Isobar Press, 2022), the poems have not only weathered their journey from Japanese to English, they have arrived in beautiful form. With this text, English readers now have access to fresh renderings of poems plucked from popular Japanese poet Ishigaki Rin’s (1920-2004) oeuvre, in which she confronted the routine and interpreted the uncanny as a single, working woman in post-WWII Japan.

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Poets, Allow Me to Reintroduce Metaphor and Simile

02/25/202102/24/2023
by Hannah Huff

USE THESE FIGURES OF SPEECH TO ELEVATE YOUR CREATIVE WRITING

Romeo and Juliet. Coyote and Raven. Lucy and Ethel. There have been many dynamic duos throughout history, but none so inseparable as Metaphor and Simile, those two figures of speech that are always taught together in third grade classrooms and onward. How could any of us forget that a metaphor is when you say something is something else and a simile is when you say it with “like” or “as”?

But alas, it seems that many of our era’s best(selling) poets are content to wallow in the literal, or extend only the tippy-top of their tiniest toe into the rich waters of metaphor and simile. Perhaps it’s because they learned these figures of speech so long ago, they’ve forgotten how they function. Or perhaps it’s because readers seem equally content to shrug off the imaginative leap required to appreciate the metaphorical. Whatever the case, getting reacquainted with metaphors and similes will make us all better readers and writers, so let’s cannonball in.

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Ekphrastic Poetry: When Art Kindles Literature

01/25/201902/24/2023
by Hannah Huff

MAGIC HAPPENS WHEN POETS RUMINATE ON MASTERPIECES

Ekphrastic poetry is right up there with the villanelle, the ghazal, the abecedarian, and other specific poetic forms that lead a highly intramural existence: poets know what they are, but rarely write them once they leave the MFA creative writing programs where they’re required to spit out such guided assignments. The problem is that in the real world, most readers don’t know what the hell those words mean, let alone the nuances of each form, and as a poet struggling to make even $5 off a poem — actually, make that even $1 — there’s no point in also struggling to write poems that have ground rules: we poets must have some small joy in our feats of creation.

But what a loss! All of those types of poetry, and the one we’re here to discuss today — ekphrastic poetry — can crack the shell on pithy nuts of insight that will never otherwise be opened through our usual, more organic modes of inspiration and composition. Thus, this blog post will hopefully educate readers on the joys of an unfamiliar type of poetry, and also rouse writers from their creative stupor — including myself.

Poeticize the Prosaic

Travel Like a Poet and Take a Sensory Odyssey

12/31/201812/31/2018
by Hannah Huff

A GUIDEBOOK TO LEARNING HOW TO SEE, HEAR, SMELL, TOUCH, AND TASTE LIKE A TRUE POET WHEN YOU JOURNEY

As you scuttle to and fro back home or on getaways among the throngs this winter and beyond — hightailing it along interstates; or flying above titian crags and sun-gilded prairies; or slowly rowing across a mercurial lake; or sitting on a Greyhound bus that stops every 4 miles (only 982 miles to go!); or rattling into a time-warp sleep on a passenger train; or clinging for dear life on the metallic saffron-hued top of a freight train boxcar because you wanted to save a pretty penny; or walking to your family’s house because you decided to be healthy, only to arrive four days later because they live 78 miles away, long after the leftover potatoes have been eaten — certainly you’ll get bored.

After all, infrastructure, with it erasure of natural landscapes and infusion of artificial hubs, signage, and paths, can induce a mental lethargy over the long distances and tenures of “along the way.” But during each journey, if you learn to look, listen, sniff, graze, and taste creatively — if you learn to perceive the sensory smorgasbord of passing environs like a real-life-real-live poet — you can come to appreciate the “getting to” almost as much as the destination where hot coffee, a soft floral patterned quilt, and a room with a view awaits. It’s time to poeticize the prosaic experience of travel and peregrinate like a poet on an ancient odyssey.

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Dear Bad Writers, Read This Poetic Line Breaks Guide

11/08/201802/24/2023
by Hannah Huff

STEP UP YOUR POETRY GAME WITH BETTER LINE BREAKS AND ENJAMBMENT

What makes a poem, a poem? Long story short, poetic line breaks. Of course, many other literary elements fuse to make poems croon, but poetry is visibly distinct from prose because its lines are sundered before the page’s natural end, at clearly calculated points. Poems are dialogues between the presence that is the text and the absence that is the white space revealed.