After Gwendolyn Brooks

“We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong
Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.”

Pedalo
We watched the pigeons on red clay roof tops as we drank apple juice, but what are we,
Restless in dusty sunlight, your 20th birthday and mushrooms are some of the things we are,
Not those seven days in September, but laughing at things
That you or I behind empty eyelids, could never think of
Alone, at 2am when we wake and our throats are dry
Going sleepless, not for days just a few hours
As we lie in our big white bed littered with grains of sand, and
Split ends, dead skin cells, the
Saliva stains from where I’ve slept with my mouth open, the patches my habit – involuntary
Nothing like you with all the answers; I don’t have a plan
So we sit and watch the ocean-lapped rocks, greyed
Eroded like what we fail to remember in
But we make new ones like the 18th of June and
Sponge Jelly fish in the water while a sun hangs grey
Above our Port De Sóller and its deck chairs holding bodies that don’t dream,
Unlike ours that do, and propel us on our yellow water bus that makes
Us laugh when we reach the other end of the floats, then the
Memory of a dream where handkerchiefs were pulled through my ears makes me feel giddy
And the metal pedal beneath my foot stops until I hear the sound
Of the contours of your lips saying that we’re not
Moving anymore, but the sapphire liquid beneath us is not as strong
As your legs that kick the pedals like
Time gone backwards, toward the man we paid five Euros for this Pedalo to rent
For thirty minutes, and watch fish feeding
On the stale white bread that we threw into a
Small school, and I consider what it might be like to be somebody’s wife
That sleeps in saliva stains, satisfying
A
Man


‘Pedalo’ moves from the present to a past reminiscence, a technique I have used in all three of my poems for two reasons: the one mentioned above, but most importantly to help me access concrete memories. By writing about places I am familiar with it is easier for me to engage fully with the senses, something that I feel is key in successful poetry. I have looked at Kate Tempest’s ‘Best Intentions’ where she uses lines like ‘the flames that make a furnace of my throat’ and ‘eyes that once looked sweetly gaze back empty’ to connect with her audience. Her phrases are no longer just words on a page; they hold significant weight through their concrete meaning and directness.

After my research I set out with the intent to include multi-sensory experiences within my poetry. I completed ‘Pedalo’ a 29 line poem, using all of the words in Gwendolyn Brooks’ first stanza from Kitchenette Building as my end line words. It would have been less demanding to choose a stanza that wouldn’t be a challenge, and the opening one contains some words that I am familiar with but scarcely use in speech not to mention in my poetry– involuntary, feeding and giddy for example. I really wanted to push myself with the task and initially, I thought it would be almost impossible due to the limitations of the exercise. However, found that working with words of a crafted poet made the task easier than first thought.
I started the process with a free-write about a visit to Majorca and soon found that I was documenting memories that I thought I had forgotten or completely buried. I made lists of specific events, conversations, flavours, and sounds that happened there – I was aware that the more material I gathered, the more flexibility I would have when being selective with what I wanted to include and what would work best with my chosen stanza.
Once I started to write, I found that keeping the end words in mind channelled me through rather than dictating the content of my poem. Although, during a meeting where I read both Nicolai’s and Matthew’s After Gwendolyn Brook’s we discovered that all of our pieces evoked natural landscapes, outdoor settings and water-based imagery. This left me with the impression that we all definitely were influenced by her voice and sense of narrative that is periodically raw.
Implosion is key in my poem because it allows the link to be made between nostalgia and the present. I achieved this by repeating ‘saliva stains’ in the same setting – a bed – but in a different contexts. Initially ‘saliva stains from where I’ve slept with my mouth open, the patches my habit – involuntary’ is a carefree memory symbolic of acceptance. Whereas ‘I consider what it might be like to be somebody’s wife, that sleeps in saliva stains, satisfying a man’, brings the reader/audience to the present through the change in tense, and connotes through the verb ‘satisfying’ that the experience in another time and place would be unpleasant.
As I have followed the outline in the brief, I intend to submit ‘Pedalo’ for The Golden Shovel anthology.