This month, we’ve been reading Megan Willome’s The Joy of Poetry: How to Keep, Save and Make Your Life With Poems together as a community. Throughout our time, you’ve been sharing your own stories as Megan’s story and poems encouraged you to reach into them. You’ve written poems in your notebooks (and the comment box), you’ve started to keep a poetry journal, and some of you have even found a Poetry Buddy to share poems with.
We’ve decided we want to extend the joy of The Joy of Poetry Book Club comment box a little bit longer, and we’re inviting YOU to be our Poetry Buddy. Each Wednesday for the next three weeks, we’ll feature a recent selection from Every Day Poems and share around it together. This week, let’s look at a poem by Anna Akhmatova we featured a few weeks ago:
Although this land is not my own,
I will remember its inland sea
and the waters that are so cold
the sand as white
as old bones, the pine trees
strangely red where the sun comes down.
I cannot say if it is our love,
or the day, that is ending.
— Anna Akhmatova, from The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova
Now, flip to the end of The Joy of Poetry and read through Megan’s tips for How to Journal About a Poem. Here are the first three of her suggestions for those who don’t have the book handy (but do be sure to read the rest—they’re really terrific ideas):
How to Journal About a Poem (excerpt)
- Read the poem silently. Then, read it aloud. Maybe write it out.
- Now, for the journaling part. What did you think? Was there a phrase you liked? An image that captured your imagination? An amusing rhyme? An unexpected turn?
- Don’t worry about what the poem means—no one knows what it means, often not even the poet, so don’t worry about getting it right or wrong. Do you find meaning in the poem? Fabulous! Write it down.
And then? Well, then meet us in the comment box. Be our Poetry Buddy and share your thoughts and ask questions about Akhmatova’s “Departure.”
Check out our book club discussion of The Joy of Poetry
Photo by Paul Hudson, Creative Commons license via Flickr. Post by LW Lindquist.
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Megan Willome’s The Joy of Poetry—part memoir, part poetry reflections, part anthology—takes readers on a journey to discovering poetry’s purpose, which is, delightfully, nothing. “Why poetry?” Willome asks. “You might as well ask, why chocolate?” Poetry reflects nothing more and nothing less than the pure joy of living, loving, and being, in all of its confusion and wonder. Willome’s book will gently guide you to read, write, and be a little more human through language’s mystery and joy.
—Tania Runyan, author of How to Read a Poem: Based on the Billy Collins Poem “Introduction to Poetry”
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Laura (L.L.) Barkat says
I wish I could read this in the original language, for the true sounds of the poem. I suspect it might have a certain sense to it that is otherwise lost. Also, I’m not sure if the translator preserved the visual sense of the poem or not, but I like this one in that it feels like a wave that then recedes (the larger first stanza followed by the quiet retreat of the last two lines).
And isn’t that how love (and its loss) is. The wave of love, the vacuum of loss.
Suddenly, too, I feel like the land that “is not my own” might not just be land, but the landscape of a person with whom love had grown cold and washed out to bone white. The strange red feels like that dissonant sense we have when something that is gone is still brilliantly, hauntingly with us.
Maureen says
There’s ambiguity in this poem, and I like it as it’s applied to love – of another person, as a parent, of a country.
The title: someone is leaving, going somewhere; something is ending.
“… the pine trees / strangely red where the sun comes down”: I “see” this simultaneously as fire (perhaps a too-hot love that burns out or maybe is mostly one-sided) and loss (also supported by “sand as white / as old bones”).
The final couplet seems to contain a hint of doubt.
———————–
Akhmatova had a terrifically difficult life, marked by great loss, from the Russian Revolution on (her partner from whom she was divorced was executed; their son imprisoned for many years). It was not a Russia she could call “my own”. She married a second and then third time (her third husband exiled to Siberia); her work was banned. But she never went into or tried to go into exile. Imagine how interior a life she had to lead.
Iris Dement, btw, set some of her work to music (‘The Trackless Woods’). There’s a video at irisdement.com
Laura (L.L.) Barkat says
Thanks for the tip, Maureen. I’ll go in search.
I just learned recently that during the time her work was banned, all her friends committed poems to mind. Four decades later, they put the work that was kept in their minds into print. Imagine one’s friends doing such work… memorizing one’s words for when the silence could finally be broken. I was so touched I wrote a poem about it. (click the image again if you don’t see the whole thing down to where my name is, because Twitter is cutting it off 🙂 )
https://twitter.com/tspoetry/status/731509314368704512
I like what you say about it speaking perhaps also as person to country or parent to child. In her case, I could certainly see it as person to country.
Laura (L.L.) Barkat says
Oh, or I guess I could try pasting it here, though it might not retain the format 🙂
Genre of Silence
Lydia Chukovskaya…committed
more of Akhmatova to memory
than anyone else.
—Jaya Savige
I commit
your words before the burn.
Your seas, your mists, your secrets
safe with me.
Let four decades pass
and the listeners who would hurt you
die of their own disintegrations.
Through my silent pen
ever-patient, ever-rehearsing, you
will someday speak again.
When the white star flower blooms
its recommencing.
Megan Willome says
What a gift. Thank you.
Laura says
Love this.
Maureen says
Beautiful poem.
Did you know she was 6 feet tall? She must have had such a commanding presence.
I’ve been reading a bit about her style. She did use rhyme and, apparently, a lot of alliteration. Plus a “falling off” in intonation at the end of her poems.
Bethany Rohde says
Laura, love what you point out about the structure of the poem here: “…it feels like a wave that then recedes…” and how that connects with “The wave of love, the vacuum of loss.”
Maureen, thank you for that bit of background on the writer, and for such a great point about the ambiguity in the ending couplet. I see that.
I am struck by the promising starts with unexpected endings. They make me uneasy – just right for expressing the turmoil of losing something/someone you’re fond of. How she remembers the water – for being cold. Remembers the sand for its similarity with not only death, but something from another age perhaps (since they are not just bones, but “old bones”).
And then there’s the red evergreens.
Megan Willome says
I remember when this poem ran. I remember being surprised by the ending, thinking that sometimes in a moment like that you don’t know if a love is actually ending or if it just feels like it is–if it is just the day. You may not know till morning or maybe not for even longer.
Then that drove me back to the beginning of the poem. I thought about me sitting in that space the poet describes, even though I can’t quite picture it (it’s the sand that’s throwing me). I’ve seen “pine trees / strangely red where the sun comes down” in Colorado, especially when there’s a drought. Which sent me down a whole Colorado/family vacation memories tangent.
Laura (L.L.) Barkat says
Recently, maybe when I was doing a Flickr search to accompany this very poem, I saw many pictures of white sand. Pure white. Beautiful like I’ve never seen it. (The Northeast is pretty much brown sand, although I once saw a beach on Long Island that was all palm-sized white round, round smooth stones and another one where the sand was eclipsed by mounds of pearly yellow and pearly peach fragile, almost translucent shells. But? After seeing all those white sand pictures, how I wished to see a whole beach of white sand. One with a happy sunrise or sunset and silence except for the sound of the wind and the waves 🙂 )
Laura Brown says
I read this when it was the Every Day Poems poem of the day a couple of weeks ago. Reading it today, after cleaning out my desk in preparation for departing the place where I’ve worked for 20 years and the state where I’ve lived for 25 years, makes it a completely different poem. Especially those first two lines.
Bethany R. says
I’m glad you shared this, Laura. How fitting that your transition casts this piece in a different light. The speaker seems to be seeing or remembering this place differently than s/he once did as well. A landscape, a lover, a community, or a poem do look a bit different as the sun sets.
Laura (L.L.) Barkat says
I would love to see you make a small collection of the poems that are meaning something at this time (and for the next few months, as you settle in your new place). A poetry snapshot, as it were, of this transition and its gifts and leavings-off.
I imagine that, in any leaving, there are the old bones and those inland seas. But the inland seas, as you suggest elsewhere in the comment box, might be something we also cultivate in ourselves, and so are places not just to remember fondly but to bring along and find afresh. The inland sea makes a nice image to keep thinking on, perhaps. (This is one thing I love about poetry—how it sometimes gives me an image that I keep mulling, keep turning to, keep living as a source of hope or wonder.)
Maureen says
Another thing about Akhmatova’s poetry:
Akhmatova was part of a movement known as Acmeism, co-founded by her first husband; in contrast to Symbolists, practitioners of Acmeism used precise and concrete imagery. References to nature serve Akhmatova well as an Acmeist.
Laura (L.L.) Barkat says
Sort of like Russian haiku? 🙂 (Without the imposed line number.)
Maureen says
I haven’t seen it described that way but I rather like the connotation.
The idea was to draw from the physical and natural to create “down to earth” and “lived” poems rather than romanticized poems, the kind of poems that don’t truck with visions and mysteries and high-falutin language. Contrast Akhmatova’s poems about love with a Verlaine or Rimbaud, and the differences are readily apparent.
What I especially like about Akhmatova’s poetry is a sense of intimacy she creates as she serves as witness (as in her Requiem collection).
I’ve become very interested in translation, though I know nothing about Russian. A friend of mine sent me a link to a Q&A about literary translation by Piotr Gwiazada, who translates from Polish:
http://authors-translators.blogspot.it/2016/04/piotr-gwiazda-and-his-authors.html
See the main page; there are interesting posts there from translators of a number of languages.
Will Willingham says
Sorry for my late arrival to this lovely conversation; I was out of pocket most of the day.
I find something hangs with me about the inland sea. It’s nothing I can put my finger on, but it is my favorite image of the poem and I find myself remembering it as well.
Laura Brown says
She lived much of her life in St. Petersburg, which I think is on the Baltic Sea. I wonder whether there was a geographic inland sea she was writing about here, and whether she’s leaving or someone else is. Or it’s all made up.
I think when we love big water (or maybe more specifically coastlines along water without end), and live far from any such coast, we somehow have to find both the local whispers of sea and the inland sea within ourselves.
Will Willingham says
That’s the thing: “or it’s all made up.” Sometimes I read a poem and think that it is based on some real event, and I wonder about the people and the details. And then I realize it is just as likely not based on anything real at all. And I like it just as well for that scenario.
Matthew says
Everything about this post makes me happy. And I loved reading through this conversation. Megan’s book has been a real gift to a lot of people. I’m so thankful she wrote it.
Megan Willome says
Aw, you’re very welcome.
Elizabeth says
Enjoyed the repeated sounds in this poem, the sounds in own, cold, old, down. The sounds. The repeated sounds in land, sand, inland,
These sounds and others slowed the rhythm of the poem to mimic the water in the sea and the passage of day.
Lovely images and movements in this poem. The leaving and departure is felt. though the construction of the poem.
Bethany says
Beautiful observation about the rhythm of the poem mimicking the sea, Elizabeth. Thanks for sharing here. 🙂
MaryJo says
I just bought Megan’s book and have enjoyed reading your comments. I don’t remember how I came to this site, but it is filling my spirit. Thank you.
Bethany says
So glad you found your way here, MaryJo, and that your spirit is being filled! Delightful to meet you. If you haven’t been already, the site has a welcome/announcement space called The Mischief Cafe. I’ll leave the link below, feel free to drop in any time. Cheers!
https://www.tweetspeakpoetry.com/mischief-cafe/