Margin Notes

What I was reading:

The other day, I remembered Billy Collin’s ‘Piano Lessons’, a short collection of free verse poems which could be considered one long poem. It took me a while to track them down using keywords in the search engine. Eventually, the entry “piano lessons left hand revenge” managed to fish the entire collection from the depths of the internet, writhing with the want to be read. After reading through them, I found it funny that the revenge of a pianist’s left hand was what stuck with me – the focus of mini-poem #5:

I am learning to play

“It Might As Well Be Spring”

but my left hand would rather be jingling

the change in the darkness of my pocket

or taking a nap on an armrest.

I have to drag him in to the music

like a difficult and neglected child.

This is the revenge of the one who never gets

to hold the pen or wave good-bye,

and now, who never gets to play the melody.

Craft Moves I Notice the Writer Making:

•  Collin sets the scene with half of a sentence (the first two lines). He is learning to play a piece on the piano – as pianists do. What edification could this bland statement possibly offer the reader? One of the important aspects of a poet’s craft is to make the mundane glorious, so the reader is left anticipating how the author will make this happen
• Collin makes interesting choices with truncation in this free verse poem. The thought on line 3 should continue instead of being cut in half to create line #4. There’s not even a coordinating conjunction to give a soft pause to justify truncation. This is an interesting creative choice contextually because “jingling” is like (unskilled) music, and we learn later that the left hand must be “dragged” to make skilled music like “a neglected child.” That the line is truncated at “jingling” brings attention to the left hand’s “song”. The last word in a line of poetry often gets more weight of meaning.
• The next seven lines offer a richly personified account of the life of the pianist’s left hand, as though it had a mind and feelings of its own. This is not meant to be a synecdoche.
• The last three lines are a counterpoint to the first line. The pianist may be learning to play “It Might As Well Be Spring,” …(lines 3-7) … But his left hand never gets to play the melody. On a side note, I listened to the song, and the left hand’s part sounds harder to play than the right hand’s part in many places.

Possibilities for Writers:

• Try personifying one of your body parts. For example, which part of your body faces neglect? Experiences injustice? Which is overworked? Which is the teacher’s pet? Does your face get tired of smiling (does it know it’s lying for you)? Do your toes feel trapped? Write about life from that part’s perspective.
• Try experimentally truncating your poetry lines, focusing on how the meaning of your sentence is altered when you let different words end a line.
• Try using ‘Piano Lessons, 6’ as a mentor text for your own free verse poem with: 1) A mundane statement, 2) An explanation for why the statement is not so mundane after all, and 3) An alternative perspective that adds to the beginning statement.

What I Was Reading:

Japanese fiction seems to be having a bit of a moment, and I finally found a copy of the beloved novella Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto, first published in 1988 and translated to English five years later. I often find translated works of literature to be more approachable – more direct, with fewer flourishes – and they have the added benefit of exposing readers to new and diverse perspectives.

The book opens with an engaging description of kitchens:

The place I like best in this world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’s a kitchen, if it’s a place where they make food, it’s fine with me. Ideally it should be well broken in. Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate. White tile catching the light (ting! ting!).

I love even incredibly dirty kitchens to distraction – vegetable droppings all over the floor, so dirty your slippers turn black on the bottom. Strangely, it’s better if this kind of kitchen is large. I lean up against the silver door of a towering, giant refrigerator stocked with enough food to get through a winter. When I raise my eyes from the oil-splattered gas burner and the rusty kitchen knife, outside the window stars are glittering, lonely.

Now only the kitchen and I are left. It’s just a little nicer than being all alone.

When I’m dead worn out, in a reverie, I often think that when it comes time to die, I want to breathe my last in a kitchen. Whether it’s cold and I’m all alone, or somebody’s there and it’s warm, I’ll stare death fearlessly in the eye. If it’s a kitchen, I’ll think, “How good.”

What Moves I Notice the Author Making:

• Lots of great subject-specific vocabulary and descriptive language: immaculate tea towels, vegetable droppings, towering refrigerator stocked with food, oil-splattered gas burner, rusty knife
• Contrasting imagery (e.g. from pristine towels and bright white tiles to filthy floors) catches the reader’s attention
• Short sentences maintain a steady pace
• Use of sentence fragments or a dash when describing/listing the characteristics of certain kinds of kitchens, rather than a colon
• Personification: “Now only the kitchen and I are left”
• Blending the general with the specific: the narrator starts by talking about kitchens in general (i.e. as a kind of space), but then moves into a more detailed description of a particular kitchen (i.e. an actual place)

Possibilities for Writers:

• Think of the ‘space’ that you like best in the world: rinks, beds, living rooms, restaurants, movie theatres, etc. and describe the general characteristics/qualities that make it your favourite. Then imagine it as a particular (yet fictional) ‘place’ and use descriptive language and sensory imagery to make it come to life (i.e. make it seem like you’re talking about a real place that you’ve experienced firsthand).
• Try a couple of the craft moves Banana Yoshimoto uses in your own piece of writing.

What I was reading: 

The rhetoric surrounding immigration has been prevalent in recent years. Having Latin American family, I’ve always seen how intrinsically connected Latin America is to the United States — what happens there matters to all the smaller nations south of it. The way Latin Americans are talked about is often through a negative, destructive lens, which can reflect certain realities. However, this narrative blinds the world to the beauty of Latin America — home to some of the most hospitable people in the world. A few weeks ago, I came across the poem Citizenship by Javier Zamora, a native of El Salvador.

Citizenship

it was clear they were hungry
with their carts empty the clothes inside their empty hands

they were hungry because their hands
were empty their hands in trashcans

the trashcans on the street
the asphalt street on the red dirt the dirt taxpayers pay for

up to that invisible line visible thick white paint
visible booths visible with the fence starting from the booths

booth road booth road booth road office building then the fence
fence fence fence

it started from a corner with an iron pole
always an iron pole at the beginning

those men those women could walk between booths
say hi to white or brown officers no problem

the problem I think were carts belts jackets
we didn’t have any

or maybe not the problem
our skin sunburned all of us spoke Spanish

we didn’t know how they had ended up that way
on that side

we didn’t know how we had ended up here
we didn’t know but we understood why they walk

the opposite direction to buy food on this side
this side we all know is hunger

Credit: Unaccompanied Copper Canyon Press, 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Javier Zamora. Published in Poem-a-Day on March 20, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.

What moves I noticed the author making:

• Title is the only word capitalized – this stresses the importance of having/needing/wanting official citizenship
• No use of punctuation – it seems to be assumed or can be interpreted. It leaves ambiguity.
• Enjambment everywhere
• Repetitive use of words or phrases to emphasize meaning and emphasize displacement (empty, their hands, booth road booth road, etc.)
• Mimicry of form and content, for eg. “fence fence fence” is on one single line and imitates how long this fence (likely the border fence is), “on this side” is one line and “this side” is on the following line – the poem mimics two different sides. The side of the fleeing people and the border fence
• Irony – the word “beginning” is at the end of a verse
• Italicized of “the” and “that” to suggest alienation
• Third last verse starts with “we” – changes to the communal.

Possibilities for Writers:

• Try using minimal or no punctuation
• Take a copy of this poem and add where you think punctuation would go
• Mimic the form and content of an object to emphasize the meaning (where the physical layout of the poem mirrors the subject — like a long, narrow poem representing a fence or scattered words symbolizing broken systems.)
• Repetition of words in a phrase in close line or verse to each other
• Use italicized words to create subtle shifts in meaning or voice.
• Experiment with enjambment — breaking lines unexpectedly to create double meanings or a sense of unfinished thought.
• Focus on small, everyday objects like shopping carts, fences, or dirt to tell a bigger story.
• Describe these objects without naming them — let their presence imply hunger, displacement, or survival.

Michael Clubine is always on the run from Southwestern Ontario and a B.Ed student at UNB. However, one of the few things he enjoys in Ontario is gazing into the summer sunsets at the lake and dreaming about everything under the sun in Muskoka.