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NPM: Carolyn Kizer

Lauren

For those who don’t know, a pantoum is a poem composed in quatrains in which the second and fourth lines are repeated as the first and third lines of the following quatrain. For other confusing forms, see the villanelle and the terzanelle.

This isn’t a perfect example of a pantoum, but it is a lovely poem about the wonderment parents feel about their children when the children who once adored their parents grow up to patronize them.

Parent’s Pantoum

Where did these enormous children come from,
More ladylike than we have ever been?
Some of ours look older than we feel.
How did they appear in their long dresses

More ladylike than we have ever been?
But they moan about their aging more than we do,
In their fragile heels and long black dresses.
They say they admire our youthful spontaneity.

They moan about their aging more than we do,
A somber group–why don’t they brighten up?
Though they say they admire our youthful spontaneity
They beg us to be dignified like them

As they ignore our pleas to brighten up.
Someday perhaps we’ll capture their attention
Then we won’t try to be dignified like them
Nor they to be so gently patronizing.

Someday perhaps we’ll capture their attention.
Don’t they know that we’re supposed to be the stars?
Instead they are so gently patronizing.
It makes us feel like children–second-childish?

Perhaps we’re too accustomed to be stars.
The famous flowers glowing in the garden,
So now we pout like children. Second-childish?
Quaint fragments of forgotten history?

Our daughters stroll together in the garden,
Chatting of news we’ve chosen to ignore,
Pausing to toss us morsels of their history,
Not questions to which only we know answers.

Eyes closed to news we’ve chosen to ignore,
We’d rather excavate old memories,
Disdaining age, ignoring pain, avoiding mirrors.
Why do they never listen to our stories?

Because they hate to excavate old memories
They don’t believe our stories have an end.
They don’t ask questions because they dread the answers.
They don’t see that we’ve become their mirrors,

We offspring of our enormous children.

Read it again and again. This one is amazing.

I need National Poetry Month to end soon. Very soon. I am far too excited about it and I have a million other things to do than locate my favorite poems.

4 thoughts on NPM: Carolyn Kizer

  1. the form of the sestina always vexed me. i could never manage to write one, at least not one that was remotely coherent. i have written a pantoum before, and it was somewhat coherent, although, i have to admit, sometimes it’s just fun to experiment with new forms without worrying about meaning and such.

    it’s always amazing to me, having read so much free verse, having written free verse almost exclusively, when a poet can confine themselves to one of those odd structures and still make sense.

  2. I like writing sestinas and pantoums more than any other type of poetry. An instructor I had said that writing formal poetry allowed the form to be “a kind of stand-in for inspiration.” That is totally correct. It is necessary, I think, to not “fight” the form, but let the form help you write the poem.

  4. diane, that was my experience with writing a pantoum. having to repeat specific lines was very inspiring, almost in a way liberating, and the fact that the form allows a certain flexibilty in the length of the poem also appealed to me. the process of writing a pantoum led me somewhere i did not initially intend to go, which was nice.

    my issue with the sestina is more a flaw of mine than it is a flaw of the form. i struggle with the end-of-line word repetition. perhaps it is just something i need to practice more. i am almost certain that the best sestinas are not their author’s first attempt at the form. like the sonnet, another form i struggle with, sestinas do not emerge from the mind fully formed–well, at least not from my mind.

    i haven’t written a villanelle before, but of course i’ve read do not go gentle into that good night enough to be familiar with the form, and i imagine it would be somewhat more difficult to write than a pantoum, but easier than a sestina or a sonnet.

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