Roy Beckemeyer and Friend
Today, Guest Blogger Roy Beckemeyer has some interesting thoughts about perception and writing poetry. Thank you, Roy, for enlightening us as poets and also prose writers.
Wringing Poetic Inspiration from the
Depths of Winter
by Roy Beckemeyer
Winter sometimes seems to be devoid of poetic subjects;
spring has tulips and daffodils, summer her roses and trees arching over
village streets. Fall's leaves light themselves up right there on the branches.
You feel as if the poetic muse may have retired to Arizona for the winter. But
I can generally find things in winter's bleakness that inspire me if I work at
it a bit: tree branches that look like skeletons, the shadows of those branches
on the neighbor's roof, snow drifting up and ghosting the world into
unrecognizable shapes.
This past winter it was birds that caught my fancy. I have
always loved the way the winter sparrows can scratch food out from under the
massing snow. In early mornings before anyone else is out and about you can see
the virgin snow impressed by the tiny tracks left by foraging birds. And in the
late evening in Wichita, KS huge flocks of crows return to the city from their feeding
trips to the fields outside town, arching their way across the sky and into
neighborhood treetops to roost for the night. I know that those images were an
impelling reason for a poem I wrote last winter.
But I also know that somewhere in my mind, as I worked on
turning those images into words, my subconscious was sifting through lines of
other poets' work I had read. And winter, after all, is prime season for
catching up on reading, wrapped up in a blanket, a cat on your lap, a dog on
your feet. I went back and found lines from three poems I had read this winter
that I believe had something to do with my word choice, the shape of the sounds
I used, the images that appeared in my poem.
From a long time favorite poem I first read 40 years ago,
Sydney Martin's "Letter to an Absent Friend" (Gazebo, 1977, Wichita State University Student Government
Association), these lines are vivid in my memory:
"Some mornings
without my glasses
I think the black
leaves have come
but it is only
the fat cold birds
puffed up feathers"
From a new book, Marilyn Nelson's Mrs. Nelson's Class (2017, World Enough Writers, Tilamook, OR), from
her poem "The Children's Moon," I found the these well-rounded lines
particularly meaningful; the moon and all the "o" sounds brought to
my mind a barred owl I had heard many mornings late this winter:
"Look, children, I said as they found their desks:
The
children's moon! A special good luck
sign!"
And, from another new book, my friend Kelly Johnston's Kalaska (2017, Blue Cedar Press,
Wichita, KS), from his poem, "Going Home to Stay,"
"In the fog of a warm
December dawn,
a lone crow beckons from a
cottonwood.
The rest of the murder remains
quiet."
I think that, as you read my three-part poem, you will see
how what I saw on my morning walks this winter, and how the words and phrases I
retained in my memory from my winter's reading, influenced the shape and tenor
of my own poetic vision:
Three Winter-Bird Poems
winter birds, fluffed-up puffs
dark
against snow hop,
stop, hop, peck
at seeds scattered, peppered,
thrown hap-
hazardly, their beaks mustached
with fuzzy snowflakes with
shattered
shells of sunflower husks their
downy
coats filling with snow their
footprints
y
y y yy
y y's on the white ground
___________________
big owls, round
eyes on round bodies
drawn by first graders, under
a big round moon their
mouths, oh, so open
O's, hooting
___________________
crows bound down
the sky, caw to one
another and curve
in arcs and droops
and deviant drops
onto barren trees,
blobs on skeletal
limbs, with croaks,
creaks, rustles, they
pull night's darkness
into themselves
___________________
—Roy
Beckemeyer, March, 2017
The message is, of course, that you can find inspiration
without end in any season if you open your eyes to the world around you and
open your mind to the words written by authors whose work you love. So go forth
and write: fill poetry month with what you have seen and read and then written.
Thanks to Nancy for making the pages of her blog available
to me once again. I am proud to have had her allow me to share her writing
space. Happy Spring, Nancy!
Bio: Roy J. Beckemeyer is a retired engineer who conducts research on Paleozoic insect fossils and writes scientific papers and poetry. His first poetry book, "Music I Once Could Dance To," was published in 2014 by Coal City Revew and Press, Lawrence, Kansas (http://coalcitypress.com/from-coal-city-press/music-i-could-once-dance-to/).
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