NaPoWriMo Day 10: Phanopoetics

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Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: “The Heaven” by Franz Wright

• Prompt

Freewrite

With this freewrite, as well as all freewrites, do not put any pressure on yourself to be good. You are simply getting thoughts on the page. You can write in poetry or in prose, but feel free to write poorly, sloppily, redundantly, and with cliches. Now is the time for ideas—we will eventually sculpt those ideas into art.

Do you ever have sensations that you can feel, but not easily explain?

Of course you do. Part of being a poet is trying to transmit complex feelings.

On gloomy days, my brain quite literally feels boxed in with concrete. When I look at ruins of ancient societies, I feel a blush of springtime bloom in my chest. The sound of a computer rebooting makes me think of the first light emerging from the Big Bang. I can’t explain any of these sensations, but I know the truth of their feeling.

Okay, that’s some of my weirdness. What about you?

Freewrite for 8-10 minutes about interesting, peculiar sensations you have. I know this is a pretty abstract prompt, so interpret it in whatever way makes sense to you—there are no wrong answers.

Poem: “The Heaven” by Franz Wright

I lived as a monster, my only
hope is to die like a child.
In the otherwise vacant
and seemingly ceilingless

vastness of a snowlit Boston

church, a voice
said: I
can do that–if you ask me, I will do it
for you.

This poem drives me insane. Insane!

Before I get into any analysis of the poem, I want to give a brief craft lesson. You might be familiar with the word “onomatopoeia,” which describes a word that sounds like the thing it describes (woof, meow, honk, etc.).

Onomatopoeia has a cousin, “phanopoeia.” Phanopoeia describes the general sensation of something being transmitted in language. To use the language of Ezra Pound, who defined the term, it’s a “casting of images upon the visual imagination.” This is different from imagery, in that imagery is the employment of images, but phanopoeia is imagery in motion, a means of creating a mental picture through more than just visual description.

Let me tether this to the poem we just read so that it’s a bit more concrete. What Wright does in this poem is recreate the feeling of speaking in an empty church. We begin with a concrete moment, a feeling of despair and contrition:

I lived as a monster, my only
hope is to die like a child.

God, what an incredible opening sentence. The second sentence comprises the rest of the poem, and there’s a notable difference in both language and form.

In the otherwise vacant
and seemingly ceilingless

vastness of a snowlit Boston

church, a voice
said: I

Notice how the sound of the poem changes here. There’s a lot more sibilance: “s” sounds abound, and they abound in a rather musical set of lines, too. Notice, also the amount of whitespace here. The poem takes a literal leap into a one-lined stanza, and then leaps again into a closing quatrain whose lines are also much shorter than the opening quatrain.

can do that–if you ask me, I will do it
for you.

The language here returns to something a little more abstract, a little less musical, but it closes on a promise from God. What promise? Perhaps the wish for the speaker to “die like a child.”

What drives me absolutely insane about this poem is its phanopoetic quality. All that whitespace and emptiness in the center, paired with its musical sibilance, makes me feel, quite literally, as though I am speaking to divinity in an empty church. The language is tall and vacant; there is room enough for both myself and God. In my mind, the emptiness invites God in. We, the reader, must also take a leap across this empty center to speak to God; we, the reader, enter into the one-line church and find we have crossed the border into something holy. We, the reader, must also contend with the line “said: I”, whose concision implies, to me, that this conversation is happening with the divinity within.

It’s remarkable for a poem to achieve such power in such few words, but the power of form and language are on full display in this piece. It drives me insane.

Prompt

Write a poem that uses phanopoeia to emulate a distinct sensation.

I know this is an abstract, challenging prompt, but don’t get discouraged by it. Franz Wright transmits an embodied experience solely through the story he tells and the way he arranges his images and the spacing of his text. This feat takes a lot of patience and revision—for your first draft, simply focus on the experience you are trying to transmit. Discover that experience in the work, and it will be easier to transmit it through revision.