NaPoWriMo Day 28: Embodied Poetry

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Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: “Afternoon” by Max Ritvo

• Divinations

• 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.

Freewrite for 8-10 minutes. Pay close attention to your body in this present moment. Perhaps even do a body scan. What do you feel? Where do you feel it? What don’t you feel? Is it on your body or inside it?

Write down what you experience. Don’t be afraid to reach for imagery and metaphor if traditional language fails you. “Hurts,” for example, might tell me there’s pain, but not how the pain really feels.

Poem: “Afternoon” by Max Ritvo

When I was about to die
my body lit up
like when I leave my house
without my wallet.

What am I missing? I ask
patting my chest
pocket.

and I am missing everything living
that won’t come with me
into this sunny afternoon

—my body lights up for life
like all the wishes being granted in a fountain
at the same instant—
all the coins burning the fountain dry—

and I give my breath
to a small bird-shaped pipe.

In the distance, behind several voices
haggling, I hear a sound like heads
clicking together. Like a game of pool,
played with people by machines.

Divinations

Max Ritvo’s short career as a poet was dazzling and kaleidoscopic. Diagnosed with a deadly cancer at the age of 16, Ritvo ended up having 9 years to put his life into verse, and his two collections of poems, both posthumously published, will mystify and electrify long after his death (which happened in 2016).

“Afternoon” is a great example of Ritvo’s work—both grounded and spiritual, concrete and mysterious, and filled with the unexpected. Among other craft elements, this poem resonates because of its ability to transform the familiar into the new—a vital skill for any poet.

Let’s examine this stanza by stanza. In the first stanza, the speaker compares the feeling of dying to that feeling you get when you’ve forgotten your wallet at home. I certainly know that feeling: a full-bodied, vibrating “oh shit” (followed by: “do you take Apple Pay?”). The phrase “lit up” is especially compelling, in that it’s an innocent verb describing something as serious as death. I’m compelled to imagine a full-body MRI, illuminated like a Christmas tree.

The next stanza carries forward this sense of anxiety, muddied by a sense of confusion. Notice the line break: “patting my chest / pocket.” Isolating “patting my chest” emphasizes the speaker checking his own body, and creating a distance, however short, between the pocket and the chest it sits on. I even wonder if this line break might be suggesting the pocket isn’t so much sitting on the speaker’s shirt, but sitting inside the speaker’s chest. What am I missing? What is he supposed to be bringing with him as he approaches the border of life and death?

The third stanza in some way answers this question, and it aches the reader’s heart to read. The speaker is missing “everything living / that won’t come with me / into this sunny afternoon”. “Everything living” is certainly an unexpected answer, but what’s even more expected is the “sunny afternoon,” which subverts one’s expectations for what the speaker must be entering into. Notice that the speaker seems to be exiting both a literal and metaphorical home. Literally, the speaker is stepping into a sunny afternoon, but we know because of the poem’s first line that the speaker is dying, thus making the familiar strange and the strange, familiar.

The fourth stanza brings back the image of a body lighting up, but further mystifies this idea. The speaker compares his body’s lighting to “all the wishes being granted in a fountain / at the same instant— / all the coins burning the fountain dry—”. What an astounding, unexpected simile. It centers the wish, something hopeful and optimistic, inside an image of a fountain being dried. There’s so much tension between the wish and the dried well, making the wish seem ominous, and the well seem like the unintended victim of desire. One cannot help but think about what that wish might be. (I also think about Ritvo’s life, here, ended so quickly. He had to live an entire lifetime in only 25 years, everything bright and intense and done in a flash.) Notice, lastly, that the fourth stanza has 3 em-dashes, making the stanza rush forward, almost as though this stanza is the poem’s “dying moment.”

The fifth stanza slows us down into a truly mystifying image. “and I give my breath / to a small bird-shaped pipe.” Notice, again, the subversion of what’s normal. I wouldn’t think of a pipe as something you give breath to, more like something you draw breath from. What could this represent? The poem doesn’t try to explain this image to us, and I encourage you to interpret it however you’d like. Perhaps this is the speaker’s final breath, and the bird-shape represents freedom, a certain kind of soaring, as though the speaker is submitting his life into something that unshackles him from his lit-up body.

And then, the final stanza. Numinous. That’s the only word that comes to mind for me. Has the speaker died? If so, are the sounds he hears coming from the life he’s left, or the life he’s entering? And that final image resists easy interpretation, and wonderfully so. “Like a game of pool, / played with people by machines.” The final line makes the familiar feel utterly strange, and it seems to be peeking into something outside of life as we know it. What is it that occurs in the beyond?

I’ve found that, the less I try to make sense of this final stanza, the more I understand it. It exemplifies Ritvo’s imagination, his uncanny ability to reach something profound and spiritual in his poetry. Ritvo himself believed that there was no afterlife; perhaps this added a sense of urgency to his poems, which seem to be bathed in the strange and wondrous light of the brilliant coming afternoon.

Prompt

Write a poem that transmits an embodied experience. Tell a story about and through your body.

Ritvo does this by making familiar feelings strange, and vice versa. But there are any number of ways of accomplishing this. Just tell the page, honestly, what your body experiences, and keep reaching for new ways to explain your body when the old ways fail.