LINE LEVEL #4
Welcome to LINE LEVEL: Craft Lessons from Poets of Color, a monthly column in which writer, editor, and educator Joanna Acevedo zooms in on an element of craft from the work of BIPOC poets. LINE LEVEL unfolds in three parts: an excerpt of a poem, followed by a contributor’s note, followed by Acevedo’s own exploration into the poet’s world of language. Guided by a curiosity that yields learning, we are invited to consider historical context, stylistic influences, and more, all the way down to the level of the line. This month, Acevedo discusses “lot’s wife shopping in a pandemic” from Pentimento by Joshua Garcia.
“lot’s wife shopping in a pandemic” from Pentimento by Joshua Garcia
you extend the same invitation come in opposite directions
a difference between turning back the pages and skipping
to the end both a kind of understanding at some point i hope
you can put things in the past your mother tells you i thought we were so far
past this and maybe you were are maybe you just got turned
around in the work of loving a person for a whole lifeturned around in
the blindfold of memory in the past both behind and beyond
maybe somewhere the we language turned to I language turned to you
and above the highway flashing SAVE LIVES STAY HOME
as you drive into town three separate times to find the right pair of jeans
three separate times because the shops won’t let you try on clothes
anymore because you need to leave some of it behind for an hour
or return to it they keep saying they want to burn it all down
she says and you don’t tell her you mean it when you do
that you’ve dug your hands into the soil and are unsure
of what’s worth salvaging you decided you need a new wardrobe
the last time you were downtown the last time you ordered another drink
because you thought more was still possible can’t we just start over?
wouldn’t it be easier if we just start over? you turn
in the mirror hanging from your bedroom door to see
if the new jeans fit gaze over your shoulder to see how you look
from behind how you look walking away from something you never had
or always did a tug of war in the blood come with me behind
and beyond your heart hardening against it all
Contributor’s Note // Joshua Garcia
This poem comes from a series of reimagined biblical scenes I wrote as I was reckoning with my faith and reorienting my relationship to its narratives. The form of these poems is largely influenced by James Longenbach’s The Art of the Poetic Line, in which he writes, “Some poets have argued that the rejection of the line carries a kind of political charge, just as poets once felt that the rejection of rhyming verse for blank verse or blank verse for free verse carries a political charge.” Longenbach’s suggestion of a political form stuck with me as I began re-evaluating my experience in the church as a queer person; coping with the onset of the pandemic; and grieving the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and others. The world felt like it was crumbling, and I think many of us were reflecting deeply on the past while trying to carve a way forward. By stripping these poems of a traditional structure and breaking up the text to allow breath and silence to control the pacing, I hoped these poems would formally mirror the feeling of moving toward an uncertain future.
Craft Lessons from Poets of Color // Joanna Acevedo
We all talk about poetic form, but what are a poem’s formal limits? How do we know we’ve found the right form for our poetry? Form can be a confusing territory to navigate, but as we see in Joshua Garcia’s poem, “lot’s wife shopping in the pandemic,” manipulating form can completely change the meaning, pacing, and breath of a poem. Without form, we would simply be writing prose, and indeed, prose poems do blur the lines—but control of the formal elements of a poem means control over how the reader comes to the poem. Intentionality with form can open whole different worlds, and changing up the way a poem is structured can radically change the way it is read, felt, and experienced.
I’ve always liked this quote from Ocean Vuong: “Besides being a vehicle for the poem’s movement, I see form as … an extension of the poem’s content, a space where tensions can be investigated even further. The way the poem moves through space, its enjambment or end-stopped line breaks, its utterances and stutters, all work in tangent with the poem’s conceit…” This quote sees form as an expansion of the poem itself, a way that the poem can open up and invite the reader in based simply on not the words, but the way that they are arranged. In Garcia’s poem, the form is integral to the way the poem works—the way the words are arranged create a feeling of movement, scattered and frantic as it may be. Garcia mentions uncertainty; this poem feels uncertain in the way it second guesses itself, hopping from place to place on the page, surprising the reader with where it ends up.
This tension between what a poem is made of and what it looks like can manifest in many different ways. Garcia’s language is simple and straightforward, and he does not engage in traditional language or imagery; in short, this is not a poem in the sense that we would think of one if we were to say, Google “poem,” or look for a “poem,” in an Encyclopedia. He uses repetition, but he’s not engaging with typical metaphors or similes, or making the kinds of observations that we would associate with traditional poetics. This breaking down of norms and forms creates something entirely new and original—and it shows that form has almost no limitations. Crossing out words, repeating words, changing the way that words appear on the page; all of these options and more have almost infinite possibilities attached to them, which allows for endless exploration and experimentation.
In Garcia’s poem, this breakdown is a symbol in itself—he is using the choppiness of the form to make the reader feel panicked about the uncertain future in the wake of the unjust deaths of Black people at the hands of the police through the stutter stops and breath manipulation that come out of working in such a stop-and-start format. Like Vuong notes, the poem’s form has become a part of the poem itself, the content and the form become inextricably linked.
Addressing one’s own forms when writing can be a daunting task. Writing poetry is already difficult, and having to tackle the problem of what your poems look like as well as how they sound makes it even more difficult. But being conscious of goals—how you want the reader to experience your work—can be an excellent place to start. If you want your reader to linger in one spot, or move quickly through a stanza, or you want their eyes to skip through a certain section; all of these are ways to change the form and guide your reader so that they are reading your work the way you want to be read.
In Garcia’s case, his forms bring us into a new space, moving away from traditional forms and into the future, whatever that may be. Poetry is constantly evolving, and we don’t know what will come next. As a community of writers, who knows what will come next? It’s up to us to keep trying new things, keep writing, and as we invent new forms, we can shape the world around us.
Joshua Garcia is the author of Pentimento (Black Lawrence Press, March 2024). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Passages North, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the College of Charleston and has received a Stadler Fellowship from Bucknell University and an Emerge—Surface—Be Fellowship from The Poetry Project. He lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York.
Joanna Acevedo
Joanna Acevedo is the Editor in Chief of Frontier Poetry. She is the author of three books and two chapbooks, and her writing in multiple genres can be found across the web and in print, most recently (or forthcoming) in The North American Review, Hunger Mountain, and Cream City Review. Nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes, she teaches workshops and creates resources for emerging writers on numerous platforms, receiving her MFA from NYU in 2021. She also holds degrees from Bard College and the New School. To learn more about her and her work, please visit her at https://www.joannaacevedo.net/.
