How to Write a Poem
i.
Cup the cry of a hawk in your palm.
See how it drips in the grass. Grins
like an oil sheen. Mix lemon, luck,
and fortune with a cup of daily confusions.
Sprinkle with reverence and simmer.
Breathe in the briny steam. That is
your poem. A poem is a quark,
a thing that cannot be further reduced.
ii.
A poem is the smallest and meanest
bitch on the block. She likes long walks,
good friends, everything in moderation
except love and disobedience. She pulls
the red-knotted rope from your throat
one psalm at a time. She has no time
for the cry of the hawk, for lemons
and brutal confusion. She comes to you
in the heat of the night, heels clicking,
hat low. She is the whisper and the light
in Elijah’s ear.
iii.
Our bodies only hold a handful of poems.
When I write a new poem, I am rewriting
an old one: every poem a palimpsest of another,
over and over. So it is with birdsong, with hymns,
with the melodies our mothers sang as we slept.
iv.
You ask what to do with a poem once you’ve found it.
You ask if a poem is a weapon. A shield. Can a poem
be a bomb? I will tell you what a poem is not:
bread, a bed, four walls. A poem did not give my grandmother the vote.
A poem is not a bottle of water in ninety degree heat.
Everybody knows this about poems—except poets. Well, we are biased.
It seems that the poem, so fierce and terrible, is after all
no more than dandelion fluff, dispersed at the lightest breath.
But lay your ear to the page of the poem
and you will feel a heartbeat, even so.
Poem is the expression of the poem.
Poem is human in the face of the anti-human.
If nobody hears the poem, even so, it is still poem,
poem as baby’s giggle, poem as mother,
poem as the tide and the cry of the hawk.
v.
The poem passed by.
A great and strong wind tore into the mountains and broke the rocks in pieces, but the poem was not in the wind;
and after the wind an earthquake, but the poem was not in the earthquake;
and after the earthquake a fire, but the poem was not in the fire;
and after the fire a still small voice.
Will you kiss your confusion like a prayer? Will you crawl
to the mouth of the cave, cloak pulled over your face,
and listen?
Eleanor Ball
Eleanor Ball is a library worker by day, a writer by night, and a stressed-out grad student 24/7. Her work has been published in ballast, Barnstorm, Psaltery & Lyre, Stone Circle Review, and elsewhere. Come say hi @eleanorball.bsky.social
Why this Knocked Taylor Out:
The first line of this poem immediately made me stop and literally cup my hands together. LIke I physically pulled my hand from my laptop track pad and cupped my palms together.
I was so quickly invested in believing in the poem and the images that were given to me by it. The stanza breaks allow for breath through this poem, which allows readers to spend more time with each section, and each section felt like it was carrying a lot of weight.
There are so many gem lines throughout that taking my time with it was truly a joy. And at the end of the day, this poem moved my heart. I love it.
The way space opens up between lines in the fifth stanza feels like how a poem should open us up. There being 5 sections like 5 fingers on a hand is lovely. The density of five sections in a longer poem also works well to allow a reader to drop themselves anywhere and explore the idea of an ars poetica from any viewpoint.
I always tell my students, images stand in for emotions in poems. And each image in this poem is allowed to exist and breathe as a different emotion that poetry can give us. I know some people are anti poems about poems but I’m alllllll for it!
Interview:
Why did you choose Team Taylor for this poem?
From the day BRAWL was announced, I always knew I would be Team Taylor (sorry, Martheaus). Her tastes align so heavily with the themes I explore in my work, from religious iconography to cultural heritage to the natural world. This particular poem explores the practice of poetry using my favorite Bible verses, 1 Kings 19:11-13, as an anchor.
This is a longer poem (2 pages in a doc, actually the longest I've ever accepted I think?), can you talk to me about its length? How did this poem expand to fill its container?
I don’t often write poems this long, but I’ve never written an ars poetica before, so I had a lot of thoughts bouncing around about what poetry is and does! All of these ideas needed space to breathe.
How did you decide on the form for this, and how did you go about revising it?
As a reader and writer of poetry, I have so many ideas about the practice and power of this genre, and these ideas are often in tension. I don’t think this tension is a problem; I think it’s productive and exciting. I wanted to invite readers into this tension through not just the verse (ex. the woman in section ii directly contradicts some of the directives in section i), but through the form as well. It felt natural to give each idea or image of poetry its own section. They’re in conversation by virtue of being in the same poem, but to a degree, they’re also presented separately.
The revision process was about five and a half months, which isn’t too out of the ordinary for me. It involved a lot of brainstorming: Have I explored poetry through this angle yet? How would I respond to this argument another poet is making? I also asked myself if every stanza was making a unique point, and if it wasn’t, I cut or condensed it. At its longest, the poem was seven sections.
The hardest piece to write was the second stanza in section iv. I wanted to communicate the immutable core of why poetry is valuable to me, despite its many limitations. I was struggling with how to articulate this until I read a Tumblr post (which I can no longer find) that said something along the lines of, “I don’t care if AI can generate artwork or poems or stories that some people enjoy. Those works will always be fundamentally uninteresting to me because they were generated by AI. I love art because it’s a window into our humanity.” That’s when everything clicked for me, and I was able to finish this piece and send it to BRAWL the next day. Poetry is human in the face of the anti-human. If nobody hears a poem, even so, it is still beautiful. It is still poem.