Monet Refuses the Operation

I love this poem for the surprise of its premise. I love the intensity with which Mueller describes argues for the unexpected benefits that age and experience bring and how we only have to stop and look hard at the world find some balance for what we have lost


MONET REFUSES THE OPERATION

Doctor, you say there are no halos
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end

Lisel Mueller

Lisel Mueller was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1924 and immigrated to America at the age of 15. She is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Alive Together: New & Selected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1996. Other awards include the Lamont Poetry Prize (1975), the National Book Award (1981), and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (2002). She lives in Chicago.

TRY YOUR HAND AT A POEM
Using strong imagery and a strong, idiosyncratic voice, write a poem that makes a compelling argument for something that, at first glance, seems illogical—without naming what the narrator is arguing for or against. You may choose a famous person, as Mueller did, or an ordinary person, perhaps someone you know

Poetry by People Who Aren't Dead Yet: "Snow"

Snow

Walking through a field with my little brother Seth

I pointed to a place where kids had made angels in the snow.
For some reason, I told him that a troop of angels
had been shot and dissolved when they hit the ground.

He asked who had shot them and I said a farmer.

Then we were on the roof of the lake.
The ice looked like a photograph of water.

Why he asked. Why did he shoot them.

I didn't know where I was going with this.

They were on his property, I said.

When it's snowing, the outdoors seem like a room.

Today I traded hellos with my neighbor.
Our voices hung close in the new acoustics.
A room with the walls blasted to shreds and falling.

We returned to our shoveling, working side by side in silence.

But why were they on his property, he asked.

David Berman

I love this poem for its sensory details that make me I feel like, reading it, I'm outside in the snow; I love the way it tells a story; and I really love the end, which is, in my mind, what makes it a poem because the question the little brother asks so beautifully reflects the willingness with which young people believe and suggests the tangle of complication that can ensue when we don't take them seriously. Poetry's favorite kind of question is one that can't really be answered, and the little brother's question resonates at the end of the poem, suggesting a million other unanswerable questions in the reader's mind.

David Berman is a living American poet, cartoonist, and singer-songwriter best known for his work with indie-rock band the Silver Jews.

TRY YOUR HAND AT A POEM

1) Think of an experience that hinged on some sort of weather condition: snow, rain, hail, humidity, heat, cold, a sunny or cloudy day. First, freewrite maybe ten minutes about the experience.
2) Freewrite about the weather itself, making simple observations and comparisons, using sensory details of all kinds to capture how being in the weather feels.
3) "Carve a poem" from the freewrite of your experience. Use a highlighter to isolate the most effective lines, then write them down. Note that "Snow" uses dialogue. You can use it, too! Play with what you've got, considering sequence, line breaks, rhythm, etc. Highlight details and language in your weather freewrite to add imagery to the poem.
4) End with a question that somehow reflects the nature of the experience.
5) Revise. Add/subtract/tinker. Do it again. And again. Until it's right.

This exercise was adapted from one created by Matt Buchanan.