Welcome,
I'm so happy that you're here.
Today I want to encourage you to think about how language,
More specifically poetry,
Can become meditation.
An opportunity to drift,
An opportunity to notice,
To observe.
Poetry,
For me,
Has always been a way to communicate all the different things that I thought I didn't have a language for.
Poetry for me was communication.
It was art.
And more recently,
Yes,
Poetry has become meditation.
So over the next couple of minutes,
I'm going to read to you a published poem of mine,
One that uses what I call my dream voice.
So when we write about dreams,
When we kind of revisit this place that really never was,
It gives us that time and space to imagine.
So as I read each stanza of the poem,
I encourage you to let whatever images pop up,
To pop up,
Just allowing them to sit where they need to sit.
Poetry is intimate.
No matter the topic,
Poetry can calm your nervous system temporarily.
Listening to poetry is a very different experience than reading it on the page.
So settling in now to the seat underneath you,
Taking a comfortable position that feels right for you,
Noticing that you are only right here,
Right now.
There's nowhere else you need to be.
Nowhere else to put your attention.
No one else to take your attention.
So let me go ahead and read to you a poem titled,
In the Moments of Elation,
In the Moon's Light,
I Dream,
By Chalene Knight.
Now the poem starts with an epigraph from Patricia Smith,
So I'll read that out before I start my poem.
Tiring of fate,
We push down the seats of the Volvo and sleep to the steady hum of this breathless heaven,
The moon rising like stones in our throats.
Is that too much to ask?
I want this night to live in my bones.
Patricia Smith,
Climbing to Erice,
Big towns,
Big talk.
And my poem starts here.
In this dream,
We are huddled together under a palm tree.
Only our backs visible,
Robed in coconut meat and husked corn.
I carry them in my hips and suck the jasmine leaves from your skin,
Freckled like mustard seeds flung into the stars.
We are nubivagant,
Slivered skies poke our shoulders.
I can't remember all the sounds we don't make invisible.
We balter each other's bodies.
Tiring of fate,
We push down the seats of the Volvo.
Sheer onto this path to becoming,
The bay of Bengal swells into the earth as you rest the soil from my fists,
Release the grime from behind my nails with rose thorns while I search for another word for sunlight.
Spreading,
You use fish bones and bamboo thicket to embank and stop the light from shattering.
Your back holds all your hurt and fantasies as you work.
I watch you cry when the music fades,
And what a little moonlight can do swallows itself in the distance.
The car radio sinks into the sand.
We burrow and sleep to the steady hum of this breathless heaven.
We found an epic gateway to these half moons gushing.
I blink away the sleep and press my fingers into your neck.
You plate my fish with smoked syrup,
Unthickened and runny,
Bellies bursting,
We are quenched.
You straddle silence as you listen to the stars crunching under my feet.
And still,
I hear you pining.
For me,
I whisk memories of loneliness and lust from my cartilage,
Line the dirt with patchwork quilts,
Simmer into your familiar.
We wake to waves thrashing the shoreline.
The moon rising like stones in our throats,
Still growing as our past bodies whiz toward full.
Now,
Catching our breath comes easy.
Like cavernous sleep,
We drift into the dim.
I wake to the lingering scent of coconut milk,
Pluck the tea leaves from between my teeth,
Trace my finger along the blueprint of your shadow,
Warm beside me,
Heating.
I lose myself in the shape of your absence,
A hollowed-out lacuna in my marrow,
Waxing.
Is it too much to ask?
I want this night to live in my bones.
So,
If you have a notebook with you,
Maybe jot down one word or phrase or line that stood out to you.
Now,
Let's go back to the beginning of the poem because I like to remind people that when you listen to a poem,
You aren't meant to catch everything.
You're meant to listen and read again and again and again and again,
And each time noticing something different.
Maybe it's a question that pops up.
Maybe it's an image that you want to carry into the rest of your day.
Now,
I'll go ahead and share a little bit more about the form of this poem,
Which is called a glossa.
G-L-O-S-S-A,
And a glossa takes four lines from another poet's poem,
And you put those at the top as the epigraph,
And then as you write your poem,
You take each line of that epigraph and repeat it at the end of each of your four stanzas.
And so,
You may have heard those four lines pop up in the poem,
So I'll read the epigraph again,
And I hope you will go back,
Listen to this track again,
Listen to this poem,
And see if you can find exactly where those lines were integrated into the poem.
It's a fascinating form.
I'll read the epigraph again.
Tiring of fate,
We push down the seats of the Volvo.
That's line one.
Line two.
And sleep to the steady hum of this breathless heaven.
Line three.
The moon rising like stones in our throats.
And line four.
Is it too much to ask?
I want this night to live in my bones.
So there you have it.
A few moments just to sit and dream and imagine.
And yet,
A little mini poetry lesson embedded in between.
I hope you will come back to this track often,
See what else you can notice,
What else stands out to you,
And write it down in your notebook and remember that one word is enough.
