On Making What’s Familiar Feel New

Do you ever read a poem, and it makes you see something normal and everyday in a new and strange light? Great poetry has the power to completely shift our worldviews, to make the familiar seem strange and the strange, familiar. 

Poets accomplish this feat through close attention to craft and to the images they weave in their work. Let’s take a closer look at a brilliant poem in which the lines between familiar and strange are constantly moved around.  

Close Study: “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.

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 $!&%” (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.

Craft Perspective: “The Experience Machine” by Maria Popova

Read it here, in The Marginalian.

In this short, illuminating essay, Popova explores the nature of experience—namely, that everything we experience is informed by our expectations and predictions, which in turn are informed by the lives we’ve already lived. The things we experience are not passively received, but rather actively imagined and interpreted, consciously and unconsciously.

In other words, attention both shapes and is shaped by our experiences of reality. There is a reciprocal relationship between the experiences we have and the experiences we expect to have.

Most immediately, this fact of neuroscience tells us a lot about how our mindsets, as well as our lived experiences, shape the ways we navigate the here-and-now. It contributes to the ways in which we see our lives reflected in every next sensation. It also gives us poets something to think about as we focus our poetic lenses onto the world around us.

Great poetry often harnesses the element of surprise. By making the reader view something in a new and unexpected light, a great poem recalibrates our understandings of the world, our emotions, our experiences, and even ourselves. A poem can go against the grain of prediction, encouraging the reader to suspend, just for a moment, their brain’s desire to control and orchestrate, letting instead the poem take over and reveal strange truths to the unsuspecting eye.

Ritvo’s poem is a perfect example of this. Every image startles; every comparison is brilliant and unexpected. The poem asks us to think about life death in fundamentally different ways, blurring the lines between the two. Everything familiar feels strange, and everything strange feels familiar. Through this, Ritvo was able to access something profound and ethereal, peeking through the curtain that separates this life and the next.

What does this mean for your own poetry? A few things:

First, try to suspend your brain’s predictive capabilities when writing poetry. This, of course, is easier said than done. Many poets embrace techniques, like mindfulness or stream-of-consciousness, to try to access something deeper and unexpected in their work. The method matters, but not so much as the impetus: to see the world in new and surprising ways, and transmit that sight into a poem.

Second, push boundaries. A great poem will experiment with sensation and experience to arrive at something new. Poets cannot simply conjure up newness; we are all working with the same familiar elements, as chemists are working with the same atoms on a periodic table. It is through the tinkering, through using the poem as a laboratory, that we can arrive at something strange or profound.

Third, be patient with the process. Poetry asks the reader to perceive the world in new ways, but how can the poet accomplish this, if the poet is not also looking for something strange in the familiar?

Finally, lean into your own unique voice and insight. Our poems are born from those sensations and experiences that our brains are hardwired to predict in the world. Do not try to write capital-P Poetry; do not try to be the next Wordsworth or Atwood or Ritvo. Only Ritvo could write his strange and enchanting poems, and only you can write your own strange and enchanting poems, too.