Poets Marilyn Nelson, Dan Vera, and Kim Roberts presented a discussion of Cliophrastic poetry at Split this Rock yesterday, a phrase they invented to name poetry that talks about history (often through persona poems).

One differentiating trait they noted was that the poems go beyond personal narrative to frame a situation within a larger historical context. Once that larger context is in place, then the poet may "go through the small door" of family history to reveal the broader narrative (Nelson).

This afternoon, I'll present a workshop about documentary poetry, a related mode, yet one that occasionally stays within the smaller frame of the personal. Another difference is that documentary poems are not written in persona as often as Cliophrastic ones.

Thus while most Cliophrastic poems, since many are inspired and informed by primary source research, are simultaneously documentary poems, the documentary poems that stay within a personal frame do not fit the definition of Cliophrastic.

I drew the diagram below to illustrate the relationships between four modes of poetry as witness. The flower shape reminded me of the poem in Nelson's book about George Carver that is written from the perspective of a field of flowers.

“Family Stories” by Dorianne Laux speaks to the things we often learn to keep inside: family secrets, our best friend’s confession, where Uncle Ned stashes his bourbon so Aunt Louise can’t find it. 

It invites exploration of that vulnerable negotiation of first dates and falling in love, in measuring our story, our family, against other families, other people we might have become, or still could be.

In regard to craft, this poem is wonderful for studying how opening lines draw the reader into the poem, and how they set the scene quickly…

I had a boyfriend who told me stories about his family,
how an argument once ended when his father
seized a lit birthday cake in both hands
and hurled it out a second-story window. That,

…as well as for its narrative arc and the birthday cake that anchors the poem’s story onto the page like sandbags keeping a hot air balloon from lifting off – all that tension of anticipated release held in place.

One of my favorite standalone lines is “and nobody ever forgave anyone. But I believed”(9). If you bring this poem into the classroom, you may want to offer it as a journal prompt, or pair it with “What’s Broken.”

This poem will be among those included in a new current I'm adding to the poems page of Poetry River later this spring: voices of resilience. I'll post more information about this new current soon, and send an announcement to subscribers of Poetry River updates.

When I’m writing and my voice feels stifled by the policy lingo of public education or obscured by a dinner party in my head from the poetry books on my nightstand, one place I’m likely to turn is Aracelis Girmay’s Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011).

Girmay’s voice leaps fresh and sure from the page, charged with wonder, ragged with loss. In “Abuela, Mi Muerto,” one of many elegies in the collection, the speaker searches for a way to reconnect with her grandmother by retracing her grandmother’s steps, looking for signs.

My head is thick, but I know
you are telling me something
when I hear the rooster crow,
or the hawk there circling.

Mostly it’s the birds who send me looking
for the lost room of your face.

In “Central City Senior Center, New Orleans,” inspired by an experience during Girmay's writing residency in a city in which she couldn’t walk anywhere “without thinking about how related we all are” (Rumpus interview), the speaker watches an old woman feeding pigeons. When she turns, she finds shared recognition in the friend who sees the woman with her.

The poem closes:

…What is close to my heart
is that woman, that city, you, that noon
on that dry land dressed in pigeons & daylight,
the dry land dressed in our brief lives, our lives
brief & miraculous, as the bees.

The connection Girmay senses in all things extends beyond animal to earth and water. In “La Boda del Mar y Arena,” the speaker watches the surf breaking on the sand:

the sea & beach move into each other’s mouths
particle by particle; each one wanders
the big rooms of the other.

O, god, let us love
like they love.

Three poems from the collection (the title poem, "Elegy," and "Ode to the Letter R") were published in Cortland Review's spring 2013 feature and include recordings of Girmay reading the poems.

Throughout Kingdom Animalia, Girmay’s arms-open, eyes-open tone invites us into those moments that inspire poems – times when, in her words, “I see something and feel, on the brink of the moment vanishing, like I want some other eyes to hold it, too. To see the thing I’m seeing too. To help me know that it existed once” (Rumpus interview).  As a result, the poems instill, simultaneously, palpable connection and the sense “we are perpetually in a state of disappearing” (Rumpus interview).