Unlocking the Poem

I thought it might be fun to write stories about some of Ricky Riccio’s individual assignments that made their way into Unlocking the Poem—and this post will be the first of several to do just that.

One assignment that sticks out—in a distinctly positive way—consisted of a sentence Ricky gave to his students to use as the title or first line of a poem: Do not give me things unbroken. Like so many of Ricky’s assignments, this is but a brief snippet from which poems could emerge . . . and emerge they did! For weeks, students returned to workshop with additional “do not give me things unbroken” poems . . . and many of the poems were truly inspired.

We, the students, were so excited by what was happening that five of us decided to collect these poems and publish them. We put together a poetry anthology called (of course!) Do Not Give Me Things Unbroken, containing poems from 54 different authors; we dedicated the volume to Ricky and his teaching. (You’ll see this assignment as Assignment Number 417 in Unlocking the Poem, “illustrated” by several poems previously published in Do Not Give Me Things Unbroken.)

Among the poems produced in response to the assignment, we had free verse and villanelles, concrete poems, prose poems, sestinas and sijo—a vast richness of the many different poetry forms Ricky had exposed us to. (Ricky was the first to show me these forms, and I am deeply grateful; for those of you not familiar with them, you can find information about them all in Unlocking the Poem.)

In a later post, I will say something about the struggle to write in “forms,” to adhere to a structure dictated by tradition, but for now I want to point out that one of the joys of Ricky’s assignments is that they create a structure for writing. Having a predetermined structure can be intensely frustrating—it’s not always easy to find the next rhyme, to adhere to the demands of the sonnet, even to use a series of seemingly random words within the same poem—but what is so valuable about Ricky’s assignments is that they provide a focus that starts each poet’s creative juices flowing. Amazing, how each person’s poems are so different, even when they all start from the same stimulus! Amazing, too, that having a fixed starting point can make it easier to write the next poem, not harder!—after all, the poems are out there, waiting to be found.

Here is one of my own Do Not Give Me Things Unbroken poems; maybe it will give you some sense of what came from the assignment. The title comes from an ancient Greek legend, about a couple whose only wish was never to be parted:

Baucis, To Philemon

Do not give me things unbroken,

things wrapped crisply in cellophane,

smelling of newness.  I want

things that have been touched

and worn—

your old, rippled shoes,

their leather softened to

the shape of your feet,

their soles imprinted with

your steady steps.

Do not give me notebooks filled

with blank white glare—I want

warmly bent corners,

pages striped and scarred with words,

floods of them

wearing the paper to softness.

A letter you once sent me,

smudged, remnants of a tear—

I think—

I have held that aged paper to my cheek,

prizing it more than cool and empty vellum,

more than unstopping ink.

Do not give me stiffly-folded clothes—I want

your mole-soft sweater,

rumpled,

one elbow wearing thin,

to lean into its suppleness

as into skin—

through unbending years I dream

of my shaking

stanched

by the branching O of your arms,

arms that know me.

We have calluses,

wens,

loosely hanging skin

and every day

you are more beautiful

in my broken eyes.

Ellen Beth Siegel

First published in Do Not Give Me Things Unbroken, 2002

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