Poet Kim Dower (a former participant in Poets At Work and now the Poet Laureate of West Hollywood) came back from a week-long workshop with poet Robert Wrigley and couldn’t wait to tell the group about it. Slightly giddy with inspiration, she quoted him saying, “Every poem is about a thing and another thing. It’s the other thing that takes the poem into all the complexities — emotional, moral, etc.”
Poems work on more than one level. The apparent subject of a poem is only one layer of what the poem is really talking about. Ann Pibel, a member of Poets At Work, wrote a poem that begins to describe a garden setting, a house with its windows open to the outside. When suddenly she describes the blossoming orange trees as “lonely brides” we start to understand that the poem is also talking about the domestic relationships of those who occupy this house. This metaphor signals a deeper layer of meaning that underlies the description. That’s the other thing in her poem.
Some poets juxtapose more than one event to layer meaning. In his poem “At Risk,” from his book, City of God, the late Gil Cuadros describes the waiting room of a doctor’s office; the speaker is there to receive his AIDS diagnosis. Also waiting are a mother and young son, the mother brutal in her efforts to get the boy to behave. This puts the speaker in mind of his own mother’s brutal discipline, adding yet a third layer to the poem. These layers fuse and deliver a power to the conclusion {“I didn’t dare ask how long I’ve got, / palm over my mouth, / I say mother / softer than I ever did before.”) that could not have been achieved by any one of the layers alone.
If you’re reading along thinking, “I don’t write poems, I’ll just skip this post,” hold on. Wrigley’s wisdom applies to all literary writing. In the language of the prose writer, he is talking about the difference between plot and theme.
My first published novel, Bailey’s Beads, is about a woman, Bryn Redding, in a coma after a car accident. The central question is Will she awaken? On the surface, that sounds like the plot of a Lifetime movie, but I wove in a conflict between Bryn’s mother and lover over who gets to define Bryn while she is unable to represent herself. I also added Bryn’s writing, which reveals yet another aspect of her. Through the use of subplots, the reader is asked to contemplate whether any of us knows the people we claim to love, or if we just invent them for our own purposes. The plot is necessary to keep the reader moving through the story, but the theme is what rewards them for making the journey.
Setting is another powerful tool writers use to invoke theme. In her story, “Bobby Kennedy Comes to Town,” longtime workshop participant Pat Alderete explores the sexual mores of a group of young women in the late 1960s; you might have sex with your boyfriend in a moment of passion if you really love him, but if you take birth control you’re seen as a whore. Alderete sets this story at the moment of Bobby Kennedy’s visit to East Los Angeles, a moment of hope and pride for the community that ends the next night in Kennedy’s assassination. At this place and time, so much in the United States was about to change, and the girls’ dilemma takes on an even greater significance.
Essays also offer powerful opportunities to develop theme. The reflective nature of the form provides occasion to contemplate the meaning of events. Nina Rota, a former workshop member who works with me privately, is writing an ambitious book of linked essays. A recent essay, “The Wedding at Cana,” makes frequent use of allusions (referencing work by other artists) to create universality to the narrator’s search for some connection to the father who never acknowledged his paternity. Among other things, she invokes the train ride across the sea from Miyazaki’s Spirited Away to describe the displacement felt by the speaker lacking this root to family, and The Wedding at Cana, a painting by Paolo Veronese stolen from Italy by Napoleon and returned to Venice as a reproduction, to talk about how we may feel connected to someone through their art, even a facsimile of their art.
Since hearing Wrigley’s quote, I often find myself asking students and myself, “Okay, but what’s the other thing?” It’s a great reminder to build those deeper layers of meaning into our work.
Text by Terry Wolverton
Photo by Yvonne M. Estrada
Thinking about joining a writing workshop? Writers At Work offers weekly, ongoing opportunities for writers of fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction, as well as creative counseling and manuscript review. Learn more at http://writersatwork.com/education.html. In 2017, we’re celebrating our 20th anniversary of inspiring, encouraging and empowering writers.
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