Poetry Already in Play: Exploring the Glosa 

Gary Rasberry
Independent Scholar, Ontario

My relationship with poetry has always been informal. Intimate and informal. It's always been about words and how they fall: from the inside to the outside (and, often, back again). Words falling. On to the page. In fits and starts. In bunches. Gathering themselves, sometimes, into tiny patterns, shapes recognizable for an instant only to disappear then reappear somewhere else in a slightly different guise. The process is ever and always beguiling, intoxicating, frustrating, compelling …

I've always taken writer Natalie Goldberg's advice to heart: keep the pen moving. The rest will take care of itself. And it does, for the most part. Through all of the writing I continue to do in my life as well as the invitation into writing I offer others in workshops and classrooms, the joy is always in discovering how words show us ourselves and the world. We find out who we are and what we are thinking and feeling by watching our words fall on to the page.

Aside from brief skirmishes in Elementary school with cinquain, diamante, quatrain, haiku and, of course, the concrete poem, I know little about form in poetry. I am not proud of this lack. Nor do I eschew form or formal poetry in my working with words. I simply took what I considered to be the helpful advice of 'Writing Process' advocates who suggested I start from where I am, write what I know, work with the muse(s) rather than worry about The Muse.

In turn, when it comes to writing pedagogy, I seem to have tapped into what I feel to be a very powerful (and often unfortunate) phenomena when it comes to writing process. Despite gravity's assistance-and insistence-our words do not seem to fall easily on to the page. The blank page often resists our writing. So, this is where we start: with the blank page and our words which we know swim freely about in our heads (too freely for many of us). So we must ask, invite, and insist that these words fall inside out.

The writing workshops I've been a part of revel in wordmaking; they become, in Goldberg's words, "a great opportunity to capture the oddities of [our] mind[s]. [To] explore the rugged edge of thought" (1986, p. 8). Learning to trust ourselves, we simply write and write and write, worrying little about worry-about what form(s) our writing might take.

On one particular day, somewhere along the (writing) path, I chose to let go of the freewrite and instead turn to form as a way of exploring another edge of the writing life. Rather than offer the blank page that begged wordmaking, I suggested an exercise that involved a page already (partly) written, a page that was already written in a certain way, a page that required us to fill in the blanks, so to speak, to find and fulfill a form that was already in play.

The workshop turned out to be a great success. We all seemed to thrive on this process of writing as a piecing together of a partly started puzzle. It seemed more invitational and disarming than prohibitive and off-putting.

This happy discovery marked an opportunity in my own writing life to seek out further opportunities to find (new) form(s); it was an invitation to explore the paradoxical notion that structure and form can be freeing. It was an opportunity to begin to slowly seek out structure and form on my own terms now that desire (not the Grade 12 Curriculum) was fueling the search.

The poet who initiated this particular process (which, for me, is still and will hopefully always be unfolding) was PK Page. PK Page, the gracious and graceful Canadian poet who, having never really been away, seems to be enjoying a marked renaissance in the public eye in this the (self-declared) glowing twilight of her writing life. (In the most recent public interview I heard of PK Page, on CBC's This Morning in the Fall of 2001, she spoke of her exploration of the short story as one of her last projects-not in a morbid sense, but in a way that suggested closure to a full and satisfying life.)

Some time ago, I stumbled on to Hologram: A Book of Glosas and my writing (and teaching) life will be forever changed. Here are PK Page's words, in her Foreword to Hologram, words that set poetry in motion.

I was introduced to the glosa through the ear. Its form, half hidden, powerfully sensed, like an iceberg at night, made me search for its outline as I listened. The eye, of course, sees it at a glance: the opening quatrain written by another poet; followed by four ten-line stanzas, their concluding lines taken consecutively from the quatrain; their sixth and ninth lines rhyming with the borrowed tenth. Used by poets of the Spanish court, the form dates back to the late 14th and early 15th century. It has not been popular in English.

For some reason I found it challenging--rather in the way a crossword puzzle is challenging. I picked up the first book of poems that came to hand--Seferis, as it happened-in search of four suitable lines. As is often the case at the moment of challenge, everything was easy. Beginner's luck, they call it. Almost without trying, I found the lines that launched 'Hologram..' I won't say I wrote it in a flash, but in a near-flash. The words that controlled the rhymes were angle, sea, peacock, and it. It was immediately clear that full rhymes would be difficult. Any rhymester knows that English is not Spanish.

I enjoyed the idea of constructing the poem backwards--the final line of each stanza is, in effect, the starting line. You work towards a known. I liked being controlled by those three reining rhymes--or do I mean reigning?--and gently influenced by the rhythm of the original … Little did I then know how obsessed I would become by the form and how, as with all obsessions, it would have to run its course. And little did I know what hazards would lie ahead.

Like PK Page, I, too, enjoyed beginner's luck. Seeking out the "glosa starters" was just as satisfying as attempting to create one. I spent a morning swimming in the words of some of my favourite poets. I finally decided on Canadian poet Tim Lilburn's poem "Pitch," from his collection To the River. I then "broke the rules" and began working on a second glosa from the lines of an essay rather than a poem. I found what I was looking for in Maxine Greene's "Introduction" to her book Releasing the Imagination. Yes, the words were, strictly speaking, prose but as anyone who has spent time with the words of Maxine Greene will know, it was poetry through and through. Maxine Greene is surely a poet for these pedagogical times we live--a world which we are invited to imagine as otherwise …

Experienced light cruises the clay banks.
You must be this without knowing you are.
The river gleaming with falling down,
      gold scar of current on its back.

Pitch                                       Tim Lilburn

How long the climb before the moon rolls over.
What is ancient but the voice here that does not speak?
So many others. So many others.
A glacial reminder that carves the heart full of hollow.
Only in this place can memory take hold and loosen,
loosen and take hold without depth or thanks.
There are easier places to find without knowing the questions.
The troubled map which isn't finds your longing.
The metaphysics of archeology becomes available only to the unguarded flanks.
Experienced light cruises the clay banks.

Still and even breathing deliver an un/awareness,
Strength and lost steps found.
Wonder. Silence. Recognition. Stars gathering.
Motion draws itself visible now.
The Fifth Movement for Wind and Strings.
The sky's weight in close, too far.
Stand there, next to the barest tree.
Interpretation erodes the moment, the weight collapsing
in on itself; the fourteenth most distant star.
You must be this without knowing who you are.

Layer upon layer, the downward pull raising you up.
Feeble thoughts fossil-crushed for foolish keeping.
How far? Which shelf now manifested?
Subterranean longings press to the surface.
The horizon might mean something less
than perfect time becoming round.
If there were waves to narrate the turning: ancient
grass or holy'd water. The gravelled shore bent under.
A lens ground down for its ocular imperfections.
Seeing the pale strip of evening's gown.
The river gleaming with falling down.

Staring up from the depths, ink through ink,
forgiveness and forgetting.
From this height, too, memory leaves only
the faintest of scars.
The pull. The pull is sometimes too much to bear
the weight of bones that anchor.
The water always and ever: black.
Meaning is troublesome and insistent and gives way
to a final movement that repeats itself.
Insight surfaces from the river's lack,
                gold scar of current on its back.

All depends upon a breaking free, a leap, and then a question.
I would like to claim that is how learning happens
the educative task is to create situations in which the young are moved
to begin to ask, in all the tones of voice there are, "Why?"

Releasing the Imagination                                         Maxine Greene

The invitation so often couched in un/familiar hues,
with love and uncertainty; the Gift offered
up in a light that colours us in-between
the lines wishing and wanting for Beauty.
Self and Other, Other Selves lost in dance;
closing time open to pedagogical suggestion.
The Human Condition is to trouble itself into
practicing theory, otherwise.
How to forgive ourselves for seeking answers in the back of the book?
For wanting to remove all apprehension.
All depends on a breaking free, a leap and then a question.

The poetic place where knowing and not-knowing might touch
and the permission to live there, dwell.
To live generously with ambivalence.
The gentle waltz; to embrace without awkwardness or embarrassment or
the clumsiness of certainty that stumbles us
blind to the broken lens.
Working with rusty metaphors chains us to the narrow.
Questions. Music. Answers. That each might live
together in every im/possible combination, permutation.
I would like to claim that that is how learning happens.

More light splashing our pages alive.
The knowing pulse that moves the circle
round with outstretched hands, holding.
Adjust to this new light, support its weight
unencumbered. The opening curtain: insight made
available, to be lived and not proven.
Step into the painting, the world made
different. New. Each time
a new ending carved from an old story regrooved.
The educative task is to create situations in which the young are moved

Why now? When learning has become so full
of intention, supposedly available to those who follow
guidelines, curricular pathways to certain
outcomes: advancement or perhaps
a more suitable place from which to participate in the increasingly
global'd economy. But learning begs to differ. (What about
the limit that is sky?) Surprises. Detours. Regression that is not
toward the mean spirited. The weathered songwriter¹
who sings, "To live is to fly both low and high,"
to begin to ask, in all the tones of voice there are, "Why?"

_________________________

¹The weathered songwriter who would no doubt loath to be part of this pedagogical enterprise is/was Townes Van Zant, a dark, edgy and important voice in the American roots music scene. The lyrics to his song "To Live is to Fly" (© 1971 Columbine Music) are worth noting, here, even if one must go without the accompanying tune:

Days up and down they come like rain on a conga drum
Forget most remember some but don't turn none away
Everything is not enough and nothin' is too much to bear
Where you been is good and gone all you keep is the getting' there

Oh to live is to fly both low and high
So shake the dust off of your wings and the sleep out of your eyes
(So shake the dust off of your wings and the tears out of your eyes)

Goodbye to all my friends it's time to go again
Think of all the poetry and the pickin' down the line
I'll miss the system here the bottom's low but the trebles clear
But it don't pay to think too much on the things you leave behind

We all got holes to fill and them holes are all that's real
Some fall on you like a storm sometimes you dig your own
The choice is yours to make, time is yours to take
Some sail upon the sea some toil upon the stone

References

Goldberg, N. (1986). Writing down the bones. Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications.

Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts and social change. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Lilburn, T. (1999). To the river. Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart.

Page, P. K. (1994). Hologram: A book of glosas. London, ON: Brick Books.