Books I Return To …
Especially in winter, but in all seasons, a handful of poetry collections, within arms-length, reach out to me. I find myself returning to these more frequently than others, for some reason I cannot name. They are favorites, to be sure, but they are not my only favorites. I have many more. The books contain excellent poetry, but there are so many others that are equally profound in style and structure. Some of these are written by friends, but I have left off this list the names of so many poetry-writing friends. The books in this list are authored by poets with varying levels of prestige – but in my mind, even the so-called "minor poets" – to borrow Simic's phrase – are very often profound, culturally essential, and moving.
I'm not able to definitively say why the books I have listed here are listed here. After all, I tend to view poetry, both new and old, major and minor, the way Bubba, in Forest Gump, appreciates shrimp in his comical, but very meaningful articulation, of all the possible shrimp recipes he recites. My list is a matter of taste. It is subjective, to say the least, and I invite readers to share their own recipes, make their own lists. Keep close those that lift you.
At my own public poetry readings, I am frequently asked to name my "favorite" poet – an impossible request! I usually answer that I don't have a favorite poet, which I think is true. I have many influences, but most honest poets are favorites. I have never been able to single one or two out exclusively. As I have prepared this list, it is apparent to me, as it will be to many readers, the tremendous authors I have not included for the reader's consideration. For example, I have not listed the wonderfully evocative Larry D. Thomas, whose works Amazing Grace and Where Skulls Speak Wind, helped me find my own voice. I have not chosen the skilled, lyrical Oklahoma poets: Paul Bowers, Paul Austin, Ron Wallace, Paul Juhasz, Ben Myers, Jim Barnes, and so many others who make regional writing in the Oklahoma context a particular, poignant force – a force underappreciated outside of Oklahoma, but each voice quite capable of standing tall on any stage anywhere. I have not chosen Anna Akhmatova, whose later work, especially, cuts my heart. I have not included Seamus Heaney, whose family sagas in Irish peat, depicted in Opened Ground, always speak to me. Nor did I include Yevgeny Yevtushenko's magnificent Collected Poems, 1952 – 1990. In fact, I have included only one international poet, though I enjoy reading all kinds of poetry from across the globe. I could also speak of Gary Worth Moody's collections, for their visceral power embedded in historical calamity. I greatly benefit from reading Major Jackson, Tracy K. Smith, Naomi Shihab Nye and Lucille Clifton, but I did not list them. Nor did I list my sister Kai Coggin, whose identity poetry is so eloquently combined with social justice and the natural realm; nor did I list my brother Quraysh Ali Lansana, who is a master of blending the historical event within a contemporary persona, rediscovering, revealing such necessary truth. I have not chosen Simon J. Ortiz, whose themes of identity within the natural context are exquisite. I have listed only one Native American poet, though I admire Phillip Carol Morgan's The Fork-in-the-Road Indian Poetry Store, even as I find the overlooked histories of Native Americans reconstructed into contemporary poetry, most satisfying.
But I have narrowed my list to nine books to which I often return. They speak to me. They inform my interior life. In my teaching, I am constantly telling students to read everyone and everything, but not to emulate. Be impressed, be informed and thereby formed, but allow what you read to shape you toward your own voice. Perhaps what links my chosen works listed here is that they continue to do that for me. On the surface at least, in my own poetry, I don't sound much like any of the poets I am listing. But each of them has helped me be a better writer, and a better human. Maybe it's the difference between menu and meal – what one tastes, what one digests, enters the blood and contributes to the health, even the personality of the consumer. Perhaps what binds these together on my list is that they are comfortable, stable companions to which I would offer to you in conversation were you to visit me.
First on my list is Alan Berecka's The Comic Flaw. Author of six books, Alan is wonderful presenter in public, always an audience favorite, yet a seriously underrated poet who should immediately be named poet laureate of the state of Texas. Berecka is a master of the narrative poem. With expert control, his stories do not digress into unnecessary prose; they are focused and moving, even as they develop the seeker within the scene. His poems, are all the more impressive for his gift of humor that lighten his contemplative, searching voice while retelling vignettes of family pain, or confusing religious emphases (having once been an altar boy himself). My favorite poem of his many excellent offerings is found in his first book, The Comic Flaw. The poem "Leveling" is a father and son encounter (always a favorite theme of mine). In "Leveling" the son is helping his father tend the grave of his mother. The son wants his dad "to think [he] / had become a man." His father "who cared / little for words, spoke / what I have come / to believe was his / greatest compliment: // Hey kid, / don't forget / how to do this."
Second, I refer to Jonas Zdanys and The Kingfisher's Reign. Proud of his Lithuanian heritage, Zdanys has written and translated more than 50 books in his esteemed career. His Thin Light of Winter and Red Stones demonstrate his skill with various poetic styles, especially enviable is his control of line, moving toward what he calls the "epiphanic moment" in the poem. The Kingfisher's Reign is a collection of prose poetry. Whatever prose poetry is, no one writes them better than Jonas. Consider the opening from "The Revenant": "There are days when the windows and doors of the whole world gradually open, when daylight whistles in with the thaws from the wide mouth of the river, when the margins of the sky shift with the changes of the season and we labor together for revival." Zdanys ends the poem: "I lift my arms in greeting like heavy wings. I tremble in the gathering light."
Third, I offer Natasha Tretheway's Pulitzer Prize winning collection Native Guard. The moment I encountered this work, I was moved by the skillful interplay between personal identity encountering racial history. The book offers a moving tribute to the Louisiana Native Guards, one of the Union's first official black units. Skillful in traditional as well as experimental poetic utterance, her "Pastoral" suggests the complex ironies of being a daughter of the racially unjust American South:
In the dream I am with the Fugitive
Poets. We're gathered for a photograph.
Behind us, the skyline of Atlanta
hidden by the photographer's backdrop –
a lush pasture, green, full of soft-eyed cows
lowing, a chant that sounds like no, no. Yes,
I say to the glass of bourbon I'm offered.
….
Say "race," the photographer croons. I'm in
blackface again when the flash freezes us.
My father's white, I tell them, and rural.
You don't hate the South? They ask. You don't hate it?
Next, I turn to Ofelia Zepeda's Where Clouds are Formed. In her famous novella The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros writes "You can never have too much sky … Here there is too much sadness and not enough sky." Those lines remind me of Zepeda's collection. Zepeda's sky covers the Sonoran Desert in south central Arizona, home to her people, the Tohono O'odham.
In her work, she reminds us of an ancient civilization surviving in her lyrical lines that transcend the limitations of appropriated culture. She presents not only a historical/cultural perspective, but also points us to the ecocritical issues we face today. In "Lost Prayers" she writes: "Passing below the sacred peak, / here prayers signified by rosary beads are futile. / Calling on the Virgin Mary is useless. // Instead, one must know the language of the land. / One must know the balance of the desert. / One must know how to pray / so that all elements of nature will fall into rhythm. In "Proclamation" she writes: "The true story of this place / recalls people walking / deserts all their lives and / continuing today, if only / in their dreams." Zepeda inspires me to keep walking and to keep looking skyward.
Lorna Dee Cervantes' first book, Emplumada, is especially magnificent given the young age of the poet when many of its poems were written. This collection moves me to consider the universal plight of seeking freedom while retaining cultural identity. Like Zepeda, her works transcend the immediate cultural considerations and speak to anyone trying to make peace with her heritage. She writes in "Freeway 280": "Once I wanted out," wanted a place "without sun," some place beyond the confines "of tomatoes burning / on swing shift in the greasy summer air." Yet the seeker returns to perhaps "find it, that part of me / mown under / like a corpse / or a loose seed." In "Oaxaca, 1974" the speaker is looking for her true heritage, despite the conflict of being given "a name / that fights me." I teach these two poems quite often in my various classes, as much as one can teach poetry. It is a joyful challenge to read them. The concluding lines of these poems are two of the finest ending phrases of any poetry.
My sixth selection is James Wright's The Branch Will Not Break. For all the pain surrounding his personal life, something tender, almost timid, seeps from the underside of his work. It's almost as if his writing saves him, perhaps prevented him from doing something really stupid in life. His blue-collar heritage, with its rough exterior, is somehow tumbling towards greatness, unadorned, unashamed and in certain ways, unmatched in quality. His humbly-stated phrasing, from the famous Ohio poems to his quasi-erotic "A Blessing" are profound for what is unsaid, as much as what they claim. In his poem "Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry …" Wright invites insects to join him. Referring to the "old grasshoppers," he "want[s] to hear them, they have clear sounds to make. / Then lovely, far off, a dark cricket begins / In the maple trees." Wright's themes of alienation, loneliness, overcoming fear, within himself and the troubling effects on society at large, are routinely countered by appeals to beauty and natural order. I have found in him a brother poet, whose personal tragedies mitigated by his poetic style motivate me to write for all I am worth, seeking the beautiful while distrusting anyone who fails to understand a dark cricket.
Seventh, I adore Tomas Tranströmer's The Half-Finished Heaven. In this book, the 2011 Nobel Prize winner offers an inspiring collection of unsurpassed excellence. In "A Winter Night" he opens with the evocative phrase: "The storm puts its lips to the house / and blows to make a sound." He ends that poem by returning to the storm image which "will blow everything inside us away." In the poem titled "The Half-Finished Heaven" he presents a series of magnificent images, seemingly disconnected, only held together by the incompleteness of bliss. His last three images are: "The endless field under us. / Water glitters between the trees. / The lake is a window into the earth." Though my favorite poem of his, "Sketch in October" is not reprinted in this collection, his adherence to the influence of seasons on human behavior frequently occurs. For any of us moved by seasonal change, this acclaimed poet is a champion.
Eighth is Arthur Sze's 2021 collection The Glass Constellation, a tour de force, representing a long poetic life filled with astonishing poems marked by acute observation and insightful inference. Sze offers a stellar collection of lyrical poems that captivate the heart of reader, even as the personae involved in the individual works also seems effected, sometimes dramatically, sometimes more subtly, but always moved. These poems are full of energy, sometimes boiling below surface, or recoiling in a desert sunset, but always linking heart and mind with sensation and intellect. His poems simply will not allow a reader to be complacent.
Finally, I offer Jane Kenyon's Otherwise, a book marked by death with dignity. The poet affords a stubborn will to keep in rhythm with the cycles of the seasons, though her own death is impending. Perhaps the most well-known poem of the collection, "Let Evening Come" settles on me like an Old Testament Psalm, riveting and ritualistic, holy in its ability to take us beyond, a sacrament for what it does not say, and how its silence makes us bow in reverence. She ends the poem with humble triumph: "Let it come, as it will, and don't / be afraid. God does not leave us / comfortless, so let evening come." Her fierce determination to hold onto life despite living with a terminal illness artistically reminds us of probably the oldest conflict humans endure – the fact of our mortality, and our response in that shared struggle.
Ken Hada
Ken Hada, professor and poet at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma, is the author of twelve collections of poetry, including Come Before Winter and Contour Feathers (Turning Plow Press, 2023 and 2021). His twelfth book, Visions for the Night was released in April at the annual Scissortail Creative Writing Festival on the campus of ECU.
Poems Aren’t Jokes, or Are They?
Before I start writing about poems and jokes, I want to tell you about my golf swing, which is much closer to a bad joke than it is a work of art. I have been playing the game since I was twelve, and the only part of it that I have ever mastered is the mulligan. For you the uninitiated, a mulligan is a do-over, or to put it more bluntly, it’s a way to cheat. Anyway, many years ago I got into a terrible slump. I mean I was hitting the ball so badly that even I could tell something had gone terribly wrong, so I kept going to a driving range hoping to figure out the problem. At some point I went to the range with a friend who happened to be left-handed. While there, I asked him if I could try one of his clubs before I gave up the game for good. When I set up to hit the ball, I noticed my shoulders had to be at a certain angle to keep the club face square at address, and I realized I had lost that position as a right-handed player. Now, I didn’t go on to get my PGA card, but I was able to return to my status as a bogey golfer, well if you don’t count a few mulligans here and there, and there. In this paper I hope to change your perspective about poems and give you a fresh way of looking at them that might help your writing the next time you tee a poem up.
Now some might be offended by the title of this paper, and I don’t mean to say that poetry or most poems are jokes. Even humorous poems carry more weight than a joke, and I believe we can all tell the difference between a joke and a poem. For the last two decades or so I have become known in a few small circles as a poet who uses humor, or perhaps a humorist who happens to write poems. The use of humor came naturally to me, I guess, but I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that I’ve always been fascinated by jokes. I was the nerdy kid in school who bought and memorized jokes books and memorized comedy albums, and yes, other kids tended to keep their distance. The first poet who piqued my interest when I was in high school was Ogden Nash, whose poems exhibited a joyful love of playing with language that one often finds in good jokes. For example, Nash wrote this ditty, often misattributed to Dorothy Parker, that offers us all sagely advise: Candy/ is Dandy/ but liquor/ is quicker. Because I have spent so much of my life immersed in jokes and poetry, I have often wondered how they work. This curiosity has led me to study in poetry workshops all over the country with master poets such as Scott Cairns, Bridgit Peegan Kelly, and BH Fairchild. I have also read most of the books I could lay my hands on that deal with the psychology and philosophy of jokes and humor. After all this effort, I can report with some confidence that no one knows the formula that will create a sure-fire successful poem or joke. If you ever come up with one, your formula will be more precious than the recipe for Coca-Cola or for the batter at KFC. However, a few years ago while reading the late Ted Cohen’s book Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters, I began seeing similarities between the way poems and jokes work, and I believe this crosspollination has helped me to see a few things about poems I hadn’t realized before. So what follows is a left-handed attempt to try to gain a little understanding about poems.
The first element both forms have in common is a reliance on concision. We all know this an important part of poetry. Here’s a short poem I wrote to illustrate the point.
Poetry 101
A prattling child, effusive
to a fault, I rambled on
through giant buck teeth.
I slurred my words
on a three-day bender.
The dissonance rubbed
my mother’s nerves raw.
She told me often, Son,
words are precious.
Don’t waste them.
We’ve all heard the theories about poets using the best words in the best order: nothing more, nothing less. But this isn’t the aspect of concision that I want to talk about. What I’d rather turn my attention to is how concision works in jokes or perhaps I should say, I’d like to explore how the demand for concision causes jokes to work. Here’s the thing about jokes, much of the context we need to understand how a joke works lies outside of the joke. A joke relies on a shared a body of knowledge between the teller and listener to work. If you don’t believe me, here goes… “Knock, Knock, (insert your reply), Dwayne, (insert your reply). Dwayne the bathtub; I’m dwoning.” It’s not just the context we share, but we also agree not to think too hard about why a man drowning in a bathtub could be knocking on your front door. A second example, that exists in the State of Texas where I live is the Aggie joke which pokes fun at those who attend Texas A&M. Texans know what to expect from the poor butt of the joke, and it lies in a shared understanding ,or should I say misunderstanding, of the intellectual capabilities of the Aggie. But should we not share the same context, the joke is destined to fail. Certainly, one thing that poems and jokes share is that they lose quite a bit of their impact if they have to be explained. For example, I am told that before the fall of the Iron Curtain in the Soviet satellite countries like Poland there was a very popular joke that goes like this: “I hope we get invaded by the Chinese Red Army 6 times.” One person would say the line to a listener, and both would laugh uproariously. As Americans what keeps us from getting this joke are two things. The first is geography, and the second is not knowing how much the other people in Eastern Europe hate the Russians. If we understood this context, we would know nothing would be more pleasing to a Slav than having the Red Army march through Russia 12 times. Oddly, even after we have the proper context, the idea of the joke might amuse us, but it will never have the impact it had in Eastern Europe 30 years ago. This joke’s failure reminds me of when I was an undergraduate 40 some years ago and my English prof swore that Eliot’s Wasteland was a great poem, and my response was something like “Well ok, if you say so.” At this point, I’d love to talk about how the modernist took poetry on a wrong turn away from the shared context of society writ large and began using a context only the intelligentsia could understand on a good day, but that is another essay all together. And I think one could also argue that the dependence on a context outside a work and the creation of context within a work is perhaps the greatest difference between poetry and prose, but let’s kick that exploration of this observation down the road as well and look at another device that poems and jokes have in common. They both build expectations only to break them.
Here’s an old joke to illustrate the point. So they automated the intake desk up in heaven, and Jesus figures St. Peter can use a day off. After all he’s been at it for around two thousand years. So Jesus tells St. Pete, to go and enjoy himself, and after a bit of convincing Jesus tells Peter, “Look I can handle it, besides it’s all computerized now, so how hard can it be, all I have to do is type a name in.” Just after St Peter goes off to enjoy a few hours of paradise, a very old man walks up to the desk, and Jesus asks for his name. The old man looks puzzled, and finally replies, “I can’t remember.” Jesus does not panic, after all, he’s Jesus, so he tells the old man that he needs a name so he can type it into the system and see if the old man can stay or needs to seek other accommodations, but he reassures the man not to worry. Perhaps if the old man can tell him something about his life, Jesus, who knows a few things, can figure out the old man’s missing name. The old man thinks and thinks and finally remembers, “I had a son.” Jesus says, “Well that narrows it down, but I still need more information. Maybe you could tell me something about your son?” The old man thinks for a while and says, “My son, he had holes in his hands and his feet.” Jesus suddenly gets a little unnerved. He hasn’t seen his father for quite a while, so he leans across the desk and whispers, “Father?” At which point the old man’s eyes brighten and he responds, “Pinocchio?”
And there you have it, a classic example of how jokes build expectations only to break them. So now I want to show how I have used the understanding of a needed shared context and building expectations to help me write some poems and give you a couple of tricks that might help you. One of the poems I’m best known for retells a story from a semester I spent in Rome, Italy when I was a college sophomore. I really struggled with how to get the reader to understand when and where I was as the poem unfolded. I wrote a notebook worth of drafts of the poem trying to figure out how to place my reader in the same context, but the poem always started with a very prosy and flat stanza, until I finally came to the realization that a certain part of a poem lies both outside and inside a poem, the much overlooked and underutilized poem part called the title. I realized if I just gave my poem a very boring title that told the reader where and when the action took place, we’d have the needed shared context. Here’s the poem.
St. Peter’s Square 1979
College kids half drunk on cheap spumante,
we decided to stand at the barricades
for hours. As the crowd grew behind us
so did our plan. The new Polish Pope
was returning from Mexico and would pass
within earshot. We knew that he was known
to stop and bless or converse with pilgrims
who spoke his native tongue. The grandson
of Polish immigrants, the group looked to me,
but my vocabulary was bluer than the Pontiff’s
eyes. I feared my broken second-hand Polish
was more likely to land me in the bottom
of some secret and dank Vatican dungeon
than it was to gain us a Papal audience.
Plan B, we decided to consult our foreign language
pocket travel guide. Short of receiving the Paraclete’s
gift of tongues, phonetics became our only chance.
We leafed through the little Polish it offered, looking
for some phrase that even Americans could pronounce.
Happy with our choice, we practiced in unison
as if we were again pre-communicants chanting
the Baltimore Catechism until we had it right.
That night as the young Pope rode past
a few feet away, we shouted in our best Berlitz,
Where are you going with our baggage?
The passing years bent the Pope
in half and hid him behind a cold
plastic mask, but I still relive that night.
Often in a dream, I see his confused look
snap around to our direction, and I swear
I can hear him answer, Too far, my son, too far.
I started writing that poem when I was working on my creative thesis at the University of North Texas back in the mid 80’s, but I didn’t include it in my thesis because all the early drafts of the poem ended at the question about baggage. I thought the poem was good, but I sensed it was a bit more of a joke than a poem. Fast forward another ten years to when I came back to poetry after a self-imposed hiatus. I remember watching some religious event on TV and the commentator said that John Paul II looked as if his body had taken on the suffering of the whole world. Bingo, I had an ending to this poem that took the poem from being about a flippant remark shouted to gain attention, to an unexpected truth about how the pope looked like he had taken on the baggage of the world before he passed, as well as anything else a reader could read into the ending of the poem.
Titles cannot only build context; they can build an expectation in the reader which you can play off of as a poet. What follows is the title that I’m most proud of; I love the way it’s meaning is revealed in the last line of the poem and how that meaning turns the reader’s understanding of the narrator.
Skeletons
As a kid I always found it harsh
when my mother claimed that if given
the chance to live her life over,
she’d become a cloistered nun.
My father, an old dog, loved to roll
in life’s dirt. One night after I graduated
from high school, my bags packed for college,
he swayed up to me, a fresh Manhattan
sweating and sloshing in his hand. He offered
me slurred advise. Kid, ya know if I could
do it all over again, I’d been an effing pimp.
After returning from my semester abroad,
I handed out souvenirs. I gave my mom
water from Lourdes, a rosary blessed
by the Pope and a cheap t-shirt. I brought
my dad brandy from Spain, a Hofbrauhaus
half-liter stein, and second-hand accounts
of his World War II Pig Alley haunts.
My mother enjoyed her gifts, especially
her John Paul II t-shirt. He stood arms raised
and spread, glowing in black and white.
That it was two sizes too large didn’t matter
to her. She wore it often and took to saying
again and again, I can’t believe how happy
the Pope looks. My father, who believed
only to a certain point, finally broke one night
during our family meal. To her constant refrain,
he shot back, For Christ sake, Stella,
I’d be ecstatic too if I had a tit in each hand.
My mother looked down. The Pope looked
up, smiling, her breasts resting in his open palms.
She said nothing. I brayed and snorted, laughing
along with my bent and breathless dad.
A few days later, the shirt appeared, hanging
neatly in the corner of my closet. I didn’t wear
it much and never in my mother’s presence.
What I especially like about that title is that until the poem introduces the closet in its next to last line, the title is a bit of a mystery. When the reader gets to the last line and the mystery of the title is revealed, there’s a good chance that the reader has the same flash of guilt that the narrator of the poem is feeling, and that feeling is really heightened by the title.
However helpful a title might be, it’s important that it doesn’t give too much information to the reader and ruin the twist. To illustrate this point, here’s a story about a joke. Many years ago, I attended a poetry workshop in what used to be a gas station in Marfa, Texas. The workshop was one of the most productive weeks as writer that I have ever experienced, and I wrote many early drafts of the poems in my first collection The Comic Flaw. The workshop was led by two great poets Scott Cairns and Bridget Pegeen Kelly. One night everyone went out to the observation area outside of town in hopes of catching a glimpse of the Marfa lights. While we waited, I told Bridget the Geppetto at the pearly gates joke that I told you a few pages ago. Bridget loved the joke, and the next day as her nascent poets settled into our places, Bridget got the attention of the class and asked, “Alan will you please tell everyone that Pinocchio joke.” After that introduction, the joke never stood a chance.
Just like titles, endings of poems can be tricky not unlike a gymnast’s dismount. Going for a big ending is a great temptation for the poet, which can lead to the common mistake where a poet tries to surprise the reader with something that has nothing to do with the rest of the poem. After the reader’s initial surprise, the next reaction is something like, “Huh?” and the poet who thought he had stuck the landing ends up slipping on the mat and getting marked down by the judge. When I was working on my last book, I was confronted with the problem of having a great ending that seemed to fly out of nowhere. I had a title I liked that wasn’t quite solving my problem, so I turned to another ancillary part of a poem to build context and expectations: the epigraph. Here’s the poem and you can be the judge this of technique’s effectiveness.
Of Suffering and Idiots
All for one and one for all… Alexandre Dumas
As a kid I could never understand why
my father went ballistic when my Uncle Ben
said something stupid. Everyone knew Ben
was an idiot, a good man of sorts, but limited
at best. In his clumsy attempts to impress,
Ben flashed his profound ignorance. The fact
that he dropped out in the third grade never
kept him from claiming that he had aced
calculus. Once when Ben overheard my aunt
and mother commiserating about that time
of month, he bragged as a kid on the farm
he had ridden his menstrual cycle
without training wheels before he had turned
six. Everyone laughed, but my father fumed.
He screamed, Ben, you talk like a guy
with a paper asshole! My wounded uncle
wept, my mother screamed, Albert!
and the rest of us sat there laughing,
wondering, What the hell is a paper asshole?
Today in a meeting, a Psych professor
who is long on ego and short on brains
was holding our pointless committee hostage
yet again with his mindless prattling,
but when he said, …and I for one,
the inane phrase sparked a rage
so hot in my core that it fried the filter
that normally sits between my mouth
and brain, and I found myself barking,
And I for one! What are you, some kind
of schizophrenic musketeer? The virgin silence
slowly filled with the titters of a few committee
members, while others stared at our table top,
as if they hoped the etiquette for exiting
the awkward situation I had caused
could be found in its fake veneer.
The prattling pedant blushed and hushed,
then he gave me that hurt—You’re a real
asshole kind of look. And I thought, Touché,
d’Artagnan, but at least I’m not a paper one
Although the epigraph of this poem just might be the weakest I ever used, I hoped it would plant a seed in the reader’s mind, so when the poem turned to the Three Musketeers, the trio wouldn’t come riding out of the blue.
In closing, I’d like to invite you to consider the context you need to place your poem in, and how much of the context you expect your reader to know, the next time you write a poem. Remember that titles and epigraphs can help build needed context or create an expectation in your readers that you can play against or break to great effect in the poem that follows. Thoughts, questions, feel free to contact me at aberecka@yahoo.com.