Tags
addressee, Bernadette Mayer, Elana Bell, epistolary poems, fictional identities, Juan Gelman, Ovid
Epistolary poems are one of the oldest forms of poetry: poems that are conceived as letters to a third person other than the readers, There is an interesting triangulation at work there: the readers are not addressed directly so we feel that there is a greater context which we perhaps do not fully understand. The poet can play around with the identity of the addressee: it can be a single person or a group of people, it can be a real person or a fictional character, living or dead. So epistolary poetry focuses our attention on the audience (the “to whom”) of poetry rather than its subjects and meanings (the “what”).
One of the oldest and most illustrious poets of epistolary poetry is Ovid. The best known of these are his Heroides, a series of poems supposedly written by much wronged mythological heroines from Ancient Greece and Rome (and goodness knows there were plenty of those!). But the epistolary poems I enjoy most are his desolate and self-pitying letters from exile, from the town of Tomis on the Black Sea coast (present-day Romania). He hated everything about the place and does not hesitate to complain bitterly about his surroundings: the hairy barbarians, the long and harsh winters, the landscape, the language. He personifies his letters, written to his friends and wife back in Rome:
A letter of Ovid’s, I come from the Euxine shore,
wearied by the sea-lanes, wearied by the roads,
to whom, weeping, he said: ‘You, go look on Rome,
who can do so. Ah, how much better your fate than mine!’
He wrote me weeping, too, and he lifted the gem
I was sealed with to his wet cheeks, first, not his lips…I can’t stand the climate, I’m not used to the water,
and the land itself, I don’t know why, displeases.
There’s no house here suitable for a patient, no food
that’s any use, no one to ease his pain with Apollo’s art,
no friend here to bring comfort, no one
to beguile with talk the slowly moving hours.
I’m weary lying here among distant peoples, places,
in sickness now thoughts come to me, of what’s not here.
After centuries of glory for both letter-writing and epistolary poems (and let’s not forget St. Paul’s Letters to Romans, Corinthians and many more in the Bible), there was a steady decline in the 20th and 21st centuries. In an age where speed is of the essence, where no one writes proper letters anymore and emails disappear all too easily, is there still time and place for such poetry? We’ve played with poems addressed to specific people on dVerse before, but would we have the patience to read whole volumes of such poems?
Here are some interesting modern examples of epistolary poems:
During her third pregnancy, American poet Bernadette Mayer wrote a series of letters – prose poems, really – about the so-called ‘motherhood brain’: fleeting impressions, thoughts, descriptions, delicious moments of intimacy. They were never meant to be sent and were published as The Desire of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (1994). Here is the opening of “To the Tune of ‘Red Embroidered Shoes’”:
It’s a rare windy day where the sun never goes away, some new weather must be moving toward us very fast as they say, you always say I notice the weather too much, that most people don’t know if it’s hot or cold, I find it hard to remember I’m not supposed to have to include it all. I think to myself I’ve gotta say that to you and then when I forget it it’s lost. To celebrate without a plan—will he buy her an ice cream on the way home?
Elana Bell is a poet, performer, and educator whose work seeks to bridge the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Her political message appears in a series of epistolary poems addressed to politicians, real people and whole cities, such as her haunting ‘Letter to Jerusalem’:
To hold the bird and not to crush her, that is the secret. Sand turned too quickly to cement and who cares if the builders lose their arms? The musk of smoldered rats on sticks that trailed their tails through tunnels underground. Trickster of light, I walk your cobbled alleys all night long and drink your salt. City of bones, I return to you with dust on my tongue. Return to your ruined temple, your spirit of revolt. Return to you, the ache at the center of the world.
Finally, let me share with you a very interesting experiment of translated fictional poetry. The real author is Argentinian poet Juan Gelman, but his volume The Poems of Sidney West are ostensibly the work of an unknown American poet, translated into Spanish. They have been translated (back?) into English and present very much an ‘outsider looking in’ version of the American West and its wide open spaces.
oh dear ones!
that rain fell years and years on the
pavement of Hereby Street
without ever erasing the slightest trace
of what had happened!
without dampening one of the humili-
ations not even one of the fears
of that man with hips scrambled tossed
in the street
late so his terrors can mix with water
and rot and end!and so died parsifal hoolig
he closed his silent eyes
kept the custom of not protesting
was a brave dead man […]and if someone supposes this is sad
if someone is going to stand up and say it
is sad
know this is exactly what happened
nothing else happened but this
under this sky or vault of heaven
It’s been a rather long Bar Talk, I apologise. I’m one of those garrulous drunks that never shut up, obviously, but here are some questions I wanted to ask you to ponder:
Do we always have to invent a persona (either for the author or for the recipient) to create a meaningful epistolary poem? Do you read such poems and, more importantly would you write such poems? What are your favourite examples of epistolary poems? Do they have anything to add that is different from ‘normal’ poems? Do they constrain you as a poet or liberate you to try new things? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
Yes, I do sometimes write epistolatory poems – I did write one to the head honcho at our bank, which actually got results! The genre is interesting because it allows you to be someone else, somewhere else in another time. Usually when I write the persona is me, and as honest or literal as I can make it, so the letter is liberating.
love that you had effect.. and yes the open letter can be most effective, there is an honesty in addressing someone in a letter that I think can convey the message very strongly.
I’m impressed you managed to have an effect on those pillars of bureaucracy. Those formal letters are like a minuet from a very different age, aren’t they, as we dance around the issues…
Interesting topic .. personally I have not come across it too much.. I actually find the format quite intriguing, though I think I would actually prefer it to be in terms of a dialogue, where it consists of two voices developing a narrative.. but I think it could benefit from being modernized into “post-it” notes, emails and sms.. there’s a lot one can do. I think there is one format that you touch upon, and that’s the open letter that can be used for political uses. I missed the prompt a couple of weeks ago, but I think I will do something…
I’d love to try a poem with sms or twitter or facebook updates – the younger generation seems to communicate almost exclusively in this way. That’s a great idea!
Gr8 🙂
An interesting article, Marina Sofia. I have written a few poems as letters, one of them for a prompt Abhra gave recently. There have been several others. I do enjoy reading poetry in the form of letters really, whether they be fiction or non-fiction. Somehow there is an ‘intimacy’ conveyed with Letter Poems.
I think I must try the letter form.. something I still have not done..
I was afraid that I might be too soon after Abhra’s prompt, but I was reminded of the more classical format – and I was wondering too, if it’s a big feature of poetry outside the Classical or Western world? Certainly in Japan the ladies and gentlemen at court would write poems to each other after each encounter… or to try and persuade the ladies they fancied to give them a bit of attention.
I just checked my blog and see that I have written seven ‘letter poems’ since I started this blog less than two years ago.
Ha… I have none so far.. 🙂
Yes, you do, Björn. Here it is: https://brudberg.wordpress.com/2013/08/17/the-last-tigers-letter/
Oops.. my blogs seem to be growing too fast.. *smiles* — but we’ve had it as a prompt before…
I think it’s almost impossible to write the same poem at two different times – so a redo of a prompt likely will result in very different results.
And the letters can be from different persons – such as the one from my father recently posted. I do like the letters from St. Paul – so many times, in spite of his travails, he did try to be encouraging. That is a good thing!
yes – encouragement is something we all can hold on to.
Ha, I had used it at one time & just a while ago Abhra did. I do think it is one that does not get old.
Well done, so it’s something that you clearly can relate to. What is it you like about this form?
You can be whatever persona you choose and address whoever you want. I also like the personal tone it implies. Have you written any?
I haven’t written a poem in that manner, but I’m excited to try. So many times in our lives it’s safer either from embarrassment or remorse to speak out to the world that way.
Is it a way for the poet to distance him/herself or is it a way to speak more immediately, more intimately? It can go both ways, it seems to me. Ovid’s feels very personal indeed.
yes – in today’s world it reminds me of the athletes and rock stars who speak of themselves in the third person.
Much better on paper.
A bit like those writer bios: Marina has been writing since before she could hold a spoon or walk, she has lived everywhere and worked as a lion-tamer, tightrope-walker, deep sea diver and polar explorer, amongst other things. And so on…
yes – that too. Do you study the classics then ?
Sadly, no! But we’ve had Ovid drummed into us because he happened to die in Romania (of course, loathing it throughout, but we don’t mention that…) Horace, I believe, was also great at epistolary poems.
I shall investigate – few things more heartbreaking than exile from home
My grandmother’s mother died of consumption in 1909 when my grandmother was four. She was writing to her youngest sister, Henriette and it is indeed a most sad letter. Any mother reading this letter, even all these years letter, would find their heart bleeding. Great grandmother Celia wrote:
My Dearest Henriette,
I fear this will be my last letter to you. As you can see, it is not in my handwriting, being instead written by the nurse on duty. I would that I could see your face and smell your hair as you lean down to kiss my cheek. I would that I could see baby Josie on her fourth birthday this May. But I know already this last and most winsome of my children will never know me. She probably doesn’t not remember me as I have been in this sanitarium since her first birthday.
I beg you to kiss both her cheeks for me and smooth her hair – Luther says she has my curly black hair. I will never be there for Christmas this year and by the time she begins her schooling, I will only exist as a rarely mentioned name and a faint picture. Please love her for me and hold her, play those games that make her smile and on May day, please cover those dear curls with the forget-me-nots and late violets I so love. My dear Henriette, beloved sister, my precious Josie. I pray for you all.
It goes on for a couple of paragraphs before it ends. It was dated April 15, 1909. She died on my Grandmother’s fifth birthday, May 16, 1909. We made copies of her letters to have in our different places where my Grandmother Josie’s children lived. Her three daughters, Celia, Henriette, and Marilyn and I as her granddaughter, treasure these few letters – some in her frail writing and the last in the hand of the nurse.
That is a heartbreaking yet so sweet – winsome – letter. Thank you for sharing. Especially in the original, frail handwriting. I have some letters that are tear-stained and nearly illegible, but they are incredibly precious because of that.
Yes, indeed more precious because of their humanity that reminds us of those feelings that stand true through the years.
letters like that pass the test of time, for the remind us of who we came from and who we might aspire to be.
You are so correct. This woman was brave -not complaing but more concerned her youngest daughter be loved and made happy.
the courage of the soft and gentle is powerful indeed
And often underestimated…
yes, that courage is not often lauded until we see it closely.
She could do more with me with her soft voice than my mother giving me the dickens. 🙂
My kids joke that they much preferred me angry than giving them “the look”
Oh yeah , “the look”….I totally relate.
So incredibly touching.. there are ways in the way the letters were written that time that makes them feel like literature.. I wonder who can write like that today.. precious.
It is indeed a precious letter. My grandmother, among other things, ensured her children and grandchild knew how to write letters. She was a winsome woman, truly. However we spoke outside of the home, she insisted we speak properly and and with clear diction. Her voice was a soft Southern slowness, clear, elegant. She said, write as you speak, speak as you would write. Slurred diction and incorrect grammar was as bad as not bathing regularly and being untidy. I am pleased when I am told I have the look of my grandmother and my father’s smile.
How precious this letter would be….and timeless as it carries forward the love your great grandmother had for your grandmother.
It truly is precious. Dying of consumption was a horrible way to die. It always impresses me how she doesn’t complain, just is concerned about her little daughter and letting her sister know of her love.
I write epistolary limericks from time to time. And you inspired me to write one today, so thanks. Here it is:
Dear Long Island Rail Road, my debt
To your system, I’ll never forget.
Back in Seventy-Seven
Your train car was heaven:
‘Twas the place where my spouse and I met.
Happy “meeting anniversary” to my wonderful husband Mark. (April 20, 1977, aboard the LIRR)
there’s a limerick for every occasion 🙂
Ha.. what a great way to meet…
What a brilliant idea – a letter limerick! And many happy returns for your meeting anniversary!
Thanks Bill, Bjorn and Marina! 🙂
I’m always struck by serendipity and coincidence. No sooner do I mention epistolary poems, when look what I come across? Poet Katie Riegel talking about her ‘Letters to Colin Firth’ poem a day project…
https://thegloriasirens.wordpress.com/2015/04/20/letters-to-colin-firth/
Then there are, of course, the Victorian love letters between Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. They are not in poetry form, but…
Great example – and Elizabeth Barrett Brownings ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ are almost a direct extension of those letters…
I could also have mentioned a personal favourite: Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which are real letters, to a real recipient, and yet are so much about poetry and art and creativity in general.
Well.. as usual.. i do not have a name for it.. before.. but in the last year.. i do this often.. in addressing poetic expression to non-fictional characters.. as it is just something else ‘i’ come(s} up with.. in creative flow..
that suits the flow as is..for now in just letting that go..
however ‘it’ ‘likes’..:)
There is a ‘cosmic collective conscious’ out and about that tRuly
no one owns by label alone..:)
And yes.. it is more than the Google Search engine.. too..;)
And tRuly i don’t do poetry.. as it comes as.. is in flow.. with
no label ‘to’.. as is now ‘for’ too it oUsly too..k..;)
So i guess IT’s just creative flow.. and no
doubt that is wHere this label tHingy
of poetry.. creativITy.. and flow gets
“It’s” direction from in the first
pLace in human heArt and
sOul expressed as that
thingy named
SPIRiT..:)
YES,
Many forms..
and expressions
in ‘sign’ language
there is.. in heArt
for THAT THINGY2..:)
So perhaps the time for reviving the letter form has arrived, but perhaps in a new format, something for our times. I read a clever quote recently: ‘In the old days, we used to write in a secret diary and complain if anyone read what we’d written. Nowadays we write online and get upset if no one reads or likes what we’ve written.’
I suppose the ‘hidden’ Victorian age is over, and all I can say about that coming from a fundie heavy handed patriarchal area of the same drab grey color that used to not change, including me, is TG for human freedom of expression all naturally unleashed and released in God of Nature human freedoms..:)
I’ve written a couple…fun, actually. One was a rant to the TSA. The other, a response to an epistolary poem of another blogger. His was a letter to his wife from a soldier who knew he would die–mine, a response from the bride to her dead husband. The form lends itself to many emotions.
That does sound very …varied in theme! I hope the rant gave you a bit of emotional release. I’d have liked to see the original post and your response, if you have the links for them – it sounds very touching.
A very interesting article Marina thanks ~ I haven’t written in this form (I think) so I am excited to try this one time ~ I will check out your examples for greater appreciation ~
Happy Monday ~
Sorry for delayed reply, it was getting midnight my time and my eyelids were drooping. There is another great recent example by Evie Shockley ‘From the lost letters of Frederick Douglass’, the imagined letters of the African-American ex-slave and reformer. Douglass wrote real letters too, a particularly famous one is to his former owner, but here the poet imagines him writing to his daughter and to contemporary figures such as Barack Obama.
When I come across these types of poems, I always enjoy them – I wish I had the examples, but there have been a few that were heartbreaking and others that were laugh out loud hilarious. And there are poems that may not be exactly epistolary but I read them as letters – as example is Miller Williams A Poem for Emily – very moving.
I just looked up that poem – addressed to his granddaughter just after her birth. As touching and beautiful as the example that Kanzensakura gave above. So much love expressed, so much looking to the future generations… Gorgeous! And yes, I think it qualifies as an epistolary poem…
It seems that I have written four or five letter poems, but I often write with a specific recipient in mind. For this reason, it does become intimate. For me, this is liberating to express emotion in this form…even if the one I am writing to is unaware. Sometimes it gives me new insight or perspective on the event or feeling that I am actually writing about.
I think I am drawn to this type of poetry as a reader as well. There is something about reading between the lines….imagining the story that led to the “letter”.
That’s a very good point: perhaps because we are putting ourselves into the recipient’s shoes, it enables us to gain a new insight or perspective. And, like you, I do enjoy filling in the gaps as a reader, and trying to piece together what might be going on…