occupied
with the blank space
when words fail...
on my attic window
April rain pattering
It was a writing class held at a Toronto branch library. The teacher discussed the four key elements of a story: setting, conflict, climax, and resolution. Half jokingly, he said out loud,"That’s almost an acronym: sucker." He drew our attention to all sorts of sharp acronyms derived from his words of wisdom, and ended the class with a warning: be aware of clichés.
A loud voice from the back of the room, "the writer is a cliché-sucker who spills out a string of little gems." Silence descended over the room as if bats had just flown out of a cave in a big, snaking cloud. And the rain started to pour...
Read in the thematic context of the poem, especially of the opening tanka, the title alludes to "April is the cruelest month" in T. S. Eliot's 1922 The Waste Land, one of the most allusive poems.
ReplyDeleteBelow is an excerpt from my email written in response to an editor's question:
[April is] The Cruelest Month (the "cliched" title, which, I hope, works effectively as the opening and closing lines)
occupied
with the blank space
when words fail...
on my attic window
April rain pattering
... "followed by a teacher's lesson, saying "Be aware of cliches." ...a student's comment"
... And the rain started to pour... [April is the cruelest month]
This cyclically thematic structure is mainly used to rework the cliched phrase, "the cruelest month," into a new context in which to ponder the dialectical relationship between writing/the poet and the use of cliches/literary tradition. Hopefully, this will stir the reader's interest in re/reading T. S. Eliot's best-known essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”