Category: Ottone Riccio

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Where the poem comes from: Catherine Morocco

Catherine Morocco and I met because she is a close friend of a close friend who decided we should get to know each other since we are both writers of poetry. Meeting both Cathy and her poetry was a great pleasure. We also share the coincidence of being former students of Ottone Riccio (“Ricky”) and having poems that are part of the book, “ Unlocking the Poem,” by him and Ellen Beth Siegel.

In addition to studying with Ricky at the Boston Center for Adult Education, Cathy has also studied with some other poets and teachers I admire, including Afaa Michael Weaver, Tom Daley, and Kathleen Spivack.

Cathy teaches an introductory and an advanced poetry writing course, has seen her poems appear in some well-respected journals, and recently completed a collection of poems that grew out of an experience of illness. This is a poem from that collection:

Son’s Story

I’m shaking scarves over my mother’s bed,

where there’s no evidence of thought.

In one of seven silken scarves, lithe women

sway around a mandala. Their skirts are painted

amber, apricot, and blue. Each sylph is named

after a continent: Antarctica’s fur headdress flames,

blue dolphins leap, swim at her feet.

My mother’s eyes are closed, while Oceana’s

teasing head is crowned in grass and leaves.

She holds a plate of purple fish. I spread

Toros Magnifico around my mother’s feet. A picador

thrusts his pic to pierce the bull into the ring.

In corners, matadors and bull horns’ swelling.

Velvet ladies hurtle roses to the bloody kill.

Just lying here, my mother is a dreamless spot

without a nerve. I cannot stir her. Is she struggling

with shades? Will she open up her eyes to see the golds,

smell fish, flowers, blood? I tie a corner

of the bull fight to a corner of the dance, join seven

scarves into one rope, lands billowing. If I throw it,

she must cling. I’ll pull her to her body, knot by knot.

In talking about how “Son’s Story” came to be written, Cathy says:

“This poem is part of a larger collection of poems, “Brain Storm. Poems of Injury and Recovery.” The poems draw on a diary I kept in the hospital, full of questions, observations, and “to do” lists to help me cope with fear and uncertainty. The diary, as well as memories, observations, hallucinations, and stories from my family members, became subjects for poetry. That material included moments of intense beauty and humor. “Son’s Story” appears in The Spoon River Poetry Review and recently won the Dana Foundation prize for poetry about the brain.

“Son’s Story was triggered by an experience with my son, who visited me in the hospital when I was recovering from surgery for a hematoma (bleeding around the brain). I was comatose part of the time. My son brought me presents of face cream and feather butterflies from Vogue, where he was working at the time. He also brought seven silk scarves from the Vogue clothes closet that is full of shoes and dresses for photo shoots. The scarves have colorful prints of bullfights, mythology, and the Statue of Liberty. Although the scarves are real and I treasure them, much of the poem is from my imagination–the son lays the scarves over the sleeping mother, he joins the scarves to pull the mother out of her deep sleep. Later, when I asked my son what my illness was like for him, he said, ‘I didn’t understand any of the medical stuff. I thought I could help your metaphysical self’.”

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Remembering Ricky: Ottone Riccio 1921-2011

My poetry teacher died on September 23. Since then I’ve been thinking about him and wondering what I could say that could give some sense of him to someone who didn’t know him.

My meeting him was a serendipitous thing, a fluke. I was living in New York, about to move to Boston, and, after many years, renewing my interest in writing poetry. In trying to figure out what I was doing I came across a book, “The Intimate Art of Writing Poetry.” Just the thing I needed–a small gem filled with practical information of poetic form, sensible advice on writing and publishing, and soaring inspiration for anyone who, as Ricky did, thought, lived, breathed, and slept poetry.

I bought the book and then discovered he taught a workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education, just a few blocks away from my new home. Lucky me! He taught me how to write poetry. Or maybe I should say he helped me learn how to write poetry.

His technique of teaching was always respectful, always made with the understanding that “this is your poem, not mine, but if it were mine, this is what I would do.” That said, though, he could be shocking in all the “darlings” he wanted us to murder. Cut to the bone, include no word that was not absolutely necessary–that was his approach. There is an apocryphal story that he once told a student with a three-page poem, “This would make a good haiku.”

When he turned 80 “Ricky’s people”–basically anyone who had ever studied with him–compiled a tribute anthology, “Do Not Give Me Things Unbroken.” This was the poem I wrote for him:

Generation

Receive

the secrets.

Trace

the path.

Apprentice

yourself to magic

and the skill

of making fire.

On moonless nights

reweave the stories

thread by thread:

begin to sing

In 2009, with Ellen Beth Siegel, he wrote “Unlocking the Poem,” a guide to writing that included some of his poem-provoking assignments (“Write a 32-line poem in quatrains, 10 syllables per line, using a linked mirror-rhyme scheme as follows: abab bcbc cdcd dede eded dcdc cbcb baba, any subject”)

As Ricky said in his introduction to “Unlocking the Poem,” “Anything less than total commitment, total involvement, is going to make the work of the poet more difficult if not impossible.” Ricky believed poetry was magic. Not some kind of facile conjuring, but something deep and mysterious, a life force. I will always miss him and be grateful to him. He was my teacher.

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The end of a week of poetry prompts

Today is the final prompt in my series honoring my teacher, Ricky (Ottone Riccio) and his new book of poetry assignments, “Unlocking the Poem.”

Ricky is known for his poem-provoking assignments and I hope you’ve tried some of these. In the time I studied with him there was always that moment at the end of the workshop when he would say, “For next week…” And what followed was often something that sounded impossible, involving both form and content, and eliciting groans around the table. But, invariably, we returned the next week energized by our efforts, eager to share our poems, and enriched by the challenge to step outside our comfort zones and try something new. And, strangely, if he gave us a few weeks off to just write whatever we chose, we’d often ask for an assignment.

For today, I’m feeling benevolent, so no villanelles based on complex text, no Shakespearean sonnets on Sumerian goddesses. Just a free verse poem of 25 lines or a prose poem of 100-120 words on the subject of “year’s end.”

Did you have some fun with these prompts? Let me know.

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Thursday poetry prompt

I continue with my week of poetry prompts in honor of my teacher, Ricky (Ottone Riccio)’s new book, “Unlocking the Poem,” written with Ellen Beth Siegel.

Here’s the one for today: write a poem based on this quote by Albert Einstein, “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.”

Now, imagine the poem…

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Another day, another poem

I’m blogging more frequently this week to let you know about a new book of poetry prompts, “Unlocking the Poem,” by my teacher, Ottone (Ricky) Riccio and Ellen Beth Siegel.

Today’s prompt comes from Ricky’s web site, where it is the assignment for the month of November: a rondeau about ocean waves crashing against the shore.

Here, from Ricky’s first book, “The Intimate Art of Writing Poetry,” is a little about the rondeau to get you started. “the rondeau evolved gradually from the older rondel and consists of 13 full lines of four beats each, arrange in three stanzas of five, three, and five lines. Only two rhyme sounds are permitted. At the end of the second and third stanzas there is a tail–a half line taken from the first half of the first line. It’s a non-rhyming tail and is frequently turned as a pun. Using R as the symbol for the tail, the rhyme pattern is aabba aabR aabbaR.”

It’s easier if you see an example, like this famous World War I-era poem by John McCrae
In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead; short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe!
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Now go try one of your own.

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Today’s poetry assignment

Yesterday I blogged about a new book of poetry prompts, “Unlocking the Poem,” by my teacher, Ottone Riccio–aka Ricky–and Ellen Beth Siegel. I offered a sample assignment. Today, as promised, another:

Write a poem, between 12 and 45 lines. It should be about you, but may not include any of the following: your name, birth date, place of birth, physical description, profession, schooling, family, partner.

Also as promised, here’s my poem from the wolves/skate prompt I talked about yesterday. And, yes, my mistake: it was wolves, not wolf. I had seen the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra play an outstanding concert of Peter and the Wolf on Saturday, so I think I was still in “wolf” mode. Though not wolf’s clothing.

So, are you writing a poem?

where the wild things are

the wolves are always waiting
staring into us with pale unblinking eyes

they watch us as we rush to hear Mozart
our red claws brushing past outstretched hands
we smile our crushed glass smiles
and hurry into cars
to restaurants with sparkling chandeliers

and the wolves with licking tongues
watch as we skate the knife edge
between day and night

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The key to unlocking your poems

Poets, here is a brand new book you should know about. “Unlocking the Poem” is by my poetry teacher, Ottone Riccio (“Ricky”), and Ellen Beth Siegel, a student of his and former workshop classmate of mine.

Here’s my Ricky story: I was living in New York, about to move to Boston. I was finding myself drawn to writing poetry, but with no idea how to proceed. I could revise a piece of prose writing, but poetry was a different world, one that felt like a mystery. Where to start?

One day in a bookstore I was lucky enough to come across a book that answered many of my questions. It was “The Intimate Art of Writing Poetry” and it turned out that the author, yes, Ricky, taught at the Boston Center for Adult Education, just a few blocks from where I would be living. He became my teacher.

Ricky has always been known for encouraging students to make their poems as concrete and as tight as possible. One apocryphal story has him saying to the author of a three-page poem, “This would make an excellent haiku.”

But beyond the deep knowledge of poetry and the striking ability to grasp what the poet was trying to do, was always a great respect for the poet. He is most definitely not of the slash-and-burn-the poet’s-ego brand of teachers. He most frequently introduces his comments by saying, “This is your poem. But if it were mine, this is what I would do.”

One of his greatest gifts as a teacher has been the assignments. And that is what “Unlocking the Poem” is all about. The book is a collection of his assignments–provocative, sometimes startling, sometimes groan-inducing prompts all designed to get you writing in new ways. To get you to dig deeper, work harder, write better. (Blatant plug reality check: some of my poems are used as examples in the book.)

One of my first of Ricky’s assignments was to write a poem using the words “wolf” and “skate.” It became, strangely, the first of several wolf poems for me and for other workshop members, too. Try it. Tomorrow I’ll post my wolf/skate poem, along with another of Ricky’s assignments for you to try.