Guest Post by Poet Fran Abrams: Arranging Words

 

Fran Abrams lives in Rockville, MD. Her poems have been published in literary magazines online and in print and appear in more than a dozen anthologies. In July 2022, the title poem of this book, “Arranging Words,” was a finalist in the 2022 Prime Number Magazine Award for Poetry. Her two previous books are: I Rode the Second Wave: A Feminist Memoir (2022) and The Poet Who Loves Pythagoras (2023). Learn more at www.franabramspoetry.com and Connect on Facebook at Fran Abrams, Poet.

Arranging Words

by Fran Abrams 

Have you ever said to someone, “I’m beside myself with worry.” And then stopped to think, How can I be beside myself? That isn’t physically possible. Funny twists of the English language like that are part of what inspired Arranging Words. Similar poems are titled “Cold Shoulder,” “Two Left Feet,” and “Frog in Her Throat.” My goal in writing these poems was to approach letters, words, and everyday phrases in a way that pokes fun at the eccentricities of the English language. 

As I wrote poetry over the past several years, I found myself turning to language as the inspiration for many poems. For example, “Arranging Words,” the title poem, came from a thought that writing poems is like stitching together words. The order of the words matters, and meaning is derived from how the words are arranged. The poem compares this process to sewing. 

As the collection developed, I thought of other ways in which words are arranged poetically. Two of the poems illustrate the Golden Shovel form in which the words in a single line of someone else’s poem are used to form the last words in the lines of the new poem. Other poems use the letters of one or two words in the title to form new words that are used in the poem. Also included are Abecedarian poems that use the alphabet as the first letter of each line. And another form uses the first letters of a phrase, in this case “Negative Capability,” to guide the structure of each line of the poem. 

In this book, I use Arranging Words to address how poetry is the craft and skill of laying out words to communicate and create interest. I particularly enjoyed thinking of letters as having their own roles and responsibilities. In the poem “Performance Review for the Letter A,” I praise the letter “A” for doing double duty in aardvark and bazaar but question the need for A to appear in weather and bread. 

What is poetry if not arranging words? And in the English language, there are many eccentricities and quirks that make writing in English about English particularly engaging. Some are serious, such as “We Have No Name for Them,” in which I ponder why we have no word, similar “widow” for someone who has lost a spouse, to mean a parent who has lost a child or a word for a child who has lost a sibling. Others are fun poems such as “Happy as a Lark,” that uses a series of cliches about birds starting with “It’s not easy finding the bluebird of happiness . . .” 

“Delicious Words” is the title of another poem that could be said to sum up the collection. How mouthwatering are the words we use every day in differing arrangements to express our ideas. I was inspired to illuminate the quirks of the English language in a lively, humorous way while demonstrating a love for words themselves.