Poem of Opposition

Poems of Opposition
One way to discover your identity is to take the work of another writer, preferably someone you admire, and write a poem that goes in a different direction then they have. Below is a poem by Galway Kinnell and a poem by one of his students. Notice that although they on the same subject matter, the form and content of the student's poem is quite different.

Daybreak

On the tidal mud, just before sunset,
dozens of starfishes
were creeping. It was
as though the mud were a sky
and enormous, imperfect stars
moved across it as slowly
as the actual stars cross heaven.
All at once they stopped,
and, as if they had simply
increased their receptivity
to gravity, they sank down
into the mud, faded down
into it and lay still, and by the time
pink of sunset broke across them
they were as invisible
as the true stars at daybreak.

In a Star’s Grasp

Just before the world turns to face
the dim morning light, I see
one starfish sitting still,
stuck to a low tide stone,
not like its namesakes above,
their jagged jets of green or white pulsing.

I bend close to this starfish spread in five directions,
frozen in indecision, and wait for it to move.
This one star stopped while the rest
went with the tide. A complex thought
coming together in the balanced gravities
of universes that throw light
as far as they can.

When earth turns to mid-morning,
the stare of the sun breaks the five fingers
so this one complexity, the one I noticed
this morning, slips beneath the incoming waves.
I imagine it waving as it parades over a sky of sand.

Although the student's poem isn't as compressed as Kinnell's, it manages to say something new on the same subject. Poems of opposition not only discover new ways of saying something, they also bring us into close attention to the original poem. The student's divergent choices lead to a different conclusion that also has validity. When the poem of opposition exercise works, the new poem is not contrary to the original but a different truth.

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