7:00 PM January 22 (2026)
Towards Lyric Possibility
Embracing the Voltaic I/Eye
On a chilly Thursday evening in January, a group of five gathered to consider how encountering an unanticipated inkling can open meaning. Nathan Mader, the guide, brought a very stimulating little booklet of poems to illuminate the notion and illustrations to spark further thought.
By the end, I felt a little more optimistic about discovering more in my own writing, both prosaic and poetic. And I better understood one of the session epigraphs, stanza 1 of “Poem 466” by Emily Dickinson:
I dwell in Possibility—
A fairer house than Prose—
More numerous of Windows—
Superior—for Doors
Nathan started by refreshing our experience of the structural turn so common in sonnets. The formal volta in Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 73: That time of year thou mayst in me behold” is a personal address that comes after 12 lines of descriptive verse, some of the preceding lines had less abrupt turns.
Then we looked at “The Air,” a contemporary sonnet by Don Paterson. It was possible to find a conventional volta, but other lines stepped through their own turns. After that work, which mostly seemed to float and be as insubstantial as the air, we felt the muscular power of “Rilke’s Archaic Torso of Apollo.” Considering it later, I began to wonder if part of the initial pleasure of dancing, or watching it, might derive from how dance waves and steps beyond everyday movement. And then… any dance performance may surprise with unexpected movement.
In its final leap the sonnet/statue said, “You must change your life.” Opinions differed among the participants.
“I lock you in an American Sonnet that is part prison” from American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin introduced me, at least, to Terrance Hayes’s accessible and stimulating poetry. Perhaps, by continually addressing the reader as “you,” he locks the reader into this sonnet. It has repaid re-reading. On YouTube, I could hear him reading it.
We considered a couple of haiku. While, technically, haiku don’t have a volta or even a turn: after the kire-ji signal word, a successful haiku ‘sparks’. As Nathan might say, the pressure and release creates the poem’s electric, voltaic charge.
Next, Nathan introduced us to the ghazal form that structured the writing of Hafez of Shiraz. In Persian literature, a ghazal is a cluster of rhyming couplets linked more through emotional tone than by narrative logic. There might be turns within the lines and couplets. Certainly, from my brief encounter, the first line of each succeeding couplet eludes expectation. Perhaps there are parallels with linked verses in Japanese short-form poetry.
Having all too briefly considered the turns thus far, Nathan suggested eight typical turns:
- silence to speech or vice versa
- subjective eye/I to voltaic eye/I
- this image to that image
- this thought to that thought
- this line to the line break
- tenor (the metaphorical thing) to vehicle (the comparison)
- writing what you know to exploring the unknown
- turning from factual truth to ecstatic truth.
Each participant—David Duff, Kirsty Kawano, David Eunice, and Foster Mickley—first wrote a haiku. After reading our efforts—no-one was too shy—we expanded them into something more like a ghazal couplet. Below are the non-attributed results:
Shadow swan or sank to rain round the reds for sun spoken
A drop of our rain lightly into a pearl the first water turned
Concentration cut by tapping on the window
Resentment spices the meal in preparation
A sliver of moon angled awkwardly in the sky
Like fingernail trimmings on my work desk
God, do I hate him, how can a man be so vile?
I pray he croaks soon, then we all rejoice.
Nathan’s handout materials had more content than we had time to adequately consider. I’m still musing over the booklet. His final poem for consideration, Lucie Brock-Broido’s “You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously to this World,” set in motion some voltaic ideas that are still flowing. People who think poetry is not for them would likely be discouraged by gaps in the lines and the general look of the page. At the time, I was particularly struck by (set below ignoring the author’s ‘voltaic’ formatting), “Or a child who rode a spotted pony to the lake away from summer in the 1930s toward the iron lung of polio.”
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
For the writer in me, it was a worthwhile evening that kindled deeper insight. Even when generated by commercial translation, my writing generally wants to be alive, to tickle the reader with a slightly thwarted expectation or two. I thought I understood the concept ‘volta,’ the notion of turn. And that is a matter the workshop has left me to ponder. Concepts are tools for thought. Relating to other concepts, they form summary meaning. Concepts are umbrellas that shelter thinkers from the rain of sensation. Using an umbrella, you only hear the rain; you don’t get wet. Nathan has helped me better to feel, and perhaps to give voice to, entanglement that eludes rationality.
It only remains for me to thank Nathan for so ably helping us to be more aware of how to let our writing ‘turn’ and for opening our eyes to poetry we have been overlooking. Most of the poems he presented are available for reading online. We also have to thank David Duff for providing a cozy venue.
Nathan kindly provided images from his handout for this report.