Sonnet: Sue Parman, ‘Kaizen: How to Build a Poem’

Ignore your hand and focus on the pen,
which writes without your knowledge of the whole.
Do not insert the personal. Avoid translation.
The changes made are small and gradual.

Commas herd their letters toward a distant
goal of rhymes and metaphors but do not
specify a conscious “I” or soul,
a bold new vision or a school of thought.

Write like a dancer making small mistakes.
What is wrong to you fulfills your friend’s desire.
Cuttings and shit are what it takes
to grow a garden from a funeral pyre.

A poet will die unless she learns to laugh.
Do not hit DELETE. Save everything as DRAFT.

*****

Sue Parman writes: “When I was four years old, my father asked me, ‘When is a door not a door?’ His answer, ‘when it’s ajar,’ infuriated and then intrigued me. I began to keep a journal in which I wrote down sentences such as, ‘If the Devil is evil, God is odd.’ Puns were my intro-duction to poetry, a form of verbal play that taught me that words, rather than being a lifeline to truth, could be slippery and contain many truths at the same time. One of my favorite poets is Kay Ryan, the queen of poetic puns (see her ‘Bestiary’). As an anthropologist, I consider them a vital contributor to mental health, since they satisfy the needs of large-brained mammals to avoid epilepsy by indulging in surprise.”

Sue Parman is an anthropologist and award-winning essayist, short story writer, poet, and playwright. She is the author of two poetry books, “The Thin Monster House” and “Carnivorous Gaze,” and her poems have been published in a variety of journals and anthologies, including the above poem in Rattle. She writes in a number of other genres as well, including anthropological travel memoirs and mysteries. Her most recent publications include a short story, “Gannets and Ghouls,” which appeared in the September/October 2024 issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine; and a nonfiction essay, “You Can’t Get There from Here,” that was awarded the Travelers’ Tales Grand Prize for Best Travel Story of 2024. After teaching anthropology in California for thirty-five years, she moved to Oregon in search of water, and travels frequently in hopes of getting lost. https://www.sueparman.com

Photo: “PDCA-Cycle-Kaizen” by Tagimaguitar is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.