SD Poets You Should Know: Lee Ann Roripaugh

South Dakota’s current Poet Laureate, Lee Ann Roripaugh teaches in and runs the creative writing program at the University of South Dakota. She’s published three books of poetry and one that’s harder to characterize but walks the line between poetry and lyric creative nonfiction. Her first book won the National Poetry Series, and she’s also won the Randall Jarrell International Poetry Prize. She’s one of my favorite poets, let alone contemporary poets, let alone South Dakota poets; a good introduction to her command of prosody and image is her poem “Dream Carp” on the Poetry Foundation’s website:Dream CarpBy Lee Ann RoripaughPeople traveled from miles away to seemy paintings of fish—the jeweled armor of their scales, the beadlikeset of their eyes inrubbery socket rings, the glimmeringswish of fin and tailso real it seemed that you could almost dipa net deep intothe paper and pull up the arching wetweight of a golden carp,a shiny trout, or the dark muscularheft of a bass withits mouth stretched into the surprised, wiry“oh” of a child’s windsock. I captured my models from the sea,lake, and goldfish pondin the back garden, so careful not tolet their mouths be tornby the hook, their scales chipped, or the silkytissue of their tailsripped by a clumsy hand. I kept them inlarge glass bowls, fed themmosquito wings or dry silkworm pupasoffered from chopsticks,and when I was finished making sketches,I quickly took themback and set them free again. Everynight I dream I swimwith these fish as a golden carp—black spotson cloisonné scales,pulled to the surface by the deceptivecreamy luster ofthe moon or the sizzle of firefly lightsacross the water.And every night I am tempted onceagain by the smellof the baited hook, by my predictablehunger for earthlythings, and each time I am surprised againby the stinging hookin my lip that pulls me mercilesslyinto the bright air,setting my gills on fire, the sharp, silverpain of the knife thatslits me open so easily from tailto throat to revealthe scarlet elastic of my raw gills,the translucent filmof my air sac, the milky rise of mystomach, and the graymarbled coil of my intestines. I riselate each day, and workin brighter light. When I die, I willhave my paintings broughtdown to the lake and slipped into the water.First the edges ofink will blur, and then there will be a greatflurry as the fins,tails, and bodies begin blossoming in-to life again, eachfish detaching from its canvas of silkor rice paper—aswirl of color, motion, swimming away. I love LOTS of things about this poem, but here I’ll focus on the form and on a couple of my favorite images. The poem is composed of tercets alternating between two long lines with a short line in between, and two short lines with a long line in between. The long lines are ten syllables, and the short five, so these two-stanza sets cohere the poem around a unifying pattern but also give it a sense of movement, of going out and back in, alternatingly, like a fish swimming this pond or this lake. The 20th-century poet Marianne Moore is famous for her use of syllabics, and this poem shares not only that formal organizing structure, but also Moore’s great eye for the specifics of the natural world.I have two favorite images here—the first is the “creamy luster / of the moon,” and the second “the scarlet elastic of my raw gills.” One normally doesn’t imagine things that “luster” to be “creamy,” but of course they can be, so the image feels right and surprising, especially about the moon as seen through water. The “scarlet elastic” image creates a metaphor for the gills but does so in a syntax that privileges materiality over metaphor—imagine how much less compelling “my raw gills of scarlet elastic” would be. I’m still interested in “scarlet elastic,” though, I’ll admit. Roripaugh is among the best at inventing surprising adjective-noun combinations (if you’re drawn to phrases like “creamy luster” and “scarlet elastic,” I’d also recommend the poetry of Claudia Emerson, though I’ll warn you that it doesn’t quite have this irreverence, this bodily immediacy, and she’s certainly not a South Dakotan).I don’t think it’s an accident that both of my favorite images come from the part of the poem after which the speaker, the painter, becomes the carp in dreams. To me, the poem hits another register of lyricism there, feeling immediate and lush perhaps because inhabiting the body of something that’s been the focus of such intense study for so long—it’s a moment of empathy enacted directly.Featured image by Elizabeth Roberts under the creative commons license on Flickr. Post by Barbara Duffy.Read about more South Dakota Poets.