My ModPo, a Well-Lighted Place
by Alonna Shaw
Humans need interaction, whether sitting around a campfire sharing stories or at a coffee shop with a poem instead of a device.
More than a coffee break, time disappears when our brains, hearts, and nervous systems can enjoy a “connection” break, get out of our apartments, out of the office, and go to a place that doesn’t require preparation, a place that welcomes that part of us that we keep inside, that rarely gets to come out and play. We can be vulnerable together, just wondering out loud why that word, that way?
Joy through the light of others, camping out around an arrangement of words, while our spark kindles back into the air where it can grow.
That is ModPo in a nutshell. That is a foundational way I continue to teach myself, by supporting others in their curiosity; they teach me. When Al Filreis conveyed that we could read poems closely, openly, collaboratively, and adventurously, not as a mystery to solve for a single cryptic meaning, my eyes began to shine.
The course uses words that confused me: close reading, parataxis, meta-poetry, open, and difficult. My mind didn’t shift all at once. I gradually came to understand and absorb this new way. The guiding principles were DIFFERENT, unexpected, and filled with engagement, risk, and adventure; aka FUN, which appealed to the straight-A kid I had been who loved to learn but needed a challenge.
Parataxis, the word itself, kind of hurt my brain every time I heard it. It can be understood simply as placing things side by side. I think in collaged images, so this feels comfortable. A poem does not always tell us how to connect the pieces. It lets relational meaning happen. I’ll include a Parataxis Playlist as I go into my story.
My Parataxis Playlist: Julia Vinograd, “Why I Write Poetry” — in my opinion, parataxis strength: medium-high. Example cluster: God, friends, sea turtles, Saturn, melon, paper bird, rope of words.
It’s strange that I can still have a negative reaction when the word poetry is brought up. Maybe it’s a pre-emptive way of indicating my interest and approach aren’t connected to that inherited use, which is bogging down the word?
How I’ve come to think of poetry…as conversations. There is no big mystery to solve. A conversation starts by noticing something in ourselves when we first read something, or when a word, a line, what is repeated, or maybe the space in a poem, prompts a question. Look for what is vague. Then someone shares what they notice, maybe why this is placed next to that, and so on. How is "vague" delivered to us on the page? Life is vague and difficult. Why shouldn’t a poem talk to us in that gray language we know?
Grownups need play, too, not as an escape from seriousness but as another way to expand our perspectives, rather like writers must put their project away before revising, so they can return with fresh eyes. I must confess, a little spontaneous silliness won’t hurt.
My way into acknowledging that my truer, internal self needed to come out and play was through kind encouragement in the online chat threads, back in 2015; each time a community teaching assistant (CTA) said hello, pointed me to something, noticed something about a comment I’d made, or suggested that I post a thread asking my question. What really spoke to my heart were images. The CTAs started a visual thread of paintings and other art as poetry.
It almost didn’t matter that we were there for poetry. We were there for a different way of doing things. These modern and contemporary poems were doing things differently from many of the poems I had been taught. The relief and joy for me was the freedom in discovering that a poem could be entered, questioned, broken open, and shared.
My experience with ModPo did not start out easy because I had a habit of trying too hard at everything. And I didn’t understand my relationship with poetry, despite having written it since childhood.
Art and writing are developed through stages of revision, while collaborative close reading gives me an opportunity to light up with connections without the labor of new creation. Instead, it happens through conversation because I have lived a life and bring myself. That is all I need as preparation: to be a human, vulnerable, and engaged, engines on. That is how we bridge different lanes in life and connect what we know to what others do. That is the carrier engine: intention, not constant examination of what the poetic metric feet might be hammering out.
I particularly gravitate to the poets with two lanes in life who weave the mundane into poems. Mundane isn't necessarily bad; it can point to how we fill our days, the "plot line" of our lives. A poet can be a doctor, an accountant, a scientist, a parent, a salesman, a hospital cleaner, an art curator, a truck driver, a jack-of-all-trades just getting by, etc., composing poems in scraps of moments.
We write while working at something, taking care of loved ones, and supporting those who need us. But did we forget to light our own fire before rising up to greet the sun each day? Let's call that flicker our "heart line." Our love story includes our own lives, too.
Philip Levine’s “What Work Is” may not be a standard ModPo poem, but it belongs near the conversation campfire for me. When you get to those last lines, you’ll know something about what poetry has given me: a way to ask what work makes impossible, or suddenly possible, in the plotline and heartline of our lives. The blur of rain can reveal what has and hasn’t been attended to. The blur of life.
My Parataxis Playlist: Philip Levine, “What Work Is” — in my opinion, parataxis strength: low-medium. Example cluster: work, rain, waiting, [spoilers if I continue].
So, I am here, doing.
Ever since reading every book in my grade school’s very small library, I thought I had discovered a way to widen myself. I would learn and experience everything, bring it all into my field of vision.
I must’ve read Emily Dickinson back when I was eight or nine. Her influence is clear in the poems I’ve written since way back then, yet I didn’t feel authorized to belong to poetry because I didn’t find my way into the space and text of formal poetry…or Shakespeare, I couldn’t find an opening. Art filled that void. It gave me permission to exist as I needed to, yet still I remained isolated and solitary.
Maybe you have experienced this too, a feeling inside about your own creative impulses, but were unsure what was “allowed”?
What if someone found out that I wrote poems, had collections, wrote while driving, wrote at auditions, wrote on my scripts, wrote in those moments in the car watching Los Angeles rain stream down the windshield before going in for a meeting? Any scrap of paper, receipt, or take-out bag would become my page.
Back in 2015, we had just unpacked after a cross-country road trip, and I was sick. I wasn’t going to sit around being unproductive, so I signed up for the Coursera online course ModPo, hosted by Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania.
I was grumpy, somewhat abrasive in my unsure interactions in the forum conversations…I was on the verge of letting out my secret, but I was afraid. How do I admit my connection with poetry since childhood, when it is “WRONG” according to the poetry I learned throughout school and in college?
My Parataxis Playlist: William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow” — in my opinion, parataxis strength: high. Example cluster: wheelbarrow, rain water, white chickens.
Recognizing parataxis in many of the poems I encountered through the course helped me trust that my own collage-thinking had real wings.
In the past, I’ve described my art, editing, writing, and tone as minimal, and affectionately, myself as a robot lacking a warm fuzziness (until AI put a negative spin on that by invading our screens with a bizarre world of language that is no longer “Lost in Space”). I tend to be a little too direct at times.
On a softer note, in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” Hemingway begins, “It was very late and everyone had left the café except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the trees made against the electric light.” From my artist perspective, this has a paratactic feel in the way images accumulate, but it uses linking words, so let’s call this a stepping stone into parataxis: café, old man, shadow, leaves, electric light.
In Hemingway’s sentence, he places these images, ideas, and feelings side by side before the story explains what they might mean.
Looking at things from angles other than eye-level appeals to me. In David Hockney’s photocollage Pearblossom Hwy., he describes his process of shifting perspective by photographing a road sign while on a ladder, capturing the top edge of the sign. He brings that altered perspective into the larger piece, leaving the viewer with a subconscious feeling that isn’t obvious at first: something is different here.
My Parataxis Playlist: David Hockney, Pearblossom Hwy. — in my opinion, visual parataxis strength: high. Example cluster: road signs, intersections, desert, car, text, and shifted perspective held in one field of vision.
In poetry, this helps me think about parataxis as angles, fragments, and questions without fixed answers. What is the space doing? How is it presented? Hockney offers a visual way to understand what the course helped me hear in poems.
I now had language for a process I had already been living through before I knew how to name it.
In much of my writing, I was already drawn to fragments, place, image, and memory. My work developed focus and increased.
In my own visual poetry and film work, including That Spot, Tidal Language, Thingy Thing Paper Woman Centos, and Memory’s Line, I often put image, language, body, and place side by side before I know what they might mean. Even the garbled remains of a floppy disc, which I harvested for my found-language experimental poems with translations, creates a current-day experience when read with modern eyes.
Some of my favorite tools of perception are juxtaposition, spatial relation, and restraint. Parataxis is one way those tools can move through language and leave an impression. Hemingway does that, art can do that, and so can we while gathered around a poem in a space filled with our presence. Maybe that is part of the point: being people together in our many vulnerable, light, lonely, dark, safe ways of holding life together.
My Parataxis Playlist: Rae Armantrout, “Speech Acts” — in my opinion, parataxis strength: very high. Example cluster: mama turnpike, sexy tough shit, steady state, thought bubble song, churn.
The community supported me through my discomfort as I went on my adventure to get the hang of this new-to-me poetic way. They invited questioning and ushered my slow arrival of illumination. This kind place became my wonderland of Oz. I learned to free my heart to have a brain, to embrace mistakes, and feel at home.
Those dear CTAs were the special messengers, the Lions, Scarecrows, Tin Men, and Dorothys. In the light and in the shadows, always there: Borkowscy, Mandana, Teri, M.C….I want to name you all. I became a CTA the next year, and then the online Global Study Group became my family. Gwen and I still continue our poem exchange. Now it is June 2026, and I’ve met my in-person Tokyo group who bring me such joy. Thank you. I’m excited to see where our adventure goes, and we are all there...here.
During those ten weeks in 2015, and a second bout of the flu, I traveled roads once thought inaccessible. I tasted new ways for words to flutter. I touched the sky. The ground beneath me became solid. And my creative work matured in ways it could not have without the endless learning that goes on in my Oz. There was a place for someone like me, like anyone.
I most appreciate that we arrive there as readers, listeners, or noticers.
The warm kindness of the community provided so much, let’s call it a safe, warm place filled with the strength of shadows who have our backs.
“This is a clean and pleasant café. It is well lighted. The light is very good and also, now, there are shadows of the leaves.”—Ernest Hemingway, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” 1933
A place can have shadows and still feel safe. Things said too directly can burn like the midday sun.
In ModPo, a poem is not treated as a locked room with one correct key. It is more like a lit place with shadows, where we don’t need to be experts, we are free to notice different openings between the shapes. We can be there together and look.
My Parataxis Playlist: Blade Runner, “tears in rain” monologue — in my opinion, cinematic parataxis strength: high. Example cluster: attack ships, Orion, C-beams, Tannhäuser Gate, moments, time, rain.
Close reading poems has helped me accept my life’s many lanes, and how collaboration with others takes experience to a place of greater possibilities. It seems simple but sometimes rain blurs things, and we might need a second look at what is right in front of us.
That is how I feel about poetry, now. We are luminous fragments. Why not share them?
ModPo is the free online course Modern & Contemporary American Poetry, hosted by Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. Participants need no prior experience with poetry.
Notes / References:
ModPo, Modern & Contemporary American Poetry, Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania.
Julia Vinograd, “Why I Write Poetry.” Discussed in ModPo, “Julia Vinograd’s ‘Why I Write Poetry,’” with Ken Paul Rosenthal, Kelly Writers House / ModPo, June 5, 2026.
Philip Levine, “What Work Is,” in What Work Is, Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.
William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” originally published as section XXII in Spring and All, 1923.
Ernest Hemingway, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” Scribner’s Magazine, March 1933; later collected in Winner Take Nothing, 1933.
David Hockney, Pearblossom Hwy., 11–18th April 1986, #2, 1986. Photographic collage / chromogenic print. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and Huell Howser, Videolog, 1988.
Rae Armantrout, “Speech Acts,” The New Republic, March 2, 2015.
Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott, 1982. “Tears in rain” monologue spoken by Roy Batty, performed by Rutger Hauer; screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, with Hauer’s alteration of the final speech widely documented.
Alonna Shaw, Tidal Language, Thingy Thing Paper Woman Centos, and Memory’s Line; That Spot, on YouTube; “0.SCR” and “AWARE.DEF” with translations published in filling Station Magazine, Issue 71, Science & Tech, March 2019.
