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Additional Reading: The Tulip Flame by Chloe Honum
In the Tulip Flame, Chloe Honum hauntingly reflects on her mother’s suicide, her practice of ballet and her failed relationship with another man. The book is broken up into four different sections and focuses on Honum’s progression through her life. Honum’s poems are full of depth and concrete image. However, they do not take up a lot of space in the page because her writing is so concise. With her choice in stanza breaks, syntax, and use of sonic devices, Honum writes with a quiet and chilling narrative, presenting her emotional experiences.
Honum’s choice in stanza length, spacing and punctuation helps focus the reader and listener on Honum’s sonic devices, observations and experiences. In “Spring” Honum breaks up the stanzas into quatrains with short lines (7). However, the reader is able to focus on the concrete images that she presents, such as the icicles that are thawing from the warmth and the birds that are nearby. While reading this poem outloud, the reader can feel as if they are among those animals and elements because there are so few words. In “Ballerina at Dawn,” Honum breaks her stanzas up into short-lined tercets. She brings back the themes of ice, nature and her experience as a dancer. Her choice to break up the stanzas in tercets and use as little text as possible allows the reader to feel as if they are actually in the same room as the dancer. Alternatively, “In Seated Dancer in Profile,” Honum writes in a prose-like style, butshe still makes use of small sentences and breaks them up by using periods. It allows the reader to know where to pause while reading, imagine the dancer wearing blue and feel Honum’semotions. Overall, the choice in writing short stanzas with concrete images brings forth a lyrical and haunting sensation for the reader.
Sonically, Honum makes use of assonance, consonance, alliteration and rhyme. My favorite poem, “Last of the Ballerina I Was” has very little text, but amazingly has many “s” sounds such as “stage, violins, ripples, slipstream, sudden, strands, shadow and shore” (47). In “Alone with Mother,” Honum has lots of “d” sounds and “s” sounds again. With the limited amount of text, she still is able to slip in similar words such as “dusk,” and “dune “long” and “love” (47).In “Crossing the Three-Rope Bridge” the reader hears some internal and slant rhyme, such as “passed, ceased” and “that” (41).Lastly in the poem “Hours,” Honum uses hidden consonance and assonance. The words, “clouds, love and smoke” all provide an “o” sound as well as “hills,” “fell” and “collided” reinforce the double “ll” sound. Because there is so little text, the listener and reader can really focus on those sounds and understand her regret and loss of her lover.
In the poem, “The Tulip Flame,” (24) Honum uses the image of the tulip to show how hope can cure hardship and loss, and uses repetitive sounds and rhyme to emphasis this reflection. With Honum’s use of rain and gray imagery, the reader can assume that the speaker is mourning and depressed after the death of her mother. Honum uses the structure of a villanelle and breaks each stanza up into tercets and uses a variety of sonic devices including repetition and rhyme.While villanelles follow a direct format, Honum uses “a hill, a lane” to appear throughout the poem as one of the rhyme schemes. The phrase “a centered tulip frame” also appears twice in the poem. These repetitions allow the reader to focus on the tulip-frame’s progression and how it bursts into flames while her sister paints it. Honum also stays in a consistent iambic-pentameter too, which helps the poem to flow.
From this work, I was able to learn how another poet writes about her experiences from the bottom of her heart. I have also wanted to write more concisely about certain topics, and I can really see that Honum is very careful about the kinds of words she chooses to insert. She uses “difficult” to find rhyme and repetition, andslips them in without sounding too generic or predictable. Overall, I loved reading this work because Honum’s style of writing is relatable and similar to mine.
Works Consulted