Pomegranate Seeds: Thinking With a Poem

Craft Talk, Revision Talk, and a Publication Share

In San Francisco, we lived around the corner from an Arab/mediterranean café, they always had some seasonal dish with pomegranate seeds. I loved them very much and tried purchasing some to make of them my own concoctions at home. Then, I discovered how quickly they ripen and mold.

The poem “Pomegranate Seeds,” by Cody Stetzel from Vagabond City Lit’s 106.1 publication.

In venerable gratitude, Vagabond City Lit published my poem here.

I wanted to offer a discussion on revisory processes once more for this poem too. Unfortunately, I don’t have the visual to offer of the literal past iterations for it as this poem existed largely in notes lines and spread across several journals in the Summer of 2023. In that beautiful assemblage of ideas that come together into poetic form.

This is a very incomplete poem in the sense that death is always an incompletion. When I first wrote this poem the entire piece was:

Pomegranate Seeds

Ripening so quickly they die.

But at the time - and still - I was full with such rage about the state of things. About Palestinian genocide. About the infuriating culture and literal war against trans and queer bodies. About the insanity of damnably sacrificing all public institutions for art, health, and community.

In this way, I strung together all types of these rages together. The poem grew, expanded with rage.

Pomegranate Seeds

Ripening so quickly they die.

This world—so much of it wants to rot.

Only those who can afford it die—everyone else is massacred.

Each night I read of a new massacre.

Trans folks, libraries, entire countries.

Even the mushrooms in my fridge are coated in sticky mold.

Can a rebellion?

As the poem grew I recognized the disparateness, the helplessness of the lyric. And maybe that was the more honest speech for the moment which generated it: it all does feel helpless, language ought reflect the every day. Yet the more I sat with the poem, the more I yearned to juxtapose its disparate misery with a question. I arrived at Is a massacre an absolute?

In writing this, I am trying to straddle the line of imposing authorial intent on the reading of a poem versus explaining the thought process of largely an additive effort of revising this poem over several months. Instead of answering the question, I’ll offer that the majority of edits I made after this question’s realization were in the conscious questioning, the revulsion, and the forward-looking.

You may find in this poem what you wish to find. I’m not entirely sure if what the poem needed was juxtaposition. Yet, I believe it’s what I needed. At the time. And perhaps as I continue to edit this poem into the future it reconciles with a stripping back, or a return to minimalism.

The last note I’ll discuss, though, is the revision toward form - notably all of the spacing and pagination-playing, the couplets, as well as the split towards a contrapuntal at the end. When I am writing a poem, sometimes I have an exercise in play where I record myself reading the poem and then play it back to myself, closing my eyes and writing the poem as I listen to it. I’ll do this maybe three, five times. And during this process form tends to explode rather rapidly. For me, form always reveals itself when I hear the poem aloud in any capacity.

I will end this discussion here, once more encouraging to please read the issue in Vagabond City Lit. A few poems, some longer form pieces, and a wonderful review can be found therein.