“The Figure a Poem Makes,” a Poem by Donna Masini
From the Collection Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For?
It’s a slow start. Notice the way
she’s holding the pen. Four-beat line to open,
leaning blue, and—synesthesia—right at the jump.
If she can shift to the conditional—yes!
She lands clean on an accented syllable. Watch her
attempt this medial caesura. What a stanza!
What an effortless move across white space.
So difficult, the timing, writing this morning
to the radiator hissing. There’s the phone.
She’s been distracted before by the male
cardinal. What a leap! Her mother’s thighs to—
oh my Lord—racial injustice. She’s known for her
leaps, sometimes a bit reckless, but look at the way
she moves down the page. It’s the years
of syllabics, all those sapphics—Holy
Smokes, what a line break! They don’t call it
enjambment for nothing, folks. This has legs.
Notice her tight line, the way she recovers,
she’s struggled with consistency, but, my God,
watch this right-branching sentence, a difficult
combination that was giving her trouble last year.
She is using this page as a trampoline. It’s the
free-write of a lifetime. Oops, another wobbly metaphor.
Not her strong suit. OK, right here, rhythmic modulation:
Dactyls so tricky to pull off tonally, and
—smart move!—she substitutes a spondee. If she
slips up here, she can recover in revision. And she
nails it! Her friends are cheering. Her family
never noticed. Five years old caught her first feeling
in an image: birthday party, Pin the Tail on the Donkey.
Sixty years she’s waited for this. The journals. The notebooks.
The shifting subjectivities. Now she’s rounding the
turn, picking up speed—going for every degree of
difficulty here—she could falter (we’ve seen it before)
with one bad pun. If she lands this next element—Yes!
What a comeback after that disastrous haiku—Italy 2018.
She’s gotta be thinking of her first coach,
Audre Lorde making her read Hopkins.
The years of loneliness, the losses. Her marriage.
To quote an abandoned draft: “Fuck the Best of.”
Gol-ly look at her. She just brought it in
on the biggest page in the world.
She doesn’t need to wait for the score.
Sixty years to the day of Sylvia Plath’s suicide.
What a story, folks. What a recovery!
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From Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For?. Used with the permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton and Company. Copyright © 2026 by Donna Masini
Donna Masini
Donna Masini is the author of three books of poems—4:30 Movie, Turning to Fiction, That Kind of Danger—and a novel, About Yvonne. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies including Poetry, Ploughshares, APR, Paris Review, Pushcart Prize, Best American Poetry 2015. A recipient of grants from the NEA and NYFA, she teaches in the MFA Creative Writing program at Hunter College. (edited)
