POETRY-IN-PROGRESS: LUISA A. IGLORIA

Editor’s Note: The Halo Halo Review is pleased to offer a new feature: “Poetry-in-progress” where poets focus on the making of a single poem, from the poem’s inspiration to various drafts until the poem reaches its “final draft.” In this feature on an ekphrastic poem by Luisa A. Igloria, one can see the effects of visual imagery on the poem's text.

When Thinking in the Language of Poems Becomes Thinking of Angels

By Luisa A. Igloria

November 14, 2025

The Grief of Angels

- after “The Fall of the Rebel Angels,” 
Peter Breughel the Elder, 1562
and “The Lamentation of Christ,” 
Giotto, 1305

Sprouting gills and lizards’ tails, rebel angels 
change in their fall from the shining walls of heaven— 
becoming horned and feathered beasts, hybrids 
of irregular size. Poisons of the puffer fish, the scaled, 
the seven-headed; and though they’re meant to stand for
what is dark and evil, their beauty still is terrible
to behold. Pistil or tulip bulb, zebra swallowtail 
butterfly with a body of burnished hair; the gleam
of shields and swords raised for lethal strike. In Giotto’s
“Lamentation of Christ,” more notable than the mourners
who have taken the body of Christ down from the cross
is the army of cherubs hovering like small planes, their grief
becoming blur against a thick impasto of clouds and sky.
Once I heard a sermon which said sacred scripture shows 
God and the angels have feelings, but more intensely 
than those of humans. Never fear, said the announcing  
angel to Mary— which meant his countenance was far 
from benign, even if he was holy. In the depths of our own 
grief as we wring our hands and rend our hair, our keening
ascends into the air as if, too, from the mouths of angels.

This poem, which became my poem of the day for Via Negativa (where I’ve been writing and posting a poem a day for 14 years by November 20), began  with my picking up an infinity card or book that I made a few weeks ago, on whose surfaces I’d pasted cut-out pictures from an art magazine depicting Giotto’s “The Lamentation of Christ” (1305). Though I was pleased with the angel figures I’d chosen, there was no text yet, but I knew I wanted it to become a book.

.

This afternoon, I saw it lying on top of some of my other hand-bound books and thought maybe this might be the time to think about text, or a poem. 

Online, I looked up an image of the Giotto painting; and then started thinking about angels in general, and angels’ depictions in Renaissance art in particular. Besides the Giotto painting, I knew I also wanted to look at Breughel’s “The Fall of the Rebel Angels” (1562)— replete with imagery reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch. I took out a small pad and started taking quick notes while studying the paintings’ details. 

Then I opened a new Word document and lined it up next to my browser windows open to the paintings and started drafting. 

You’ll see in the photos how the first lines of the poem progressed.

 

I hope the pictures show how I worked through some of the lines (and line breaks) in the first half or thereabouts of the poem. After that, I knew where I wanted the poem to go, and I knew what I wanted to say.  

The more important part of the process of writing a poem like this (ekphrastic) is spending time looking at the details. Though there is nothing like spending time in front of an actual piece of art, one benefit of examining online is that you can expand and magnify sections at a time then go back to look at the entire image again. 

Looking through my very brief page of handwritten notes, I also then knew that the Albrecht Durer and Hans Holbein the Elder works that I’d also listed as potential “candidates” for inclusion, would probably be better used in another poem.

The final version of my poem (my poem for the day) is at the beginning of this little process essay. As for the infinity book — I don’t think the entire poem will fit there, so I may just pick out some lines and think about how to lay them out (I intend to ink them in by hand).

*****

Luisa A. Igloria is a poet, essayist, translator, bookbinder, and aspiring watercolorist and collage artist. She is the author of Caulbearer (Immigrant Writing Series Prize, Black Lawrence Press; 2024), Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Co-Winner, 2019 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Prize (Southern Illinois University Press, 2020), The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2018), 12 other books, and 4 chapbooks. She was the inaugural recipient of the 2015 Resurgence Poetry Prize, UK—the world’s first major award for ecopoetry (now known as the Ginkgo Prize), selected by a panel headed by former UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion. She is lead editor of the new ecopoetry anthology The Nature of Our Times: Poems on America’s Lands, Waters, Wildlife, and Other Natural Wonders (Paloma Press, 2025), with Aileen Cassinetto and David Hassler; and lead editor, along with co-editors Aileen Cassinetto and Jeremy S. Hoffman, of Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States (Paloma Press, September 2023). Luisa is a Louis I. Jaffe Professor of English and Creative Writing in the MFA Program at Old Dominion University; she also leads workshops for and is a member of the board of The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk. During her appointed term as 20^th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-22), Emerita, the Academy of American Poets awarded her one of twenty-three Poet Laureate Fellowships in 2021, to support a program of public poetry projects.  www.luisaigloria.com  https://linktr.ee/thepoetslizard