Monthly Archives: September 2018

14 posts

The Child of Your Rainy Sundays

fly

When you pick up a novel you read years ago, threads of narrative fabric stand out, looking familiar to you. Not so the poetry collection. If you’ve read it once, a year ago or more, chances are it will feel new to you as you read it again. A gift, then! Further testament to the mysteries of poetry.

Yesterday I pulled Simic’s That Little Something from the shelf as a tonic after watching a little too much of the Senate hearing on Judge (for Yourself) Brett Kavanaugh. Effects were remarkable, swift, and salubrious!

Reinvigorated, I shared Simic’s ode-like piece, “To Laziness” on these pages, so today I follow san- with -guine by giving you its brother-in-arms, the equally tranquil “To Boredom.” (Ah, for the good old days, when one could afford to be bored!)

To Boredom
by Charles Simic

I’m the child of your rainy Sundays.
I watched time crawl
Over the ceiling
Like a wounded fly.

A day would last forever,
Making pellets of bread,
Waiting for a branch
On a bare tree to move.

The silence would deepen,
The sky would darken,
As Grandmother knitted
With a ball of black yarn.

Heaven is like that.
In eternity’s classrooms,
The angels sit like bored children
With their heads bowed.

As former students, I’m sure we can all relate to “eternity’s classrooms,” especially in a poem called “To Boredom.” Few classrooms, after all, were capable of escaping so swift a predator as eternity. We’ll see for ourselves some day, I assure you!

With that, my blessings: May your Saturday be rainy. Or sunny, for all I care. As long as it’s slow enough to watch time “crawl / Over the ceiling / Like a wounded fly.”

Why Do Some Poems Inspire You To Write While Others Don’t?

poetry poetry books writing writing inspiration writing poetry

After Roman Coliseum-like spectacles like yesterday’s special Senate hearing on the pending Supreme Court nomination, one can’t help but curl up in a ball of despair or read poetry.

I chose poetry. It took my mind off ugly things and reminded me of what can be beautiful in life. For succor, I chose my copy of Charles Simic’s That Little Something, flipping open to pick-a-page, any-page. Turns out, the page was 21 — older than most Senators acted yesterday — and the poem was “To Laziness.”

I don’t know about you, but for me, there are poets and there are poets who inspire one to write. Simic belongs in the latter category. His free verse, his often short lines, his conviction that the ordinary is worth exploration, they all drive me to blacken a blank screen and revise.

This poem, in true wu-wei fashion, does a whole lot of nothing elegantly. Stanza one muses on big topics, like eternity, but stanza two dives into that simplest of difficult techniques to pull off well — the list — finishing with the poem’s strongest lines, a metaphoric sail “made of cigarette smoke.”

In the final stanza, simply enough, Simic does a little “meta-” wondering. Where am I? Why am I here? Until even the clouds (echoing the cigarette smoke’s infectious listlessness a stanza earlier) are described as not being sure “which way to go.”

Did laziness ever look so good? Especially when it cleanses your mind of pompous partisans and drives you to write yourself? Rhetorical questions, all!

Here, then, is Simic’s poem:

To Laziness
by Charles Simic

Only you understood
How little time we are given,
Not enough to lift a finger.
The voices on the stairs,
Thoughts too quick to pursue,
What do they all matter?
When eternity beckons.

The heavy curtains drawn,
The newspapers unread.
The keys collecting dust.
The flies either sluggish or dead.
The bed like a slow boat,
With its one listless sail
Made of cigarette smoke.

When I did move at last,
The stores were closed.
Was it already Sunday?
The weddings and funerals were over.
The one or two white clouds left
Above the dark rooftops,
Not sure which way to go.

A Hazy (Blue) Shade of Winter

poetry

Though not an artist, I love to wrestle with the use of color in poetry. Like the Internet, it giveth (in professional hands) and taketh away (in amateurs’).

For a pep talk on the matter, I often refer to Mark Doty’s The Art of Description, where he considers the value of color — when used lightly and effectively (and ah, there’s the rub!). Let’s audit the course and listen in to his lecture:

“A beautiful use of ‘oppositional color’ appears in an early poem of A. R. Ammons’s:

Winter Scene

There is now not a single
leaf on the cherry tree:

except when the jay
plummets in, lights, and,

in pure clarity, squalls:
then every branch

quivers and
breaks out in blue leaves.

“There are no cherries here, but we can’t help but see a small burst of color when we hear the word, and then how rich that final blue becomes when it ‘breaks out’ in the space where only a little potential red and green have been. It seems fair to say the poem’s ‘about’ the blue of winter—blue light on snow, blue winter twilights, that wintry shade in the western sky after sundown.

“It’s surprising how strongly the naming of particulars brings color into a poem’s perceptual web. This stanza by Robert Has arose across the continent from Ammons’s poem, and uses only ‘silver’ and ‘golden’ as signposts to render a lushly austere summer landscape:

The creek’s silver in the sun of almost August,
And bright dry air, and last runnels of snowmelt,
Percolating through the roots of mountain grasses
Vinegar wee, golden smoke, or meadow rust…

(“That Music”)

“Roots and grasses, vinegar and smoke and rust: perhaps this stanza comes as close to a painting (impossible, longed-for accomplishment) as a poem can get.”

As you can see, this brief foray into color gives pause. It gives reason, too — reason to revise your existing poems with color in mind. Subtle yet powerful color. The kind that implies as much as it paints.

A Certain, Lovely Ghostliness

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lake

There is more poetry in autumn than summer, it would seem. Traveling from the congested highways of an overcrowded Commonwealth to the quiet shorelines of a Maine lake proves as much.

Last night we arrived to high winds and whitecaps. This morning I arise to clear, Canadian air, sun, calm. That coupled with the possibility and hope that comprises every dawn if you wake and look for it.

Maine lakes in autumn are a different animal than their summer counterparts. For one, the vacationers have returned home to their jobs and their schools. The buzz of boats and jet skis has gone, as have the screams of swimming children, the voices from up shore and down.

Today, traffic on the lake, this early on, consists of the sun’s reflection and a pair of loons.

It’s human nature to say the loons’ appearance is personal. A postcard for me. As is the soft wind high in the pine tops. And the chickadees’ back-and-forth. All an antidote for any blues coloring the spirit.

The neighboring camps on either side? Empty. Though they are not closed and shuttered for the season, they seem circumspect, lips sealed out of deference to me.

I expected some leaves to be in the early stages of fall color, but no. Still green, celebrating their false summer born of our recent warmth and humidity.

Thoreau would like this, I think. The lake in autumn, after all, looks much like it would in his century. Or any younger, more innocent century, for that matter. Any time you find a vista that can make that claim, you’re in a good spot. Far from the madding media.

But Thoreau was not one to stay in one place, either. He was a restless spirit, a walking botanist, a bridegroom to changing trails, hills, and outlooks.

That’s OK, though. Details like this never get in the way of capital-R Romantic delusions. Those are like deep breaths of cool air, those metaphors for a life lighthearted. They can even be found here in the cabin, in rooms still crowded with the ghosts of loved ones from the summer months.

I once wrote in a poem about such loud silences — how they’re like a school playground in early summer, empty yet still reverberating with the echoes of their youthful essence.

Yes. Like so. A certain, lovely ghostliness. Something both spiritual and reflective like a poem. A poem like all unwritten poems. The laughing and elusive one, waiting to be captured and translated, forged from ethereal to real.

The Good-Reading Prince Discovers Royalties

humor poetry

ophelia

HAMLET: To-read or not to-read? That is the question.

OPHELIA: Don’t tell me. Goodreads member, right?

HAMLET: How did you know? Art thou a mind reader?

OPHELIA: A profile reader, you great, fool Dane. 87 books “read” and 8,777 books “to-read,” I see.

HAMLET: Uh, what are you doing here, anyway? Do you not understand the “sol” in “soliloquy”?

OPHELIA: Yea, verily. And the “dia” in “dialogue,” too.

HAMLET: Perhaps you should exit, stage left, instead of hectoring a man?

OPHELIA: Perhaps you should stop clicking “to-read” on books instead of teasing their authors most obscenely?

HAMLET: But I really want to read this 8,777th book!

OPHELIA: Don’t tell me. Some day.

HAMLET: OK, I won’t tell you the day then.

OPHELIA: Why haven’t you read Numbers 1 through 8,776, pray tell? Didn’t you want to read them, too? Or is this like a New Year’s resolution ha-ha? Good until January 5th, ha-ha.

HAMLET: “The road to not-reading is paved with good intentions.” Shakespeare, I’ll wager!

OPHELIA: Impossible. Pavement isn’t even invented yet.

HAMLET: Is Goodreads?

OPHELIA: Don’t mess with me, or I’ll twist you like an underbaked Danish.

HAMLET: What’s your deal, anyway? Aren’t women supposed to be seen but not heard?

OPHELIA: Children, Ham. Children. My advice is to clear it out. All of it. Make like Marie Kondo and spark some joy by blowing up your “to-read” shelf completely. Here’s the fuse.

HAMLET: But… it took so long to build! And all those pretty spines for my friends and followers to see! They look so… Goodreads!

OPHELIA: Replace it. Tabula rasa. No more clicking “to-read.”

HAMLET: Will (sic) I suffer withdrawal symptoms?

OPHELIA: No. Instead of clicking “to-read,” click “Amazon,” then “Add to Cart,” then “Place Order.” Be a Dane of conviction. Then get plenty of rest and see me in the morning.

HAMLET: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Dost thou not realize that placing an order would actually mean reading my “to-reads”?

OPHELIA: And supporting your “to-reads” authors who have spent a year or more crafting a product every bit as worthy as that fine coat you’re wearing and that distinguished artisanal goblet you’re drinking from. Have you not heard of royalties? Now make like QE I and produce some! After all, what do you think is supporting this Globe Theater stage we’re standing on?

HAMLET: Atlas?

OPHELIA:

HAMLET: Timber, maybe?

OPHELIA: Royalties, you fool Dane! Queen Elizabeth’s sizable assets, to start! And a percentage of the groundlings’ gate, to gild some lily. Where there’s a Will, there’s some pay!

HAMLET: Lower your voice before you raise the dead! I just coaxed my father off the ramparts last week! Now let me think on this. (Shuts eyes.) OK, I’m thinking like so: Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

OPHELIA: Right church, wrong play.

HAMLET: Can I buy a few hours, then, with a, “Hey nonny, nonny?”

OPHELIA: Stop it and grow up. I’m serious. Back to zero with this “to-read” stuff. Using it only inflates all these authors’ “to-read” stocks. Hundreds upon hundreds of non-promissory notes. Much Ado About Nothing. Empty as the wind. Is that who you really are?

HAMLET: I need extra time for such questions! I’m still on “to be or not to be”! Don’t you have a nunnery to get thee to or something?

OPHELIA: (Eyes looking like grenades — which are not invented yet) You tax my patience like an exchequer, British for the tax man. Is my point made? Can we move on to Act V already?

HAMLET: OK, OK. But first, you doing anything tonight?

OPHELIA: Reading. Books from my cart. Delivered in two days thanks to Hippolyta Prime. Now let’s exeunt while the exeunting is good….

“Ophelia’s Poetry Tip-of-the-Day” Jar (Artisanal, Hand-Crafted Poems)

tips

Random Thoughts: September Edition

blathering comma mine opinion poetry random thoughts

Humidity has made New England its home these past few weeks. The eviction notices don’t appear to be working.
According to translators Kazuaki Tanahashi and Peter Levitt, the famous Cold Mountain poems appear to have been written by more than one person over time.
Is that as shocking as Shakespeare wasn’t written by Shakespeare? Not quite, but I’m sure a few Hermit Hanshan fans might think so.
(Oh, and if you’re wondering, I’m on Team Shakespeare.)
Has anyone noticed how many women are running for political office this election cycle? What a wonderful “actions speak louder than words” follow-up to the Women’s Marches that occupied Washington in the days after the Electoral College Presidency took root.
Weeding. It’s a wonderful thing (once it’s done, I mean).
Baroque music, as exemplified by good old Johann Sebastian Bach, is a neat metaphor for the beauty of effective repetition and refrains in poetry.
Submittable has a cool filter button when looking over available markets. First you can click “poetry,” for instance, and then you can click “no fees.”
Now if only you could click “reading periods” and set up special columns for hand-picked periodicals.
Frustration #1: Journals that do not allow simultaneous submissions, but then take their time about reading your poems, effectively freezing them from consideration for whole swaths of time elsewhere.
Frustration #2: The Poetry World. Once you jump through the looking glass from the real world, you find yourself in a comforting, gut-reaction-from-Trump world where old white males are not the norm. All good*…
Asterisk*… except that old white male poets (motto: “I’m not dead yet!”) would be wise not to advertise their ages or give any hint of it in their poetry, as the Poetry World seems to like best elder poets of note (read: ones already famous). Beyond that, the journals are awash with Millennial poets.
Meaning: In the Poetry World, some would do their math just so: old + white + male = the new minority. Paying for the sins of their fathers, amen.
Bottom line of frustrations: If only race, gender, sexual orientation, culture, etc., didn’t matter. If only humanity and this brief license to life, as common denominators, mattered most. If only we’d drop the labels entirely and judge poetry on its merits as poetry alone, leaving differences at the publishing door.
Cold Mountain Poem #99, Dedicated to The Donald:

Greedy people are good at accumulating wealth,
like owls who love their young,
though when the children grow large, they devour their mothers.
Possessions are just like this.
When you give them away, you grow happy,
when you hoard them, it brings misfortune.
Owning nothing causes no harm,
like a bird flapping its wings in the great blue sky.

How’re the sales going, people? What? Not, so, and hot? Think the Little Engine That Could. It’s a great rallying image for every writer, no? I think I can, I think I can, I think I can….
I bring good tidings from the education world: Another reaction to what’s gone (way) down in Washington is the phoenix-like return of Civics in education. We have ordered Bill of Rights posters for every history classroom because we don’t want our rights to become history.
And how many Americans can actually name their rights as granted by the First Amendment?
Frightening answer: not as many as can name the Kardashian sisters and brothers and fathers and mothers.
Not wanting to end on a sour note, and in an attempt to encourage the cold snap of an early fall in New England, I leave you this reminder:

October
by Robert Frost

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if the were all,
Whose elaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—
For the grapes’ sake along the all.

Guilt as the Root of All Poetry

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Emotions and feelings. They are like the gasoline and oil of that engine we call creativity. Take guilt, for instance. A powerful motivator. A source of bitter reflection. And not the type of thing a fugitive from conscience wants chasing after him.

Below are two war-related poems with guilt as their tap root. It’s the contrast of life in a peaceful, affluent society (say, America’s) juxtaposed with wars raging in other parts of the world.

Especially wars where America (or maybe your country?) holds “interests.” Especially wars where your tax dollars helped birth bombs that drop on innocent civilians. You as the midwife of misery.

The easiest solution in such situations? Put on blinders and make like Old Dobbs the Horse plodding through a field of daisies and bee buzz. What you don’t see or hear or experience won’t kill you, after all. And what power do you have to stop it, anyway?

Pose that question to Gandhi.

In the mean time, for your Sunday consideration, I offer these two cool poems as evidence, both tracing the same fissure of guilt — the first by a Ukrainian-born American citizen, the second by a Canadian.

We Lived Happily During the War
by Ilya Kaminsky

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

It Is Dangerous To Read Newspapers
by Margaret Atwood

While I was building neat
castles in the sandbox,
the hasty pits were
filling with bulldozed corpses

and as I walked to the school
washed and combed, my feet
stepping on the cracks in the cement
detonated red bombs.

Now I am grownup
and literate, and I sit in my chair
as quietly as a fuse

and the jungles are flaming, the under-
brush is charged with soldiers,
the names on the difficult
maps go up in smoke.

I am the cause, I am a stockpile of chemical
toys, my body
is a deadly gadget,
I reach out in love, my hands are guns,
my good intentions are completely lethal.

Even my
passive eyes transmute
everything I look at to the pocked
black and white of a war photo,
how
can I stop myself.

It is dangerous to read newspapers.

Each time I hit a key
on my electric typewriter,
speaking of peaceful trees

another village explodes.

Reading these prove once again the power of poetry. And of emotions — the way they can cause detonations to happen not only on the ground, but in the conscience.

Garrison Keillor Redux

poetry poetry in the news

garrison

Good news for the poetry world: Garrison Keillor is back with his daily dose of The Writer’s Almanac, which you can subscribe to for a poem a day in your inbox, just like the good old days.

As you’ll recall, last year Minnesota Public Radio decided to toss baby, bathwater, and everything when they not only shut down Mr. Keillor, but unplugged a vast trove of poems from over the years.

This collection included not only the likes of Yeats, Dickinson, and Frost, but (move over and make a little room, please) someone who looked suspiciously like me.

As this was akin to taking sledgehammers to the statue of David or burning the library at Alexandria, there was much hue and, as required by law, cry.

But now Garrison Keillor has made amends for MPR’s missteps by setting up his own shop in St. Paul.

A new beginning. A new infusion for poets and poetry, contemporary and classic. A new reason to celebrate.

Writing Prompts: They Hide in the Wide Open

poetry

town

Traci K. Smith divides her anthology, American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, into five sections: “The Small Town of My Youth,” “Something Shines Out From Every Darkness,” “Words Tangled in Debris,” “Here, the Sentence Will Be Respected,” and “One Singing Thing.”

Think about it. Each of those section titles would make a great prompt. Five stirrers for your daily writing cocktail. The first opens up memoir-like possibilities from your past and the town you grew up in.

The second offers a study in contrasts where you can use the rhetorical device of antithesis to explore one small phoenix that poked out from the ashes.

The third? Play with words and see how even tangled debris can take on significance.

Looking at the fourth title, I think of how the word “sentence” can be taken two ways, one if my diction and two if by the judge’s gavel.

And finally, the wonder, the shout, the ode of “one singing thing.”

So much for “I have no ideas.”

As an example of a poem Smith chose for the first section, “The Small Town of My Youth,” here is a poem by Oliver de la Paz:

In Defense of Small Towns
by Oliver de la Paz

When I look at it, it’s simple, really. I hated life there. September,

once filled with animal deaths and toughened hay. And the smells

of fall were boiled-down beets and potatoes

or the farmhands’ breeches smeared with oil and diesel

as they rode into town, dusty and pissed. The radio station

split time between metal and Tejano, and the only action

happened on Friday nights where the high school football team

gave everyone a chance at forgiveness. The town left no room

for novelty or change. The sheriff knew everyone’s son and despite that,

we’d cruise up and down the avenues, switching between

brake and gearshift. We’d fight and spit chew into Big Gulp cups

and have our hearts broken nightly. In that town I learned

to fire a shotgun at nine and wring a chicken’s neck

with one hand by twirling the bird and whipping it straight like a towel.

But I loved the place once. Everything was blonde and cracked

and the irrigation ditches stretched to the end of the earth. You could

ride on a bicycle and see clearly the outline of every leaf

or catch on the streets each word of a neighbor’s argument.

Nothing could happen there and if I willed it, the place would have me

slipping over its rocks into the river with the sugar plant’s steam

or signing papers at a storefront army desk, buttoned up

with medallions and a crew cut, eyeing the next recruits.

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I could be anywhere,

staring at a hunk of asphalt or listening to the clap of billiard balls

against each other in a bar and hear my name. Indifference now?

Some. I shook loose, but that isn’t the whole story. The fact is

I’m still in love. And when I wake up, I watch my son yawn,

and my mind turns his upswept hair into cornstalks

at the edge of a field. Stillness is an acre, and his body

idles, deep like heavy machinery. I want to take him back there,

to the small town of my youth and hold the book of wildflowers

open for him, and look. I want him to know the colors of horses,

to run with a cattail in his hand and watch as its seeds

fly weightless as though nothing mattered, as though

the little things we tell ourselves about our pasts stay there,

rising slightly and just out of reach.

From Chaos, Unexpected Order

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Sometimes chaos seems to have a purpose. Like yesterday morning, when my wife suddenly shouted, “Oh my god, I’m suppose to be at tennis!” and went into a Tasmanian devil whirlwind to outfit herself for the courts where three other ladies were no doubt looking at their watches and wondering about her absence.

Bad to worse: her car was almost out of gas. And mine, being a stick shift, was beyond her driving skills. “Can you drive me?” she asked. Um. Of course.

Ideas for poems come out of chaos. Slowly, you pull strands and fight them into some manner of order. Today I would learn that even something as humble as a book could be born of chaos. After dropping her off, I had an hour to kill. Luckily for me, there was an independent bookstore—that rare beast!—but a mile away.

In the poetry section, I came across American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time selected and introduced by Tracy K. Smith (Poet Laureate of the United States). I read the first paragraph of her introduction:

“This is why I love poems: they invite me to sit down and listen to a voice speaking thoughtfully and passionately about what it feels like to be alive. Usually the someone doing the talking—the poem’s speaker—is a person I’d never get the chance to meet were it not for the poem. Because the distance between us is too great. Or because we are too unlike one another to ever feel this at ease face-to-face. Or maybe because the person talking to me never actually existed as anything other than the figment of a poet’s imagination, a character invented for reasons I may not ever know. Even when that someone is the real-life poet speaking of things that have actually happened, there is something different—some new strength, vulnerability, or authority—that the poem fosters. This is why I love poems: they require me to sit still, listen deeply, and imagine putting myself in someone else’s unfamiliar shoes. The world I return to the the poem is over seems fuller and more comprehensible as a result.”

It’s a pretty good reason to love poems, don’t you think? And, in our fraught political times, it’s nice to think of poetry as a place where people can calmly sit and listen to each other via the arbiter called poetry. I especially like the bit about putting ourselves in another’s shoes. Empathy and vision—a new vision—are essential to a poem’s living spirit.

Later in the introduction, Smith continues:

“Poems call upon sounds and silence to operate like music. They invoke vivid sensory images to make abstract feelings like love or anger or doubt feel solid and unmistakable. Like movies, poems slow time down or speed it up; they cross cut from one viewpoint to another as a way of discerning connections between unlikely things; they use line and stanza breaks to create suspense. Even the visual layout of words on the page is a device to help conduct the reader’s movement through the encounter that is the poem. These and other tools help poems call out attention to moments when the ordinary nature of experience changes—when the things we think we know flare into brighter colors, starker contrasts, strange and intoxicating possibilities.”

As the book contained 50 newer voices in the poetry world, I knew it was for me. I brought it to the register and cashed in. And now I’m looking forward to reading and rereading Smith’s choices slowly. In order. Like focusing on one voice at a time in a choir. All because of chaos.

The tennis ladies forgave my wife and said it happens to all of us. I thanked her and said, because of her, this book happened to me. Fate is funny that way.