Monthly Archives: November 2018

13 posts

“Thou Shalt Not Write About Pet Death” (and Other Commandments Moses Never Brought Down)

poetry writing writing poetry

old cat

As a high school English teacher, I can remember teaching a unit on admissions essays. We had many resources, of course, and almost all of them warned of clichés and clichéd topics. One of these verboten topics? You guessed it: pet death.

Pet death is an entry drug to bad writing, the experts warned. Admissions officers who read such essays complained of the treacly sentimentality, the sugar-coated hyperbole, and yes, clichés like blackflies in a Maine forest. Some said they even gave up reading the minute they realized they were reading “The Death of Fluffy.”

If you’ve read this blog any (and I know a few of you exist), you know I bridle at the whole idea of “Thou shalt not’s….” It bothers me when so-called experts say, “You can’t write about that topic. It’s tired.” It bothers me when the nabobs of knowledge say, “No to that word. And that one. Oh. And, of course, that one!” It bothers me even when a respected saint of the canon like St. Billy of Collins writes, apparently seriously, that he stops reading any poem the minute he comes across the word “cicada.”

But still. If you’re going to write about your pets death, proceeding with caution is advisable. Once your pet death poem is done, you and your critique pals can debate its success, given the degree of difficulty. Going where angels fear to tread takes some angelic spine, after all, and I like that in a poet.

As Exhibit A on the topic of “pet death” (insert sound of cliché alarms blaring here), I give you Robin Chapman’s “Enough,” about the death of her cat (which, by the way, opens up a whole new can of worms in the form of cat pictures on the Internet, but I’m not going there, thank you). See what you think:

“Enough”
by Robin Chapman

There is always enough.

My old cat of long years, who

stayed all the months of his dying,

though, made sick by food,

he refused to eat, till, long-stroked,

he turned again to accept

another piece of dry catfood

or spoonful of meat, a little water,

another day through which

he purred, small engine

losing heat—I made him nests

of pillow and blanket, a curve of body

where he curled against my legs,

and when the time came, he slipped out

a loose door into the cold world

whose abundance included

the death of his choosing.

 

It’s Giving Tuesday. You Know What THAT Means!

Lost Sherpa of Happiness poetry

giving tuesday

Yes, it means you are supposed to be giving, and that explains why you are getting all of these e-mails from journals and magazines that once (or three times) rejected your poetry but now promise NOT to reject your money.

I could get jaded and do a narrative eye roll here, but I fully understand these magazines’ plights. I have signed on to two new poetry journal subscriptions in the past month. Truth be told, I didn’t know “Giving Tuesday” existed, so I jumped the gun. But no one seems put out, so it’s all good.

But really, if we’re going to talk giving, we have no choice but to talk books, because everybody (and his sister) knows that the best gifts are books. Sure, it’s more fun to receive books, but this is Giving Tuesday, not Receiving Tuesday, so let’s get over that technicality ipso fasto, ‘K?

If you give a new (to you) poet some support by buying his book, that is a major give on an otherwise ordinary-looking November Tuesday. That can be done by taking your giving mood over to Amazon’s “Lost & Found” Department, where you’ll find a shiny new copy of Lost Sherpa of Happiness. Check out these “giving” reviews:

The New York Times: “A dark horse!”

TIME Magazine: “Below the radar no more!”

The Washington Post:” I know this guy!”

Best of all? Your gift of poetry is matched. That’s right. It counts for the person you give it to (even if it’s yourself, in which case your secret’s safe with us), and it counts for the starving artist and his small, independent publisher (in this case, Kelsay Books in full Dickensian mode).

Sound tempting? God, I hope so. Waxing poetic for no reason at all would be such a drag!

The Dangerous But Necessary Art of Compression

poetry

I still have my George Bilgere book out from yesterday, so why not share another poem? Although wistful, like sentimentality, is quicksand-dangerous for a poet, Bilgere seems to walk the edges with aplomb. What is creativity without risk? Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, but we’re not in this to play safe.

This poem, in three swift stanzas, tries to negotiate the mysteries of innocence and aging. The question it poses: Is youth as good as it gets? If you’re an adult, you certainly hope not. You say, “It’s not quite as simple as all that.” And yet… and yet.

Let’s dip our toe in the pool and get wet, shall we?

 

“The Wading Pool”
by George Bilgere

The toddlers in their tadpole bodies,
with their squirt guns and snorkels,
their beautiful mommies and inflatable whales,
are still too young to understand
that this is as good as it gets.

Soon they must leave the wading pool
and stand all day at the concession stand
with their hormones and snow cones,
their soul patches and tribal tattoos,
pretending not to notice how beautiful they are,

until they simply can’t stand it
and before you know it
they’re lined up on lawn chairs,
dozing in the noonday sun
with their stretch marks and beer bellies,
their Wall Street Journals and SPF 50.

 

Parallel structure is used throughout, as Bilgere uses concrete “stand-ins” to represent toddlerhood, teen and twenty-something-dom, and, finally, the maturity of our discontent.

The question in poems like this is simple: Is there enough runway for a poem to lift-off and make profounds statements (in this case about conformity and mortality)? It is, after all, the duty of poetry to compress, not just words but ideas. The duty and the challenge, I should say (and there’s the rub).

Which reminds me, I need to rub the bird with a salt and brown sugar brine so it can brood in the fridge for a day. Happy Thanksgiving to all (4.5) of my readers. Wade in bravely!

How Abstract “Sets” into Concrete

poetry writing writing inspiration writing poetry

shoals

Abstractions are hard—to write about successfully. Especially when concretes have to do all the talking for them.

As Exhibit A, I give you the concept of “silence.” It’s basically a nothing that is something. But how do you describe it?

If you look at a long list of abstract nouns and pick one to write about, you’ll see what I mean. It’s a workout, one your doctor will approve of due to the cardiovascular benefits. You know, where you have trouble carrying on conversation with a work-out partner because you’re too busy breathing.

For inspiration, let’s look at the concrete images the late Tomas Tranströmer came up with for the word “silence.”

You might wonder, straight off, what the antecedent is for the pronoun “they” which appears in Stanza 1 and is repeated in Stanza 4. As for me, I will luxuriate in the final stanza and its image of silver shoals—no, table silver—just kidding, silver shoals, swimming the depths of the black Atlantic’s “silence.”

If it leaves you thinking about the different types of silences, all the better. That’s the thing with abstract words. They are protean in nature. Expansive. Malleable. Perfect, turns out, for a series of concrete images created by you and your rogue accomplice, the imagination.

 

“Silence”
by Tomas Tranströmer

Walk past, they are buried…
A cloud glides over the sun’s disk.

Starvation is a tall building
that moves about by night—

in the bedroom an elevator shaft opens,
a dark rod pointing toward the interior.

Flowers in the ditch. Fanfare and silence.
Walk past, they are buried…

The table silver survives in giant shoals
down deep where the Atlantic is black.

200 Candles for Ivan Turgenev!

my poems poetry The Indifferent World

turgenev

It’s hard to keep up with family birthdays, much less venerated writers’ birthdays. You stumble across them by accident on the Internet, however. How else would I know that Ivan Turgenev just turned 200 on Nov. 9th?

Like many bibliophiles, I have fond memories of my Russian phase. In fact, if my literary leanings were to be portrayed in print, they might be titled Portrait of the Russian Lit. Reader as a Young Man. As a teen, I was consuming Russkies like pizzas: Turgenev, Chekhov, Pushkin, Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Bulgakov, and especially Tolstoy.

But Turgenev was one of the first. Chiefly reading Sketches from a Hunter’s Album (which has since been published under many like-sounding names), a collection of short stories that I will forever associate with the place where I read them, a Maine farmhouse sitting on top of a hill. I was holed up in that house during a freak November nor’easter.

But what did that matter to me? I had my Turgenev, my wood-burning Franklin stove, plenty of food and drink, and friends and family who had joined me on a deer hunting trip (the least of my ambitions at the time… I was more there for atmosphere than venison).

When I returned to Connecticut days after the storm abated, I continued my Turgenev bender. I still have the black Penguin paperbacks on my bookshelf, too: Fathers and Sons, Home of the Gentry, Rudin, On the Eve.

Now it’s been decades since I read poor Ivan Turgenev’s. He waits patiently on the shelf in hopes of my return. The prodigal reader, and all that. But he’d be happy to know that he did inspire a poem. Appearing in my first collection, it’s called, appropriately enough, “Turgenev Time.”

A gift, then, for Ivan with appreciation:

 

Turgenev Time
by Ken Craft

As a young man, I lay in a finished
basement for years, bound
to an oatmeal carpet, sickly and citrus-skinned
in the tangerine glow of incandescent bulbs.
Outside it was winter in Connecticut; far
away it was Hell in Vietnam; but inside it was merely
hard Berber rug, a gas heater,
and my gentrified Russian novels.
The knot-paneled room offered neither hope
nor despair nor thought of escape. Warm-woozy,
I dozed, awakened, read
more as the heater exhaled
comfort.

In the books, lime trees rattled and rooks took wing.
Bough to fragrant leaf, kvas-drinking peasants
laughed and cursed. On the wind came the smells
of horse and rain and superfluous ideas.
Outside it was spring in Oryol; inside it was
black-backed Penguins, ocher-edged paper,
ink in Monotype Bembo, the chalky outline
of my sun-starved body on the floor.

I remember my mother’s art deco clock, gold spikes
gripping the dark pine wall, how it dripped
hours and minutes, weighing tick for heavy tick
with the pinging heater, submerging
me and my future pasts—all of them—
in the calm killing current of Turgenev time.

 

— © Ken Craft, The Indifferent World, Future Cycle Press, 2016

Of Little Goats and Alcoholics

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Appropriately enough, Kaveh Akbar’s collection, Portrait of the Alcoholic, is dedicated quite simply “for drunks.” It’s not surprising, then, that you get poems dealing with issues of addiction.

One has the catchy title, “Besides, Little Goat, You Can’t Just Go Asking for Mercy.” Well, he could, but it would do him little good if he was about to be sacrificed and roasted as a celebratory meal (no kidding).

It’s exactly how an alcoholic might feel. Or a drug addict. Or anyone harried by any habit they just cannot shed.

Here’s the poem:

 

“Besides, Little Goat, You Can’t Just Go Asking for Mercy”
by Kaveh Akbar

Besides, little goat, you can’t just go asking for mercy.
With a body like that, it’s easy to forget

about the spirit—the sun unfolding over your coat, your throat
too elegant for prayer. I like it fine, this daily struggle

to not die, to not drink or smoke or snort anything
that might return me to combustibility. Historical problem:

it’s harder than you’d think to burn even what’s flammable.
Once I charged into your body and invented breath. Or,

I stumbled into your mouth and found you breathing. When I left,
I left a lozenge of molten ore on your tongue. Stony grain-pounder,

sleepy pattern-locator, do this: cover your wings, trust
the earth, spread your genes. Nothing here is owned. The ladder

you’re looking for starts not on the ground but several feet below it.

An Ode to Food Sections

poetry

 

I don’t know about you but on these cold and dark November days—clocks cowed back an hour to the time of our father’s fathers—I start to think obsessively about food. Fortunately, I am neither alone nor outside the ordinary. In the two weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, everyone and his cousin twice removed (from the kiddies’ table) is thinking about food, most especially newspaper and magazine food editors.

Some people dream of money. Some people dream of bling. And some people dream of wheels (arrest-me-red race cars are cute, after all). But me, I dream of Thanksgiving.

It’s easy. You can even dream with your eyes open. Consider all the color photography around us—feature upon feature with shots of brown-skinned turkeys, glistening bowls of homemade cranberry sauces, steamy piles of stuffing, Brussels sprouts and sausage, sweet potato pie, pumpkin pie, squmkin pie (but mostly, and dearest to my heart, faux mincemeat pie).

Without invitation, Norman Rockwell crashes the party and people laugh. And why not? Everyone at the table is leaning in, smiling, forgetting about the world (thank Squanto!) for awhile. What’s not to like?

These days you’ll find me, then, in the Food sections of the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. Bon Appetit? Yes, please. On-line recipe sites? Some more, please, sir! A gazillion ingredients requiring a full-time cook? Who cares, I’m just reading and dreaming here. You’ll find me in the dictionary between “vicarious” and “pleasures.”

Thanksgiving is where I’d like to slam on the brakes, avoiding Christmas altogether. Or maybe make like ten lords a-leaping by jumping over Christmas altogether. Thanksgiving resonates (and smells up the house with nostalgia) because there’s no gift-buying, no lines, no politics, just family (OK, maybe some politics, if you count Uncle George) and *food*.

And a few winers. And loosen-the-belt nappers. And football-game watching zombies.

But most importantly, it’s a festival focusing on one of life’s most heralded pleasures: food and drink. Before the day, in living color and 28-page spreads. After the day, in leftover turkey soup and ridiculously fat sandwiches featuring breast meat, stuffing, and cranberry as condiment (extra points for gravy)

Calories? No one cares. Cholesterol? Take it outside, Debbie Downer. For one day only, we’re here to cast care to the wind and let cheer and conversation in.

Just had to take a time out to say all of this, is all. Now back to my regularly-scheduled eye feast.  Reading isn’t fattening, after all. It’s just anticipation. Like Carly Simon says….

Metaphoric Push-Ups

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rosary

Easily the most difficult exercise you can practice in poetry is the metaphoric push-up. Leave your like’s and as’s in the cupboard, why don’t you, and point-blank tell the world how this is that, knowing full well that this isn’t that, but the audacity of saying so works. Somehow. Against all odds. Thus, the burn in your creative muscle.

To start, choose something simple. Or unusual. Does it matter? Simplicity and complexity are each malleable. Silly Putty under the kneading thumbs of a child. Play-Doh with its grainy smells of yellow and red and blue. A floury ball of dough in the fine sinewy hands of a baker. Proteus the Shape-shifter would be pleased with all this. His diet is metaphor with milk, three times a day.

Before you have fun, you can read this William Matthews poem called “The Snake.” How many ways can you describe something you take your eyes off of (and your feet away from) ipso fasto every time you come across it? Or, in Matthews’ case, something you can’t take your eyes off of because snakes are a form of hypnosis?

Rhetorical questions, of course. Many, many ways, as shown here. See which metaphor (or rogue simile) you like best:

 

“The Snake”
by William Matthews

A snake is the love of a thumb
and forefinger.
Other times, an arm
that has swallowed a bicep.

The air behind this one
is like a knot
in a child’s shoelace
come undone
while you were blinking.

It is bearing something away.
What? What time
does the next snake leave?

This one’s tail is ravelling
into its burrow—
a rosary returned to a purse.
The snake is the last time your spine
could go anywhere alone.

 

 

Perhaps he saved the best for last, but Matthews really outdoes himself in the last stanza. You know. That bit about the snake returning to its burrow being a rosary slipping back into a purse.

My God and hers, it reminds me of my grandmother, the last person I know to actually use rosary beads, and use them she did. Each bead. Religiously. Doing praying push-ups, which are something  *like* metaphoric ones: a work out well worth the effort. Or so I like to think, imagining my grandmother in heaven, where she belongs.

Sins of the Fathers (and Brothers)

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It’s always amusing to hear people say, “My God. I sound just like my mother.” Or father, for that matter. We grow up vowing that we have learned from what we disliked as children growing up, but sometimes, when cast into the role of parents ourselves, we instinctively begin a shadow dance with our pasts.

The power of childhood is greater and darker than we know. One extreme example lies in the behavior of the aged on their deathbeds. If they are in the throes of pain or delirium, they often call out for long-deceased mother or father. This with a lifelong married partner at their side, even. Such is the powerful imprint of childhood, the wild woods we unconsciously navigate in times of blind stress.

Foreshadowing such behavior are the sometimes unchecked instincts learned in our childhoods not only as sons and daughters, but as brothers and sisters. It is this renegade instinct that the poet Patrick Phillips wrestles with in the following poem, wherein the speaker’s two sons become disturbing echoes of the speaker’s own childhood.

The beauty of the poem? The concrete subject, a wrestling move, lends more than one meaning to its abstract title. It’s one of the things good poetry does. See if you can’t find more than one way to interpret the word “mercy,” as seen through a childhood darkly:

 

“Mercy”
by Patrick Phillips

Like two wrestlers etched
around some ancient urn,

we’d lace our hands, then wrench
each other’s wrists back

until the muscles ached
and the tendons burned,

and one brother or the other
grunted mercy—a game

we played so many times
I finally taught my sons,

not knowing what it was,
until too late, I’d done:

when the oldest rose
like my brother’s ghost,

grappling with the little
ghost I was at ten—

who cried out Mercy!
in my own voice Mercy!

as I watched from deep
inside my father’s skin.

 

Sometimes the “Enemy of the People” Is… the People

poetry

Election Eve Special:

Poetry appears in many places—history, even. Is it not poetic justice, after all, that friends and frequent political jousters John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of American independence?

I am reading Joseph Ellis’s bracing new book, American Dialogue: The Founders and Us, which has a structure of then (as in, the root of our problems) and now (as in, what flower—or thorns—these roots have wrought since the Founding Fathers’ day).

The first section focuses, appropriately enough, on race and on Thomas Jefferson (then and very much now). And although there is a lot I could say about these fascinating opening chapters, I’m moved instead by what I’m reading in the next pair of chapters (“Equality”), which focuses on John Adams.

But why listen to me? Here is Ellis on a critique Adams offered on Thomas Jefferson:

“…the Adams critique of Jefferson operates at a much deeper level of intellectual and ideological sophistication, involving nothing less than a wholesale rejection of what he regarded as the following illusions of the French Enlightenment: the unfounded belief in the preternatural wisdom of ‘the people’; the naïve assumption that human beings are inherently rational creatures; and the romantic conviction that American society was immune to the class divisions so prevalent in Europe. The political differences between Adams and Jefferson are too multifaceted to be captured in the conventional categories of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative.’ What we must negotiate is the distinction between a realist and an idealist, a pessimist and an optimist, a skeptic and a believer. Both men were rock-ribbed American patriots, though diametrically at odds over the likely shape of America’s future…

“The clear implication of [Adams’] presidency, at least as Adams saw it, was that leadership necessarily entailed not listening to the voice of ‘the people’ when it ran counter to the abiding interest of ‘the public,’ which the president had a moral obligation to defend even more forcefully when it was unpopular… Adams had no trouble endorsing the Lockean doctrine that all political power derived from ‘the people.’ but he could never bring himself to think about popular sovereignty in the reverential fashion that Jefferson embraced with such intoxicating assurance. ‘The fundamental Article of my political Creed,’ he declared quite defiantly, ‘is that Despotism, or unlimited Sovereignty, or Absolute Power is the same in a popular Assembly, an Aristocratic Counsel, an Oligarchic Junto and a single Emperor.’

“Adams realized that this creedal statement was heretical in the Jeffersonian political universe, where it was inherently impossible for ‘the people’ to behave despotically. He was attempting to disabuse his old friend of the same kind of magical thinking that had permitted medieval theologians to conjure up miracles. There was in fact no surefire source of political omniscience on this side of heaven, and making ‘the people’ into just such a heavenly creature was a preposterous perpetuation of an alluring illusion about kings long since discredited by Jefferson himself in his indictment of George III in the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, if you wanted to know where such illusions about the infallibility of ‘the people’ led, you only needed to follow the bloodstained trail of the French Revolution, which moved through massacres at the guillotine to its inevitably despotic destination in Napoleon.”

I’m looking forward to the “Now” chapter that complements this Adams one. It is called “Our Gilded Age” and will draw lines, I am sure, between notions of “equality” then and today.

In the meantime, we’d all do well to remember John Adams’ stark warning. Sometimes the enemy of the people is… the people, voting themselves to perdition and other places we don’t want to go.

Happy Election Day, 2018, and I hope you pick up Ellis’s book for a look-see at Thomas Jefferson’s, John Adams’s, James Madison’s, and George Washington’s “dialogues” with the present day. It will cause you to think, and thinking is something the Founding Fathers valued very, very much.