Yearly Archives: 2018

133 posts

Poetry in Motion and Other Moving Thoughts

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Notes on my return from spring break:

Time flies even when you don’t (file under “fear of flying”).
Which is to say, a week off traveling someplace will always disappear faster than a week off at home.
Reading on a train is conducive to sleeping.
After training south on Amtrak’s “Quiet Car” and failing to nab a seat on the “Quiet Car” heading back north, I now fully appreciate how and why the “Quiet Car” was invented.
Which begs the question: Why is there only one “Quiet Car”?
Good news: I finished one book going south and read half of another coming north.
Bad news: As you mathematicians can see, “quiet” = whole book and “noisy” = half a book.
I did not see a single raindrop all week.
Why is it that I love the sound of rain and even the feel of rain but NOT while I’m on vacation?
The book I am reading, A Time for Everything by Karl Ove Knausgaard, was originally written in 2004 but raised from the dead by his notoriety after the My Struggle books.
Meaning: His sales are not struggling.
I only read one poem all week and came home hungry.
Which is more than I can say for my stomach, which seemed to like the looks of every poetic cake, cookie, and candy it saw.
Back to the noisy car north: the culprits were primarily of a technological bent.
Meaning: I think we were on the “Giggly Car,” as three couples around us were watching videos on their phones slash iPads slash laptops while laughing hysterically as if no one else was around them.
Is there anything more annoying than other people continuously laughing on a plane, train, or automobile?
(Answer: “No.”)
(Acceptable Answer #2: “Hell is other people laughing. Continuously.”)
Coughing. It should also be noted that the whole world is coughing uncontrollably. No one seems to have a cough drop or hard candy. No one seems to think of buying Amtrak’s expensive bottles of water to douse their coughing. They just cough. Into the air. With only a half-hearted effort to cover their mouths.
Surely Sartre knew (but kept secret) that Hell is also other people coughing. Continuously. In your air.
One grown man was watching a cartoon on his laptop and telling anyone who would listen all about it. Something on the Comedy Channel. Gigglingly-good.
Is everybody 12?
One woman who was giggling loudly for 45 minutes straight finally fell asleep (apparently exhausted by her laughter). When someone opened and slammed shut an overhead compartment, however, she startled awake and gave the offender a menacing look.
Meaning: It’s OK if I make a lot of noise (because it’s me) but not if you make a lot of noise (because it’s you).
I saw hardly any news this past week and learned that a Trump-free week is good for both body and soul. Especially soul. Call me “Zen Craft,” then. I feel like Columbus after he discovered India in the Caribbean. (Try that next time you are in the Caribbean.)
Today is my official recovery day. The problem with thinking in advance by arranging for an official recovery day before returning to work is there is too much to do on official recovery days, like grocery shopping and laundry and planning lessons and looking at notes for future poems jotted on the blank pages at the end of Karl Ove’s new old book while other people are giggling.
If you’ve come this far, gentle reader, welcome back!

Teaching an Imitation Poem with “The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee”

Once they leave the elementary grades, students are typically loath to write poetry. One way to get them to do so is to use a template based on well-known poem. I get good results with N. Scott Momaday’s “The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee.”

To start, I read the poem and discuss it like you would any other. What do you notice? (Students will surely mention the repetition.) What’s the coolest line? (Many students dig that long track of the moon on the lake.)

From here, I ask students to use Momaday’s structure to write an imitation poem. Thus, all lines in the longer first stanza start with the metaphor-producing words “I am…” and all lines (except for first and last, which I have them use verbatim) in the second stanza start with the words “I stand in good relation to….” In the name of variety, I ask them not to stand in good relation to any of the same things as Momaday, nice as they are.

As a less-intimidating model, I compose my own imitation poem of this poem on the SmartBoard. I also demonstrate a little revision on the whiteboard by writing the rather prosaic line “I am the frost on the grass.” I improve it a bit by changing it to “I am the frost on the morning grass,” but we had already done a lesson on distrusting adjectives — especially if they would come readily to the mind of readers, given the nouns they modify — and students will usually allow that frost on grass is most associated with the morning.

Great! For revision the third, then, I write “I am the crystal on the first frost of November grass.” Still imperfect, but definitely becoming more specific and subtle — similar to the insights Momaday uses to show his intimacy with nature.

For further practice on both identifying unnecessary adjectives (because they’re obvious), write “cold snow,” “white clouds,” “green grass,” and “blue sky” on the board. Ask for a revision competition–something realistic, but, for readers, unexpected. You’ll see how much more satisfying student creativity is when they give you things like “blue snow,” “slate clouds,” “burnt grass,” and “tangerine skies.” (And yes, you might add, using the writerly trick of using a THING that is that color instead of the color itself, works wonders in poetry).

Without fail, the first drafts produced in 18 minutes or so are remarkable, especially when they correlate to each student’s daily life. I have students do a read-around with their groups and choose a favorite from each group to be shared with the class.

Each of these creations are named “The Delight Song of (Student’s Name).” Once placed in a portfolio and read by Mom and Dad, they often draw comments and (dare I say it?) delight.

As it should be!

What Does “National Poetry Month” Actually Mean? I Found the Answers.

humor Lost Sherpa of Happiness opinion poetry The Indifferent World

I almost forgot, but it’s National Poetry Month. How I ever went a full week without realizing it is beyond me, but here we are and here I am, apparently unscathed.

What the heck does National Poetry Month mean, anyway? Is it more inept political meddling on the part of our Do-Nothing Congress led by our Do-Demagogue President? Actually, no. National Poetry Month is the invention of the Academy of American Poets.

Which begs the question: What in the world (OK, country) is the Academy of American Poets, and why am I not an honorary member? Turns out, it is comprised of not only poets but booksellers, librarians, publishers, and teachers. Together, back in 1995, they noted the successes of Black History Month (February) and Women’s History Month (March) to plot National Poetry Month (April) beginning in 1996.

(All I can say is, “Look out, May!”)

The venerable poets.org website offered these tips on how you can celebrate the month, but I have devised a few tips of my own:

Isn’t it time you memorized a poem? Pick one you like and then, in the time you would ordinarily use to check texts on your cellphone every day (about 9 hours and 36 minutes), commit it to memory, two lines at a time.
Read a poem aloud to someone you love. You can do it in lieu of grace some night at supper. Or instead of the maniacally-repetitious “Happy Birthday” song just before the day’s star blows out the candles and spreads his germs all over the frosting.
Copy a short poem onto a large piece of paper and post it at work after hours or before hours. I did this once and then, when everyone tried to figure out who did it, played dumb. It wasn’t hard. (The “playing dumb” part, not the posting a poem part.)
Read a book of poems. Honestly, I can’t tell you how many proud “bookworms” and self-described “readers” never read poetry. It’s a national scandal, which is why I’m leaning toward a National Scandal Month for May (and I know I’ll get cooperation from our president on that one).
In honor of National Poetry Month, the publisher of my first book is practically giving away my first book’s Kindle version for only three bucks. This alone is a national scandal (OK, quite localized scandal), but if it exposes more people to the radiation of my poetry, so be it.
Me, I like the feel of an actual book in my hands, however. I also like the National Sniff-a-Book Month (June is available) smell of its new paper and ink. And while The Indifferent World in paperback is $15.95 at amazon dot glom, I have copies for $12 each, which is something-something percent off (I hate numbers). Just e-mail me for the National-Poetry-Month deal (see “About” section above for e-mail).
And speaking of deals, my newest book, Lost Sherpa of Happiness, can be found on sale the same way.
Which can only mean that National Poetry Month is a way for poets not named Rupi Kaur to sell their books. May you wonder no longer. And if you made it this far, accept my blessings and gratitude. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m off to enjoy National Eat-Some-Pancakes-Drowned-in-Maple Syrup Month…

The Problem with “Best” Poems

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Let’s start with the judging-by-the-cover. The color is green-awful, giving perfectly delicious pea soup a bad name. And the chair. I’m not sure I would fancy the chair, for fear of turning into a fern before page 12 (were I to sit in it, and I would not).

That said, I’m sure Natasha Trethewey, guest-editor for Year of Our Lord 2017, had nothing to do with this cover. Nor did David Lehman (whoever he is), series editor. Sometimes covers just happen. Like Heaven’s Gate in the movies.

Every review of the “Best” series sings the same song: “Unevenly As She Goes.” Me, I like to see what poetry publications the poems are plucked from for future reference. The thinking goes like this: “Golly. Maybe if I send poems to the same publications, THEY’LL be selected as the best among American poems (2018, 2019, what have you) too!”

But it’s like chasing yesterday’s hot stock. Next year’s guest editor may have a yen for very different poetry publications, though you can always count on a few big boppers like Poetry, of course, and The New Yorker.

Among my faves in this collection: “Higher Education” (Jeffrey Harrison), “Certain Things” (David Brendan Hopes), “The Watch” (Danusha Laméris), “The Mercy Home” (Michael Ryan), “Seeing Things” (Charles Simic), “Good Bones” (Maggie Smith), and “Afraid to Pray” (Pamela Sutton).

There. Flip through to these next time you’re at the bookstore. It will be one man’s “best of the best” and equally uneven, proving the futility of the whole process of choosing the best. Or the best of the best. Or the best of the best of the best.

I best stop here. But first, a link to the Charles Simic poem, “Seeing Things.” Simple. Straightforward. However…. My kind of poem.

When Good Poems Arrive in the Mail

poetry reading poetry

horse

You can’t support every poetry journal you admire, and you can’t purchase every book by every aspiring, talented poet you admire, true. But just as true? You can’t sit on the sidelines and support neither.

One of the journals I support is Beloit Poetry Journal out of Maine. When one of your subscriptions arrives in the mailbox, it is good news — gold lying among the muck called bills to pay. And when you find a poem you admire tucked inside its pages, you read it and reread it. You feel like looking up the poet and writing down his or her books to perhaps explore further.

This was the case when I read this little mood piece that had deeper meaning, especially in the last stanza with that wild plum orchard and high corn, with those simple but somehow essential farm bodies “wanting to hear how it is with him now.” See if you like it, too:

after oats they lie down
by J. T. Ledbetter

when las light falls out of the sycamores
into the horse tank work horses plunge their soft noses
into the cold water their backs steaming in the snow

after oats they lie down in straw kicking their legs in their dreams
their eyes white as shadows running beside them

the man waits for the tea kettle pluming on the stove
upstairs his wife combs out her long grey hair and lies down

he cups the hot tea inside his coat and goes to the barn to help the mother
birth the colt then lies down in the bloody stall
watching her nibble at the sack her lips pulled away from her teeth

later he sits in the kitchen with some cold meat and dips a piece of bread in his tea
he sits very still because the blood on his clothes is hard
he does not know his wife has died nor will he know what to do
he will sit beside her until morning then call a neighbor
and wonder if he should turn off something

he will go to the barn to throw down some hay and listen to the pigeons
thrumming against the tin roof
and when shadows move from Turley’s Woods toward the farm
he knows they wait to press their farm bodies against him
wanting to hear how it is with him now
he thinks he could go in if he walks through the wild plum orchard
if he crosses the old bridge into the high corn

— Beloit Poetry Journal, Winter 2018 issue

All I can say of Turley’s Woods (whose shadows move a bit like Birnam Wood) is “whose woods they are, I think I know.”

We all do.

Easter Synchronicity

opinion poetry

Sunday morning–even Easter Sunday morning–is rather ritualistic for me. Always pancakes and maple syrup. Always with the New York Times as reading material.

But sometimes waiting for the New York Times is like waiting for Godot. So instead, I read a book under the buttery light of an early-morning lamp. Or I park myself in a chair by an east window to read by natural light.

It’s nice to read by sunlight, yes, but it’s OK to read by clouds like today’s too, especially to the sound of wind. I am all caught up on my reading, however, having greedily read all of Seamus Heaney’s book on Good Friday.

So I scour the bookshelves for an unread book. Or a book not meant to be read cover-to-back: a perfect “tweener” book, or “dipper” book, or whatever you call such necessary works.

Ah. Here’s one. Dancing in the Water of Life–Volume Five 1963-1965 of Thomas Merton’s journals. How I ever came to have Vol. 5 when I own none of the others, God only knows. But it’s synchronicity, isn’t it? Reading Thomas Merton on Easter Sunday? Waiting for the New York Times? Being glad to be alive, sharing humility and silence with a Sunday morn?

Random Thoughts on the Eve of Easter

opinion poetry

The front page of newspapers is bad for writing poetry, especially these days.
So is watching 60 Minutes, where the forecast is mostly Stormy. It all clouds the brain. Anger “trumps” creativity every time. Turn off your TV, writers!
If you’re bringing your muse in for a check-up by telling friends you just don’t get ideas anymore, you’ve got more than mechanical problems.
Photography before, during, and after serving as president will age a person’s face. Photos of Abraham Lincoln, poor man, attest to that. The only other known ager of men is the poetry market, where you can grow a 5-year-wrinkle just waiting for replies.
For most occasions, “replies” being loosely defined as form e-mails.
March is down to but a few days of lambdom. Then it’s April, the month T.S. Eliot ruined forever by turning it into a cruller. No, wait. A misspelled crueller (sic) month.
(Yes, Virginia, it sometimes snows in April.)
It think it was Basho who once said (in 17 syllables) that selling poetry books is like selling winter coats in July. Renga that.
I once worked in the marketing department of a corporation. The line there was “pennies a day, Mr. Customer. Pennies a day.” So the next time someone looks at the price of poetry books in alarm ($15 for just 85 pages?), remind them that it is but 4/10ths of a cent a day.
Plus, unlike today’s newspaper, it rereads nicely. For years!
And you thought all the deals were at Target!
Almost Easter, which forever reminds me of W. B. Yeats “Easter, 1916,” which (while we’re talking risings) in turn leads me to his poem “The Second Coming” with its iconic lines: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;”
Ordinarily that would be good enough to secure “The Second Coming’s” place among most-quoted poems or poems who gave other writers book-title material, but the poem contains yet one more gem: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
I once went slouching towards Bridgeport. Does that count?
Just finished reading Marie Howe’s debut poetry collection, The Good Thief, which is not as strong as her later collection What the Living Do. The good news? I can learn as much from one as the other.
Why are so many holidays marked by sugar? With Easter upon us, I think of chocolate eggs, chocolate bunnies, and (God save us all) peeps. Halloween? Nothing but door-to-door candy robberies. Valentine’s Day? Love plays second fiddle to sweets, Sweetie. Christmas? Cookies and candies and cakes, oh my! The sugar industry has done something right.
Opening Day in baseball is today. It’s as much a marker of spring as the redwing blackbirds I hear out back.
The problem with gift certificates to bookstores, online or brick and mortar, is spending them. Like Christmas Eve, anticipation is what makes it. Once you buy books, you inevitably bring them home, sometimes to never read them, sometimes to read them and get disappointed. Expectation is a tough character to match.
Spring also means my favorite made-up word: “mudluscious.” Any word e.e. cummings likes but autocorrect does not is OK by me.
If you celebrate Easter, “ham” it up. Me, I’m passing on the ham this year. You reach a point where you crave variety and throw yourself at a restaurant menu’s mercy.

The Beauty of Holding a New Book in Your Hands

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Can you beat the feeling of buying a new book you’re looking forward to reading? I don’t care what the date is, it’s like Christmas morning.

Better than Christmas morning, even, because you don’t have to put up with all the people and the noise and the obligations (and can you think of three more lethal things for reading?).

And not only is the new book good for you, it’s good for the author, who—unless he’s Dan Brown—is not making much on this writing and appreciates every little royalty he can get. (On this count, I speak from first-hand knowledge.)

Me, I like to look the new book over, feel it front and back, sniff a riff of pages. Oh, yeah. Only then do I turn into it slowly, looking at the colophon, dedication page, epigraph, acknowledgments, table of contents, etc.

And when it comes to a new book of poetry, when I’m done teasing myself with a little anticipation, I read the first poem—the warm-up, the promise of things to come–slowly. Then again. And then, because it’s a magical number, a third time.

You knew where I was going with this, I’m sure. This was me, yesterday, with George Bilgere’s new book of poems, Blood Pages, which can be had on sale if you scroll down here.

Anyway, the first poem. Take a look:

’56 Corvette
by George Bilgere

I’m grateful to the camera for reaching out
sixty years ago and putting a stop
to time, if only for the 1/125th of a second,
so that my father and I can sit a little longer
in the nifty white convertible he’s just bought
and driven home to take me for a spin.

I’m five years old, and taking in
what the camera can’t: perfume of seat leather,
my dad’s Chesterfield, and the lilt
of Vitalis in the air as he slips
the little beauty into first, eases out
the clutch, and heads off to be dead
by the end of the year, his liver
finally throwing in the towel.

We smiled as the shutter clicked,
giving the film its sweet slice of light,
and my mother waved and went back into the dark
part of life that doesn’t get its picture taken.

There. See what I mean? New book. Smooth page. Sweet poem with more to follow. All you need do is find your favorite place to read. You know. Away from people, noise, and Christmas morning.

***

When Poets Make Cameos in Your Poems

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horses

It stands to reason, if you read poetry as much as poets do, that sooner or later famous poets will enter your poems. The cameos are not restricted to poets, however. Prose writers rise to the occasion as well. It’s a reimagining of their imagined worlds in your own imagination, if you will.

In my first book, appearances were made by Tolstoy, Turgenev, Pliny, and James Joyce. In the latest, it’s Hemingway and James Wright. The poem below, “Reading James Wright,” appeared in the fall 2017 issue of The MacGuffin, a fine journal of poetry and prose put out by Schoolcraft College in Livonia, Michigan. Subsequently the poem appeared in my latest collection, Lost Sherpa of Happiness.

Reading James Wright
by Ken Craft

I have been wandering with Wright
These two hours, under trees
Shadowy with women and dance. Soon it is dusk.
Somewhere horses
Move. The flint of hooves. The stone masking soft
Kindnesses.
He doesn’t know I am here, mistakes
Me for loneliness on a sturdy branch.
I leave him to his
Beautiful dark,
The dampness of give beneath my feet.

I felt a little sad writing it. For me “his beautiful dark” was the death Wright addressed so often in his poetry. And the “dampness of give beneath my feet” was meant as a metaphor for my own mortality–all of our mortalities–which will someday reunite us beneath the earth.

I can’t stress the importance of writers reading widely enough. When you read a collection by a poet you admire, you come under the writer’s spell. Sometimes the spell leads you to write yourself–about the conjurer. It’s one of the nine muses, I’m more than sure. The name is Greek to me, but you understand.

***

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Unimpeachable? Why Writers Cannot Count on the Constitution

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constituion

Reading the New York Times’ Sunday Book Review, I dwelled longer than recommended on Andrew Sullivan’s review of two Trump-centric books: Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide by Cass R. Sunstein, and Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America, a collection of essays edited by the same man.

First things first: authoritarianism is bad news for everyone, save the powers-that-be and their toadies, but it is particularly dangerous for writers who dare consort with such dangerous accomplices as Truth and Criticism. And I mean writers of every stripe, from journalists to poets. And I mean artists of every stripe, from actors to painters to musicians, because authoritarians love to lump us all together and label us: “liberals,” “socialists,” “elitists.”

That last one is particularly amusing. I am about as elitist as an old truck. But if the powers-that-be label you and repeat their lies enough, their toadies in the swamp begin to sing the same song. The refrain? Any enemy of Trump’s is an enemy of the state’s.

Back to Andrew Sullivan’s article: If you’re looking for a cautionary tale on authoritarianism, Sullivan writes, you need go no further than Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is systematically turning that country’s democracy into permanent one-man rule.

Could it happen in the United States? As Trump begins to beat the drums (read: tweet the tweets) more and more about Robert Mueller the closer Mueller’s investigation leads back to Trump’s lair, the answer is increasingly becoming a foregone conclusion that no doubt will include Mueller’s firing. Here’s Sullivan in a key paragraph:

“The dismemberment of a public discourse centered on objective truth is a key first step, fomented by unceasing dissemination of outright lies from the very top, metabolized by tribal social media, ever more extreme talk radio and what is essentially a state propaganda channel, Fox News. The neutering of the courts is the second step — and Trump is well on his way to (constitutionally) establishing a federal judiciary whose most important feature will be reliable assent to executive power. Congress itself has far less approval than Trump; its inability to do anything but further bankrupt the country, enrich oligarchy and sabotage many Americans’ health care leaves an aching void filled by… a president who repeatedly insists that ‘I am the only one who matters’.”

Sullivan goes on to bemoan the fact that “the possibility of reasoned deliberation at the heart of democratic life has been obliterated by the white-hot racial and cultural hatreds that Trump was able to exploit to get elected and that he constantly fuels.”

Scarier still? Trump has not cornered the market on capitalizing on racial and cultural hatred. It is unfolding in other countries as well, all in an ominously 1930s kind of way.

Sullivan wraps up his book review with these profoundly disturbing words: “The Democrats find themselves in opposition a little like Marco Rubio in the primaries. Take the high road and you are irrelevant; take the low road and you cannot compete with the biggest bully and liar on the block. The result is that an unimpeachable president is slowly constructing the kind of authoritarian state that America was actually founded to overthrow.

“There is nothing in the Constitutions’s formal operation that can prevent this. Impeachment certainly cannot. As long as one major political party endorses it, and a solid plurality of Americans support such an authoritarian slide, it is unstoppable. The founders knew that without a virtuous citizenry, the Constitution was a mere piece of paper and, in Madison’s words, ‘no theoretical checks — no form of government can render us secure.’ Franklin was blunter in forecasting the moment we are now in: He believed that the American experiment in self-government ‘can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.’ You can impeach a president, but you can’t, alas, impeach the people. They voted for the kind of monarch the American republic was designed, above all else, to resist; and they have gotten one.”

As Sullivan sums up his words on Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America, he hints that the collected essayists have already come to a frightening conclusion regarding the titular question of the hour: Can it happen here? “If you read between the lines,” he writes, “‘it’ already has.”