Yearly Archives: 2018

128 posts

When Good Poems Arrive in the Mail

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

poetry poetry books

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

Lost Sherpa of Happiness my poems poetry poetry books

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.

***

Enjoying the posts? Enjoy the latest poems available here.

Unimpeachable? Why Writers Cannot Count on the Constitution

opinion poetry

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.”

Warming Up to Tarjei Vesaas’s Ice Palace

poetry prose poems

ice palace

On the back of Tarjei Vesaas’s book, The Ice Palace, is a blurb by Nova that reads, “Believable and haunting…this beautiful neo-prose poem is as sombre and Scandinavian as a Bergman film.”

I can’t vouch for the Bergman film bit (I think I’ve seen all of one), but I’m all in on the “haunting” and the “beautiful” and the “sombre” parts. As for “neo-prose poem,” I guess that is because it is a novel, not a prose poem, so the prefix gives Nova poetic license to call it such.

Shall we put it to the prose poem test? Here’s a paragraph describing the ice palace itself–a structure which is a collaboration between winter and a waterfall in Norway–to consider. Put your neo- goggles on and see what you think:

“The sun had suddenly disappeared. There was a ravine with steep sides; the sun would perhaps reach into it later, but now it was in ice-cold shadow. Unn looked down into an enchanted world of small pinnacles, gables, frosted domes, soft curves, and confused tracery. All of it was ice, and the water spurted between, building it up continually. Branches of the waterfall had been diverted and rushed into new channels, creating new forms. Everything shone. The sun had not yet come, but it shone ice-blue and green of itself, and deathly cold. The waterfall plunged into the middle of it as if diving into a black cellar. Up on the edge of the rock the water spread out in stripes, the color changing from black to green, from green to yellow and white, as the fall became wilder. A booming came from the cellar-hole where the water dashed itself into white foam against the stones on the bottom. Huge puffs of mist rose into the air.”

Such description could easily become a found poem of the neo-lyric variety, no? Heck with the 500-piece puzzle. Try your hand at a found poem using the above paragraph as an exercise.

Me? I’m off to work, but look forward to some of your efforts. And no, it won’t be graded. Make your found grade an “A” why don’t you? You’ll see that poetic license melts icy grading systems every time….

Snow: The Poetry & Politics of Praising It

poetry

Be careful what you wish for, the saying goes. Was it only a week ago, March 7th, that I posted a poetic paean to snow called “March Snow”?

Yes, I waxed poetic about how innocent March snow was, how wet and transient, how beautiful in that it inevitably signaled Old Man Winter’s death throes.

Are snow storms any reason to stop by woods (to write a poem) on a snowy evening? Or is that strictly the province of a man appropriately named “Frost”?

Last week’s storm turned out to be a nor’easter that knocked our power out for 13 hours. And we were one of the lucky ones. Many surrounding Massachusetts towns were without power for days. In the cold. (Or shall we say, with the cold mousing its way in?)

Schools were closed for two days — Day One because of the snow, and Day Two because of the widespread power outages and downed tree limbs littering impassable side roads.

Yes, pretty March snow is dense with moisture. The kind that weighs on the minds of birch and white pine limbs, especially.

Yesterday, another nor’easter blew through, bringing us 20 inches more of the lovely March Snow. School was cancelled anew. Electrical power blinked off, on, off for good in many homes. And this morning I’ve learned schools will be closed a second day for the second time in two weeks. Four days lost, just like that, to the drifting beauty that is March Snow.

Be careful what you wish for, the saying goes.

And how naive can a poet get, writing rhapsodic about the beauty of snow at the end of its season? Everyone says it’s a pain, a plague, a plight to be endured. Why then, am I thinking “muse”?

It’s an outrage, I guess. I had a small collection of villagers with pitchforks and torches outside my home last night shouting and calling me out. My post brought on these two nor’easters, you see. Jinxed us but good. Must be!

But really, I’m here to stand by my post. These storms are no less beautiful because they take away our games and diversions. No lights, no internet, no TV. Granted, no heat is a more serious matter, but our forefathers (and not just four of them) would seriously wonder what we’ve come to if we no longer prepare for the unexpected. Why, they’d ask, would we live in New England without the back-up peace of mind that’s called a wood-burning stove or a pellet stove?

“Weather happens,” as they used to say in colonial times. “Now let’s write a poem. By candlelight.”

ENVOY:

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
by Robert Frost (a man without a pitchfork or torch)

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Books That Lead You to Books

opinion poetry

Word of mouth is powerful exchange in the market of book selling. No publicist can match it. Person A reads a book and recommends it to Person B, who immediately tells Person C, “You have to read this!” right on down the alphabet.

Me, I’ve had more recommendations via “word of author.” If I admire an author, I often read the writers he or she admires. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Especially if you believe as I do that writing is informed by the writers you admire, consciously or subconsciously.

My first reading extravaganza came thanks to the young and tortured anti-hero, Holden Caulfield, in The Catcher in the Rye. In an early scene in his private school dorm, Holden is found reading.

What’s the title? As the reader bends for a closer look, he finds it is none other than Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen. It might have been a strange choice for a teenager, but as a teenager myself, I hunted it down and read it as well, feeling cool in a Caulfield kind of way.

The other book Holden recommends in this scene is The Return of the Native. Thomas Hardy, the author, was the kind of guy you’d like to call up and talk to, Holden says. Though I was still in high school, I met Eustacia Vye because of Holden. Talk about a blind date! I made it to the end, too–classic or no–and even read a few more Hardy’s (most memorably, Tess of the D’Urbervilles).

Another great word-of-author guy is Ernest Hemingway. He loved to write about eating, drinking, and reading. In A Moveable Feast (misspelling and all), he shares the books he’s checked out of Sylvia Beach’s Paris bookstore, Shakespeare & Co. One was Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches, a book I took with me on a deer hunt in Maine.

We often associate books with location read, and that collection of stories will forever go down as the one in my hands when the early snowstorm socked us into a farmhouse on a Maine mountain. I’d rather read than hunt, anyway.

Hemingway also was reading Constance Garnett’s translation of War and Peace while playing the starving artist in 1920s Paris. That and Dostoevsky’s The Gambler and Other Stories. I credit Ernie with making me the Russophile that I am–at least when it comes to Russian literature from the golden age (19th century).

In The Green Hills of Africa, EH talks books some more. He’s still reading Tolstoy, in fact. “The Cossacks” and Leo’s other stories of Sevastopol. I bought these stories, too, and read them quickly and selfishly, like a hungry dog that doesn’t want to share his meal.

Hemingway doesn’t stop there. He has Stendhal while big-game hunting in Africa, reading Le Rouge et Le Noir. Suddenly and dutifully, I was reading Stendhal as well. I think I liked The Charterhouse of Parma even better, but I never would have read either if not for Ernie.

It’s like dominoes after awhile. When reading Tolstoy, I got to read books he mentioned. Chekhov’s short stories. Pushkin’s wonderful Belkin’s Tales. Lermontov’s atmospheric A Hero of Our Time, another short masterpiece featuring an anti-hero.

Perhaps it speaks to my shy nature as a teenager. Word of mouth was for the social sorts. Me, I hung out with writers in a vicarious way, and followed up on their every recommendation. That habit has brought nothing but literary gold, making me a “wealthy” man of sorts, at least if “well-read” counts for something on the stock exchange.

And if you find Tolstoy and Turgenev and Hemingway in my poems (and you will), it’s for a reason. Books that led me to books.

The Hubris of Daylight Savings Time

humor poetry

You wake up. Squint at the clock. Seven o’clock. Is that possible?

No, wait. Spring ahead. Was this clock sprung before bed?

Yes, because it’s in the bedroom. Or that was your thought last night, anyway. So six o’clock, really. And you went to bed at 11. No, make that 10. Which means you slept a total of… oh, forget about it.

Downstairs to make the Sunday morning coffee. Seems brighter than usual. Or maybe that’s just bright reflecting off the forward-March snow.

Where the hell’s the atomic clock? Or the cable box. The internet will do, too. Big Brothers, all. They have our times, all right. More than we know.

Let the spring rituals begin: Fix the clock on the microwave (quick time). Fix the clock on the stove (hot times). Where else? There’s got to be a rogue clock somewhere, holding its Eastern Standard Time hostage on the principle of it all. Maybe you’ll leave it — the revolutionary in you giving tacit sympathy to its cause.

Who invented Daylights Savings, anyhow? Why are we subjected to these insignificantly significant jolts to our inner circadian rhythms twice a year? Fall bleeping back. Spring bleeping ahead. Late to this appointment. Early to that one.

You don’t want to think about it too much, because the answer is Congressmen. Lord. Politicians! Playing politics with clocks based on their “studies” which, you’ve learned, have to be studied themselves because they’re seldom if ever true.

And this evening, the outside will look strangely different, too. All because of political hubris. All because of men playing god. The Greeks knew a thing or two about the folly of mortals getting uppity. After all, didn’t they invent the word hubris?

Case closed. Eyes closed. You need a nap. Too much thinking for today, especially considering you were robbed of an hour while you slept.

So go ahead. Dream a little. Of clock-less rooms. Of time-less worlds. Of lands where no man can wear his wealth on his wrist and call it an expensive watch. Time will take care of itself. And it will never fall or spring. It will just bide with a little smirk on its lips….