Yearly Archives: 2018

133 posts

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….

 

 

We Interrupt This Plot-Based Novel to Give You a Poetic Moment

poetry

As a lifetime dog guy, I know better than to say, “I hate cats,” because my wife and I have owned a few cats along the way and, I’ve discovered, you do get your occasional cat who acts like a dog. It would be more accurate, therefore, to say I am a dog guy who might like the rare cat that runs against the snooty cat grain.

Ditto poems and novels. There’s no black and white. I read novels for escapism and, often, the words. Every poet knows it when he or she is in a “poetic” novel. Heck with the roses. You stop and smell the imagery, the metaphors, the word choice.

As you can imagine, it can take a long time to read a poetic novel due to all this stopping and sniffing. But sometimes, like Cracker Jacks, there’s a surprise inside of garden-variety, read-for-pleasure novels, too.

Once such book is the recently-released ghost tale, The Afterlives, by Thomas Pierce. After the required-by-law slow start, it picks up steam. Plot, mostly. Flip, flip, flip. This is what pages are for, most readers will assure you. But then, on p. 251, I came across this:

“She slept peacefully, her warm rump turned toward me, the blanket halfway up her leg, a burn mark on the sheet from the dryer. Everything felt significant, fleeting.

“I wanted to appreciate every aspect of this moment, to preserve it, to live in it forever. Annie’s light wheezing breath, the dance of the curtain across the AC vent on the floor, the clock’s red flashing colon that held the hours from collapsing into the minutes. I was in agony. I was crying. Sobbing, actually, face pressed to the pillow, the heat of my face rebounding off the fabric.”

No, it’s not Wallace Stevens or anything, but for one brief, shining moment, the speed-read-me novel of entertainment pauses to slow down its story, to catch a breath and drop a little imagery (Annie’s warm rump, the heat of his face on the pillow, the dancing curtain above the vent, the burn mark on the sheets).

I especially enjoyed the clock’s red flashing colon acting like a bulwark, trying to keep hours from collapsing into minutes. This novel is concerned, after all, with time and its partner in crime, death, with where we go after we die, and (the crowd-pleasing part) with ghosts who can’t quite cross the river, preferring to loiter among mortals who still haven’t figured out they’re not immortal. Thus, the clock imagery is especially apt to the moment.

So, yeah. As a reader you just never know when your escapist novel might gift you a poetic interlude. When you find it, take it for what it’s worth.

And, if your plot book gives you NO poetic moments, so be it. Make like Lewis and Clark and move on — over the western horizon to a book of poetry where you can breath deep the loyal doggy air for a bit. Variety, someone told me, is the spice of life….

Poetry Pays in Strange Ways

blathering comma mine humor my poems poetry

book

Writing is work–a craft as much as the handsomely-paid job of carpentry. Too bad payment for writing is nowhere near that enjoyed by the lads of lumber. Poetry specifically pays poorly. Most often, when you submit to a journal, your compensation is (ta-da!) a complimentary copy.

Which brings us to today’s conundrum–what to do with all of those complimentary copies. My shelves are already looking at me cross-eyed thanks to all the book weight. Like Atlas, they shoulder the load as asked, but they’re beginning to wonder, “Do you have to jam them in so much and slide horizontal books on top of the vertical ones to boot? I mean, really. There’s reasonable, and then there’s you.”

I dare not bring up the complimentary copy topic because they, too, are beginning to spread like a magazine megalopolis on the far left space of the second shelf. At first, of course, I was thrilled with not only the compliments, but the copies. Look! I thought. These poetry journals are publishing me, myself, and I — my three favorite nouveau poets!”

But then, after the thrill flew south, the mailbox arrival of another journal became more pedestrian. And the bookshelf! I had near-civil war breaking out between books and journals. “They’re called BOOKshelves for a reason!” my copy of War and Peace said to the nearest journal. (It’s never good when personification erupts between books and journals, let me tell you.)

And that’s not the end of the story with complimentary journals, either. When they arrived, I found myself reading my accepted poems — always in fear of finding an error — and a few of the other poems but never the whole thing.

The routine often went like this: Open with trepidation to own page, read own poem for errors, breathe sigh of relief, shelf.

Only what to do with them once they’re shelved? In all honesty, I haven’t taken a single one out to read again. In the words of the prophets Simon & Garfunkel: “Time, time, time, see what’s become of me!”

“You could steel yourself and toss them,” one friend suggested.

“But what if my kids want to read them someday? You know, once they live in Posterity, N.Y., and I’m gone like the wind?”

“Do your kids want your furniture now that you’re downsizing? Your appliances? Your clothes? No, no, and no–so who are you kidding? All kids want of their parents’ is money and expensive jewelry.”

I call my friend The Voice of Truth. Then I show him the door, so he can hang outside with Honesty, another impertinent sort.

Eh. Not a big deal, in the end. So if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to settle the latest squabble on my bookshelf….

March Snow

blathering comma mine poetry

springsnow

Waiting for snow today. And the only thing more poignant than March snow is the “cruelest month’s” snow come April. With a few spring-like days behind us, winter’s fate is already taken for granted. No one takes it entirely seriously when it drops snowfall heavy and wet and weary, the cold sweat of a few months’ work already weighing its skies.

None know this better than the red-winged black birds I have already heard in the marsh behind us this week. The bands of robins who arrive earlier and earlier each year. The sleep-deprived black bear whose hibernation grows shorter and shorter each carbon-cankered winter.

So bring it on. It will be pretty on the witch hazel buds already reddening. The tiger lily shoots already prowling at dawn for spring sun. The white pine’s ever-gentle green.

Drivers will tolerate snow with an amused look now. Some might even hit the brakes in the parking lot at work, sneaking in a final skid and swerve. A little fun late in life, both the driver’s and the winter’s. A little reminisce of distant teenaged days. A final toast to snow that’s slow to go, that hangs on to life like all living things do.

We all enjoy a good fight to the end. An underdog. A snow whose life story is already written and ready for the press. Thus, our subconscious tolerance for snow like today’s, as beautiful as November’s first snow, after all.

Pulitzer Pablum and Other Curiosities

humor opinion poetry

Hello, Ruby Tuesday. Special, apparently, to Mick Jagger, but for me, just another day of the week to wonder, whine, and wax ineloquent about this wonderful world we share through no choice of our own. (Please, though. Don’t blame Mom and Dad. They were young and restless, too, at one time!)

  • Is it me, or do award shows like the Oscars begin to verge on self-parody more and more?
  • March Madness is here! Unfortunately for NCAA basketball, the “madness” is more about corruption and greed than about zone defense and buzzer beaters. Bracket that.
  • I’ve loved getting to know Marie Howe’s poetry in recent weeks, but looking at her author photo makes me worry about the weight of her hair. What some of the receding-hairline crowd would do for some of that profusion!
  • Since writing about listening at poetry readings on these pages, I have heard from more and more people (even poets!) admitting that they often don’t fully grasp what’s being read to them, either. “Listen my children, and you shall hear…,” is all I can say. Well, actually, I can say a lot more than that, as you can see…
  • Ever notice how some poetry terms refuse to stick? Dactyls and litotes and haibuns (oh, my!). Like Teflon, I fear. Sliding off the cerebellum every time.
  • Best poet’s name of all time? I nominate William Wordsworth.
  • Did you know that Ernest Hemingway’s first literary efforts were in the field of poetry? It didn’t go so well, but credit where credit’s due: some men know when to retreat.
  • In reading William H. Gass’s essay, “Pulitzer: The People’s Prize,” I came across these amusing quotes: “The Pulitzer Prize in fiction takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses…,” “Not only will [judges] be partisans of their own tastes–that’s natural–each will be implicitly asked to represent their region, race, or sex…,” “While the Pulitzer Prize for poetry has none of the esteem that the Bollingen conveys, it has been spared fiction’s shame, partly, I think, because there is no appreciable audience at all for poetry, consequently no reader whose moral and mental welfare the judges must consider their prizewinning poems to improve.”
  • Rest assured, when Gass uses “People’s” as an adjective, he means it as a pejorative.
  • While we’re on classical Gass and his opinions (the man does not lack!), he despises the present tense. (Should I say he despised the present tense?) Many poets, on the other hand, seem to love it as much as the dish did the spoon (hey diddle, diddle).
  • March, the Season of Mud (or “mudluscious,” as edward estlin might say), gives us but one holiday: St. Patrick’s Day. Call the famous beer mix a “black and tan” at your own risk (at least in Ireland). Half and half, that’s called!
  • And I have no idea what “Erin Go Bragh!” means, but I do know this much about the 17th: If you’re not Irish, fake it.
  • Enya: Flash in the pan, or talent?
  • The world is divided into two kinds of poetry lovers: Those who see Rupi Kaur as a “gateway poet” leading our youth to better things, and those who see Rupi Kaur as a gateway (in need of oil).
  • Credit where it’s due: Some “Instagram Poets” (anything like the “Lake Poets”?) are making more hay than their more conventionally-published brethren (ahem).
  • I love the word “brethren.” I like it’s sound: “Brethren.”
  • I am dabbling in Inscape, a meditation app that I borrowed my wife’s iPad to use (as I have no cellphone). The lady who leads you through your meditative practice has a lovely voice (making her my brethren), a lovely accent (though I can’t place the country), and a peculiar way of saying “nose” (like it’s the plural of “no”).
  • For those keeping score, so far it’s Monkey Mind 56, Me 0.
  • Goodreads, Amazon’s latest glom, recently switched its Goodreads Giveaway program for authors from free to $119 a shot (make that $599 for a “premium Giveaway,” because the word “premium” is expensive). Each GR author sees an “Authors & Advertisers” blog on his or her Author Dashboard. And Goodreads invites comments to these blog entries, of course — except for posts about the Goodreads Giveaway program. Comments are mysteriously closed on those posts.
  • Amazon, champions of freedom of speech! (Care for a little verbal irony with your coffee this morning?)
  • A good day’s reading, suggested dosage one poem each: Galway Kinnell, Jane Kenyon, Jack Gilbert, Robert Frost, Wislawa Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, Marie Howe, Jane Hirshfield,  James Wright, and Tony Hoagland. With plenty of liquids and lots of bedrest.
  • I’m never quite ready for the surprise question: “Name your favorite poem.” Even if you tell me in advance.
  • Best headline seen the past month, from Charles M. Blow of the New York Times: “America Is a Gun.”
  • I recall the line “Pass, crow…” from a poem, but cannot recall the poem itself. That doesn’t stop me from talking to the birds in question, occasionally: “Pass, crow,” I say. They laugh in their crow kind of way.
  • I had to look up “pablum” for the headline of this post. Just to make sure. You know. Teflon again. But I had it right. “Trite, insipid, simplistic writing.” First drafts, in other words.

Outrage as Political Muse

poetry reading poetry

check

Some writers believe politics and poetics do not mix. Like oil and water, fire and water, cats and water. Not true, of course. Almost any argument in poetry’s clothing is a political poem, and then there’s the obvious statement. The Dirty Harry, Go-Ahead, Make-My-Day poem.

Before I put my Wendell Berry collection aside, I’ll share a poem of this breed. In these dark times, I regret to say, Americans could add many stanzas to Berry’s work, then deliver the amended poem to the White House, where it would have to find someone who could read (much like medieval times, where a member of the clergy was on hand to read and write for the king).

 

Questionnaire by Wendell Berry

1. How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.

2. For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.

3. What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy

4. In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.

5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security;
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.

 

Don’t misunderstand me. Donald Trump, who this weekend responded to the news of China’s presidency becoming permanent by musing about America following its lead, has not cornered the market on having to fill such questionnaires out. More and more, the world begins to resemble the 1930s with the types of leaders Trump, in his utter simplicity, admires.

Therefore, if it applies, many “leaders” may take up a pencil and respond to Berry’s queries. No matter, though. Wherever it’s taken, the final score will be Poet 1, Politician, 0.

How To Be a Poet

poetry reading poetry

The old joke goes: “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.” And, of course, any word could be substituted for “doctor”–even “poet.”

Wendell Berry’s poem “How To Be a Poet” got me to thinking: Is there, as with Taoism, a “way”? When my students insist they cannot write poetry, I show them Naomi Shihab Nye’s One Boy Told Me, a found poem consisting of wonder straight from the mouth of her young son.

“We’re all poets when we’re little,” she says. For young writers who all share on their résumés this thing called “childhood,” it’s helpful. Each student can recollect things they said and noticed as a kid, and if they can’t, they need only interview their parents for homework and come back “poets” the next day!

But back to Wendell Berry. His “how-to” is more poetic, as you might expect. Thus, would-be poets thinking in terms of black berets, happening cafés, and certain prescribed ways need not apply. If muses could be bought in a bottle, after all, every alchemist would sell them.

 

How To Be a Poet
(to remind myself)

i
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.
ii
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
iii
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.
#
#
#
The last two lines are a bit like a koan: “make a poem that does not disturb / the silence from which it came.”
Meditate on that, grasshopper. Then see if you can figure your own way to be a poet, for someone else’s way is never yours. If that comes as some disappointment to you, trust me. You’ll be better for it in the long run.