Yearly Archives: 2018

132 posts

Finding Your Own Way Up Cold Mountain…

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cold mtn

Reading Kazuaki Tanahashi & Peter Levitt’s new translation of The Complete Poems of Cold Mountain while also being subjected to news of the Supreme Court nomination hearings of Brett Kavanaugh is a telling study in contrasts. One is pointless, the other enduring. One is noise, the other sound.

Where would you be if you didn’t listen to or read a word of this tribal news from Washington, this much ado about nothing? On your way up Cold Mountain, that’s what.

As the first poem demonstrates, “the way” is not so much a path as a state of mind—one that is pure and protected from the clanging cymbals we call power and greed and hate.

Cold Mountain, Poem #1
by the Hermit Hanshan

You ask the way to Cold Mountain,
but the road does not go through.
In summer, the ice is not yet melted,
the morning sun remains hidden in mist.
How can you get here, like I did?
Our minds are not the same.
When your mind becomes like mine,
you will get here, too.

Deep breath in, slowly out….

Walking the Thin Line: Nostalgia vs. Sentimentality

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No matter how long it has been since you sat behind a school desk, you carry that school desk with you throughout life. For better or worse. With memories good and bad.

For teachers, the bittersweet memories consist of two pasts harmonizing fitfully: a student past first and a teacher past second. Perhaps no poems nails the teacher past as nicely as one of Edward Hirsch’s appearing in the September / October issue of The American Poetry Review.

“Days of 1975” treads on tricky territory. We’ve been here before. Some call it sentimentality (negative connotation) and some nostalgia (positive). Totally avoiding the former and going lightly on the latter is one of the tougher tasks a poet can undertake. Take a look at how Hirsch handles it here:

Days of 1975
by Edward Hirsch

It started with the tattered blue secret
of Bashō, that windswept spirit,
riding my back pocket for luck.
It started with a walk
through the woods at dawn,
mud on my new shoes,
high humming in the trees.
I was not prepared for the scent
of freshly turned soil
to pervade the empty classroom
or the morning to commence
with a bell that did not stop
ringing in my head.
So many expectations filed
noisily into the room–
I was ready to begin.
From the tall windows
I could see a storefront church
opening on the other side
of the polluted river.
I remember walking past the rows
and rows of bent heads,
scarred desks,
and gazing up
at the Endless Mountains.
In those hopeful days of 1975
I drove the country roads
in honor of radiance.
O spirit of poetry,
souls of those I have loved,
come back to teach me again.

Starting with an invocation to one of the greatest masters of haiku gives Hirsch immediate leeway. Both the Japanese and the Chinese poets were masters of brevity, imagery, nature, the senses. More still, they were masters of the unstated, which plays no small role in Hirsch’s poem.

Thus, the luck of Bashō in the back pocket of this (probably young) teacher beginning his journey; thus, the walk through the woods before school and the smell of mud under new shoes in the classroom. The spirit has entered!

For teachers, the sad beauty of the poem lies in phrases like “So many expectations filed / noisily into the room” and “I remember walking past the rows / and rows of bent heads, / scarred desks….” Perhaps others don’t know how difficult it is to fulfill the hopes of so many who are at such different levels of skills and who bring into the room so many different metaphorical crosses and satchels from home. But the good teacher must and the good teacher does his best.

The poem’s timelessness is evident when the teacher views the “Endless Mountains” outside those “tall windows” of what no doubt is a huge old brick structure with giant windows of the old style. The endlessness could be interpreted in many ways, whether it is one dealing with nature’s profusion and constant cyclical growth (from Bashō’s time to ours) or with the regenerative nature of students—each year the teacher ages but his students do not. They reappear each September, always in the same grade and always at the same age.

In the end, Hirsch goes where only the ancients and the confident dare tread by using the word (letter?) “O”: “O spirit of poetry, / souls of those I have loved, / come back to teach me again.”

Now the scarred desk is turned. Now the teacher, apparently aged and looking back many years, is pleading for the return of innocence and beauty — the “radiance” — that once filled his being, something he tried to share with his students.

I like how “souls of those I loved” is used as an appositive for “spirit of poetry” here. In that sense, observing beauty and capturing its transient essence in a poem is love. It is also the reason we write.

Writing Is a Solitary Pursuit, But…

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Writing is a solitary pursuit, yes, as well it should be. And it seems best suited for the early morning hours.

But first things first. If you have a dog, you have a perfect excuse to walk it in pre-dawn darkness. Only this morning there was the full moon, making the headlamp unnecessary, and that white brushstroke of clouds around it, lining itself up for you and you alone. On mornings like this, only the brightest stars still have their say, and you say in kind, “Good morning,” with a humble nod of the head.

Back inside, dog fed, you make coffee like a Buddhist, listening as the water boils, enjoying the steam as it rises from the wet grounds, sniffing those warm echoes of distant Guatemala’s beans.

Waiting for the water to settle through the cone, I typically read a poem. This morning, opening Hayden Carruth’s Collected Shorter Poems 1946-1991, it was “Of Brook and Stone” on p. 245:

Bo, may you someday,
as I now you,
here by our brook in a yellow
August afternoon,

bless your son in his absence
from you, you then
standing as I stand, alone
on our big stone.

And may, though many changes
will have transmuted many
things, this rock still
hold you, and this old brook’s

water still flow then
as now, murmuring
beneath your feet of why
and how and when.

Kind of sad and beautiful, that, reminding me of my own absent son, of how we have things that are “ours” too, things as simple and lovely as a big stone. The first sip of coffee couldn’t help but taste better after that.

As a youngster, I was a writer of letters. Thus, the daily arrival of mail in the summer was an event. Approaching the mailbox. Hearing the rusty hinge upon opening. Hoping the hollow would be filled with envelopes, at least one of which was addressed by a friend responding in kind.

Nowadays, as a writer, there is some of that in checking morning e-mail. Writing is a solitary pursuit, yes, as well it should be. But one always anticipates the arrival of a stranger’s e-mail. A stranger / editor accepting one or more of your poems.

This is one thing writers live for, no? For their work to speak in some way to a stranger. A stranger eager to share it with even more strangers through publication. That way the poem can become a big stone, too, words flowing below it like a brook.

You stand on the stone. You think of others who now hold it in common with you. The “why and how and when.”

News Flash: Poetry Matters Again!

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The September 2018 issue of The Atlantic — a bit briny as usual — just beached itself in my mailbox and lo, there was a feature article on poetry in it! What’s more, it’s headline proclaimed (“Dewey Wins!”-like) “How Poetry Came to Matter Again.” Which means, in case you haven’t been paying attention, that poetry hasn’t really mattered at all. Up until now, I mean.

For full appreciation, you should read Jesse Lichtenstein’s article yourself. I can sum up its main points, however. The Pearly (Very, Very White) Gates have been stormed. Like Lazarus, poetry has been brought back to life, most probably by a dark-skinned, female, transgender Jesus.

Meaning: We owe a debt of gratitude to the very people our wonderful president Donny (and president of vice, Mikey) have little use for: immigrants, minorities, LGBTQ, and females.

This should come as no surprise to people peddling their poetry. In their submission write-ups, many markets make special points of soliciting work from these writers. This article clarifies why. New blood. New life. New voices. All good, especially if it makes poetry appealing to young readers and listeners, all but forgotten by poets of the past.

Also getting shout-outs in Lichtenstein’s article? Spoken word and performance poetry. Old-school types may be writing their poetry under bushels, sharing only with each other in the shadows of their critiquing covers before sending poems out along the traditional poetry highways to poetry magazines and poetry publishers, but the new schoolers are taking the road more digitally traveled.

They’re taking their poetry public to ITube, YouTube, and WeTube; to podcasts, Instagram, and open mics. They’re truly out there. Self-promoting, self-proclaiming, self-advocating. As Exhibit A, I need only say two words: “Rupi” and “Kaur” (or, as she is known in some poetry circles: “best” and “seller”).

Me, I am new to the poetry-writing world and have found it very tight indeed. Protective circles, the higher you go. Fellow back-scratchers. M’s, F’s, and A’s, sprinkled with teacher-poet’s pets who promote their proteges.

This does not make me a minority in the classic sense. It just makes me a (ahem) “seasoned” white guy who only merits the title “minority” as an “outsider.”

That’s OK, though. I took heart that this article promoted a renewed acceptance of the pronoun “I” and how new voices are unabashedly embracing it. I’ve written about the pronoun “I” and poetry before, if you’re a pronoun fan.

It’s also important to remember that, no matter what our backgrounds or identities, we are all similar in our humanity, though separate in our unique mortal coils, each built by unique histories.

In that sense, we are all immigrants to the world, all conscripted against our wills to our finite lives, all capable of speaking to readers no matter what their age, race, sex, or gender identity.

I like to think, at least.

So the lesson of the article is this: Poetry is not an ivory tower, it is a big tent. Poetry belongs to the people, and the people can be reached in new and unique ways.

What’s more, poetry does not and should not belong to select cliques. This includes poetry pecking orders. They should be toppled like statues of Stalin. Yet poets, young AND old, talented and published, still stick to promoting only their friends and writers they consider their equals.

If you want to write for yourself, that’s cool. For me, though, poetry without readers is like speakers without listeners. A supreme form of solipsism.

As JFK might have put it, then: Ask not what poetry can do for you; ask what you can do for poetry. Audiences are out there and waiting.

Random Thoughts: August Edition

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augustus

Yes, it’s time for some Random Thoughts (Copyright and Patent Pending) for the month of August, named after the formidably crowned Caesar Augustus:

Speaking of August, summer is fast running out of real estate, at least for teachers. It officially ends on September 23rd, yes, but for educators, it ends on the first day of school, whatever day that happens to be in your corner of the world.
That day, by the way, is a day of mourning for tanned teachers returning to the trenches and a day of joy for weary parents everywhere (who, as July and August can attest, have earned their joyous stripes by now).
For teachers, July and August are in no way equal. July is like Saturday on a weekend—as vast as the desert and school-thought-free—whereas Sunday is a patch of cricket-charged meadow, leg-scratching its warnings: “Tomorrow is Monday-read-September! Tomorrow is Monday-read-September!”
It’s OK, though. I just heard the loons calling my number from the lake. I don’t know why these birds have become borderline worshipped by the greater public, but I’m glad they have. I like their size, their red eyes, and their crazy-as-hell-make-that-our-world-today calls.
Did you know the bald eagle and the loon are sworn enemies? And that eagles often steal meals captured by hawks? And that Ben “My Main Man” Franklin wanted the wild turkey over the bald eagle as our national symbol because the eagle was such a lazy opportunist?
I think “lazy opportunist” might be a better symbol for a capitalist country, however. Sorry, Ben. I still like your hundred-dollar bills, though. We poets earn them all the time. Alas, the currency is always in the mail.
I am forever amused, when listening to the classical channel streaming on-line, to the serious way announcers pronounce good-ole Johann Sebastian’s last name: Baccchhhh. It’s like some classical thing has caught in their throats. Or like they are choking into the mic at the crucial moment.
Or maybe it’s just German.
I just finished Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient because the Booker people, in a successful bid to sell more books, labelled it the Booker to End All Bookers. Truth be told, I think it holds up better as an extended poem than a logical novel. Like the girl nursing the titular hero, I lost patience by the end. More than once! Thus, the plural. Of patients, you see.
(Note to self: If you’re working too hard for a joke, it’s not a very good joke.)
Fast approaching: September 1st, a day umpteen poetry markets (read: colleges) open. Ready, set… reading fee!
And yes, the non-reading fee market is shrinking like plastic wrap these days. You may well wonder who’s reading your work for all these fees. In many cases, it’s not the editors. In some cases, it’s no one at all. Slush-pile volunteers are a varied crew, many of them more intent on incoming texts than your poem.
I am now charging “rejection fees” to the tune of $3 each received in my new “for-pay-only” inbox. I call it The Empire Strikes Back! and it is a lucrative trade.
In other words, Pay is your Pal. Dot all-is-calm.
In the New York Times Book Review, we get Boris Fishman reviewing Keith Gessen’s A Terrible Country (referring to a man’s return to his native land, Russia). Fishman mixes quote with paraphrase to give us this, “…yes, Putin was a coldblooded killer, but ‘he was our coldblooded killer,'” which could not help but remind me of another country, only one led by a coldblooded liar who is supported by people of similar logic (“…yes, he is a coldblooded liar, but he is our coldblooded liar”), Mr. Ten Guesses.
If you want further explanation of that “we know he’s a liar but we love him anyway” logic, this Emily Ogden piece is a must-read. In summary: “If he pisses off the people we want to piss off, we don’t much care. In fact, we love his shtick all the more!”
So much for the requisite political asides in our monthly Random Thoughts edition. It is a requirement of the Resistance, and I live too close to the Concord Bridge not to heed its call.
Spoiler Alert: In the end, the Minutepoets win.
In a nod to the King of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, I have adopted his line regarding my book, Lost Sherpa of Happiness.. Here it is: “Order Soon! Only 2 Remaining! More on the Way!”
Translation in Bezos-$peak: “Hurry, damn it! Those two will be worth money some day– more than a rejection fee, even!”
Happy Monday and Happy Fleeting Summer, people. Keep reading, and make sure that poetry collections are part of your regime.
As Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, once said: “Read literature. Not too little. Mostly poems.”

First-Place “Garbage”

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As with journalism, poetry often rewards those with an angle. Got something new, different? Or are you the same old skylark, Grecian urn, and daffodils; the same old mended wall, spidery design, and woods-you-think-you-know?

In her chapbook, Reservoir (winner of the 2017 Yemassee Journal Chapbook Contest), Taneum Bambrick assembles 17 poems. Only they’re not your ordinary poems. Rather they got the jump on any competition by detailing the experiences of a young woman working a traditional “man’s” job.

And an unusual job it was — working out in the wilderness, picking up the neglected, the dead, and the unwanted. Stuff. Junk. Carcasses. Then trying to act nonplussed as it is heaved into the back of a pick-up or a thick bag or the landfills of memory.

What is life like with a garbage crew, then? For a taste, you can visit The Nashville Review for a look-see at the poem, “Litter.” Lots of alliteration. And imagery that reeks wonderfully off the page (screen, what have you). Forceful stuff.

In “Visitor’s Center,” notice Bambrick’s attention to detail and devotion to the exact words associated with a hatchery pond: “sturgeon,” “shoal,” “Coho,” “upper-tail lobes,” “bone plates,” “scutes,” “barbels.”

Something’s fishy all right. And the chapbook manuscript’s chances were lifted not only by the requisite talent in poetry but by the novelty in both topic and approach.

So if you aren’t familiar enough with something unique to write about, you can certainly approach it from a direction (upwind, I suggest) seldom taken. It might just land you a “Who, me?” win.

Congratulations to Taneum Bambrick, and continued well wishes to poets everywhere exploring the hidden angles of life.

Poetry — The Word, Not the Genre

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poetry

In recent months, the Poetry Foundation’s flagbearer magazine, Poetry, has been featuring the same cover, only with different typographical fonts and colors, using the six letters in the word “poetry.”

While I have not been ga-ga about what is being printed between the pages of this magazine, I do like the simplicity and beauty of laying out covers like this. I stare at them often, like a coffee-table book you never open but leave out for public amusement and occasional dust collection.

It’s a bit of a tic-tac-toe, really. Going with contiguous letters, you find a few familiar friends hiding in the word:

POE as in good old Edgar Allan
POT as in a saucepan or a hippie’s best friend
PET as in the little furry fellow at your feet
YEP as in an informal consent
YET as in “not…”
REP as in a shorthanded representative (it was probably caught in the POT)
PERT as in saucy and flip
OPT as in “out”
TOE as in the ten (we hope) lowest parts of your body politic
TOPE as in drinking to excess or (who knew?) a type of shark
TRY as in what poets do every day, supposedly
TREY as in being related to the number three (e.g. basketball’s 3-pointer)
RYE as in pumpernickel bread or a field of Holden’s own
POET as in the mirror you’re gazing at or the writers you should be but probably are not reading (coward)

poetry 2

Of course, once you move on to jumping letters, all poetry breaks loose:

ROPE as in a useful tool for sailors and hangmen
ROT as in a useful British expression
PREY as in, if it didn’t exist, PREDATORS would go out of business (or, like that “successful businessman, Donald Trump,” declare bankruptcy early and often)
ORE as in iron or Oregon, maybe
YORE as in “years of…”
PRO as in a professional abbreviator
TOY as in what hijacked Christmas
ROE as in the eggs of fish or lobster (ew)
PORT as in ships seeking a safe harbors, or a specialty wine
TROPE as in a used and abused figure of speech from days of YORE

And so on and so forth. You might get a subscription to try the game yourself, but I’m off this judging-a-magazine-by-its-cover kick so will make the Beatles and let it be.

Still, if you find more words and want to have useless (to posterity) fun with POETRY, feel free to comment away.

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Sour Notes Will Happen

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cherry

I thoroughly enjoyed Donald Hall’s hand-picked “best hits” (in 2015) The Selected Poems of Donald Hall. For me, only a couple of poems hit a sour note, but that’s a great batting average, for poetry.

One was “Black Olives,” which lamented high school days when young Donald was good at being a mascot, a class president, and a poet (his best line as a young poet: “dead people don’t like black olives”),but not a favorite of the beautiful cheerleaders. Seems the cheerleaders preferred (news flash!) halfbacks and quarterbacks — muscle and brawn over meter and ballads. But then, in the last stanza, the Empire (A Young Poet) Strikes Back (at an Elderly Age):

Decades later, after the dead
have stopped their blathering
about olives, obese halfbacks wheeze
upstairs to sleep beside cheerleaders
waiting for hip replacements,
while a lascivious, doddering poet,
his burning eyes deep-set
in wrinkles, cavorts with their daughters.

OK, OK. We all like to see the jocks get theirs in the end, but this is a tad yuck, no? Or maybe our times are too PC for their own comeuppance.

On a more serious note, I give you “The Master” in its entirety. It’s the type of poem established poets love to write (and can get away with) while unestablished poets would be laughed at if they submitted it to a journal.

It’s similar to novelists who talk about characters “taking over” their novels, wresting control from the author as in a prison uprising. Oh, brother. It all sounds accurate and deep, sure, until you read and reread and say, “Huh?” (Which is “dumbese” for “Where’s the emperor’s clothes?”). Here it is, by the name of (what else?) “The Master”:

The Master
by Donald Hall

Where the poet stops, the poem
begins. The poem asks only
that the poet get out of the way.

The poem empties itself
in order to fill itself up.

The poem is nearest the poet
when the poet laments
that it has vanished forever.

When the poet disappears
the poem becomes visible.

What may the poem choose,
best for the poet?
It will choose that the poet
not choose for himself.

I can appreciate how, as a person and poet, your own idiosyncrasies and sentimentalities and bad habits can get in the way, but to personify a poem like that? To imply that the poem has shoved its creator aside to touch the hand of God, Sistine Chapel-like? Whatever.

Still, I cannot emphasize enough that I count myself a big Donald Hall fan. And Jane Kenyon. I wish to hell the two could have written a few decades more on their little New Hampshire acre of paradise on pond at the foot of Mount Kearsarge.

As a final sour cherry, I picked a good one. It’s from the grandfather of all paying poetry markets, Poetry. The July / August 2018 issue. Here it is, in its entirety, scribed by the prolific writer Joyce Carol Oates:

Sinkholes

take you where
you don’t want to go.

Where you’d been
and had passed smilingly through,
and were alive. Then.

Whew. If you or I sent that baby in, it would not have made it past the first reader, a summer intern English major. But coming from the well-established literary firm of Joyce, Carol, & Oates? In! And taking up precious real estate.

Pass the cherries….

Donald Hall on Poetry: Revising, Sharing, & Critiquing

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Hall Book

While reading The Selected Poems of Donald Hall, I jumped to the “Postscriptum,” where Hall offers up some thoughts on poetry writing — and especially on poetry sharing with someone who could give competent feedback. In Hall’s lucky case, he was married to that person, fellow poet Jane Kenyon, until she died of leukemia at the ridiculously young age of 47. What follows are selected bits from Hall’s P.S.:

“Reading my things aloud a thousand times, I have become aware of language that works and language that has dead spots.”
“Most of my life, I have worked on poems each morning, fiddling with everything. I have crossed out a word and substituted another; the next day I have often returned to the first word, or found yet another. Or I have broken a line at a new place. Always when I finished a poem, I showed it to friends who told me if it was terrible, or at least suggested improvements. I did the same for them.”
After we married, Jane [Kenyon] and I worked together over each other’s poems. We did not look at early drafts — it’s a bad habit; wait until the poem solidifies — but when the poems felt done, each of us used the other as first reader. One day I would say, ‘I left some stuff on your footstool,’ or Jane would tell me, ‘Perkins, there are some things on your desk.’ (‘Perkins’ was me.) If I repeated a word — a twist acquired from Yeats — Jane crossed it out. Whenever she used verbal auxiliaries I removed them, and ‘it was raining’ became ‘it rained.’ Jane kept her lines clear of dead metaphor, knowing my crankiness on the subject. She exulted when she found one in my drafts. ‘Perkins! Here’s a dead metaphor!’
“Neither of us did everything the other said. We helped each other vastly. She save me from a thousand gaffes, cut my wordiness and straightened out my syntax. She seldom told me anything was good. Sometimes she’d say, ‘This is almost done,’ or ‘You’ve brought this a long way, Perkins.’ I asked, ‘But is it any good?’ I pined for her praise. It was essential that we never go easy on each other.
“People have long assumed that poets flourish when they are young, but for most poets their best work comes in middle life. Wallace Stevens said, ‘Some of one’s early things give one the creeps.’ A friend insists that no one should publish a poem written after eighty. I hope I wrote good things, young and old, but my best work came in my early sixties.”

Mercenary Poets Take Note!

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Art for art’s sake? What about money, for god’s sakes? If you have some semblance of poetic talent or are adept at fooling some of the people some of the time (in politics, it’s “some of the people all of the time”), you might try these three strategies:

Be an INSTAGRAM POET. I have never been on Instagram and wouldn’t know how to navigate it if landed there after a 3-hour tour (terribly dated Gilligan’s Island reference). That said, I do know of some poets who have raked in fans like autumn leaves by breaking the rules (The Third Commandment: Though shalt not ruin your poems for submissions by offering them for public viewing). It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that Rupi Kaur is the best example of this. And you can laugh or sneer all you want at her “poetry.” She’s laughing or sneering all the way to the bank. Score: Rupi 1, Purists 0.
Be a WEDDING POET. If you write poetry, you know that 99.47% of the reading public (which is 23.85% of the public) do not read poetry or, worse still, listen to it… unless they’re at a wedding. Ask any bride-to-be. On the extensive checklist for becoming a bride (beyond spending the equivalent of Costa Rica’s GNP) is finding so-called love poetry–something modern to go along with anything read from the Bible. As for the Bible, it is somewhat ironic that you seldom hear anything read from that hot-and-heavy entry from the Old Testament, The Song of Solomon. In parts, it’s too racy for even a wedding! My recommendation is that grooms read it on their honeymoon, maybe. Their brides will be suitably impressed!
Be a FUNERAL POET. Right behind weddings are funerals. Like fertilizer for poetry, they are. And we all know that funerals, like weddings, eliminate any need for family reunions. This is the Ben Franklin approach to writing poetry, and it sells. Yes, your poem could go VIRAL (killer stuff!) if it’s perfect for sending off the dead. Think of that song, “Wind Beneath My Wings” (Bette Midler, poet) or “In the Arms of an Angel” (Sarah McLaughlin, poet). Oh, man. If I hear them one more time…. But, people love ’em! And groove to them. And especially love to cry to them. Poetry not as neglected side-liner, but as Roman conqueror.

Veni, vidi, vici, people! Get writing. About love! About death! Preferably on Instagram!