Monthly Archives: January 2019

14 posts

Memento Mori, Meet Your Poetry

poetry

Should religion and poetry be kept in their respective corners like church and state? Yes and no.

First, let’s dispense with the “no.” The Bible is full of poetry–often beautiful poetry. One need only walk through the Song of Solomon among other books to see that. And poems abound at weddings and funerals, most held under the roof of a religious institution.

That said, modern-day poets invoking the heavens often walk a thin line. Coming across as proselytizing or didactic or moralistic can have its costs. Mary Karr is willing to take those risks, however. As someone heavily-invested in the Roman Catholic faith, she invokes religion early and often in her latest book, Tropic of Squalor.

The collection contains 16 free poems, many with religious undertones, followed by a set of 21 titled “The Less Holy Bible.”  As an exempli gratia, I give you the last poem in the book, the anchor given the task of representing the book as a whole:

 

Coda Toward the New New Covenant: Death Sentence
(for Father Joseph Kane)
by Mary Karr

We lean close when the dying speak
though instinct says recoil from
the decaying form, but silence
radiates off them and blooms our loud
selves out, out, out of the way, and we long
to know what from each essential
self will exhale over us, and if we every
single one of us (it would only work
if we all agreed) listened to our own
deaths growing inside us geologically
slow inching forward as the skull
will someday edge through skin, then we would
each speak only the truest lines:
I’ve always loved you.

 

Memento mori. In Latin, it means “Remember you must die.” In order to “memento” your “mori-ing” reader, however, your poem needs a blend of faith and harsh, physical reality.

As in the opening church and state remark, Karr walks the line here, clearly invoking faith in a greater purpose while also reminding us, through the last breaths of the dying and mention of a skull that will soon transgress the flesh that covers it, that death is not only all around us but within us, no matter how much we wish to kid ourselves by recoiling from it.

Recoil? Lean in, is the message here. Lean closer to your brothers and sisters who are dying because, if the relationship is not clear to you right now, then you’re kidding yourself, of course.

Your death sentence is in every poem you read, somewhere.

“Go on. Get on, girl.”

poetry poetry readings

This week’s New York Times Magazine poem, selected by Rita Dove, is “One-Way Gate” by Jenny George. I immediately liked the poem, but I cheered even more when I read the brief bio stating that “Jenny George is a poet whose debut collection, The Dream of Reason, was published last year by Copper Canyon Press.”

“Debut” and “Copper Canyon Press” in the same sentence? Very, meet impressive! That’s a top-of-the-line poetry publisher, so breaking through is worthy of all available kudos (“All kudos on deck!” as was once said).

Now back to the poem. As it is, like us, set in January (take a look out your window if you need any reminders), and as it features lines where the speaker looks one way while the cattle look another, one can’t help but think of Janus, the Roman god famous for being two-faced.

Sounds bad, but is he any different from the rest of us, looking both to the past and to the future, regretting on the one hand and hoping on the other? Just don’t tell the Buddhists with their “PRESENT” pennants, will you?

Reading this poem, one can see why Jenny George might catch an editor’s eye. For one, her topic is unique. For another, she has an interesting facility with words and the underlying thoughts that marry them.

For a taste, let’s read “One-Way Gate” together and then run back through the gate because, unlike the cattle, we can.

 

One-Way Gate
by Jenny George

I was moving the herd from the lower pasture
to the loading pen up by the road.
It was cold and their mouths steamed like torn bread.
The gate swung on its wheel, knocking at the herd
as they pushed through. They stomped
and pocked the freezing mud with their hooves.
This was January. I faced backward into the hard year.
The herd faced forward as the herd always does,
muscling through the lit pane of winter air.

It could have been any gate, any moment when things go
one way and not the other — an act of tenderness
or a small, cruel thing done with a pocketknife.
A child being born. Or the way we move
from sleeping to dreams, as a river flows uneasy under ice.

Of course, nothing can ever be returned to exactly.
In the pen the herd nosed the fence and I forked them hay.
A few dry snowflakes swirled the air. The truck would be there
in an hour. Hey, good girl. Go on. Get on, girl.

 

In S1, I just love the simile, “It was cold and their mouths steamed like torn bread.” It’s one of those “stops-me” similes. What the…? Torn bread? But wait, I kind of get it. There’s slant rhyme and there’s “slant simile” (and if there wasn’t, I just made it up, so now there is.)

Torn white bread! Maybe circa 19 Wonder-Bread-Three. Like steam “tearing loose” from the mouth in the winter air. Get it?

Then, at the end of the stanza, the herd is seen “muscling through the lit pane of winter air.” Not as high on the Wowzer Scale, but still very nice indeed.

S3, which follows the middle stanza’s more philosophical turn, brings us back to concrete details. It’s one of those deadpan, “life is just so banal, but…” finishes. Nothing spectacular or catchy,  instead going for effect through the sheer simplicity of moving dumb beasts that are juxtaposed to a one-way gate of fate. These poor beasts don’t know the quarter of it (or should I say, the “quarter pound with cheese” of it?).

All that banal stuff only heightens the impact of those parting words: “Hey, good girl. Go on. Get on, girl.” Alas, the time to “get on” comes for all of us, eventually.

Our truck will be waiting someday. As will a market in the sky….

Why “Kids These Days” Doesn’t Fly

poetry reading poetry

ice car

You’ve seen it before: adults shaking their heads saying, “Kids these days,” as if kids these days are any different from kids those days (pick a century, any century, in a country, any country).

No. The more we change, the more we stay the same. Isn’t that part of the definition of “classic,” a work that remains resilient and salient no matter how long ago it was written?

Exhibit A is Shakespeare comma William. No one reads his plays, scrunches their nose, and mutters, “People those days.”

Why? Because Shakespeare’s plays are undeniable classics, which tap into universal human traits that (listen for it!) do. not. change.

So, the next time you catch yourself thinking that the world is going to Hell in a hand basket (and where does this weird expression come from?), stop thinking so much. Please.

And the next time you hear someone complain about the so-called “millennials” or Generation X (Y, Z, it’s all one to Me), run interference, why don’t you, and remind them that it’s all the same song playing over and over again on the Cosmos’ spinning turntable: “Variations on a Key of Kid Commonalities.”

I was reminded of all this when I came across Thomas R. Moore’s poem about a bunch of teenagers who drive their Plymouth on a frozen lake winter nights, doing doughnuts and sliding around at high speeds.

Are they stupid? (Yes.) Are they just asking for it by tempting fate? (Yes.) Yet, in this case, they’re part of what is now fondly called “The Great Generation”— the one that lived through the years of World War II.

“The Plymouth on Ice”
by Thomas R. Moore

On frigid January nights we’d
take my ‘forty-eight Plymouth onto
the local reservoir, lights off
to dodge the cops, take turns

holding long manila lines in pairs
behind the car, cutting colossal
loops and swoons across
the crackly range of ice. Oh

god did we have fun! At ridges
and fissures we careened,
tumbled onto each other, the girls
yelping, splayed out on all fours,

and sometimes we heard groans
deep along the fracture lines as
we spun off in twos, to paw, clumsy,
under parkas, never thinking of

love’s falls nor how thin ice
would ease us into certain death.
No, death was never on our minds,
we were eighteen, caterwauling

under our own moon that
warded off the cops and
front-page stories of six kids
slipping under the fickle surface.

What Moore is tapping into here is not your garden-variety stupidity, however. It’s more stupidity’s lovingly-cherished second cousin twice removed: invincibility.

This theme begins with the final line of the fourth stanza: “… never thinking of / love’s falls nor how thin ice / would ease us into certain death.”

And why are these teenaged crazies not thinking? Simple. They hold in their hands not just a steering wheel or a “long manila line” but a magic talisman: youth. They’re invincible because they’re eighteen and because they’re caterwauling

under [their] own moon that
warded off the cops and
front-page stories of six kids
slipping under the fickle surface.

This is how it goes and goes, from time immemorial. Youth gets its own moons, ones that ward off the law, front pages of newspapers, and that fickle dude known as Dr. Death.

Remember those days? Of course. Because kids these days are just like the kids you knew in your day. Questionable at best, but laughing through life’s lottery as if their numbers will never come up.

As Hemingway put it on the last page of The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Well, if you’ve made it far enough to write a poem about it, yes.

Poetry Myth or Truth? You’d Be Surprised.

blathering comma mine humor marketing poetry poetry

  • Myth or Truth? Buying a poetry collection in the Kindle version may save you money, but it’s just not the same experience as reading the poems in book form.

Truth: Based on wide-ranging experience (once), I found that trying to read poems on an electronic device was an antiseptic experience at best, one which took from the overall aesthetic pleasure of reading poetry. Worst still, some of the formatting was wonky. Imagine writing a poem that uses white space and stanzas in a unique way, only to see it eviscerated by the indignity of ether.

  • Myth or Truth? The translation of a poetry collection you choose is everything.

Truth: Some purists go so far as to say you should never read poetry in translation. For the real experience, it must be read in its native language. To me, that’s going too far. Imagine the poets we would miss if we were that inflexible. That said, the difference between translations of the same work is often immense, and researching “the best translation of such-and-such work” online is of little help because it is so subjective. It’s better to know thyself. Do you prefer translations that are loyal to the exact word, or to figures of speech? Catching the flavor, the connotations, and the syntax is no small feat, and boy does it affect your reading of a work.

  • Myth or Truth? Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 Hours of Deliberate Practice” rule can not only make you the next William, but the next Carlos Williams.

Myth: There is practice and there is practice. Do we all agree on a definition to the word? And do we all set egg timers each time we sit to write? And really, if a dogwood practices being a dog for 10,000 hours, is it going to become man’s best friend? All bark and no bite, I’m afraid. Pretty flowers in the spring, though.

  • It is possible there is an undiscovered William Carlos Williams out there who has submitted poetry for 10,000 hours and come up empty-handed, at least as far as the big-bopper markets go.

Truth: Talent will not always out. Like translations, it is subjective, and unknown names are like salmon leaping whitewater upstream. Busy editors can be drowned by the din of the river—the river of established names.

  • Myth or Truth? When someone buys a Kindle version of your book and it leaps to the Top 100 in Poetry slash American slash Contemporary, you feel like the company you keep (read: Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, and a bevy of female Instagram poets-of-the-moment).

Truth: Seriously. You had to give this some thought?

  • Myth or Truth? It is more difficult to read a poetry collection cover-to-cover than it is to read a novel cover-to-cover.

Myth: After a few experiences and whether or not I did it chronologically or chrono-illogically, I’ve learned that reading entire poetry collections is not “more difficult,” it is just “different.” Sometimes parents call the unique child in their brood a “difficult” child. That is a rather selfish job of labeling, reflecting more on the parent than the child.

  • Myth or Truth? Deciding how to spend a Christmas gift certificate to either Barnes or Noble is an inexact science because sometimes you order books that you will never read.

Truth: Whims, they’re called. Or, channeling Ken Kesey: Sometimes a Great Notion. Some books look damn interesting in theory and then, once they find a home on your shelves,  “nest,” happily remaining there because you can find no reason to disturb them. “Who was that person who ordered these things way back when?” you wind up asking yourself, as if your book ordering is done by a doppelgänger. Still—pretty spines, don’t you think?

  • Myth or Truth? Myth or Truth columns are random and unable to conclusively determine whether something is a myth or a truth.

Truth. No, Myth! No… Ah, just enjoy the ride, why don’t you.