Yearly Archives: 2019

120 posts

Famous Quote, Humble Catalyst

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Galway Kinnell once said, “The secret title of every good poem might be ‘Tenderness.'” David Kirby must have been listening. Check out where his poem “Taking It Home to Jerome” starts and ends:

 

Taking It Home to Jerome
by David Kirby

In Baton Rouge, there was a DJ on the soul station who was
always urging his listeners to “take it on home to Jerome.”

No one knew who Jerome was. And nobody cared. So it
didn’t matter. I was, what, ten, twelve? I didn’t have anything

to take home to anyone. Parents and teachers told us that all
we needed to do in this world were three things: be happy,

do good, and find work that fulfills you. But I also wanted
to learn that trick where you grab your left ankle in your

right hand and then jump through with your other leg.
Everything else was to come, everything about love:

the sadness of it, knowing it can’t last, that all lives must end,
all hearts are broken. Sometimes when I’m writing a poem,

I feel as though I’m operating that crusher that turns
a full-size car into a metal cube the size of a suitcase.

At other times, I’m just a secretary: the world has so much
to say, and I’m writing it down. This great tenderness.

 

Of course, I don’t know that Kirby was familiar with Kinnell’s words, but it almost seems like “Taking It Home to Jerome,” which starts with a specific and quixotic DJ in Baton Rouge (of all things), was written in response to the Vermont poet’s observation. Quote as prompt, if you will. And personal challenge: Can you take some specific quirkiness from your past and distill it to an abstract found in some famous person’s quote?

Occasionally, poets will be upfront about their inspiration. They might include an italicized quote under the poem’s title before launching in. Otherwise, we have no way of knowing. It is just as likely me making connections about tenderness as Kirby, in other words.

Tenderness, after all, is a universal feeling, and like all universal feelings it is in the public domain of ideas that all poets cherry pick from. A quote may try to sum the big word up succinctly, and a poem might attempt to elaborate, only the elaboration must be an act of compression, as all poetry is.

Have a favorite quote with an abstract emotion at its heart? Try writing a poem to it as a compressed exercise in elaboration. It may lead you to some surprising places, like Baton Rouge where, decades ago, a certain DJ had a certain saying that we might equate to poetry writing itself: “Take it home, Jerome. Get that poem done.”

In Praise of Going Slow

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“I never thought of it that way.” If you say this after reading a poem, the poet has done his or her job. The whole purpose of poetry, after all, is to make you consider the ordinary in a novel way. At least to you.

Take a cliché like, “You need to slow down and smell the roses.” Yes. Gives you the heebie-jeebies a bit, doesn’t it? Then you read a poem like Faith Shearin’s “Retired” and see it another way.

What if you learned patience and slowing down from people who have no choice but to be patient and slow down—the elderly? When you think about retired folks in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, a whole vista of modified approaches to an otherwise fast life appears. Check it out:

 

Retired
by Faith Shearin

On the island where I was a child
nearly everyone was retired, their fortunes

already made. Death was around them
the way water was around our streets.

They taught me how to go fishing
without catching fish; the tide’s breath

was marked in notebooks they kept
beneath their pillows. One old lady

fed me chocolates from a tin
until my teeth were stained by greed.

The old do things slowly so I grew used
to grocery store lines

that did not move, cars that stopped
in the middle of the road. One man spent

a whole day helping me bury a squirrel;
we wrote odes and dirges

to the way it once hurried and planned.

 

First, we’re situated on an island, which we can’t help but associate with either vacations or retirement living. No one’s thinking of Rhode or Long Island, let’s put it that way. Instead, we get a Caribbean flavor.

“Death was around them / the way water was around our streets” is a metaphorical echo of the setting. Then it’s on to activities in a key of largo (the musical term for “slow” by way of Italian and Latin): fishing, nibbling chocolate bon-bons, waiting in grocery store lines, sitting in traffic.

And the final stroke, incorporating the couplets-to-final-single-line-for-emphasis technique? Burying a squirrel. Taking forever to do it. Then noting the ironic contrast: “…we wrote odes and dirges / to the way it once hurried and planned.”

That’d be us, gentle readers. The ones just compared to a silly squirrel running madly about all day, burying nuts in locations it will never even remember.

Makes a squirrelly sort rather sheepish, doesn’t it?

 

Regrets About Mom

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What is the best thing you can do? Like all questions that lack a single answer, it’s worth some thought. Worth some poetry, too, as Ron Padgett found out when he embarked on writing “The Best Thing I Did,” which at least afforded him the luxury of hindsight and the audacity of choosing.

His choice wasn’t bad, either. Nor would yours be, if the word “love” were involved. It seems to be the constant among prophets in all major religions. Love. Against all odds. Despite the easier, more bitter fruits of hate and resentment.

But for Padgett, the love is elemental, reaching back to childhood. The love of a mother. The sacrifice. The willingness to give and not expect anything in return. Let’s see how he expresses it in stanzas:

 

The Best Thing I Did
by Ron Padgett

The best thing I did
for my mother
was to outlive her

for which I deserve
no credit

though it makes me glad
that she didn’t have
to see me die

Like most people
(I suppose)
I feel I should
have done more
for her

Like what?
I wasn’t such a bad son

I would have wanted
to have loved her as much
as she loved me
but I couldn’t
I had a life a son of my own

a wife and my youth that kept going on
maybe too long

And now I love her more
and more

so that perhaps
when I die
our love will be the same

though I seriously doubt
my heart can ever be
as big as hers

 

Some people object to a poem’s title also being in the poem itself. This school of thought bridles, especially, at the sight of the title in the first line.

Of course, you can always play the trick of treating the title like it’s the first line, but some people object to that even more.

As a poet, you’re not thinking about objections, though. You’re just trying to wrestle wild and disparate thoughts into a sack—no easy feat.

This poem works because it reflects the tortured mind of its narrator. It is all at once both homage and regret. At least the narrator had the decency to outlive his mother, for no parent ever wants to witness the loss of a child. But really, how much effort did that require?

Then come the wishes, the regrets, the rationalizations: I should have loved her more; I wasn’t so bad, really; I was busy with a wife and son of my own; and, the clincher, “my youth that kept going on / maybe too long.”

Still, now that his mother is gone, the love has only become greater, with the hope that it might actually match hers some day. But that’s all it is: hope. The premise of the poem establishes that it never can. The nobility of the poem professes that it wants so badly to try.

As for Mom, were she alive, she would have cherished this poem above all else. Secretly or not, I think the poet knows as much. It takes a while for meditations to evolve into poetry, after all, and though the poet-narrator’s love may never be a match for his mother’s, surely this is the best “second best” a son can muster.

The Writing Equivalent of Frankenstein’s Monster

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As writers, we are the sum of our reading parts. Or so the thinking goes. Like Frankenstein’s monster, we are pieced together by the books we read and all those styles, old and fresh, become parts of our body politic.

But it doesn’t always work that way. For instance, I have been reading more of Charles Simic’s poetry than anyone else’s of late. You know the feeling. You get in a groove for awhile, so you ride the wave and hang ten until you’re ready for some beach and a little rest under some other writer’s sun.

Simic is the epitome of simplicity. That’s a simplistic characterization, of course, but I mean his diction. His poems are mostly short, as are his lines. He favors end stops and many sentences travel no further than one or two lines, five max. It’s a style that invites imitation, like Hemingway’s in the prose world.

As a for instance, here’s a Simic poem I read just last night:

 

Nearest Nameless
by Charles Simic

So damn familiar
Most of the time,
I don’t even know you are here.
My life,
My portion of eternity,

A little shiver,
As if the chill of the grave
Is already
Catching up with me–
No matter.

Descartes smelled
Witches burning
While he sat thinking
Of a truth so obvious
We keep failing to see it.

I never knew it either
Till today.
When I heard a bird shriek:
The cat is coming,
And I felt myself tremble.

 

Gee, I wonder who Mr. Nearest Nameless is? Our old familiar friend, that’s what. The one carrying sharp objects (he has no respect for safety rules) while wearing a hood so he is as faceless as he is nameless.

The thing is, I also wrote a poem yesterday, to a friend who had lost a friend to the Nameless one. Was it the epitome of simplicity? Did it resound of Simic as you would expect?

Not quite. It was a single stanza poem, ten lines strong and all one sentence (commas working time and a half).

The moral of this story? It’s too easy to say that monkeys seeing will always become monkeys doing. Sometimes influences will push you in different directions. Sometimes, as a writer, you become the antithesis of the models you’ve been reading. It’s a bit like love, famous for bringing opposites together, where harmony can be found as each part finds a soothing escape from itself.

So much for “we hold these truths to be self-evident.” Yes, your writing may come under the spell of both classical masters and well-received contemporaries. But it may also make like the Sons of Liberty, tossing a little tea in the harbor in the name of artistic rebellion.

Whatever happens, accept it, because, whether you write with the tide or against it, you’re responding to it, and that’s what’s known in the writing world as inspiration.

So my thanks and appreciation go out to you, Charles. In short sentences or long, leggy poems or clipped. At least you have me writing!

Spring Is Icumen In–Sing Cuccu

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Yesterday we sang a joyful ditty to spring (prematurely) . Today we double down, figuring singing generates heat, so what the heck.

Yes, there’s the famous olde English round, “Sumer Is Icumen In–Cuccu!” but really, emotions run much higher when we sing invitations to spring. Summer? It can wait. Once we get there, we’ll do nothing but gripe about the heat and humidity anyway.

But spring? It’s less than two weeks away. Don’t believe me? I yield the floor to an expert. An expert grouch, that is. Even he looks happy (for him) in this paean to spring:

 

Coming
by Philip Larkin

On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.
It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon —
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.

 

Instead of “Cuccu!” this thrush sings “It will be spring soon, / It will be spring soon.” I like that in a thrush. Repetitive to the point of inexplicable giddiness, to the point where Larkin, whose childhood was boring like yours and mine, “can understand nothing / But the unusual laughter, / And starts to be happy.”

Take that thought (Larkin smiling) and sound (thrush singing) to work with you today. The “fresh-peeled voice” that astonishes brickwork will lift you like nothing else. Then you can laugh at winter’s remnants.

It will feel good, I promise. Even if it’s in public. Even if you look downright cuccu.

Spring-Inspired Poems

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As has been the habit these past few years, winter has saved itself for March. Until Sunday night’s snowstorm (over a foot of snow, scorning the 4-8 inch predictions of our so-called “weathermen”), the winter was laughable, snow-wise. Cold? Yeah. But snow? Hardly enough to roll Frosty, taking him for all he’s worth.

March isn’t the most popular of months. Supposedly coming in like a lion and going out like a lamb, it is the advent of mud season (bad), red-winged blackbirds (good), and St. Patrick’s Day (if you like beer, very good).

It also heralds the coming of spring (March 20th) in the northern hemisphere, giving poet Jim Harrison the right idea. He knew a sense of humor about March was essential to the season. As evidence, watch what he does at the end of this little poem:

 

Winter, Spring
by Jim Harrison

Winter is black and beige down here
from drought. Suddenly in March
there’s a good rain and in a couple
of weeks we are enveloped in green.
Green everywhere in the mesquites, oaks,
cottonwoods, the bowers of thick
willow bushes the warblers love
for reasons of food or the branches,
the tiny aphids they eat with relish.

Each year it is a surprise
that the world can turn green again.
It is the grandest surprise in life,
the birds coming back from the south to my open
arms, which they fly past, aiming at the feeders.

 

Clearly Jim wrote this about parts south of here. Note the specific nouns that matter most to a poem, in this case “mesquites,” “oaks,” “cottonwoods,” and the alliterative “willow bushes” and “warblers.” And like any hot dog, the aphids are eaten “with relish” (sorry, bad joke there).

Harrison uses a new stanza for a shift. The poem’s view pans back to a more philosophical scope. It goes from a particular March to “Each year it is a surprise…,” heaping praise on the earth’s regenerative powers, despite everything man does to it, despite the cynic’s sneaking suspicion that the cold may never let go.

Note how “the grandest surprise in life” is a phrase whose antecedent should be the world turning green but (curveball) turns out to be “the birds coming back from the south to my open / arms, which they fly past, aiming at the feeders.”

Oh, those selfish little birds. Guilty of gluttony, one of the Seven Deadly Sins. But anyone who has fed birds can appreciate the gentle joke here. The cliché, “she eats like a bird” to denote she hardly eats anything is laughably inappropriate. Birds eat many times their weight every day, and I’ve yet to see a chapter of Weight Watchers for Warblers open in any neighborhood near or far.

No, sir. Birds are ripped, as they say. Like charter members of Cross Fit. In great shape, as is Harrison’s sense of humor—a good thing to hold onto in such gloomy months as March.

Selling Poetry Books: What Works

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Selling poetry books, they say, is like selling space heaters in Hell. Or ice cream cones in Antarctica. Or the truth at the Orange House.

Honestly, as the reports stream in from fellow published poets, I begin to wonder. That may be because I am not on email terms (alas!) with any heavy-hitter poets. I email St. Billy of Collins and hear the lovely sound device of crickets (an alliterative insect). I drop a line to the admirable Marie Howe, and she doesn’t stoop to pick it up. I send a quick “Hey, there!” to Tracy K. Smith and her secretary returns a boilerplate rejection slip (poor Tracy is so busy being Ambassador to Poetry that she has eliminated emails from her reading regimen).

But where was I? Oh. Selling poetry books. What works, poets wonder? Here’s a list of trial balloons my fellow published poets have cross-examined:

  • Poet A: “Whenever I get a request for money from a charity or a telemarketer on the phone (and cursed be the names of Alexander, Graham, and Bell), I tell them yes on one condition: They go on amazon.com and buy my book first. Once that sale is confirmed, I write the check, but only for amounts less than that of the book. A girl’s got to turn a profit. Especially a poet girl!”
  • Poet B: “After a year on the market, standing against the wall like the nerd with zits at a middle school dance, my poetry book needs some help. I contact my editor and tell her to slash the price of my book in half on amazon. I tell her most people find the hardcover price for soft-cover poetry books too much. She laughs and say, ‘Whatever.’ Whatever that means….”
  • Poet C: “You’ve got to unplug that ‘Look Inside!’ feature on amazon, man. It’s not a peek, it’s a downright dressing down! Over half the book can be read for free! How you gonna sell books that way, huh? Huh?”
  • Poet D: “Marketing savvy, dearie. I created a special Facebook account for my book and, after two years of marketing savvy, sold two books there. And the Twitter book. At least one sale in two years right there. As they say in Boston: How do you like them apples?”
  • Poet E: “I send my manuscripts-to-be to all the Saints: St. Billy of Collins, St. Marie of Howe, St. Tracy of Smith, etc., and ask for a blurb. You get that heavyweight blurb on the back and see if that doesn’t make a difference. You might have to buy a few relics first. You know, pieces of wood that W. B. Yeats or Wallace Stevens supposedly touched, but it’s worth it.”
  • Poet F: “Poetry readings. Lots of poetry readings. To hear my voice. While everyone else in the audience — chiefly other poets, who are tighter than two coats of paint — sit there and don’t hear my voice because they’re too busy preparing for their own voice at the mic. Yep. An open mic reading is good for one sale almost every time. Almost.”
  • Poet G: “I mail my books to newspaper poetry editors (or book editors, if the newspaper is too tiny to staff a poetry editor) and ask them for a read and a review. Sure, it’s expensive, all those books and all that charity to the United States Postal Service, but every once in a while, you hit pay dirt. Usually it’s a small weekly in Nebraska, but Oh, Pioneers, does it feel good!”
  • Poet H: “Keep a poetry blog and become a personality. This country runs on the cult of personality. This country is addicted to cults and all about the Kool-Aid. Why, this blog alone, the one I’ve nurtured like a broken-winged baby bird for six years, has sold two books. I know because 8,850 readers have clicked ‘TO READ’ on Goodreads dot com, and the working ratio on ‘TO READ’ to ‘SOLD’ is 3,000 to 1. It’s coming soon, I tell you! 9,000 ‘To-Reads-Means-One-Book.’ The Promised Land!”
  • Poet I-Yi-Yi: “I do Goodreads dot com Giveaways. It works like this: I ‘give away’ hundreds of dollars to put a book up for free, then the anything-for-free groupies all sign on for it by the thousands. Finally, I mail my book into the void for free, never to be heard from again. Oh, wait. Do you mean ‘What sells poetry book?’ or ‘What sells Goodreads’ Giveaways’?”
  • Poet JK: “Selling Poetry Books: What Works? Nothing. You write poetry for yourself. You do it for ego. You do it for art’s sake. But you don’t do it for sales. It’s a buyers’ market, and everyone’s sitting on their prose-grimy hands, waiting it out, waiting for a price they like: Free. And even then, many will take a pass. Sestina that, why don’t you?”

 

Oh, those bitter poets. They’re a laugh riot in their alphabetical way, aren’t they?

Maybe I should have titled this “Selling Poetry Books: What Doesn’t Work.” But who would read that, I ask you? The post would become the equivalent of a poetry book, languishing on the charts like Prometheus on his rock.

Damn those eagles of reality, anyway.

When Bitter Meets Sweet

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bittersweet

In poetry writing we see many dancing pairs. Sometimes they are pulled tight into a slow dance, and other times one spins off from the other for a bit of solo work before magnetically returning home to her partner.

This came to mind as I read Stephen Dunn’s poem “Sweetness.” It starts with generalities and philosophical abstractions about life, then settles in to some specifics by finding its way to a concrete example. The camera slowly pans across life, then zooms in on a specific life.

In this case, the poem is tracing life’s bittersweet roots. How can something so bad be so beautiful? Watch for the poem’s “turn” in the sixth tercet:

 

Sweetness
by Stephen Dunn

Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world

except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving

someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn’t leave a stain,
no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet.

Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving. His voice was low

and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief

until we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough

to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don’t care

where it’s been, or what bitter road
it’s traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.

 

Most interesting here is how sweetness arrives, staying “just long enough / to make sense of what it means to be alive, / then returns to its dark / source.” It seems passing strange to see sweetness described this way, but that is one of the functions of poetry, to explain the passing strange, or at least to make it a possibility for startled readers.

When sweetness travels a “bitter road,” Dunn seems to imply, it is most like life. It has come far for this epiphany, this understanding that blending and contrasts most often bring out the true nature of life.

Dance on, paradox.

Hot Cha!

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When you think William Carlos Williams, you think memorable name. You think Paterson, New Jersey. You think poetry slash doctor who wrote the compelling short story, “The Use of Force.”

And assuredly you think of the little-poem-that-could, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” where white chickens are forever pecking around a red wheelbarrow glinting with rain. Or maybe the sweetness of the simple but satisfying “This Is Just to Say,” where plums remain “so sweet / and so cold” in the timeless ice box of memory.

But such notoriety is no reason to skip reading deeper into a famous poet’s work. There are surprises. There are lesser-known and lesser-regarded works that may resonate with you, a poetry reader with your own discerning tastes.

“No ideas but in things,” WCW famously reminded us when he was in teacher mode. If you keep it simple and if you keep a sharp focus on “things” that have names, you can imply ideas that hide behind them.

By way of example, “Late for Summer Weather” is a thing de force (French for “great example”) with its objects (mostly clothes) and its colors (but no wheelbarrows in the rain).

It also features a most unusual, for the often dour-looking Williams, ending line. Shall we, then?

 

Late for Summer Weather
by William Carlos Williams

He has on
an old light grey Fedora
She a black beret

He a dirty sweater
She an old blue coat
that fits her tight

Grey flapping pants
Red skirt and
broken down black pumps

Fat Lost Ambling
nowhere through
the upper town they kick

their way through
heaps of
fallen maple leaves

still green-and
crisp as dollar bills
Nothing to do. Hot cha!

 

Ah. The beauty of working hard at doing nothing! The beauty of a straight neck looking around at nature as opposed to down at a cellphone like some bent Neanderthal training for a future Humpback Olympics. And mostly the beauty of a town called Fat Lost Ambling, New Jersey (Exit 157 on the Jersey Turnpike).

Hot cha!

Painting Your Own Private Malibu

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malibu

In my last post, I talked about the magic of trains, how they can serve as metaphors for not only romance and adventure, but escape and renewal. In this post, I give you the poor man’s train: his brain.

Who needs an engine when the tireless brain can get you there? It has a habit, doesn’t it, of imagining a place called “Better” and sometimes the town one over, “Better Yet.”

As individuals, we all know places that are more than happy to play the role of Paradise on Earth. Sometimes it is a place we have actually visited. Other times it is a place we’ve read about or seen on television. Does the brain care? It is to laugh! Daydreaming brains specialize in not caring.

Here’s a concrete example. For the poet Mary K. Stillwell, the answer to her troubles is found on the California coast. It is a town called Malibu, one we’ve all heard of and one that seems particularly well-suited to serve as an engine of desire. Exempli gratia:

 

Moving to Malibu
by Mary K. Stillwell

Some nights I think of it,
moving to Malibu, just as I stretch,
like a cat stretches, to my full length,
as though I am easing into cool waters.
I imagine the blue of the sea;
the bright green leaves of the geranium
on the patio, the bright pink blooms,
the yellow sun and white sand,
in the distance, white triangles,
from the deck, wind chimes.
I will be as content and as happy
as Balboa. I will have breakfast
at my wicker table and in my wicker chair,
with the cats watching. I will taste
salt on my lips after coffee.
My door will be open. When you come,
you will carry a loaf of bread,
a bunch of flowers. The sunset
is brilliant; we might as well be anywhere.

 

If you’re going to write about a dream destination that will change your life to storybook, bring your palette of colors (notice here the “blue of the sea,” the “bright green leaves of the geranium / on the patio, the bright pink blooms, the yellow sun and white sand” and, “in the distance, white triangles.”

Sensory details, too, please (“from the deck, wind chimes”). A simile never hurts, and here Stillwell is “as happy / as Balboa,” the guy who trekked across Panama, climbed a tree, and cried, “Ocean, ho!” (Pacific, that is. Supposedly calmer than its wicked sister of the east, the Atlantic.)

Reveries are personal, as you can see. Here the speaker’s is populated with wicker and cats, two things I’d give a wide berth to while negotiating a dream existence. But she does not fail to remember the other. The welcome visitor. The love interest. The one how will “carry a loaf of bread, / a bunch of flowers” to enhance the happiness by sharing it.

Once you pencil in “the one” (whether you already have one or not—this is your poem, after all), the picture is complete, for we are nothing if not social animals, and no paradise is worth its chlorophyll in fig leafs if you do not have a lover to walk it with.

Just ask Adam and Eve. They might have taken a wrecking ball to their Garden of Malibu, but at least they had each other.

And one last sunset, too. I hear it was brilliant.