Yearly Archives: 2019

127 posts

Jack Kerouac & Gary Snyder: Two Haiku Buddies

Last night I started reading my first Kerouac. Oh, I had tried On the Road many decades back, but I soon lost interest and got off the road. You know. Rest stop for 30 years or so.

The book I picked up last night was The Dharma Bums. I figured my interest in Buddhism would sustain me. That and the fact that the protagonist’s buddy, Japhy, was based on the Buddhist poet Gary Snyder.

After reading the introduction I learned that Kerouac, a good Catholic boy from Lowell, MA, dabbled in Buddhism himself. Thus, the book. The introduction made it clear that both Kerouac and Snyder thought highly of haiku. That’s right. The much-maligned (these days) poetic form taken over and held ransom by so many classroom teachers and their students.

First, here’s a haiku by Gary Snyder, called “A Dent in a Bucket”:

Hammering a dent out of a bucket

a woodpecker

answers from the woods

And here are three haiku written by Jack:

The bottoms of my shoes

are clean

From walking in the rain

In my medicine cabinet

the winter fly

Has died of old age

Useless! Useless!

—heavy rain driving

into the sea

Kind of fun, that. The guy known for spontaneous writing (and it shows) in his novels playing within the most restricted, most succinct parameters on the poetry chessboard.

Hey, at least I’m expanding my horizons. Previous to this, the most exposure I had to Jack Kerouac was listening to Natalie Merchant’s gravelly voice in 10,000 Maniacs rendition of the song, “Hey, Jack Kerouac.”

Sing it, Natalie. You, too, Jack. In three lines only, like a good Buddhist boy from Lowell, MA….

The Endless Reservoir of Self-Doubt

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When it comes to inspiration, we think of the usual suspects: love, nature, emotions both positive and negative. What we seldom think of, but have ample reserves of, is self-doubt.

Unless we are megalomaniacs who think we’re the greatest, we tend to question ourselves frequently. We are our own greatest critics. Why? Because we know ourselves better than any outsider, warts and all. This is why we often love mates who are opposites of ourselves. This is why we loathe people who are mirror images of ourselves (despite not realizing it).

Watch how Jeffrey Harrison mines the endless reservoir of self-doubt in his poem, “The Day you Looked Upon Me as a Stranger.” His self-doubt flourishes in the Petri dish we call marriage. You know, the old flower petal trick: “She loves me, she loves me not.” Read what I mean:

The Day You Looked Upon Me as a Stranger
by Jeffrey Harrison

I had left you at the gate to buy a newspaper
and on my way back stopped at a bank of monitors
to check the status of our flight to London.

That was when you noticed a middle-aged man
in a brown jacket and the green short-brimmed cap
I’d bought for the trip. It wasn’t until I turned

and walked toward you that you saw him as me.
What a nice-looking man, you told me you’d thought—
maybe European, with that unusual cap …

somebody, you said, you might want to meet.
We both laughed. And it aroused my vanity
that you had been attracted to me afresh,

with no baggage. A kind of affirmation.
But doubt seeped into that crevice of time
when you had looked upon me as a stranger,

and I wondered if you’d pictured him
as someone more intriguing than I could be
after decades of marriage, all my foibles known.

Did you have one of those under-the-radar daydreams
of meeting him, hitting it off, and getting
on a plane together? In those few moments,

did you imagine a whole life with him?
And were you disappointed, or glad, to find
it was only the life you already had?

What rings truest in this poem is the way the narrator first experiences a bout of vanity when his wife confesses to not recognizing him briefly. But then he thinks too much, and nothing encourages self-doubt more than thinking too much.

Thinking is bad, then, you ask? Yes and no. It can lead to self-doubt, which is bad, but it also can lead to writing inspiration, which is good. What is poetry, after all, if not thinking too much? Looking at something from every angle? Trying to suss it out from angles no one has before you.

Think about that next time you’re driving yourself crazy with doubt. Instead of getting worked up about it, take pen to paper and think it through. Inspiration hides in the strangest places, for one thing. And readers will relate, for another.

Funny, that.

Thanks, I Needed That!

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Once upon a time on a television far, far away, there was a strange series of commercials for Mennen Skin Bracer that featured the catchy byline “Thanks, I needed that!”

Those words quickly entered the lexicon of everyday America, with people, for various reasons, offering sincere or tongue-in-cheek gratitude under the precedence of Mennen’s advertising wisdom.

For those who submit poetry online, the “Thanks, I Needed That!” mentality looms large. Using Submittable as a tracking device, we launch dozens of our poetic progenies into the endless vacuum of hyperspace, then retire to the waiting room from Hell where we wait. And wait. And wait.

Honest, the wait-time has reached epic proportions. Months peel off the calendar. Soon responses have taken longer than it takes for a baby to enter the world. Soon you’re knocking on a year’s time with no news.

The journals are that backed up. Too many submissions. Too few readers.

Given that, imagine a market that prides itself on rapid response, even to the point of flaunting it on their “About” pages. University journals, with their deep benches (as they say in basketball) of student-readers, are especially suited to quick turnarounds.

As Exhibit A, I offer you The Penn Review’s “About” page. Note the words “Currently ranked as one of the 25 Fastest Fiction & Poetry Markets in Duotrope’s database, we strive to respond to all submissions within a week, and are currently averaging a 2-3 day response time.”

You read correctly: A response to your blindly-read poems in three days is unheard of (at least until you tune your ears to the University of Pennsylvania). The frustrated poet, whose line-up of submissions on Submittable currently resembles a 300-year-old redwood tree, can’t help but give it a go, even if it leads to a “no.”

That’s right. Go ahead, UPenn. Reject me! But do it quickly, please, like removing a Band-Aid. Fast. Ouchless.

Show me someone’s out there, in other words. Someone actually reading my work. And then, if you deny my five poems your editorial love, at least let me move on and try them elsewhere (or let me back them into a poetry port for some additional body work).

I promise to speak highly of you, even if you reject me. I’ll do it in the name of expeditiousness. I’ll sing your praises. I won’t even fuss over the rejections, if it comes to that. In fact, I’ll crow, “Thanks, I needed that!” and pass on the skin-tightening after-shave.

Sometimes doing your job quickly is all it takes to make friends in this world, especially if it’s the tortoise-paced poetry world where all manner of shell games take place.

Note to other journals: See how easy…? Go ahead. Make like Menen and slap yourselves in the face. You’ll be happy you did!

Three Merwin Poems

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Sad, but true. Famous writers are made most famous by death. Sadder but truer. Famous writers sell more books in the weeks after they take on Death as an agent.

Ah, well. At least there are the beneficiaries.

But we are all beneficiaries, in a way, if we read and enjoy a poet’s collected works. And if you decide today, the day after his death, to begin reading Merwin’s poetic output, you’ve got your work cut out for you.

He wrote a lot of verse about the world, from topics big to small. And he left a lot to his reader, too. Like punctuating. You want to read Merwin? Take pause to punctuate! Here’s an example of Merwin’s work, in this case about a mere (ha!) word:

Term
by W.S. Merwin

At the last minute a word is waiting
not heard that way before and not to be
repeated or ever be remembered
one that always had been a household word
used in speaking of the ordinary
everyday recurrences of living
not newly chosen or long considered
or a matter for comment afterward
who would ever have thought it was the one
saying itself from the beginning through
all its uses and circumstances to
utter at last that meaning of its own
for which it had long been the only word
though it seems now that any word would do

In addition to language and nature, Merwin was marked as we all are by his beginnings. His was a difficult childhood, marked by the classic distant father, a busy minister. That, coupled with the antediluvian story of Noah, brought us this:

Before the Flood
by W.S. Merwin

Why did he promise me
that we would build ourselves
an ark all by ourselves
out in back of the house
on New York Avenue
in Union City New Jersey
to the singing of the streetcars
after the story
of Noah whom nobody
believed about the waters
that would rise over everything
when I told my father
I wanted us to build
an ark of our own there
in the back yard under
the kitchen could we do that
he told me that we could
I want to I said and will we
he promised me that we would
why did he promise that
I wanted us to start then
nobody will believe us
I said that we are building
an ark because the rains
are coming and that was true
nobody ever believed
we would build an ark there
nobody would believe
that the waters were coming

You don’t have to be a kid to sometimes wonder if the world deserves a second soaking before it consumes itself in fire. Only who is the chosen family? Who Noahs?

To give you some sense of Merwin’s expansive life, he recalls meeting Ezra Pound in the video link below: “You want to be a poet? Write 75 lines a day.”

W.S. Merwin Video

And for a bit of what went into the making of a Merwin documentary, called “Even Though the Whole World Is Burning,” we hear how Merwin passed on the typical poet’s life in academia for one closer to the land, the seasons, the flora and fauna of the world. Thoreau, who struggled himself as a teacher and gave it up, would be proud!

Even Though the Whole World Is Burning

He ends the above clip by reading this poem:

Rain Light
by W.S. Merwin

All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning

Thank you W.S.–tree planter, poet, painter of patchworks spreading on hills….

R.I.P. W.S. Merwin

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The poetry world lost a big one in W.S. Merwin today. What’s amazing is how much an obituary teaches you about a person. Palm gardens. Walden on the Pacific. Hawaii!

Oh, and poetry, too. So much poetry. Not to mention essays, short fiction, a memoir (Summer Doorways, which I enjoyed last year), and copious amounts of poetry, which would win him a National Book Award once and the Pulitzer twice.

Not bad for a day’s work.

You can read a fine obituary on W.S. Merwin here, on the New York Times’ website.

Fare thee well, William Stanley. You will be missed!

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?

"Retired" Faith Shearin

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.