Yearly Archives: 2019

127 posts

“Their Suddenly Forbidden Houses”

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Americans move a lot. Often it is jobs that uproot them and carry them, like feathery seeds in the wind, to new pastures. Sometimes family concerns are the cause. Retirement, too, is often the driver once you’ve loaded all your earthly goods (and there are far too many) onto the cargo space of a moving truck.

When I was young and naive, I thought moving was a way to leave your troubles behind. If you hoped for a new life as a new person, I figured, you need only change your zip code.

Since then I’ve learned the lie in that theory. You can’t leave yourself behind. And you certainly can’t change who you are as a person like the flip of a switch. There’s the hardwiring to reckon with. There’s the lifetime experiences that resist the clean idea of a tabula rasa.

These thoughts rose to the surface when I read Howard Nemerov’s poem below. It’s a neat mix of concrete images and abstract thought, the artful blending that leads to the heart of any successful poem. Let’s take a ride with him:

 

Going Away
Howard Nemerov

Now as the year turns toward its darkness
the car is packed, and time come to start
driving west. We have lived here
for many years and been more or less content;
now we are going away. That is how
things happen, and how into new places,
among other people, we shall carry
our lives with their peculiar memories
both happy and unhappy but either way
touched with a strange tonality
of what is gone but inalienable, the clear
and level light of a late afternoon
out on the terrace, looking to the mountains,
drinking with friends. Voices and laughter
lifted in still air, in a light
that seemed to paralyze time.
We have had kindness here, and some
unkindness; now we are going on.
Though we are young enough still
And militant enough to be resolved,
Keeping our faces to the front, there is
A moment, after saying all farewells,
when we taste the dry and bitter dust
of everything that we have said and done
for many years, and our mouths are dumb,
and the easy tears will not do. Soon
the north wind will shake the leaves,
the leaves will fall. It may be
never again that we shall see them,
the strangers who stand on the steps,
smiling and waving, before the screen doors
of their suddenly forbidden houses.

 

Though much of the poem deals with inner thoughts, hopes, dreams, pleasant memories and bitter doubts, the end takes us to another truth: those we leave behind. It seems often that friends from one location become strangers once we’ve touched down in another. This despite our pledges to stay in touch, to visit, to remember.

Going away, then, often pulls us toward the blank promise of tabula rasa whether we wish it to or not.

And the north wind shakes the leaves….

Poetry for the Little Guy

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Two cheers for the little guy!

No one can relate to him like a poet. We are naturally inclined toward the second best, the also-rans, the almost-but-not-quites.

We’re little guys, too. We launch poems into some deep space called Submittable, then look through the telescope for months sandwiched on months, catching only empty blackness and distant stars (apparently known as “editors” who are rumored to exist).

Not much happens when you’re a little guy. Day in, day out. Same old, same old. Only when you least expect it do you get a meteor flaming out in your Inbox. Usually it’s a form letter saying, “Thanks but no thanks.” Never is it a form letter saying, “Do you realize how many thousands of poems we have to wade through? These never even got past the first readers, who are overworked, by the way, and often distracted. You’d be, too, if you were given the minimum minimum wage (read: nothing per hour) to read this stuff.”

That’s why I like best the first-time published poets when I see them designated as such in poetry journals. Heroes. New poets who ran the gauntlet and actually came out the other side, bloody but still on two feet. Anything-but-safe-poets. Anything-but-well-known-poets-who-take-up-bandwidth.

The poet Ron Koertge gets it. In the poem below, he sings the praises of sidekicks, those little guys forced to stand in the shadow of heroes, the heroes viewers demand, the stuff of our little-guys-yearning-to-be-heroes dreams. I think you’ll identify. Give it a go:

 

Sidekicks
Ron Koertge

They were never handsome and often came
with a hormone imbalance manifested by corpulence,
a yodel of a voice or ears big as kidneys.

But each was brave. More than once a sidekick
has thrown himself in front of our hero in order
to receive the bullet or blow meant for that
perfect face and body.

Thankfully, heroes never die in movies and leave
the sidekick alone. He would not stand for it.
Gabby or Pat, Pancho or Andy remind us of a part
of ourselves,

the dependent part that can never grow up,
the part that is painfully eager to please,
always wants a hug and never gets enough.

Who could sit in a darkened theatre, listen
to the organ music and watch the best
of ourselves lowered into the ground while
the rest stood up there, tears pouring off
that enormous nose.

Going Off Track

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Narrative poetry is more often anecdotal poetry than not. When a poet gets caught up in a sweeping or, God forbid, generational story, she may never see the end of it. But anecdotal? And, say, one featuring the generational attitudes? Much more manageable.

Here Lawrence Raab starts with words he surely heard one day: “Your train departed ahead of schedule.” From there, he lays out a brief story featuring unexpected reactions in his family, chiefly from his son, who apparently has a bit of the Tom Sawyer in him—enough to defuse any angst or anger, enough to turn a smile.

 

It’s Not Just Trains
Lawrence Raab

The ticket office was closing
when we arrived and were informed
our train had departed ahead of schedule.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Trains
leave on time, or late, but never early.”
“Such things happen,” the agent replied,

“more often than you would think.”
“Look around,” he added,
“and pay attention. It’s not just trains.”

When I told my family of this unexpected
predicament, I was taken aback
by their lack of surprise. “Let’s wander

a while through this pretty little town,”
my wife proposed, “and see what happens.”
“Or else,” said my son, “let’s head off

into that dark woods beyond the tracks,
each alone and without our baggage,
and try to find our way out

before nightfall.” He smiled, I thought,
at me in particular, as if he’d known
all along that would be the plan.

 

Not much in the way of poetic tricks and flowery language here. Just the facts, Jack. An anecdote straight up.

Sometimes story alone can carry the day. Even in poetry.

For Teachers of Poetry, a Cautionary Tale

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Yesterday I provided an excerpt from Rattle editor Tim Green’s interview of the poet Kwame Dawes. Today, a final excerpt, this time touching on the damage “education” can inflict on poetry.

“Part of the problem is that we teach poetry with a manual that is used for an exam. Just think about when people encounter poetry. As children you learn nursery rhymes, but slowly that narrows down, and you stop hearing poetry except in school and in a context that demands the dreaded ‘analysis.’ You don’t have the advantage of a poem being made into a Lifetime movie, which you have for fiction and plays. For poetry it starts to be all school. And in school the teacher stops one day and says, ‘What does it mean?’ But the teacher doesn’t say, ‘You’re going to spend the next 40 years of your life trying to understand what it means.’ ‘Next week there will be an exam!’ is what the teacher says. ‘So you’d better know what this means now.’ Poetry is not like that, but we learn poetry that way.

“Consequently, people come to a poetry reading to apprehend in the moment, because if they don’t, they remember their childhood experience when they felt like idiots for not understanding. If someone comes up to me after a reading and says a poem is deep, what they often mean is, ‘I didn’t understand a word of it, but I can’t admit it, so I’ll say you’re really deep.’ That’s the anxiety. That’s what we need to break. Here’s the thing: we do not put that pressure on music. I admit there’s some music that’s poppy, but look at how many songs are hugely difficult, and people will stay with them and will come back 30 years later and say, ‘You know, I’ve been singing this song for 30 years, and I never realized what was going on.’ … It’s because there’s no exam!

“Listen, I don’t want to stereotype cultures, but in Ireland poetry is read at bars and so on, and people don’t know what they’re hearing while it’s being read, but as they grow older they begin to contemplate it. They know it by heart, and eventually they begin to understand things that are quite complex, but at the time they had something to hold on to, and it was enough—they had the cadence, they had the prose, but they also had stretches that they understood, and they were allowed to have time, because that is not a school room. This also happens in griot cultures in North and West Africa where the griot carries the histories of the community. In cultures in which proverbs are cherished and valued, this also happens. We have come to ritualize this process of learning over time in American rural and urban cultures where ‘folk’ sayings and proverbs are granted the chance to be mysterious for a time. No exam next week. Heck, it happens in churches the world over. We accept mystery and the slow process of understanding.

“The problem with poetry today, even here in America, is what happens in the class room. That’s the problem with apprehending poetry, because we feel like we have to understand it right now—all of it, right now. And the only thing you can understand right now is the Hallmark greeting card—which, by the way, are very smartly written. [both laugh]

“Hallmark cards aren’t easy to write, if you think about what they achieve. My wife gives me a card, and it’s lovely, it tells me a lot. A guy in South Carolina gets the same card and thinks, ‘Wow, you found my soul.’ Same poem—wow, that’s pretty impressive, right? [laughs] So I do think that is the dilemma. That’s the heart of the dilemma: giving people permission to return, to learn and read and apprehend poetry over time. And I think, as we ease the pressure for immediate comprehension, we allow for the possibility of complexity. Because the technology of writing allows us to return and return and return. When there was no writing, we either memorized or we apprehended in the moment, and then the rest was the dew. But the technology of writing,  we can read to the bottom and go right back to the top. If we didn’t have an exam next week, we could keep doing that. If there’s any gift that our poetry community can try to inculcate in the culture, it’s that poetry is a life and life lived. I am not suggesting that we toss out the exam, but I am suggesting that we parallel that kind of learning with more open-ended approaches to encountering poetry. Because we do it with so much else. People go back to museums and do pilgrimages back to the same pieces of art once a month, and they come up with complex feelings and ideas about it. No one says they need a degree in art appreciation… But we rarely give poetry that space. I think that’s something that’s desperately needed.”

 

Nota bene: The entire interview can be found in the Fall 2019 issue of Rattle.

 

“Boredom and Disruption Are Healthy…”

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Why do so many avid readers not read poetry? Why is there such resistance to its inherent challenges? Rattle editor Tim Green, in an interview with the poet Kwame Dawes, opines that people who don’t ordinarily read poetry are put off by its difficulty. In a lengthy response, some of which I’ll quote here, Dawes takes a different trajectory on the question of difficulty:

“I disagree with that vehemently, I think. I’ll tell you why. I think there are reasons why people may resist poetry, and it has less to do with it being transformative and has to do with practical things like language. Things that we think are okay—for instance the simile. The simile is a contract. It’s the similitudes. So when we think of a book like Proverbs or Ecclesiastes, those are similitudes: ‘This is like that. Those are like that.’ The safe and normal functioning of similitudes requires a contract between speaker and hearer; it’s a way to say the thing that cannot be said of itself using the knowledge that we have of the world.

“So if I come and I say, ‘What is this?’ [holds up hat] ‘What color is this? Describe this.’ What do you do? So if somebody can’t see it, then you say, ‘Black.’ That means we’ve coded into our culture a relationship between something that looks like this and the word ‘black.’ But if you say you can’t use the world ‘black,’  inevitably the only way you can get there is through the simile, and beyond that the concretizing of the simile becomes the metaphor. But the point I’m making is that it is part of language, and language is about finding the words within our pool of understanding to help articulate the thing that seems difficult to articulate. This is the deal. It is a contract, or what we often call a convention.

“The poet masters that capacity over time, but there’s a logic to it. What has happened often in periods of poetic change and innovation is boredom with the order, and therefore an effort to unsettle things even more, by creating things that, frankly, don’t make sense. I don’t call that heightened poetry, I just call that a time when people are bored and they do this kind of thing. Boredom and disruption are healthy, but not necessarily holy or brilliant. They are healthy because they disrupt the cliché, which amounts to a certain kind of presumption of meaning around what can be closed societies, closed cliques, closed sites of resistance, can lead to fresher engagements with the world and can force us to see our biases and our prejudices. This is not comfortable. But these disruptions, I must add, are best when they are predicated on some kind of principle. At least that is what they are for me. But too often in poetry, these disruptions quickly become closed systems that can be as oppressive and as lazy at the thing they claim to be disrupting. Because here’s the thing—you’re disrupting an existing line. You’re not making up anything; you’re just disrupting it by throwing it into relief. And this is great, and exciting, but you’re not that smart. I can make a poem crazy, because, if I’m walking along here, I can just choose not to walk along here. If I say, ‘This is like a crow [raising the black baseball cap]. It’s the color of a crow,’ we say, ‘Okay, a crow is black, and this is black.’ If I say, ‘This [raising the black baseball cap again] is the color of a seagull,’ you go, ‘Oh, that’s weird,’ but that’s not profound. I’m fascinated by disrupting the mystique that we create around making those choices, because I think they are technical choices.

“I think most people are moved by a fresh way of seeing something, and it does disrupt things. I think Pope is onto something when he says poetry is ‘what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.’ I think that appeals to everybody. That sounds very conservative, but show me otherwise. Bring all your weird stuff and I’ll talk you through it to show you that we’re all still doing the same thing. I don’t know why we think we’re making up new stuff. This poetry thing goes back so far. I think it’s a youthful enthusiasm to think otherwise, but all is vanity and a chasing after the wind. We’re going to be dust again, and if we are lucky, for a period, a memory, and that is it.  Perhaps chasing reminds us that we are alive. I suppose that might be part of it. We’re just adding to what has existed before—this is the best we can hope for, and as it happens, it’s a lot. So there is a sense that part of what keeps us going is the idea that we’re retaining our unique DNA, but there is very little new under the sun. So I find a great satisfaction in seeing myself as part of a long tradition and practicing that tradition until I feel I have a mastery of that tradition. And if, in all of this, something new, something that marks me as meaningful, is there, then good. But in the meantime, I’m not inventing anything new in poetry, except in that grand and necessary belief that we are each uniquely formed. Holding onto this faith—even for those who claim faithfulness—may very well be the grand poem that staves off despair. There is a fine line between accepting that we are mere specks in a consuming and overwhelming universe, and our capacity to hold to a sense of our intrinsic value.

“I like to think that poetry rests at that fissure between those two existential extremes. So what Emily Dickinson said, I don’t think she’s saying there’s dissonance…”

Nota Bene: These last words reference Green’s earlier remark: “…poets are drawn toward cognitive dissonance. What poetry does that ‘takes the top of your head off,’ like Dickinson said, is that it reconstructs your worldview in a way that’s really shifting. And I feel like there’s some percentage of the population who loves that feeling, and others who hate it.”

The complete interview can be found in the Fall 2019 issue of Rattle.

Finding Your Full-Court Poetry Press

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Finding a publisher for your ready-to-go manuscript is not for the faint of heart. On the one hand, it seems there are millions to choose from, and on the other hand, it seems there are none that are just right.

Sure, if you are a known entity with a seat at the round table within poetry’s ivory tower, you’re all set.  Poetry journals have published whatever you sent their way, in some cases regardless of the quality. Big-name publishers with public relations departments to help with advertising and sales are ready to listen and joust for the rights to publication.

That’s if.

But let’s get back to the world as we know it. For the rest of us, who score publication in somewhat known and unknown journals (with the occasional breakthrough in a bigger-deal journal, perhaps), finding a publisher means time and money. Yours.

Vanity press, you ask? Like “used car,” that term has gone out of style in favor of euphemisms (“pre-owned,” anyone?). But yes, in spirit, they exist. A publisher who offers soup to nuts in the publication process for your book, sight unseen, is one that is willing to print anything for the money. The BIG money. This is a vanity press.

Then there are publishers who will publish your work only after reading it, liking it, and seeing an acknowledgements page that proves 25-50% of the poems have been accepted and published by journals and ezines. In this case, you may get a few books free, but for the most part will have to buy your own books at a discount. The more books you order, the bigger the discount.

Still, the publisher is in this game for profit. It’s up to the author to sell books on her own if any monies are to come her way. As for royalties, read the fine print. They are seldom offered and, when they are, seldom achieved by the unknown or little known poet, anyway, making them a moot point, dollar-wise. Poetry collections sell like space heaters in Hell, as a rule.

And yes, you can always take the self-publishing route, which lies through amazon’s CreateSpace and other outfits. But if you want a more traditional trajectory, you face these questions: Where to go? When to go?

It’s a money proposition, mostly. Sure, some publishers do not charge reading fees, but more do. Then there’s the contest game. You may enter your manuscript in contests, but at $25-$45 a clip, you are hoeing that row to the poor farm.

And where is the action at, anyway? My advice is to read the biographical blurbs of poets published in magazines. They will often cite past books, their publishers, and the year of publication. Pay special note to those published in the past three years, as many small, independent publishers go under over time, then visit those publishers’ web sites to see the lay of the land.

Looking at the bios at the back of Poetry magazines from the months of September, October, and November, for instance, I see that, over the past three years, the following publishers have put out books by poets:

 

University of Pittsburgh Press
University of Arkansas Press
Wesleyan University Press
Southern Indiana Review Press
Louisiana State University Press
Hesterglock Press
Willow Publishing
Flood Editions
Graywolf Press
University of Notre Dame Press
Nightboat
Bloof Books
University of Nebraska Press
Omnidawn
Milkweed Editions
BOA Editions
Haymarket Books
Offord Road Books
University of Chicago Press
Txtbooks
Tolsun Books
Academic Studies Press
Lost Horse Press
fog machine press
Tin House Books
Noemi Press
Alice James Press
Copper Canyon Press
Diode Editions
Spork Press
University of Washington Press
Arc Publications
Kent State University Press
Veliz Books
Harvard University Press
Carcanet Press
New Issues

I have tried to leave out the heavy-hitters reserved for limelight poets (W.W. Norton, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Ecco, etc.). I have also left out known vanity publishers who make you pay-all or require the selling x number of books to ensure their own profits.

What remains on the above list by no means guarantees a happy match, but it’s a start and it’s an education.

Bottom line: Artists have to be businessmen, too, and THAT’S an education. A necessary one. For those ready to dive in and market their poetry collection, good luck! If anyone would like to add a reputable publisher of poetry to the list, feel free to use the comments sections.

Making Questions Your Bread & Butter

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In their search for a subject (or, if you like your Greek straight up, “the Muse”), writers often look for answers and revelations, but what education theorists tell us (and not enough teachers teach us), is that questions rule the land, not answers. The person adept at formulating questions is the person holding the compass, the person most likely to forge her own Northwest Passage to the Promised Land.

If your “Promised Land” is a finished piece, then the questions might look something like Gayle Brandeis’s poem “Bread and Butter,” which dwells on the simple things in life that most writers overlook, employing them instead as tools leading to something more complex.

Never forget your inner little kid (simple) who constantly asks (complex): “How?” and “Why?” Then, after reading the poem, consider your own questions in a new way — as possible goals and not just so many overlooked processes.

 

“Bread and Butter”
Gayle Brandeis

for Michael

I often wonder how people figured
things out—simple things like bread
and butter. How did the first person know
to grind and knead and bake,
to milk and skim and churn?
How did someone realize they could soak
olives in lye or let grape juice ferment
inside casks of oak? How, when
we first leaned toward each other,
did our tongues know to touch
before our brains knew
we were going to kiss at all?

 

 

 

“The Water Turned Her Skin Sky.”

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While reading the November 2019 issue of Poetry, I came across a poem that lends a bit of magical realism to its grammar. Though some readers might object to using words in unusual ways, I find it refreshing to read and one of the chief joys of poetry.

The poem is “América” by Sarah María Medina, a newcomer to the magazine whose work has appeared in Prelude, Black Warrior Review, and Poetry Northwest. I will only share the first third or so of the poem to illustrate a few moves that look simple but are actually not (if you’re the one trying to think of them, anyway).

Alas, the HTML does not allow me to reflect the visual aspects of the poem, as each line is indented by various degrees in double-spaced succession. See if you can pick out the words that come across as more “poetic” than most:

 

From “América” by Sarah María Medina

The river was deep & wide.
Wild girls grew along
the riverbanks. Wild strawberries grew
among the wet grass. A girl tramped barefoot.
Her tips arrowed. The tracks wept
in the distance. She scavenged
wild strawberries. The river water stung her mouth.
The water turned her skin sky. Alone
the girl knelt to sift water
through her fingers. There was once a dock
with a wooden boat. Once a general.
Once a sister. Once a mother who hid
behind the general. Once a machete.
Once a girl who swallowed salt.
She held the resonance of chromatic
harmony. The quiet of faded mist…

 

The first unusual word is “arrowed” in L5. Arrow is a well-known noun, but less often seen as a verb. That said, Merriam-Webster provides three definitions of “arrow” when used as a verb, the first being the intransitive version, “to move fast and straight like an arrow in flight.”

What I like about the usage is its subject “tips.” This word immediately brings arrows to mind, even though it is referencing the tips of the girl’s feet. Good poetry enlists words in refreshing ways. It gives the reader pause, and any time a reader pauses for a good reason, the poem can be said to be “working.”

Directly thereafter we get “The tracks wept / in the distance.” (L5/6)  Personification works best when it works twice. Yes, it is a poetic device, and yes, we don’t often think of tracks as weeping, but when you consider looking back at your own tracks over any damp grounds and how the soft the imprints look wetter due to your weight, you see the appropriateness of “wept” as a predicate for “tracks.”

Finally, in L8, we get “The water turned her skin sky.” Again, the reader pauses at the unusual word pairings. Water? Turning skin “sky”? You might first fear that the poor girl is turning blue, but it makes more sense to see the girl as one with the natural world she apparently lives in each day. River water, sky, girl. And a “double” is scored in that we get alliteration “skin” slides into “sky.”

At this point in the poem, a narrative tempo begins to pick up. Anaphora is used in a series of “Once…” lines presaging story. And story you will get. One that might help answer the accent aigu found in the title.

If you’re interested, you can find the complete poem in a copy of the magazine for sale or at the public library. Meanwhile, as a reader and a writer, note and consider how language is used in unusual, thus effective, ways as you read poems. Grammar is important, yes. But it is never a tyrant in the Kingdom of Poetry. Poetic license and creativity provide the checks and balances. And thankfully, the rule the realm.

 

Are You My Reader? The Story of a Newborn Poetry Book

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With apologies to P.D. Eastman’s classic children’s book, Are You My Mother?, here’s what it might look like for a first poetry collection written by a new-to-the-scene poet. (It happens every day!)

are you my mother

A poet worked on his manuscript.

The manuscript grew.

“Uh-oh,” said the poet, “my manuscript will be ready for submission. It will need a publisher!”

“I must send my manuscript out to poetry publishers. I will check the submission guidelines and mail it as an attachment.”

So away as a pdf. the manuscript flew.

The manuscript was rejected. It was rejected, and rejected, and rejected.

Then came an acceptance! The book was published!

“Where are my readers?” the book said.

It looked for them.

It looked up. It did not see them. It looked down. It did not see them.

“I will go and look for them,” the poetry book said.

Down in the Amazon best sellers rank the book went.

Down, down, down! It was a long way down!

The book could not sell on its unknown author’s name alone. It had no budget. It had no PR help. It had no reviews.

“I will go and find my readers,” it said. “I will go to poetry readings and events!”

The book did not know what its readers looked like. It could be passing right by them.

It came to a best-seller reader holding a John Grisham. “Are you my reader?” It said to the best-seller reader.

The best-seller reader just looked. It looked and looked, but did not say a thing.

The best-seller reader was not its reader, so the book went on.

Then the book came to a mystery, thriller, and suspense reader holding a Michael Connelly. “Are you my reader?” it said to the mystery, thriller, and suspense reader.

“No,” said the mystery, thriller, and suspense reader holding a Michael Connelly book.

The John Grisham buyer was not its reader. The Michael Connelly buyer was not its reader.

“I have to find my reader! But where? Where could he or she be?”

Then the book came to a YA reader holding a J.K. Rowling book.  “Are you my reader?” it said to the YA reader.

“I am not your reader,” said the YA reader. “I am a YA reader.”

The John Grisham buyer was not its reader. The Michael Connelly buyer was not its reader. The J.K. Rowling buyer was not its reader.

So the book went on. Now it came to a history reader holding a Doris Kearns Goodwin.

“Are you my reader?” the book said.

“How could I be your reader?” the history reader said. “I am a history reader.”

The John Grisham and Michael Connelly buyers were not its reader. The J.K. Rowling and Doris Kearns Goodwin buyers were not its reader.

Did the poetry book have a reader?

“I did have a reader,” the poetry book said. “I know I did. I have to find him or her. I will. I WILL!”

Now the book did not wait for readers, it ran looking for readers.

Then it saw a Shakespeare reader with a mustache. Could that person be his reader? No, it could not. The book did not stop. It ran on and on.

Now it looked down. It saw a Robert Heinlein reader. “There he is!” said the poetry book. It called to the reader but the reader did not look up. The reader flipped the page.

The poetry book looked way, way up and saw a St. Billy of Collins reader. “Here I am, reader!” it called out. But the St. Billy of Collins reader did not notice. The St. Billy of Collins reader knew St. Billy of Collins and liked St. Billy of Collins and so read St. Billy of Collins religiously.

Just then the poetry book saw a big thing. This must be his reader! “There she is!” it said. “There is my reader!”

The book ran right up to it. “Reader! Reader! Here I am, reader!” it said to the big thing.

The big thing was a small group of friends and relatives. The friends and relatives were thankful for the poetry book and read some of its poems. The friends and relatives said kind things, even though most had not read a poem since that Robert Frost one in high school that the teacher had spent 5 1/2 classes analyzing, utterly destroying it.

“Oh, you are not my real readers,” the poetry book said. “You are a friends and relatives who are kind. I want my poems to have new friends who actually find them relative. They are my real readers!”

Then something happened. Time passed and the friends and relatives put the poetry book in magazine piles or on book shelves or in the local consignment store bin. They were not sales. They were not marketing. They could not give the poetry book’s author any word-of-mouth sales.

Finally a poetry reader never seen before decided to adopt the book after a reading. The poetry book felt important. It had a buyer and a reader, and for the newborn, first-time book, the hands of the reader felt as warm and feathery as a nest.

“Do you know who I am?” the poetry reader said to the poetry book. “I am a poetry reader, very rare and seldom seen in the wild, but a poetry reader.”

Having learned the hard way, the poetry book said, “Yes, I know who you are. You are one poetry reader. You do not make a blip on the Amazon sales list and you will likely not write a review, but you are a poetry reader and I cherish you,” said the poetry book.

“You are not a John Grisham reader.

“You are not a Michael Connelly reader.

“You are not a J.K. Rowling reader.

“You are not a Doris Kearns Goodwin reader.

“You are not a Shakespeare or Heinlein or St. Billy of Collins reader.

“You are someone who loves poems and is willing to buy a new book with a new name because you actually liked what you sampled. You are a true poetry lover, someone a poetry book could love.

“You are my reader.”

 

The End

 

 

 

 

Doors as Metaphors

poetry poetry books

Here is the opening poem to the National Book Finalist,  Be Recorder, a collection written by Carmen Giménez Smith and published by Graywolf Press.

 

“Origins”
Carmen Giménez Smith

People sometimes confuse me for someone else they know
because they’ve projected an idea onto me. I’ve developed
a second sense for this—some call it paranoia, but I call it
the profoundest consciousness on the face of the earth.
This gift was passed on to me from my mother who learned it from
solid and socially constructed doors whooshing inches from her face.
It may seem like a lie to anyone who has not felt the whoosh, but
a door swinging inches from your face is no joke. It feels like being
invisible, which is also what it feels like when someone looks
at your face and thinks you’re someone else. In graduate school
a teacher called me by another woman’s name with not even
brown skin, but what you might call a brown name. That sting
took years to overcome, but I got over it and here
I am with a name that’s at the front of this object, a name
I’ve made singular, that I spent my whole life making.

 

It’s a good opener in that it plants the flag of identity, pronouncing one of the themes of the book. It also digs into the concept of names and their importance to their owners because names are more than just letters. Names become everything about you, from Biblical times (think of Esau, who sold his birthright in Genesis) to modern times.

Everyone seeks to “protect their good name,” because names are their calling card, their reputation, their individuality struggling not to be typecast in any way. It seems simple, but is complex. Here, Smith tries to capture it in a brief anecdote about her mother’s encounter with “solid and socially constructed doors whooshing inches from her face.”

Those aren’t just any doors, obviously. They are metaphors. And what’s on the other side of them, when opened, depends on the beholder.