Yearly Archives: 2019

120 posts

Epiphany Enclosed

Thanks to James Joyce, the word epiphany has been co-opted from the church by the world of literature. In A Poet’s Glossary, Edward Hirsch says this about the word:

“From a Greek word meaning ‘to appear.’ An epiphany is a sudden spiritual manifestation, a luminous or visionary moment. Epiphany means the manifestation of a god or spirit in the body, and thus the Christian epiphany is literally the manifestation of Christ to the Magi. James Joyce (1882-1941) secularized the term so that it came to mean a sudden manifestation of spiritual meaning, an unexpected revelation of truth in the commonplace, a psychological and literary mode of perception. It disrupts the ordinary, a moment out of time.”

Poets are well-versed (heh) in epiphanies. They consider it an essential part of their toolbox. The a-ha moment, after all, is often the spark to a poem and catnip for the Muse.

But what if the epiphany doesn’t come from within? What if it comes compliments of another person, someone who knows better, someone hellbent on overcoming our stubbornness or ignorance?

Ah, yes. That, too, is the stuff of poetry. For Exhibit A, I give you the always dependable Seamus Heaney:

The Skylight
by Seamus Heaney

You were the one for skylights. I opposed
Cutting into the seasoned tongue-and-groove
Of pitch pine. I liked it low and closed,
Its claustrophobic, nest-up-in-the-roof
Effect. I liked the snuff-dry feeling,
The perfect, trunk-lid fit of the old ceiling.
Under there, it was all hutch and hatch.
The blue slates kept the heat like midnight thatch.

But when the slates came off, extravagant
Sky entered and held surprise wide open.
For days I felt like an inhabitant
Of that house where the man sick of the palsy
Was lowered through the roof, had his sins forgiven,
Was healed, took up his bed and walked away.

Saying Goodbye to Your Books

humor poetry

books

Books are family, some extended and some immediate, but if you are a writing bibliophile like me, your bookshelves are groaning and your day of reckoning is nigh.

Marie Kondo aside (thank you), Judgment Day usually comes in the form of a move, specifically a variety known as the Downsizing Move. While my wife does battle with the dragons known as clothes and sentimental junk (read: stuff saved for the kids, who will not want it), I take arms against books—a thought previously unheard of.

While looking over my shelves, all manner of questions come to the fore. Why do I still have this book? Will I ever read this book? Will I ever reread this book? Even, how on earth did this book get here?

What’s more, I’ve learned a lot about myself. Let me count the reasons why I’ve collected books over the years:

The books are a history of me. That’s right. I find myself remembering when I got the book, why I got the book, how I got the book. Donating or selling these books will be like tearing a chapter out of my own book—my life’s history, a.k.a. The Story of Me.
The books haven’t been read yet. OK, fair enough, but is the desire still there? In confronting myself with this question, I often have to be honest and say no. Why did I buy it, then? Mood purchases. Phase purchases. Impulse purchases. Whatever it might be, I have to face this question and be honest if I hope to give it the old heave-ho.
The books speak of time and place. Oh, man, I loved that trip to Miami Beach! The one where I read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises by the pool. And what about the strange week’s vacation at Old Orchard Beach, the one where I read that little-known “beach read” called The Charterhouse of Palma? Man, did I love those books, almost in a sentimental, geographic kind of way! How can I part with them now? Wouldn’t it be like a divorce between time and place?
The books are pretty. They’ve long been evicted from the already-cluttered coffee table, and they’re so big they lie on their big sides, but these coffee table books look first rate because, well, they’ve only been opened once—the day I got them. How can I part with such masterpieces in mint condition? What kind of cruel tyrant am I, anyway? And what about those cute little Penguin paperbacks with their black spines, each calling out the name of a beloved author from Russia’s Golden Age (Turgenev! Tolstoy! Lermontov!)?
The books might be worth money. It’s incredible how many first editions I have on these hallowed shelves. What? Donate riches to the library book sale? No doubt they’d be plucked from the pile by some savvy overseer of sales who will sell them for personal profit! So I search on eBay and discover, verily, that the same first edition as I now hold in my hand sells for a range of prices: $5 to $599. Welcome to eBay, Online Field of Dreams! (And how does one do eBay, anyway? Doesn’t it involve buying stock in the United States Postal Service?)
The book was a gift. What? Donate a book that Aunt Mae gave to me for my 12th birthday? But, but… What if Aunt Mae, in her dotage, visits us for Christmas next year and asks how often I’ve reread that Tom Sawyer she bought me? What if she takes a moment to scour the bookshelves for its place of honor, then casually quips, “Ken, I can’t seem to find that copy of Tom Sawyer I gave you when you were a lad. Can you give me a hand here?”
The books will come back to haunt me. I often wonder about future me, reaching for a book that has always been there. You know, the initial confusion while I’m having trouble finding it, searching on high shelves and low only to discover that Nefarious Me (Past Tense) has dumped it in the name of downsizing or, worse still, the trendy (at the time) name of Marie Kondo. It will seem like I’ve downsized my heart (see Grinch comma green) and not my home!

True, some books will make the cut, and no book should wind up in a cardboard box of the new, smaller home’s basement, but still, these Days of Biblio Reckoning are terrible things. They do not spark joy so much as rebellion. They spark an uncivil war within the conflicted, bookish heart!

“To Enchant Someone Meaninglessly…”

poetry

Reviews. Yesterday I mentioned how they can draw you in, make you want to click to cart on amazon dot glom, run to your local bookstore, or — if your biblio-habits are bankrupting you — enter a hold on your interlibrary loan system.

This happened with Chelsey Minnis’ new book Baby, I Don’t Care, which I could not secure due to all the holds. So I reserved instead Poemland, an older book with no holds. And no holds barred.

As a poet, it’s always interesting to read a wide swath of different voices and styles, and boy, howdy, is Minnis’ voice and style different. In Poemland, she elopes with the ellipsis. The exclamation point doesn’t scare her, either! And the single-space thing is for more conventional types. (Check the mirror, friends!)

Although the poems are not named, they are spread out between black divider pages, so I’ll take that construct as a “poem, ” Minis-style, and give you a sample from Poemland here. Have fun! (I think that’s the point, Jeeves.)

I want to sit very calmly with my bangs curled…

But my pet monster has bitten my hand!

Life makes me sad.

So sad that I walk down the street etc.

When I read poems I don’t like them…

But I like them like pouf-roses…

I like them like gilt saws…

And I like them like dark brown ram shearling!…

To enchant someone meaninglessly…

Is like getting insulted and kissed by your riding instructor…

This is when your hair sticks to your lipstick and it is so cuckoo…

You close the bedroom-dividing curtain…

Gold smudges…and a gemstone powered engine!…

A great devalued thing is a plain life…

But I like it like a venus-fly-trap pried open with tweezers…

I like to live a hard life but I know I shouldn’t do it…

I should live an easy life or I am a fool!

The sea-crabs try to cling onto anything.

The crab fishermen don’t even want all the crab…they want

money…

Even though their mustaches are covered with ice…

If you are a person you can also be someone’s goat…

I can tell you all about it for free…

I can long remember a nastie thing…

If it is well done..

This is a present of tiny pretty scissors…

Which you must use to cut your beast hair…

I am a vile baby…

Look, death, I have so much delicious vulture food within my

chest cavity…

I look to the left and right with my eyes and then I swing the sharp

thing…

As you rise out of a cloud on a mechanized contraption…

If you open your mouth to start to complain I will fill it with

whipped cream…

There is a floating sadness nearby…

Don’t try to walk away from a little girl like me!

This is a recollection of flopped happiness…

And it is a fistfight in the rain under a held umbrella…

There is a way to smoke your cigarette and look out the window

but you’ll never get enough of it.

Chasing Today’s Hot Property

poetry

Typically, this is how it goes down: You read a review of a new poetry book (say, Chelsey Minnis’ Baby, I Don’t Care), and it intrigues you. Going on interlibrary loan, you find the book, place it on “hold,” and see you are hold number #23 on 2 books in the system.

So you get in line. If you were in England Comma Jolly Olde, you’d get in queue, but in the Very Unjolly (These Days) Estatos Disunitos, you get in line with the other 99%.

Then it dawns upon you, sun and all. This poet has written previous books (say, Poemland). So you search and find one of them on the library site’s digital catalogue and, of course, there are zero holds on it even though it is the same poet of the moment.

poemland

This is because the old book is yesterday’s news, and if there’s one thing people cannot abide, it is old news (and people).

Canaries are one thing. They read old news lining the bottom of their cages. Ditto puppies, who are traditionally trained to leak old news on the floor. Before they learn to take it outside, I mean.

Anyway, happily, the voice of the searchable poet is the same in the old book as it is in the new book’s excerpts. And if you read enough of the old books, eventually your hold on the new book will inch up the line and you will be notified that it’s ready and waiting on your beloved public library’s “reserved shelf.”

Only then you’re on to something else. Some other poet. Your interest in the old “gotta read” has waned.

Why, you wonder, is interest always waning? It’s like the interest on your savings account at the bank, which has waned to 0.86 APY.

Whatever APY means.

Pantoums: Easier Said Than Done

poetry

As most of you know, poetry, supposedly dying (see Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry for all the news unfit to print) has inched its way into The New York Times Magazine on Sundays.

This week Rita Dove selected a form I haven’t seen in a while, the pantoum. As Dove explains, it hails from Malaysian oral tradition and seems easy, but isn’t. The easier part is the ABAB rhyme scheme. The more difficult part is the shifting: “Lines 2 and 4 of each quatrain become Lines 1 and 3 in the next stanza.” Hoo, boy. Like working on a 500-piece puzzle some rainy Sunday, that.

As with haiku, it is much easier to write bad pantoums than good ones. It is also a type of writing that appeals to some poets who like a challenge (example: Allison Joseph, pictured) and repels others (example: Ken Craft, seen here hiding from pantoums), who like to control their challenges, thank you.

Here’s the poem Dove offered up this week as an excellent example of the pantoum form. If you want to read Dove’s introduction as well, take a jump down this rabbit hole.

Flirtation
By Allison Joseph

I like my tights electric blue,
my shoes of patent leather.
This dance I dance is meant for you —
I move quick as new weather.

My shoes of patent leather
shine brighter than my skin.
I move, quick as new weather,
to shed the dress I’m in.

Shining brighter than my skin,
my eyes, they say it all.
I’ll shed the dress I’m in,
let summer fabric fall.

My eyes, they see it all.
They see what’s false, what’s true.
Let summer fabric fall.
I know what we can do.

I know what’s false, what’s true.
I dance the dance that’s meant for you.
Show me what you can do.
You like my tights, electric blue.

When the Lines Are Good Enough

poetry

It is well known that some poems enchant you so much you have to read again. And again. And again, kind of like savoring a fine wine with the tongue.

Less known, maybe, is when the same thing happens with a few lines. You read them and are willing to stop reading the poem, back up, and read the lines and the lines only again. And again. And again, kind of like savoring a tall glass of cold water on a blazing summer’s day.

I got that feeling when reading Frank O’Hara last night. These opening lines:

It seems far away and gentle now
the morning miseries of childhood
and its raining calms over the schools

The first of six stanzas, and none of the remaining five hit me like this one, so maybe it’s me, and maybe it’s personal, and maybe what puts the “fine” in my “wine” doesn’t so much in yours.

That’s poetry. Poetry that “seems far away and gentle now.”

The Trouble with Spring

marketing poetry poetry

Ah, spring, inspired by the month of May, which brings to mind May baskets, the maypole of old, and flowers encouraged by rains of recently departed April.

Spring inspires not only birds and bees, but poets. Any survey course of poetry will show you as much. Spring is icumen, cuccu (or something like that).

The spring-inspired poet lifts his pencil and smooths out a clean page in his poetry journal. Thoughts, dreams, reflections find their fertile way to paper.

Cross outs, add-ins, revisions. Cut to the bone. (OK. To the stem, then.) It’s spring and the imagination, like perennials, is sprouting full force.

Type 3-5 poems into a single Word document, PDF, or rich text format. Go to your favorite poetry journal. And another. And a third, on and on like rising dandelions, and behold the weedy words of the season:

There are presently no open calls for submissions.

In the words of the poets of old: May Day, May Day, poetry markets are sinking!

And in the words of The Happenings, “See You in September.” Your baby named “Ample Poetry Markets” has gone not only for the spring, but for the summer.

Marketing work is no summer vacation, friends. It’s about to become work.

Adult Brain + Kid Wondering = Poetry

poetry

Sometimes you just have to be kid-curious to write poetry by saying, “What if?” and “Imagine that….” Rest assured if you are a poet walking on crowded city sidewalks, you are not thinking the same things as the folks looking down at their Palm Gods (read: cellphones). No. Your mind is moving faster than you are, turning at every bend, allowing no law of physics to get in your creative way.

In a follow-up to yesterday’s Wislawa Szymborska’s poem, here’s another that has, whether she intended it or not, a distinct samsara flavor.

Thoughts That Visit Me on Busy Streets
Wislawa Szymborska

Faces.
Billions of faces on the earth’s surface.
Each different, so we’re told,
from those that have been and will be.
But Nature—since who really understands her?—
may grow tired of her ceaseless labors
and so repeats earlier ideas
by supplying us
with preworn faces.

Those passersby might be Archimedes in jeans,
Catherine the Great draped in resale,
some pharaoh with briefcase and glasses.

An unshod shoemaker’s widow
from a still pint-sized Warsaw,
the master from the cave at Altamira
taking his grandkids to the zoo,
a shaggy Vandal en route to the museum
to gasp at past masters.

The fallen from two hundred centuries ago,
five centuries ago,
half a century ago.

One brought here in a golden carriage,
another conveyed by extermination transport,
Montezuma, Confucius, Nebuchadnezzar,
their nannies, their laundresses, and Semiramida
who speaks only English.

Billions of faces on the earth’s surface.
My face, yours, whose—
you’ll never know.
Maybe nature has to shortchange us,
and to keep up, meet demand,
she fishes up what’s been sunk
in the mirror of oblivion.

I like all the cameos here by famous people—people kind enough to share their faces with contemporary Warsaw, mind you. I had to look up Altamira to see that it is an ancient cave filled with caveman (and woman) canvases (rock on!) that might hang in the Prado if cave walls could move. As for Semirada, an opera, it appears, starring a queen of same name. Maybe Szymborska was a fan of the opera. Me, I give it a wide berth, being the Vandal that I am.

Face it, you could do worse than let your mind wander to strange wonders today. Whimsy is on the same shelf as poetry, after all. Just ask Dewey Decimal.

"Thoughts That Visit Me on Busy Streets" Wislawa Szymborska

The Poetry in Questions

poetry reading poetry

I am not a fan of invasive photography and film. You know. People, for instance, who record a burial in a cemetery. Such images, to my mind, belong to the photography of memory, a holier place where they can shift and adjust over time according to the mood and age of the person recalling it.

Don’t get me wrong. My wife and I have albums upon albums of photography, mostly generated by our children’s upbringing. We look at them somewhere between seldom and never, and they elbow out space for books on the bookshelves. What’s more, our children, now grown, have little interest or room for such truck.

So speak, Memory, I want to say. Heck with photos and film. The past is lovely when seen through a memory darkly.

I thought of all of this while reading the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska (and how I love that name!) yesterday. I came upon her “Portrait from Memory,” and it was all questions. The poetry of questions, if you will. But the shifting images in these questions were rich with possibility—much richer than the strict limits of an actual photograph would have been.

So here’s to our suspect memories, and the (what else?) artful way Szymborska plays with them. An album of photographs would take its ball and go home right away. With its cold logic, it would have little patience for word play. More’s the pity. More’s the reason Szymborska developed images with the aperture of her poet’s eye instead.

Portrait from Memory
Wislawa Szymborska (translation: Clare Cavanagh & Stanislaw Baranczak)

Everything seems to agree.
The head’s shape, the features, the silhouette, the height.
But there’s no resemblance.
Maybe not in that position?
A different color scheme?
Maybe more in profile,
as if looking at something?
What about something in his hands?
His own book? Someone else’s?
A map? Binoculars? A fishing reel?
And shouldn’t he be wearing something different?
A soldier’s uniform in ’39? Camp stripes?
A windbreaker from that closet?
Or—as if passing to the other shore—
up to his ankles, his knees, his waist, his neck,
deluged? Naked?
And maybe a backdrop should be added?
For example, a meadow still uncut?
Rushes? Birches? A lovely cloudy day?
Maybe someone should be next to him?
Arguing with him? Joking?
Drinking? Playing cards?
A relative? A chum?
Several women? One?
Maybe standing in a window?
Going out the door?
With a stray dog at his feet?
In a friendly crowd?
No, no, all wrong.
He should be alone,
that suits some best.
And not so familiar, so close up?
Farther? Even farther?
In the furthermost depths of the image?
His voice couldn’t carry
even if he called?
And what in the foreground?
Oh, anything.
As long as it’s a bird
just flying by.

"Portrait from Memory" Wislawa Szymborska

Writing About Writers, Reading About Books

poetry reading poetry

Readers like reading about books and the act of reading. Thus, the occasional bestseller about libraries or rare book collectors or, God save us, the randomly-chosen Top 100 Books We Must Read Before Kicking off into the Milky’s Way (where you’ll be a star, trust me).

A corollary is this: Writers like to write about writers. This provides fodder for reader-writers reading about writers whose works they have read. These truths became self-evident last night while I was reading the new issue of Poetry (May, 2019). Flipping through pages the younger, I found a poem called “Marcus Aurelius” by Bianca Stone.

What? A poem about everyone’s favorite Stoic? Catnip!

Before even diving in, I first conjured memories of rainy afternoons on Martha’s Vineyard, where I read the landlord’s leather-bound copy of The Meditations. Who could lament lost beach weather when Marc was waxing eloquent on life, bringing seeming order to all the turmoil I’d taken existence to be?

Here is Stone’s neat little nod to the student of Epictetus:

Marcus Aurelius
by Bianca Stone

Sometimes I wake up in the night
with a terrible headache, my mouth
blackened; a ghost looking for valuables
in the debris, I turn on a battery-powered
light, clipped to a book, I write things down
in the spirit of Marcus Aurelius
who said the finest bottle of wine
is just grape juice, passing through the liver,
no matter the beauty of a frothing glass,
or a night of big Truth-seeking, never recalled;
the importance of putting something bittersweet
into our mouths, turning it around and around
on our tongues, attaching to it, our missions,
our purpose—in the end
we are all just filters, not even
as beautiful as the plainest bird
or as zen as the meanest deer tick,
nothing is given over to, nothing new is lit.
So often it is this. I wake up, urgent, fatalistic,
with the taste of nectar on my boughs.
I replay on a loop my one stoic consistency,
my middle of the night vow,
that I will start tomorrow
the essential dismantling
of what I live.

We read the philosophers when we are lost and want to be found. Trouble is, reading most philosophers, you will be more lost than when you started. Not so with Marcus Aurelius, and Stone’s poem perfectly captures the mood and self-reflection necessary to savor Stoicism like a secret Epicurean.

The poem’s narrator admits to weakness, and the honesty is both disarming and inviting. Marcus Aurelius, the original self-help section of Roman bookstores? Yes, please! I’ll have some of what she’s having! And maybe look up a few more of the works of Bianca Stone while I’m at it.

If you write but haven’t written about writers, know that there is a built-in audience. I’ve written poems about James Wright, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, and Jack Gilbert, for instance. And once, when my poem “Hemingway Fishing” appeared in Gray’s Sporting Journal, I received an email from a reader who said it was no trouble tracking me down.

His purpose? To say thanks, is all. For writing about a writer he cared about.