Yearly Archives: 2019

123 posts

The Poetry in Questions

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

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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.

Continental Drift, the Friends & Family Version

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fatherdaughter

Change. It’s in your pocket, in one sense, but you’re in its pocket in another.

That is, we are all pawns on the chessboard of change. It happens. Sometimes, as our lives change, we come out unscathed. Sometimes we even find ourselves in a better place. But other times, unbeknownst to us, we are moments away from being swiped off the board by a bellicose bishop.

The poet Charles Rafferty composed a theme on a variation of change with the poem “Drift.” It connotes a more gradual change. One we don’t notice until we do. Like stars moving across the heavens on the darkest of summer nights. They look as still as ice crystals stuck to a celestial map, and yet movement here is causing drift up there.

Let’s see if we can discern the movement in Rafferty’s poem:

Drift
by Charles Rafferty

Long ago, the old friends stopped calling. I used to think they had
lost my number. Now I forgive them their children and their jobs,
their wives and their divorces, their cancer and their lawns, the fifteen
minutes they allow themselves at the piano every night. I am able to go
on without them—a kind of orphan from the life I used to live. This is
what I’m thinking as I get in the car to take my daughter to her voice
lesson. The ride is a quiet one. She is getting older and has learned to
keep things to herself. When we arrive at the lesson, she makes it clear,
without saying so, that I should wait outside. So I stay in the car—doing
the bills, doing the things I hate—as her high notes drift through the
studio door, the glass of the car window, the air that will be between us
now from here until the end.

In Line 2, Rafferty uses parallel structure to good effect as he forgives his former friends “their children and their jobs, / their wives and their divorces, their cancer and their lawns, the fifteen / minutes they allow themselves at the piano every night.”

In the distant unknown we once called friendship, there is drama playing out. Always, it seems. Some comedy, but often tragedy. Tolstoy’s prophetic “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” And boy, it’s rough when you see “cancer” casually paired off with “lawns” like that.

So life drifts on. In one of the strongest phrases in the poem, the narrator refers to himself as “a kind of orphan from the life I used to live.”

Then he finishes with his daughter. A ride to her voice lesson. A ride that, ironically, includes very little voice in the car because she “has learned to / keep things to herself.”

What scares me a bit is the ending. Sitting outside in the car, the narrator hears his daughter’s voice “drift” (get it?) outside to “the air that will be between us / now from here until the end.”

Ouch. A drift that crash lands into permanent change. But me, I’m going to take solace in two places—a Mark Twain quote and my own experience. First, the Twain. He once said, “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

True, some teens are susceptible to sullen years where their friends are everything and their parents are a minor (or major) inconvenience, but I’m happy to report that, in my kids’ cases, it all came around full circle. Somehow I learned a thing or two over the years. Somehow I was worth talking to and listening to again.

Like the tide, then. Change can drift in and drift out. Still, Rafferty’s poem points to the subtleties that can sneak up on us. And when a little reflection makes you realize that they have, you get… poetry.

April Is the Cruller Month

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No, wait. That can’t be right. “April is the cruellest month,” according to T.S. Eliot, with “cruelest” misspelled.

Or maybe it’s a case of Brit-spell, which we fought a war over. I still remember the peace treaty at Yorktown, where George Washington proclaimed that, heretofore, “colour” would be spelled “color.” Huzzah (and all that)! Strike up “Yankee Doodle” and let’s get some lunch.

But back to Eliot. It’s a great line about April (which debuts today). A humdinger of a line. One everyone remembers, even people who consider poetry as foreign as Neptune. To stretch it out a bit, the first four lines of “The Waste Land” go like so:

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

The line works especially well in New England, where new life can be coaxed out of the earth only to be slammed with a late-season frost or a “whoops” snowstorm. Cruel.

The bigger point here, though, is great lines. All of us write them (by “us” I mean poets not quite as well-known as old Thomas Stearns Eliot), it’s just the company they keep. That is, when we create an awesome line that makes us proud, we have trouble drumming up players to go out on the field or court with it.

Poetry, you see, is a team sport outfitted with players called words and lines and stanzas. Given that, a great line cannot stand alone. It is not an orchestra unto itself. It requires other lines to help it resonate, make sense, fill the room with music. You can put a star on a basketball team, for instance, but if the other four players are mediocre at best, good luck.

Some poetry “how-to” books advise a collection of your best lines, shoehorning them into one poem. To me, that’s a cheat sure to fail.

What? My best lines from five poems forced to play together, even if they treat on different subjects? Just imagine the egos of five superstars on that basketball court with no practice as a cohesive unit. Ball hogs. Hot doggers. Ma, look-at-me’s.

No, no, no. That will not do. That would be cruelly unkind and one mess of a poem.

Think of that next time you try to devise ways to make one of your favorite lines famous. I recommend starting from scratch. Build a team around your great line. It’s not easy, but whoever said poetry was? Not this guy. So pass the crullers, poor a coffee, and get to work.

My Kingdom for an Audience!

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audience

In this age and day, it is good to read a poem that starts with the line “How kind people are!” Not just read it, but with-an-exclamation-point read it, as if the idea needs to shout in these times where boorishness, shamelessness, and lies are king.

Connie Wanek’s poem, “Audience,” brings to mind poetry readings, where folks are, as a rule, kind. And rare. And often few and far between — but, by definition, still an “audience.”

The denotation is deliciously limber. My wife is an audience, for instance, when I unpack my troubles on her to divide them in half. It is a key part of a spouse’s job: relief through division.

My dog can serve as audience, too, tilting his head like Nipper, the old RCA Victor dog, as I go on and on, Mark Twain-like, about the damned human race (hint: no one’s in the lead).

But let’s return to Connie’s audience, shall we?

Audience
by Connie Wanek

How kind people are!
How few in the crowd truly hope
the tightrope will break.

Rare’s the man who’ll shoot the Pope
or throw his shoe at a liar,
though joining in—that’s natural.

An audience of St. Paul’s sparrows
is easily bored, easily frightened.
One blasphemy and off they fly.

Even a polite dog will snore
through reprimands,
though he’ll rouse to follow

the refreshments with a calculating eye.
But people, especially Minnesotans,
pull their sleeves over their watches

and want to find a way to like you.
If they can sit through winter’s sermons,
they can sit through you.

Sometimes poetry can send you in peculiar directions of your own making. It may be that the poet would be alarmed to hear it. Or it may be that she’d cry, “That’s exactly what I was thinking!”

Stanza one, for instance, reminds me of hockey games where fans wait out the game in hopes of a fistfight on ice. Or Nascar races where folks anticipate an exciting car crash. Stanza two, with the thrown shoe, brings images of President G. W. Bush — a.k.a. “another kettle of fish” — dodging a shoe some foreign journalist tossed at him during a press conference. Give him this. Bush had the moves if not the credentials.

Stanzas three and four bring more docile behavior to the fore. In five, the calculating eye of the dog eying refreshments cheers a reader. We love consistency and predictable behavior, after all, in our best friends.

I can’t speak to Minnesotans, having met none in my life. That they check their watches while finding “a way to like you” speaks highly of them, though. Trained by sermons, the joke goes. And sometimes a little humor is just the right touch when it comes to the tricky part of a poem (i.e. the ending). The days of saying, “And the audience lived happily ever after” are over, after all.

Applause, please.

***

Nota Bene: How kind authors are to avoid putting TIP JAR buttons on their websites. Or one of those dreaded BUY ME A COFFEE buttons.

Heck, if you like what you read on this site, I’d much rather you support the cause by buying one of my books from the BOOKS page, the monies of which go into paying the yearly cost of this site. That way, you get something out of it, too. And me, I get an “Audience” (the tie-in you were waiting for)!

😉

A Dog, Samsara, and the Sea

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Wash. Rinse. Repeat. A good mantra for samsara, seems. But the Buddhist view of samsara is negative—i.e. an endless cycle of pain, sickness, and death—while the Western view skews positive. You know. Reincarnation as better-than-nothing form of immortality. Too bad you can’t remember your former lives. Unless you’re Shirley MacLaine, that is.

Today’s poem is one part samsara and one part shaggy dog. Dogs, you see, are a form of immortality too. When life hits you with trauma and misery, invest in a puppy. Voilà, as they say in Versaille. Your worries dissolve in the day-to-day delights of puppy tail and puppy tongue.

A dog, after all, lives in the moment. It has little use for past or future. In that sense, it is not only man’s best friend, but his bodhisattva, a being that long ago reached enlightenment but is there for you anyway.

So the next time you read some rule that says, “Thou shalt not write a poem about dogs,” you can either roll your eyes and ignore it OR do as David Salner does and double down: dog plus Eastern philosophy.

A Dog by the Sea
by David Salner

Just after dawn, we get up,
without coffee, and let the dog lead us
through a grove of wind-stunted trees,
spiked succulents, red-berried holly,
and over the dune ridge out of the gray
of still sleeping minds. A line of pink
from the not yet risen sun
reminds me of the lilac shadows
caught in the radial grooves of shells.
I take up your hand and feel the blood
warming your fingers, as the dog bounds off
dragging her leash through wet sand.
She’s after gulls and a line of waves
that repeat themselves, she seems to think,
because they want to play.
A morning breeze
stirs the now turning tide, breathing over it,
sighing toward bayside. As the waves come in
whorls of light unfold on the sand. How I want
for us to repeat ourselves, on and on,
you holding the leash of a silly dog, me
feeling the beat, the blood in your hand.

In addition to imagery related to the sea, note how the waves repeat themselves, the tide turns eternal, and the narrator confesses “How I want / for us to repeat ourselves, on and on.”

If you inhale deeply while reading, you’ll catch whiffs of both salt and Buddhism, meaning we have a dog poem, yes. But an oh-so-human-in-its-wistfulness one, too.

Random Thoughts for March (i.e. Madness!)

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Every once in a while, I write a Random Thoughts post (copyright, patent pending). As advertised, it is random. The equivalent of blathering, often with the intent of being humorous. Think funny raft floating on a stream of serious, then don’t take it too seriously. Streams of Consciousness are on the protected conservation lands list, after all.

Or were, before some powers-that-unfortunately-be started “unprotecting” everything in the name of plutocracy, autocracy, oligarchy, et al. You know, as Lincoln never put it: “Government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations….”

Here in the Estados-Disunitos, we have this thing called “March Madness,” denoting a time of year when a billionaire organization (read: The National Collegiate Athletic Association) reaps fistfuls of advertising dollars while “student-athletes” play for no pay.
It’s called “Madness” because every American worker, student, and self-anointed “expert” jumps into a pool (despite the chilly time of year, the water’s fine!) and speaks mysteriously (e.g. “Hey, Bud. All three of my upset picks won last night,” and “Oh, man, is my West bracket busted, or what?”).
Nothing galls the office pool dudes more than some “mere woman” winning everything because she picked teams by color, mascot, or dartboard. Thus, the beauty of it all.
What? The Mueller Report is out this weekend? I lied. March Madness means the same as every other month’s madness we’ve been experiencing since January 2017 when the White House turned into the House of Orange.
Given the increasing time it takes to hear back from poetry markets, I’d say, as is true with the casino industry in the northeast, that the market is saturated.
Quick-response poetry journals, when they reject you within a week, are the poetry-journal equivalent of euthanasia. A bittersweet form of mercy, that!
Speaking of bittersweet, it’s always odd to enjoy a personal note from an editor (vs. a boilerplate rejection). You know the one I mean: “We particularly enjoyed your poem ‘Dover Beach’ but decided the tide wasn’t quite right for us just now. Please consult your tide charts and try us again six months from now.”
Such notes are found in the dictionary under paradox (n.) — “a compliment that isn’t; an endorsement that confirms and denies; a pair of mallards.”
Goodreads continues to skew bad. Since Amazon dot glom took over, they’ve slowly been trending more and more toward being an advertisement site, one where members get “used” for free (kind of like basketball stars in the NCAA!).
Exhibit A: Huge ads framing 40% of the screen when you click on a book title to learn more about that book (hint: the ad is for a completely different book). The moral of the story? Pay no attention to those blinking GIFs and videos no longer behind the curtain!
Exhibit B: the second entry on your activity feed, which is now an ad pretending to be an actual activity feed, saying something like (Goodreads Friend Z loves “Book Title Whose Publisher Has Paid for This Ad”).
Of course, Goodreads Friend Z has no clue that her innocent “like” of a book has been appropriated by the Amazons-That-Be for free advertising. It’s all in the fine print written by lawyers (a.k.a. “Terms and Conditions”).
Speaking of Goodreads “likes” and other fluff clicks, can you imagine if the “Wants to Read” button was a “one-click” purchase of said book? All of you writers under small, independent presses would be feeling the love (vs. the cruel tease) right now! Right in the royalties!
What if there were brackets for the Top 68 poets? Who would make your Sweet Sixteen? Your Elite Eight? Your Final Four?
Would it change, year to year?
I hope so. But then, I hope a lot of things. Kind of like Pandora, just before she shut the box as someone quipped, “Too late, sister. But good luck to you.”

amazon.com

Jack Kerouac & Gary Snyder: Two Haiku Buddies

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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!

poetry submitting poetry

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!