Monthly Archives: January 2024

13 posts

Huckleberry Poems

poetry

Each time I reread The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I find myself pausing most often when Mark Twain takes a moment to describe nature. To me, these excerpts are Twain at his most poetic — even if it’s prose.

Here are four excerpts I like especially. Maybe it will send you back to your raft days (real or vicarious), too?

 

Ch. 8

The sun was up so high when I waked that I judged it was after eight o’clock. I laid there in the grass and the cool shade thinking about things, and feeling rested and ruther comfortable and satisfied. I could see the sun out at one or two holes, but mostly it was big trees all about, and gloomy in there amongst them. There was freckled places on the ground where the light sifted down through the leaves, and the freckled places swapped about a little, showing there was a little breeze up there. A couple of squirrels set on a limb and jabbered at me very friendly. I was powerful lazy and comfortable—didn’t want to get up and cook breakfast.

 

Ch. 9

We spread the blankets inside for a carpet, and eat our dinner in there. We put all the other things handy at the back of the cavern. Pretty soon it darkened up, and begun to thunder and lighten; so the birds was right about it. Directly it begun to rain, and it rained like all fury, too, and I never see the wind blow so. It was one of these regular summer storms. It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside, and lovely; and the rain would thrash along by so thick that the trees off a little ways looked dim and spider-webby; and here would come a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale underside of the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; and next, when it was just about the bluest and blackest—fst! it was as bright as glory, and you’d have a little glimpse of tree-tops a-plunging about away off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see before; dark as sin again in a second, and now you’d hear the thunder let go with an awful crash, and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling, down the sky towards the under side of the world, like rolling empty barrels down stairs—where it’s long stairs and they bounce a good deal, you know.

 

Ch. 19

Two or three days and nights went by; I reckon I might say they swum by, they slid along so quiet and smooth and lovely. Here is the way we put in the time. It was a monstrous big river down there—sometimes a mile and a half wide; we run nights, and laid up and hid daytimes; soon as night was most gone we stopped navigating and tied up—nearly always in the dead water under a towhead; and then cut young cottonwoods and willows, and hid the raft with them.

Then we set out the lines. Next we slid into the river and had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool off; then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee deep, and watched the day-light come. Not a sound anywheres—perfectly still—just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bullfrogs a-cluttering, maybe.T he first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line—that was the woods on t’other side; you couldn’t make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness spreading around; then the river softened up away off, and warn’t black anymore, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along ever so far away—trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks—rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by and by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there’s a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log-cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t’other side of the river, being a wood yard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh and sweet to smell on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they’ve left dead fish laying around, gars and such, and they do get pretty rank; and next you’ve got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it!

A little smoke couldn’t be noticed now, so we would take some fish off of the lines and cook up a hot breakfast. And afterwards we would watch the lonesomeness of the river, and kind of lazy along, and by and by lazy off to sleep. Wake up by and by, and look to see what done it, and maybe see a steamboat coughing along up-stream, so far off towards the other side you couldn’t tell nothing about her only whether she was a stern-wheel or side-wheel; then for about an hour there wouldn’t be nothing to hear nor nothing to see—just solid lonesomeness. Next you’d see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping, because they’re most always doing it on a raft; you’d see the axe flash and come down—you don’t hear nothing; you see that axe go up again, and by the time it’s above the man’s head then you hear the k’chunk!—it had took all that time to come over the water.

So we would put in the day, lazying around, listening to the stillness. Once there was a thick fog, and the rafts and things that went by was beating tin pans so the steamboats wouldn’t run over them. A scow or a raft went by so close we could hear them talking and cussing and laughing—heard them plain; but we couldn’t see no sign of them; it made you feel crawly; it was like spirits carrying on that way in the air. Jim said he believed it was spirits; but I says: “No; spirits wouldn’t say, ‘Dern the dern fog.’”

 

Ch. 32

When I got there it was all still and Sunday-like, and hot and sunshiny; the hands was gone to the fields; and there was them kind of faint dronings of bugs and flies in the air that makes it seem so lonesome and like everybody’s dead and gone; and if a breeze fans along and quivers the leaves it makes you feel mournful, because you feel like it’s spirits whispering—spirits that’s been dead ever so many years—and you always think they’re talking about you. As a general thing it makes a body wish he was dead, too, and done with it all.

 

Made in Vermont: The Poetry of Ruth Stone

poetry reading poetry

One weekend a few years back, I found myself at a bed and breakfast in Vermont, where my wife was enjoying a weekend of tennis with friends. I had with me a copy of Wislawa Szymborska’s Map: Collected and Last Poems, a 464-pager sure to see me through the short stay.

Or so I thought. Turns out,  my insomnia had other ideas (it’s willful like that). Rising in the thin hours of the morning dark, I repaired to the first-floor library where I could turn on a light and read without disturbing anyone. Soon I was fresh out of Szymborska and scouring the shelves for another book.

It was here that I found a book of poetry by native daughter Ruth Stone, a Vermonter who lived from 1915 to 2011. It was Stone’s book that got me through the weekend. It also introduced me to a poet I’d never heard of (a tribe I’ve since learned is quite large).

I like Szymborska’s poetry, and I discovered I like Stone’s too. As place holds a preeminent place in memory, especially when it comes to book associations, I will always remember this Vermont weekend and this B&B for those two books by those two poets, one if by Poland and two if by Vermont.

If you’re unfamiliar with Stone, here’s an example of her work:

 

Before the Blight
by Ruth Stone

The elms stretched themselves in indolent joy,
arching over the street that lay in green shadow
under their loose tent.
And the roses in Mrs. Mix’s yard pretzeled up her trellis
with pink Limoges cabbage blooms like Rubens’ nudes.
My lips whispered over the names of things
in the meadows, in the orchard, in the woods,
where I sometimes stood for long moments
listening to some bird telling me of the strangeness of myself;
rocked in the sinewy arms of summer.

 

Desire under the blighted elms, indeed. In this brief 10-liner, you can enjoy the personification of “indolent joy,” the imagery and metaphor of a “green shadow / under their loose tent,” and the co-opting of a noun to serve a verb’s visual demands: i.e. “pretzeled.”

And what about those “pink Limoge cabbages” that bloom “like Rubens’ nudes”? Nice, that.

It puts you in a contemplative mood to listen to the whisper of cascading prepositional phrases like “in the meadows, in the orchard, in the woods” — places where birds tell you of the strangeness of yourself, places where summer rocks you in its sinewy arms, places like Vermont.

Cheating Death (Sort Of…)

Ken Craft kencraftpoetry poetry poetry books updates on a free-verse life

jack gilbert

The old axiom has it that writers can cheat death if their words live on. I’m not terribly impressed with the formula because my words don’t experience the five senses as well as I do. If they live on, a lot of good that does me, in other words. And yes, you might say words (and plots and characters and Muses) have a mind of their own, but that’s like arguing that a computer has a mind of its own, too. It sounds good, but it’s a pleasant and popular fallacy.

When I first read Jack Gilbert’s Collected Poems, it was on a train (I always remember books read on trains, especially) and, as you might expect, I felt like I knew the guy quite well. Immortality, right? Cheated death (asterisk, wink, fingers crossed), right? But poor Jack doesn’t know any better. He died in 2012 after 87 good years.

Anyway, back to the book. It was a loan from the Worcester Library and contained a sacrilege. When I reached page 350 (of 384) with supplies and water running low, I noticed a page cleanly ripped out of the book.

Who does such things? What kind of person? Going to the table of contents, I find the answer. The missing poem, starting on the now-ghost page of 351, is called “The Answer.” So someone found an answer, all right, but apparently couldn’t memorize it, so they stole it, and the devil take the rest of us, apparently. The rest of us who are left with “The Question.”

Of course, curiosity piqued, I had to look the missing poem up on the Internet. Why couldn’t the mad ripper have done the same? Is printer toner that expensive? Anyway, here’s what I (and all readers of this library’s book) was missing:

 

“The Answer” by Jack Gilbert

Is the clarity, the simplicity, an arriving
or an emptying out? If the heart persists
in waiting, does it begin to lessen?
If we are always good, does God lose track
of us? When I wake at night, there is
something important there. Like the humming
of giant turbines in the high-ceilinged stations
in the slums. There is a silence in me,
absolute and inconvenient. I am haunted
by the day I walked through the Greek village
where everyone was asleep and somebody began
playing Chopin, slowly, faintly, inside
the upper floor of a plain white stone house.

 

Now, where was I? Ah, yes. Immortal Jack. When people say, “You don’t know Jack,” they’re wrong. I got to know his eternal soul well. He likes one-stanza poems. A lot. Mostly on one page, though occasionally on two. None as far as three. So if long poems drive you to distraction because your attention span is shorter than a Dachshund, check out Jack.

Frequently, Jack discusses past loves — wives divorced (Linda Gregg… a poet, too) and wives died (Michiko). He also is a well-traveled guy. Like Virgil, his ghost gave me more than one tour of towns and villages in Greece and Italy and Japan and New England. Also big cities like San Francisco and New York City. Pittsburgh as well. Jack is a Pittsburgh boy, after all.

Like the ancient Chinese and Japanese, he’s heavily invested in nature. And women. Fixated on nipples, too — a word that makes frequent cameos in his work. And life and death, anticipating his immortality, as in the final poem in the book:

 

“Convalescing” by Jack Gilbert

I spend the days deciding
on a commemorative poem.
Not, luckily, an epitaph.
A quiet poem
to establish the fact of me.
As one of the incidental faces
in those stone processions.
Carefully done.
Not claiming that I was
at any of the great victories.
But that I volunteered.

 

Jack doesn’t think he has much of a sense of humor, but he’s being modest. The man who totally lacks a sense of humor is rare, indeed (though he sometimes gets elected to the highest public office in the land). Some of the poems have a bemused tone, the kind of thing you hear in any work where writers are trying to figure life out (a poetic pastime). He also writes about writing on more than one occasion. For those who try to write poetry, there’s this “insider” poem:

 

“Doing Poetry” by Jack Gilbert

Poem, you sonofabitch, it’s bad enough
that I embarrass myself working so hard
to get it right even a little,
and that little grudging and awkward.
But it’s afterwards I resent, when
the sweet sure should hold me like
a trout in the bright summer stream.
There should be at least briefly
access to your glamour and tenderness.
But there’s always this same old
dissatisfaction instead.

 

For true immortality, some might say, you need to reach the level of the Bard and such. And remember, some writers seem shoe-ins for immortality when the moods of Fate turn against them. Famous today, not so much tomorrow. T. S. Eliot is famous, but how much is he read anymore? Longfellow was a Victorian giant, but try to find him now.

On a local level, Jack Gilbert is now famous to me. With this many poems read in this fast a succession, you’re bound to find quirks and holes (e.g. if poems are supposed to be “cut to the bone,” then many of Jack’s dodged the butcher’s poetic blade). But overall, it was a man that began to take shape beside me as I read on the train and, later, on the patio under the spring-break sun. It was a life revisited in a world where very few remain.

Immortal? Cheating death? Of a sort. In a way. But it’s the best a writer can do, so let’s celebrate the lie and leave philosophical arguments for the academics.

Rilke’s Cats

poetry reading poetry

Rilke must have been feeling fine when he went into feline mode. As proof, I give you a brace of poems: “The Panther” and “Black Cat.” In them, you will see reflections of Rilke’s advice (Letters to a Young Poet) to young Kappus–not only to adopt solitude and write for yourself and yourself alone, but to look to nature, its great indifference, its acceptance of what is difficult. You know. The sort of thing poets take to instinctively. Here are two of Rilke’s better known cat works:

 

The Panther

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly–. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Black Cat

A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place
your sight can knock on, echoing; but here
within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze
will be absorbed and utterly disappear:

just as a raving madman, when nothing else
can ease him, charges into his dark night
howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels
the rage being taken in and pacified.

She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen
into her, so that, like an audience,
she can look them over, menacing and sullen,
and curl to sleep with them. But all at once

as if awakened, she turns her face to yours;
and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,
inside the golden amber of her eyeballs
suspended, like a prehistoric fly.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

 

The eyes have it, as they say. And notice how small we are by comparison to these animals. Shakespeare (“eyes are the windows to the soul”) would be proud. As would Twain (who referred to mankind as “the damned human race”).

As are we, fans of poetry.

Waxing Poetic About Teachers

poetry

Ask most any adult, and he or she can tell you a story about a teacher. Sometimes it’s the teacher who inspired them, whose class they loved to walk into each morning. Other times it’s a teacher who, with one swift and devastating line, embarrassed, belittled, or destroyed a fragile kid. That, too, sticks for life.

Here are three poems written by three poets, each channeling the outsized influence and authority of a teacher. “Turtle Came to See Me” is more neutral, “Trouble with Math in a One-Room Country School” more negative, and “Ode to Teachers” more positive.

Whatever the emotion, it seems sure that most poets, if put to the task, could find a poem in a schoolroom of their past.

 

“Turtle Came to See Me”
by Margarita Engle

The first story I ever write
is a bright crayon picture
of a dancing tree, the branches
tossed by island wind.

I draw myself standing beside the tree,
with a colorful parrot soaring above me,
and a magical turtle clasped in my hand,
and two yellow wings fluttering
on the proud shoulders of my ruffled
Cuban rumba dancer’s
fancy dress.

In my California kindergarten class,
the teacher scolds me: REAL TREES
DON’T LOOK LIKE THAT.

It’s the moment
when I first
begin to learn
that teachers
can be wrong.

They have never seen
the dancing plants
of Cuba.

 

Comment: Maybe it’s inadvertent, but here an instructor teaches a valuable lesson. At a young age, the speaker learns that adults are not invincible and omniscient. They are imperfect beings subject to the same whims and sins as the rest of us. Though she keeps it to herself, the speaker is the real teacher here. She knows about Cuba’s dancing trees, something completely foreign to the “expert” in the room.

 

“Trouble with Math in a One-Room Country School”
by Jane Kenyon

The others bent their heads and started in.
Confused, I asked my neighbor
to explain—a sturdy, bright-cheeked girl
who brought raw milk to school from her family’s
herd of Holsteins. Ann had a blue bookmark,
and on it Christ revealed his beating heart,
holding the flesh back with His wounded hand.
Ann understood division. . . .

Miss Moran sprang from her monumental desk
and led me roughly through the class
without a word. My shame was radical
as she propelled me past the cloakroom
to the furnace closet, where only the boys
were put, only the older ones at that.
The door swung briskly shut.

The warmth, the gloom, the smell
of sweeping compound clinging to the broom
soothed me. I found a bucket, turned it
upside down, and sat, hugging my knees.
I hummed a theme from Haydn that I knew
from my piano lessons. . . .
and hardened my heart against authority.
And then I heard her steps, her fingers
on the latch. She led me, blinking
and changed, back to the class.

 

Comment: I love the last line of Kenyon’s poem: “She led me, blinking and changed, back to the class.” Proof positive (once again) that life lessons do not come inside textbooks or across the black and green plains of chalkboards. When injustice is meted out, the student finds succor and epiphanies in a cloakroom. That she hums Haydn and hardens her heart against authority is even better. The reader sings back-up vocals and relates—we’ve all suffered an experience like this before.

 

“Ode to Teachers”
by Pat Mora

I remember
the first day,
how I looked down,
hoping you wouldn’t see
me,
and when I glanced up,
I saw your smile
shining like a soft light
from deep inside you.

“I’m listening,” you encourage us.
“Come on!
Join our conversation,
let us hear your neon certainties,
thorny doubts, tangled angers,”
but for weeks I hid inside.

I read and reread your notes
praising
my writing,
and you whispered,
“We need you
and your stories
and questions
that like a fresh path
will take us to new vistas.”

Slowly, your faith grew
into my courage
and for you—
instead of handing you
a note or apple or flowers—
I raised my hand.

I carry your smile
and faith inside like I carry
my dog’s face,
my sister’s laugh,
creamy melodies,
the softness of sunrise,
steady blessings of stars,
autumn smell of gingerbread,
the security of a sweater on a chilly day.

 

Comment: A teacher’s faith grows into a student’s courage, and the litany of similes in the final stanza shows just how valuable that can be to an impressionable child. I wish all teachers knew just how enormous the stakes are in their classrooms. This is not punching a time clock work. This is lives, memories, inspirational ripples whose ends teachers will never see but must, at all times, imagine.

Frost on Writing Poetry

poetry

rfrost

Reading Robert Frost on writing poetry is nice ice after the fire of his poems. You can tell the man was a teacher once upon a time.

Frost can be forgiven his prejudices and miscues. He disliked the poetry of Wallace Stevens, for instance, comparing it to “bric-a-brac.” He was not a fan of Walden or Robinson Crusoe. But if you focus on quotes about the writing life alone, it’s like a sweating glass of iced tea on a hot summer day. Bracing!

Below, then, a few quotes to distract you from that blank page or screen:

 

“To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.”

“A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”

“The artist in me cries out for design.”

“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”

“I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.”

“The surest way to reach the heart [of the reader] is through the ear. The visual images thrown up by a poem are important, but it is more important still to choose and arrange words in a sequence so as virtually to control the intonations and pauses of the reader’s voice. By arrangement and choice of words on the part of the poet, the effects of humor, pathos, hysteria,  anger, and in fact, all effects, can be indicated or obtained.”

“The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.”

“The best way out is always through.”

“Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.”

“A poem is best read in the light of all the other poems ever written…Progress is not the aim, but circulation.”

“Enthusiasm must be forced through the prism of metaphor.”

“For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.”

“Every poem is the epitome of the great predicament; a figure of the will braving alien entanglements.”

 

Not sure I can buy in on the free verse quote, but it’s to be expected from a guy married to form poems. Me, I don’t much traffic in form (only one published form poem to my credit so far), but my ear DOES enjoy stopping by woods on snowy evenings. Ah, the sound of snow!

 

“The Art of Faith, The Faith of Art”

philosophy poetry poetry books

Voice. It’s that magical, magnetic je ne sais quoi that draws us. To people, yes. But to writing, too: artists heard through the medium of paper and ink.

From the earliest pages of Christian Wiman’s book He Held Radical Light, I found myself attracted to the voice. To me, it seemed the voice of reason. Balanced, yet opinionated. Informed, yet informal.

And the biggest test of all? I found myself liking most of the poems that meant a lot to Wiman. As Facebook and Twitter have proven (though not to me, as I avoid both like the plague), there’s nothing people like better than listening to a sermon from the choir.

On the first page, in the first sentence, we find Wiman reading the letters of A. R. Ammons “who for years sowed and savored his loneliness in lonely Ithaca, New York.” This leads to an Ammons poem, the one that would lend Wiman a title for his collection of short essays. Let’s listen in:

 

THE CITY LIMITS
by A. R. Ammons

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds’ bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.

 

From here, Wiman gets into anecdotes about listening to Ammons do a memorable (for the wrong reasons) poetry reading. Then to 80-year-old Donald Hall’s scary admission, “I was thirty-eight when I realized not a word I wrote was going to last.” Those words gave Wiman a “galactic chill.” For a writer—especially a young writer—it’s like walking willingly into that dark night.

Which of course puts Wiman onto his themes for this book. Or shall I say its dichotomies: religion vs. atheism, fame vs. obscurity, faith vs. art. He offers up two looks at the same chasm: Jack Gilbert’s and Mark Strand’s. Here are the two poems, a bracing start for your Sabbath Day morning with Wiman’s commentary in  between:

 

They will put my body into the ground.
Chemistry will have its way for a time,
and then large beetles will come.
After that, the small beetles. Then
the disassembling. After that, the Puccini
will dwindle the way light goes
from the sea. Even Pittsburgh will
vanish, leaving a greed tough as winter.
—JACK GILBERT

 

Wiman comments: “What is it we want when we can’t stop wanting? I say God, but Jack Gilbert’s greed may be equally accurate, at least as long as God is an object of desire rather than its engine, end rather than means. Gilbert’s poem amounts to a kind of metaphysics for materialists. Something survives us, the poem suggests, some cellular imperative ravening past whatever cohesion kept us, us; some life force that is suspiciously close to a death force: it’s winter, after all, and not any ordinary winter but one from which even Puccini and Pittsburgh have vanished, an ur-winter, you might say, even a nuclear one. Of course on the literal level the poem is referring to the way information dies out in one man’s brain—Gilbert was actually from Pittsburgh, and I assume he loved Puccini—but the end of the poem reverberates in a way that is both beautiful and terrible. When you are ending, it can seem like everything is, and the last task of some lives is to let the world go on being the world they once loved. But what song—or what but song—can contain that tangle of pain and praise?”

Then comes the example of Mark Strand, who sheds some light on love. A love, perhaps, you haven’t thought of.

 

A.M.
by Mark Strand

. . . And here the dark infinitive to feel,
Which would endure and have the earth be still
And the star-strewn night pour down the mountains
Into the hissing fields and silent towns until the last
Insomniac turned in, must end, and early risers see
The scarlet clouds break up and golden plumes of smoke
From uniform dark homes turn white, and so on down
To the smallest blade of grass and fallen leaf
Touched by the arriving light. Another day has come,
Another fabulous escape from the damages of night,
So even the gulls, in the ragged circle of their flight,
Above the sea’s long lanes that flash and fall, scream
Their approval. How well the sun’s rays probe
The rotting carcass of a skate, how well
They show the worms and swarming flies at work,
How well they shine upon the fatal sprawl
Of everything on earth. How well they love us all.

 

That Ugly Duckling We Call “Prose Poetry”

Lost Sherpa of Happiness poetry poetry books

To some people, the term “prose poetry” is like fingernails on a blackboard. Painful to hear. If it’s poetry, how is it prose? And if it’s prose, how is it poetry?

Beats me. I had a sum total of zero “prose poems” in my first book. Then I read Zbigniew Herbert, Poland’s wonderful poet. He sold me on the style with poems like “The History of the Minotaur” and “Old Prometheus.” Whatever you choose to call them, four of these “prose poems” wound up in my recent Lost Sherpa of Happiness collection, and I kinda like them.

In A Little Book on Form, Robert Hass has a few funny lines about this form. You should know, in advance, that he himself wrote prose poems. He provides a little history in his little book on this little form, too. If you thought this ugly duckling came of age in the rocking 60s, think again. It’s old. Older than me, even! We’re talking century comma 19th!

  • “In 1802 Coleridge contributed a few of his journal entries to a miscellany edited by his friend Robert Southey. He gave one of them a title:

December Morning

The giant shadows sleeping amid the wan yellow light of the December morning, looked like wrecks and scattered ruins of the long, long night.

“It did not start a stampede toward a new poetic form, so prose did not get annexed to the formal possibilities of poetry until August 26,1862, when a Paris daily newspaper La presse published a few of Baudelaire’s Petits poemes en prose (Le spleen de Paris). The entire collection of fifty prose pieces was published in 1869 two years after Baudelaire’s death….”

  • “The term ‘prose poem’: it had the force at one time of contradiction, of breaking down categories. And there may still be great value in a term impossible to define. All you have to do is read the scholars to see that it is impossible to define. Prose using all the techniques of poetry except meter, lineation, and rhyme? But there are no techniques special to poetry except meter, lineation, and rhyme. Short prose written by poets? Then their letters are prose poems. Short prose that avoids the usual discursive uses of prose? A proscription, not a definition. Writing that the authors call ‘prose poems’? Short pieces of prose organized in books like poems?”
  • “Conversation About the Definition of a Prose Poem on Woodpecker Trail at Coralville Lake at the End of March, the Wind Rising:

B: The thing is it doesn’t have a definition.

B: Sure it does. A poem without lines.

B: Well, that includes prose.

B: Right.”

Of all the chapters in Hass’s book, I found this one of the more enlightening–and amusing–ones. For the purposes of today’s entry, know this: If you hate prose poems, blame Baudelaire. And if you love them? Blame Baudelaire.

 

Sharon Olds’ “The Winter After Your Death”

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I found this Sharon Olds poem in Jane Hirshfield’s lovely collection of essays, Nine Gates and, as someone who who enjoys nature poetry more than the identity poetry so prevalent today, thought I’d share it for any other eco-fans in the crowd:

The Winter After Your Death by Sharon Olds

The long bands of mellow light
across the snow
narrow slowly.
The sun closes her gold fan
and nothing is left but black and white–
the quick steam of my breath, the dead
accurate shapes of the weeds, still, as if
pressed in an album.
Deep in my body my green heart
turns, and thinks of you. Deep in the
pond, under the thick trap
door of ice, the water moves,
the carp hangs like a sun, its scarlet
heart visible in its side.

“All Genuine Poetry in My View Is Antipoetry.”

philosophy poetry poetry criticism

Like Tony Hoagland, Charles Simic is no one-trick pony. In addition to his prowess in poetry, he knows his way around an essay, too. While reading “Notes on Poetry and Philosophy,” I noted much of interest, both from Simic and from the poets and philosophers he quotes.

For instance, Wallace Stevens once said that the twentieth-century poet is “a metaphysician in the dark.” Simic, not so sure, compares this idea to chasing a black cat in a dark room. Not only is poetry on the loose in there, but theology and Western and Eastern Philosophies as well. So if you’re bumping heads a lot, don’t be surprised. And if there’s no cat to begin with, don’t be surprised by that, either. It may be the trickster Devil and not the cat that’s truly on the loose in the dark.

Surprisingly, Simic does not believe that poets know what they are going to write about in advance, simply sitting down to execute those ideas. He says, “My poems (in the beginning) are like a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one’s walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a torn photograph, etc.,… where after months of looking at them and thinking about them daily, certain surprising relationships, which hint at meanings, begin to appear.”

He then shares the pleasing (to poets familiar with rejections) anecdote of the time he wrote a series of poems about ordinary objects such as knives, spoons, and forks. The poems were summarily rejected by a poetry editor who wrote back asking why the young Simic wasted his time on such topics.

Simic was struck by how an “insider” like this editor might consider certain topics worthy and serious enough to write about and certain others not. In his own defense, he quoted Husserl: “Back to things themselves” (reminding me of William Carlos Williams’ famous words: “No ideas but in things”).

Added Simic: “An object is the irreducible itself, a convenient place to begin, it seemed to me. What appealed to me, too, was the discipline, the attention required, and the dialectics that went with it. You look and you don’t see. It’s so familiar that it is invisible, etc. I mean, anybody can tell when you’re faking it. Everybody is an expert when it comes to forks. Plus, all genuine poetry in my view is antipoetry.”

The gist of Simic’s philosophy on poetry comes after he quotes Jack Spicer: “Poets think they’re pitchers when they’re really catchers.”

Simic riffs on this idea: “Everything would be very simple if we could will our metaphors. We cannot.

“This is true of poems, too. We may start believing that we are recreating an experience, that we are making an attempt at mimesis, but then the language takes over,. Suddenly the words have a mind of their own.

“It’s like saying, ‘I wanted to go to church but the poem took me to the dog races.’

“When it first happened I was horrified. It took me years to admit that the poem is smarter than I am. Now I go where it wants to go.”

The basis of all this talk? Simic’s love of philosophy—Heidegger in particular. Old Heidegger said that poetry could not be understood until thinking itself was understood. “Then he says, most interestingly, that the nature of thinking is something other than thinking, something other than willing.

“It’s this ‘other’ that poetry sets traps for.”

That’s philosophy for you. Something is what it is not. In short, according to Simic, “The labor of poetry is finding ways through language to point to what cannot be put into words….

“Being cannot be represented and uttered—as poor realists foolishly believe—but only hinted at. Writing is always a rough translation from wordlessness into words.”

I don’t know about you, but I have to open my poetry file now so my poems can write me.

Should be nice for a change, don’t you think? Like having your car tugged slowly through an automatic car wash, only with words and sentences instead of suds and brushes….