Monthly Archives: May 2024

9 posts

The Poet, the Presidents, and the People

Almost to the man, the Founding Fathers of this careening experiment we call the United States of America feared the eventual appearance of a demagogue. George Washington warned us about him. Alexander Hamilton warned us about him. John Adams warned us about him.

These early presidents and first Secretary of the Treasury were all familiar with the concept of a king (George III, in this case) enriching himself and his family by taking the natural resources, labor, and money of the colonies. They also knew how easily people could be fooled by a demagogue who loved to talk, one full of grievances, one full of promises about the future and lies about the past, one who constantly hearkens to a “golden age” when everything was wonderful, promising to bring these mythical days of purity back. The history of many countries is littered with examples of this sort of man and his ability to beguile the people, job the system, and get into power before changing the rules to keep it. And this is before the internet, which only makes the job that much easier.

In this sense, the poet Charles Bukowski and the Founding Fathers share something in common—fear. You might think, “This could never happen here,” but if you do, you might want to think again. As evidence, I give you Bukowski’s poem “Democracy,” which, if ever a word needed air quotes, needs it now in this age of “Don’t Tread on Me, I’ll Tread on You,” this age of state legislatures gerrymandering their way to perpetual power, this age of using the Electoral College (as opposed to the popular vote) to engineer a White House elected by voters in a handful of states vs. all of them, this age of stuffing the Supreme Court with zealous partisans in robes rather than objective arbiters of justice.

Let’s give Bukowski a listen, then:

Democracy
Charles Bukowski

the problem, of course, isn’t the Democratic System,
it’s the
living parts which make up the Democratic System.
the next person you pass on the street,
multiply
him or
her by
3 or 4 or 40 million
and you will know
immediately
why things remain non-functional
for most of
us.

I wish I had a cure for the chess pieces
we call Humanity…

we’ve undergone any number of political
cures

and we all remain
foolish enough to hope
that the one on the way
NOW
will cure almost
everything.

fellow citizens,
the problem never was the Democratic
System, the problem is

you.

Nothing like the mirror. People love to look at themselves yet hate to consider themselves. Instead, we live in an age of pointing fingers, of “us” vs. “them,” no mirrors needed.

As for Bukowski’s one-word, one-line envoi, it’s meant to send a message to all of us, one that says we need to get out of our silos and echo chambers and read up on our history. Before it’s too late.

“I’m Still Falling Through Its Silence”

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We Americans spend too much time squawking about our rights and individual liberties, our grievances and hatred for “them” (anyone who doesn’t think like our tribe, red or blue). Me, me, me. Land of the Me masquerading as Land of the Free.

Perhaps, this Memorial Day, it would do to give some thanks for once. To consider others. To appreciate all we have. I mean, there are worse countries to live in. Places where war and hunger are facts of life every day in every way (conceding these scourges are facts of life in certain spots within our own borders).

Is it any wonder I love Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem, “Thanks”? The speaker looks back at his service in Vietnam, how he was saved only by chance, how his one precious life was wrapped up and regifted to him till he had to live a new life — a new life of thanks.

It would seem, reading it, that there is more to the world than self, than bombast, than greed. The speaker in “Thanks” says he is “still / falling through the silence” of his new life. And while we as readers may not have experienced something as dramatic as an attempt on our lives that failed (something many a soldier can attest to), we can certainly learn something from the speaker’s humility and love of life as well as of others.

Thanks
Yusef Komunyakaa

Thanks for the tree
between me & a sniper’s bullet.
I don’t know what made the grass
sway seconds before the Viet Cong
raised his soundless rifle.
Some voice always followed,
telling me which foot
to put down first.
Thanks for deflecting the ricochet
against that anarchy of dusk.
I was back in San Francisco
wrapped up in a woman’s wild colors,
causing some dark bird’s love call
to be shattered by daylight
when my hands reached up
& pulled a branch away
from my face. Thanks
for the vague white flower
that pointed to the gleaming metal
reflecting how it is to be broken
like mist over the grass,
as we played some deadly
game for blind gods.
What made me spot the monarch
writhing on a single thread
tied to a farmer’s gate,
holding the day together
like an unfingered guitar string,
is beyond me. Maybe the hills
grew weary & leaned a little in the heat.
Again, thanks for the dud
hand grenade tossed at my feet
outside Chu Lai. I’m still
falling through its silence.
I don’t know why the intrepid
sun touched the bayonet,
but I know that something
stood among those lost trees
& moved only when I moved

Mother, May I?

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Don’t look now, but we’re running out of month of May.

May I offer up a poem, then, dedicated to this dying month, the one we consider the heart of spring?

It’s our old friend Robert Bly, one of those poets who seems especially attuned to nature. I like that in a poet, even if poems about nature have gone out of style and get rejected with some regularity by poetry editors who are looking for something more contemporary and hip (don’t tell the rose hips that they are no longer hip, will you?).

In the Month of May
Robert Bly

In the month of May when all leaves open,
I see when I walk how well all things
lean on each other, how the bees work,
the fish make their living the first day.
Monarchs fly high; then I understand
I love you with what in me is unfinished.

I love you with what in me is still
changing, what has no head or arms
or legs, what has not found its body.
And why shouldn’t the miraculous,
caught on this earth, visit
the old man alone in his hut?

And why shouldn’t Gabriel, who loves honey,
be fed with our own radishes and walnuts?
And lovers, tough ones, how many there are
whose holy bodies are not yet born.
Along the roads, I see so many places
I would like us to spend the night.

The last line of stanza one seems almost aphoristic: “I love you with what in me is unfinished.” You may think such lines flirt with cliché (and why not, as they are attractively French), but I find the vein of truth a comfort food of sorts because, well, I’ll die unfinished, too, just like you.

In stanza two, Bly tries to describe the indescribable, which gives him room to run on about love and the ineffable beauty of same.

Then, in stanza three, we get everyone’s favorite angel, the ever-ready Gabriel, only here he’s eating honey, radishes, and walnuts—humble goods which, in his hands, sound heavenly. Or perhaps you prefer the more realistic — Gabriel as animal with an angelic name.

It all wraps up big-picture. My God. The unborn yet, ready to take our places. Ready to fall in love as we have and as all four of our forefathers have.

Not many poets can get away with this stuff, so please, don’t try it at home. Just leave it to the professional drivers on a closed course.

The Poetry of Questions (and Possible Answers)

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Poetry serves many purposes, but one of my favorites is as facilitator of questions and possible answers. Why? Because the answers are often novel concepts. Even better, they’re often new questions in answer’s clothing. Sure, they might not pass muster with a scientist, but who’s worried about scientists when reading poems? Not this guy.

The late W. S. Merwin provides a nice example of the Q&A model with his poem “Old Man At Home Alone in the Morning.” As is true with all Merwin poems, the first hurdle is reading for rhythm, specifically the rhythm lost by his habit of forsaking my favorite writing prop, punctuation.

Once you have that figured out, you can better notice how the age of wisdom (read: old age) both is and isn’t so wise. Or at least the narrator seems to conclude here. Let’s don our poetic bathing suits and jump into his stream of consciousness:

“Old Man At Home Alone in the Morning”
W.S. Merwin

There are questions that I no longer ask
and others that I have not asked for a long time
that I return to and dust off and discover
that I’m smiling and the question
has always been me and that it is
no question at all but that it means
different things at the same time
yes I am old now and I am the child
I remember what are called the old days and there is
no one to ask how they became the old days
and if I ask myself there is no answer
so this is old and what I have become
and the answer is something I would come to
later when I was old but this morning
is not old and I am the morning
in which the autumn leaves have no question
as the breeze passes through them and is gone

I think we can agree that the narrator has figured out a few things about life, and one of them is that we’ll never figure out everything about life. One pearl of wisdom is knowing what questions not to ask anymore, either because you’ve come to learn the answers through experience or because you’ve come to the conclusion, “Why bother?”

Then there’s that mirror thing, namely those questions that reflect the asker. According to the speaker, these are questions…

…I return to and dust off and discover
that I’m smiling and the question
has always been me and that it is
no question at all but that it means
different things at the same time

Got it? You are the question, but it is not a question, and it holds multiple meanings. Here the poem takes on the character of a koan.

Then comes the paradox of age: how an old man or woman always holds within the young boy or girl, both simultaneously alive in one form.

Finally there’s an admission: Though the answer is incomplete and always will be, arriving to an advanced age seems a partial solution.

The poem “turns” (as many good poems do) in the 14th line with that heavy-lifting conjunction “but.” Despite all the deep, head-scratching thoughts about life, the narrator knows this much for sure (and it’s a novel concept, the kind poetry is uniquely positioned to pose):

…but this morning
is not old and I am the morning
in which the autumn leaves have no question
as the breeze passes through them and is gone.

If you’re Buddhist, you’re finding the familiar in this thinking: Let’s focus on the present. Sure, I’m old, but this morning (like all mornings) is not old and “I am the morning.”

Hot damn. Ponce de Leon spent all that time hunting the Fountain of Youth in the Everglades, and all he had to do is become the morning, which sat on his doorstep each dawn.

Sounds easy, right? But not so fast. The last two lines place this poetic meditation in the season of autumn. Note that the leaves have no questions. Note that the breeze (our short lifetimes on Earth) “passes through them and is gone.”

To return, the speaker implies, because that’s what winds and seasons do. The circle thing. Samsara. The old mouth-eating-tail metaphor of questions and answers.

Zero at the Bone

Lost Sherpa of Happiness poetry

Maybe the Bible was on to something. There’s something elemental about snakes, after all, and their reach into our psyches. Why do 97% of people fear them? And why do the 3% who don’t rub the 97%’s faces in it by picking them up, fondling them, and bringing them closer for a little cold-blooded interaction?

Without even realizing it, I wrote not one but two poems about snakes in the “animal poems only” section of my second book, Lost Sherpa of Happiness (“Search 2”), but they’ve got some growing to do to surpass Emily Dickinson’s stop-the-presses poem about a little guy who slithered through her Amherst lawn so many years ago.

Note how she makes a long length of simple words undulate in extraordinary ways! Note how striking the poem is, how quickly it sinks its fascinating fangs into our 97% hearts:

A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096) by Emily Dickinson

A narrow Fellow in the Grass

Occasionally rides —

You may have met him? Did you not

His notice instant is —

The Grass divides as with a Comb–

A spotted Shaft is seen–

And then it closes at your Feet

And opens further on —

He likes a Boggy Acre

A Floor too cool for Corn —

But when a Boy and Barefoot–

I more than once at Noon

Have passed I thought a Whip Lash

Unbraiding in the Sun

When stooping to secure it

It wrinkled And was gone —

Several of Nature’s People

I know, and they know me–

I feel for them a transport

Of Cordiality–

But never met this Fellow

Attended, or alone

Without a tighter Breathing

And Zero at the Bone–

I didn’t have to give you the poet’s name for your to realize Emily’s work. Random capitalization and dashes, dashes, dashes give it away. Me, I like best the description of the grass via simile: “The Grass divides as with a Comb–” and the neat use of imagery: “A Floor too cool for Corn–.”

Note, too, the use of active verbs for this most ambulatory (when not lolling in the sun) of “Fellows” (sans “for he’s a jolly good…): “rides,” “divides,” “closes,” “opens,” “wrinkled.” And yes, there are the verbals, too, adjectives in verb’s clothing–swanky participles that paint pictures of movement. Words like “unbraiding” and “stooping.”

That all said, I think the poem rises its scaly head above the hundreds of others Dickinson wrote because of that most difficult maneuver for every poet: the ending. You know, when you meet this fellow, how you feel “a tighter Breathing / And Zero at the Bone.”

That last line, as I like to say, is worth the price of admission alone. Using “Zero” instead of the easier “chills you to the bone.” Clearly she thought of the cliché, then she thought one better.

See how it’s done, poets? You think. Then you think one better. Too many poets get stuck at the think part or think and then pat themselves on the back for a job well done, but the real deal–the part that separates the grass between good poets and superior poets–is the think one better part.

Seems simple, doesn’t it? Kind of like narrow fellows in the grass….

Three “Hit the Open Road” Poems

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I’m in the habit, when I read a poetry anthology, of marking my favorites in the table of contents. When I pull the book off the shelf in need of a little protein boost of good poems, this helps in a big way. Instead of thumbing through an anthology randomly, I simply seek the starred entry and reference the page.

One such anthology I own is Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems: American Places. Keillor divides the poems into 15 sections, but these three are taken from the first, “On the Road.” Jack Kerouac would be proud. How about you?

Small Towns Are Passing
by Wesley McNair

Small towns are passing
into the rearview
mirrors of our cars.
The white houses
are moving away,
wrapping trees
around themselves,
and stores are taking
their gas pumps
down the street
backwards. Just like that
whole families picnicking
on their lawns tilt
over the hill,
and kids on bikes
ride toward us
off the horizon,
leaving no trace
of where they have gone.
Signs turn back and start
after them. Packs of mailboxes,
like dogs, chase them
around corner after corner.

The Sacred
by Stephen Dunn

After the teacher asked if anyone had
a sacred place
and the students fidgeted and shrank

in their chairs, the most serious of them all
said it was his car,
being in it alone, his tape deck playing

things he’d chosen, and others knew the truth
had been spoken
and began speaking about their rooms,

their hiding places, but the car kept coming up,
the car in motion,
music filling it, and sometimes one other person

who understood the bright altar of the dashboard
and how far away
a car could take him from the need

to speak, or to answer, the key
in having a key
and putting it in, and going.

Driving at Night
by Sheila Packa

Up north, the dashboard lights of the family car
gleam in memory, the radio
plays to itself as I drive
my father plied the highways
while my mother talked, she tried to hide
that low lilt, that Finnish brogue,
in the back seat, my sisters and I
our eyes always tied to the Big Dipper
I watch it still
on summer evenings, as the fireflies stream
above the ditches and moths smack
into the windshield and the wildlife’s
red eyes bore out from the dark forests
we flew by, then scattered like the last bit of star
light years before.
It’s like a different country, the past
we made wishes on unnamed falling stars
that I’ve forgotten, that maybe were granted
because I wished for love.

Good stuff, no? In McNair’s poem, I love the concept of white houses wrapping trees around themselves as you speed past them in the car. In Dunn’s it’s that stop-the-show line: “the bright altar of the dashboard.” And in Packa’s poem, I like “It’s like a different country, the past.”

Amen to that, and to the fact that we all own our own Fodor’s guide.

A Few Words from St. Billy of Collins

Lost Sherpa of Happiness memorizing poetry poetry poetry books poetry criticism The Indifferent World

The book Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process offers some poetic illumination in a Billy Collins essay included in that collection. In it Collins references an earlier essay he wrote called “Poetry, Pleasure, and the Hedonist Reader.”

First, Collins speaks to why he finds W.B. Yeats’ poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” so inspiring. He teaches it, for one, and after many years of doing so, decided to commit it to memory (one of the “pleasures” of poetry).

Next he shares an anecdote I could relate to–one involving an MRI (I had my first a few years back and yes, got a poem out of it). Collins said it was “like being buried alive in a very high-tech coffin.” With the help of Yeats, Collins survived his half hour of hell by reciting “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” over and over and over again.

Ah, the medicinal uses of poetry!

From here, Collins gives a little history of poetry before the written word, how its rhyme and meter helped the shamans commit to memory, kind of like how people commit songs to memory today with little effort and through the help of repetition (thank you, radio stations and/or mp3s or whatever people are constantly streaming out of Pandora’s box these days).

Collins claims he seeks the same rhythms in his own free verse, making it a bit less free, maybe. He explains:

It’s hard to describe, though you know it when you feel it. For me, it’s often about gracefulness. I want graceful lines and graceful sentences. I try to write very simply. The vocabulary is simple, the sentences tend to be quite conventional—subject, verb, object. I try to be very unchallenging in syntax. I want the trip to be one of imagination and not completely of the language. But I’m also thinking about the reader, whom I’m trying to guide through an imaginative experience. I want the excitement of the poem—if I can generate some—not to lie in a fancy use of language, or an eccentric use of language. I want the poem to be an imaginative thrill. To take the reader to an odd place, or a challenging place, or a disorienting place, but to do that with fairly simple language. I don’t want the language itself to be the trip. I want the imaginative spaces that we’re moving through to be the trip.

One thing I think we all can agree upon is that some modern-day poetry has lost its way. It is reassuring, therefore, to hear Collins agree. Go get ’em, Billy!:

Poetry’s kind of a mixture of the clear and the mysterious. It’s very important to know when to be which: what to be clear about and what to leave mysterious. A lot of poetry I find unreadable is trying to be mysterious all the time. It’s not so much a mixture of clarity and mystery, instead of a balance between the two. If the reader doesn’t feel oriented in the beginning of the poem, he or she can’t be disoriented later. Often, the first lines of a poem—many times, I find them completely disorienting. But I’d like to go to that place, but I like to be taken there rather than than being shoved into it. It’s like being pushed off the title into the path of an approaching train.

I know from past sermons that Collins believes you should start your books with your strongest poems. It’s advice I’ve tried to take in my own books, only I sometimes worry when my readers point out anything BUT my lead-off batter as their favorites.

That’s how subjective poetry can be. It’s scary, yes, but reassuring, too. Think of it: MANY of your poems, no matter what their seeding in the brackets of your book, can serve as the best and the brightest up front. At least if your readers are to be believed (and who else would you believe more, I ask rhetorically?).

My favorite passage in Collins’ essay speaks to poetry’s “diminished public stature.” Here’s the relevant Collins:

And yet I think poetry is as important today as it’s ever been, despite its diminished public stature. Its uses become obvious when you read it. Poetry privileges subjectivity. It foregrounds the interior life of the writer, who is trying to draw in a reader. And it gets readers into contact with their own subjective life. This is valuable, especially now. If you look around at the society we live in, we’re being pulled constantly into public life. It’s not just Facebook, which is sort of the willing forfeiture of one’s own privacy. The sanctuaries of privacy are so scarce these days. Every banality, from “I’m going out for pizza,” to “JoAnn is passed out on the sofa,” is broadcast to the wide world. I think I read recently that we’re not suffering from an overflow of information—we’re suffering from an overflow of insignificance. Well, poetry becomes an oasis or sanctuary from the forces constantly drawing us into social and public life.

I like that. The gratuitous dis of on-line behavior, especially. “We’re not suffering from an overflow of information–we’re suffering from an overflow of insignificance.”

So why would so many “readers” become addicted to THAT while turning up their noses to poetry? Perhaps we should assign them “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” as a cure? Perhaps they need a “bee-loud glade” or two to realign their perspectives?

I think so. Turning off social networks will slow things down, and that’s the first thing “readers” need to do to appreciate poetry. Slow down. Reread. Luxuriate in language and swim in its sounds to reacquaint yourself with peace, “for peace comes dropping slow….”

One of My Poems Wins a Pushcart Prize — To Be Published in 2025 Anthology

Ken Craft my poems publishing Pushcart Prize Reincarnation & Other Stimulants

I’m pleased to announce that my poem “The Pause Between” was selected for a Pushcart Prize and will appear in Pushcart Prize XLIX: Best of the Small Presses (2025 edition), Pushcart’s annual anthology scheduled for publication on Dec. 3, 2024.

The poem appeared in the 2023 issue of Deep Wild: Writing From the Backcountry, and also can be found in my third collection, Reincarnation & Other Stimulants (Kelsay Books, 2021).

A heartfelt thanks to Heidi Blankenship, Poetry Editor at Deep Wild, for nominating the poem, and to the Pushcart Committee for selecting it for this honor.

Here is a link to Deep Wild’s blog making the announcement.

Poets Who Mine the Past

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mary karr

If there’s one endless source of material for poetry—a treasure chest available to every poet—it’s the past. Granted, some pasts are more dramatic than others; and granted, some poets over-indulge in their treasure chests to the point where readers want to enter a reading monastery on a program of self-imposed poverty, BUT it can be done with aplomb and class, too.

One “memoir-ish” poem that appeals to writers especially is Mary Karr’s (herself famous for writing book-length memoirs) “Revelations in the Key of K.” To understand the poem, a little background knowledge helps–namely, that this poet has made a career out of writing (as opposed to used it as a sideline avocation to dabble in).

Let’s look at the poem and how she puts the letter “K” to good use, making it earn its living by working overtime:

“Revelation in the Key of K”
by Mary Karr

I came awake in kindergarten,

under the letter K chalked neat

on a field-green placard leaned

on the blackboard’s top edge. They’d caged me

in a metal desk—the dull word writ

to show K’s sound. But K meant kick and kill

when a boy I’d kissed drew me

as a whiskered troll in art. On my sheet,

the puffy clouds I made to keep rain in

let torrents dagger loose. “Screw those

who color in the lines,” my mom had preached,

words I shared that landed me on a short chair

facing the corner’s empty, sheetrock page. Craning up,

I found my K high above.

You’ll have to grow to here, its silence said.

And in the surrounding alphabet, my whole life hid—

names of my beloveds, sacred vows I’d break.

With my pencil stub applied to wall,

I moved around the loops and vectors,

Z to A, learning how to mean, how

in the mean world to be.

But while I worked the room around me

began to smudge—like a charcoal sketch my mom

was rubbing with her thumb. Then

the instant went, the month, and every season

smeared, till with a wrenching arm tug

I was here, grown, but still bent

to set down words before the black eraser

swipes our moment into cloud, dispersing all

to zip. And when I blunder in the valley

of the shadow of blank about to break

in half, my being leans against my spinal K,

which props me up, broomstick straight,

a strong bone in the crypt of meat I am.

Me, I like the poem’s playfulness up top with the kindergarten class, the alphabet on the placard, how she uses the letter for vengeful purposes (“kick and kill“) when a boy uses his artistic talents to make a troll of her. I also like the cameo by her irreverent mom.

Two of my favorite lines are “And in the surrounding alphabet, my whole life hid– / names of my beloveds, sacred vows I’d break.” This is what good poetry does–thinks of the ordinary in a different way. Thus, to have a child look at an A to Z placard running along the top of a blackboard and consider that these letters have the power to mix in different ways, creating words, which in turn will create sentences, which in turn will create paragraphs and paragraphs chronicling the child’s secret futures. Nice, that. The power of the written word, yes, but from a new angle!

The poem turns when the artwork smudges and the daydream dissipates as the poet comes out of her reverie as an adult, doing the same thing, working to make meaning with language and letters. We get a Biblical allusion (“And when I blunder in the valley / of the shadow of blank about to break / in half”), referring to the struggle of every writer before Karr puts her special letter to work one last time (“my being leans against my spinal K, / which props me up, broomstick straight, / a strong bone in the crypt of meat I am.”).

The poem finishes with a flourish, with that powerful image of strength hidden within the vulnerable and mortal bodies we cart around for a lifetime. Her strength, her lifeline, her sanity all come from the same source–letters, her ability to write and make sense of her existence in this crazy world.

To me, “Revelations in the Key of K” is a perfect example of memory mined to good effect. Bravo in B Major, as Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms might say!