Monthly Archives: October 2024

9 posts

Aubades: Love Poems That Dawn On You

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“Poetry doesn’t get enough mainstream attention these days. It’s a mode of engaging with the world, it feels like magic, it requires nothing of you other than a willing ear. It’s also a mode of engagement that is not argumentative, it’s full of surprise, and it’s full of grace.”

Thus spake Jia Tolentino in her video intro to a reading of Tracy K. Smith’s “Solstice,” taken from Life on Mars, the book I’ve been rereading (or perhaps that’s been rereading me).

The book itself is a rich nougat, much sweeter and more filling than expected. All manner of poetry is going on here, from free verse to bound forms to boundless imagination in the form of postcard missives between people.

As another example of the variety, I give you an aubade entitled, quite simply, “Aubade.” An old French form, an aubade, gets its own 2-minute podcast on Merriam-Webster. Although it looks like you’d pronounce it with a long “a,” it is, in fact, pronounced “oh-BOD.” Without further ado, here is Tracy’s love song to the morning:

 

“Aubade”
by Tracy K. Smith

You wake with a start from some dream
Asking if I want to walk with you around the block.

You go through the things that need doing
Before Monday. Six emails. A presentation on Manet.

No, I don’t want to put on clothes and shoes
And dark glasses and follow the dog and you

Down Smith Street. It’s eight o’clock. The sun
Is toying with those thick clouds and the trees

Shake their heads in the wind. You exhale,

Wheel your feet to the floor, walk around to my side
And let your back end drop down onto the bed.

You resort to the weather. A high today of 78.
But that’s hours aways. And look at the dog

Still passed out cold, twitching in a dream.

When we stop talking, we hear the soft sounds
He makes in his sleep. Not quite barking. More like

Learning to speak. As if he’s in the middle of a scene
Where he must stand before the great dog god

Trying to account for his life.

 

Mornings can get rather prosaic, as this aubade attests, making it a much easier form for poets to explore than the ghazals we find leaping around in so many poetry journals these days. And it feels as if the aubade isn’t done speaking, either, when we see, two poems later, Smith’s continuation of the dog theme. For what goes with mornings more than dogs, eager and ready to be your best friend while going out into their best friend (the outdoors)?

 

“Eggs Norwegian”

by Tracy K. Smith

Give a man a stick, and he’ll hurl it at the sun
For his dog to race toward as it falls. He’ll relish
The snap in those jagged teeth, the rough breath
Sawing in and out through the craggy mouth, the clink
Of tags approaching as the dog canters back. He’ll stoop
To do it again and again, so your walk through grass
Lasts all morning, the dog tired now in the heat,
The stick now just a wet and gnarled nub that doesn’t sail
So much as drop. And when the dog plops to the grass
Like a misbegotten turd, and even you want nothing
More than a plate of eggs at some sidewalk café, the man–
Who, too, by now has dropped even the idea of fetch—
Will push you against a tree and ease his leg between
Your legs as his industrious tongue whispers
Convincingly into your mouth.

 

A stronger poem, I think, but every bit as lovely as morning, the best time of day, the most creative time of day, the time of day I need no alarm clock to greet. Speaking of days, maybe we need to discover the Norwegian word for “egg poems.”

Love, dogs, eggs — may yours go over easy and be a good day, no matter how much remains of it.

Music, the Opium of the Masses

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Karl Marx is famous (or infamous, depending on your viewpoint) for saying, “Religion is the opium of the masses.” Right church, different pew, I think. It’s music that is the opium of the masses, which may explain why churches resonate with song, the nearer God to be.

Unconvinced? You need only walk along city sidewalks or ride in the subway to see as much. People with earplugs, now wireless and white, poking out of their ears as they walk or sit to the beat of their own drummers, avoiding at all costs engagement with their fellow man.

Thomas Lux (Latin for “light”) was on to this. In fact, he penned a poem to music, specifically music without words which, by his reckoning, loses nothing without the voices. There’s something primal in the beat, he was convinced. Something beautiful, like a field of poppies in bloom.

 

Regarding (Most) Songs
by Thomas Lux

Whatever is too stupid to say
can be sung.
—JOSEPH ADDISON (1672-1719)

The human voice can sing a vowel to break your heart.
It trills a string of banal words,
but your blood jumps, regardless. You don’t care
about the words but only how they’re sung
and the music behind—the brass, the drums.
Oh the primal, necessary drums
behind the words so dumb!
That power, the bang and the boom and again the bang
we cannot, need not, live without,
nor without other means to make sweet noise,
the guitar or violin, the things that sing
the plaintive, joyful sounds.
Which is why I like songs best
when I can’t hear the words, or, better still,
when there are no words at all .

 

Lux was fond of wandering into a patch of end rhymes before returning to his regularly-scheduled free verse. Thus “sung,” “drums,” “drums,” “dumb.” Dumb but necessary. And primal because of “the bang and the boom and again the bang,” which is Lux’s way of employing a sound device (alliteration) and rhetoric (polysyndeton) to the rhythm and the cause.

It works. I should know. I sometimes offer myself up to music, too. Or lose myself to it. And write to it.

And I, too, prefer wordless music–at least when I write. It seems to lead me to heights without leading me astray as the distraction of lyrics might.

What about you? Ever been to the church, mosque, or temple of music? And ever notice how important it is to its second cousin twice removed (but returned), poetry?

Jane Hirshfield’s Handout on Revision

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Jane H

In their book, The Poet’s Companion, Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux share a worksheet Jane Hirshfield created for a Napa Valley Writers’ Conference she taught.

Can you imagine? Being surrounded by both the poet Jane Hirshfield and hundreds of wineries? Sounds inspiring to me (and rated 90-plus by the Poetry Advocate), but I have yet to attend any writers’ conference, much less one in California with Jane Hirshfield, which I mean to change some year soon. (As Shakespeare wrote: “My kingdom for a bucket list!”)

Addonizio and Laux (sounds like a good law firm) claim Hirshfield’s list tackles “the more existential aspects of revision,” so it gets better and better: Hirshfield + wine + Camus. Pass the baguette and ghazals!

But enough word play. Let’s take a look at Hirshfield’s revisionary wisdom for poets and see if the Buddha doesn’t sneak in:

SOME POSSIBLE QUESTIONS TO ASK OF YOUR POEM IN REVISION

  • What is being said?
  • Is there joy, depth, muscle, in the music of its saying?
  • Is there more that wants to be said?
  • Does it want a more deeply living body of sound?
  • Is it true?
  • Is it ethical?
  • Does it feel?
  • Does it follow its own deepest impulses, not necessarily the initial idea?
  • Does it know more than you did when you started it?
  • Are there things in it that don’t belong?
  • Are whatever digressions it takes in its own best service?
  • Are there things in it that are confusing?
  • Are there things in it that are clichéd or sentimental?
  • Is it self-satisfied?
  • Is it predictable?
  • Does it go deep enough? far enough?
  • Is it particular?
  • Is the grammar correct?
  • If the syntax is unusual, is it for a purpose?
  • Are the transitions accurate?
  • Is it in the right voice?
  • Is it in the right order?
  • Does the diction fit?
  • Could any of its words be more interesting? more surprising? more alive?
  • Do its rhythms work? (i.e. both seem right and accomplish meaning and feeling)
  • Does the music work?
  • Does the shape/form work? (line breaks, stanzas, etc.)
  • Does each image work? each statement?
  • Does it allow strangeness?
  • Does each of its moments actively move the poem toward its full realization?
  • Should it go out into the world?
  • Is it a seed for something else?
  • Is it finished?
  • Six months later, is it still finished?
  • Six years later, is it still finished?

 

Maybe the Buddhist leanings of Hirshfield are in there, maybe not, but change is inevitable and personification is apparent. I especially like the finishing flourish. Should your precious child go out in the world? Remember now, as the author, you are blinded by love. Sometimes the answer is a decided no.

And what about that seed of something else bit? A terrific way of reminding ourselves that we often start writing a poem with one goal and accidentally achieve something entirely different. Celebrate! Then start revising.

And the last two points on the list. Sing them loud, sing them clear: Wait, wait, wait! Be patient! Let your poems age in their oak barrels a bit, gain character and fruity notes of currants and blackberries. Look at them again after a few flips of the calendar page. Chances are you’ll see a very different poem: one that requires revision, especially if you initially allowed strangeness that you thought was good strangeness but it turned out to be just weird strangeness.

Time helps you recognize that, kind of like the morning after too much wine brings recognition, too. In that sense, good poems revealed as bad are like the epiphany of Sunday morning headaches. You learn and revise….

Digging Seamus Heaney

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I visited the library and picked up a first-edition paperback of Seamus Heaney’s debut collection of poems, Death of a Naturalist, which included in its title (Kismet!) Henry David Thoreau’s favorite word.

It was an auspicious day. One in which I not only started, but finished this British paperback (Faber and Faber, sold for 1.25 pounds in 1966) of 57 pages in one sitting. That’s 34 Seamus Heaney poems with an old-school library card in the back showing it was signed out for the first time on June 15, 1977, and only three more times after that, the last being Dec. 22, 1995.

Gentle aside to poets: If you’re wondering why your poetry books aren’t selling better, you need look no further than this Irish giant’s first foray, which apparently got little play as well. Small comfort, that, I realize, but still….

Now some people are intimidated by the likes of men named Seamus Heaney. He did, after all, develop a style to be reckoned with over time. Have no fear here, however. Seamus’s first outing is mostly one-page poems (a particular favorite length of mine) filled with memories of farm life and boyhood back in the days of yore in Ireland. Sod. Cows. Cuds. Potatoes. Barns. Drowning kittens. Irish wakes. Young love. The usual and the un-, in other words.

Leading off, a familiar poem. The only one I knew from this collection, turns out. See if you know it, too:

 

Digging
by Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

 

And dig he did, rooting out many a poem in his day. And it all started here. First. For him when it was published. For me, when I checked it out of the library 58 years later.

 

How To Review a Poetry Collection

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5star

There are many reasons your average bibliophile gives no “phile” to poetry collections. One, maybe the reader is intimidated. Two, maybe the reader has a conditioned response thanks to a thankless high school English teacher. And three, maybe the reader wouldn’t know where to begin with a poetry book review.

As the first two are out of my control, let me address the third. You don’t have to be a professor or wear black turtleneck and beret to review poetry. You don’t even have to know the difference between dactyls and ducks, blank verse and bearcats, pentameter and porcupines. Writing from the basic bastion of your position as average reader works just fine, thank you. Here’s how:

  • First of all, forget the myth that poetry collections cannot be read wall-to-wall (or, shall we say, cover-to-cover). Though some poems may be chewier than others, meriting a reread, confine your chewing 100 times before swallowing to poems you actually enjoy before continuing to the next. If you get a “Huh?” reaction, move on unless something in the poem compels you to try again.
  • When you finish, ask yourself how much you liked the collection and why. Be honest. It’s a basic start for any review. “I enjoyed this collection because…” or “I had mixed feelings about this book because…” or even “No poetry collection can contain equally strong poems, start to finish. That said, I found….” You get the idea. Subjective starts get you out of the blocks.
  • Does this poet remind you of another you’ve read and enjoyed? Who is it? What are the similarities? Or perhaps you want to explain why this collection stands alone, unique as a unicorn’s forehead.
  • What are a few major themes you noticed in the book? Possible readers will be interested in this. And, if you can find a specific poem or two that illustrates the theme, quote from it and offer a few thoughts on its effectiveness.
  • Quoting poetry need not be scarier than a week-long visit from the mother-in-law. For three lines or less, simply use quotation marks and type them into the body of your sentences exactly as is, adding a space, a backward slash, and a space to signify line breaks.
  • If you want to quote four lines or more, skip a line, indent, and type the lines exactly as they appear in the poem. When you’re done, skip a line again and resume your review. No quotation marks are necessary, as the indented quote serves notice that these are the poet’s words as they appeared.
  • If you found a few turns of phrase, examples of figurative language, or unusual word pairings that got your heart beating faster, share them as examples of what the poet is capable of.
  • Don’t confuse a poem’s speaker with its poet. The pronoun “I” can dupe readers into thinking the poet is speaking from direct experience. More likely the “I” is a speaker created by the poet.
  • Finish with overall thoughts as you leave the book. Might you read it again some year? What type of reader might like it? And, if you seldom review poetry collections, how did it feel to prove the big bad wolf was actually a Dalmatian pup?

A final word about authors of poetry collection–and this is strictly my opinion, which some might justifiably disagree with. I don’t think you should hold beginning poets to the same bar as well-known ones. That is, if you’re reviewing on a site like Amazon or Goodreads, both of which employ a 5-star rating system, you don’t want to criticize Suzy Starter for not being Emily Dickinson, or Freddie First-time for not being Robert Frost. Emily and Rob had to start somewhere, too.

Be gentle, then. Find their strengths, for their strengths may well be the roots of better things to come as they continue to develop as a poet.

That said, the worst you can do is not read poetry or read and then not review a poetry collection at all. Reviews are the lifeblood that sustain poetry collections, which are living on thin air as it is. They need readers and reactions. They need support lauding the things they do well.

So don’t hold back because you want to read another same ole, same ole (Paulo Coelho, Joyce Carol Oates, Jo Nesbo). Get outside your comfort zone now and then—review poetry with ease because, let’s face it, you don’t need a poetic license to do so. Your high school English teacher is not watching. The scanning and analyses are over.

Class dismissed!

 

 

 

 

 

The Paradoxical Poetry of Tao Te Ching

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The Tao is the way. Too bad Machiavelli never heard of it. Or got to read it. If he had, The Prince might have been a different fellow. An unrecognizable one, in fact.

I like to read Lao Tzu’s paradoxical pages every now and then, and when I do, I reach for my copy of Tao Te Ching.  The wisdom here is unsettlingly logical. So un-Western. And in this day and age, sadly, so un-Eastern, too.

Here is one entry I particularly enjoyed. Like rivers and streams, the metaphor is simple yet deep. If only a few politicians who resemble the Duke and the Dauphin Huck meets (their weaknesses exposed the minute they open their well-snakeoiled mouths) would read it. But that won’t happen unless it is read aloud to said politicians . On Fox Channel story time, maybe. Which gives the fox—an otherwise fine animal—a bad name.

 

From Tao Te Ching:

The reason the river and sea can be regarded as
The rulers of all the valley streams
Is because of their being below them.
Therefore they can be their rulers.
So if you want to be over people
You must speak humbly to them.
If you want to lead them
You must place yourself behind them.

Thus the sage is positioned above
And the people do not feel oppressed.
He is in front and they feel nothing wrong.
Therefore they like to push him front and never resent him.

Since he does not contend

No one can contend with him.

 

The moral of our story: Lead from behind. Get on top from below. Be humble! In our time, most wannabe leaders have lost their way (reminder: “The Tao is the way”).

Poems Inspired by (American) Football

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Did you know that Super Bowl Monday—the day following the N.F.L.’s championship game—is the most called-in sick day in the United States? Talk about the tail (football) wagging the dog (country)!

As for those going to work, they will no doubt burn some water-cooler time discussing the merits of Super Bowl commercials, even to the point of grading them. This culmination of the National Football League’s schedule is final proof that football is king of the hill here in the states. In college sports, football is the money-driver. And in the professional realm, it is the most watched sports entertainment on television and in-person.

For me, though, football is more a reminder of two things — the fall season and the season of my youth. Apparently I’m not alone. Here are three football-inspired poems, the last by me, and the first by people more famous than me. (For me it’s 4th and 20 with a minute on the clock—but hope, and apparently Tom Brady, are eternal!):

 

Football Dreams
by Jacqueline Woodson

No one was faster
than my father on the football field.
No one could keep him
from crossing the line. Then
touching down again.
Coaches were watching the way he moved,
his easy stride, his long arms reaching
up, snatching the ball from its soft pockets
of air.

My father dreamed football dreams,
and woke up to a scholarship
at Ohio State University.
Grown now
living the big-city life
in Columbus
just sixty miles
from Nelsonville
and from there
Interstate 70 could get you
on your way west to Chicago
Interstate 77 could take you south
but my father said
no colored Buckeye in his right mind
would ever want to go there.

From Columbus, my father said,
you could go just about
anywhere.

 

First Practice
by Gary Gildner

After the doctor checked to see
we weren’t ruptured,
the man with the short cigar took us
under the grade school,
where we went in case of attack
or storm, and said
he was Clifford Hill, he was
a man who believed dogs
ate dogs, he had once killed
for his country, and if
there were any girls present
for them to leave now.
No one
left. OK, he said, he said I take
that to mean you are hungry
men who hate to lose as much
as I do. OK. Then
he made two lines of us
facing each other,
and across the way, he said,
is the man you hate most
in the world,
and if we are to win
that title I want to see how.
But I don’t want to see
any marks, when you’re dressed,
he said. He said, Now.

 

And finally, my own entry, from my second book Lost Sherpa of Happiness:

Trip, Memory
Ken Craft

It starts with the sound of a whistle.
The smell of cigar smoke
riding bareback on October air.
The cheerleaders’ “We got the T-E-AYY-M,”
the dry prayer of their pom-poms.
Me and the boys, uniformly cool—brave
in our home whites and eye black,
our grass-scarred helmets,
our nonfunctional mouthguards,
throwing Hail Mary’s and dropping f-bombs,
our bodies bolting
and dangerous with weedy want.

That’s all it takes—a somewhere referee’s
somehow whistle. I’m 13 again.
I haven’t even begun to think about thinking.
The smell of tobacco is a promise,
nothing foreboding.
And the sight of fallen, windblown leaves
rolling toward my cleats is just that
because my veins breathe and bulge as Coach yells
and my blood hits hard to feel the bruise of pleasure
and there’s no such thing as symbolism
because death is only something cowboys
and Indians do on black and white TV.

 

NOTE: Want to read a fourth football-themed poem? Jump to this post, which includes a football poem by Al Ortolani.

Meghan McCain Makes Good (and Uses Some Time-Honored Writers’ Tools)

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Just over six years ago, watching Meghan McCain’s eulogy for her father, John McCain, I felt refreshed in an unexpected manner —as a writer, as an American, and as a man. I’ll say this: When we are dust, ash, or worm motel, may we all have children who can sing our praises so well before a gathering of family, friends, and well-wishers.

The word “eulogy” is often confused with “elegy,” a word poets are familiar with. A check with my good friends Merriam and Webster clears this up:

“Both elegy and eulogy may be used about writing or speech in remembrance of a person who has passed away, and this semantic overlap creates the potential for confusion. Elegy (which may be traced to the Greek word elegos, “song of mourning”) commonly refers to a song or poem lamenting one who is dead; the word may also refer somewhat figuratively to a nostalgic poem, or to a kind of musical composition. While eulogy is also commonly found referring to words about the deceased, its basic meaning, both in English and in the Greek language from which it was borrowed, is “praise.” Formed from the Greek roots eu “good” and logos “speech,” a eulogy is an encomium given for one who is either living or dead. If you are praising your partner’s unsurpassed beauty or commending the virtues of the deceased at a funeral, you are delivering a eulogy; if you are composing a lamenting reminiscence about a person who has long since passed, you are writing an elegy.”

Meghan’s 17-minute eulogy managed to be both eloquent and emotional, mixing elements from the speech writer’s (and poet’s) toolbox and techniques of persuasion espoused by Aristotle so long ago. As writers reading the full text of her words here, we can see that she has learned the value of anaphora especially—the effective use of repetition coming at listeners in waves. As for the persuasion, both ethos (her character as well as her father’s) and pathos (the leavening of biography with rising emotion) are seen in abundance.

Also on display here is the power of anecdote. Nothing illustrates an abstract point better than a concrete example. Note the story of the horse, especially—how Meghan broke her collarbone falling off of one, how her father took her to the hospital, and how he then took her home and put her back on that horse’s back.

The contrasting technique of antithesis was highlighted, too, when Meghan McCain said, “We gather to mourn the passing of American greatness, the real thing, not cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice, those that live lives of comfort and privilege while he suffered and served.”

And, of course, by the line this eulogy will most be remembered for: “The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great.”

To be honest, I was never much impressed with John McCain’s politics and didn’t vote for him when he ran for president. As an American, though, I was much impressed with the example he set once in the grip of terminal cancer. McCain, the former prisoner, was captive again, this time by the take-no-prisoners brain cancer called glioblastoma (the same that took down his friend across the aisle, Ted Kennedy). But he fought, not only the disease, but the disease he perceived to be spreading across America.

For that, McCain gained my respect. Thus, I found myself inexplicably teary-eyed watching Meghan’s eulogy. What was the source, I wondered? Obviously the man’s death and the family’s loss played into it, but a little self-searching brought up more.

I was mourning the passing of another America, one I’m not sure will return, given the goings on not only here but across the world where authoritarian regimes are popping up like poisonous mushrooms. At the time of this speech, the electoral college-elected president was absent by design. The McCain family, citing the need for dignity, asked him to stay away (though I doubt he’d have attended anyway). In any event, thanks to the eulogy, I inhaled a little fresh air at a time when the air was claustrophobic with a certain someone’s narcissism. It returned a sense of sanity and patriotism that I hadn’t breathed in two years.

That’s something, and it bears reconsidering as we approach one last chance to rid ourselves of this pestilence. And that’s proof that a eulogy—like any piece of good writing—can have effects beyond their stated purpose.

 

 

When the World Slaps You, Poetry…

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One of the themes running through Gregory Orr’s book,  Poetry as Survival, is the role of trauma and adversity in the creative process. The “survival” in Orr’s title speaks to the lyric poet’s need to make sense of past difficulty, hardship, and pain.

One poet who Orr quotes is Stanley Kunitz. In the first, more famous poem—“The Portrait”—an unfortunate family dynamic, a fateful triangle, is the topic, as Kunitz recalls discovering a portrait of his father, who committed suicide, in the attic. When his mother discovers her son’s find, her reaction is unexpectedly brutal:

 

“The Portrait”
by Stanley Kunitz

My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave moustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.

 

The poem’s dramatic moment comes at the end where son, like the father, absorbs the sting of living with his mother, though certainly in less permanent fashion.

Kunitz also wrote about the pain of anti-Semitism. In the first line of “An Old Cracked Tune,” he lifts a line used in a taunting jingle he often endured as a youth. Here we have a sting of another sort, a cheek still burning from the slap of prejudice. A cheek burning with anger, resentment, and yes, determination:

 

“An Old Cracked Tune”
by Stanley Kunitz

My name is Solomon Levi,
the desert is my home,
my mother’s breast was thorny,
and father I had none.

The sands whispered, Be separate,
the stones taught me, Be hard.
I dance, for the joy of surviving,
on the edge of the road.

 

Here is a video of Kunitz reading this brief poem. It is easy to see the Muse’s role in survival. Pounding the disorder of pain into the order of a lyric poem can be powerful medicine. Consider it, as you look to the thickets of your own past….