Yearly Archives: 2024

123 posts

Quick Wrights (in the Key of James)

Sometimes James Wright in Eastern mode is all you need by way of meditative start to your day. Like “Trying to Pray”:

Trying to Pray
by James Wright

This time, I have left my body behind me, crying
In its dark thorns.
Still,
There are good things in this world.
It is dusk.
It is the good darkness
Of women’s hands that touch loaves.
The spirit of a tree begins to move.
I touch leaves.
I close my eyes, and think of water.

Restorative, no? Thinking of good things in the world (which we sometimes forget, especially if we read front pages of newspapers). Thinking of “good” darkness (which we often assume as inherently “bad”). But mostly thinking of women’s hands touching loaves. Simple. Nice. With the powder of flour tracing the wrinkles.

Here’s another quick Wright:

In the Cold House
by James Wright

I slept a few minutes ago,
Even though the stove has been out for hours.
I am growing old.
A bird cries in bare elder trees.

Very Li Po, that. The nature image at the end, reflecting back on his personal situation as a sleepy man in a cold house. Wonderful metaphor for old age, I think. And somehow, in both cases, good warm-up poems to read before you write your own.

…which I think I’ll do now.

Rogue Poems on the Lam

humor poetry reading poetry

Charles Simic is of the camp that says poems, like characters in a novelist’s work, take on a life of their own minutes after written, quickly declaring independence from the poet-god that breathed life into their lungs.

It’s an expansive, capital-R Romantic notion, the type Dr. Frankenstein could relate to (if you forget, for a minute, that Dr. F’s “poem” was a monster hit with other lessons to teach).

Whether you believe your poems are independent states or not, it’s pretty to think so, and rather amusing, too. As evidence, you need only read Ellie Schoenfeld’s ode to other poets who, thanks to her imagination, take on lives of their own, too (“It’s…a-livvvvve!”).

Originally written in 2009 as part of her collection The Dark Honey: New and Used Poems, Schoenfeld’s poem, an ode to personification if ever there was one, was shared on yesterday’s Writer’s Almanac.

Let’s listen in here and see what poems (and rival poets) do when left to their own devices:

The Other Poet
by Ellie Schoenfeld

The poet explains exactly
what her poems are doing on a variety of levels.
I am jealously impressed.
My poems go places
but send no postcards––I have no idea
what they are doing. They do
whatever they want to.
I give them curfews
but they wake me in the middle
of the night, they interrupt meetings
and other situations where I have no time
for them. They hang on me
when I am on the phone.
They do not keep my secrets
and sometimes they lie.
They can be sullen and withdrawn
or explosively obscene.
I think my poems have problems with authority,
conduct disorders, attention deficit.
The other poet is like the parent
with the bumper sticker about their honor student
while I am speeding along
to get to the correctional facility
before visiting hours are over.
I try to give my poems direction.
They tell me they have cleaned their rooms
but we both know it’s not true.
After all these years of therapy
we still don’t understand each other.
I write a poem and think
“What the hell is that?!”

Humor is healthy, but humor popping the vitamins of truth can run circles around us. Rhomboids, too.

Still, if you cannot laugh at yourself, at your own obstinate writings, or at the whole danged microcosm called Poetry World (it runs by its own rules of physics, like your rogue poems), what business do you have filling white screens with briefly free verse?

I thought so.

The Ekphrastic Fantastic

Ken Craft poetry updates on a free-verse life

Ekphrasis, according to The Oxford Classical Dictionary, means “the rhetorical description of a work of art.” And Edward Hirsch, in his hefty resource, A Poet’s Glossary, quotes Paul Valéry as saying, “We should apologize that we dare to speak about painting” in one breath, and, “There are important reasons for not keeping silent [since] all the arts live by words. Each work of art demand its response” in another.

Now that Paul has cleared that up, we writers might consider what it would be like to labor on a painting only to have a writer “interpret” it via ekphrastic poetry. Would we take umbrage? Would we be flattered?

Me, I’d be happy to invite all comers with their various interpretations, but the thing about ekphrastic poetry is that it yields a spectrum of styles and results. Some poems can blatantly interpret, sometimes taking obvious liberties because they can, while others are more delicately descriptive, as if it’s a game of “close your eyes and listen, my child, seeing if my words can’t paint as well as the master.”

Best for both purposes are puzzling paintings like Paul Delvaux’s Village of the Mermaids, which led to Lisel Mueller’s poem “Paul Delvaux: The Village of the Mermaids.” Mueller’s poem asks (and implicitly creates) more questions than it states answers–for me, a valid purpose of ekphrastic poetry.

Mueller is our woman in Havana, so to speak, giving us a play-by-play of the curiosity she sees before her. Mermaids? These look like no mermaids Hans Christian Andersen (or, for that matter, Walt Disney) has ever conjured. They look like nuns. No. Like prostitutes, Mueller says. Such opposites are a graphic throwing out of the hands in confusion. They are also an invitation for the reader to find and scrutinize the painting as well. Which is it? And is the writer correct?

For Mueller, the lodestone of the painting is the man in black and in back. In stanza one, the words “The painter” come up right after this mystery man is mentioned, as if implying perhaps the painter himself is walking away. Or not, as wondered in stanza three, where the poet returns to the man in black, this time calling him the only “familiar figure” just after mentioning the date, 1942–a year sure to bring Hitler to mind. The man in black is “approaching the sea, / and he is small and walking away from us.”

“Small” could imply insignificant, unworthy, or helpless, all of which would send the poem in drastically different directions. What the poem gets right, and what serves the ekphrastic art perfectly, is how the poem echoes the painting’s mysterious nature. Mueller respects the painting by wondering while avoiding direct interpretations. Unless you, the reader, want to take the baton and finish the race yourself by interpreting Mueller’s poem and, by proxy, the painting, too.

But isn’t that what any museum patron can do, or should do, while staring at the original canvas? I think so, and therein lies a happy marriage of painting and writing, of art and art.

“Paul Delvaux: The Village of the Mermaids”

Oil on canvas, 1942

by Lisel Mueller

Who is that man in black, walking
away from us into the distance?
The painter, they say, took a long time
finding his vision of the world.

The mermaids, if that is what they are
under their full-length skirts,
sit facing each other
all down the street, more of an alley,
in front of their gray row houses.
They all look the same, like a fair-haired
order of nuns, or like prostitutes
with chaste, identical faces.
How calm they are, with their vacant eyes,
their hands in laps that betray nothing.
Only one has scales on her dusky dress.

It is 1942; it is Europe,
and nothing fits. The one familiar figure
is the man in black approaching the sea,
and he is small and walking away from us.

So On and So Fourth of July

Ken Craft kencraftpoetry Lost Sherpa of Happiness my poems poetry updates on a free-verse life

This prose poem, originally printed in Issue 14 of Unbroken Journal as well as in my second book, Lost Sherpa of Happiness, is half lark, half rant against all the usual suspects: (insert invective here) fireworks, drinking, general mayhem particular to colors red, white, and blue. Up side? Writing it helped pay for my annual dues to Curmudgeons Amalgamated Local 406.

American or not, curmudgeonly or not, red, white, or blue, too, or not — I’m wishing a Happy Fourth to all of my readers, regular of first-time!

IT’S THE FOURTH OF JULY

by Ken Craft

and he’s listening to Oh Say Can You See in a sea of runners and an awakening 8 a.m. heat. The blue smell of Ben-Gay on the mentholated old guys & Axe on the sun-venerating young guys & armpit on the just-rolled-out-of-bed lazy guys & no one’s run a New Balance step yet. The ellipsis after the song’s last line is always a chant of USA! USA! USA! from the fun-run campers who must not read (at least footnotes) because they never feel the wet hand of irony in that disunited “U” running down their body-painted backs.

Jesus, but he bolts when the pistol goes, heat or no. On the course, though, he is passed by sausage-heavy middle-aged men & oxy-huffing retired men & stick-legged kids & women of all stars & stripes. Begrudge not, says the Bible, so he celebrates their speed or their youth, their fat or their fair sex—whatever hare-bodied thing there is to celebrate.

That night, after the picnic-table splinters & charred cheeseburgers, after the fries & bottles of we’re-out-of-ketchup, the fireworks mushroom into night clouds & umbrellas rain down hiss & heat sparkle, made-in-China reds, whites & blues. He cranes his neck, the skies soured with smoke & sulfur, holding tight the hand of his sweetheart.

Then it’s blessed be bed, after the grande finds its finale, only he is wakened by more (USA!) fireworks up the street (USA!) at 11:30 p.m. Still the holiday, after all, ignited by the undoubtedly drunk, after all, because booze is God-Bless-America’s drug of choice, after all. The outdoors explodes until midnight & he’s had about all he can stand lying down & cursed be Thomas Jefferson anyway, with his noble agrarian society & its whiskey rebellions & its pursuits of happiness & its God-given rights & its who-the-hell-are-you-to-tell-me, question comma rhetorical.

You know how this ends: It’s insomnia again. In the shallow, post-patriotic hours of the Fifth of July. Come cock-crow morning, on his walk, Fido sniffs the empty nips & plastic fifths along the sandy shoulder of sleepy roads. There’s even a patriotic Bud box, hollowed-be-its-name, white stars emblazoned on the blue of its crumpled carcass.

God bless America, he tells it.

"It's the Fourth of July" by Ken Craft

Space In the Middle of a Line

poetry

space

Poetry is ever-evolving. Sometimes what looks new (read: “prose poetry”) has actually been around a long time (read: since the 1840s). But what about space in the middle of a line? I see more and more of it. What does it mean? You can’t look it up in your Poet’s Glossary. I mean, where would you search? An entry for “line”? For “space”? For “blank”?

Maybe it’s the cool thing to do in poetry, like the latest fashion or name brand being worn by the popular kids in middle school. I don’t know. I am, as usual, behind the curve. Bewitched and bewildered. Late to the party.

So let’s try to figure it out together. Here is a segment from the title poem of Meghan O’Rourke’s collection, Sun in Days. I’ve enjoyed a lot of her work in the book, but some of the poems do this sudden space thing. It’s like “we interrupt this poem to do the Star Trek space-the-final-frontier thing. We will get back to our regularly-scheduled line as soon as Scottie beams words down.”

from Part 2 of “Sun in Days’ by Meghan O’Rourke:

The pond near the house in Maine
where we lived for one year
to “get away” from the city the pond
where the skaters on Saturdays came,
red scarves through white snow,
voices drawing near and pulling
away, trees against the clouds.

My first thought was, “Ah. It’s a line break in the middle of a line, so as to avoid overly-short lines!” It was a Eureka moment. In O’Rourke’s lines above, this theory seems to work in the fifth line where you might not want to see a two-word line such as “red scarves.”

Or maybe the whole purpose of the space is to signal the reader to pause. This theory looks reasonable in line 3 where the gap between “city” and “the pond” serves as a logical place for a comma, perhaps. The problem with the theory, though, comes with line 4. Why would a reader pause between “skaters” and “on Saturdays came” when they logically flow together?

Is it like concrete poetry, then? Do we connect the white space to form something pleasing to the eye, a treasure-map secret to the poem’s meaning, possibly?

How about this–an invisible em dash there to point at and emphasize what follows?

As they say in the UK, I’m gobsmacked. Still, that hasn’t stopped me from trying to innovate. I’m considering trying some of this in my new work, so it might prove handy. And cutting-edge. And cooler than a penguin in Reykjavik.

But, to be boy-scout honest, I’d be spacing as another form of punctuation, is all. Space as hard period or semicolon. Space as soft comma or colon. Space as “OK, people, let’s take a quick breath because we can.”

That’s it. Because we can. Poetic license strikes again in a place with zero gravity yet.

“Finish the Wine in This Field of Air”

poetry

Look at any photograph of Jim Harrison and you might think him Charles Bukowski-like. Craggy and gruff. Cigarette burning between two fingers. No-nonsense poems that allow for the occasional nonsense, usually involving alcohol.

In sustained reading of Harrison’s poems in his book, Song of Unreason, however, I’d say he’s more of a nature guy like Frost, say, or Bly. Unlike Frost, though, there’s little in the way of form poems with meter and rhyme scheme. Just off the cuff stuff that looks easy but, of course, isn’t.

Here’s the lead-off poem in the collection that gives you an idea of his range:

Broom by Jim Harrison

To remember you’re alive
visit the cemetery of your father
at noon after you’ve made love
and are still wrapped in a mammalian
odor that you are forced to cherish.
Under each stone is someone’s inevitable
surprise, the unexpected death
of their biology that struggled hard, as it must.
Now to home without looking back,
enough is enough.
En route buy the best wine
you can afford and a dozen stiff brooms.
Have a few swallows then throw the furniture
out the window and begin sweeping.
Sweep until the walls are
bare of paint and at your feet sweep
until the floor disappears. Finish the wine
in this field of air, return to the cemetery
in evening and wind through the stones
a slow dance of your name visible only to birds.

Poems That End with a Question

Ken Craft poetry reading poetry updates on a free-verse life

dunn

Let’s hear it for poems that end with a question. Reason? Questions are more fun than statements. Questions better reflect life, which is, after all, nothing but a big question mark. Good question makers are much more inspiring to be around and to talk to than big pronouncement types who hit us with their ego-driven blah, blah, blahs like so many blasts of hubris in a growing balloon.

Last time out I discussed a New Yorker poem that gave me pause like so many big-glossy-winning poetic efforts do. You know, the type poem that has you saying, “Really?” to some imaginary editor with an imaginary dream job.

Today, though, I come not to bury Caesar but to praise him (move over Mark Antony). The Sept. 4, 2017, issue serves up a breezy philosophical piece by old friend Stephen Dunn, a poem that ends on a question that, like every good question, leaves you thinking. Have a look, why don’t you:

“The Inheritance”

by Stephen Dunn

You shouldn’t be surprised that the place

you always sought, and now have been given,

carries with it a certain disappointment.

Here you are, finally inside, and not a friend

in sight. The only gaiety that exists

is the gaiety you’ve brought with you,

and how little you had to bring.

The bougainvillea outside your front window,

like the gardener himself, has the look

of something that wants constant praise.

And the exposed wooden beams,

once a main attraction, now feel pretentious,

fit for someone other than you.

But it’s yours now and you suspect

you’ll be known by the paintings you hang,

the books you shelve, and no doubt

you need to speak about the wallpaper

as if it weren’t your fault. Perhaps that’s why

wherever you go these days

vanity has followed you like a clownish dog.

You’re thinking that with a house like this

you should throw a big party and invite

a Nick Carraway and ask him to bring

your dream girl, and would he please also

referee the uncertainties of the night?

You’re thinking that some fictional

characters can be better friends

than real friends can ever be.

For weeks now your dreams have been

offering you their fractured truths.

You don’t know how to inhabit them yet,

and it might cost another fortune to find out.

Why not just try to settle in,

take your place, however undeserved,

among the fortunate? Why not trust

that almost everyone, even in

his own house, is a troubled guest?

Very cool, don’t you think? Especially if you consider your mind a “house” of sorts. We are all troubled guests in our short durations here, and just when we think we’ve stumbled upon the key to happiness, we are disabused of the notion in swift fashion.

Some people, for instance, think the key to happiness is a new start, as in moving away. They quickly discover, however, that you can’t move away from yourself. That “house” we call a mortal coil moves with you.

Money? An inheritance? It is to laugh. In that sense, Dunn’s poem is a cautionary laugh, a troubled, how-did-this-happen laugh.

I don’t know about you, but I like troubled poems, ones with furrowed brows, ones that finish in a questioning tone. It’s as if the poet brings up a problem in life and then hands it off. “Here,” he seems to say, giving it over like a meditation bead, “why don’t you chew this over for a bit.”

And so, we’re left with bougainvilleas and Carraway-less dreams that gently disturb us. Isn’t that what good poetry ending in questions do? Isn’t that one thing we ask of them?

How To Make the Old Seem New Again

poetry

Contrast. It’s such a wonderful tool, the sharpest and most precise, perhaps, in the writer’s toolbox. Finding examples isn’t difficult and reading them is not only easy but downright pleasant on the eyes.

Consider the minor misery of being a tourist. Obligated to go here and there, to see this and that, the weight of history or great art or imposing architecture on our shoulders.

It’s enough to make you feel like Atlas saddled with the world against his will. Or to cheer for the little guy who rebels in the great tradition of Mark Twain abroad.

Exhibit A today is a poem from my good friend (OK, we exchanged all of three e-mails, so good enough) George Bilgere.

Really Eternal City
by George Bilgere

After we’d walked for at least an hour,
heading toward the Vatican
on a broiling August day,
I began thinking about how long
the tour we’d signed up for was going to be,
and how many sacred things would be on view,
and how much complicated information
the guide would tell us about the ancient paintings
and Roman numerals and relics
and tombs and holy knuckle bones.

I knew it would all kind of just melt together
and congeal into one big lumpen mass
of guilt and suffering and miracles
and gloomy old men in sandals.

And as I was thinking this
we were passing through a shady little square
where a couple of bare-breasted marble nymphs
were playing in the fountain,
and there were no tour guides anywhere,
there was no suffering or crucifixions,
nor was there even one important name or date
I would have to try to remember.

And the cheap red wine at the sidewalk ristorante
where we ended up spending the afternoon
instead of going to the Vatican
was wonderful, even miraculous,
as was the spaghetti bolognese.

In the penultimate stanza, the tone begins to shift. It’s like the winter freeze’s first crack under the glory of an unseasonably warm March day. Mercy, then, for “bare-breasted marble nymphs…playing in the fountain.” And mercy for “no suffering or crucifixions” or important names or dates to remember, too.

Instead we see “cheap red wine at the sidewalk ristorante / where we ended up spending the afternoon / instead of going to the Vatican.”

It can’t help but be “wonderful, even miraculous, / as was the spaghetti bolognese.”

It’s a neat reminder that history and art and architecture are undoubtedly wonderful things, but nothing beats the prime pleasures of life: food and wine shared with the one you love.

Of course we knew that already, and of course it’s a most ordinary thought. But put in contrast to the rigors of touring the Vatican, it becomes new again.

Pass the contrast and the parmesan, in other words. Oh. And the bottle, too.

The Possibilities in an “Endlessly Muddled Middle”

philosophy poetry writing writing inspiration writing poetry

They say man is a storytelling animal, which therefor means he is a story-listening animal.

Children love story time, of course, but adults do as well. Teachers know that high school seniors will be as rapt to a great story read aloud as kindergarteners will. As for movies and the theater and television? One big, ear-and-eye-popping story.

In his book, Minds Made for Stories, Thomas Newkirk argues that all writing–expository, persuasive, descriptive–is essentially narrative at its root. Jonathan Gottschall, meanwhile, put out a bestselling book in 2012 called The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. His thesis? You must be some kind of monster if your dislike stories (never mind that monsters make for wonderful stories, as the dark space under your bed can testify).

It’s hard to argue with all this, right? We are surrounded every day by unfolding storylines. Our lives are storylines, in fact. Ones where Free Will steps into the ring to do battle with Fate on a daily basis. We either write our own lives or watch helplessly as our lives get written for us.

Into this end-of-story fray steps William H. Gass. In his essay, “Finding a Form,” he begs to differ with the story enthusiasts. With relish, even! Hark:

“If words find comfort in the sentence’s syntactical handclasp, and sentences find the proper place of pieces of furniture in the rhetorical space of the paragraph, what shall control each scene as it develops, form the fiction finally as a whole?

“Well, the old answer was always: plot. It’s a terrible word in English, unless one is thinking of some second-rate conspiracy, a meaning it serves very well. Otherwise, it stands for an error for which there’s no longer an excuse. There’s bird drop, horse plop, and novel plot. Story is what can be taken out of the fiction and made into a movie. Story is what you tell people when they embarrass you by asking what your novel is about. Story is what you do to clean up life and make God into a good burgher who manages the world like a business. History is often written as a story so that it can seem to have a purpose, to be on its way somewhere; because stories deny that life is no more than an endlessly muddled middle; they beg each length of it to have a beginning and end like a ballgame or a banquet. Stories are sneaky justifications. You can buy stories at the store, where they are a dime a dozen. Stories are interesting only when they are floors in a building. Stories are a bore. What one wants to do with stories is screw them up. Stories ought to be in pictures. They’re wonderful to see.

“Still, a little story gets into everything. Thank the Ghost of Fictions Past for that.”

An amusing foray, I found it–especially the word play: “There’s bird drop, horse plop, and novel plot.” And what about this: “Stories are interesting only when they are floors in a building.”

God save us from the 13th story, eh?

For poets, Gass’s rant is inspirational in its way, for which genre “screws stories up” more than poetry? Yes, yes, we have narrative poems, and we have those who love them. But more often the Hansel-and-Gretel trail is lost in the dark wood of a poem. Dark and lovely wood, one hopes.

I once wrote a young adult novel that actually got a reading and a handwritten reply from an editor at a top publishing house. Her rejection apologies were all about the plot, but she ended on a positive. “Beautiful descriptions,” she wrote. “The imagery is inspiring. Have you considered poetry?”

Truth be told, I had not. But the seed was planted, and when a seed germinates and pierces the earthy ceiling of possibilities above it, a story begins and rushes and commences the search for its “endlessly muddled middle.”

Therein lies the art, I think. No need to be spellbound with neatly-ribboned endings are advance-screen cheers for happily ever afters. Life is a muddle. And reading poems that muse on that muddle in unique and beautiful ways is a story unto itself. Leave plots to the rabble and the cemetery’s diggers. The end may just be another beginning.

Eye Candy for Revisionists

poetry revising poetry

revise

Revisionist. It’s an ugly word in history and politics, but in the world of poetry? Nirvana! Frankly, I much prefer revising my poems to creating them. Birth from the white womb of blankness, page or screen, can be painful. Tinkering with existing words, lines, even punctuation? Another matter entirely.

Of course, revising must be earned. You can’t revise nothing because, in the words of the prophet, Billy Preston, nothing from nothing leaves nothing. (This is math I can understand!)

If you missed it, I have to share with you a New York Times feature on poets’ revisionary tactics. It was, as the phrase has been sweetly coined, “eye candy” for poets. You look at typed poems and witness glorious cross-outs, arrows, and scribbles. In short, a creative history of brains at work.

In this case, the brains are Eduardo C. Corral, Billy Collins, Jenny Zhang, Marie Howe, Robert Pinsky, and Mary Jo Bang. Which reminds me. Why can’t I have a catchy name like Mary Jo Bang? Holy cow. Where do people get such catchy names? I’ve no idea if it is real or a nom de plume, but either way, I like the sound of it.

You can check out this New York Times feature, called “Poets in Action,” here. Not only do you get to see who’s messiest, you get to read a bit of commentary by each poet below the manuscript. Not that’s a Sunday treat.

Bon weekend, people!