Yearly Archives: 2024

123 posts

Chekhov’s Secret: Not a Gun on the Wall

As is true with poetry, short stories are typically frowned upon by book publishers. To get a collection of short fiction accepted, you either have to be a well-known name or your stories have to be very, very (did I say “very”?) good.

This truth, as self-evident as Thomas Jefferson’s were supposed to be, struck me while rereading Peter Orner’s collection, Maggie Brown and Other Stories. In one called “Ineffectual Tribute to Len,” Orner goes on an Anton Chekhov riff.

As I read parts of this story, I found myself replacing the word “story” with “poem” because, whether good old Chekhov knew it or not, a lot of his philosophy holds in both genres. In this particular story, the narrator wants to write about his friend, Len, and has had a novel in mind all along. Then suddenly, it strikes him. Len is a story-in-waiting, not a novel, and Chekhov is the key. Read along and see what I mean:

“All hail Chekhov. If done right, he tells us, a story never ends. A story: lurks. A story, a good story, is just out of reach, always. Wake up in an unfamiliar darkness, in a room you don’t seem to recognize. Flip on the light. Nothing there. It’s your room again. But didn’t you feel a presence in the dark? The presence of someone you once knew? Someone you once loved? All these years I’ve been deluding myself, carrying around this folder as if one day it would grow covers and a binding. So simple, Len’s a story.”

Then the narrator decides to write his publisher, Little, Brown and Company, about his revelation:

“You say stories don’t sell, and God knows I have no reason to doubt you (I’ve seen the numbers on my story collections and they aren’t pretty; I know I’m basically a charity case), but don’t you see? It’s what Chekhov teaches. The last period of the last sentence of a story isn’t a full stop; it’s a horizon. It’s not about word count or pages. That’s a smothered way of thinking. We’re talking about the quest for infinity here. Horizons can’t ever be reached no matter how many words you lard on a novel. The attempt at closure is inherently dishonest. But a story! One that ends but doesn’t end, that’s infinity, immortality, right there…”

A short story master, Orner found inspiration in an earlier master. The master. And I love how he puts it here: “The last period of the last sentence of a story isn’t a full stop; it’s a horizon.”

I love even better how changing “story” to “poem” should make would-be poets realize that a poem’s ending cannot be a “full stop,” either. It must be a “horizon,” one that causes its reader to feel a certain resonance bringing both satisfaction and yearning.

Note, too, how Orner follows “full stop” with a semi-colon instead of a period. I particularly liked that touch, the semi-colon not quite being a full stop itself. The punctuation echoes the sentiment.

So, yes. Chekhov can teach practitioners of short writing—be they stories or poems—a thing or three. Think about that challenge the next time you sit down to write.

Hell with the Chekhovian gun on the wall that must be fired by the end. It’s the horizon that matters.

The Poetry of Past, Present, and Future

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The reason Buddhism (whether you take yours as religion or as philosophy) is so Protean in nature is simple. At least to me (a simple man).

There’s no need to do any math, either. No Four Noble Truths. No Eightfold Path. I just repeat the mantra “change” and watch for the internal battle of two-against-one.

In that corner, the crowd favorites, the past and the future. And in this corner, the seriously undervalued known as the present.

When you look through the lens of that unholy trinity (past, present, future), you’ll see the futility of the favorites and the persistence of the underdog in many pieces of literature. The smiling referee? Change.

A lot of poems work with this model because it’s so broad, but for my purposes this morning I’ll take two by Joseph Mills, a writer who spins family conversation into poetic gold. First, a look at a poem titled in a most deja vu kind of way.

“We’ve Had This Conversation Before”
Joseph Mills

We’ve had this conversation before,
my daughter and I, many times,
about what she might buy
with her allowance, about candy,
about how her brother annoys her,
about where her birth mother might be,

and we’ve had this conversation before,
my son and I, many times,
about how fast he is, how fast horses are,
about candy, about how his sister bosses him,
about how much a horse costs,

and we’ve had this conversation before,
my wife and I, many times,
about how tired we are,
about what we might buy them
and how much it all costs,
about how they annoy us, how fast
they’re growing, how scared we are
about what might happen, about this life,
this life, so tiring and wonderful,
and how, if we could, we’d repeat it,
this life, many times,
many times.

By nature, many poets mine their pasts for material. Experience is the muse of memoir, after all, and memories move poets to write. Here we note the son and daughter both struggling with their desires and their wishes. And here we note the parents worried, too, especially about change and what the future will bring for their kids.

These worries prevent them from enjoying the present, yes, but the final lines imply that they’d gladly do it all over again.

This is a very western take on samsara or reincarnation. Second chances? Tenth? Hundredth? Yes, please!. But to the Buddhist and Hindu scholars of old, these cycles of birth, life, and death were unpleasant, indeed. Pain. Sickness. Old Age. Death. All the things westerners hide from and do their best to thwart, over and over again.

If you think the unspoken worry of Mills’ first poem is a death that takes all this joy away in the blink of a lifetime’s eye, you’ll be interested in a second poem that cuts to the quick (as only children can blithely do).

“Questions”
Joseph Mills

On the Interstate, my daughter tells me
she only has two questions. I’m relieved
because she usually has two hundred.
I say, Okay, let’s have them, and she asks,
What was there before there was anything?
Stupidly, I think I can answer this:
There was grass, forests, fields, meadows, rivers.
She stops me. No, Daddy. I mean before
there was anything at all, what was there?
I say that I don’t know, so then she asks,
Where do we go when we die? I tell her
I don’t know the answer to this either.
She looks out the side, and I look forward,
then she asks if we can have some music.

Maybe you can read something into the final lines where the daughter looks “out the side” (present) and the father looks “forward” (future) and maybe not, but it seems clear that the daughter’s quick shift to the oh-so-ordinary (“she asks if we can have some music”) is an enlightened response to her father’s non-response.

Oh. No answers (or possibly unpleasant ones) about the future? Let’s enjoy the present, then, shall we? Music, maestro!

Thus, in the most prosaic of ways, does Joseph Mills make a larger point. One the Buddha would have applauded. With one hand.

Poems of Sickness and Hope

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Prayer. It has religious connotations, of course, but the word is big-tent and willing to accommodate any plea to any higher force. Prayer can simply be a wish in hope’s clothing.

In the poem “Prayer,” Keetje Kuipers uses the second-person point of view with the pronoun “you.” Some readers object to this because “you” can mean an actual someone else and “you” can also mean a narrator addressing herself.

Me, I have no problem with it because, in my opinion, it works the way the reader wants it to work. That is, it gives the sense that a speaker may be referring to me personally, to everyone in the world, or to herself only. All good.

As for “Prayer,” it could be categorized as a sickness poem or a mother poem. But really, the two can be interpreted as one. Memories of mothers caring for us in childhood run strong. Deep as a tap root — so strong and deep that many people, delirious on their deathbeds late in a long life, call out for their mothers, even if that mother has been dead for too many decades to recall.

Both sad and haunting, that. But for now, let us pray:

Prayer
Keetje Kuipers

Perhaps as a child you had the chicken pox
and your mother, to soothe you in your fever
or to help you fall asleep, came into your room
and read to you from some favorite book,
Charlotte’s Web or Little House on the Prairie,
a long story that she quietly took you through
until your eyes became magnets for your shuttering
lids and she saw your breathing go slow. And then
she read on, this time silently and to herself,
not because she didn’t know the story,
it seemed to her that there had never been a time
when she didn’t know this story—the young girl
and her benevolence, the young girl in her sod house—
but because she did not yet want to leave your side
though she knew there was nothing more
she could do for you. And you, not asleep but simply weak,
listened to her turn the pages, still feeling
the lamp warm against one cheek, knowing the shape
of the rocking chair’s shadow as it slid across
your chest. So that now, these many years later,
when you are clenched in the damp fist of a hospital bed,
or signing the papers that say you won’t love him anymore,
when you are bent at your son’s gravesite or haunted
by a war that makes you wake with the gun
cocked in your hand, you would like to believe
that such generosity comes from God, too,
who now, when you have the strength to ask, might begin
the story again, just as your mother would,
from the place where you have both left off.

Fathers & Sons (Non-Turgenev Model)

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Parental relationships are fraught and shifting things. Some people never got along with Dad or Mom growing up, then grow closer over time. Some people are extremely tight with their parents as children, then drift apart as adults. In either case, rhyme and reason are more words for poetry and science than life.

Michael Moran’s narrative poem provides a snapshot of a moment in time where a dad— heretofore disappointed in his bookish son—beams proudly. The reason? Not a college degree. Not a high-paying job. But Jim Beam.

That’s my boy!

It’s an amusing glance at a moment in time, something poetry is perfectly purposed to provide. Let’s read along:

The Day I Made My Father Proud
Michael Moran

The doorbell jarred me
toward consciousness
on a sultry Sunday morning
when I was nineteen,
a college sophomore.
I had slept where the bourbon
laid me—on an old couch
reclaimed from a curb.
The party had sped by,
left me road-kill,
limp and snoring,
so my roommates said,
and now I stumbled
to the buzzing door,
remembering what I had never
completely forgotten—
my family is coming.

Dad at the door.
I mumble, ‘I overslept,’
as he surveys the wreckage
of these tired rooms:
lip-sticked cigarette butts,
crushed aluminum cans,
glasses floating sliced limes,
broken brown bottles,
a sticky wooden floor under
smoked-and-perfumed air.
He turns slowly to me
and winks! ‘We can’t
let your mother see this,’
as if we’d planned the party
together, drank from the same
Yellowstone bottle all night.

We spring to action,
sponging spills, opening windows,
gathering garbage. He spins
through the rooms
with the grace of a dancer—
a miniature Falstaff—
humming old barroom songs
from his Navy days,
chuckling softly, his eyes
gleaming as he hides
the half-emptied Jim Beam.
By the time my mother
has herded all my siblings
up the stairs to the apartment,
we have salvaged it to decency.

You see, he thought I was
too serious, worried that I
read too many books, never
got into real trouble.
I remember the way
he stared at me
one Halloween evening
when I told him
I was staying home
to read King Lear.
His cold brown eyes
were sad, disgusted,
the eyes of an Elizabethan
reveler who had just heard
that the Puritans
had closed the theatres.

But that morning
I made him proud,
couldn’t have done better,
unless, perhaps,
one of the girls
had slept over
and answered the door,
wearing nothing
but my faded
red flannel shirt,
top buttons
undone.

Sometimes all it takes to repair a relationship with Dad is a mini-conspiracy against Mom. The key metaphor for me comes at the end of the penultimate stanza, where a flashback of import occurs:

I remember the way
he stared at me
one Halloween evening
when I told him
I was staying home
to read King Lear.
His cold brown eyes
were sad, disgusted,
the eyes of an Elizabethan
reveler who had just heard
that the Puritans
had closed the theatres.

It brings to mind a central truth: Every Dad hopes for his son one of two things. Either Sonny Boy is a chip off the old block (where the compliment lies in the echo) or Sonny Boy does one better by becoming the man Dad always hoped he’d be (where the script is rewritten).

What more could a father ask for? That you call him on Fathers’ Day, maybe, and tell him you love him in whatever manner he would understand and admire.

“The Mix of Flag Blood & Surprise Blurring the Eyes”

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All politics is local, they say. And all poetry, too, seen in a certain slant of light. Sometimes it’s bright and obvious. Other times, you have to work in the dark a bit to see it.

As I continue to slowly read (and reread) Terrance Hayes’ American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, I find not a little (wait for it) politics. This is not surprising, considering the word “American” in the title. It’s a fraught word these days. Divisive. Undefinable. Or, if you’re an insistent lexicographer, with too many definitions to track down.

But that’s OK. Sometimes politics preaches to the choir, joining church and state. One example is this sonnet which does not directly name “He Who Must Not Be Named for Fear of Getting Cheetos Dust All Over the Furniture” (it’s a character in Harry Potter— look it up), but leaves little political guesswork for the novice reader.

Anyway, take it away, Terrance:

Are you not the color of this country’s current threat
Advisory? And of pompoms at a school whose mascot
Is the clementine? Color of the quartered cantaloupe
Beside the tiers of easily bruised bananas cowering
In towers of yellow skin? And of Caligula’s copper-toned
Jabber-jaw jammed with grapes shaped like the eyeballs
Of blind people? Light as a featherweight monarch,
Viceroy, goldfish. Pomp & pumpkin pompadour,
Are you not a flame of hollow Hellos & Hell Nos,
A wild, tattered spirit versus what? Enemy to Foe of
Those Opposed to Upholding the Laws Against What?
I know your shade. You are the color of a sucker punch,
The mix of flag blood & surprise blurring the eyes, a flare
Of confusion, a contusion before it swells & darkens.

Reading the poem aloud gives you some rewarding sounds like “Jabber-jaw jammed” and “grapes shaped” and “Pomp & pumpkin pompadour” and especially “flag blood & surprise blurring the eyes.”

And though the coloring of this character unwanted in 50 states is other-worldly, I guess “the color of a sucker punch” comes about as close as a body can to describing it. Or as close as a body wants to come, anyway.

God save us. And, while we’re at it, let’s thank Him. For politics in poetry, I mean.

The Slender Sadness and Other Truths

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In 1907 the psychoanalyst Georg Groddeck wrote an essay called “Charakter and Typus” where he said, “Goethe’s short poems have a strange ring to them. They are entirely impersonal; in fact, you could say of them that they are not created by a person, but by nature. In them a person is not seen as an ‘I,’ but as a part of something else.”

Groddeck was distinguishing between poets who bring “news of the human mind” and poets who bring “news of the universe,” which is the title Robert Bly would adopt for his anthology of poets who write not so much like Narcissus, but like poets aware of their inconsequential place in the universe.

And talk about going against the tide! Groddeck even dares criticize Shakespeare. Why? For the Bard’s strength is his incisive commentary on the human animal, one that seemingly acts and lives and dies among other humans with little regard or mention of the natural world around him.

“Only a person with really sluggish blood could put up with the average interior state of the human being without yawning, and to make art out of it is impossible, at least not in the way Shakespeare and Beethoven go about it…. The only poet who could make anything out of it is a man who sees in human beings a part of the universe, for whom human nature is interesting not because it is human, but because it is nature.”

Bly quotes a short Goethe poem here, one where a man gets “the news” that counts:

Wanderers Nachtlied II
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

There is a stillness
On the tops of the hills.
In the tree tops
You feel
Hardly a breath of air.
The small birds fall silent in the trees.
Simply wait: soon
You too will be silent

Bly goes on to write in greater depth about nature and writers / poets who make it their muse:

“The psychic tone of nature strikes many people as having some melancholy in it. The tone of nature is related to what human beings call ‘grief,’ what Lucretius called ‘the tears of things,’ what in Japanese poetry is called mono no aware, the slender sadness with the incessant wheel of of reproduction, going on without pause.”

As an example of a poet understanding nature’s predominant role in human life, Bly cites Yeats:

Fragments
W. B. Yeats

Locke sank into a swoon;
The Garden died.
God took the spinning-jenny
Out of his side.

Where got I that truth?
Out of a medium’s mouth,
Out of nothing it came,
Out of the forest loam,
Out of dark night where lay
The crowns of Ninevah.

As Bly explains, “When Yeats says, ‘Locke sank into a swoon,’ he is summing up sixty years of experience during the Industrial Revolution, in which the inventiveness of human beings seemed a prophecy finally come true.”

As a metaphor for human mastery over nature, Bly goes to William Irwin Thompson, who pointed out the Crystal Palace built in 1851: “… in this palace, for the first time in history, steel beams were used, with glass, to enclose living trees. That was a great triumph for the Old Position, because it said that human consciousness, now intensified and narrowed into ‘technology,’ had succeeded in its ancient war with the consciousness of nature, and won.”

And this is where we are today, Bly says. A land that brought us Augustine, the railroad and airplanes, the Nuremberg rallies, doctors’ “war on death.” Bly calls it “Locke’s dizzy spell.”

“To feel the contrast between our contemporary experience when we look at an object or a hillside, and the experience that is possible when an ‘opened’ human being does that, we have to go far back into the past of the human race.”

For Bly, Yeats’ second stanza in “Fragments” does just that, in the name of truth.

“The Sugar Was Sweet Snow”

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If ever you need a reminder of the lot of women, of how much it has changed, of how much it has yet to change, you can read a poem like Marge Piercy’s “The Scent of Apple Cake.”

Such an attractive title. Under its cover, what could go wrong? Well, there’s more than cake and cookies baking in a mother’s kitchen. Definitely true of a generation ago and beyond, but often still true today. Think of that the next time you ask Mom to whip up a batch of her specialty.

Note how Piercy leavens a simple bread of imagery with some harsh realities:

The Scent of Apple Cake
Marge Piercy

My mother cooked as drudgery
the same fifteen dishes round
and round like a donkey bound
to a millstone grinding dust.

My mother baked as a dance,
the flour falling from the sifter
in a rain of fine white pollen.
The sugar was sweet snow.

The dough beneath her palms
was the warm flesh of a baby
when they were all hers before
their wills sprouted like mushrooms.

Cookies she formed in rows
on the baking sheets, oatmeal,
molasses, lemon, chocolate chip,
delights anyone could love.

Love was in short supply,
but pies were obedient to her
command of their pastry, crisp
holding the sweetness within.

Desserts were her reward for endless
cleaning in the acid yellow cloud
of Detroit, begging dollars from
my father, mending, darning, bleaching.

In the oven she made sweetness
where otherwise there was none.

Yes, we learn in S1 that cooking is a “drudgery,” but it really begins to hit home in S5, where “Love was in short supply,” in S6, where we see her “begging dollars from / my father, mending, darning, bleaching,” and, of course, in the two-line envoi.

The two-line envoi about says it all.

The Poet, the Presidents, and the People

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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.