Yearly Archives: 2025

18 posts

April Is the Cruller Month

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No, wait. That can’t be right. “April is the cruellest month,” according to T.S. Eliot (with “cruelest” misspelled).

Or maybe it’s a case of Brit-spell, which we fought a war over. I still remember the peace treaty at Yorktown, where George Washington proclaimed that, heretofore, “colour” would be spelled “color.” Huzzah (and all that)! Strike up “Yankee Doodle” and let’s get some lunch.

But back to Eliot. It’s a great line about April (which debuts today). A humdinger of a line. One everyone remembers, even people who consider poetry as foreign as Neptune. To stretch it out a bit, the first four lines of “The Waste Land” go like so:

 

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

 

The line works especially well in New England, where new life can be coaxed out of the earth only to be slammed with a late-season frost or a “whoops” snowstorm. Cruel.

The bigger point here, though, is great lines. All of us write them (by “us” I mean poets not quite as well-known as old Thomas Stearns Eliot), it’s just the company they keep. That is, when we create an awesome line that makes us proud, we have trouble drumming up players to go out on the field or court with it.

Poetry, you see, is a team sport outfitted with players called words and lines and stanzas. Given that, a great line cannot stand alone. It is not an orchestra unto itself. It requires other lines to help it resonate, make sense, fill the room with music. You can put a star on a basketball team, for instance, but if the other four players are mediocre at best, good luck.

Some poetry “how-to” books advise a collection of your best lines, shoehorning them into one poem. To me, that’s a cheat sure to fail.

What? My best lines from five poems forced to play together, even if they treat on different subjects? Just imagine the egos of five superstars on that basketball court with no practice as a cohesive unit. Ball hogs. Hot doggers. Ma, look-at-me’s.

No, no, no. That will not do. That would be cruelly unkind and one mess of a poem.

Think of that next time you try to devise ways to make one of your favorite lines famous. I recommend starting from scratch. Build a team around your great line. It’s not easy, but whoever said poetry was? Not this guy. So pass the crullers, poor a coffee, and get to work.

Writing Prompts: They Hide in the Wide Open

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Traci K. Smith divides her anthology, American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, into five sections: “The Small Town of My Youth,” “Something Shines Out From Every Darkness,” “Words Tangled in Debris,” “Here, the Sentence Will Be Respected,” and “One Singing Thing.”

Think about it. Each of those section titles would make a great prompt. Five stirrers for your daily writing cocktail. The first opens up memoir-like possibilities from your past and the town you grew up in.

The second offers a study in contrasts where you can use the rhetorical device of antithesis to explore one small phoenix that poked out from the ashes.

The third? Play with words and see how even tangled debris can take on significance.

Looking at the fourth title, I think of how the word “sentence” can be taken two ways, one if my diction and two if by the judge’s gavel.

And finally, the wonder, the shout, the ode of “one singing thing.”

So much for “I have no ideas.”

As an example of a poem Smith chose for the first section, “The Small Town of My Youth,” here is a poem by Oliver de la Paz:

 

In Defense of Small Towns
by Oliver de la Paz

When I look at it, it’s simple, really. I hated life there. September,
once filled with animal deaths and toughened hay. And the smells

 

of fall were boiled-down beets and potatoes
or the farmhands’ breeches smeared with oil and diesel

 

as they rode into town, dusty and pissed. The radio station
split time between metal and Tejano, and the only action

 

happened on Friday nights where the high school football team
gave everyone a chance at forgiveness. The town left no room

 

for novelty or change. The sheriff knew everyone’s son and despite that,
we’d cruise up and down the avenues, switching between

 

brake and gearshift. We’d fight and spit chew into Big Gulp cups
and have our hearts broken nightly. In that town I learned

 

to fire a shotgun at nine and wring a chicken’s neck
with one hand by twirling the bird and whipping it straight like a towel.

 

But I loved the place once. Everything was blonde and cracked
and the irrigation ditches stretched to the end of the earth. You could

 

ride on a bicycle and see clearly the outline of every leaf
or catch on the streets each word of a neighbor’s argument.

 

Nothing could happen there and if I willed it, the place would have me
slipping over its rocks into the river with the sugar plant’s steam

 

or signing papers at a storefront army desk, buttoned up
with medallions and a crew cut, eyeing the next recruits.

 

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I could be anywhere,
staring at a hunk of asphalt or listening to the clap of billiard balls

 

against each other in a bar and hear my name. Indifference now?
Some. I shook loose, but that isn’t the whole story. The fact is

 

I’m still in love. And when I wake up, I watch my son yawn,
and my mind turns his upswept hair into cornstalks

 

at the edge of a field. Stillness is an acre, and his body
idles, deep like heavy machinery. I want to take him back there,

 

to the small town of my youth and hold the book of wildflowers
open for him, and look. I want him to know the colors of horses,

 

to run with a cattail in his hand and watch as its seeds
fly weightless as though nothing mattered, as though

 

the little things we tell ourselves about our pasts stay there,
rising slightly and just out of reach.

Writing (vs. Fighting) Like Cats and Dogs

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I have oft written of dog poems because I am a dog guy. That’s why I disapprove of such crazy commandments as the 11th, “Thou shalt not write a poem about dogs.”

But what about cats? As I have little patience for their kind, I feel more sympathetic toward “no cat” rules. After all, cat pics clutter Internet feeds like cholesterol clogged King Henry VIII’s arteries. Said pics can be found in the dictionary under “clichés” as opposed to “cute.”

Still, I’d be foolish and inconsistent to rule in dogs’ favor while wishing cats their tenth lives. And so it is that I advise writers who love one or the other or both to go forth and multiply in your creative efforts (the 12th Commandment).

No less a poet than Marge Piercy leads the way (see below and meet me at the bend):

 

A Republic of Cats
Marge Piercy

Nobody rules. They all
take turns. I can never
tell who will chase who
playing war over the couch

and chairs, round and
round again until suddenly
they stop as if a whistle
blew in their heads.

Five of them, aged fifteen
to two. Who will curl
together making one cushion
of patchwork fur? Who

will painstakingly lick
a friend, washing and
cuddling. Who will growl
at their friend of last hour?

The one rule is where each
sleeps at night, their spot
in the bed and with whom.
It is written in bone.

 

Writing about pets starts with scientific observation. With that data, the writer turns to more creatively figurative ideas and goes for it. The writer must! Dogs and cats are too well known not to.

For me, all credit in this poem goes to the start (“Nobody rules.”) and the end (“It is written in bone.”). Hook the reader from the start, lest you lose that impatient-as-all-get-out customer (and think of it—no two words better capture “cat-dom” than those).

Then comes the end. Your poem depends on a final flourish. Something memorable. Something with panache. If sleeping spots are as important to cats as lunchroom table spots are to middle schoolers, then say it in style: The rule “is written in bone.”

Now go watch your cats and dogs with a notebook, why don’t you. Take notes. Then make like clumsy Moses and break some commandments.

Adult Brain + Kid Wondering = Poetry

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Sometimes you just have to be kid-curious to write poetry by saying, “What if?” and “Imagine that….” Rest assured if you are a poet walking on crowded city sidewalks, you are not thinking the same things as the folks looking down at their Palm Gods (read: cellphones). No. Your mind is moving faster than you are, turning at every bend, allowing no law of physics to get in your creative way.

By way of example, here’s a Wislawa Szymborska poem which, whether she intended it or not, has a distinct samsara flavor.

 

Thoughts That Visit Me on Busy Streets
Wislawa Szymborska

Faces.
Billions of faces on the earth’s surface.
Each different, so we’re told,
from those that have been and will be.
But Nature—since who really understands her?—
may grow tired of her ceaseless labors
and so repeats earlier ideas
by supplying us
with preworn faces.

Those passersby might be Archimedes in jeans,
Catherine the Great draped in resale,
some pharaoh with briefcase and glasses.

An unshod shoemaker’s widow
from a still pint-sized Warsaw,
the master from the cave at Altamira
taking his grandkids to the zoo,
a shaggy Vandal en route to the museum
to gasp at past masters.

The fallen from two hundred centuries ago,
five centuries ago,
half a century ago.

One brought here in a golden carriage,
another conveyed by extermination transport,
Montezuma, Confucius, Nebuchadnezzar,
their nannies, their laundresses, and Semiramida
who speaks only English.

Billions of faces on the earth’s surface.
My face, yours, whose—
you’ll never know.
Maybe nature has to shortchange us,
and to keep up, meet demand,
she fishes up what’s been sunk
in the mirror of oblivion.

 

I like all the cameos here by people both famous and infamous—people kind enough to share their faces in Szymborska’s Warsaw one week. I had to look up Altamira to see that it is an ancient cave filled with caveman (and woman) canvases (rock on!) that might hang in the Prado if cave walls could move. As for Semirada, an opera, it appears, starring a queen of the same name. Maybe Szymborska was a fan of the opera. Me, I give it a wide berth, being the modern Vandal that I am.

Face it, you could do worse than let your mind wander to such strange wonders today. Whimsy is on the same shelf as poetry, after all. Just ask Dewey Decimal.

A Carnival of Losses, A Big Top of Gains

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In poet Donald Hall’s second (and final, given his death in 2018) collection of essays, A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety, his prose style is concise and entertaining, proving compression (i.e. “the art of poetry”) has pay-offs for the essay writer, too.

For fans of poetry, two of the book’s four sections merit mention: “The Selected Poets of Donald Hall” (a series of reminisces about poets Hall met and interacted with over the years) and “Necropoetics” (an extended study of poems about death… something Hall was quite familiar with, having experienced the long and fateful death of his poet wife, Jane Kenyon).

Poets discussed in the “Selected Poets” section of the book include Theodore Roethke, Robert Creeley, Louis MacNeice, William Carlos Williams, John Holmes, Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Hill, James Dickey, Allen Tate, Edwin and Willa Muir, Kenneth Rexroth, Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, Richard Wilbur, E.E. Cummings, Tom Clark, and James Wright. Most of these “essays” are but a page or two long.

For a shorter one and a taste of Hall’s style, I give you his take on Kenneth Rexroth:

 

“New Directions published Kenneth Rexroth’s poems, and I read Rexroth with pleasure and excitement beginning in my twenties and thirties. Long poems and short, I admired him and learned from him, his diction and his three beats a line. His radio talks on California NPR made his opinions public. A dedicated anti-academic, he bragged, ‘I write like I talk.’ Whatever his taste or careful grammar, I kept on admiring his poems as he kept on being nasty about me and my eastern gang. I thought of a happy revenge. Frequently I wrote essays for the New York Times Book Review, so I asked its editor if he’d like an appreciation of Rexroth. Sincerely and passionately and with a devious motive, I wrote an essay to celebrate the poetry of Kenneth Rexroth. I imagined the consternation in California after my piece came out in the New York Times—the shock, the shame, possibly the reluctant pleasure. Mind you, he would not thank me. His publisher James Laughlin, mumbling out of the corner of his mouth, brought me a meager but appreciative word.”

 

Kill ’em with kindness, I always say. Especially when they’re playing tribal politics, something we watch with horror as it plays out in Swampington D.C. and thus, as poets, something we should know better than to repeat in our own little microcosm of intrigues and jealousies.

The reminisce about Allen Tate is quick but quick-witted, showing Hall’s signature sense of humor:

 

“My recollections of some poets are brief. Allen Tate always looked grumpy.”

 

The Tate page is so white, it is reminiscent of Basho and jumping frogs. A haiku, then, to the fifth of Snow White’s dwarfs, Grumpy:

Sp
las
h!

The Complication in Simple Truths

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Simple truths. They abound out there. Put them to paper, though, and they may play like clichés, fast and loose. You need an angle, then. You need your own way.

Pretty much, that’s the simple complication to writing. Everyone holds any given truth to be self-evident, but only one can put it in a certain way—one that makes readers nod and say, “Yes, this illustrates that truth perfectly.”

For example, let’s see how Marjorie Saiser angles in on a simple truth with the following poem:

 

Weekends, Sleeping In
Marjorie Saiser

No jump-starting the day,
no bare feet slapping the floor
to bath and breakfast.

Dozing instead
in the nest
like, I suppose,
a pair of gophers

underground
in fuzz and wood shavings.
One jostles the other
in closed-eye luxury.

We are at last
perhaps
what we are:

uncombed,
unclothed,
mortal.

Pulse
and breath
and dream.

 

Visually, the poem keeps whittling itself down to basic truths, and those basics are delivered in two final stanzas that amount to one- and two-word lines. That’s all. People like gophers in wood shavings “uncombed, / unclothed, / mortal.”

Better yet, the final word of the final stanza, so different than the physiological ones that precede it: “Pulse / and breath / and dream.” This time the short waves come without punctuation or hesitation, but we are more than just autonomous pulse and breath. We are the stuff of dreams.

A basic truth about a lazy day with a loved one. Terribly uncomplicated, really, until you tackle the complication of saying it your own way.

 

“The General, Big-Bearded Arrogance of Certainty.” And Then There’s Poetry.

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As a subscriber to Poetry, I admit to enjoying the essays in the back section as much as or, some months, more than the poetry up front. I’m still safe at the plate, however, as the essays are about poetry.

Jumping into the archives as I sometimes do, for instance, I find the May, 2018, issue, which features Poetry‘s well-advised fourth installment of exchanges with England’s estimable Poetry Review. I enjoyed one essay in particular—Jack Underwood’s “On Poetry and Uncertain Subjects.”

Though an essay, Underwood’s is an ode to poetry’s protean knack for escaping. Escaping what, you ask? Lots of things. Predictions. Definitions. Sometimes even meaning.

In poetry, Underwood writes, “You not only have to acknowledge the innate inaccuracy of language as a system that cannot catch or hold onto anything securely, but also that it’s precisely this characteristic of inaccuracy that a poetic, empathetic transactions rests on.”

When it comes to writing and publishing poems, Underwood warns, “you deliberately build your poem as an open habitation; you have to learn to leave holes in the walls, because you won’t and can’t be around later on to clear up any ambiguities when the lakes of your readers’ lives come flooding up through the floor.”

(Editor’s Note: Underwood assumes that your poems will, in fact, have readers.)

What resonated with me most in this essay is its admission that our poems can slip away even from us, the supposedly confidant author / poets:

“If a poem works it’s because you’ve made it such that other people might participate in making it meaningful, and this participation will always rest on another person’s understanding of the poem and its relationship to a world that is not your own. Your own understanding of the poem will evolve over time too, as you reread it in light of your changing world, just as you will find the world altered in light of the poem you wrote to understand a small uncertain corner of it.  With poems, you never get to settle on a final meaning for your work, just as you never get to feel settled, finally, as yourself. So it seems entirely natural to me that poets, exploring and nudging such unstable material, foregrounding connotation and metaphor, and constantly dredging up the gunk of unconscious activity over which they have no control, might start to doubt the confidence, finality, and the general big-bearded Victorian arrogance of certainty as it seems to appear in other forms of language: mathematical, religious, political, legal, or financial.”

Doubtful? You need only dig up some of your own published work, whether they be poems in poetry journals or poems in your own books. Trust me when I say, some of your poems will wink at you, stick their tongues out at you, and even turn their backs on you.

Willful children, I think they used to be called. You did your best, and now they go out unto the world to be interpreted as they will by the many, many people they will cross paths with.

Vaya con Dios, I tell them. Godspeed and may you reflect kindly on your creator.

A Day in the Life (Non-Beatles Version)

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5:30 a.m. Rise and, first and foremost, get water boiling for a carafe of freshly-ground coffee. The first cup is the best. Always. But that never stopped a man from nursing numbers two and three.

6:00 a.m. Before checking the old inbox, repeat three times: “I need some good news today.” Click. See Merriam-Webster’s word of the day only. Well, at least it’s not bad news.

6:30 a.m. Begin writing. The focus has moved in the direction of journaling (the habit turns up stuff I can actually use later, I’ve discovered), but some mornings I’m still in the mood to tinker with poems from MS #4, even though it’s out a-courting some nine lucky publishers. I Know, You Know, and Don’t Know (the names of Mark Twain’s dogs, and you can look it up) that, when the manuscript is accepted, these revisions will be allowed through the pre-publication gates, so it is a worthwhile habit.

7:30 a.m. Timeout for breakfast. For me, it’s been the same drill lately. The night before, I take out an 8-ounce Bell jar, put a few raisins and a dash of cinnamon on the bottom, fill halfway with Old-Fashioned Oatmeal, then another round of raisins and cinnamon, followed by the second half of oatmeal, topped off with a third and final touch of raisins and cinnamon. Then I slowly pour in unsweetened almond milk (you could use the milk of your choice) until all the oats are just covered. Screw on the top, set in the fridge, and know that, by morning, it will be bliss, soft and cool. I follow up this cold oatmeal breakfast with a sliced orange.

8:00 a.m. More coffee, more writing. Some days it’s more deleting than writing. Some days I get to show off my addition skills. But more often I find myself tearing down yesterday’s progress, like a little bully boy at the beach who kicks other kids’ sandcastles down. The writer bully in me = eyes 24 hours wiser. The writer bully in me = nothing like what’s in the House comma White.

10:00 a.m. Take a reading break. Whatever the book of the moment may be (and right now, it’s Matthew Rohrer’s Army of Giants), usually, or sometimes I go to the two “ongoing” reads when I’m in the mood for them: The Complete Emily Dickinson (her poems may be short, but her production was immense) and Thoreau’s Journals (I like to match today’s date with a similar month and day in his journal, equally immense).

11:00 a.m. If it’s not raining, I make a short drive to the beach, where I get out and walk four miles. At the beach, everything is as it ever was: the surf, the sand, the seagulls and all the other S’s. They have no clue what “demagoguery” or “oligarchy” means. Nor do they care to. I can learn from cheek like that. I get a lot of “writing” done while I walk, too, thinking about that morning’s writing and where it went wrong or could go “righter.” As I logged many years at the shoreline as a boy growing up, looking out at the shards of sunlight on the seas’ surface brings me back. From your eyes, without glancing at your body, you forget that you’ve aged because, damn, it all looks the same, just like the days when you were young and limber.

11:30 a.m. How is it I never gave white sharks a second thought all those years I swam in the ocean? Summers nowadays? It seems that’s all I think of while in the briny is being vigilant, being ready to do battle with the weapons at hand (read: none).

12:30 p.m. Home for lunch. These days, not much, because you cannot eat as much after half a century’s walking on this earth, for one, and because lunch is the least interesting of meals. For me, it’s typically a protein powder shake (vegetable source) with frozen organic strawberries and blueberries and a sliced apple thrown in. And please, don’t get on my case about the “organic” thing by calling me a “foodie” or a “yuppie” or whatever label people like to throw about in our label-addicted world. “Organic” predates the conventional, herbicide- and pesticide-laden fruits and veggies we eat now. “Organic” simply means REAL and CONVENTIONAL because it’s what your granny (or certainly great-granny) ate before all the chemical giants came to the fore in the era of WW II (in that sense, we all suffered the same fate as Germany and Japan). So “organic” means “real food,” straight and simple, the way it was from time immemorial. Got a problem with that?

2:00 p.m. Practice on-line French. I took cinq ans of French back in the day but recall precious little (or, as they say in Paris, “petite presciouse“). They say that this, along with learning a musical instrument, is your best hedge against Alzheimer’s. I try to do at least 30 minutes of practice de français une jour.

2:30 p.m. I think to myself: “Remember when people worried about Alzheimer’s? Remember when “going viral” was a good thing?” Then I stop thinking for a bit, at least in that direction. Safer that way.

3:00 p.m. Time for a 30-minute nap, though it’s not a sacred animal for me or an assured thing or even an everyday thing, necessarily. It all depends on how the old insomnia thing was acting the night before.

3:30 p.m. Afternoon coffee, about as late as I dare. This is a small leftover cup from the morning, so nowhere near as good, but still good, and still better than snacking on processed food (again, thank you WW II era). I do this while going through another hour or two of reading the book of the moment.

5:30 p.m. Supper. I’d make a lousy European or cosmopolitan sort, as those folks like to eat at 9 at night or so. Still, there is good news for early supper eaters like me. The later in the evening you eat, the more likely it is that calories become love handles and belly fat while you sleep. Unless, of course, you’re blessed with one of those metabolisms. You know, the ones where adults can eat like 14-year-old boys and still look like healthy sticks.

6:30 p.m. Used to be, I’d watch the nightly news at this hour, although this almost assuredly is harmful for the health circa 2025. On good days, then, I go straight to some pre-recorded, bubble-brained comedy. Of late, my wife’s taken a shining to Younger which is enjoying a second life on Netflix. And sometimes, movies. Back in the bad old days of Covid lockdowns, I learned to pace myself for movies again. Occasionally. Most are still too long, just like contemporary novels are too long (lacking editors willing and able to use the scissors of common sense). Previous to Covid, I mostly loathed the movies and television shows. You know. Like Holden Caulfield did. After the word “phonies,” he probably said, “I hate the movies” more than anything else.

8:30 p.m. Last check for “good news” in the inbox from editors fighting it out for the privilege of publishing my poems (and what a joyful cartoon image THAT is!). Why do these people take so long? Why do I continue to dream that, some day, some editor will happen to read the work I submitted via Submittable on the same day it arrives and JUMP on it before any other editor can? Blame the last thing out of Pandora’s Box. Anyway, after this delusion, I repair to the kitchen to make tomorrow morning’s Overnight Oatmeal (see 7:30 a.m. entry for, ahem, recipe)

9:00 p.m. To bed with the book of the moment. This usually lasts all of 20 minutes before I drop the book on my face, making a literary divot on the bridge of my nose.

2:30 a.m. If I’m lucky to get this far, the first wake up. If I’m really lucky, I’ll get back to sleep within 20 minutes, but if it goes longer than that, it usually drags out for 90 minutes at least, forcing me to witness that most unseemly of hours: 3 to 4 o’clock, the hour that inspired me to write these poems in my first book:

 

Insomnia
Ken Craft

Three is the loneliest number on a clock
when the night can’t save you.

No doubt it is the constellated tug,
a conspiracy of stars, the silent, primal

voice that whispers the uselessness,
that grinds greater gears,

that mocks the hubris of careful plans,
set alarms. Every blanketed life around you

sleeps safe and happy and secure
like nothing can touch them, like change

has made its exception, named it you,
and passed finally over the frosted roof.

 

 

3:30
Ken Craft

In the dark
from over the water, a rooster
celebrates my insomnia

 

5:30 a.m. Wake and sing the simple ditty by some obscure minstrels from long ago: “Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head.” And a fine déjà vu to you, too, using something as dated as a comb.

May you all have a great “day in the life” of your own, especially if you made it this far. Hum a John, Paul, George and Ringo song, why don’t you.

Ditching Social Networks for Answering Poems

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By now it’s no news that social networks online are not only bad for you but bad for us (or should I say, “U.S.”?). If your new year’s resolution was to ditch the people who make you and your personal information their product (read: Facebook, Instagram, et al.), you might consider a more ancient form of social networking: the answering poem.

What, you ask, is an answering poem? Think of the telephone. You call a friend. He or she answers. Only it takes a bit of time, because your “call” takes the form of a poem, and your friend’s response takes the form of a responding poem.

Put them together and what have you got? Something the Earl of Sandwich, in a mood more reflective than mayonnaise, might like.

Answering poems are on my mind because I’ve been poking around in the book, Robert Bly: Collected Poems, wherein we get some best hits from Bly’s various and sundry books. In his 1973 collection, Jumping Out of Bed, we find answering poems between Wang Wei and P’ei Ti, translated by Bly.

Let’s make like a party line and listen in:

 

“The Walnut Tree Orchards”

WANG WEI:  In the old days the serious man was not an “important
person.” He thought making decisions was too complicated for
him. He took whatever small job came along.
Essentially he did nothing, like these walnut trees.

P’EI TI:  I soon found doing nothing was a great joy to me.
Look, you see, here I am! Keeping my ancient promise.
Let’s spend today just strolling around these walnut trees.
The two of us will nourish the ecstasies Chuang Tzu loved.

 

“The Hill of Hua-Tzu”

WANG WEI:  The birds fly away into the air that never ends;
the magnificence of fall comes back to the mountain.
Whenever I walk up or down Hua-Tzu hill,
my whole body feels confusion and inner suffering.

P’EI TI:  The sun goes down; there is wind sound in the pines.
Walking home I notice dew on the grass.
The white clouds look up at me from the tracks of my
shoes. The blue from the mountain touches my clothes.

 

“The Creek by the Luan House”

WANG WEI:  Autumn rain and sudden winds.
The water plunges, bouncing off the rocks.
Waves leap aimlessly over each other.
The white heron is alarmed and lands.

P’EI TI:  A man could hear the water-sound far off.
I walk down looking for the ford.
Ducks and egrets swim away, and then
veer back, longing to be near people.

 

“The Magnolia Grove”

WANG WEI:  The mountain receives the last sunshine of fall.
Flocks fly off following the first that leaves.
Occasionally something emerald flashes in the trees.
The evening dark has nowhere to settle down.

P’EI TI:  Settling down at dusk from the dome of light
bird voices get mingled with the river sounds.
The path beside the river winds off into the distance.
Joy of solitude, will you ever come to an end?

 

Of course, in 8th-century China, nature is front page news every day, as are the charms of doing nothing (known, philosophically, as “wu wei,” or “non-action”). This couldn’t be farther from where we are today, in the Realm of Instant Gratification, where we are conditioned to constantly check cellphones (read: “binkies”) for messages and “likes.”

Lord, what would Wang Wei and P’ei Ti make of what we’ve become? Nothing human, I’m guessing. Something that has evolved far away from what they knew in their day.

That said, if you want to try an answering poem with a fellow poet, it doesn’t have to be about nature. No. Subject matter is your call. And the response is your answering call.

And, here’s the pay-off: in doing so, neither of you are burning time on social networks or your addicting binkie—all good, as they say on the Hill of Hua-Tzu.

The Secret to Happiness

poetry reading poetry

The ode has come a long way. Consider its not-so-humble roots. In A Poet’s Glossary, Edward Hirsch defines it as “a celebratory poem in an elevated language on an occasion of public importance or on a lofty common theme.” In ancient Greece, odes were meant to be sung. Cue joy and victory.

But boy, howdy, has the ode evolved. Now it is like a comfortable shoe. Easy. Accessible. But still joyful and worthy of a victory lap. Hirsch says, “The modern ode, which freely intermingles  Greek and Latin elements, represents the claiming of an obligation, some inner feeling rising up in urgent response to an outer occasion, something owed.”

He continues: “The idea of a formal poem of considerable length written in an elevated language has had less currency in modern times, but has sometimes been revitalized, as in Hölderlin’s mystical odes or in Pablo Neruda’s wildly energetic three books of odes on daily subjects, which praise the dignity and strangeness of ordinary things.”

If there’s one thing we modern-types love, it’s the ordinary. We fancy ourselves, after all, as ordinary in every way. Perfect mediums, then, to sing the praises of quotidian delights.

Here, the late Thomas Lux considers these strangely wonderful beings from another planet called “happy people.”

How do they do it? Especially (channeling Hemingway here) “in our time”? Step One is to avoid the news, I’m sure. But step everything else is to focus on the good in everyone. It’s there in varying doses, in case you’re wondering. Lux’s poem, then, is a description, an homage, a celebratory song to that simple, but often overlooked, fact:

 

Ode to the Joyful Ones
by Thomas Lux

Shield your joyful ones.
—from an Anglican prayer

That they walk, even stumble, among us is reason
to praise them, or protect them—even the sound
of a lead slug dropped on a lead plate, even that, for them,
is music. Because they bring laughter’s
brief amnesia. Because they stand,
talking, taking pleasure in others,
with their hands on the shoulders of strangers
and the shoulders of each other.
Because you don’t have to tell them to walk toward the light.
Because if there are two pork chops
they will serve you the better one.
Because they will give you the crutch off their backs.
Because when there are two of them together
their shining fills the room.
Because you don’t have to tell them to walk toward the light.

 

I love how joyful ones “bring laughter’s / brief amnesia.” I love how joyful ones lack the selfish gene we secretly cherish so much. And I love best joyful ones’ incandescent, otherworldly ability to shine and walk toward more shining.

We can emulate that. We can knock on the tree fort door of joyful ones. Both you know and I know they’ll let us in. Going there, then, is not half the battle. It’s all of it.

Previous to Lux, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda did wonders for updating the ode. He wrote two books of them. Odes to all manner of every day items, clothes, foods, utensils. As an example, here is his extravagant praise for a new pair of homemade socks:

 

 

Ode to My Socks by Pablo Neruda

 

Mara Mori brought me

a pair of socks

which she knitted herself

with her sheepherder’s hands,

two socks as soft as rabbits.

I slipped my feet into them

as if they were two cases

knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin,

Violent socks,

my feet were two fish made of wool,

two long sharks

sea blue, shot through

by one golden thread,

two immense blackbirds,

two cannons,

my feet were honored in this way

by these heavenly socks.

They were so handsome for the first time

my feet seemed to me unacceptable

like two decrepit firemen,

firemen unworthy of that woven fire,

of those glowing socks.

 

Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation

to save them somewhere as schoolboys

keep fireflies,

as learned men collect

sacred texts,

I resisted the mad impulse to put them

in a golden cage and each day give them

birdseed and pieces of pink melon.

Like explorers in the jungle

who hand over the very rare green deer

to the spit and eat it with remorse,

I stretched out my feet and pulled on

the magnificent socks and then my shoes.

 

The moral of my ode is this:

beauty is twice beauty

and what is good is doubly good

when it is a matter of two socks

made of wool in winter.