Monthly Archives: January 2025

4 posts

A Garden of Earthworm Delights

reading poetry

Now is the winter of our discontent, said the Bard, in some play’s-the-thing or other. Here in Maine, it’s zero degrees Fahrenheit outside and, before sunrise, might hit the magical Negative Number One. Time to think of summery things, to engage in a Southern Hemisphere frame of mind. What better way than a Danusha Laméris poem? One with imagery from a garden of earthly delights, or maybe a garden of earthworm delights. Check it out:

 

Feeding the Worms

by Danusha Laméris

 

Ever since I found out that earth worms have taste buds

all over the delicate pink string of their bodies,

I pause dropping apple peels into the compost bin, imagine

the dark, writhing ecstasy, the sweetness of apples

permeating their pores. I offer beets and parsley,

avocado, and melon, the feathery tops of carrots.

 

I’d always thought theirs a menial life, eyeless and hidden,

almost vulgar–though now, it seems, they bear a pleasure

so sublime, so decadent, I want to contribute however I can,

forgetting, a moment, my place on the menu.

 

This little gem starts with trivia–a fact I never knew. Wasting no time, Laméris tells us that earthworms are wrapped in taste buds, which explains why they like to get down and dirty early and often. This brings the speaker to the compost pile, rife with worms. She feeds it (and thus them) a litany of specific foods that delight the January eye: apple peels, beets, parsley, avocado, melons, the feathery tops of carrots. Imagery like this is enough to attract even carnivores!

In stanza two, Laméris shares thoughts that might be similar to our own: “I’d always thought theirs a menial life, eyeless and hidden / almost vulgar,” but then goes in an unexpected direction, and there’s nothing poetry likes better than unexpected directions!  “…though now, it seems, they bear a pleasure / so sublime, so decadent, I want to contribute however I can.”

Ironically, contribute the speaker (as well as all the poem’s readers) will, which leads us to the lovely last line: “forgetting, a moment, my place on the menu.”

Ah, a sweet memento mori poem! That’s Latin for “remember that you must die,” which is English for “so enjoy great poetry like this while you’re still alive!” (Oh. And pass the apple slices with peanut butter, thank you.)

The Angry Young Man

poetry reading poetry

In the recent long ago known as 1976, Billy Joel wrote a song called “The Angry Young Man.”  Basically, it described a dude who was forever angry at the world, forever fire, forever brimstone. Oh. And forever a bore to be around.

Tony Hoagland’s poem “You’re the Top” reminded me, in its way, of the Joel song. The poem’s speaker describes his grandmother, a debutante in 1938, who sees the world of privilege as an ideal one. The speaker sees it differently: “My liberal adolescent rage / was like a righteous fist back then / that wouldn’t let me rest.”

But there’s a slight turn toward the end of this poem. This angry young man matures to his own realizations — both about himself and about his grandmother. When you get there, note the power not only of the last line but the last word.

 

You’re the Top
Tony Hoagland

Of all the people that I’ve ever known
I think my grandmother Bernice
would be best qualified to be beside me now

driving north of Boston in a rented car
while Cole Porter warbles on the radio;
Only she would be trivial and un-

politically correct enough to totally enjoy
the rhyming of Mahatma Ghandi
with Napoleon brandy;

and she would understand, from 1948,
the miracle that once was cellophane,
which Porter rhymes with night in Spain.

She loved that image of the high gay life
where people dressed by servants
turned every night into the Ritz:

dancing through a shower of just
uncorked champagne
into the shelter of a dry martini.

When she was 70 and I was young
I hated how a life of privilege
had kept her ignorance intact

about the world beneath her pretty feet,
how she believed that people with good manners
naturally had yachts, knew how to waltz

and dribbled French into their sentences
like salad dressing. My liberal adolescent rage
was like a righteous fist back then

that wouldn’t let me rest,
but I’ve come far enough from who I was
to see her as she saw herself:

a tipsy debutante in 1938,
kicking off a party with her shoes;
launching the lipstick-red high heel
from her elegant big toe

into the orbit of a chandelier
suspended in a lyric by Cole Porter,
bright and beautiful and useless

First-Person Point of Dock

kencraftpoetry Lost Sherpa of Happiness marketing poetry poetry poetry books

Here in Maine, in the very heart of winter, there are times when you need to close your eyes and conjure the smooth, sun-struck slats of a dock jutting over a lake.

Even much-maligned heat waves don’t seem so bad from the vantage point of winter. After all, on a lake in the month of July, the escape is just inches away in the form of deep and cool water.

The dock days of summer inspired a poem once. I dug it out for a reread yesterday. It’s one of those poems written last for a manuscript (which would become Lost Sherpa of Happiness). One that never had a chance to play the markets and look for a home in some poetry journal.

I often like these orphans best. Never accepted anywhere, but never rejected, either. They just “are,” which is the perfect metaphor for whiling away hours on a dock, like you did when you were a kid and time held nothing against you.

Rereading poems from different seasons sometimes brings you back, and they’re much less complicated than a time machine, where hitting the wrong button could land you in the Battle of Hastings or something. If you’re cold, why not join me for a sec? And if you’re in the Southern hemisphere, perhaps you can relate:

 

From a Dock on a Maine Lake
Ken Craft

Lying here, side of my head resting
on the crook of right arm and gazing
from the grotto of my right eye,
I hear the water and see the creased
dam of my left elbow, the occasional bird
flying through its wild blond grasslands.

The left eye, though. It peers over
the tanned levee, sees the high gold-shot
lake—so high it threatens
to flood and marl the east shore
where clear sky, punctured by treeline,
seeps anemic blue to airy bone.

Shifting to my back I get the sky’s
gas-flame blue scribed by pine and maple
treetops, the firmament a forgotten
language from first-person point of boy.

And my God, the wind! Needles and leaves
nodding like anxious ponies,
wagging like old ladies’ heads
at green gossip. Trees exhaling a ropey
poem of clouds. White thoughts, broken
words, startled birds put to flight. They flock,
elongate, twist and split open like smoky time
seeking its own shore to roost.

When Reputations Are Wrong

poetry reading poetry

olds

Sometimes poets get a reputation and carry it around like Jacob Marley’s chains. Consider Sharon Olds and sex. The two are closely aligned in poetry readers’ minds, but Olds is more than that. She can write about family–both her kids and her parents–in moving ways. Ways that could pass muster with the Hallmark Channel, even.

Consider “Late Poem to My Father.” It is an exercise in empathy wherein Olds uses her imagination to visit her own father’s childhood and what he might have experienced under his father. The incentive? Olds’ father apparently was an alcoholic, and like most alcoholic fathers, no joy to be around if you were his son or daughter.

“Why?” Olds must have asked. “How?” And, as is so often the case with poets, these questions drove her muse.

Olds’ poem, then, is similar to an adopted child’s search for her birth parent. The chariot is driven by the winged horses Why and How. The poem seeks answers. It wants to understand, to connect, in the worst way. Let’s take a look-see:

 

Late Poem to My Father
by Sharon Olds

Suddenly I thought of you
as a child in that house, the unlit rooms
and the hot fireplace with the man in front of it,
silent. You moved through the heavy air
in your physical beauty, a boy of seven,
helpless, smart, there were things the man
did near you, and he was your father,
the mold by which you were made. Down in the
cellar, the barrels of sweet apples,
picked at their peak from the tree, rotted and
rotted, and past the cellar door
the creek ran and ran, and something was
not given to you, or something was
taken from you that you were born with, so that
even at 30 and 40 you set the
oily medicine to your lips
every night, the poison to help you
drop down unconscious. I always thought the
point was what you did to us
as a grown man, but then I remembered that
child being formed in front of the fire, the
tiny bones inside his soul
twisted in greenstick fractures, the small
tendons that hold the heart in place
snapped. And what they did to you
you did not do to me. When I love you now,
I like to think I am giving my love
directly to that boy in the fiery room,
as if it could reach him in time.

 

Here time dials all the way back to Dad at age seven, when he was “helpless, smart.” Then comes the purposely vague “there were things the man / did near you, and he was your father.”

So much for hard and fast rules. Writers are instructed to forswear words like “things” and yet, sometimes, they are just the ticket. Sometimes letting the reader imagine different concrete interpretations enhances the effect.

Olds continues with her reverie: “…something was / not given to you, or something was / taken from you that you were born with.” Either might explain a path toward alcohol–one cleared with the machete of misery rooted in childhood.

The poetic part of the poem hits its stride toward the end:

I always thought the
point was what you did to us
as a grown man, but then I remembered that
child being formed in front of the fire, the
tiny bones inside his soul
twisted in greenstick fractures, the small
tendons that hold the heart in place
snapped. And what they did to you
you did not do to me.

Not many are willing to look at an adult and see a child “formed in front of the fire,” or see “the tiny bones inside his soul / twisted in greenstick fractures, the small / tendons that hold the hear in place / snapped.”

With images rendered like that, despite his very evident flaws, the father is redeemed by a forgiving daughter who wishes she were there to help him as a child when he was most vulnerable. And now, she finds it noble that, unlike so many others, her father, addicted as he might be, refuses to carry the curse forward: “And what they did to you / you did not do to me.”

Sharon Olds’ poems with sexual themes are often frank and provocative–hardly subtle. But the story, as with most reputations, is more complicated than that. Reading a collection of her works shows that she can be sensitive and forgiving, too. She is not, in other words, a one-trick pony.