Ken Craft

718 posts

Tony Hoagland’s America: Look Familiar?

If you’re tired of empty phrases like “Build a Wall” and “Make America Great Again,” you might consider Tony Hoagland’s America for respite. At least you’d be a realist, and at most a decent judge of political poetry.

Tony Hoagland’s view of America is subtle, though. No in-your-face pronouncements. Just creative and philosophical riffs that seem to be written in the key of how-did-we-get-here?

Here are two examples, starting with the more famous older one:

America

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud

Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes

Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,

He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them

Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds

Of the thick satin quilt of America

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,

or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,

It was not blood but money

That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills

Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,

He gasped “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were

Clogging up my heart—

And so I perish happily,

Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—

Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad

Would never speak in rhymed couplets,

And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes

And I think, “I am asleep in America too,

And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”

And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

“I was listening to the cries of the past,

When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable

Or what kind of nightmare it might be

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you

And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

Even while others are drowning underneath you

And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

And yet it seems to be your own hand

Which turns the volume higher?

I like the idea of America’s walls consisting of Radio Shacks and Burger Kings and MTV episodes. And of fathers being stabbed and bleeding Benjamins instead of blood. A Goldman Sachs America, then. “My plutocracy, t’is of thee/Sweet Land of Money Trees,/of Thee I write,” and all that.

Note, too, the all-important “your own hand” in the penultimate line. Americans as accessories to the crime. Yes, even protesting Americans, ones who miss the inherent hypocrisies of commercialism and comfort.

And now, a more small-town America look:

Summer in a Small Town

Yes, the young mothers are beautiful,

with all the self-acceptance of exhaustion,

still dazed from their great outpouring,

pushing their strollers along the public river walk.

And the day is also beautiful—the replica 19th-century paddle-wheeler

perpetually moored at the city wharf

with its glassed-in bar and grill

for the lunch-and-cocktail-seekers

who come for the Mark Twain Happy Hour

which lasts as long as the Mississippi.

This is the kind of town where the rush hour traffic halts

to let three wild turkeys cross the road,

and when the high school music teacher retires

after thirty years

the movie marquee says, “Thanks Mr. Biddleman!”

and the whole town comes to hear

the tuba solos of old students.

Summer, when the living is easy

and we store up pleasure in our bodies

like fat, like Eskimos,

for the coming season of privation.

All August the Ferris wheel will turn

in the little amusement park,

and screaming teenage girls will jump into the river

with their clothes on,

right next to the No Swimming sign.

Trying to cool the heat inside the small towns

of their bodies,

for which they have no words;

obedient to the voice inside which tells them,

“Now. Steal Pleasure.”

For me, the price of admission is paid in two spots: “Summer, when the living is easy/and we store up pleasure in our bodies/like fat, like Eskimos,/for the coming season privation.” And “Trying to cool the heat inside the small towns/of their bodies,/for which they have no words:”

Even Hoagland seems to know he’s struck gold, featuring his brilliant turns in short lines as he does. Big picture, small picture. It’s all in your perspective, America. Just don’t let the forest blind your from the trees.

“Don’t Forget That When You Get Older.”

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Quaint. That’s the word that comes to mind when reading Elizabeth Bishop’s “Manners,” a poem dedicated to some “child” 106 years ago.

It is especially quaint (and I daresay nostalgic in the most human of ways) to see it through the clouded lens of 2024. A poem about manners? In the Age of Trump and its trickle-down rudeness, selfishness, greed, and narcissism?

The speaker’s grandfather, perhaps laughable to more cynical readers, might come across as almost holy to others. Grandpa as prophet, then, and where did we get lost along the way?

See where you fall as a reader. Is it a hopelessly-dated chuckle or a prophetic reminder that there’s still time, and always will be, to go back to being human beings who are part of a shared community—that is, humans who are actually kind and considerate of each other no matter where they fall on the political spectrum?

I hope that question is not rhetorical. And that horses enjoy the poem as much as humans…

Manners
Elizabeth Bishop

For a child of 1918

My grandfather said to me
as we sat on the wagon seat,
“Be sure to remember to always
speak, to everyone you meet.”

We met a stranger on foot.
My grandfather’s whip tapped his hat.
“Good day, sir. Good day. A fine day.”
And I said it and bowed where I sat.

Then we overtook a boy we knew
with his big pet crow on his shoulder.
“Always offer everyone a ride;
don’t forget that when you get older,”

my grandfather said. So Willy
climbed up with us, but the crow
gave a “Caw!” and flew off. I was worried.
How would he know where to go?

But he flew a little way at a time
from fence post to fence post, ahead;
and when Willy whistled he answered.
“A fine bird,” my grandfather said,

“and he’s well brought up. See, he answers
nicely when he’s spoken to.
Man or beast, that’s good manners.
Be sure that you both always do.”

When automobiles went by,
the dust hid the people’s faces,
but we shouted ”Good day! Good day!
Fine day!” at the top of our voices.

When we came to Hustler Hill,
he said that the mare was tired,
so we all got down and walked,
as our good manners required.

A Father Confesses Confusion

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Playing father to a teenager is work—unpaid work that deserves holiday overtime. Yes, fathers vaguely recall being teenagers themselves, but their own sons are cryptic echoes at best, ciphers not easily solved, and memory is of little use because each child is so different from that little guy called “me” from our own distant memory.

In his conversational confession poem, “Last Night I Drove My Son Home,” Jim Daniels provides insight into the rigors of bonding with 15-year-old sons who have changed mightily since their grade-school days.

Let’s make like Father Sullivan and listen in:

“Last Night I Drove My Son Home”
by Jim Daniels

from his friend’s house, where they were filming
a movie starring my son in a love triangle.
My son, fifteen, has never been in a love right angle,
or even a love straight line, as far as I know.
He stopped talking two years ago—
to me, I mean. I got this secondhand from a street informant
I’ll refer to here by her code name, Little Sister.

A warm night, windows rolled down—my cheap car
requires physical cranking. (Not even a CD player!)
Purchased in 2003 when he was ten and still kissed me goodnight
and may even have held my hand while we watched
old movies. (No cable TV either!) Yesterday
he made me kill a giant bug, and I briefly saw
that ten-year-old again.

Full moon—I could see him looking up at it,
following it as I turned and we lost it to the trees.
September, but moist like August. I ached
for a few soft words between us in that silence.

On a sidewalk near the park a young man sat,
face in hands, a friend standing helpless above him.
I slowed down. What’s that guy doing? I said aloud.
Is he Okay?

I see him too, my son said.
As the friend helped the man
to his feet, I sped on.

My son hummed an old song about the moon
that I didn’t know he knew. My son, the star
of a movie I’ll never see. I just get
these vague coming attractions.
I caught him in a lie or two this week.
Every exchange a house of cards—all it takes
is a deep sigh, and they come tumbling down.

I’d have hummed along with him,
but I didn’t want him to stop.

The poem purposely jumps from the good (snippets of conversation and the humming of a song the son might have sung when young) to the bad (silence, lies, and the constant specter of a sigh razing any exchange to the ground).

The snapshot, a mix of dialogue and first-person point-of-father, tries to capture the essence of a stage in life—a stage parents want to solve and rescue, on the one hand, and to see pass quickly and mercifully, on the other.

When it comes to family mythology, time is life’s trickster. Some parents have it easy with their kids, and others are put through the wringer. It’s random, so any poem about it can be random, too, in a calculated kind of way, of course.

Do you have a family confession to make? It can be from the past or the present, but the ordeal, if spoken as truth, will meet sympathetic ears from the Father Confessors known as your readers.

You know, like that guy from any Catholic childhood’s past, nodding his head behind a dimly-lit screen.

Un-Haiku-ish

my poems poetry The Indifferent World

rooster

Last night, once again, long bouts of insomnia. One of those nights where you’re awake so much, you cannot recall sleep time from awake time. The shortest poem in my first book (The Indifferent World), a mere three lines, hits on this experience.

Three lines, you say? Is it haiku? Maybe. It certainly is not the 5-7-5 syllabic formula favored in schools, but these days anything three lines can be called “haiku-ish,” just as anything 14 lines gets labeled “sonnet-ish.”

Being more of a purist, I prefer calling the poem “un-haiku-ish.” Still, it catches the flavor of sleeplessness all right, and serves as a salve this morning as I prepare to begin another “day in the life,” as the Beatles called their tribute to the quotidian first written and sung in 1967.

Here you go:

3:30
by Ken Craft

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

By which I mean, 3:30 is something that should be slept through, not experienced. It is, in short, best left to roosters like Chanticleer (who brings no cheer).

Bottom line? Thank God for afternoon naps.

Planes, Trains, and Poems

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vietnam

Sometimes poems do the jobs of planes, trains, and automobiles by taking us places we’ve never been, then giving us a taste (a sight, a smell, a sound, a touch) of what that location is like.

This is what happened for me in one of the poems included in Jane Hirshfield’s Ten Windows. It’s called “Facing It,” a poem where Yusef Kanunyakaa has me standing in front of a memorial I’ve never seen: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Notice the images, how some the figurative language mirrors what many of these names went through in that faraway land, that faraway folly instigated by old men back home. This is but one thing that poetry does–and does well.

Facing It by Yusef Kanunyakaa

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't,
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way--the stone lets me go.
I turn that way--I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman's trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

Jay Hopler’s Green Squall: Awash With Light and Color

poetry books reading poetry

According to the notes, the title poem of Jay Hopler’s book comes from green squall, or rashmahanic (West Indian Creole), which means unruly or unruly behavior. As this poetry collection is mainly concerned with gardens and is introduced by one of the author’s poetry teachers, Louise Glück, who counted herself a fan of gardens in verse, maybe the title tips its hat to plants’ rather unruly habits (including weeds, of course, which sprout up in any poetry collection, no matter how pretty).

Sadly, we lost Jay Hopler in 2022 to metastatic prostate cancer at age 51 (this is where we say, Too young!). This book, winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, came out in 2006, however. The opening number signals Hopler’s willingness to play with words and parts of speech the way Dylan Thomas once did:

The Garden

And the sky!

Nooned with the steadfast blue enthusiasm

Of an empty nursery.

Crooked lizards grassed in yellow shade.

The grass was lizarding,

Green and on a rampage.

Shade tenacious in the crook of a bent stem.

Noon. This noon –

Skyed, blue and full of hum, full of bloom.

The grass was lizarding.

Here, in a classic “morning” poetry form, Hopler invokes both plants and sunlight:

Aubade

Standing next to a large white pot

Filled to overflowing with orange

And yellow snapdragons, my old

Coonhound looks across the dew-

Strewn lawn at the magnolia tree.

Suddenly, from somewhere deep

Within the squall of all those big

And sloppy blossoms, a desolate

Call rings out.

This morning, still

And warm, heavy with the smells

Of gardenia and Chinese wisteria,

The first few beams of spring sun-

Light filtering through the flower-

Crowded boughs of the magnolia,

I cannot conceive a more genuine,

More merciful, form of happiness

Than solitude.

In a single, black and ragged line,

The shadow of the magnolia tree

Draws nearer to the flower pots.

The coonhound lowers her snout

To its dark edge –. What was it

We heard call out so mournfully?

To what heartbreak would a call

Like that be heir? The air is still,

But differently.

Nature, once a bountiful source, has been relegated to darker quarters in poetry these days. It lies east of Eden while the garden is given over to identity: cultural, political, and social issues of the day. If you need a break from modern fads, you can do worse than take a walk through Hopler’s Green Squall. The poetry may lean unruly, but overall, the sights and smells should please you.

Like a Catfish Out of Water

reading poetry

Discovering a new (old) poet is always a good thing. For me, it often happens via subscriptions to “poems of the day.” A week or so back, a poem called “Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump” by David Bottoms surfaced in my inbox. If there’s one thing I’m a sucker for, it’s a poem with an unusual subject, and this was one of them.

After enjoying the rat poem, I purchased Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 1995) by Bottoms. In the first section, from his first book, I found another poem that delivered. So simple, straightforward, and unusual. Here you go:

The Catfish by David Bottoms

From a traffic jam on St. Simons bridg

I watched a fisherman break down his rod,

take bait-bucket in hand, and throw

to the pavement a catfish too small to keep.

As he walked to his car at the end of the bridge,

the fish jumped like a crippled frog, stopped

and sucked hard, straining to gill air.

Mud gathered on the belly. Sun dried the scaleless back.

I took a beach towel from the back seat

and opened the car door, walked to the curb

where the catfish swimming on the sidewalk

lay like a document on evolution.

I picked it up in the towel

and watched the quiver of its pre-crawling,

felt whiskers groping in the darkness of the alien light

then threw it high above the concrete railing

back to the current of our breathable past.

So much to admire here, but I’ll point out what attracted my attention especially. The similes, for one: “…the fish jumped like a crippled frog,” “…the catfish swimming on the sidewalk/lay like a document on evolution.”

Then there’s how the fish “sucked hard, straining to gill air” and how the speaker “watched the quiver of its pre-crawling,/felt whiskers groping in the darkness of the alien light.”

Last lines are all-important, and here Bottoms nails the landing as the speaker “threw it high above the concrete railing/back to the current of our breathable past.”

Short, compact, dense. Only a few bites but rich in calories, in other words. A great poem to model your work after, in other words.

A “Wow” Poem Is Born

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If you said a beautiful poem could be written about the beautifully messy process of giving birth, I’d say, “I’d like to see you try.”

Enter Kevin Young’s wow poem (as I call poems that bowl me over), “Crowning.” I’ve read it dozens of times, often aloud, often just to enjoy the sound devices that come in lovely waves like painless contractions.

It’s all there: alliteration, assonance, consonance. And colors. And words shifting their part of speech to allow for passage of a baby: “purpled power” and “crocused into air.”

A poem is born! The reader can do nothing but step back and offer congratulations. A fellow poet can do nothing but step back and say, “Wow! I wish I’d written that!”

Crowning
Kevin Young

Now that knowing means nothing,
now that you are more born
than being, more awake
than awaited, since I’ve seen
your hair deep inside mother,
a glimpse, grass in late
winter, early spring, watching
your mother’s pursed, throbbing,
purpled power, her pushing
you for one whole hour, two,
almost three, almost out,
maybe never, animal smell
and peat, breath and sweat
and mulch-matter, and at once
you descend, or drive, are driven
by mother’s body, by her will
and brilliance, by bowel,
by wanting and your hair
peering as if it could see, and I saw
you storming forth,
taproot, your cap of hair half
in, half out, and wait, hold
it there, the doctors say, and
she squeezing my hand, her face
full of fire, then groaning your face
out like a flower, blood-bloom,
crocused into air, shoulders
and the long cord still rooting
you to each other, to the other
world, into this afterlife
among us living, the cord
I cut like an iris, pulsing,
then you wet against mother’s chest
still purple, not blue, not yet
red, no cry,
warming now, now opening
your eyes midnight
blue in the blue black dawn.

Cat-People Poetry Has Its Moment

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Sometimes you don’t need ideas to write poetry. Sometimes you need only look around. The cat. Your wife. Yourself and all three of your healths. Voilà! A poem!

Or as St. Billy of Collins calls it: “The Order of the Day” (hint: the cat comes first because, well, he’s a CAT). I hope it brings you both cheer and nostalgia for the sometimes elusive goals of comfort and order!

The Order of the Day
Billy Collins

A morning after a week of rain
and the sun shot down through the branches
into the tall, bare windows.

The brindled cat rolled over on his back,
and I could hear you in the kitchen
grinding coffee beans into a powder.

Everything seemed especially vivid
because I knew we were all going to die,
first the cat, then you, then me,

then somewhat later the liquefied sun
was the order I was envisioning.
But then again, you never really know.

The cat had a fiercely healthy look,
his coat so bristling and electric
I wondered what you had been feeding him

and what you had been feeding me
as I turned a corner
and beheld you out there on the sunny deck

lost in exercise, running in place,
knees lifted high, skin glistening—
and that toothy, immortal-looking smile of yours.

An Elegy for the Self

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The elegy is an elastic form. If we define it broadly, it can be any melancholy contemplation, though it is chiefly associated with a lamentation for the dead.

Each spring, on the first morning of daylight savings, you could write an elegy for the lost hour, for instance. The sacrificed hour where Congress made like Mayan chieftains of old by giving up some poor, innocent youth to the Gods of Time.

But elegies to lost hours might be too tongue-in-cheek for an elegy. As a rule, an elegy is serious in tone and meaning. As an example, let’s look at the late Linda Pastan’s short and simple poem, “Elegy,” which uses dogwoods as a metaphor for something larger (and it doesn’t get any larger than the concept of mortality).

Elegy
by Linda Pastan

Our final dogwood leans
over the forest floor

offering berries
to the birds, the squirrels.

It’s a relic
of the days when dogwoods

flourished—creamy lace in April,
spilled milk in May—

their beauty delicate
but commonplace.

When I took for granted
that the world would remain

as it was, and I
would remain with it.

Seven simple couplets, with the “turn” occurring in stanza #6, where Pastan leaves discussion of the old dogwood and turns to contemplate her own mortal coil, which the reader can’t help but think once “flourished” with a “beauty delicate / but commonplace.”

The older self, like the last warrior — a dogwood leaning “over the forest floor” and, we can infer, under the slings and arrows of the decades — no longer takes life for granted. That assumption was the beautiful sin of a younger self, a girl who assumed “that the world would remain / as it was, and I / would remain with it.”

Philosophically, it’s always interesting how the “self” — or, if you prefer, a “person” — is the same yet quite different over time. The paradox of 7-year-old me vs. 70-year-old me allows poets to look through a glass darkly, as the Bible would have it, and ruminate in the form of an elegy for the self.

Ruminate and rue not only lost hours, but lost days. Ones where a version of one’s “self” is already dead and gone and worthy of a nostalgic elegy like this.