Ken Craft

718 posts

Random Thoughts: MLK Eve Edition

There’s a certain poetry in quotidian things, like getting out of bed, for instance, when the room is cold and the bed is warm. It gets you thinking ahead: the cold of bathroom floor tiles on your soles, the gooseflesh on your exposed body as you dress, the tiny jingle of license tags as the dog lifts his head when you come down the stairs, and mostly, the vigor of outdoor air rushing in and out of your nose, sometimes smelling piney and sometimes just dry and wintery, while the crows who have been up for hours laugh overhead. All this, while you’re still in bed!
This is why mentors advise you carry a small pad of paper with pencil: those snippets of thought, that mortar that will some day hold the bricks of a mighty poetic wall. Yes, it’s tough finding pencils in bed and when you’re in the shower, but I just make a rhyme of the idea, singing it in my head, until I can get to the paper.
A 3-day weekend is a marvelous thing. I especially like the “island day,” Sunday, a piece of luxury real estate in the middle. Usually Sunday carries a pall–wherein the monkey mind thinks of Monday, but on an island day? No. Just turquoise ocean, palm trees, and coconuts on the beach.
This weekend we meditate on Martin Luther King, Jr., and his message. Especially this weekend. MLK had a dream, but he’d have a nightmare in the decidedly White House were he alive today. “We shall overcome.”
This year, the MLK federal holiday falls on his actual birthday: Jan. 15th. (King was born in 1929.)
The best vow I ever made as a reader? Diversifying. If you thought that was financial talk, think again. Last year I branched away from my steady diet of fiction (comfort food) and started putting more fiber in my reading diet with nonfiction, short story collections, YA, and especially poetry. Oddly, it’s changed the way I read everything–even my comfort food–because these genres use different techniques and thus require of the reader different skills. Poetry, for instance, slows me down, invites rereading and marveling at how words are used. Reading it makes me notice the sloppiness of many novelists (where words are a luxury often abused) and the beauty when novelists (writers’ writers) treasure words like a poet. I’m seeing that now as I read Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing.
It’s never too late for a “New Year’s resolution,” by the way. I hope you’ll try the Eclectic Reading Plan in 2018 yourself.
The more I write poetry, the more I realize the toughest part is nailing the end of a poem. True of novels, too. How many novels have horrible endings? Too many.
Which is why I so appreciate James Wright’s ending to the oddly-named “Lying in a Hammock on William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”: “I have wasted my life.” This while he is engaging in an activity most westerners would consider a “waste of time”–lying in a hammock! What’s irony to some is all-too-obvious to Buddhists.
Seems every time I experiment with my poetry, I get some reader who critiques it by advising that I change the part I experimented on. I’m beginning to think that you can’t experiment unless you go solo and just send the poem out, unvetted. I mean, of course it’s weird! It’s an experiment! Flying kites in lightning storms is weird, too!
How do you know you’ve made it or are on your way to making it in the poetry world? You publish a “Collected Poems.” (Meaning: You have enough poems to collect, so they’d better be good!)
Although society is less religious than it used to be, there’s no denying the innate appeal of church bells riding the crisp air to your ears. The sound is both sad and beautiful, a wonderful match.
I love it when writers from the past visit your poetry and make themselves at home. In my first book it was Turgenev and Tolstoy. In my latest it is James Wright, Jack Gilbert, and Ernest Hemingway. They’re good company, all of them, and make for good cameos in a poem.
Favorite good deed: Pushing Raymond Carver’s collected poems on unsuspecting readers. The man’s unjustly labeled as a short story master when, in fact, he is a short story AND poetry master, especially if you like narrative poetry and simple poetry that does not do its best imitation of a Rubik’s Cube.
Some of my poems are starting to rhyme unbidden. What’s up with that? I’m not going to question it, though. Never question something Robert Frost ran with.
Speaking of, it took England to discover what America had the chance to figure out first: Frost was one bad-ass poet! Thank you, England, and sorry about that little Tea Party thing in Boston Harbor.
My wife still isn’t sure about the title Lost Sherpa of Happiness. My daughter loves it.
Between Christmas and January birthday, I am (and will be) happily awash in new books, including new poets: Barbara Guest and Wendell Berry so far, with more on the way (like the poetic cavalry riding over the hill in stanzas to the meter of horse hooves).
Some say writing a blog distracts you from the real deal (writing poetry). Some say it’s an essential warm-up for the real deal. And some say the world will end in fire, some in ice. (Frost would say “either will suffice.”) For now, I’m sticking with the blog.
Thanks for putting up with another in this regular feature called randomness. Happy Day of Rest. I hope you make like Wright in a hammock today. Read, write, muse. Let it be. The world is much ado about nothing, after all….

*************************************************************************

Unlike major publishing houses, small, independent publishers have no marketing budget to speak of, so they depend upon word-of-mouth enthusiasm among their readers. I hope you can help keep the word-of-mouth buzz rolling for Lost Sherpa of Happiness by visiting Amazon for a copy. Thank you, and may the book’s 63 poems bring a little Buddhist & Taoist joy into your life!

All This, Before Dawn…

poetry

dawn

I never quite understood night owls. People up until high hours are knocked down to small numbers. People who sleep their way to double digits again.

When I woke at 4 this morning, it was just me and the winter rain, like an old friend returned and calling me from the clapboards of the house, the newly-running gutters, the softly-gurgling drains.

Like me, every window is dark and reflective now. The world has constricted to the small circle of light I sit in with this book. It’s just the author, whispering, and me, listening, only occasionally interrupting in that complementary back-and-forth writers and readers have honored since Gutenberg.

The family still sleeps. The old dog, who got up briefly, settles at my feet, patiently waiting for my morning moment to expire so we can go out to meet the rain.

But first, this silence. This coffee. This book. All at a time when anything seems possible and everything feels refreshed and new.

*************************************************************************

Unlike major publishing houses, small, independent publishers have no marketing budget to speak of, so they depend upon word-of-mouth enthusiasm among their readers. Help keep the word-of-mouth buzz rolling for Lost Sherpa of Happiness by visiting Amazon for a copy. Thank you, and may the book’s 63 poems bring a little Buddhist & Taoist joy into your life!

When Death Is Neither Dark Nor Depressing

poetry poetry books

When you write about death, a very western response is to label it “dark” or “depressing.” The Buddhists, who often meditate on their demise (and even on the grotesque look of what lies beneath their comely skin, eyes, and smile), would have it otherwise. They take a more pedestrian view of death, and it’s as fair a topic as what to wear today, that ant crossing the sidewalk, or the raindrop that just landed on your eyelash.

This point was driven home as I read the late Dick Allen’s last book, Zen Master Poems. He hits the usual topics of Buddhists, most of them quite simple (but not), and he does not veer from death, either. Reading his work only weeks after death took him to new lives was especially poignant. Let me share a few:

Sickness Is My Companion by Dick Allen

Sickness is my companion
that walks with me beside the sand garden
and follows me into the zendo room.

Death is my friend
that never leaves me to myself on a hilltop
and always awaits my footsteps.

The three of us,
sitting around a small table, sipping tea,
whispering among the rising fumes.

Reminiscent, isn’t it, of Siddhartha riding outside his palace walls to meet old age, sickness, and death. It was the catalyst for all that would follow, that. And another:

Awakening the Fire by Dick Allen

“Awakening the fire,” I call it.
You listen to people, you listen so deeply
you can hear their past lives,
the crackle of their funeral pyres,
and see smoke rising over the Ganges,
and there it is, that individual spark
that makes one life unlike any other.
You tease it out. You blow on it. You fan it.
You offer it a handful of dried tinder.
But that’s all you can do
and almost always
the spark glows momentarily and then
returns to ash.
Not this life. Not this life. Not this life.
Not even the next.

Safe travels, we wish Dick. None of us is far behind. Not in the perspective of the universe, where both people and their time are fleeting.

An Interview with the Lost Sherpa of Happiness

Lost Sherpa of Happiness poetry

It’s not every day you track down a lost sherpa (if briefly). Not every day he agrees to pause for a brief interview, either. But yesterday, in single-digit weather, with wind gusts making it feel like sub-zero weather, LS did just that. As I learned a thing or two about poetry (or “life,” as he’d prefer you call it), I figured I’d share the back-and-forth:

KC: Why are you called the “Lost Sherpa of Happiness”? I mean, are you really lost?

LS: Not me. We.

KC: All lost?

LS: Look at the stars tonight, which are only the beginning, and consider your place here. What you know. What you don’t know. Does it seem disconcerting to be considered lost?

KC: Some readers of the book look at the cover and think the collection will be about Nepal or summiting Mount Everest or Buddhism, perhaps. Why does the book carry that title and that artwork?

LS: You have to stop thinking of the challenge we call “Everest” and the guidance we call “sherpa” as a place and a person. Then you will see that all the poems in this book are about “Everests” of a kind — challenges, obstacles, frustrations. The figurative mountains you’d see around you, if you looked, Nepal or not.

KC: But you yourself are only in one poem. The title poem that wraps the book up.

LS: I am both reader and writer as well. Therefore, I am in every poem. Reading and writing are all ways of walking, searching, observing. Sometimes choosing to question and more times choosing not to.

KC: What about section two of the book’s three parts–all animal poems. Is there a reason for this?

LS: It is a human propensity to box and label things, to demand order from our disorderly world. Yes, it’s true that the “Second Search” poems tell the stories of various birds and mammals and reptiles, but those stories are our stories. We are animals. We are that song sparrow singing, despite the hawk far above in the pine tree. We are that young raccoon trapped in a dumpster after enjoying someone’s thrown-away food. We are that dog just being a dog in a room with humans who demand silence from a dog not being a dog. As your American writer, Mark Twain, once said, humans are often less logical animals than the ones they feel superior to.

KC: What about the first search, the part where many poem’s recall your youth?

LS: Or your youth. Or any reader’s. As youths, we are often wiser than the elders. The nonconformism. The imagination. The openness and the wonder. Poems see this because, as has been said by the Buddha himself, we are all poets when we are children. Not writers of poetry. Observers of a world that is poetry. We look at things like we never could as adults who have been shaped by society, pressed by authority, molded by the tyranny of others’ opinions and demands and expectations.

KC: So I guess that means the last section is really not so much about twilight years…

LS: True. Life as wheel. The way the elderly finally free themselves of caring, becoming more open like the children they once were, preparing themselves for their next life, for freedom from samsara.

KC: Does this mean you are not lost, then?

LS: It means I am happy, and that “lost” is more word than state of being. There is great joy and discovery in being “lost.” That is the country these poems travel — “country” as in land, not nation with arbitrary borders (which, by their nature, can’t help but be arbitrary).

KC: Do you have a favorite among the poems in the book?

LS: Picking favorites would be like claiming individualism does not exist. It does exist. There are many faces to happiness, to sadness and to regret. All the human emotions we see on our journeys and searches.

KC: So, I gather, you have no intention of being found or finding what you’re looking for.

LS: In the words of the prophet, Bono (an Irish Buddha of sorts!), “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for…” We all carry those words in our hearts. It’s how we interpret them. I embrace the negative contraction positively because it is the spirit of the present. Finding, searching, being lost. It is being. How else will we ever enjoy this “tenuous moment of wilderness,” as the last poem of the book terms it, called life?

KC: Thank you, and I won’t keep you any longer. Good luck with your fourth search. And thank you for sharing your pursuit of happiness in this book.

LS: (laughter) Thomas Jefferson. The pursuit of happiness. It is the pursuit itself, not the happiness you imagine ahead and out of reach. Take that with you on your own searches. See what you find….

*************************************************************************

Lost Sherpa of Happiness Ken Craft

Robert Hass and I Chat a Little Prose and a Little Poetry

poetry poetry books

hass

In this our third and final entry on the exciting world of prose poetry, I present quoted bits from Bob (his new book, A Little Book on Form), interlaced by my responses. A friendly chat, if you will (or even if you won’t). As you will see, Robert Hass knows a lot more than me on the topic, but I’m here to learn.

RH: “There are at least two kinds of this kind of thing: proses that are one paragraph long and proses that are more than one paragraph long.

“The paragraph as a formal device differs from the stanza in that the proposition of the paragraph is unity.

“The proposition of a composition of one paragraph is completeness.

“A paragraph that goes on for much longer than a page breaks the basic contract of the paragraph.

“These are all expressive possibilities.”

KC: Amen to that contract bit. I can’t tell you how many classics I’ve read where, when you turn the page, you see a paragraph that swallows BOTH pages, left and right. It’s like taking a deep breath and diving in to swim the underwater length of an Olympic-sized pool.

RH: “What the texts for writers say is true: The four kinds of prose are narration, description, exposition, and argument.

“This expectation is also an expressive possibility.

“From the beginning, this kind of prose was torn between undermining its medium and appropriating it.”

KC: Huh?

RH: “So a paragraph, which is a proposition of unity, full of non sequiturs is a contradiction in terms. This is, has been an expressive possibility.

“The prose poem came into existence not only during the age of prose and the age of realism, but at the moment when prose and realism were just beginning to enjoy the prestige of art.”

KC: I enjoy that, too. I’m a prestige guy from way-back.

RH: “This kind of prose was sired by ambivalence and envy. The ‘prose poet’ is either worshipping at or pissing on the altar of narration, description, exposition, and argument. Or both.

“To write this kind of prose you probably have to love or hate the characteristic rhythms of prose.

“The rhythms of poetry have quicker access to the unconscious than the rhythms of prose. It may be that this is one of the reasons many people prefer prose to verse. It does not make an indecent claim on the reader’s person at the outset.”

KC: I personally hate it when people make indecent claims on my person. Unless it’s my wife.

RH: “One of the obvious possibilities of this kind of prose was to fill it full of the devices that people identify as lyrical as a kind of alchemy to transform prose and the world of prose into poetry. This was the way of Rimbaud.

“Another possibility was to thwart the expectations of prose. Cubist prose, like Tender Buttons [Gertrude Stein], did it at the level of grammar. Surrealist prose did it at the level of representation and at the level of sequence.

“In all three cases, varying in intensity, the idea was to use the medium in ways that would subvert the usual expectations of the medium.”

KC: I’m loving this. And I think I’m even getting it. Especially how poetry has quicker access to the unconscious than prose. There’s clearly a difference when you read the two. Even when you read a poem side by side with its ugly duckling cousin, a “prose poem” (whose name is even ugly). Uh, would you mind passing the peanuts?

*************************************************************************

Help keep the word-of-mouth buzz rolling for Lost Sherpa of Happiness by visiting Amazon for a copy. (And as Amazon likes to say, “Only Three Remaining! Order Now!”)

Prose Poem: Hero in Minotaur’s Clothing?

poetry

minotaur

One poet Robert Hass mentioned as a periodic practitioner of the “prose poem” was Zbigniew Herbert, who offers “an example of the way it appropriates fable.” For today’s discussion purposes, below is a copy of Herbert’s prose poem “The History of the Minotaur” as translated into English by Alissa Valles.

As you read, ask yourself this: Does it look like poetry or prose to you? Is it “poetry” only because it is, like the ugly duckling (read: quacking swan) walking with ducks, that is, a poem only because it is in a book surrounded by other poems?

And this: Is it rife with poetic devices? Does the humor work to its poetic advantage? The snappy ending, maybe?

Me? I have no horse in this race and couldn’t tell you if I did. The good news is, I’m not sure the established poet and professor and winner of the Pulitzer Prize–Mr. Hass–could, either. If ever a man needed his poetic license to get out of a difficult spot, this is it!

The History of the Minotaur

by Zbigniew Herbert

The true history of the prince Minotaur is told in the yet undeciphered script Linear A. He was–despite later rumors–the authentic son of King Minos and Pasiphaë. The little boy was born healthy, but with an abnormally large head–which fortune-tellers read as a sign of his future wisdom. In fact with the years the Minotaur grew into a robust, slightly melancholy idiot. The king decided to give him up to be educated as a priest. But the priests explained that they couldn’t accept the feeble-minded prince, for that might diminish the authority of religion, already undermined by the invention of the wheel.

Minos then brought in the engineer Daedalus, who was fashionable in Greece at the time as the creator of a popular branch of pedagogical architecture. And so the labyrinth arose. Within its system of pathways from elementary to more and more complicated, its variations in levels and rungs of abstraction, it was supposed to train the Minotaur prince in the principles of correct thinking.

So the unhappy prince wandered along the pathways of induction and deduction, prodded by his preceptors, gazing blankly at ideological frescos. He didn’t get them at all.
Having exhausted all his resources, King Minos resolved to get rid of this disgrace to the royal line. He brought in (again from Greece, which was known for its able men) the ace assassin Theseus. And Theseus killed the Minotaur. On this point myth and history agree.

Through the labyrinth–now a useless primer–Theseus makes his way back carrying the big, bloody head of the Minotaur with its goggling eyes, in which for the first time wisdom had begun to sprout–of a kind ordinarily attributed to experience.

There you go! One of the prose poems touted by Mr. Hass himself. Is it my favorite in my much-esteemed Collected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert 1956-1998? Not hardly, but that matters not and is not pertinent to our exploration of the form.

In our next post, more Robert Hass debating with himself over the stormy marriage of prose and poetry. It’s like reality TV. Only in a book. Tune in tomorrow!

What Lights YOUR Muse’s Campfire?

poetry writing writing inspiration writing poetry

It’s a fact of life: Famous writers inspire famous writers. Don’t believe it? Doubting your inner Thomas? You need only read Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process, edited by Joe Fassler, wherein dozens of writerly-types share snippets of works that lit their muse’s campfire. Curious, I read the book–mostly–and here are a few for you:

Aimee Bender chooses Wallace Stevens’ poem, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” particularly the line “How high that highest candle lights the dark.”
Sherman Alexie chooses a poem, too–one by the Paiute poet Adrian C. Louis called “Elegy for the Forgotten Oldsmobile.” Alexie takes a shining to the line, “O Uncle Adrian! I’m in the reservation of my mind” because the metaphor gives him license to be an Indian and write like an Indian, which he has done with great success.
Elizabeth Gilbert waxes poetic for her namesake (unrelated), Jack Gilbert, who I have written about on this blog before (I took him on an Amtrak ride last spring and wrote a poem about the experience, too, which landed in my new book). Gilbert comma Eliza swoons to Gilbert comma Jack’s poem “A Brief for the Defense,” particularly the lines “We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, / but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have / the stubbornness to accept our gladness on the ruthless / furnace of this world.” That Jack. He comes out metaphors a blazing, doesn’t he?
Amy Tan makes a more predictable choice: Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”
Junot Diaz taps Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. He especially loves this: “She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”
Andre Dubus III tips his hat to Richard Bausch’s “Dear Writer.” In it, Bausch writes, “Do not think, dream.” That advice is for first drafts, by the way. After that, Logic, who has been pounding on the door, can be let in. See Dubus’s essay for particulars.
Billy Collins selects W. B. Yeats’ famous poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” I will give that choice and Billy’s reasons its own post tomorrow. I love talking with BC.
Kathryn Harrison gives a shout-out to Joseph Brodsky. She cites the poem “On Love” and the lines “For darkness restores what light cannot repair.” If you like mysteries in the dark, you’ll take a shining to her essay.
David Mitchell? The talented novelist chooses a poem (God bless him, everyone!) by James Wright– perhaps Wright’s most famous: “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.” It’s the equally famous finish he cites: “I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. / A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. / I have wasted my life.” Those last five words serve as a warning not only to Mitchell, but to all of us wasting time with stuff like “writer’s block” and other malware of the mind. Just do it! (That’s Nike for the sport of writing.)
Curiously, Tom Perrotta is inspired by Our Town, the Thornton Wilder play. “At least, choose an unimportant day. Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.” The play moves Perrotta to tears to this day. And here I still have to read the thing!
Jonathan Lethem likes his Kafka, especially the short piece “Leopards in the Temple.” He notes the quote, “Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.” Let the leopards in, Lethem says. Spot on, I’d add.
Charles Simic is the second writer to point to Whitman. But it is a less well-known Whitman: the poem “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim.” The line noted here is “Young man I think I know you–I think this face is the face of the Christ himself, Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.” Simic’s own wartime experiences as a boy in the Balkans creates the camaraderie with Whitman’s poem.
Emma Donoghue is one of two in the book who point to Emily Dickinson, the pride of Amherst, Mass. It’s the poem “Wild Nights–Wild Nights”: “Rowing in Eden– / Ah, the Sea! / Might I but moor–Tonight– / In thee!”
Claire Messed resurrects an old favorite seldom read nowadays, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. “These fragments! I have shored against my ruins.” It’s an admittedly cool line, for those of us with both shores and ruins.
T.C. Boyle acknowledges Raymond Carver (also written about on these pages this past year). He loves the ending of the short story, “Cathedral,” specifically the lines “My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything. ‘It’s really something,’ I said.” In that scene, the narrator has his eyes shut, trying to reimagine life from a blind man’s dark point of view. You can see how that might connect to the writing life, no? Carver is the man.

Anyway, that’s a a sampling. In each essay, the author explains why the lines noted inspire, why they “light the dark,” so to speak, and feed their muse’s inner fires.

You can play the game, too, of course. It’s a popular pastime for writers to keep a quote posted to the wall above in their favorite writing spot, after all. For me, it’s Wislawa Szymborka’s poem, “The Joy of Writing.”

And you?

Season’s (and Spices’) Greetings

humor poetry

season

Season’s Greetings–and thank you–to my readers. I could take those seasons and spice it up with specificity: Cinnamon’s Greetings, maybe, or Allspice’s Greetings, or the lovely Clove’s Greetings (sounding so close to Love’s Greetings). Or I could be more inclusive altogether: Garam Masala’s Greetings! (A little black pepper never hurt anything.)

Whatever it is, I wish it for you and yours. I will not be posting again until the Christmas to New Year’s stretch, when I list my 2018 resolutions for all to laugh at. But today? Simply greetings and thanks:

Greetings and thanks to regular readers of this blog, living on the outer edge of the virtual world (flat or round, however you serve it).
Greetings and thanks to irregular readers who land here thanks to those time machines we call “search engines,” take one look around, and hightail it to the back button. Verily, you can’t go home again, unless it’s the internet.
Greetings and thanks to people of all countries who visit me, even if they have to use Google Translator to make heads or tails out of what I say.
Greetings and thanks to anyone who laughed at something written here. Chuckled? Smirked ironically? I’ll take it.
Greetings and thanks to anyone who enjoyed a poem posted here, sympathized with a poet here, or enjoyed reading some poetry-related advice here.
Greetings and thanks to readers who have given up their genre ruts, leavening their reading bread with short stories, poems, essays, plays, nonfiction. The novel may be king, but its kingdom is vast and varied! Pull a fresh horse from the stable and ride out to enjoy it!
Greetings and thanks specifically to readers who have not just ordered one of my books but read them and enjoyed them and contacted me to say as much. Now that’s a hat trick to celebrate (as they say in hockey rinks).
Greetings and thanks to people who connect locally by signing up for local writers groups or reading groups. For the grassroots writer, all literature is local.
Finally, greetings and thanks to people who do and do not celebrate Christmas. It’s a big world out there and the more inclusive we are, celebrating our similarities as humans, the better.

The Story of the “Last Poem In”

my poems poetry revising poetry The Indifferent World

benfranklin

As your publisher’s deadline approaches for the final version of a manuscript, decisions must be made. Is a poem too weak? And, if you pull it, do you have something stronger to replace it?

These sound like easy questions, but when you consider how unpredictable tastes in poetry can be and, more importantly, how difficult it is to judge your own work–especially when freshly written–they are anything but.

The story of the last poem in with my first book, The Indifferent World, is illustrative. I had been tinkering with a holiday-themed poem that suffered identity issues. Yes, the theme was post-holiday blues, but dark humor kept creeping in like the charred remains of a Yule log. I wrestled first with the poem, then with whether to pop it into the manuscript as a final switch. After sleeping on it, I opted to throw it in as a replacement.

That poem, titled “Black Dogs Redux,” was inserted deep into the book where it would be lost in the crush. But a funny thing happened. As reviews crept in, numerous readers alluded to “Black Dogs Redux” or quoted it. What was up with that, I wondered.

Like I said, illustrative. It seemed such an unassuming poem. A wallflower poem. A quirky-afterthought-to-some-of-its-more-noisy-neighbors poem. And yet, something about it invited comment, despite its dark secret as “last poem in” which, you might assume, would make it the “last poem worthy of comment.”

As the holiday is nigh once more, I figured I’d share it, warts and all:

Black Dogs Redux
by Ken Craft

The blue sad light is on again.
Maybe it’s the weather. Or the season.
Or the relentless grind of the quotidian.
Maybe it’s the “Is that all there is?” of the holidays,
where boxing ornaments, burning dried holly, and recycling
wrapping paper feels like picking up
after the dogs. The black dogs. Who heel all too well.
Orion has his astral-eyed pooch;
I have my black-furred dogs, loyal as shadow.

Walking backwards, man’s best friend is god, who has a hand
in this. That’s the sensation: the Great One’s hand applies
a slight pressure to my head, weighing me down.
The motivation to read? Nothing seems good anymore.
To write? I have nothing to say.
And damn Ecclesiastes anyway, it’s all been said.
Everything is vanity, all right, a striving after wind.
And like the Greek chorus, there’s this 33-degree rain
at 5 in the morning. Not the silent, deflected sound of snow
but that direct, cold ping running down the gutters of my spirit.

I adjust the sad light so the angle is better,
file rays in the blue facets of my eyes,
reshuffle them, come up with a deeper blue: slow, indigo
in scope. I can always sleep, but sleep leaves ash dreams.
I know exercise is an antidote, but I must first scale
the architecture of my own apathy. All those slivers under the fingernails!
It’s easier to eat ice cream that never judges.
Scoop of here in a cone of now.

Didn’t Ben Franklin say we should be well-rounded, after all?
He said a lot. And never once owned a dog.
Ben just donned beaver caps
and attracted lovely French ladies, who earlied-to-bed
when he was early to rise. Gay Parisian moths to a flame burning
with New World life, they were. Giggling in French. Obsessed
with their own dogged desires.

OK, so the thought of it gives a little lift. But just a little.
I’m too depressed for anything drastic.

Characteristic of last poems in, this one experienced the fewest revisions and perhaps it shows. Some readers admire the last lines of the second and third stanzas. But a few felt it should’ve ended after that third stanza, that Ben Franklin photo-bombed the poem much like Tom Sawyer photo-bombed the ending of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

So be it. Last poems in, flawed and honest, are what they are, much like the holidays. It’s the nature of the beast and, in any publishing process, there will always be final, rushed decisions. In retrospect, I still can’t say that it’s better or worse than the one it replaced (which I can no longer recall). Still, it’s fun to Monday morning quarterback.

What about Lost Sherpa of Happiness, you ask? What was the last poem in for that book? “Puddle Duck at Picking Time,” of course. On page 62, still quacking itself up.

One Last List of Literary Trivia

poetry

tennyson

Part 3 of 3–a last look at cool facts gleaned from David Markson’s Reader’s Block:

Tennyson was reading Cymbeline when he died. His copy of the play was put into his coffin.
Thomas Gray was one of twelve children. All eleven others died as infants.
Eliot, as an editor, rejected Animal Farm.
Tolstoy ranked Guy de Maupassant second only to Hugo as the great European writer of his day.
Nobody ever laid it down without wishing it were longer. Said Johnson of Robinson Crusoe.
Blake was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave.
Joyce had lost all his teeth by the age of forty-one.
When Stalin himself was found dead, a recording of Mozart’s twenty-third piano concerto lay on his turntable.
Goethe, to Eckermann: Have all the nations of the world since Euripides produced one dramatist worthy to hand him his slippers?
Apollinaire came extremely close to being permanently paralyzed by a head wound in World War I.
Melville and Whitman were born within two months of each other and died within six. And were in close proximity in or near New York through much of their lives. Never meeting.
As a master at a boy’s school in London during World War I, Eliot tried to teach his pupils baseball. John Betjeman included.
John Berryman: Rilke was a jerk.
I guess maybe there are two kinds of writers: writers who write stories and writers who write writing. Said Raymond Chandler.
Carl Sandburg was the one poet who would probably gain from translation. Said Frost.
Kafka died in 1924. All three of his younger sisters would later be incinerated by the Nazis.
Lucia Joyce, institutionalized, when told of her father’s death: What is he doing underground, that idiot?
Nothing bores me more than political novels and the literature of social intent, Nabokov said.
Dickens was certain after reading only her first novel that the name George Eliot belonged to a woman.
Joyce called “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” the greatest of all short stories.
Cavafy, acknowledged as the great Greek poet of his time. Who lived his entire writing life in Egypt.
I couldn’t do that to him. Said Nora, at the suggestion that Joyce be given a Catholic funeral.
Van Gogh shot himself in the chest. And then walked home and took two days to die.
Whittier threw Leaves of Grass into a fire.

And from Markson himself, in the role of blocked reader:

Why does it sadden Reader to realize he will almost certainly never know what book will turn out to be the last he ever read? What piece of music, the last he ever heard?