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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

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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

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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.

“Autumn Glory and Candy Wrappers”

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New to me is Matthew Rohrer, a New York City poet who has a whiff of the old New York School, given his casual verse and non sequiturs (minus Lana Turner and the season of falling). I just finished his collection, Surrounded by Friends. Here is a review, as posted on GoodReads, everyone’s favorite Amazon-owned reading site to revile:

 

If you write poetry, you read poetry. What’s weird is how reading some poets’ work inspires you with ideas of your own, while reading others inspires…nothing. It doesn’t mean the poet is BAD if they do not inspire — in fact, they can be depressingly talented — but the inspirational ones are often writing approachable stuff like a particularly docile and friendly horse happy to come over to the fence and munch carrot or cube from your hand.

Yes, yes. It all looks so simple, kind of like imitating Hemingway in short story writing. Then, when you go there, you see that your work is very un-Hemingway, so maybe there’s some hidden complexity in the simplicity’s weeds. That happens with the poets that inspire, too, but hey, at least it gets words churning in the brain and marching on the paper (or screen).

As you might have guessed, Matthew Rohrer is one of these approachable guys. Short poems. A bit off-the-wall poems. A little this, a little that. Some non sequiturs thrown in. Unusual word pairings. Thoughts local and worldly. Lines three to six words short. By way of two examples, I give you these:

Where I Lived

I live up here,
you live down there,
he said, touching first
my forehead then
my sternum; come up
and see me sometime,
and flicked my nose
as he said this,
traveling up from where
I lived to where he lived.
He also said, every time
our family saddled up
to depart, see you in the
funny papers, which was
another place he mistakenly
believed I lived, when I lived,
as everyone knew, in an
enormous mitten with a beetle,
a mouse, a hedgehog, a hare,
a badger, and other increasingly
large creatures of the forest,
and waited there for a stranger’s
kiss to set me free. His own wife,
my grandmother, knitted it for me.

Autumn Glory

Looking at old pictures
I’m on fire
don’t show your dad
how it says Legalize it
on the other side of the hill
now we are older
it’s like that whole place
shifted out from under us
the self is the constant
past which time flies
until a cloud melts
through the wall
it is a translation
of an abstract painting
into a feeling
I don’t even have
I have a slight fever
while feeding the kids
and in a dream
they eat candy
on top of me
and when I wake up
autumn glory and candy wrappers

Wallace Stevens: When Weird Is Grounded in Normal

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wallace stevens

“The greatest poverty,” Wallace Stevens once wrote, “is not to live in a physical world.” This observation came decades before the SmartPhone, the Internet, and the iPad, meaning, if Stevens were to return today, he’d find the entire planet a “third-world nation”–impoverished, indeed!

Ironically, Stevens used the physical world for fantastic leaps by using metaphor to couple reality with the imagination. Delmore Schwartz called him “an aesthete in the best sense of the word.” Marianne Moore crowned him “America’s chief conjurer.”

Stevens finishes his poem “In the Carolinas,” for instance, with this surprising proclamation on the physical world: “The pine-tree sweetens my body / The white iris beautifies me.” The effect of such unnatural naturalness might explain his poetry.

Note, for instance, how far afield Stevens goes from the physical world while still hewing close to his own realities in another famous poem:

 

Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded centuries.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.

 

Everything’s normal here, right? And not. We have familiar colors, white night-gowns, and lace socks. But we have reality skewed, too. The house is haunted, the old sailor is drunk, and people might just dream of such realities as “baboons and periwinkles” (what a pair!) if they’re not careful. Best of all, and most memorable, you can catch tigers in “red” weather. For readers, it’s all familiarly strange–a quintessential Stevens poem.

Only Wallace Stevens could look at the abject ordinariness of a blackbird from thirteen angles. In “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” one of his most famous poems, readers might well surrender all hope of interpretation and take succor on his delicious turns of phrases alone: “twenty snowy mountains,” “of three minds,” “small part of a pantomime,” “A man and a woman and a blackbird / Are one,” “the beauty of innuendoes,” “barbaric glass,” “thin men of Haddam,” “noble accents,” “the edge / Of one of many circles,” “bawds of euphony,” “the shadow of his equipage,” “The river is moving,” and “It was evening all afternoon.”

If you don’t understand the poem, you well know the feeling of it being evening all afternoon because you understand evenings and you understand afternoons. You just haven’t understood how one could be the other at the same time. Until now.

Unusual word pairings are Wallace Stevens’ reality, and his readers are at once at home and off balance because of it. That’s why the greatest riches are found while living in his unique physical world. Read him and leave poverty to the SmartPhone addicts.

“Their Suddenly Forbidden Houses”

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Americans move a lot. Often it is jobs that uproot them and carry them, like seeds in the wind, to new pastures. Sometimes family concerns are the cause. Retirement, too, is often the driver once you’ve loaded all your earthly goods (and there are far too many) onto the cargo space of a moving truck.

When I was young and naive, I thought moving was a way to leave your troubles behind. If you hoped for a new life as a new person, I figured, you need only change your zip code.

Since then I’ve learned the lie in that theory. You can’t leave yourself behind. And you certainly can’t change who you are as a person like the flip of a switch. There’s hard-wiring to be reckoned with. There’s the lifetime experiences that resist the beguiling idea of a tabula rasa.

These thoughts rose to the surface when I read Howard Nemerov’s poem below. It’s a neat mix of concrete images and abstract thought, the artful blending that leads to the heart of any successful poem. Let’s take a ride with him:

 

Going Away
Howard Nemerov

Now as the year turns toward its darkness
the car is packed, and time come to start
driving west. We have lived here
for many years and been more or less content;
now we are going away. That is how
things happen, and how into new places,
among other people, we shall carry
our lives with their peculiar memories
both happy and unhappy but either way
touched with a strange tonality
of what is gone but inalienable, the clear
and level light of a late afternoon
out on the terrace, looking to the mountains,
drinking with friends. Voices and laughter
lifted in still air, in a light
that seemed to paralyze time.
We have had kindness here, and some
unkindness; now we are going on.
Though we are young enough still
And militant enough to be resolved,
Keeping our faces to the front, there is
A moment, after saying all farewells,
when we taste the dry and bitter dust
of everything that we have said and done
for many years, and our mouths are dumb,
and the easy tears will not do. Soon
the north wind will shake the leaves,
the leaves will fall. It may be
never again that we shall see them,
the strangers who stand on the steps,
smiling and waving, before the screen doors
of their suddenly forbidden houses.

 

Though much of the poem deals with inner thoughts, hopes, dreams, pleasant memories and bitter doubts, the end takes us to another truth: those we leave behind. It seems often that friends from one location become strangers once we’ve touched down in another. This despite our pledges to stay in touch, to visit, to remember.

Going away, then, often pulls us toward the blank promise of tabula rasa whether we wish it to or not.

And the north wind shakes the leaves….

Why Do YOU Want to Be a Poet?

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If you had told me fifty years ago that I would someday be a poet, I would have laughed and replied, “Right. And I’ll be the pope someday, too.”

But here I stand, sans ecclesiastical garbs and kiss-the-ring, scribbling lines in the thin hours of the morning. What’s wrong with me? And what intrinsic reasons push me to do this, line by line and stanza by stanza?

I’ve given these questions some thought and decided it is a lot like teaching. Both teacher and poet are stuck in jobs that can never be fully mastered. Yes, over time you can become quite accomplished at either, given the tools and the tenacity, but the thought of conquering the tasks is ludicrous. The challenge will never dissipate.

And that’s what I like about both trades. The fact that you sometimes succeed and sometimes fail and always will. The fact that there are no hard and fast rules. The fact that you have to keep experimenting with new words in new ways.

Sisyphus comes to mind, in his dogged way. The hill and the stone. The job that can never be finished in any fully satisfactory way. Yes, there will be successes, but they will be as ephemerally fleeting as December sunshine. Here this morning, gone this afternoon. You may have a poem accepted in a journal of note and say, “Finally, I have arrived,” but you will quickly be disabused of the notion with the next day’s rejections. Three of them.

As for payment, how low can you go? Compared to other trades, especially in the corporate world, the teaching profession pays poorly. And compared to writing other genres, writing verse brings negligible monetary rewards (unless “complimentary copies” now earn interest at banks).

In her poem, “But I, Too, Want to Be a Poet,” Fanny Howe has some fun with all this. Which brings me to another point. If you’re going to write poetry, let your hair down now and then. Have some fun. Laugh at yourself. Like Cherry Garcia ice cream at midnight, it’s sometimes necessary.

 

But I, Too, Want to Be a Poet
Fanny Howe

But I, too, want to be a poet
to erase from my days
confusion & poverty
fiction & a sharp tongue

To sing again
with the tones of adolescence
demanding vengeance
against my enemies, with words
clear & austere

To end this tumultuous quest
for reasonable solutions
to situations mysterious & sore

To have the height to view
myself as I view others
with lenience & love

To be free of the need
to make a waste of money
when my passion,
first and last,
is for the ecstatic lash
of the poetic line

and no visible recompense

How Voice Escorts Us into the “Interior of the World”

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It seems fitting that Tony Hoagland’s farewell book to the world would tackle the concept of voice. If any poet knew of what he spoke, Hoagland was the man. Whether you read his poems or his sage essays about poems or writing poetry, you “heard” Hoagland and felt as if you were lucky to have found an open seat in his seminar.

The last seminar you can attend is The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice. The posthumous collection of essays stands as a short, “Hey, wait a minute,” on the matter of hard and fast rules about poetry writing. Chief among them? Your poetry must be as concise as possible to succeed.

The old adages sound logical, but Strunk and White weren’t poets, either. What about voice? With due diligence, Hoagland demonstrates that voice often requires colloquialisms, idioms, asides, etc. — the stuff that leavens our daily speech.

If executed with purpose, voice quickly bonds writer with reader, who is more than willing to forgive linguistic excess in exchange for a temporary soul mate capable of providing an insight or two on the world.

Hoagland provides many examples of poems, some complete and others frustratingly not, to back up his words. Here’s an excerpt he uses from Lisa Lewis’s poem, “While I’m Walking”:

 

Once I saw a man get mad because two people asked him
The same question. The second didn’t even know of the
first;
Anyone would’ve called the man unfair, unreasonable,
He stormed at the person who approached him
That unfortunate second time, and it was nothing,
Where’s the restroom? or Where could I find a telephone?
He was a clerk, and the second person, a shopper,
suggested
He “change his attitude”…

But though it ruined their day it improved mine, I could rest
Less alone in anger and wounded spirits. That was long ago,…

 

Hoagland comments, “Lewis’s plain linguistic style might be described as ‘prosaic,’ that is, verbose and unpoetic, yet it compels us because her speaker tells more truth than we usually get, and she does so with a bluntness that tests the conventions of decorum. Lewis is a narrative-discursive poet in style, not a poet of lyrical language, but there is a rhythmic, businesslike terseness in her storytelling and thinking that is riveting in is purposeful informality. Her speaker captivates us for the duration of whatever she wants to say. That’s what a voice poet wants to do: hook us and then escort us deep into the interior of the poem, which is also the interior of the poet, which is also the interior of the world.

“In a world where, socially, we often feel stranded on the surface of appearances, people go to poems for the fierce, uncensored candor they provide, the complex, unflattering, often ambivalent way they stare into the middle of things. In a world where, as one poet says, ‘people speak to each other mostly for profit,’ it is exhilarating to listen to a voice that is practicing disclosure without seeking advantage. That is intimate.”

And so the book leaves practitioners with an oxymoron of sorts. For voice, the poet must practice her intimacy, plan her informality, execute her natural voice for a casually-preconceived cause.

There are some writing exercises at the back of the book, if you wish. And some reader-writers will dive in. But others, like me, will find the book’s encouragement enough. Rereading a 168-page book is an exercise of sorts, too.

Either way, you’ll leave the book realizing that there are more angles than you thought to “voice,” and more “types” of voice, too, such as “speech registers” and “imported voices” and “voices borrowed from the environment.”

Bottom line? Strunk and White were fine for your college freshmen writing course, but maybe not for your poems. Perhaps it’s time to make like Pygmalion and give voice to your art.

“The Silent Passion, the Deep Nobility and Childlike Loveliness”

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Photographic memories are  unnecessary. A small pad of paper will do, thank you. I mean for those times when you feel overwhelmed by the moment and can’t put it into words — yet.

For the time being, just make a note of the camping site: the rock walls and mountain ridges and forests. The stars. The camp-fire. The kids asleep in their sleeping bags.

After that, you can sing the lovely rock’s praises in the Key of Ode Major. When all is said and done, it might be good enough to make your readers think they experienced it, too.

 

Oh, Lovely Rock
Robinson Jeffers

We stayed the night in the pathless gorge of Ventana Creek, up the east fork.
The rock walls and the mountain ridges hung forest on forest above our heads, maple and redwood,
Laurel, oak, madrone, up to the high and slender Santa Lucian firs that stare up the cataracts
Of slide-rock to the star-color precipices.

We lay on gravel and kept a little campfire for warmth.
Past midnight only two or three coals glowed red in the cooling darkness; I laid a clutch of dead bay-leaves
On the ember ends and felted dry sticks across them and lay down again. The revived flame
Lighted my sleeping son’s face and his companion’s, and the vertical face of the great gorge-wall
Across the stream. Light leaves overhead danced in the fire’s breath, tree-trunks were seen: it was the rock wall
That fascinated my eyes and mind. Nothing strange: light-gray diorite with two or three slanting seams in it,
Smooth-polished by the endless attrition of slides and floods; no fern nor lichen, pure naked rock… as if I were
Seeing rock for the first time. As if I were seeing through the flame-lit surface into the real and bodily
And living rock. Nothing strange… I cannot
Tell you how strange: the silent passion, the deep nobility and childlike loveliness: this fate going on
Outside our fates. It is here in the mountain like a grave smiling child. I shall die, and my boys
Will live and die, our world will go on through its rapid agonies of change and discovery; this age will die,
And wolves have howled in the snow around a new Bethlehem: this rock will be here, grave, earnest, not passive: the energies
That are its atoms will still be bearing the whole mountain above: and I, many packed centuries ago,
Felt its intense reality with love and wonder, this lonely rock.