Journal

720 posts

UPDATES ON A FREE VERSE LIFE

Last Days of a Scarecrow Summer

poetry

Don’t look now, but we are fast running out of summer dawns. Days when one swaps clothes with a scarecrow. Days when one lie on your back in the grass and talk up the first cloud that passes overhead. I miss such simplicity already.

Still, typing poems you like is good practice for writers. It counts as “close reading” when you type word for word, punctuation for punctuation, and then reread for accuracy. You think things like, “When does this sentence end?” and “Shouldn’t there be a period and not a comma here?” and “Shoot. Wish I’d thought of that!”

Let us hold our collective breath for the last days of summer, then, and turn to Simic, a poet who had a sense for the absurd. A poet from eastern Europe who could appreciate the simple things. A poet who is always worth revisiting.

Summer Dawn
by Charles Simic

Just as the day breaks, it may be time
To slip away on foot
Carrying no belongings,
Leaving even your shoes behind
In some rooming house,
Or wherever you’ve hidden yourself away

To look for another refuge,
Preferring at the moment
The open country, the interstate highway
Empty at this hour,
Or small-town cemeteries, where the birds
In the trees have fallen silent,

The minister has left the church unlocked.
You could enter and rest in its pews,
Or you could wade into a cornfield,
Swap clothes with a scarecrow,
Stretch out on the grass and have a long talk
With the first cloud of the new day.

"Summer Dawn" Charles Simic

Rebecca Solnit on the “Astonishing Wealth” Called “Writing”

poetry voice word choice writing

Montaigne would be proud of Rebecca Solnit’s in her 2013 collection, The Faraway Nearby.

In an essay called “Flight,” she devotes a few paragraphs to the act of writing and, as is only necessary, reading (because what’s one without the other?). I thought it was interesting. Maybe you will, too:

“Writing is saying to no one and everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone. Or rather writing is saying to the no one who may eventually be the reader those things one has no someone to whom to say them. Matters that are so subtle, so personal, so obscure, that I ordinarily can’t imagine saying them to the people to whom I’m closest. Every once in a while I try to say them aloud and find that what turns to mush in my mouth or falls short of their ears can be written down for total strangers. Said to total strangers in the silence of writing that is recuperated and heard in the solitude of reading. Is it the shared solitude of writing, is it that separately we all reside in a place deeper than society, even the society of two? Is it that the tongue fails where the fingers succeed, in telling truths so lengthy and nuanced that they are almost impossible aloud?

“I started out in silence, writing as quietly as I had read, and then eventually people read some of what I had written, and some of the readers entered my world or drew me into theirs. I started out in silence and traveled until I arrived at a voice that was heard far away—first the silent voice that can only be read, and then I was asked to speak aloud and to read aloud. When I began to read aloud, another voice, one I hardly recognized, emerged from my mouth. Maybe it was more relaxed, because writing is speaking to no one, and even when you’re reading to a crowd, you’re still in that conversation with the absent, the faraway, the not yet born, the unknown, and the long gone for whom writers write, the crowd of the absent who hover all around the desk.

“Sometime in the late nineteenth century, a poor rural English girl who would grow up to become a writer was told by a gypsy, ‘You will be loved by people you’ve never met.’ This is the odd compact with strangers who will lose themselves in your words and the partial recompense for the solitude that makes writers and writing. You have an intimacy with the faraway and distance from the near at hand. Like digging a hole to China and actually coming out the other side, the depth of that solitude of reading and then writing took me all the way through to connect with people again in an unexpected way. It was astonishing wealth for one who had once been so poor.”

You see the words “faraway” and “nearby” popping up here, how perfect they are for the lonely sharing that is writing and reading, yet the source of the title is alluded to in another essay called “Wound.” Georgia O’Keefe, the great artist who once lived in New York City, moved to the desert boonies (read: Taos, New Mexico), and when she did, she signed letters to friends with the closing “From the faraway nearby.”

Thank you, Georgia, for a theme! One which Solnit stitches like a thread through the collection is this wide-ranging book. Thank you, too, for a metaphor. One elastic enough to cover writing and reading and many other paradoxes afforded by daily life.

As for her pearls of wisdom re: writing, you can see Solnit’s point all too well if you write. As I am the nearest writer at the moment, let’s use me as an example.

Why am I writing this? I could just sip this wonderful first black coffee and passively read emails (easy) and news of the world (not-so-easy). Instead, I’m milling away at this keyboard, watching letters do the ant-crawl thing across this screen.

I’m not writing strictly for myself (though I gain from it, surely). I’m doing it for intrinsic reasons, because I’m compelled to as part of a “odd compact,” as Solnit puts it, an assumption that people I will never know are out there (in the “faraway nearby”) reading words I only recently strung together, enjoying them, relating to them.

Scary, I know. But think of it: Some may start this piece and not finish it. Some may dig all the way to the other side (the end, or what Solnit might call “China”). Some may even return to this webpage regularly to see what I write again.

Almost mystical, isn’t it? But without each other (writers, readers), the magic would be gone. The faraway wouldn’t be nearby at all.

Tony Hoagland’s America: Look Familiar?

poetry poetry books reading poetry

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.”

poetry reading poetry

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

poetry reading poetry writing inspiration

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

poetry reading poetry

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

poetry reading poetry

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.