Out With the Old, In With the New

The year was almost through, and I realized I'd spent most of it reading old poetry, which is not a bad thing, but not necessarily a good thing. Contemporary poetry is ridiculously good (except for the bad stuff, but it doesn't usually get published in the best places or receive tons of awards and stuff, so we'll ignore it) and way easier to read. I've read several amazing books of poetry lately, beginning with Nikky Finney's Head Off and Split, a National Book Award Winner. Some of it was fabulous, and some of it I couldn't get into. It was all so fabulously well-written, though. Then, I read Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith (ahem, Pulitzer Prize Winner) and fell hopelessly in love with her. Her poems about science and society and culture spoke to me in a deep way. I'm now reading Jim Harrison's Songs of Unreason and am again speechless and jealous of how brilliant brilliant writers are. I haven't finished the book yet, but here's the poem that inspired this post.

American Sermon

by Jim Harrison

I am uniquely privileged to be alive

or so they say. I have asked others

who are unsure, especially the man with three

kids who's being foreclosed next month.

One daughter says she isn't leaving the farm,

they can pry her out with tractor

and chain. Mother needs heart surgery

but there is no insurance. A lifetime of cooking

with pork fat. My friend Sam has made

five hundred bucks in 40 years

of writing poetry. He has applied for 120

grants but so have 50,000 others. Sam keeps

strict track. The fact is he's not very good.

Back to the girl on the farm. She's been

keeping records of all the wildflowers

on the never-tilled land down the road,

a 40-acre clearing where they've bloomed

since the glaciers. She picks wild strawberries

with a young female bear who eats them. She's being

taken from the eastern Upper Peninsula down

to Lansing where Dad has a job in a

bottling plant. She won't survive the move.

Why You Should Read Poetry

Remember that novel you began back in May, right before summer began and books were forgotten on a shelf while you splashed in the lake with your children or partied at that trendy outdoor bar with your bff almost every night, because, well, it was summer? Yeah, me too. Remember how when the first frost came, you thought, gee, I should read the rest of that novel? Remember how you started reading from the middle but found you couldn't remember how the book began?

That's why you need poetry. You want to read, but you're a busy person. You can read a book of poems in one sitting - they're relatively short. Or, you can read a poem a day for a couple of months. Which takes up about a minute of your day. And even though poems in a book of poems are kind of sort of related sometimes, they're also separate beings. So you can read one poem now and one next year, and you'll pretty much never wonder what happened before or after the poem.

Should you give up novels? Nah. Should you consider buying more poetry books to relieve that reading itch when life gets a bit too busy for Moby Dick (seriously, I've been reading MB on and off for months and am 3% finished)? Absolutely.

Coming to Terms with Another New Year

As the year dwindles and falters, I am constantly thinking of time and mortality, the finiteness of everything. How fitting I should happen upon this beautifully sad and easily relatable poem. As the year closes, I vow to make the most of time.

Time Problem 

By Brenda Hillman

 

The problem

of time.          Of there not being   

enough of it.

My girl came to the study

and said Help me;

I told her I had a time problem   

which meant:

I would die for you but I don’t have ten minutes.   

Numbers hung in the math book   

like motel coathangers. The Lean   

Cuisine was burning

like an ancient city: black at the edges,   

bubbly earth tones in the center.   

The latest thing they’re saying is lack   

of time might be

a “woman’s problem.” She sat there   

with her math book sobbing—

(turned out to be prime factoring: whole numbers   

dangle in little nooses)

Hawking says if you back up far enough   

it’s not even

an issue, time falls away into

'the curve' which is finite,

boundaryless. Appointment book,   

soprano telephone—

(beep End beep went the microwave)

The hands fell off my watch in the night.

I spoke to the spirit

who took them, told her: Time is the funniest thing   

they invented. Had wakened from a big

dream of love in a boat

No time to get the watch fixed so the blank face   

lived for months in my dresser,

no arrows

for hands, just quartz intentions, just the pinocchio   

nose         (before the lie)

left in the center;            the watch

didn’t have twenty minutes; neither did I.

My girl was doing

her gym clothes by herself;         (red leaked

toward black, then into the white

insignia)                  I was grading papers,

heard her call from the laundry room:   

Mama?

Hawking says there are two

types of it,

real and imaginary (imaginary time must be   

like decaf), says it’s meaningless

to decide which is which

but I say: there was tomorrow-

and-a-half

when I started thinking about it; now   

there’s less than a day. More

done. That’s

the thing that keeps being said. I thought   

I could get more done as in:

fish stew from a book. As in: Versateller   

archon, then push-push-push

the tired-tired around the track like a planet.   

Legs, remember him?

Our love—when we stagger—lies down inside us. . .   

Hawking says

there are little folds in time

(actually he calls them wormholes)

but I say:

there’s a universe beyond

where they’re hammering the brass cut-outs .. .

Push us out in the boat and leave time here—         

(because: where in the plan was it written,   

You’ll be too busy to close parentheses,

the snapdragon’s bunchy mouth needs water,   

even the caterpillar will hurry past you?

Pulled the travel alarm

to my face: the black

behind the phosphorous argument kept the dark   

from being ruined. Opened   

the art book

—saw the languorous wrists of the lady

in Tissot’s “Summer Evening.” Relaxed. Turning   

gently. The glove

(just slightly—but still:)   

“aghast”;

opened Hawking, he says, time gets smoothed   

into a fourth dimension   

but I say

space thought it up, as in: Let’s make

a baby space, and then

it missed. Were seconds born early, and why   

didn’t things unhappen also, such as

the tree became Daphne. . .

At the beginning of harvest, we felt

the seven directions.

Time did not visit us. We slept

till noon.

With one voice I called him, with one voice   

I let him sleep, remembering

summer years ago,

I had come to visit him in the house of last straws   

and when he returned

above the garden of pears, he said

our weeping caused the dew. . .

I have borrowed the little boat

and I say to him Come into the little boat,   

you were happy there;

the evening reverses itself, we’ll push out   

onto the pond,

or onto the reflection of the pond,   

whichever one is eternal

Bizarre and Amazing, or Amazingly Bizarre?

My son is about to wake up from his afternoon nap. Any minute now, he'll wake up and make little sleepy grumpy noises to let me know he's awake. I'll go in and hold him and rub his hair and tell him everything's okay and bribe him with some milk. See how much time I'm spending thinking about my son waking from his nap? A few minutes ago, I was pacing the apartment, thinking about how I wanted to do something but couldn't because there wouldn't be enough time to finish a task before the tiny tot woke up. Then, I realized: there's always time for poetry. So I read a poem, which was really bizarre. But I think it's pretty amazing actually. So here it is. What do you think?

Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock

by Wallace Stevens

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 ceintures.

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.

A Poem, Just Because

My favorite poems are those that give me chills. Here's one that is kind of old (1867) yet hauntingly current. It speaks, I think, to the timelessness of this whole thing we call humanity (or lack thereof). This one gives me the shivers!

Dover Beach

by Matthew Arnold, 1867 (Yup, I'm still reading this old stuff and am pleasantly surprised!)

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

 

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Uncle Walt Strikes Again

The Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry began, well, great. Filled mostly with American poets from the 19th and 20th Century, it's a testament to our heritage. But lately I haven't been feeling that into this book. I've had a hard time understanding, let alone relating to some of the older poetry. And then I stumbled upon another Walt Whitman poem. Uncle Walt has always held a soft, pillowy spot in my heart, and here's another reason why. This poignant, insightful, timeless piece almost made me cry.

Reconciliation 

1865

Word over all, beautiful as the sky,

Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,

That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever 

         again, this soiled world;

For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,

I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin -- I draw near,

Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

Beginning

Despite my schooling, I'm not convinced that a poem must be doing something. I'm not convinced I even have to understand a poem to be totally ensnared in it. Take, for instance, this glorious piece by James Wright.

Beginning

The moon drops one or two feathers into the field.   

The dark wheat listens.

Be still.

Now.

There they are, the moons young, trying

Their wings.

Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow

Of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone

Wholly, into the air.

I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe

Or move.

I listen.

The wheat leans back toward its own darkness,

And I lean toward mine.

Of course it is doing something! you say. And you're right. But I'm not sure it's doing the same thing for you that it's doing for me. I don't know what Wright was thinking when he wrote this poem, nor what he hoped I might think when I read it today. I mean, the moon is a bird. Is this weird? Is this natural? It lives in the sky, after all. Why is the wheat listening? Where does the woman come from? Is the poem about the woman? The speaker compares himself with the dark wheat, listening to what? To the moon, to the moon's young, to the woman? To the unmentioned rustling of the wind? What is this the beginning of? What I get mostly from this poem, all fantastical elements aside, is the power of nature and observation. I am fully present in this moment, as I am instructed to be, and despite the lack of sounds described in the poem, I am hearing as much as I'm seeing, and I am straining my ears in anticipation for, you guessed it, something to begin. If that doesn't blow your mind, nothing will, my friend, nothing will.

Wallace Stevens: Good or Bad?

Okay, I'm still reading Wallace Stevens: The Collected Poems (Vintage Books, 1982), many, many lunar cycles after beginning it (with a long way to go). I have to say, I hated the first 50 pages. Bizarre, inaccessible, weird, are a few of the words that came to mind along the way. And how am I going to finish this? has often plagued me while using the toilet (yup, W.S. is in my bathroom).

Around page 51, though, things start looking up. We move from oddball narratives to evocative images and things I can actually kind of understand. I know there are academics cringing out there. I know that there is merit in those first pages that I don't have the energy to find. Sorry about that, but I'm not trying to be a scholar. I'm trying to adore poetry here. So here's one that I adore. It makes the book worth reading. I have about 450 pages to go, but as long as there are other gems like this one, I'll keep on keepin' on. If you have a favorite W.S. poem, please let me know!

On the Surface of Things

by Wallace Stevens

I.

In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;

But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.

II.

From my balcony, I survey the yellow air,

Reading where I have written,

"The spring is like a belle undressing."

III.

The gold tree is blue.

The singer has pulled his cloak over his head.

The moon is in the folds of the cloak.

Happy Fourth!

The purpose of poetry is multifaceted. One of its many purposes it celebration. Here, dear old Uncle Walt reminds us why America is both beautiful and brave. Though written thousands of moons ago, this poem speaks to those things that make our country great - hard work, passion, diversity, and community. I Hear America Singing by Walt Whitman I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong, The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam, The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work, The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck, The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands, The wood-cutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown, The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing, Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else, The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly, Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

What is poetry? Why is it important?

The answers to these questions are often as annoying as the questions. We live in a culture where many people do not care about poetry, which is okay, if that's your choice. You don't have to like poetry, but you should give it a chance. I have always said I don't like liver, but I have never actually tasted it. How do I know? The truth is that I don't know. Throughout high school and college, many students are forced to read poetry that would bore and confuse any of us, and they are left to wonder what the point of poetry is and resolve to never read it again. That's too bad, because poetry is both interesting and purposeful. When asked by family and friends "Why poetry?" I am often left stuttering. I feel attacked. I lose all sense and reason. In these scenes, I'm too close to poetry to defend it the way it ought to be defended. I let my emotions take control. That's too bad. So here, the purpose and joy of poetry eloquently explained, I present to you the first four paragraphs of the Introduction to the book The Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry, edited by Christopher Burns, which is one of four awesome poetry anthologies I received for my birthday. Be prepared for more about these books in this here blog! And, if you're lucky, I will try liver and get back to you. 

"Great poetry is personal. Like a seashell held to your ear, a poem resonates to the beating of your heart, matching the design of its inner chamber to the contours of your mind. The poet brings the words, you bring your life and together you make the song. The stories of great poetry are familiar. Constructed from the culture and the symbols the writer and reader have in common, a poem can present a personal experience so truthfully that it is not read, as Robert Frost said, so much as it is recognized. The account of life it offers can be so accurate and self-effacing that it becomes our own, informing our memory, extending our vision and clarifying our thoughts. We find our feelings given voice. We get involved.

The language of great poetry, too, is like our own. It invites us in. All poems capture thought in a rhythmic narrative that is easy to remember, and to that extent poetry is little more than a device, a chant, a mantra, a prayer. But the rhythms employed in great poetry are more intimate: the studied stride of formal speech, the monotones of madness, the quiet sighing of despair, the blurting out of love. And through image, irony and symbolism the message is structured to turn on us in surprise like life itself. While the syntax may be as difficult to parse as a midnight thought, great poetry breaks through to a higher grammar of ideas and feelings. Let go of the rhyme and listen. Modern verse in particular speaks as we do, using the power of plain words, searing and unadorned.

Too often, though, in our efforts to understand and discuss it with others, we hold poetry at arms length, concentrating on it as a cultural specimen or a puzzle to be solved: here the poet reveals her neurosis; there the stain of his times shows through. We shine a light into the poet’s eyes: what exactly did you mean by that? Yes, it deepens our understanding to know a little about the circumstances in which the poem was written. Friends often ask that kind of knowledge of each other. And, yes, we must sometimes enter into a poem’s strangeness, however discomforting and difficult the lesson may be. Our closest friends, too, can be demanding and obscure. But great poetry should be held up close. It is often your life and not the poet’s that gives the language meaning. The great poems are usually about you.

Is it dangerous to get so personally involved? Poetry takes your mind off the job; it raises questions; it gets your blood boiling. Even Plato banished poetry from his Republic because it might encourage troublesome ideas that were in conflict with official doctrine. Aristotle replied that it should be permitted to continue because it can be made instructive and of service to the State. But both seem equally wrong. Poetry is no servant, it is another regime, a parliament of ideas in permanent session, still working its colorful and circuitous way through the whereases. Poetry has been banished a thousand times and we still have poetry. States rise and preen and march and have their day, and it is poetry that survives. It is in poetry, not on the Senate floor, that we debate the issues of honor, loyalty, love and respect for nature that are the foundations of our society. Poetry is a truth toward which our reason turns and we measure its strength by the way we feel."

Three Poems for Poem in Your Pocket Day

Happy Poem in Your Pocket Day! The point of this day is simply to share poetry with others. Some people like poetry. Some people don't. To the latter, you just haven't found the right poem, or the right poet, yet. Be patient. There are plenty of poems in the poetry ocean. Today, my partner, son, and I are carrying around the following poems. Maybe you'll like one. Maybe you won't. Either way, I encourage you to go out and find your own pocket poem. Feel free to share it with a friend, coworker, or stranger. You can even post it here under the Comments section. Enjoy!

The following poems are from Poem in Your Pocket For Young Poets: 100 Poems to Rip Out & Read, which I purchased last year and will last the three of us about 33.33 years if we only use it on Poem in Your Pocket Day. We'll see.

Kevyn's Poem (He's a softball fanatic.)

Instruction by Conrad Hilberry

The coach has taught her how to swing,

run bases, slide, how to throw

to second, flip off her mask for fouls.

Now, on her own, she studies

how to knock the dirt out of her cleats,

hitch up her pants, miss her shoulder

with a stream of spit, bump

her fist into her catcher's mitt,

and stare incredulously at the ump.

Niko's Poem (He likes to play but is also very thoughtful.)

Lots to Play by Gary Snyder

Lots to play

in the way things work,

in the way things are.

History is made of mistakes.

yet - on the surface - 

the world looks OK

lots to play.

My Poem (I usually have a very strong dislike for e. e. cummings - SORRY! - so I thought I should give him a chance today.)

maggie and milly and molly and may by e. e. cummings

maggie and milly and molly and may 
went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang 
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing 
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone 
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me) 
it's always ourselves we find in the sea

Translations are Grrrreat!

I'm still milling through last year's copies of Poetry magazine. I'm currently reading the June 2011 issue, which is devoted to translations. This issue is my favorite yet. I love the following poem: 

Animalistic Hymn

The red sun rises

without intent

and shines the same on all of us.

We play like children under the sun.

One day, our ashes will scatter—

                                           it doesn’t matter when.

Now the sun finds our innermost hearts,

                                           fills us with oblivion

intense as the forest, winter and sea.

By Edith Södergran

Translated from the Swedish by Brooklyn Copeland