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