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Bert Meyers

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

There are so many new poets, sometimes it’s hard to remember how many good poets have come and gone! Here’s Bert Meyer’s homage to a wonderful allium.

The Garlic

Rabbi of condiments,
whose breath is a verb,
wearing a thin beard
and a white robe;
you who are pale and small
and shaped like a fist,
a synagogue,
bless our bitterness,
transcend the kitchen
to sweeten death—
our wax in the flame
and our seed in the bread.

Now, my parents pray,
my grandfather sits,
my uncles fill
my mouth with ashes.

Bert Meyers, “The Garlic” from In a Dybbuk’s Raincoat: Collected Poems.

Linda Pastan

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

Linda Pastan died in January this year, and this seems an appropriate poem to post for her.  She was born in 1932 and went to Radcliffe. During her senior year, Pastan won a collegiate poetry prize sponsored by Mademoiselle magazinem a contest in which Sylvia Plath placed second. I wonder how that felt later on.

1932

I saw my name in print the other day
with 1932 and then a blank
and knew that even now some grassy bank
just waited for my grave. And somewhere a grey

slab of marble existed already
on which the final number would be carved—
as if the stone itself were somehow starved
for definition. When I went steady

in high school years ago, my boyfriend’s name
was what I tried out, hearing how it fit
with mine; then names of film stars in some hit.
My husband was anonymous as rain.

There is a number out there, odd or even
that will become familiar to my sons
and daughter. (They are the living ones
I think of now: Peter, Rachel, Stephen.)

I picture it, four integers in a row
5 or 7, 6 or 2 or 9:
a period; silence; an end-stopped line;
a hammer poised … delivering its blow.

Linda Pastan, from Paris Review

Donald Justice

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

According to legend, when John Berryman taught a poetry workshop at Iowa, his class was oversubscribed. He assigned a sonnet to everyone who wanted to attend and picked the attendees based on their work.  This is the sonnet that Donald Justice submitted:

The Wall

The wall surrounding them they never saw;
The angels, often. Angels were as common
As birds or butterflies, but looked more human.
As long as the wings were furled, they felt no awe.
Beasts, too, were friendly. They could find no flaw
In all of Eden: this was the first omen.
The second was the dream which woke the woman.
She dreamed she saw the lion sharpen his claw.
As for the fruit, it had no taste at all.
They had been warned of what was bound to happen.
They had been told of something called the world.
They had been told and told about the wall.
They saw it now; the gate was standing open.
As they advanced, the giant wings unfurled.

If I had been in that workshop, I would have suggested the following edit:

The wall surrounding them they never saw;
The angels, often. Angels were as common
As birds or butterflies, but looked more human.
As long as the wings were furled, they felt no awe.
Beasts, too, were friendly. They could find no flaw
In all of Eden: this was the first omen.
The second was the dream which woke the woman.
She dreamed she saw the lion sharpen his claw.
They had been warned of what was bound to happen.
They had been told of something called the world.
They had been told and told about the wall.
They saw it now; the gate was standing open.
As they advanced, the giant wings unfurled.
As for the fruit, it had no taste at all.

Would love to know what you think.

B.H. Fairchild

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

This poem is from Fairchild’s new book, An Ordinary Life, which just came out. It’s full of wonderful poetry.

Often the Dying Ask for a Map

So when Locie, embraced by the great softness
of bed #12, her late blizzard of silver hair
fanning out beneath head and shoulders, asked
for one in plaintive, almost desperate tones,
I went out to my car and brought back my old,
frayed road map of Kansas, and she followed
the unfolding as if it in itself were a miracle,
and then held it over her head, scanning
the red interstates and blue country roads
without apparent method or intent but
smiling her morphined grand smile of awe
and wonder within an air of childhood
surprise and overwhelming acceptance.
Because here it was—the way there, or here,
or out or over or in, and here, sweetie,
let me hold it for you, let me hold…and
her trembling index finger knows no certain
path but wanders through the Flint Hills toward
Cottonwood Falls, then darts up toward
Osawatomie, and she can smell the new wheat,
its dark green deep as the jade of the necklace
her husband brought home from the war
in the Pacific. And now as she crosses
the Kaw River, she sees a young woman
standing beneath the moon in a wheatfield
in Kansas and wondering, what will I be?
Who will I marry? Where will we live?
Will I have children? And if, at the end,
I am lost, how will I find my way home?

B.H. Fairchild

Poetry and Science

Posted on by Meryl in Uncategorized

This poem reminds me how poems can arise from any experience.  I especially love the references to Keats and how the poem contains so much.

Anatomy Exam

Today at the college library the students check out arms
and legs—towering models of muscles and veins
perched on a stand like a hat rack. The exam
just two weeks before Cadaver Day, when they will arrive
pale-faced and woozy in my lit class. I will read them
Keats and they will think of the vastus medialis
and the rectus femoris, and how they looked not strong
and red as on the model but brown and shriveled,
spoiled like old meat. They will think of the sound of their
blade slicing into a corpse’s leg, of the tibial nerve running
long and taut like a highway straight down to the ankle,
of the precarity of their bodies made only of body.
I will tell them that Keats trained as a surgeon before
donating his body to poetry, how he died just a few years
older than them. But their mind will stay lost in the length
of the leg on the table: how the toes wriggled with a tug
on the ribboned tendons, how the toes had nails, how
the nails once grew, how an old woman with a name
once bent to trim them over a toilet bowl. And now
after all to feel so temporary, to hear finally the words
within the words uttered sacred by the preacher,
the teacher, the nurse. Beauty is truth and truth is beauty,
but a body on a table is made of parts with names
that must be known as certainly as Adam knew the names
of the animals, or at least as I know my own—name of
the body I live in, a body I’ve long thought of offering,
so I can teach again in death. But that is not for today.
Today is for hopeful plastic models that snap together
like toys. Today they color the arteries red and the veins blue,
dreaming of their scrubs and their stethoscopes,
strangers to Keats and the plague they’ll soon grapple.
Today the answer is not: Someone once kissed this spot, so tender
behind the knee, but, Gracilis, plantaris, extensor hallucis longus.

Alyse Knorr
first published in The Southern Review

A Celebration

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry, Uncategorized

I love the mysteriousness of this poem, the juxtapositions, the quiet ominousness, and the way it moves the way the mind moves. So lucky that translation brings this poem to us.

A Celebration

The thread of the story fell to the ground, so I went down on my hands and knees to hunt for it. This was at one of those patriotic celebrations, and all I saw were imported shoes and jackboots.
.        Once, on the train, an Afghan woman who had never seen Afghanistan said to me, “Triumph is possible.” Is that a prophecy? I wanted to ask. But my Persian was straight from a beginner’s textbook and she looked, while listening to me, as though she were picking through a wardrobe whose owner had died in a fire.
.        Let’s assume the people arrived en masse at the square. Let’s assume the people is not a dirty word and that we know the meaning of the phrase en masse. Then how did all these police dogs get here? Who fitted them with parti-colored masks? More important, where is the line between flags and lingerie, anthems and anathemas, God and his creations—the ones who pay taxes and walk on earth?
.        Celebration. As if I’d never said the word before. As if it came from a Greek lexicon in which the victorious Spartans march home with Persian blood still wet on their spears and shields.
.        Perhaps there was no train, no prophecy, no Afghan woman sitting across from me for two hours. At times, for his own amusement, God leads our memories astray. What I can say is that from down here, among the shoes and jackboots, I’ll never know for certain who triumphed over whom.

by Iman Mersal, translated by Robyn Creswell
First published in The Paris Review, issue 197, Summer 2011

A.E. Stallings

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

Today I read a review of Alicia Stallings new book of poems, This Afterlife, by David Orr, in which he mentions: The main thing Stallings has going for her is that she’s good at writing poems. She is!. I reviewed her book LIKE  for ZYZZYVA a few years ago. She often uses form, meter, rhyme, as in this unusual sonnet. I don’t know if this is in the new book, I’ve ordered it, but it hasn’t arrived yet.

Sea Girls

“Not gulls, girls.” You frown, and you insist—
Between two languages, you work at words
(R’s and L’s, it’s hard to get them right.)
We watch the heavens’ flotsam:  garbage-white
Above the island dump (just out of sight),
Dirty, common, greedy—only birds.
OK, I acquiesce, too tired to banter.

Somehow they’re not the same, though. See, they rise
As though we glimpsed them through a torn disguise—
Spellbound maidens, wild in flight, forsaken—
Some metamorphosis that Ovid missed,
With their pale breasts, their almost human cries.
So maybe it is I who am mistaken;
But you have changed them. You are the enchanter.

A.E. Stallings

 

 

 

The exemplary sentence

Posted on by Meryl in Prose

I subscribe to Ben Dolnick’s occasional posts about fiction, which I love. His recent missive on “the likable narrator” made me think of Tom Ripley, one of the most underrated characters in 20th century fiction. Patricia Highsmith created a complex, haunted character, with a shakey moral compass. Not likable. Nonetheless, you can’t help rooting for him as he murders and cheats and steals his way across Europe, longing to be someone better.  Here is a passage at the center of  The Talented Mr. Ripley, that I think is stunning:

Now Tom stopped. He had an impulse to go back, not necessarily to go back to the Italian, but to leave Dickie. Then his tension snapped suddenly. His shoulders relaxed, aching, and his breath began to come fast, through his mouth. He wanted to say at least ‘All right Dickie,’ to make it up to make Dickie forget it. He felt tongue-tied. He stared at Dickie’s blue eyes that were still frowning, the sun-bleached eyebrows white and the eyes themselves shining and empty, nothing but little pieces of blue jelly with a black dot in them, meaningless, without relation to him. You were supposed to see the soul through the eyes, to see love through the eyes, the one place you could  look at another human being and see what really went  on inside, and in Dickie’s eyes Tom saw nothing more now than he would have seen if he had looked at the hard, bloodless surface of a mirror. Tom felt a painful wrench in his breast, and he covered his face with his hands. It was as if Dickie had been suddenly snatched away from him. They were not friends. They didn’t know each other. It struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time, true for the people he had known in the past and for those he would know in the future: each had stood and would stand before him, and he would know time and time again that he would never know them, and the worst was that there would always be that illusion, for a time, that he did know them, and that he and they were completely in harmony and alike. For an instant the wordless shock of his realization seemed more than he could bear. He felt in the grip of a fit, as if he would fall to the ground. It was too much: the foreignness around him, the different language, his failure, and the fact that Dickie hated him. He felt suddenly surrounded by strangeness, by hostility. He felt Dickie yank his hands down from his eyes…
Dickie yanked him by the arm Tom tripped over a door step. They were in the little bar opposite the post office. Tom heard Dickie ordering a brandy, specifying Italian brandy because he wasn’t good enough for French, Tom supposed. Tom drank it off, slightly sweetish, medicinal-tasting, drank three of them, like a magic medicine to bring him back to what his mind know was  usually called reality: the smell of the Nazionale in Dickie’s hand, the curlycued grain in the wood of the bar under his fingers, the fact that his stomach had a hard pressure in it as if someone were holding a fist against his navel, the vivid anticipation of the long steep walk from here up to the house, the faint ache that would come in his thighs from it.
‘I’m okay,’ Ton said in a quiet, deep voice.’ I don’t know what was the matter Must have been the heat that got me for a minute.’ He laughed a little. That was reality, laughing it off, making it silly, something that was more important than anything that had happened to him in the five weeks since he had met Dickie, maybe that had ever happened to him.”
It’s unfortunate that the four subsequent Ripley novels are disappointing. But this one is a masterpiece. It ranks with the best books of the 20th century. And I also loved Ben Dolnick’s most recent book, The Ghost Notebooks.