This narrative poem by Elizabeth Bishop seems so plainly written, yet I think it’s pretty extraordinary.
In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist’s appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist’s waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people, Continue reading “Elizabeth Bishop”
Reading though poems this morning, trying to find one to post, I couldn’t resist this one. He’s got the jargon so perfectly. I especially like his description of “holding the fear inside/like a tipsy glass of water”:
And The Men
want back in:
all the Dougs and the Michaels, the Darnells, the Erics and Josés,
they’re standing by the off-ramp of the interstate
holding up cardboard signs that say WILL WORK FOR RELATIONSHIP.
Their love-mobiles are rusty.
Their Shaggin’ Wagons are up on cinderblocks.
They’re reading self-help books and practicing abstinence,
taking out Personals ads that say
xxxx “Good listener would like to meet lesbian ladies,
xxxx for purposes of friendship only.”
In short, they’ve changed their minds, the men:
they want another shot at the collaborative enterprise.
Want to do fifty-fifty housework and childcare;
They want commitment renewal weekends and couples therapy.
Because being a man was finally too sad—
In spite of the perks, the lifetime membership benefits.
And it got old,
telling the joke about the hooker and the priest
at the company barbeque, praising the vintage of the beer and
xxxx punching the shoulders of a bud
xxxx in a little overflow of homosocial bonhomie—
Always holding the fear inside
xxxx like a tipsy glass of water—
Now they’re ready to talk, really talk about their feelings,
in fact they’re ready to make you sick with revelations of
xxxx their vulnerability—
A pool of testosterone is spreading from around their feet,
it’s draining out of them like radiator fluid,
like history, like an experiment that failed.
So here they come on their hands and knees, the men:
Here they come. They’re really beaten. No tricks this time.
xxxx No fine print.
Please, they’re begging you. Look out.
Tony Hoagland
When I heard Rachel Tzvia Back speak at the Stronach lecture in May, she mentioned the poems of Tuvia Ruebner, a Slovenian born in 1924, who emigrated to Israel in 1941, escaping the holocaust in which most of his family perished. He writes in Hebrew, and Back has translated much of his work. Here are a few short poems that illustrate his style:
How the sun couples with a cloud!
How the wind shifts the shapes of the trees!
There’s the fragrance of rain in the air!
Oh, all this joy!
Even after me. Continue reading “Tuvia Ruebner”
At Squaw Valley, there was a lot of remembering of Galway Kinnell, who was the director and guiding spirit of the poetry workshop for almost three decades. His kindness, encouragement, and his own work were an inspiration. Bob Hass said that he “cracked the bones of life to suck the marrow into his poetry.” Here is a poem of his one poet recited:
How many nights
have I lain in terror,
O Creator Spirit, maker of night and day,
only to walk out
the next morning over the frozen world
hearing under the creaking of snow
faint, peaceful breaths… Continue reading “Some sadness”
This is to me a difficult pseudonym for Bess Miller (Moore) Brigham, a poet who opted to spell her name phonetically. instead of Bess Miller Brigham, she used the more colloquial “Besmilr” because it was closer to the way people spoke in Arkansas, where she mostly lived.
I found this poem, describing what happened to a poisonous water moccasin (also called cottonmouth) after a tornado, in a book of essays by Forrest Gander. The syntax and typography are a little difficult, a little tornado wracked, but the image of the snake’s fangs embedded in its own body is pretty vivid:
Heaved From the Earthafter the tornado, a dead moccasin
nailed to the pole
boards scattered across a pasture Continue reading “Besmirl Brigham”
It’s the end of June, and I’m at the poetry workshop in Squaw Valley. While I hardly ever publish long poems here, I heard one tonight that just blew me away. Evie Shockley talked about how poets use time, especially the way they use it to address race and history, and her first example was this poem by Ross Gay:
for Don Belton
Who sits like this on the kitchen floor
at two in the morning turning over and over
the small silent body in his hands
with his eyes closed fingering the ornate
tendril of ivy cast delicately into the spoon
that came home with me eight months ago
from a potluck next door during which
the birthday boy so lush on smoke
ad drink and cake made like a baby
and slept on the floor with his thumb
in his mouth until he stumbled through my garden
to my house the next morning where I was frying up
stove top sweet potato biscuits, and making
himself at home as was his way,
after sampling one of my bricks
told me I could add some baking powder
to his and could I put on some coffee
and turn up the Nina Simone and rub, maybe,
his feet, which I did, the baking powder,
stirring it in, and I like to think, Continue reading “At Squaw Valley”
Thanks to David Juda, who has added me to his roster of online poets. In addition spoken versions of the works of great poets of the past, David is assembling a library of spoken poetry by living poets, curated by the poets themselves. Here is my page. This is a labor of love by David, and I’m glad to be included.
A friend asked me to show her a poem by Tony Hoagland that “hit it out of the park.”
I hope this qualifies:
After I heard It’s a Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall
played softly by an accordion quartet
through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping Mall,
then I understood: there’s nothin
we can’t pluck the stinger from,
nothing we can’t turn into a soft drink flavor or a t-shirt.
Even serenity can become something horrible
if you make a commercial about it
using smiling, white-haired people
quoting Thoreau to sell retirement homes
in the Everglades, where the swamp has been
drained and bulldozed into a nineteen hole golf course
with electrified alligator barriers. Continue reading “A hard rain”
I picked up a novel by John D. MacDonald, and while I don’t think he’s in the same class as Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammet, he wrote a lovely description of the start of a hurricane:
“It began earlier, and in a timeless way. Flat sea baking under a tropic sun. Water temperature raised by the long summer. The still air, heated by sun and sea, rising endlessly, creating an area of low pressure to be filled by air moving in from all sides to rise in turn. Continue reading “The exemplary sentence”
If you’ve never read Theodore Roethke, you have a treat in store. He has written some of the lushest poems about gardens, dirt, and decay that you’d ever want to read, a lovely villanelle and many profound, longer poems. Today I’m posting the last two sections from “Mediations of an Old Woman,” one of the long poems. But “My Papa’s Waltz,” “The Waking” (villanelle), “Root Cellar, and “Big Wind”are among my favorites.
3
As when silt drifts and sifts down through muddy pond-water,
Settling in small beads around weed and sunken branches,
And one crab, tentative, hunches himself before moving along the bottom,
Grotesque, awkward, his extended eyes looking at nothing in particular,
Only a few bubbles loosening from the ill-matched tentacles,
The tail and smaller legs slipping and sliding slowly backward—
So the spirit tries for another life,
Another way and place in which to continue;
Or a salmon tired, moving up a shallow stream,
Nudges into a back-eddy, a sandy inlet,
Bumping against sticks and bottom-stones, then swinging
Around, back into the tiny maincurrent, the rush of brownish-white water,
So, I suppose, the spirit journeys.
4
I have gone into the waste lonely places
Behind the eye; the lost acres at the edge of smoky cities.
What’s beyond never crumbles like an embankment,
Explodes like a rose, or thrusts wings over the Caribbean.
There are no pursuing forms, faces on walls:
Only the motes of dust in the immaculate hallways,
The darkness of falling hair, the warning from lint and spiders,
The vines graying to a fine powder.
There is no riven tree, or lamb dropped by an eagle.
There are still times, morning and evening:
The cerulean, high in the elm,
Thin and insistent as a cicada,
And the far phoebe, singing,
The long plaintive notes floating down,
Drifting through leaves, oak and maple,
Or the whippoorwill, along the smoky ridges,
A single bird calling and calling:
A fume reminds me, drifting across wet gravel;
A cold wind comes over stones;
A flame, intense, visible,
Plays over the dry pods,
Runs fitfully along the stubble,
Moves over the field,
Without burning.
xxxxIn such times, lacking a god,
xxxxI am still happy.
Theodore Roethke
Last night I attended a marvelous talk by Rachel Tzvia Back, called “‘This Bequest of Wings’ on Teaching Poetry in a Region of Conflict.” It was one of a series of lectures sponsored by Ray Lifchez in memory of his wife Judith (more about her later). Ms. Bach ia a vivid, insightful presenter with a beautiful speaking voice (you can hear her here).
She started with the question, what use is poetry in an environment of conflict. She said that her world, contemporary Israel, if filled with militaristic, politicized rhectoric. Racism, alienation, hatred of “the other,” are common. She teaches an introduction to poetry course in the English department that is compulsory and includes Christians, Druze, Muslim, Jewish and secular students who range in age from 18 to early 40s. In this somewhat hostile atmosphere–the students have to take the course–she starts with a poem by William Carlos Williams, “To Daphne and Virginia”:
Be Patient that I address you in a poem,
there is no other
fit medium
The mind
lives there. It is uncertain,
can trick us and leave us
agonized. But for resources
what can equal it?
There is nothing. We
should be lost
without its wings to
fly off upon . . . .
An editorial in the paper reminded me that on Memorial Day we remember those who died in the war; on Veterans Day we remember the ones who returned. In either case, not just a day added to the weekend, but a day to reflect. Here is Yeats, reflecting on the death of Lady Gregory’s son, who died in 1918 in an air battle over Italy. My favorite line comes near the end: “What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?” Continue reading “Memorial Day”