Category: Literature

A snail for Larry

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

hit&runpresslogo_optNo adult gifts is the holiday rule in our house, but there is a little child waiting for presents in each of us, so I can’t resist at least one small thing for everyone–and I mean REALLY small. For example, this poem by Thom Gunn is my gift to Larry, who uses the snail as his hit & run press logo.

Considering the Snail

The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth’s dark. He
moves in a wood of desire, Continue reading “A snail for Larry” →

The Exemplary Sentence

Posted on by Meryl in Prose

Sentence DiagramI have been reading a book by an anonymous woman, called A Woman in Berlin. It’s a diary of the period between late April and mid-June 1945. It describes the fall of Berlin and its takeover by the Red Army. Society is  in collapse, and the book is amazingly frank, thoughtful, and unsentimental. Much of it details the simple tasks of staying alive, managing not to be raped by too many of the soldiers, finding food and relative safety.

Here are a few snippets:

“These days I keep noticing how my feelings toward [German] men–and the feelings of all the other women–are changing. We feel sorry for them: they seem so miserable and powerless… The Nazi world–ruled by men, glorifying the strong man–is beginning to crumble and with it the myth of ‘Man.’… Among the many defeats at the end of this war is the defeat of the male sex.” Continue reading “The Exemplary Sentence” →

Poetry Monday–two from Lucille

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

imagesI know it’s Tuesday again, but I was in an anti-poetry mood yesterday, wandering through my friends’ extensive library and not liking anything I read. We poets are a pretentious bunch! Then I thought about Lucille Clifton. I was lucky to have worked with her two different years at Squaw Valley. Although I knew her only slightly, she was one of those people who make a big impression. I watched her deftly improve poems, encourage without over praising, and say things like, “the house of poetry has many rooms.” Her own poems are usually short, accessible, and powerful like these samples. They are not all about being a woman, or black, but they all have wit and a big heart. Lucille didn’t capitalize much, and was sparing in punctuation. When asked about it by one of the students she said that was just how it came to her:

to my last period

well, girl, goodbye,
after thirty-eight years.
thirty-eight years and you
never arrived
splendid in your red dress
without trouble for me
somewhere, somehow. Continue reading “Poetry Monday–two from Lucille” →

Oulipo

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

OulipoI had never heard of it either, but it’s a French acronym, short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle; roughly translated: “workshop of potential literature”). You can read up on it here.  We studied it recently in a class I’m taking on the structure of poetry.

PerecFounded in 1960, by Georges Perec, Oulipo’s members used mathematics to place constraints on the creation of literature. Continue reading “Oulipo” →

Welcome to the Monkey House

Posted on by Meryl in Prose

vonnegutI’ve been listening to these Kurt Vonnegut stories on DVD after reading them many years ago. Some are cranky and clunky, but many hold up pretty well. The one I remembered was “Harrison Bergeron,” a story set in the future, where everyone is fully equal–the more extraordinary your talents, the greater the handicap you are issued by Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General.

FairnessWhile an exaggeration, we have often invoked Diana Moon Glampers when reading about some act of extreme political correctness, and I remembered the story pretty accurately. Continue reading “Welcome to the Monkey House” →

More Fennelly

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

A few weeks ago I posted a poem by Beth Ann Fennelly, I’d found in anthology of erotica. I have been looking at a couple of her books, and thought I’d post another today, a different kind of erotic.

Once I Did Kiss Her Wetly on the Mouth

Once I did kiss her wetly on the mouth
and her lips loosened, her tongue rising like a fish
to swim in my waters
because she learns the world
by tasting it, by taking it inside. Continue reading “More Fennelly” →

Another Ghazal

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

Monday, and here’s another poem I found in the book of Ghazals: Ravishing Disunities

Summer Whites

I want old-fashioned metaphor; I dress in black.
My son was murdered. I bear witness in black.

The graveyard shocks with rampant green.
In a rusted chair sits grief, enormous in black.

Died July 16, 1983.
Navy’s white headstone, christcross in black.

A cadnal falmes—sudden visitation.
Loy spirit? Surcease from black?

Grackles keen in mad falsetto.
Treeful of banshees. Fracas in black.

It should be told, of course, in small details
and with restraint (artfulness in black).

He was a sailor in summer whites in a port city.
He was walking, streets dangerous in black.

The bullet entered right shoulder, ricocheted.
In the ground his dress blues decompose to black.

I am Isabel. He was Jerry John. The dead
are listening for their names, soundless in black.

Isabel Nathaniel

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Ghazal for Monday

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

I have been reading about and playing with the poetic form called a Ghazal. The rules of the Ghazal are that it is an unspecified number of couplets. The first couplet sets out a repeating word or phrase in first line, and repeats that word or phrase at the end of every couplet. The word before the repeated words should rhyme in every couplet. And in the final couplet, the author should use their own name. The couplets should each stand alone. This form comes to us from the Arabic, and according to Agha Shahid Ali’s book, Ravishing Disunities, at poetry readings the audience participates in the form by calling out the repeated phrase as it occurs in each couplet.  Here’s one by Lisa Rappoport:

When I Was a Boyimages-3

I was afraid of the girls: their cliques and all
that gossiping made me sick for them all.

Their willingness to wear dresses
showed they bought into the rhetoric and all.

Worthwhile activities like climbing trees or
bicycling
were severely hampered by such icky folderol. Continue reading “Ghazal for Monday” →

No there there, a short rant

Posted on by Meryl in Literature

I am taking a class on prosody, and yesterday, Gertrude Stein and her work came up in conjunction with form.  It led me to reflect on her and my reaction against words separated from meaning.

490px-GertrudeSteinFrom 1940-1944, while other Jews in France were being systematically ferreted out and deported to camps, Gertrude Stein lived in cosseted comfort. She was an apologist and translator for Marshal Pétain and his Vichy government, and had publicly supported Franco in the 30’s. No amount of revisiting of Stein and her views can change that fact that during her years in France during World War II she never distressed or disturbed herself in any way about the horrors around her. Stein was an extraordinarily privileged woman with large influence; she never raised a dime or a word in defense of the persecuted. Continue reading “No there there, a short rant” →

Poetry Monday: Erotica

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

Those of you who have been reading this blog for awhile know about my passion for libraries, how I like to have a card for any library I pass so I can go in and get a book.

stacksThe only card I pay for is my UC Berkeley library card, and going there is a bit of an expedition, involving finding a parking space, at least a 10-minute walk, and usually a specific quest for a book I can’t get elsewhere. So it’s a disappointment when the book I’ve carefully looked up online and gone to get isn’t available, which happened a few weeks ago when the main library stacks were closed due to a power failure, which was itself due to an explosion caused by the theft of copper wire from a University power plant, a whole other story–one for someone else to write.

All of which is a preamble to explain why I wandered the undergraduate library for consolation, and came home with a book called The Best American Erotic Poems from 1800 to the Present, edited by David Lehman. The poems are arranged by the poets’ year of birth, and I find it depressing that people very much younger than I can write so well. In some moods, of course, I find it encouraging, but rarely. Continue reading “Poetry Monday: Erotica” →