We Convince By Our Presence

Day Thirty - A Movie Version of A Blessing by James Wright

2011-04-30T05:27:00.000-07:00

We've reached the end of another April. I've tried desperately to keep up as I've posted a new poem or poetry related feature every day this month, but life has gotten in the way a few times. Still, I hope you've enjoyed the new poems, found something fresh in the old poems, and taken insights and questions away from We Convince By Our Presence this year. It is my intention to continue on a for a fifth year in 2012. I will occasionally post new content (probably more of these movie versions of poems) throughout the year. As always, your comments and ideas are greatly appreciated. Here's to the many ways that poetry makes our lives better!

Day Twenty Nine - You Reading This, Be Ready by William Stafford

2011-04-29T19:50:00.000-07:00

YOU READING THIS, BE READY

Starting here, what do you want to remember?

How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?

What scent of old wood hovers, what softened

sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world

than the breathing respect that you carry

wherever you go right now? Are you waiting

for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this

new glimpse that you found; carry into evening

all that you want from this day. This interval you spent

reading or hearing this, keep it for life---

What can anyone give you greater than now,

starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

---William Stafford

William Stafford's You Reading This, Be Ready

I, like the other 7 billion people on earth right now, have moments where life dazzles and delights me, where I'm in awe of everywhere, everything, and everyone around me. These are the moments I live for...but these moments are special because they are rare. They naturally arise without expectation or anticipation and they just as naturally recede into the minutiae of routines and normal daily life. After reading William Stafford's poem You Reading This, Be Ready, I noticed that the greatest trait we, as human beings, can possess just might be contentment. To be content, truly content, requires a sense of awareness, purpose, and focus that for most people is unattainable. Contentment is hard work! You have to assess your life and the metrics of the world with the most honest vision. This quest takes us into our greatest desires, hopes, and dreams, and while these possibilities can be invigorating the honesty part is certainly a buzz kill. For example, contentment means accepting that because I'm 5 feet 8 inches tall there is very little chance that I'll ever play power forward for the Chicago Bulls. Coming to grips with this realization and other far more traumatic ones is the hard work of finding contentment. The grind continues when you take stock of the good in your life, because conversely you must consider the horrors you've avoided. I might have gripes about my apartment, my car, and my job, but at least I haven't weathered the atrocities of civil war, battled against malaria without proper medicine, or suffered through tsunamis and hurricanes that wiped all I'd accumulated in this world to the bottom of the ocean. I'll repeat it because it bears repeating: contentment is hard work. So what is the payoff? If you asked William Stafford that question I'd bet that this poem would be his answer. Contentment is "sunlight...along a shining floor" and "the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now." Contentment is the peace that Stafford implores us to hold onto, the peace that he wants to breathe through us and fortify our souls. It is fresh and new, it is sparkling and joyous, and because it is these things and so much more, Stafford's words should stay with us: "carry into evening all that you want from this day. This interval you spent reading or hearing this, keep it for life." It would be easy to let this calm cover your surface and because it is easy most people will ingest it in this way. But remember, contentment is difficult, even the pay off is difficult. The payoff, if you accept the challenge, will overwhelm you. The payoff happens when no one is looking "when you turn around." I say all of these things as if I'm an expert, but I've just as guilty of the surface contentment as the next guy or gal. Maybe I should take up the hard work of contentment, maybe it's time to ask Stafford's question: "Starting here, what do you want to remember?"

Day Twenty Eight - A Man In His Life by Yehuda Amichai

2011-04-28T21:26:00.000-07:00

A MAN IN HIS LIFE

A man doesn't have time in his life

to have time for everything.

He doesn't have seasons enough to have

a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes

Was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,

to laugh and cry with the same eyes,

with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,

to make love in war and war in love.

And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,

to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest

what history

takes years and years to do.

A man doesn't have time.

When he loses he seeks, when he finds

he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves

he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul

is very professional.

Only his body remains forever

an amateur. It tries and it misses,

gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,

drunk and blind in its pleasures

and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,

Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,

the leaves growing dry on the ground,

the bare branches pointing to the place

where there's time for everything.

---Yehuda Amichai

Day Twenty Seven - Sonnet Of The Sweet Complaint by Frederico Garcia Lorca

2011-04-27T20:10:00.000-07:00

SONNET OF THE SWEET COMPLAINT

Never let me lose the marvel

of your statue-like eyes, or the accent

the solitary rose of your breath

places on my cheek at night.

I am afraid of being, on this shore,

a branchless trunk, and what I most regret

is having no flower, pulp, or clay

for the worm of my despair.

If you are my hidden treasure,

if you are my cross, my dampened pain,

if I am a dog, and you alone my master,

never let me lose what I have gained,

and adorn the branches of your river

with leaves of my estranged Autumn.

---Frederico Garcia Lorca

Sonnet of the Sweet Complaint by Frederico Garcia Lorca

With some of these essays I try to provide back story on the poet, the poem, or the technique(s) exercised in the poem. This will not be one of those essays. No, in fact, I've included this poem with no knowledge about it. I know a smattering about Lorca and have read about his time in New York, but overall I'm also undereducated on him, compared to some of the other poets featured on We Convince By Our Presence. So, then, the question is why have I included this poem and poet? Sometimes it's refreshing to stumble upon a poem that dazzles you in the moment and engages your own consciousness in a way that is devoid of context. Sonnet of the Sweet Complaint is one of those poems that seems to have refreshed my poetry palette.

The first stanza rings my comparison alarm bells and fills my mind with images of Apollo and his archaic torso, as described by another triple-named poet (Rainer Maria Rilke). The life-like statute that, in it's solid state, still convinces Rilke that he must seize his own fate and change his life is slightly more intense than the "marvel / of your statue like eyes." Still, Lorca is clinging like Rilke, to a "hidden treasure" of a love that allows him to avoid being "a branchless trunk...having no flower." Lorca's testament to love, in the form of powerful metaphors, sweeps through his fears and regrets, only to reach a unique kind of promise.

"If you are my cross, my dampened pain, / if I am a dog, and you alone my master," this litany of burdens and pains that seem to rule and control Lorca is a confusing mixed metaphor if I've ever seen one! Sure, a hidden treasure is a compliment, I guess, although hidden implies an understated quality that could also be seen as downplaying or diminishing his beloved's appearance. Then he compares his love to a cross and dampened pain. It's tough to argue that a cross is a positive comparison, but I'd venture to say that dampened pain implies an easing of pain where it has once been excruciating. And as if it wasn't confusing enough, Lorca caps the stanza off with a strange dog to master analogy that I might expect to see on an old SAT question. Viewed en mass, these comparisons construct a clear mixed message that Lorca hints at in the title of the poem with the ironic choice of "sweet complaint."

Lorca concludes in a continuation of his ironic, wishy-washy style that just might be the most impressive portion of the poem. The metaphors he built into the bedrock of the poem now have a chance to support each other in what appears to be a winding mess, but is actually a carefully orchestrated stanza of chaos. After a tercet of "ifs," if you are like me then you are expecting Lorca to launch into a pretty big "then" to wrap things up. Instead, he issues something that falls between a request, a prayer, and an ultimatum. "Never let me lose what I have gained," transfers the power back to the loved one who he fears might leave him a branchless trunk with no fruit or fauna for his worm of despair to wallow in. Instead, he wants a presence on the branches of his love's river, a presence that is perplexing and illuminating at the same time. The word choice of "estranged" as a descriptor of his Autumn is a fantastic mind bend and one final twist to send us reeling, just as Lorca himself is throughout this poem. The Sweet Complaint is unnerving and disorienting, not just for Lorca, but also for his audience. Interestingly, his most skillful accomplishment in this poem is creating this unnerving and disorienting pendulum that he himself is feeling in the minds of his readers.

Day Twenty Six - Life Lines

2011-04-26T20:00:00.000-07:00

Over the last decade, actually even further back, there have been numerous public initiatives to increase the visibility and viability of poetry. Some of these attempts were commercialized and rather artificial tries to stave off the oft proclaimed death of poetry. Other attempts rang true because they were natural and encouraged everyone to embrace poetry, not just the upper crust of the poetry world. One of the programs that I would like to bring some attention to is Life Lines through the Academy of American Poets (http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/339#rfros). A cross section of accomplished poets and attentive readers of poetry, Life Lines are fun to read and provide many personal connections to poems we know and love, as well as poems we might have never encountered before.

Here's an example of lines from a poem I've previously featured on this blog (Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost) with the corresponding mini-essay coming from a poet I've previously featured on this blog (B.H. Fairchild):

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

—from "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost

One night late on my way home from college for Christmas, I was caught in a blizzard without the company of an intelligent guide (I was driving, instead of a horse, a '62 Buick Special). I had passed through the last small town and was halfway between nowhere and Dodge City, Kansas when the road vanished beneath snow and my little car foundered badly. Realizing that no one was going to be passing by until the next day, I got out and started walking. Nothing. Nobody, no thing anywhere. At last the distant light of a farmhouse appeared, the only one, I discovered later, within miles. And if it hadn't been for the family inside that farmhouse, I might simply have frozen to death. As I was walking toward it, I thought of this poem, and I knew that I would be able to keep my promises, and I felt ecstatically liberated. Never have I seen these last lines in "Stopping by Woods" read as liberating rather than duty-bound. So boring for students: oh, this is a little lesson about obligations and responsibility. No time to ski, you've got chores to do before sleep, and you always will, and that's the way life is, suck it up and live with it. But the misunderstanding here is not in the specific explanation; it's in the very attempt at explanation. I hope they continue to teach in high schools the most over taught poem in America; I just wish they would stop explaining it.

B.H. Fairchild

Claremont, California

Day Twenty Five - Four Civil War Paintings By Winslow Homer by Ted Kooser

2011-04-25T18:57:00.000-07:00

FOUR CIVIL WAR PAINTINGS BY WINSLOW HOMER

"...if the painter shows that he observes more than he reflects, we will forget the limitation and take his work as we take nature, which if it does not think, is yet the cause of thought in us." ---The Evening Post, New York, May 31, 1865

1. SHARPSHOOTER

(A Union sniper in a tree)

Some part of art is the art

of waiting---the chord

behind the tight fence

of a musical staff,

the sonnet shut in a book.

This is a painting of

waiting: the sharp crack

of the rifle still coiled

under the tiny

percussion cap, the cap

poised under the cocked

curl of the hammer,

and this young man among

the pine needles,

his finger as light as a breath

on the trigger,

just a pinpoint of light

in his one open eye,

like a star you might see

in broad daylight,

if you thought to look up.

----Ted Kooser

Ted Kooser's Four Civil War Paintings by Winslow Homer (1. Sharpshooter)

I'm cheating a little bit by only including this one section of Ted Kooser's examination of four Winslow Homer Civil War paintings, but I'm including this specific section for a reason. Like Ted Kooser, Winslow Homer's Sharpshooter painting spoke to me. Years ago I encountered the picture at the top of this blog post. It was frighteningly real, made all the more unsettling because Homer was observing this soldier waiting for his next kill to wander into sight. Homer's eye for detail made the painting vivid, but also cemented in my mind that he watched this soldier steady himself in his perch and patiently do his job. My mind raced when I stared at this painting, and even now I'm still swimming in backstories for this soldier, the soldier he will shoot at, and their combined families. Homer captures the situation in the midst of the action, filled with tension that only grows as the sharpshooter is always on the ready. I tried my hand at writing a persona poem of Winslow Homer's sharpshooter and I still think the poem is pretty good, but Ted Kooser beat me to it by a bunch of years. If I'm being honest with myself, Ted's poem is probably a little bit more stirring than my own. Why is that so? Well let's see...

With his hard enjambment of the first line producing a symbolic pause and wait for the next line, Ted Kooser launches us into the world of Winslow Homer's Sharpshooter. Homer took his subject and perfectly depicted him at his patient and focused best; Kooser provides examples where similar waiting must take place in the world of art: the musical chord hidden behind a pause and the sonnet trapped in a book waiting to be opened and explored. Just as the action is supposed by Kooser, Homer has taught him how to do this with his Sharpshooter painting. Kooser notes this in a list that builds sequentially backward from the "sharp crack of the rifle" to the "young man among / the pine needles." At this moment, after all the planning and setup, Kooser delivers the goods. He describes the soldier's finger "as light as a breath / on the trigger." This simile folds into another that is so intricately constructed that it comes off as natural as the breath Kooser just described. "A pinpoint of light / in his one open eye" is filtered from Homer's canvas through Kooser's mind to become "a star you might see / in broad daylight, / if you thought to look up." This is such a clever, fitting, and abrupt ending. Notice how Kooser has kept us aware of the event in the painting and the art of capturing this action, but now he finally shifts the readers into the minds of the prey. We are left as the soldiers walking along the path home or the path to the next battle, only to meet our swift demise. Kooser knows there is beauty in the Sharpshooter's eye, that is why he compares it to a star. Still, the Sharpshooter and his eye are also elusive, a quality that is essential to his survival and success. Purposefully, Kooser has kept our vision focused on the Sharpshooter up to this point, but in the end he shakes us with the final line of "if you thought to look up." This disorienting closure throws us back into the role of the soldiers walking the trail. We have just studied the hunter and now, without warning and not by choice we become the hunted. It is primitive and painful, it is masterful and measured, it is emblematic of many struggles that develop in war, but most of all it is great art rising from the carcass of our country's greatest prolonged tragedy and spurring on a chain of great art in years to follow.

Day Twenty Four - Losing The Game by Diane Ackerman

2011-04-24T19:28:00.000-07:00

LOSING THE GAME

On the face of this midfielder,

a saint’s passion.

Sweat brilliantines his hair

flat as a seal pup’s fur.

Thorns rake one knee, and fatigue

is a train whistle that never quits.

In his mind, the falcon of defeat

slips off its own hood

and sails into the vapory cold December,

hangs like a crucifixion over the field,

then slants down the wide thermal

of his shame. Today 2 + 2 is algebra,

and nothing will transmute

his base metal to gold leaf.

When crowd and players have gone,

he watches the sun set

under a tumultuous bruise of sky,

below the empty grin of the bleachers,

deep into the valley,

a ghastly, yellow bile draining out.

---Diane Ackerman

Diane Ackerman's Losing The Game

I've always found it inspiring to see young athletes expose so much of their physical and emotional selves in order to perform to their best ability. You've probably heard the same sports cliches that I have, phrases like "you can't win 'em all," "give it your best shot," "there's no I in team," and "leave it all on the field." Notice that last phrase, "leave it all on the field," and think about how those six simple words can propel teenagers to sacrifice themselves for the good of their team. Just this past week I watched a piece on ESPN's E60 that showcased a girls high school cross country team in the San Francisco area. This team is a perennial powerhouse and is coached by a highly respected leader in the field of running. Unfortunately, this gentlemen has been diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) and he is slowly losing his body to the disease. For a man who is used to running miles every day, it's now a struggle to walk step-by-step. His team of young women, realizing this might their last season with their coach, performed exceptionally this year, especially at the State Championship Meet. The E60 piece honed in on this meet and how the team's championship hopes hinged on the team captain's finish. With less than a 100 yards to the finish line her body shut down and with less than 10 yards to the finish she collapsed on all fours. Displaying that aforementioned trait of "leaving it all on the field" the young woman crawled the remaining yards with other runners passing her by. Severly dehydrated, she finished and placed high enough for the team to win another state championship for their ailing coach. It's stories like this that reinforce the thrill of victory and the epitome of why we compete. Diane Ackerman's poem Losing The Game is not about the thrill of victory. The agony of defeat is just as much a part of why we compete. If there is a winner then there has to be a loser. Learning to lose is just as important to savoring a win. The lessons gained from losing might not be immediately applicable, but with the distance that time provides we can gain much from our unsuccessful experiences.

Teenage athletes are admirable for the passion they display in their athletic pursuits. We've already mentioned "leaving it all on the field," and this mindset allows student athletes to view games as matters of life and death. In some athletes this brings out the worst, prompting cheating, unsporting behavior, and violence. In other athletes this brings out the best and they display perseverance, sportsmanship, and a selflessness that is rare in society. Older generations sometimes scoff at youthful exuberance for athletics, failing to remember that time in their lives when their team's performance meant the world to them. Yes, there is life beyond my JV soccer team's performance in tonight's game, but the high school sophomore can't see that life. The future is far off and as a result the here and now takes precedence. With that thought in mind, Diane Ackerman constructed an accurate depiction of what it is like to lose a game as a student athlete. There is an epic quality to her poem Losing The Game and if you can't see it, instead viewing the poem as melodrama, then you might be a part of that generation out-of-touch with youthful passion.

Diane Ackerman's poem Losing The Game is carefully constructed to reinforce the high school sporting event as an epic happening. The midfielder's face has "a saint's passion" and his hair is not just matted with sweat, but it dramatically "brilliantines his hair / flat as a seal pup's fur." The athlete, who presumably will go home to study for subjects like algebra and his driving exam, takes on the qualities of a battle weary warrior. As "thorns rake his knee" and Ackerman takes us into his mind, which is a creative and perceptive universe of thoughts, emotions, and reactions. In his mind, the game is not a fixed period of quarters or halves with a final outcome that sends everyone home in their cars to resume their lives afterwards. No, "In his mind, the falcon of defeat / slips off its own hood / and sails into the vapory cold December, / hangs like a crucifixion over the field, / then slants down the wide thermal / of his shame." His mind can't loosen its grip on defeat, but there is a beauty in his downtrodden nature. Passion exudes from his defeated shell, and although he may have lost, Ackerman's athlete equates his game with the more important things in his life. This is apparent in the overarching religious motif, where the athlete has thorns, crucifixion, saints, and a swirling symbolic falcon on his mind. Like many leaders, both religious and secular, throughout history, the athlete in Diane Ackerman's poem reflects in solitude after the "crowd and players have gone." His eyes and heart are open, the defeat has left him exposed and raw. As a result, the sky is a "tumultuous bruise," the bleachers are taunting him with their "empty grin," and the sun is not tinged in gold as it sets but it is a "ghastly, yellow bile draining out." Ackerman captures the mind of a young athlete in the grips of defeat so vividly that she doesn't miss a single truth or nuance. This is the temporary mental paralysis of defeat, but this is also the stage that will allow for life-altering growth. No one wants to lose the game, but everyone wants the long term benefits that come from losing and reflecting on that loss to improve yourself. Even the cross country team and their coach that E60 profiled recently knows they will not win every race, but I would guess that they let the taste of their losses linger in their mouths each time they approach a new race reminding them what could happen if they fail to "leave it all on the field."

Day Twenty Three - Teaching Poetry to Children - Rose, where did you get that red

2011-04-23T18:31:00.000-07:00

I admire Kenneth Koch and the tireless work he did to inspire joy and foster creativity in elementary school students in New York City. Koch, a talented poet and college professor, tackled the "problem" of poetry's inaccessibility by taking it to children. The question that bugged Koch was how do you teach children great poetry that the world believes is too advanced for them and more likely to be understood by adults? It's a tough question indeed, but answering it thoroughly and thoughtfully could alter the way that a whole population of children approach poetry, and on a larger level, approach all art. In Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?, Koch details his experiences teaching the reading and writing of poetry to elementary schoolers. Koch believed that: "The problem in teaching adult poetry to children is that for them it often seems difficult and remote; the poetry ideas, by making the adult poetry to some degree part of an activity of their own, brought it closer and made it more accessible to them. The excitement of writing carried over to their reading; and the excitement of the poem they read inspired them in their writing." If any of this sounds interesting to you, I would highly encourage you to check out Koch's book of the aforementioned title, or at least to check out an excerpt of a related article at this website: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/17152

I'll leave you today with a poem by one of Koch's talented students:

Giraffes, how did they make Carmen? Well, you see,

Carmen ate the prettiest rose in the world and then

just then the great change of heaven occurred and she

became the prettiest girl in the world and because I love her.

Lions, why does your mane flame like fire of the devil?

Because I have the speed of the wind

and the strength of the earth at my command.

Oh Kiwi, why have you no wings? Because I have been

born with the despair to walk the earth without

the power of flight and am damned to do so.

Oh bird of flight, why have you been granted

the power to fly? Because I was meant to sit

upon the branch and to be with the wind.

Oh crocodile, why were you granted the power

to slaughter your fellow animal? I do not answer.

-- Chip Wareing, 5th grade, PS 61

Day Twenty Two - Poems I'm Glad I Know

2011-04-22T19:47:00.000-07:00

I know I'm not the only National Poetry Month Blogger out there. In fact, I derive just as much pleasure in checking out the writing of some of my fellow poetry bloggers as I do in constructing my own essay and entries. One blog I've been checking out recently is The Southern Review's Lagniappe, which has featured entries titled "Poems I'm Glad I Know" from a select group of writers and editors. It reminds me of the playlists that celebrities post on Itunes with their words on why certain songs resonate with them. Sadly, one of the editors and driving forces behind the site and TSR in general, Jeanne Lieby appears to have passed away recently. In tribute, TSR posted Lieby's choices for "Poems I'm Glad I Know." Here is that posting: http://www.thesouthernreviewblog.org/

Here's my five selections for "Poems I'm Glad I Know":

1. Body And Soul - by B.H. Fairchild (This remains my favorite poem. It is mesmerizing like few other poems and pieces of art that I've ever experienced. The images are enchanting, the story and characters are authentic, and the language rolls off the tongue in establishing a folksy, yet all-knowing tone. It might be a long poem, but it's worth every second you spend with it.)

2. One Art - by Elizabeth Bishop (You want to read the perfect villanelle, well here it is. Bishop's pain is on display in this poem and by the end it is a tangible anchor that she takes from her neck and transfers to the reader as a weight they must bear. Like Fairchild, Bishop's mastery of tone and language is spellbinding.)

3. Tonight I Can Write - by Pablo Neruda (I've long wondered if anything new can be written about love because Pablo Neruda seemingly wrote it all! In what might be his most famous poem, Neruda exposes his longing, love, and loss with such bittersweet truth that well after reading the poem Neruda's words will still ring through your body like the tattering on cymbals during a drum solo. And if you ever want to hear this poem read dramatically, then you should search for the soundtrack to Il Postino, where Andy Garcia gives a powerful reading.)

4. Oranges - by Gary Soto (The snap, sway, and sweetness of youth is nowhere more evident than in this poem from Soto. Image driven and fueled by figurative language, Soto's poem, like the young boy who serves as the central character, "knows what it's all about." Read this poem and you'll be swimming in memories from childhood, possibly of your first crush, first kiss, and first love.)

5. Song Of The Open Road (Section 5) - by Walt Whitman (This poem could very well be my private prayer and the mantra I live by. Whitman's words are like a heartbeat challenging us to beat along with it, to never give up or deviate from who we are and who we should be. I repeat this poem to myself when I need to center myself or be reminded of what I can do to make the world and myself better. I can hear the words now..."I am larger, better than I thought, / I did not know I held so much goodness."

Day Twenty One - Taxi by Elise Paschen

2011-04-21T19:08:00.000-07:00

TAXI

Why don't we cruise

Times Square at noon

enjoy the jam

I'm not immune

to your deft charm

in one stalled car

I'd like to take

you as you are

---Elise Paschen

TAXI by Elise Paschen

Before anything else, our first impulse is to understand. In our search for answers, we often carry our own baggage with us and put it to work. With our baggage in tow, we attempt to find depth, or create depth where it doesn't exist. What a mistake this can be! Because we want something more, something more literary, something more high brow and challenging, we miss out on the art right before our eyes. It's like showering the prom queen with attention, but ignoring the girl-next-door who's loved you forever.

Taxi by Elise Paschen is a perfect example of a small, but powerful poem that loses some of its truth and beauty when we try to read more into it than actually exists. In this poem, Paschen has fun with words and their sounds. There are rhymes and slant rhymes all in a neat package of eight lines, each containing four syllables. Paschen establishes pace very deliberately with the structure and she's chosen. It's a single image of the poet and a friend, or presumably a lover, in a midday Times Square traffic jam that sets the poem in motion. There's irony in the poem rumbling to life with a traffic jam. But the traffic slows the outside world so that the world inside the car takes center stage. Paschen takes this deliberate moment to highlight that she is "not immune / to (your) deft charm / in one stalled car." She knows it is charm and there could be pretense behind it, but she also knows that it works on her. In fact, it works so well that she understands herself and what she wants. She'd "like to take / you as you are." Yes, this poem has clever line breaks and a fun rhyme scheme. I could break these down and show how Paschen creates something truly great in the short course of eight lines, but sometimes you just have to pause, take a breath, and remind yourself not to complicate a piece of art that is already great without me and my baggage.

Day Twenty - R&R By Brian Turner

2011-04-20T18:29:00.000-07:00

R & R

The curve of her hip where I’d lay my head,

that’s what I’m thinking of now, her fingers

gone slow through my hair on a blue day

ten thousand miles off in the future somewhere,

where the beer is so cold it sweats in your hand,

cool as her kissing you with crushed ice,

her tongue wet with blackberry and melon.

That's what I’m thinking of now.

Because I’m all out of adrenaline,

all out of smoking incendiaries.

Somewhere deep in the landscape of the brain,

under the skull’s blue curving dome—

that’s where I am now, swaying

in a hammock by the water’s edge

as soldiers laugh and play volleyball

just down the beach, while others tan

and talk with the nurses who bring pills

to help them sleep. And if this is crazy,

then let this be my sanatorium,

let the doctors walk among us here

marking their charts as they will.

I have a lover with hair that falls

like autumn leaves on my skin.

Water that rolls in smooth and cool

as anesthesia. Birds that carry

all my bullets into the barrel of the sun.

---Brian Turner

R&R by Brian Turner

Everyone needs something to look forward to, a proverbial light at the end of the tunnel that keeps us focused and fuels us through our most challenging moments. Goals are what make the process worthwhile. For a soldier, like Brian Turner, the lack of a goal can be deadly. Without opportunities, possibilities, and the joyous love waiting at home, soldiers might be overtaken by the darkness around them. The rest and relaxation that Turner describes in R&R might be an illusion, but some illusions are necessary to the preservation of reality.

In a quiet moment away from the dangers and rigors of combat, the speaker in Brian Turner's poem R&R thinks of "the curve of her hip" where he'd "lay his head" and "her fingers / gone slow through (his) hair." The curve of his love's hip could just as well be the curve of his gun handle, but he needs an outlet from the violent world he resides in. That outlet, even though it's "ten thousand miles off in the future somewhere," is a peaceful place that resembles a utopian reward "where the beer is so cold it sweats in your hand, / cool as her kissing you with crushed ice, / her tongue wet with blackberry and melon." Turner's outlet is familiar, refreshing, and sweet, but he only seeks the outlet because he's "all out of adrenaline, / all out of smoking incendiaries." Crashing from his rough current reality, he seeks a comfortable place in a previous world that he hopes to visit again in the future.

Turner can thread images of joy together, but even he acknowledges they are "somewhere deep in the landscape of the brain." They are figments, but somehow they seem so real. In fact, they are imbued with such reality that Turner must confront the idea of lunacy. He knows how it looks and declares "And if this is crazy, / then let this be my sanatorium, / let the doctors walk among us here / marking their charts as they will." He doesn't care how it looks and he doesn't care if he truly is crazy because this diversion from the pain of his real, war-torn life is the key to his survival. It is the R&R that allows Turner to so beautifully tell the world, and remind himself, that he has "a lover with hair that falls / like autumn leaves on (my) skin." She is the goal, the reason, the reward. She...and the water...and the sun...and the world where evil can exist, but where beauty, truth, hope, and love are prone to "roll in smooth and cool."

Day Nineteen - Goose Population Gains High Level by Ogden Nash

2011-04-19T19:10:00.001-07:00

GOOSE POPULATION GAINS HIGH LEVEL

Headline (New York Times)

Besides pollution and erosion

We now must face a goose explosion.

A glut of geese can play the devil

With national life on every level,

Especially in politics,

Where geese and government intermix.

This solemn thought I introduce:

The higher the level, the bigger the goose.

---Ogden Nash

Goose Population Gains High Level by Ogden Nash

Oh, how I chuckle nearly every time I read an Ogden Nash poem. It's often a challenge to fuse poetry with humor, but Nash embraced the challenge and made a fairly successful career out of witty words. Of his many worthy poems, I chose this one from Nash because I share his strong dislike for geese. Having worked at golf courses growing up, I've had my fair share of run-ins with these evil creatures. The angry hiss of a hard charging goose is one of the more aggressive displays I've seen in my life. Not only are geese mean, territorial animals, but they seem to procreate disproportionately and they have a propensity to poop everywhere. With those character traits in the back of his mind, Nash constructs a fitting metaphor between our political leaders and geese. Admittedly, I don't have much to say about this poem from a technical perspective, but I still think it's a fabulous poem and funny detour during this National Poetry Month. In fact, I bet you'll think of this poem the next time you step into a pile of slimy, sticky dark green goose poop.

Day Eighteen - Poetry 180

2011-04-18T20:56:00.000-07:00

A few years back, Billy Collins devised a rather simple, yet wholly substantive way to reintroduce poetry to the mainstream. He looked at the public school calendar and realized there are approximately 180 days in the school year. At that point he set about collecting 180 poems to be read (some of them aloud) in classrooms by students on a daily basis. The poems would need to be humorous, interesting, intelligent, touching, and fun; after all, they would be for a very difficult audience of school aged children and teens. Collins collected a diverse set of poems into his first collection for Poetry 180. It is a stunningly addictive book that I would recommend to any poetry lover. Collins followed this first collection up with a second 180 poems to use in the classroom. Speaking of the classroom, I have used Poetry 180 with students and have noticed it to be quite engaging and stimulating. Students seem to respond to the relevance of the poems Collins has selected; instead of flowery, archaic verse, Poetry 180 delivers the in-your face modernity that students need to find poems to be real. If that isn't enough motivation for you, then I'll mention this: many of the poems featured on this blog over the last four years have come from the Poetry 180 collections. I encourage all of you to check out Poetry 180, and those of you who are teaching I would advise you to find a way to include it in your classrooms. You'll thank me, and Billy Collins, later!

http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/

Day Seventeen - Rain by Claribel Alegria

2011-04-17T07:51:00.000-07:00

RAIN

As the falling rain

trickles among the stones

memories come bubbling out.

It's as if the rain

had pierced my temples.

Streaming

streaming chaotically

come memories:

the reedy voice

of the servant

telling me tales

of ghosts.

They sat beside me

the ghosts

and the bed creaked

that purple-dark afternoon

when I learned you were leaving forever,

a gleaming pebble

from constant rubbing

becomes a comet.

Rain is falling

falling

and memories keep flooding by

they show me a senseless

world

a voracious

world--abyss

ambush

whirlwind

spur

but I keep loving it

because I do

because of my five senses

because of my amazement

because every morning,

because forever, I have loved it

without knowing why.

Rain by Claribel Alegria

Isn't it funny how rain stirs memories and gives us reason to pause and think. We've had torrential storms here in the Washington D.C. area these last few days, yet I've found time to open my windows and sit in the dark silence listening to the clip clap of heavy raindrops thumping the ground. I'm left, like Claribel Alegria, thinking and sifting through the memories that "come bubbling out." The "pierced temples" that Alegria speaks of are not so much an immediate pain, but more so a tunneling into the past that we hold in our fragile minds. In these gentle containers of time gone by, we carry "tales of ghosts." For Alegria the ultimate tale is when she learned her beloved was leaving forever. This pain reminds her that "a gleaming pebble / from constant rubbing / becomes a comet." In this example that serves as a much larger metaphor for what happens in life, the pebble is striped of it's gleam and beauty by the constant pressure and pain, only to find new life in a form of even greater beauty, strength, and rarity. The trade off is that the comet can't be touched, can't be predicted accurately all the time, and is perfectly distant in it's beauty, almost as a mythical creature is. A transformation like this is bound to remind Alegria, and all of us readers, that memories point out what we don't want to acknowledge about the world: that it can't be figured out. The "senseless world" is "abyss / ambush / whirlwind / spur," it's a place of confusion, disillusionment, and longing. Still, the world, with all its faults is also spread full with goodness, with reasons for holding those memories that can unlock our pasts we would rather keep hidden. Alegria enumerates these reasons the world is good when she closes the poem by saying "but I keep loving it / because I do / because of my five senses/ because of my amazement / because every morning, / because forever, I have loved it / without knowing why." The world eludes our understanding, even though the rain stirs memories and begs us to find purpose and clarity in our past and present. We may continue to seek understanding and we may continue to be frustrated as our quest leads us to dead ends, but there is a greater message. Do not lose the love of life, do not forget to greet each day with your senses that make something like rain so enchanting and mesmerizing, do not lose the ability to be amazed, do not lose the fresh starts of new days, and do not lose the past, even if it is tinged with pain, because all is prelude to now, and now you are ready to live.

Day Sixteen - Rememberance

2011-04-16T12:16:00.000-07:00

Time heals most wounds, but it leaves a sliver of what existed before the pain. Tragedies come in all shapes and sizes, impacting individuals and whole nations worldwide, regardless of class, race, religion, and any other classification you can produce. No one survives a tragedy unscathed; all of us with some connection---even a thin, seemingly minor connection---are left to cope with the silence of lost voices, the vibrant lives so abruptly and unfairly taken from us. It doesn't help to wonder what could have been and there's only little comfort in remembering what was. The only positive we can take from tragedy is the rising triumph of the human spirit. Together, we acknowledge our sorrow and pain, but we also acknowledge the selfless strength of character our community possesses. Why am I offering this treatise on rememberance and tragedy? Because four years ago today a horrific tragedy occurred at Virginia Tech, my beloved alma mater, my favorite place on this planet, and the community that I most identify with. Today, I'm remembering the 32 lives that were taken violently and senselessly from our community and our world. I'm also remembering the triumph of the human spirit that circulated amongst us Hokies and all who joined us in support and prayer.

Here's a reposting of Dr. Giovanni's galvanizing chant poem that still shatters, then builds me back up every time I read or hear it.

WE ARE VIRGINIA TECH

We Are Virginia Tech. We are sad today and we will be sad for quite a while…We are not moving on. We are embracing our mourning. We are Virginia Tech.

We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly. We are brave enough to bend to cry. And sad enoughto know we must laugh again. We are Virginia Tech.

We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it. But neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS. Neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by a rogue army. Neither does the baby elephant watching his community be devastated for ivory. Neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water. Neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy. We are Virginia Tech.

The Hokie Nation embraces our own and reaches out with open hearts and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong and brave and innocent and unafraid. We are better than we think, and not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imagination and the possibilities.

We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears, through all this sadness. We are the Hokies!

We will …prevail! We will prevail! We will prevail! WE ARE VIRGINIA TECH!

---Nikki Giovanni

Day Fifteen - Pablo Neruda's Nobel Lecture

2011-04-15T19:30:00.000-07:00

As we reach the middle of National Poetry Month 2011, I figured some words from the legendary Pablo Neruda might be a nice halfway marker. 1971 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, a cancer stricken Neruda accepted his prize in Stockholm, but would die a short time later. Here are some of Neruda's words delivered during his Nobel Prize lecture. Few poets have enjoyed the process of writing and helping others to delight in words as much as Pablo Neruda. Let's see what he had to say...

"Ladies and Gentlemen, I did not learn from books any recipe for writing a poem, and I , in my turn, will avoid giving any advice on mode or style which might give the new poets even a drop of supposed insight...Because in the course of my life I have always found somewhere the necessary support, the formula which had been waiting for me, not in order to be petrified in my words, but in order to explain me to myself..."

"And I believe that poetry is an action, ephemeral or solemn, in which there enter as equal partners solitude and solidarity, emotion and action, the nearness to oneself, the nearness to mankind, and to the secret manifestations of nature."

---Pablo Neruda

Day Fourteen - In Praise of My Bed by Meredith Holmes

2011-04-14T19:36:00.000-07:00

IN PRAISE OF MY BED

At last I can be with you!

The grinding hours

since I left your side!

The labor of being fully human,

working my opposable thumb,

talking, and walking upright.

Now I have unclasped,

unzipped, stepped out of.

Husked, soft, a be-er only,

I do nothing, but point

my bare feet into your

clean smoothness

feel your quiet strength

the whole length of my body.

I close my eyes, hear myself

moan, so grateful to be held this way.

---Meredith Holmes

In Praise of My Bed by Meredith Holmes

Meredith Holmes gives us a praise poem in the tradition of Pablo Neruda's odes to common things. Like Neruda, Holmes delights in a simple, yet essential act: sleeping. But not just any slumber will do; Holmes wants her own bed and she wants it now! I can sympathize with her. This is one of my own busier seasons of the professional year where I'm traveling around the country and often longing for my own bed, as well as the friends and loved ones that can't travel with me from city to city. And to make my connection to this poem even stronger, I would put clean, crisp, sheets on my bed at the top of my list of favorite things in the world. There is a certain comfort that I feel nowhere else when I'm tucked into those fresh sheets of my own bed, laying back for a snooze and hoping for memorable dreams to last beyond my first few moments of wakefulness in the morning. Ben Franklin would tell us that "Fatigue is the best pillow" and this might be true, but like Meredith Holmes I still want my own pillow and my own bed.

There is an underlying dark humor to Holmes' poem. She pokes fun at herself from the very beginning, noting that "At least I can be with you!" in reference to her bed. It's humorous, but it's also quite dark and reveals an undertone of lonely sadness. Still, the humor is far more distinct early in the poem than this darkness. Holmes exaggerates the stresses of being human, such as "working my opposable thumb, / talking, and walking upright." After facing these challenges, Holmes has the reward of her bed. First, before seizing her reward she must perform that time honored tradition of the undressing, or in her case "unclasped, / unzipped, stepped out of." And now she can settle into that cloud-like apparatus that knows exactly how she likes it. Likes sleep, that is :). The poem ends with the same dark humor that it began with. Holmes pauses in her moment of sheer joy to "close my eyes, hear myself / moan, so grateful to be held this way." Her bed just might be better than any other companion, or she doesn't have a companion so the bed is taking his/her place. Either way, Holmes has constructed a poem that praises, describes, builds, and pays off, similarly to the way a good bed can. I can feel the bed Holmes melts into like a pad of butter on a warm scoop of mashed potatoes and I can hear her gentle moan because I've had it tumble slowly from my own mouth before.

Day Thirteen - Juke Box Love Song by Langston Hughes

2011-04-13T20:10:00.000-07:00

JUKE BOX LOVE SONG

I could take the Harlem night

and wrap around you,

Take the neon lights and make a crown,

Take the Lenox Avenue buses,

Taxis, subways,

And for your love song tone their rumble down.

Take Harlem's heartbeat,

Make a drumbeat,

Put it on a record, let it whirl,

And while we listen to it play,

Dance with you till day—

Dance with you, my sweet brown Harlem girl.

---Langston Hughes

Juke Box Love Song by Langston Hughes

In Juke Box Love Song, Langston Hughes skillfully crafts a poem that showcases his love of a woman and his love of their home. It's difficult, but do-able to write a love poem to a person. It's also a challenge, but possible to write a love poem to a place. Figuring one challenge wasn't enough for him, Langston Hughes combined the two focuses and wrote himself a love poem that glorifies his beloved Harlem and his beloved woman at the same time. The poem is so organic in it's construction and flow that it probably seems like it was easy to write, but that would be the genius of Langston Hughes.

From the beginning, Hughes intertwines his woman and his city, proclaiming "I could take the Harlem night / and wrap around you." There is a slightly odd attraction about this image of Hughes clothing his love in Harlem, but the weird factor decreases as other parts of Harlem join the mix. "Take the neon lights and make a crown, / Take the Lenox Avenue buses, / Taxis, subways, / And for your love song tone their rumble down." She, like Harlem, is glowing in neon, and her song is a low "rumble" that has power, but prefers smoothness. At this point, Hughes introduces himself into the poem, not to create a love triangle, but instead to provide the perfect compliment. Listening to "Harlem's heartbeat," Hughes takes it to "make a drumbeat, / Put it on a record, let it whirl." Using Harlem as their soundtrack, and dare I say aphrodisiac, Hughes tells his beloved that he will "Dance with you till day— / Dance with you, my sweet brown Harlem girl." I could read this poem a hundred times and I think it would be a fifty fifty split as to who this love poem is addressed to. Harlem is just as prominent as the girl in this poem, so prominent that the two are inherently linked in Hughes' mind.

Day Twelve - Poem In My Pocket

2011-04-12T20:29:00.000-07:00

*For some reason Blogger has been non-functional over the last few days when I've tried to post to the blog. I'm not sure what the root of the problem is, but rest assured I'll continue to try to find ways to post daily for the rest of the month. Back to our regularly scheduled programming...

There are plenty of great features on the Academy of American Poets webpage. I often lose an hour or five when I wander over to their page. I guess that's what happens when you immerse yourself in a community of like-minded poetry lovers. Speaking of loving poetry and the Academy of American Poets, one of the current National Poetry Month features on their webpage is for the Poem In Your Pocket Day (April 14).

Here's the website: http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/406

So the question to ask yourself is which poem would you carry in your pocket? Hmmm, let me think about that one...

Day Eleven - Video of Famous by Naomi Shihab Nye

2011-04-11T20:11:00.000-07:00

Here's another installment in the movies I've been making of favorite poems that I've previously featured on this blog. Famous by Naomi Shihab Nye naturally lends itself to this visual media format with all of its distinct images. My one regret is that some of the photos are grainy, while others are of fantastic quality, providing an uneven feel to the images. Still, I urge you to check this movie out and let me know what you think!

Day ten - inspiration and truths

2011-04-10T18:48:00.001-07:00

In the world of literature, and poetry in particular, inspiration is omnipresent. The best bits of inspiration are grounded in a truth that aches with reality. These following three quotations fit the bill and are some of the more humbling and simultaneously uplifting ideas about poetry. I have them tacked above my desk and sometimes I find myself lost in the challenges they present.

"Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting." --- Robert Frost

"Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking." --- William Butler Yeats

"A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times." --- Randall Jarrell

Day Nine - Poetry Trivia

2011-04-09T15:15:00.000-07:00

So here's a little break from the tough questions, enthralling poems, and entertaining movies. One of my current favorite time-wasters is the website Sporcle (www.sporcle.com). Do I recommend it? Yes...well, only if you have ample time to spend taking quizzes on a variety of subjects ranging from Jersey Shore Cast Members to Countries of the World. With that in mind, here are links to a few of the poetry based quizzes on Sporcle. The gauntlet has been dropped, the challenge has been laid before you, try them if you dare!

http://www.sporcle.com/games/kcostell/There_once_was_a_man_from_where

http://www.sporcle.com/games/XCBoss/poems

http://www.sporcle.com/games/joyberg/poetrylines1

http://www.sporcle.com/games/pembersep/poets

Day Eight - Speech to the Young, Speech to the Progress-Toward by Gwendolyn Brooks

2011-04-08T18:26:00.000-07:00

SPEECH TO THE YOUNG, SPEECH TO THE PROGRESS-TOWARD

Say to them,

say to the down-keepers,

the sun-slappers,

the self-soilers,

the harmony-hushers,

“Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night .”

You will be right.

For that is the hard home-run.

Live not for battles won.

Live not for the-end-of-the-song.

Live in the along.

---Gwendolyn Brooks

Speech to the Young, Speech to the Progress-Toward by Gwendolyn Brooks

Ms. Brooks was one of those rare poets who you could count on for equal parts style and substance. This unusual, yet highly palatable balance made her poetry easy on the ears and challenging to the mind. Speech to the Young, Speech to the Progress-Toward is just one of those poems. Like some of her other poems, most notably We Real Cool, Brooks establishes a cadence in this poem that propels it forward. This driving rhythm doesn’t come at the cost of a theme. Brooks implores herself to stir the complacent and misguided youth by speaking to the “down-keepers,” “sun-slappers,” “self-soilers,” and “harmony-hushers,” and delivering a firm, yet hopeful message. It doesn’t matter if you are set on oppressing others or you oppress yourself with your laziness, Brooks has words for you. She wants you to know that “even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.” Change is coming, whether you like it or not. She knows the change is coming and this is why she “will be right.” In this instance, her vision of what is to come is “the hard home-run,” it is the winning play, but even if she does not win or hear the message in the final notes of her favorite song, Brooks is not content with settling for a courtside seat to her own life. Like Gwendolyn Brooks, we should all strive to “live in the along.”

Day Seven - Ocean Of Grass by Edward Hirsch

2011-04-07T06:46:00.000-07:00

OCEAN OF GRASS

The ground was holy, but the wind was harsh

and unbroken prairie stretched for hundreds of miles

so that all she could see was an ocean of grass.

Some days she got so lonely she went outside

and nestled among the sheep, for company.

The ground was holy, but the wind was harsh

and prairie fires swept across the plains,

lighting up the country like a vast tinderbox

until all she could see was an ocean of flames.

She went three years without viewing a tree.

When her husband finally took her on a timber run

she called the ground holy and the wind harsh

and got down on her knees and wept inconsolably,

and lived in a sod hut for thirty more years

until the world dissolved in an ocean of grass.

Think of her sometimes when you pace the earth,

our mother, where she was laid to rest.

The ground was holy, but the wind was harsh

for those who drowned in an ocean of grass.

---Edward Hirsch

Lately, I’ve been fond of asking the question ‘What is sacred?’. Each of us is bound to answer this question differently, and on some levels we should. Certainly there will be things that all of us hold dear, but our differences in terms of what we value and place above all else are interesting to explore. The fisherman who holds sacred the still waters of morning when the sun has just woken and begun its rise might not understand why the accountant holds sacred a clean ledger with zero balances, and vice versa. Yes, we hold different things sacred, but we can learn from our differences and better understand others by asking that question about what they hold sacred. Edward Hirsch built a whole poem around that question and a story rolls forth in his modified villanelle Oceans of Grass.

“The ground was holy, but the wind was harsh.” This beginning will serve as one of the key repeating lines in Hirsch’s villanelle rhyme scheme, but it also occupies an important place in the story he tells. The woman in the poem is symbolic of people in general and she identifies her strange, contradictory answer to what she holds sacred. The ground, the earth itself, is holy to her, but an element of that earth, the wind and weather, is destructive. This sets up an inevitable and constant tension that will play out on “unbroken prairie stretched for hundreds of miles,” a disorienting vast landscape that looks like an “ocean of grass.”

I’m fascinated by how Hirsch clips bits and pieces of many storytelling techniques in this poem. He uses a villanelle, a classic poetic form built upon repetition, but modifies it because, I would assume, he places the story above the form. There is not a perfect end rhyming pattern or a middle line rhyming pattern in this poem, but Hirsch’s changes are not glaring because they naturally fit the fable he is telling us. Hirsch also slips in allusions, such as the lonely woman “nestled among the sheep,” that had me vaguely thinking of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, and even The Bible. Beyond biblical and literary allusions, Hirsch organically maintains a reverential tone in the poem toward the earth, the type of respectful mindset that is characterized by early Native Americans. When the woman in the poem “went three years without viewing a tree” I understood how much this affected here, possibly more than other people. When she “got down on her knees and wept inconsolably, / and lived in a sod hut for thirty more years / until the world dissolved in an ocean of grass,” I could feel her loss and I could see the larger picture of what her story means to us today. The woman in this poem and her land of origin might be nameless, but Hirsch cleverly equips the poem with little touches that allows it to connect to many previous, meaningful mediums.

Villanelle’s are known for delivering that final stanza oomph, the masterstroke that stops readers in their tracks and hopefully makes them want to go back and explore the poem again. Hirsch continues this tradition by completely shifting the poem’s focus in its final stanza. Up to this point he’s focused on the woman and her reaction to her “ocean of grass” becoming an “ocean of flames,” but now Hirsch shifts to us, the readers, breaking down that proverbial wall. He instructs us to “Think of her sometimes when you pace the earth, / our mother, where she was laid to rest.” Drawing a line between us and her, Hirsch charts our ancestry for us and forges a connection between her loss and what could potentially become our own loss in the future. Returning to our initial question about what we hold sacred, I’m filled with a bittersweet taste in my mouth by the end of the poem. She “drowned in an ocean of grass,” but this grass was something she held sacred.

Day Six - Live Poetry Readings

2011-04-06T18:53:00.000-07:00

LIVE POETRY READINGS

It wasn't until college that I went to my first proper live poetry reading. By graduate school I was seeking them out and going to two, sometimes three, possibly even four readings of poetry and fiction in a week. (Austin has a reputation for being the live music capital of the world, but I would contend that Boston deserves the moniker of live poetry reading capital of the world!) Live poetry readings come in all shapes and sizes, from interactive poetry slams with hooting and hollering to live readings in a library with a stark, reverential silence after the poet clicks her tongue over the final word. Why should you attend poetry readings? Well, if you've never attended one before then you are missing out on a fresh experience worth crossing off your bucket list. Live readings are in the same family as concerts; just as you attend a concert to be amongst a group of like-minded fans waiting to hear the music performed live by the musicians who created it, the audience at a live poetry reading hears the poet deliver his or her words exactly as they positioned themselves in his or her brain before being transferred to the page. I always find that live readings make my creative juices simmer then boil over; I'm left scurrying home with plenty of my own ideas to write about. If you are skeptical about live poetry and thinking that it might be a collection of beret wearing, finger snapping, goateed beatniks...well it might, but more likely you'll encounter folks like you'll find on Poetry Everywhere's fantastic Youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/PoetryEverywherePTV)

And here's video of part of a live reading just to give you a little taste:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90yxqlVrLP8

Day Five - First Fig - Edna St. Vincent Millay

2011-04-05T17:46:00.000-07:00

FIRST FIG

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends⎯

It gives a lovely light!

---Edna St. Vincent Millay

First Fig by Edna St. Vincent Millay

In elementary school I first encountered this brief and beautiful image driven commentary on how we spend our time here on earth. At that point in time, the childhood version of me didn’t necessarily understand all the complex issues contained in this small wonder. The sounds and cadences in the poem were attractive to my ears and my mind struggled to picture how a candle could burn at both ends and still be in a candlestick holder. Oh, how times change! Years later, I read this poem and turn inward yet again, but now I’m overcome by how I’m spending my candle and the light I’m giving off. In a mere four lines Millay layers the poem with enough depth to literally last a lifetime. Millay’s words are a challenge: are you satisfied with the light you’re giving off?

Day Four - Funeral Blues - W.H. Auden

2011-04-04T18:23:00.000-07:00

FUNERAL BLUES

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

---W.H. Auden

W.H. Auden's Funeral Blues

I’ve been itching to include this poem since I began We Convince By Our Presence over 3 years ago. I find Auden’s command of language, form, and, most startlingly, his emotions, to be rather spellbinding. Part of me hesitated to include this poem so early in the month, and on the heels of another poem about loss, but I couldn’t wait any longer. Funeral Blues is a tour-de-force poem; hundreds of thousands of people have heard this poem recited at funerals, which is rare territory for a poem. In researching for this brief analysis, I purposely did very little research. No, I did not discover the identity of the deceased loved one in the poem. Nor, did I hear the poem sung by Hedli Anderson or any other sopranos who had the poem put to music for them. And I certainly did not find an early first draft of the poem when it was a more satirical, five stanza mocking of the obituary-esque poems for politicians that had become trendy during Auden’s earlier years. Essentially, the only bit of interesting research I did seek out on this poem was about the title. Auden never formally titled this poem; it was often a numbered poem in his notebooks and only took its title in an edited edition of Auden’s poetry a few years after his death. This is interesting to note because without the title, who’s to say if the poem would be nearly as popular at funerals, and as a result who’s to say if the poem would be known worldwide like it is today.

From the beginning, Auden halts life and isolates readers from normalcy with his listing of stilted disturbances. When the clocks are stopped we are separated from time and when the telephones are cut off our ability to communicate is destroyed. The joy we might receive from music is commanded otherwise with “silence the pianos,” and even the dogs are made quiet “with a juicy bone.” In these images, Auden efficiently conveys a sense of immediate dread. He delivers upon this foreboding with the first stanza’s final line: “Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.”

The second stanza troubled me after many readings of the poem. It seemed to illustrate a rather bizarre attachment to possibly unnecessary details in the wake of tragedy and loss. Who wants airplanes sputtering above writing “He is Dead” in the sky above about their loved one? Why would anyone put “crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves?” And what compels us to remember that the policemen working traffic detail for a funeral are wearing “black cotton gloves?” The easy answer is to look at the poem’s form and tone, then assume that Auden needed help in preserving the poem’s rhyme scheme and abrupt tone that commands life to shift from its daily occurrences to a focused grief. The more probable answer is that Auden keeps his images public because they bring grieving into the domain where others are still living their lives.

The third stanza in Funeral Blues might be W.H. Auden’s ultimate stanza in his vast collection of poetry. After filing numerous requests to stop, cut off, let, and put the world on hold, Auden delivers an emotional pay off that is ruthlessly heart wrenching. Permanent and tied to direction, the geography allusion that begins the stanza illustrates just how much he’s lost. Beyond the physical geography and sense of direction lacking in his life, Auden has also had the purpose and routine of “working week” and the “Sunday rest” stripped from him. With place and purpose taken from him, Auden also notices that his communication (“talk” and “song”) and the possibility of closure or fresh starts (“noon” and “midnight”) are equally destroyed. “I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong,” is the chilling declaration that ends the stanza and leaves readers sharing in the limitless depths of Auden’s loss.

How do you follow a stanza like that? Auden proceeds by giving away the world that he previously commanded to stop and grieve along with him. “Stars are not wanted now” and Auden believes it wise to “pack up the moon, dismantle the sun.” The physical world must be “poured away” and “swept up” because “nothing now can ever come to any good.” The final stanza caps the poem by driving home the concept of cleaning up the world when that person who’s gone was your whole world.

Day Three - Why Poetry Matters? Pleasure v.s. Purpose

2011-04-03T07:23:00.000-07:00

This year I'm trying something new on We Convince By Our Presence. Every few days I'll take a break from presenting new poems and essays to share an interesting (and hopefully thought-provoking) question relating to poetry. Starting us off, here's a question I've raised before and continues to be worthy of discussion: Why does poetry matter?

Here are two starkly different arguments for why poetry matters:

"But why should anyone but a poet care about the problems of American poetry? What possible relevance does this archaic art form have to contemporary society? In a better world, poetry would need no justification beyond the sheer splendor of its own existence. As Wallace Stevens once observed, 'The purpose of poetry is to contribute to man's happiness.' Children know this essential truth when they ask to hear their favorite nursery rhymes again and again. Aesthetic pleasure needs no justification, because a life without such pleasure is one not worth living." --- Dana Gioia

"A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep." --- Salman Rushdie

Dana Gioia argues for the sheer pleasure of poetry. He cites children who clamor for their favorite nursery rhymes and the happiness we feel listening to beautiful words. Salman Rushdie takes a more purposeful approach. Rushdie believes that poet's have a responsibility to keep the world around them just and vigilantly aware of notable conflicts and threats. Both of these writers are correct in their assessments, but I think that's the beauty of poetry: it is an all-encompassing art form that allows the silly and the serious to exist together, peacefully, in the same world of poetry.

Day Two - The Peace That So Lovingly Descends - Noelle Kocot

2011-04-02T05:41:00.000-07:00

THE PEACE THAT SO LOVINGLY DESCENDS

"You" have transformed into "my loss."

The nettles in your vanished hair

Restore the absolute truth

Of warring animals without a haven.

I know, I'm as pathetic as a railroad

Without tracks. In June, I eat

The lonesome berries from the branches.

What can I say, except the forecast

Never changes. I sleep without you,

And the letters that you sent

Are now faded into failed lessons

Of an animal that's found a home. This.

---Noelle Kocot

The Peace That So Lovingly Descends by Noelle Kocot

Rarely do I come away satisfied from a poem that disorients me, fills me with a bitter longing, and wraps me in the tattered remains of grief. Noelle Kocot’s The Peace That So Lovingly Descends has a tongue-in-cheek title that ironically juxtaposes with a poem that presents the domestication of tormented loss. I can’t put my finger on it, but something about this poem reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art. Kocot, who slips in a line from Bishop as an epigraph to another of her poems, might like this comparison. Yes, both poems focus on loss, but after that blatant similarity there’s little else I can concretely produce to link the two poems together. Even so, I feel an evolutionary poetic link between them, almost as if the emotional realm of loss is prone to modernity on the surface just like everything else, but it’s core principles remain the same.

So why is this poem a new favorite of mine? An easy answer would be the simile “I’m as pathetic as a railroad / Without tracks.” That is a magnificent piece of writing and upon closer examination of some of Kocot’s other poems, she is a master craftswoman of similes and metaphors. But it’s just a single simile? Okay, okay, I hear you and I understand you want more. Notice the usage of quotation marks in the first line of the poem. Kocot takes a risk to use the equivalent of “air quotes” to smash the readers upside the head with a crucial point: a loved one is gone. And as if that isn’t enough, Kocot’s speaker has felt the effects of overwhelming grief, reverting to a state of primordial savagery. We read of “warring animals without a haven” and when she recalls letters the loved and lost one sent they are “failed lessons / Of an animal that’s found a home.” Heck, she even admits “I eat / The lonesome berries from the branches.”

Upon second thought, there is a key difference between the speaker in Kocot’s poem and the speaker in Bishop’s One Art. Kocot’s speaker has resigned herself to being “pathetic as a railroad / Without tracks.” She knows that “the forecast / Never changes” and the home she’s made for herself in her grief and longing is confirmed by the lonely surrender of a one word final line: “This.” The brief glimpse of life presented in the poem is hers, she doesn’t need coaxing to accept it. This is the point of divergence with One Art, because Bishop’s speaker is guarded and doesn’t mention the lost loved one until her final stanza. It’s in this final stanza that she must urge herself onward: “It’s evident / the art of losing’s not too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.” Whereas Kocot’s speaker has accepted her loss in a far from lovingly descending state of peace, Bishop’s speaker is at odds with herself and the bravado required to brush off the loss of true love as mere skill to be mastered. In both cases, we as readers, are fortunate to have poetry that stretches loss far beyond railroads without tracks.

Day One - Video of "Numbers" Mary Cornish

2011-04-01T04:00:00.000-07:00

"Poetry is the alchemy which teaches us to convert ordinary materials into gold." --- Anais Nin

Welcome to National Poetry Month 2011! We have a fun journey ahead of us this month with poetry in many forms. For the next thirty days I'll post quotations, web links, movies, and, of course, poems. In this celebration of the written word I hope you'll find one or two pieces that engage you and make a home in your mind, body, and soul. If we allow ourselves to be open to all art (especially poetry), we'll see the ordinary materials in our lives that we pass by everyday revitalized with a curious golden beauty.

The first poem I featured on We Convince By Our Presence three years ago was Numbers by Mary Cornish. I thought it would be fitting to start this year's incarnation of WCBOP with a multimedia version of the same poem. Check out this movie I made and I think you'll see how poetry can blend very nicely with other media forms.

Check it out!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNOqNNK0K9k

April is almost upon us...BRING ON THE POETRY!!!

2011-03-23T19:41:00.000-07:00

Hi Everyone,

We are only a week away from the start of National Poetry Month. Are you excited? You should be. I hope you'll be checking in with me frequently over the month of April. One thing that you'll notice is that many of my essays will be on the shorter side this year; in fact, they might be single paragraphs. I'm also planning to include a few movies I've made of some favorite poems, both old and new. There's a reason for these changes. With my job and my pursuit of a second graduate degree, time is quite limited. I contemplated placing We Convince By Our Presence on a one year hiatus and coming back refreshed and hopefully with more free time next year. Instead, I opted for briefer essays, but a new feature of some movie versions of favorite poems. A new feature will be posted on the blog daily, with new essays and movies posted every other day.

I look forward to you joining me on a wonderful, month-long journey through some excellent poems.

All the best,

Matt

Happy Holidays!!!

2010-12-18T11:58:00.000-08:00

The holiday season is upon us and winter is in full swing here in the Washington D.C. area. For some reason I've had a keen eye towards differences lately. It seems every day that we discover more differences in our world. We find differences in the way we think, learn, celebrate, dance, exercise, compete, and eat. Yes, human beings are strange creatures, but our uniqueness is one of the things to love about us. Even amongst our differences, there is one common thread that I think all people could agree on: peace. We all could use peace in our lives and around the world. As we move toward Christmas, I wanted to wish everyone a joyous and peaceful holiday season (no matter what you personally celebrate!). Here's a brief movie featuring Alfred Lord Tennyson's classic Christmas poem Voices In The Mist. You can also check it out on my youtube channel at:

No tricks, just a little treat...

2010-10-17T07:44:00.000-07:00

Yes, we are still months away from National Poetry Month and the start of my fourth year of blogposts, but in the interim I wanted to share something that I thought everyone would enjoy. In a graduate course that I'm currently taking we had an assignment to create a video to use in the classroom. The video I came up with brings to life Gary Soto's poem Oranges, which I wrote about in the first year of this blog. Check this video out! I hope to make more of them to post here (assuming I have time to make them!). Let me know what you think.

Let Evening Come --- Jane Kenyon

2010-04-29T20:08:00.000-07:00

LET EVENING COME

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

--- Jane Kenyon

Jane Kenyon's Let Evening Come:

A long time ago I settled upon this poem to end the third year of my National Poetry Month Blog. It is the type of poem that you read and cannot forget. The images enter your brain and suddenly the natural world is inside of you. The light, the cricket, the moon, the fox, the wind, the bottle and the oats, and the evening---all of it comes together to deliver a simple truth: there is beauty in this life of ours and even though life will certainly end the beauty will remain with us, just in another form, in the comfort of faith, family, and friends. I read an interview with Jane Kenyon pertaining to this poem. A woman who battled the demons of depression, Kenyon has written some of the most startling and honest verse about the pain and paralysis of mental illness. This poem stands in contrast to her others, working as a harbinger of hope and goodness amidst the many horrors we must endure. As Kenyon said in the aforementioned interview, "How, when there could have been nothing, does it happen that there is love, kindness, and beauty?" I honestly don't know, but thankfully we have poets like Jane Kenyon to explore this question for us.

As the poem starts it is made clear to the audience that this is a poem about the balance of what is coming next and what is happening right now. The conflict between the present and future is fascinating to me: the inherent lineage between what you do now and what you will do next. "Let the light of late afternoon / shine through chinks in the barn" is an opening that serves many purposes. Utilizing a command is a very distinct way to set the poem's tone. In the images, we notice that afternoon is slipping off toward night because it is late, but also we can see it tangibly in how the light is escaping through rough spots in the barn. The metaphor of an aged body of a person who's light---I mean life---is fading is unavoidable. Are we to read something extra into the contrast of the light "moving / up the bales as the sun moves down"?

Kenyon continues the commands, this time advising the cricket to find its call. She compares the cricket to a "woman tak(ing) up her needles / and her yarn." Again we have a comparison that evokes age, but also evokes an earnestness and purposefulness. While knitting might be associated with old woman, the fruits of their labor---hats, scarves, gloves, and other items---serve important purposes to warmth and preservation in cold seasons. The second stanza ends with the first appearance of a refrain that drives the poem and will predictably become the final line of the poem: "let evening come."

We are building to the arrival of evening, just as a well-lived life builds to its end. But the essence isn't in the beginning or the ending, as cliched as it may sound the essence of life is in the living. It is in the dew, but more so in the hoe being used to produce and labor, rather than being "abandoned / in long grass." It is in the stars and moon's "silver horn" because there should be a certain time in all of our lives where night does not signal a stiff ending to our day, but rather a period of discovery and activity. But in this instance, Kenyon uses the stars and the moon as further signals that the close of day is also the close of life's rhythms and essential movements. "Let the fox go back to its sandy den. / Let the wind die down. Let the shed / go black inside. Let evening come." The list is a progression of life, in its many forms, taking natural paths towards closure. Even when closure has occurred in one form, there are other objects and elements of like that remain. Kenyon illustrates this beautifully in the penultimate stanza. For the bottle, useless after its liquid is drunk; for the scoop, useless without a hand to operate it; for the air soon to be expelled from the lungs, these are the items most lonely and prone to loss, still she urges them to "let evening come." But why does Kenyon do this?

Most people are afraid of death, they just choose not to talk about it. I can respect that. Morbid conversations about death are not particularly endearing and even amongst the closest of friends it is a topic that is likely to induce some level of unease and discomfort. What I've come to discover is that while most people are afraid of death, they are more afraid of the unknown and of losing control, the things that death ultimately represents. The unknown is only frightening if you allow your mind and soul to stray from your faith and belief in fellow human beings, in a sublime sense of goodness and balance in the universe, and/or in a higher power. And what is there to fear about losing control, in fact I would argue that we are often at our best when we do not hold total control over a situation. Jane Kenyon's answer and her testament to faith is present in the poem's final stanza: "Let it come, as it will, and don't / be afraid. God does not leave us / comfortless, so let evening come."

There's a certain magic to the fact that many people near death can hold on just long enough to say final goodbyes, as if they have a minuscule amount of control over their mortality, enough to hold out for the little things that are most important to them. Similarly, I find the presages of the gravely ill as to when they will die to be shocking in their accuracy. In our age and experiences we come to know the rhythms of our bodies, just as well as the shortcomings that undo us. We come to see, feel, and hear the world around us, all of it. Some may say we come to know these vital details when all is lost already, when it's far too late for practical use. Jane Kenyon shows us this is not what we should be concerning ourselves with; we should let go and "let evening come" because "God does not leave us / comfortless." I take great comfort in this poem and I hope you do as well.

Nothing Twice - Wislawa Szymborska

2010-04-27T20:38:00.000-07:00

Nothing Twice

Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.

Even if there is no one dumber,
if you're the planet's biggest dunce,
you can't repeat the class in summer:
this course is only offered once.

No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way,
with precisely the same kisses.

One day, perhaps some idle tongue
mentions your name by accident:
I feel as if a rose were flung
into the room, all hue and scent.

The next day, though you're here with me,
I can't help looking at the clock:
A rose? A rose? What could that be?
Is it a flower or a rock?

Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It's in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow.

With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we're different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.

----Wislawa Szymborska
Translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak

I first encountered this poem in graduate school when I was studying Eastern European poets, specifically Polish poets. Wislawa Szymborska stood out among her male counterparts. Her talent was unmistakable, but the hopefulness and playfulness in her language was what differentiated her from other poets from Eastern Europe. Nothing Twice is a sterling example of Szymborska's spirit as translated by the equally talented Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak. We know that there is no magic pause button when it comes to life; we can't rewind the good moments and fast forward through the tragedies and atrocities. We live and life is unforgiving, for better or worse. But in its exactness, life has the unique partner of memory. We remember what we did in the past when we encountered a similar situation and hopefully we adjust our behavior and expectations accordingly. Still, memory can be useless, for example when we step outside of our comfort zones to experience new things. There is an exhilaration that comes with the sense of fear you feel when experiencing something new, mostly because you are letting go. Not in control, you rely on the world around you and are open to all it has to offer. In Nothing Twice, Szymborska is urging us onward to days of meaning and worth, rather than days that end leaving us wondering where they went.

"Nothing can ever happen twice." The poem begins with this statement, a statement so strong that we can do little more accept it as fact. Deja vu aside, Szymborska is spot on with her initial point and she follows it with this related analysis: "In consequence, the sorry fact is / that we arrive here improvised / and leave without the chance to practice." The tone, at this point, is matter-of-fact and a little disappointed by the merciless nature of life. I'm reminded of a line I've referenced a few times in this blog, even once earlier this month: If only I knew now what I knew back then…It is a great philosophical dilemma—are we meant to only possess essential knowledge after the moment it could have been most useful to us? Who knows, and more importantly is that even the question we should be asking? Without a lively and adventurous spirit we'll lack those experiences anyways, which is why Szymborska takes a different, more humorous approach to drive home the same point as before in the second stanza. "Even if there is no one dumber, / if you're the planet's biggest dunce, / you can't repeat the class in summer: / this course is only offered once." I love how seamless the rhyme scheme and tone weave together to infuse humor into the poem. You can't help but laugh when you read those lines and picture yourself wearing the dunce cap.

The poem begins a shift from the conceptual to the concrete in the third stanza with the mention of specific kisses. Sure, "No day copies yesterday" is a valid and valuable line, but for the line and idea behind it to have the greatest impact an individualized emotion connection needs to be established. By inserting the word "precisely" in front of kisses, Szymborska dares you to flip through your catalogue of kisses and pull out some of those fun, sensual, surprising, and even embarrassing ones. These are the moments that have made you who you are today, because no two were "precisely" alike you begin to see the parallel that she is attempting to convey about days. If the kiss isn't enough, Szymborska presents the example of an "idle tongue" that "mentions your name by accident." Invoking a lost love, the poet is further casting out her nets to yank in the readers by their hearts. The mere accidental mention of her love's name fills her with the beauty of a rose, "all hue and scent." Even when the love is present with her in the next stanza, the poet moves from the wondrous rose to the tireless, painful ticking of the clock. It's a jarring shift, but highly effective in reminding us that time is unrelenting and carries on with the same "precision" that we earlier saw attached to the far more attractive feature of kisses.

In the final two stanzas Szymborska returns to the style and tone that made the beginning of the poem so strong. She supplies a rhetorical question about fear of time, which fits nicely on the heels of the shift of the previous stanza. Szymborska also provides a quasi rhetorical answer: "It's in its nature not to stay: / Today is always gone tomorrow." Yes, that is true, but a large part of me feels I knew that already, in fact I feel like Szymborska told me that already. At this point in the poem, I need a stronger ending; thank goodness there is one stanza left! Up to this point most of the poem has focused on the nature of time and our reaction to it, showing how no two days are the same so we must live them fully. This is a great message, but to reiterate this again would steer the poem into a predictable zone that the poem wouldn't be able to recover from. Instead of cruising, Szymborska opts for the bumpy path and this change-of-direction works like a charm. We are the ones on display in the final stanza, our nature is examined and the ultimate similarity is revealed: just as each day, each moment is different than the next, we, too, possess this same level of uniqueness. I am unlike any other human being who has ever existed, who currently exists, and who will ever exist. When you take this individuality and combine it with the same individuality of days in our lives then you see the pristine opportunities we have before us in pretty much every moment we are alive. It's a shame we waste so many of these moments with the stupid fallacy of operating under what others think of us.

Hatred - Gwendolyn Bennett

2010-04-25T22:29:00.000-07:00

HATRED

I shall hate you
Like a dart of singing steel
Shot through still air
At even-tide,
Or solemnly
As pines are sober
When they stand etched
Against the sky.
Hating you shall be a game
Played with cool hands
And slim fingers.
Your heart will yearn
For the lonely splendor
Of the pine tree
While rekindled fires
In my eyes
Shall wound you like swift arrows.
Memory will lay its hands
Upon your breast
And you will understand
My hatred.

---Gwendolyn Bennett

Gwendolyn Bennett's Hatred:

With all the poems I've featured that centered on love, you had to expect I would eventually balance them out with a poem or two about something not as pleasant. I don't enjoy turning toward pessimistic and negative topics, but such detours are sometimes refreshing, and other times they are downright necessary. If you're asking why hatred or anger are necessary, then, by all means, let me explain why. Think for a moment of the man who bottles up his anger, never letting even the smallest smidgen of disapproval or disgust seep from his tightly controlled body. Or consider the woman who puts on a happy face every day, even though her daily life is plagued by inequities, degradations, and abuse. Believe me, I could provide you a long list of examples, but that's not what's important. We all face moments that prove how severely unfair life (and the people in our lives) can be. To deny that these moments exist is wrong, just as it is wrong to deny that moments of sheer brilliance and love exist. In fact, a lifetime of denial only clears the way for a monumental, and sometimes deadly, explosion. The raw emotions contained in anger and, yes, hatred are direct relatives to the similarly powerful emotions that accompany love. It goes without saying that love and hate are intertwined, but Gwendolyn Bennett offers today's poem as further proof.

"I shall hate you / Like a dart of singing steel / Shot through still air / At even tide." Never has hatred been more poetic and beautiful than in those initial lines from Gwendolyn Bennett's poem Hatred. Working against our expectations, Bennett eschews our typical ideas about hatred being a snarling, unrefined emotion. Sure, the venom is still present in abundance, but Bennett presents a notion of hatred that is polished and premeditated. The dart she compares her hatred to is made of "singing steel" rather than rugged, rough metal. When the dart is "Shot through still air / At even-tide" the poet has, indirectly, become a calculated sniper with her hatred, aiming and firing away at the "you" character the poem is addressed to. Still, this represents just one incarnation of her hatred; she has more in her repertoire than deadly force. Her hatred will also be doled out "solemnly / As pines are sober / When they stand etched / Against the sky." For some the violent hatred might be the most frightening, but for others this stoic hatred that resolves to grow regardless of the elements around it is far more terrifying. This second hatred is resolved and thought-out in a manner that indicates a change-of-mind is nearly impossible.

Just when I said it was impossible for Bennett to reverse her hatred for the "you" character this poem is addressed to, she threads the needle and draws the first stitch towards forgiveness when she asserts that "Hating you shall be a game / Played with cool hands / And slim fingers." Her joy in hating this person is actually, I believe, a good sign. That she can derive some happiness from this activity is indicative of the depth of her emotional connection with the person…or it's indicative of how horribly she was wronged by the person, which, come to think of it, would be a very bad sign for any chance of forgiveness. This indecisiveness is a nutshell example of why this poem is excellently constructed, and a further example of the poem's brilliance is on display when Bennett reasserts her dominance: "Your heart will yearn / For the lonely splendor / Of the pine tree / While rekindled fires / In my eyes / Shall wound you like swift arrows." She will decide how this hatred will arrive upon him and what brand of hatred it will be. You can bet that Bennett will opt for the most painful and lingering form of hatred.

If you're like me then by this point in the poem you were chomping at the bit to find out what it was that this person did to Bennett. I promise I'm not a gossip hound, but with these tour-de-force descriptions of hatred it's hard not to wonder what generated them. Bennett employs a technique common in come of the best horror and suspense films ever made: she doesn't show us the root of her hatred, instead offering just enough to let our imaginations run ferociously wild. "Memory will lay its hands / Upon your breast / And you will understand / My hatred." These lines essentially say "You know what you did," and while some readers may view this as a cheap ending, I'm not one of those readers. It is a private ending to a very public poem, but by turning inward Bennett opens the poem back up to her audience. We all have ghosts traveling with us from past indiscretions we'd rather forget. These reminders can be suppressed, but they always find a way to break free, whether it is a familiar scent from that moment or a word that was spoken that day. Our present is not immune to our past; if we were wrong, someone still possesses a memory of it, even if you are the one with the memory, even if you are the one unable to forgive…yourself.

I Walked Past A House Where I Lived Once - Yehuda Amichai

2010-04-23T07:08:00.001-07:00

I WALKED PAST A HOUSE WHERE I LIVED ONCE

I walked past a house where I lived once:
a man and a woman are still together in the whispers there.
Many years have passed with the quiet hum
of the staircase bulb going on
and off and on again.

The keyholes are like little wounds
where all the blood seeped out. And inside,
people pale as death.

I want to stand once again as I did
holding my first love all night long in the doorway.
When we left at dawn, the house
began to fall apart and since then the city and since then
the whole world.

I want to be filled with longing again
till dark burn marks show on my skin.

I want to be written again
in the Book of Life, to be written every single day
till the writing hand hurts.

---Yehuda Amichai

I could mention the hippocampus and other parts of the limbic system. I could drone on about the importance of the cerebral cortex. Heck, I could even diagram how a memory is formed and retained within your brain. It would be nice to understand why we fixate on certain memories, while others rush away like rain water toward a sewer. Even a cursory understanding of the biology and psychology behind memory won't better help us understand Yehuda Amichai's poem "I Walked Past A House Where I Lived Once." No, this poem is most accessible to those of us who have lived, lost, and live with the memories of what we once had. The loss could be as simple as a favorite pair of shoes that were completely worn down and needed to be tossed out. The loss could be as grand as a person, a loved one you couldn't imagine life without. In the case of this poem, Amichai's loss is a composite of many things he no longer has, but it all starts with his house.

"I walked past a house where I lived once: / a man and a woman are still together in the whispers there." Am I the only one who thinks that is a haunting start for a poem? And the mystery is not wasted on me; in the poet's former residence the figures could be memories of him and his lover, or possibly his parents, or maybe they are two random strangers living in this intimate space that was once his. I often wonder about the houses I grew up in as a child. How did the families that came after mine see the house? Did they treat it the same way we did? Decorate it differently? Clean it regularly? Some of the questions I ask are foolish, probably because when viewed together they appear to refer to the house as if it is alive. Leaving a house behind for a new location, there is the undeniable feeling that your family is lessened and that something or someone is missing, a void that is only slightly filled by the new house. Amichai offers a clever metaphor of "staircase bulb going on / and off and on again" to demonstrate the emotional tension that comes with moving. The pain is reflected in the physical edifices of the house itself: "The keyholes are like little wounds / where all the blood seeped out." Certainly there is a loss in leaving a place and sometimes an even greater emotional strain in having to start over somewhere new.

While losing a house can be traumatic, there seems to be no greater trauma than losing a person from your life. When a friend, family member, or lover disappears from your life the pain is long-lasting and while its intensity might decrease over time it will never completely be washed from your consciousness. The sight of his old house has led Amichai back to memories of his earliest love: "I want to stand once again as I did / holding my first love all night long in the doorway." Amichai wants to return to a simpler, purer time in his life. He wants to recapture the hopefulness and optimism his younger, more naive self once had. I can't blame him one bit because I know I have felt the same way. When you realize you're mortal and moving past moments in your life that were colored with seminal greatness you want to hit the rewind button and experience them all over again. This desire has to be tied somewhat to the fear that life is passing you by and that you might not have many moments left like the instances of early love Amichai wrote about in this poem. In Amichai's case, once the moment ends that era of his life slams to a close in a dramatic fashion: "When we left at dawn, the house / began to fall apart and since then the city and since then / the whole world." He has tied his well-being in the present to a single night of youthful reverie, asserting that in leaving the house that one night everything in his life, including the house, began to rot before his eyes.

As the poem moves toward its conclusion I find it interesting that Amichai starts his final three stanzas with the phrase "I want." This recurring beginning acts as a familiar, prayer-like chant as Amichai details his physical and emotional desires. The "I want" constructs could be read as forceful demands and a valid case could be made for this, but I would argue that they are battered, desperate pleas. "I want to be filled with longing again / till dark burn marks show on my skin" are the words of a man who already has been burned and bruised, and if he's going to feel that way then he wants the payoff that comes with it. "I want to be written again / in the Book of Life, to be written every single day / till the writing hand hurts" are lines that acknowledge the imperfections of love and memory, and yet Amichai wants those bittersweet moments of life to return to him. Momentum clearly builds as the poem reaches its end and the momentum seems to point to one thing: Yehuda Amichai has had enough of his past memories, he wants to return to making them in the present.

After Years --- Ted Kooser

2010-04-21T04:18:00.000-07:00

AFTER YEARS

Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
fell in the Cumberlands, holding only
a handful of leaves, and an old woman
scattering corn to her chickens looked up
for an instant. At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer's retina
as he stood in the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell.

---Ted Kooser

Ted Kooser's After Years

Some people prefer testing attitude with the question 'is the glass half empty or half full,' but I think the moments when we feel curious about our place in the vast, perpetually changing universe are an even better test. The only problem with this alternate gauge of perspective is that these moments are, by nature, spontaneous; a contrived moment of introspection will not tell us anything about ourselves. I don't need someone telling me I'm strange, or destined for greatness, or utterly purposeless; believe me, I will discover these things on my own. In fact, it's imperative that I discover them on my own, just as Ted Kooser does in his perfectly bittersweet poem After Years.

The speaker in Ted's poem stumbles into one of those moments where an internal pause button is pressed on the giant remote control inside of him. He sees a former lover "from a distance" and it literally stops him cold in his tracks. Ironically, while he is physically still, his mind hums along at warp speed through his own personal ecosystem created within his memories. Upon seeing her, Kooser sharply observes "the glittering face of a glacier / slid into the sea." One random near rendezvous seems responsible for, or at the very least connected to, the slow dissolution of the natural world. It's funny how the coming together of man and woman is linked to the separation of nature. Kooser takes this idea further: "An ancient oak / fell in the Cumberlands, holding only / a handful of leaves." At this point it appears the poem is all bitter and no sweet. I know what you're saying to yourself: It has to get better, right?

If you answered maybe to that preceding question then kudos to you my friend. There is no guarantee that this poem will turn sappy and earn itself a spot on the cork board above some lovestruck sophomore's desk. That uncertainty, which is embedded in the natural world and in our dormant human connections, is the central vein of Kooser's poem. It is precisely why "an old woman / scattering corn to her chickens / looked up for an instant," and we are not surprised by this. We accept the woman into the poem because this is one of those spontaneous moments of introspection brought on by a severe case of the what-could-have-beens. Now we may not be surprised by the old woman, but what she sees is rather interesting. Her view propels us into the final third of this poem and constructs an extended metaphor that brilliantly ties a knot with the poem's beginning.

"At the other side / of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times / the size of our own sun exploded / and vanished." Surely this is a big deal. A star sizably larger than our own sun, which is central to our existence, has not only exploded, but it completely vanished. Keep in mind that this colossal event was triggered by the chance encounter between Kooser and his former lover at the poem's start. Strangely enough, it is only a partial connection because it's not even acknowledged that the woman saw Ted. In fact, it's implied that she didn't notice him at all. For a star to blow to smithereens because of this near reunion, well, there must be some serious unrequited love and simmering passion going on. This is the point in the poem where we get to the test on a person's perspective. Let's push on to the poem's end: the star has exploded, "leaving a small green spot / on the astronomer's retina." So what does that have to do with testing to see if you're an optimist or a pessimist? Be patient, let's look at the final lines that follow and check out how Kooser brilliantly twists the poem back to its beginning roots, namely his long held love for the woman he views from a distance. The star's explosion, caused by Kooser's chance viewing of his former love, is viewed by an astronomer who Kooser tells us resides in "the great open dome / of my heart with no one to tell." Some (mostly snooty) people scoff at poem's that use hearts, either the word or the image. Overtly sentimental words or images should never be banned from poems, but they should be used carefully and creatively as Kooser does in this poem's ending. The heart—his heart—is the constant that ties this ending to the poem's other parts. All of these happenings, from the glaciers to the Cumberlands, have occurred within the world of his heart, contributing a depth that is shocking and powerful. Reading this poem, I identify a longing for a lost love that others might view as sad, but I see it is a moment that reminds us of the rare fate of being human.

Poem 1246 - Rumi

2010-04-19T18:25:00.000-07:00

1246

The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along.

---Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)

Trust me, featuring a five line poem in my blog is not me being lazy or taking a day off, especially when the poem is laced with emotion as this gem from Rumi, by way of Coleman Barks, certainly is. Coleman Barks is a unique figure in the world of poetry. He has devoted most of his writing life to translating Rumi, an ancient Persian mystic and master teacher. You might find it interesting to know that many of Rumi's "poems" are lines that he spoke in his teachings. That's probably why you can't read a Rumi poem without finding a lesson. With some poets that is a recipe for disaster, but in Coleman Barks' careful and caring hands Rumi appears fresh and fulfilled in his reincarnation in the English language.

What is it about this tiny poem that makes it one of my favorites? Well, there is something to be said for poems that you can memorize. Stored away in the brain, a poem can come in handy in a variety of situations: wedding toast, moment of reflection, perhaps in a stressful situation when you need to gain back your nerves. Yes, it's far easier to memorize a five line poem than the Odyssey, but a poem's length is not directly relative to its impact upon the reader. This poem, #1246, contains the intensity, sweetness and brevity of a Hershey Kiss. For a guy who gave up chocolate for Lent this year, let me tell you how powerful a single Hershey Kiss can be! This poem is all about love, as are so many of the poems this blog has looked at over the years. Still, this poem displays a tone that is calm, yet in complete control of love. Is this strange to anyone else? Along with its polar opposite of hate, love is a perennially unbridled and energetic force. With this poem Rumi seems to have tamed love, but how did he do it?

"The minute I heard my first love story," is an initial line that invites us to join Rumi in his past with a situation we all share and know well. Reading that line, we think of our own introduction to love stories and happily ever afters. They provide us with a set of rules and practices that must be followed in order to secure a lasting, lifelong love. Without question, we accept this quest for love as a path natural as life itself. In hearing his first love story, Rumi "started looking for you." Of course he did, this is exactly what the love story requires and expects, but the next part of the line is surprising: "not knowing / how blind that was." In a quick twist Rumi goes from a naive love-sick boy to a mature love-ready man. He doesn't share the road that led him to this transformation, but he does provide the truth that he acquired along the way: "Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. / They're in each other all along." This idea radiates with a beauty and confidence all its own. The ability to love another is inside each of us developing with time and experience and it flows forth when an opportunity to love presents itself. Coincidentally, the features you will love in another are already in your own character. When someone mentions "sparks" in a romance it is often an indescribable, yet overwhelming rush of feelings. Sparks come from the answers Rumi and Barks deliver in the final two lines of this joyous poem. They are inside us and inside the person we love. They are not easily, if ever, lost. As you remember the origins of love, take this poem with you in memory, it will serve you well.

December At Yase --- Gary Snyder

2010-04-17T13:31:00.000-07:00

DECEMBER AT YASE

You said, that October,
In the tall dry grass by the orchard
When you chose to be free,
"Again someday, maybe ten years."

After college I saw you
One time. You were strange.
And I was obsessed with a plan.

Now ten years and more have
Gone by: I've always known
where you were—
I might have gone to you
Hoping to win your love back.
You still are single.

I didn't.
I thought I must make it alone. I
Have done that.

Only in dream, like this dawn,
Does the grave, awed intensity
Of our young love
Return to my mind, to my flesh.

We had what the others
All crave and seek for;
We left it behind at nineteen.

I feel ancient, as though I had
Lived many lives.

And may never now know
If I am a fool
Or have done what my
karma demands.

---Gary Snyder

Recently I was speaking at a conference and I heard one of the fellow speakers mention that he didn't believe in fate or destiny. I'm passing this example along not to be critical of my colleague's beliefs, but to provide a beginning point for an interesting philosophical discussion. Are we fated or destined for certain things in our lives? Where we work, where we live, and who we love---are these all predetermined? If so, then there are two distinctly different outlooks. First, there is great comfort in knowing that no matter what you do or how you do it fate will play a role in your life. If it is meant to be it will be. Others look at this revelation and shudder with fear. With everything being predetermined, why should I even bother living? It's not like anything I do will make a difference anyways. If fate does not exist there is an equally contentious argument that comes into play. The same people who were excited by the prospect of fate are now left disappointed and feeling an empty hopelessness. Those who were terrified by the prospect of fate making their daily lives pointless are relieved to know that they have free will to make decisions without any cosmic interference. I'm not sure it's fair to summarize this complex argument into generalizations, but I see it as the romantic idealist versus the pragmatic realist. When I read and reread Gary Snyder's poem December At Yase I'm overcome by the mystery of fate. What might have been right at one point in life could be completely wrong at another point. You hear it so often, the timing just wasn't right. For such a fickle and interconnected thing, timing, or fate, can exert the ultimate influence over the most essential elements of our lives.

Snyder begins the poem with a breakup scene. It is not overly contentious or emotional, rather he is stoic in his analysis and description, probably because he's had years to think about it and hash through his feelings. The girl's decision is described as "deciding to be free" and she offers the consolation of "Again someday, maybe in ten years." Inherently human beings are selfish so asking for a decade of patience when it comes to love is ridiculous. It's her attempt at softening the blow when in reality it only does more damage by stoking a tiny slice of hope that the poet holds onto. Although he doesn't bluntly say it, the poet clings to the belief that if the timing is right and they are fated to be together that it will happen. But when they run into each other down the line there is no spark, no remnants of what they once had. "After college I saw you / One time. You were strange. / And I was obsessed with a plan." That's certainly the opposite of a pleasant reunion, showing how time, space and life experiences can drastically change people. The most damning evidence that this young love will never be rekindled comes in the following stanza. Snyder points out that the ten year sentence she imposed upon him has expired and while he "might have gone to you / Hoping to win your love back. / You are still single." What is stopping him? She is not attached or married and they once had an intimate connection, a connection that still haunts him today. Could it be his pride? Could he be afraid? Snyder gives us a half answer: "I thought I must make it alone. I / Have done that."

The language in this poem is stripped down even though the emotions being explored are complex and powerful. Notice how the diction and syntax are often simple, but occasionally a line break with pop up that throws us for a loop. Snyder's hard enjambments at the beginning of the second and third stanzas allow the lines to drop into the next, mirroring the dropping feeling that comes with remembering a lost love. This technique is cleverly executed, as is the enjambment on the answering line mentioned in the previous paragraph. When Snyder tells us why he hasn't made the courageous motion to win her back he is focused on himself and this is particularly apparent in his line break: "I thought I must make it alone. I / Have done that." It once was about them, but at some point he turned inward and it became about him, about the "I" instead of the "you" or the "we." Maybe his fate was to live on in the shadow of what could have been. Perhaps "the grave, awed intensity / Of our young love" is fueling and pushing him. Or it could be that all that he had and "left behind at nineteen" is a constant tormentor. Snyder feels "ancient" and is ultimately unsure if the path he's following is the right one. This isn't a poem that unravels the complex riddle of fate and destiny, but in the life experiences the poem reveals we gain a better understanding of how individuals react when faced with fateful challenges. Snyder ends the poem with a question of fate, wondering if he is "a fool / Or (has he) done what my / karma demands." I'm not sure Synder expects an answer...at least in this life.

Sadiq --- Brian Turner

2010-04-15T19:06:00.000-07:00

SADIQ

“It is a condition of wisdom in the archer to be patient because when the arrow leaves the bow, it returns no more.” ---SA’DI

It should make you shake and sweat,
nightmare you, strand you in a desert
of irrevocable desolation, the consequences
seared into the vein, no matter what adrenaline
feeds the muscle its courage, no matter
what god shines down on you, no matter
what crackling pain and anger
you carry in your fists, my friend,
it should break your heart to kill.

Brian Turner’s Sadiq

A soldier named James recently came to my office with questions about pursuing a college education. He was in his early twenties with the standard uniform of fatigues and a crew cut. A gear pack the size of a small child was propped against his feet and shins as we sat and talked. In the course of our conversation James explained that he had dropped out of high school and joined the national guard. With a wife and two children, James had his GED but now wanted to get a college degree to provide his family with a better life, or at least one where he would be around. Having just returned from a tour in Afghanistan, James recalled multiple shrapnel and bullet wounds, children strapped with bombs, and an ambush that left him carrying his dead Captain from the ruble of their humvee after it exploded. It was tough for James to describe these events, not just because of the emotional depths they stirred, but also because one of his injuries included a gunshot to the head that had left him with a severely debilitating stutter. Although he suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, James has already been told that he’ll be heading back on another tour in October. Additionally, James must pay for his own counseling and even had to pay for the pints of blood he received from the Red Cross after one of his most severe injuries. There’s no way around it: James deserves more from his country, he deserves more from this world.

There are many others like James on all sides of conflicts throughout the globe. Brian Turner, the poet behind today’s powerful piece Sadiq, like James, was a member of the United States Army. Spending time in Iraq, Turner experienced the gruesome and unforgettable horrors of combat as an infantry team leader. In his groundbreaking collection Here, Bullet, Turner documents and dissects the images and emotions of war. As I read this collection I was struck by the strange mixture of beautiful and visceral images. Turner's poems are characterized by a merciless tone that reverberates and thumps like rapidly approaching air strikes. With the heyday of the 24 hour news cycle, the distance between the safe confines of one’s home and the battlegrounds of Afghanistan and Iraq have shrunk dramatically. Technology enables us to experience war up close, still Turner’s poetry does far more for me than anything I’ve ever watched on CNN. He pauses to find beauty beside pain, a subtle reminder of how senseless war can be. Yes, there are times when fighting is the only true option; we’ve seen numerous moments throughout history when a moral cause could not reach fruition without bloodshed. We’ve also looked back at conflicts and noticed the horrifying combination of an overwhelming loss of life with no just purpose. If I had it my way I’d require all fresh recruits entering basic training to read Brian Turner’s poem Sadiq, not to discourage them from their chosen path but to reinforce the gravity and fragility of what lies ahead for them.

Largely a set of fierce declarations, Sadiq works because Turner is relentless in his honesty. “It should make you shake and sweat, / nightmare you.” If that first line and a half doesn’t disturb and intrigue you I don’t know what will. The startling beginning could have easily been wasted if the poem veered toward a predictable and drawn out path, but Turner slams forward with his intensely personal instructions. The poem forges past “consequences / seared into the vein” (although the ultimate consequences await in the poem’s ending) to examine the reasons we kill each other, ultimately deciding any rationale is insufficient for such an act. If the thrill is your motive, this is quickly rebuked by “no matter what adrenaline / feeds the muscle its courage.” Maybe you’re fighting for a righteous cause, a religious conviction that guides your every action. Even so, Turner acknowledges there are many paths to God with the subtle diction in the line “no matter / what god shines down on you.” After touching on the biological and the spiritual, the logical last stop is pure, uncontrollable rage. If you shoot to kill because of a thirst for revenge, well the poem has words for you as well. “No matter / what crackling pain and anger / you carry in your fists, my friend.” In the end all of these reasons are flawed because you will be left with a burden you cannot suppress. If it doesn’t destroy a large part of you in the very moment you kill, Turner is wise enough to advise that “it should break your heart to kill.” It breaks my heart to read that line and to think about soldiers like James, but I am also filled with gratitude for them because there are people in the world whose hearts will not break, not even waver, when they set out to kill. These are the folks we all need protection from.

Archaic Torso of Apollo --- Rainer Maria Rilke

2010-04-13T17:40:00.000-07:00

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

---Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke

If you've followed my blog the last few years then you know that I'm a sucker for strong endings. A poem that packs a punch at the end is more likely to stick with me than one that fizzles into the ether. Sure, there are instances when a contemplative conclusion is necessary, but far too often for my tastes contemporary poets opt for the quiet fade. I'm not sure why they do this—maybe out of fear that they'll produce a nice tidy ending? In my own writing I often opt for a strong ending because it allows me to better understand the poem and to understand why I'm writing it. Sometimes the initial ending will find another part of the poem more hospitable, but that exercise of crystalizing the poem in some small way acts as the final movement in my creative process. When I'm teaching poetry workshops I often advise students to try a seemingly simple exercise in revision. I ask them to write the gist of their poem in a single short sentence. Striping their writing down to a raw, base level, students often find the extra haymaker their poem seemed to be lacking. There is some belief that wrapping everything up neatly without any questions or doubts is juvenile and not worthy of lasting, meaningful literature. I could not disagree more and offer Rainer Maria Rilke's wonder work "Archaic Torso Of Apollo" as proof to the contrary.

On first glance years ago, a poem about an "archaic" statue did not pique my interest. What did I care about the body of an old, dead, mythological god? I still don't blame anyone who sees the title of this poem and decides to flip the page, but this oversight would be a horrible mistake. Rilke makes a boring figure rustle and rumble with life. How Rilke accomplishes this feat is particularly interesting: after surveying the external body, he quickly turns his keen eye to the "brilliance from inside" that Apollo possesses. There is life inside of this lifeless statue, from his "eyes like ripening fruit" to "his gaze, now turned to low, / gleams in all its power." The key to Apollo's presence is the aforementioned "brilliance from inside." Rilke notes that the statue is "suffused" with this brilliance and makes the comparison to a lamp shining forth. Without this inner force that has permeated this sculpture, "the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could / a smile run through the placid hips and thighs / to that dark center where procreation flared." If we can view a piece of art, particularly a human sculpture, and see actual life then the artist has done a remarkable job accomplishing a challenging task. I assume Rilke would agree with that last sentence, but it is merely a launching point for the deeper issues this poem delves into.

The life we see in the sculpture is intrinsically linked with Apollo and his mythology, the sculptor and his artistic vision, the poet and his own artistic vision, and the audience (us) with our varied life experiences. Without all of these features working in unison the "stone would seem defaced…and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur…would not, from all the borders of itself, / burst like a star." Because we have the historic context, the art, and the audience all together in one quasi-community, Rilke asserts a strange consciousness that all parties share. As you read this poem, Apollo has been dead for thousands of years (if he ever actually existed) and the artist has presumably been dead for a while as well, even Rilke is dead. The only ones physically alive are us, the audience, and even when we die this poem will live on for years to come with new audiences. With that bit of contextual information, it becomes undeniably clear that the final two lines of the poem are meant for the living.

On a personal level, I find the ending to contain a grand and clever transformation---in fact, I'll go out on a limb and proclaim it the best ending of a poem that I've ever read. It's the type of ending that storms the reader's soul and conquers doubts, fears, apathies, and any other impurities. If Apollo has his "gleam" inside him, then the end of the poem is taking that gleam and lighting a proverbial fire under our backsides. Still, this isn't your typical Carpe Diem message. After all the descriptions of Apollo and his body, Rilke flips the script in the final two lines and now Apollo is the one viewing us. This inanimate sculpture is staring down each and every one of us in the audience…and it is not a pleasant gaze. "For here there is no place / that does not see you." There is an accountability and responsibility in that line that will terrify most people. If you aren't feeling the pangs of guilt, Rilke uses the final line to demand "You must change your life." If you thought this was a harmless poem about a statue, boy were you wrong! This is a poem about a poet challenging you to live your life and not resort to the comfortable complacency of a statue.

I read this poem often. And even though it has a tightly constructed ending, it is a immensely challenging piece of literature. Wherever you are in life this is a poem that requires you to take a step back, evaluate, and then act. Recently as I've read this poem I've looked at the final line as the beginning of another poem. This has morphed into a fun mini writing exercise that produces different results from day to day. Take the final line of Rilke's poem (You must change your life) as a first line and from there go ahead and produce nine lines of your own. I'm curious to see what you come up with and if this exercise works for you like it has for me. Here's a recent effort that I came up with; it's not anything groundbreaking, but I like it:

YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE
(After Rilke)

Charge into the unknown darkness
and crack those useless fears
staking you to the tidy tract,
release the past—people, places, words
you promised you'd never forget—
feel them traveling within you,
sharing your breath, embracing
your most beautiful struggle. Each of us
must discover our joyful purpose;
you are almost there. Go!

The Kiss --- Stephen Dunn

2010-04-11T08:17:00.001-07:00

The Kiss

"She pressed her lips to mind" --- a typo

How many years I must have yearned
for someone's lips against mind.
Pheromones, newly born, were floating
between us. There was hardly any air.

She kissed me again, reaching that place
that sends messages to toes and fingertips,
then all the way to something like home.
Some music was playing on its own.

Nothing like a woman who knows
to kiss the right thing at the right time,
then kisses the things she's missed.
How had I ever settled for less?

I was thinking this is intelligence,
this is the wisest tongue
since the Oracle got into a Greek's ear,
speaking sense. It's the Good,

defining itself. I was out of my mind.
She was in. We married as soon as we could.

---Stephen Dunn

The Kiss by Stephen Dunn

Oh how I love when greatness comes out of a mistake. Are there any more humble origins for successes than mistakes? A stale, moldy piece of bread trumps countless hours of lab research in the discovery of powerful antibiotics; a misplaced comma or two is the difference between one million dollars and one dollar; a fluttering of wind steers a ship far enough off course that it reaches a new land, America, and not the West Indies. An abundance of world-altering discoveries are rooted in mistakes. Powerful business minds, people like Jack Welch, Bill Gates, even Oprah, are often critical of young students and their fear of mistakes. The fear of being wrong pigeonholes us to a safe tract; what great discoveries have been made from the safe tract? I see what these folks are getting at. Mistakes provide the best learning experiences possible. In fact, our missteps are sometimes not even missteps at all, but mere launching off points for epiphanies. In his poem The Kiss, Stephen Dunn seizes upon a harmless, mindless typo to create a beautiful poem that plumbs the emotional depths a single kiss can accomplish. Someone else's mistake is the catalyst for Dunn's treasured poem.

Before anything else it is funny: "She pressed her lips to mind." Reading that line surely induces a chuckle, as it should. Mistakes are funny because they are unexpected and goofy. It would be simple to stop at that and move on, maybe telling someone about the typo over coffee later in the day. Dunn doesn't take the simple path. Pressing lips to mind is a fascinating image, both scientific, spiritual, sensual, and strangely comforting. This realization is where the poem begins, asking "How many years I must have yearned / for someone's lips against mind." Yes, he's having a little fun with a pun of his own, but again this is just the beginning. He imagines "Pheromones, newly born, were floating / between us," and with that we are transported to a new world where "there was hardly any air." This breathlessness gives an immediacy and magic to the world and to the kiss.

"She kissed me again, reaching that place / that sends messages to toes and fingertips." Wow, that is some deep kiss, but it makes sense that lips upon mind would achieve such a cerebral connection. This melding of mind and body, of the physical with the intellectual, seems indicative of the purest love. How many times do you hear 'I love her for her personality' or 'He has an exquisite mind' and question the validity of these statements? Dunn is showing us a true representation of loving someone's mind with your body; a kiss to the mind, a transfer of the physical, emotional, and intellectual at the same time. Pardon the pun, but it's mind-blowing. The kiss doesn't just orbit to his bodies furthest points, but it probes inward "all the way to something like home." While it reaches for his most comfortable and guarded places, Dunn obliges, noting "some music was playing on its own."

I want to pause for a moment from the analysis to look at a few technical aspects Dunn has mastered with this poem. While the poem is eighteen lines in length, I would still contend it is a modified sonnet. The subject matter certainly fits the bill for a sonnet, focusing on a kiss, albeit a metaphysical one, and the romance that accompanies it. Most of the lines are roughly similar in length and syllables. The stanzas are organized into quatrains, with a final couplet at the end. There is also the skeleton of a rhyme scheme within the poem, especially apparent in the middle of the poem. 'Home' and 'own' provide a near perfect rhyme in the second stanza, while 'missed' and 'less' deliver the same in the third stanza. The near rhymes (or slant rhymes, if you prefer) in the fourth stanza and final couplet are a little less obvious, but they are there. It might seem lackadaisical at first, but Dunn has done something very clever with rhyme scheme in this poem. Think about the action that is taking place in the poem and the theme it represents. The rhyme scheme begins to appear in the second stanza when the kiss is first beginning and Dunn has music playing on its own. As he slips into the trance the kiss creates and considers the woman doing the kissing, the rhymes continue in the third stanza. In the fourth stanza he tries to evaluate the kiss, and this breaking free to the rational also represents a departure from the rhyme scheme that was popping up in the poem. Dunn has given us a dashing example of tying all of the poem's moving parts together, without drawing attention to his handiwork.

In the midst of this amazing kiss Dunn makes sure to praise the woman for the wonderful gift she is giving him. "Nothing like a woman who knows / to kiss the right thing at the right time." Sure, I could focus on the innuendo in those lines, but that innuendo belies a skillfully buried feature within the compliment. The woman "knows," meaning she has knowledge, not just of the kiss, but of what Dunn loves. This knowing carefully loops back to the poem's beginning when "she pressed her lips to mind." A sign that she is completely knowledgeable, caring, and aware, she "then kisses the things she's missed." I get the sense that she missed things on purpose so that in returning to them there's extra emphasis, but one could easily argue that she doesn't miss anything at all. Either way, Dunn knows, without a doubt, that he is a lucky man, asking about this new kiss, "How had I ever settled for less?"

As with all good kisses, the brain seems to get in the way and force an ending. When Dunn begins to analyze the kiss and thinks "this is intelligence, / the wisest tongue / since the Oracle got into a Greek's ear," he's dooming the kiss to an end. Maybe "dooming" is too strong a word, because as we see the end is a happy one with a marriage, but still his thinking gets in the way of the kiss. Yes, "It's the Good, / defining itself," but this revelation feels somewhat bittersweet, almost like a mistake. We know full well that mistakes might be bad in the short term, but they pay long term dividends that future generations will reap. Maybe Dunn's mistake to end the kiss gave him the chance to go forth and write this poem, to loose her lips from his mind and share with us all that was inside.

Symptom Recital - Dorothy Parker

2010-04-09T04:41:00.000-07:00

SYMPTOM RECITAL

I do not like my state of mind;
I'm bitter, querulous, unkind.
I hate my legs, I hate my hands,
I do not yearn for lovelier lands.
I dread the dawn's recurrent light;
I hate to go to bed at night.
I snoot at simple, earnest folk.
I cannot take the gentlest joke.
I find no peace in paint or type.
My world is but a lot of tripe.
I'm disillusioned, empty-breasted.
For what I think, I'd be arrested.
I am not sick, I am not well.
My quondam dreams are shot to hell.
My soul is crushed, my spirit sore;
I do not like me any more.
I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse.
I ponder on the narrow house.
I shudder at the thought of me…
I'm due to fall in love again.

---Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker's Symptom Recital

Dorothy Parker was one of those immensely talented, yet tortured souls that seem to populate the history of literature. A quick skim of her Wikipedia page (if you accept the validity of anything Wikipedia has to say) reveals a colorful life brimming with brilliance and turmoil. Her mother died when she was a young child and her relationship with her father and stepmother was horrible. She helmed the famed Algonquin Roundtable and was an early contributor to Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker. Ms. Parker has been the subject of numerous movies---and while we're speaking of movies I should mention that Dorothy was a talented screenwriter, as her Academy Award nomination for A Star Is Born confirms. Sadly, Parker experienced failed marriages, a Hollywood blacklisting, severe depression, alcoholism, and the suicidal overdose of one of her husbands. There is much to be surprised about in the trajectory of Parker's life, but the one thing I noticed that surprised me more than anything else was about her collected works, The Portable Dorothy Parker. In the Viking Press Portable Books series there are only three books that have never gone out of print: The Bible, William Shakespeare, and Dorothy Parker.

As much as I'd like to continue a study into Dororthy Parker's fascinating life, we have a poem to discuss and coincidentally it's by Ms. Parker. Symptom Recital is typical Dorothy Parker: impeccably witty, slightly exaggerated, and undeniably raw. The poem is a quick moving and well-rhymed list of all the reasons the poet hates herself and has issues with the world. It's not what many would consider uplifting or positive, until the wry final line turns the poem and its readers completely on their heads. One of the great achievements of this poem is its pacing. Because each line in the poem is eight or nine syllables with a clear AABB rhyme scheme the poem takes on a rhythm that is in unison with the poet's snappy, complaining mindset. From the outset Parker is definitive about the poet's voice: "I do not like my state of mind." I'm not sure there is a more direct first line in all of poetry. Such displays of directness are not always taken well; literary scholars want to be tested, they want a riddle to unravel over the course of the poem. Parker effectively says to hell with that and does it her way in Symptom Recital.

After commenting on her attitude, Parker turns her focus to her physical appearance, her ambition, and her anxieties. "I hate my legs, I hate my hands, / I do not yearn for lovelier lands. / I dread the dawn's recurrent light; / I hate to go to bed at night. / I snoot at simple, earnest folk. / I cannot take the gentlest joke." She does not sound like a fun person to be around, right? Down on herself and down on others, Parker is making a case for being the world's unhappiest and most unlikable person. Out of all the descriptive lines in the poem she might have it spot on when she asserts "I'm disillusioned, empty breasted." Parker's lacing the truth with a little exaggeration because that is the perfect formula to set readers up for her planned twist at the end. Just as the list is beginning to grow stale, the poem speeds up to its grand finale. In this build up the tone subtly shifts; the direct lines that characterized the first half of the poem are replaced by more mysterious lines like "I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse. / I ponder on the narrow house." But this is a mere reprieve from the poem's in-your-face nature. Parker slams the ending upon readers and it works particularly well because of the penultimate line. "I shudder at the thought of me… / I'm due to fall in love again." In a poem that has adhered to strict rhythm and rhyme rules, the variation that caps the poem is the perfect punchline to an intricately crafted joke. All the quibbles she has with the world and all the distresses she has with herself are the human factors that signal she's ripe for redemption by the bittersweet uber-force of love.

Ripening --- Wendell Berry

2010-04-07T19:11:00.000-07:00

RIPENING

The longer we are together
the larger death grows around us.
How many we know by now
who are dead! We, who were young,
now count the cost of having been.
And yet as we know the dead
we grow familiar with the world.
We, who were young and loved each other
ignorantly, now come to know
each other in love, married
by what we have done, as much
as by what we intend. Our hair
turns white with our ripening
as though to fly away in some
coming wind, bearing the seed
of what we know. It was bitter to learn
that we come to death as we come
to love, bitter to face
the just and solving welcome
that death prepares. But that is bitter
only to the ignorant, who pray
it will not happen. Having come
the bitter way to better prayer, we have
the sweetness of ripening. How sweet
to know you by the signs of this world!

---Wendell Berry

Ripening by Wendell Berry

As I "ripen" and the "signs of this world" present themselves in a variety of unpredictable ways I find myself repeating a common refrain: If I had knew then what I know now…To have the knowledge I do now, when I could have used it sooner is absorbing, tantalizing, and slightly mischievous. Yet again fate seems to have the upper hand, but maybe that's not such a bad thing. Maybe, as Wendell Berry shows us in his poem Ripening, there is nothing more natural than taking the bitter with the sweet, using our lives and taking risks rather than allowing our days to expire routinely toward inevitable death.

"The longer we are together / the larger death grows around us." Yep, now that's an uplifting beginning to a poem; I can almost feel the sunshine, smell the fragrant flowers in bloom, see the rainbow, and hear the sweet notes of a harp. It may not be fun or comforting, but Berry's blunt first lines plant us squarely into the mindset he wants us to be in. Those of us that are lucky to live long enough will have a moment where we look around and see tangible clues that death is venturing toward us. Maybe death is still a long ways out, but it's clear that his itinerary includes a visit with us. You see it in the friends and family that are no longer with you. When your bones ache, thoughts of death are not far off. When you can't remember the name of the restaurant you ate at on your first date with your spouse, death will remind you exactly what it is you're forgetting. These are just some of the "costs of having been," but as Berry reminds us the collection of these costs coincides with refreshing discoveries. Similar to those aha moments I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, as we "grow familiar with the world" we lose some of our ignorance and "come to know / each other in love." With our accomplishments and motives mixing, Berry notices that we carry sparks of passion and long suffering dreams, contained and "bearing the seed / of what we know." He compares our gray and thinning hair, falling off and away to those seeds of ourselves scattering amongst the world. I'd like to think this image, this metaphor, is a little late. We give these pieces of ourselves once we realize, with confidence, that what we have to give is worth any sacrifice we might incur. Berry assumes this moment arrives later in life, but this is where I beg to differ.

Yes, it is "bitter to learn / that we come to death as we come / to love," that is to say it is bitter to learn that we are ill-prepared, a little selfish, and undoubtedly afraid. Yet, in both cases, we loosen and allow ourselves to transform, often changing for the better. I've heard friends comment on married couples saying "they help the other person to be the best possible version of themselves." This is not the work of a moment, but rather a gradual learning of each other as they ripen to different places in their lives. When this proverbial perfect couple is afraid of the next step they discuss those fears, they live those fears, and they plan for what those fears might become. What might seem "just and solving" at one point in life changes with perspective. Acquiring experiences seems to shift the prism through which we view our lives and these new vantage points are what allows Berry to surmise that death is "bitter / only to the ignorant, who pray / it will not happen." I don't need to tell you what they say about death and taxes, but still there are people who live in utter denial (and I'm not talking about paying their taxes!). I feel sorry for those people, but I know how difficult their load is to bear. It only dawned on me within the last five years that I would someday die. It took me to my mid twenties to figure out that I was not immortal, when even a child could have told you that simple bit of knowledge. I didn't really pay death much mind and in some ways that was a great thing I can never have back. But when I came to the realization that myself and all the people I care about will one day die, I was immediately awestruck with a chilling, debilitating fear. I would think about it all the time, even in moments of joy when there was no reason to think about anything bad at all, let alone death. I couldn't reconcile the truth with what I wanted to be true. As I've continued to ripen, I've come my own "bitter way to better prayer." By the way, how great is that line! The internal rhyme of bitter and better is genius and there's even a little something going on between way and prayer. The poem's epiphanous conclusion is "the sweetness of ripening" and fittingly it is not given, but earned over a lifetime. I know I haven't completely tasted the sweetness of my ripening, but each time I have a moment where the signs of the world present themselves I know I'm on the right track and it feels as good as bittersweet can.

It Is This Way With Men --- CK Williams

2010-04-05T18:57:00.000-07:00

IT IS THIS WAY WITH MEN

They are pounded into the Earth
like nails; move an inch,
they are driven down again.
The earth is sore with them.
It is a spiny fruit
that has lost hope
of being raised and eaten.
It can only ripen and ripen.
And men, they too are wounded.
They too are sifted from their loss
and are without hope. The core
softens. The pure flesh softens
and melts. There are thorns, there
are the dark seeds, and they end.

---CK Williams

IT IS THIS WAY WITH MEN ----- CK WILLIAMS

I was introduced to this poem and a few others I will share this month in the Robert Bly edited collection The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart. Bly and his fellow editors included this CK Williams poem in a section that began with a scathing essay on American culture and our unabashed perfection of denial. The stirring indictment of practical ignorance was aimed at the United States circa 1992, when the book was first published. It goes without saying that the United States of 2010 is quite different. Think, for a moment, of all the things that have contributed to the maturation of our society since 1992—The OJ Trial, The First Gulf War, Hip Hop, Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, CDs, Napster, Microsoft, Ipods, Cell Phones, Iphones, 9/11, Osama Bin Laden, Columbine, Virginia Tech, The Second Gulf War, Hanging Chads, Global Warming, The Internet, Email, Reality Television, Barack Obama, Y2K, Starbucks, Tiger Woods, Big Oil, Modern Medicine, Bernie Madoff. Add in a witty turn of phrase or two and you've got an updated version of Billy Joel's We Didn't Start The Fire. Still, there's a valid and valuable reason for presenting this list. With all that has occurred in the last eighteen years are we still the global leaders in denial? There's no denying that a close look at CK Williams' It Is This Way With Men will provide insight on this topic, and possibly insight on why people insist on perpetuating bad puns like the one at the beginning of this sentence.

The men that populate CK Williams' poem, whether they are CEOs, soldiers, or night shift workers, each face the crippling weight of being a man. They can put on happy faces, hiding their fears, doubts, and anxieties from the people they love, but this will eventually catch up with them. These men attempt to provide, reassure, and protect, even as all redemptive beauty slips away from their lives like seaweed carried out with the tide. Williams starts off with a hard charging analytical simile: "They are pounded into the earth / like nails; move an inch, / they are driven down again." We quickly know that man is not in control; Williams is so forceful that readers cannot deny the inherent weaknesses of man in the face of a world relentlessly pursuing not only his body, but also his soul. If he struggles or rebels, man must be put in his place until "the earth is sore with them." Williams shifts the focus from man to where he is being pounded and struck into painful submission. It is not Earth's fault that man is suffering his horrifying fate. In fact, Earth is a surrogate for much of man's pain, becoming "a spiny fruit / that has lost hope / of being raised and eaten." While it has become common to view humans as culprits in the destruction of Mother Earth, Williams displays the shared futility of human beings and the land they inhabit. Readers could see this as a denial on Williams' part to acknowledge mankind's share of the blame in Earth's deterioration, but as the poem moves denial is sharply peeled away.

What about mankind's culpability? Surely, we are to blame for the evils we perpetuate upon each other and our world? Before assigning blame, Williams begs that we take a closer look at man. Through the poet's eyes men, "they too are wounded. / They too are sifted from their loss / and are without hope." Well if that doesn't make you excited and proud to be a human then I don't know what will! Obviously I'm kidding, but this is a seriously bleak assertion from Williams. First he identifies our scars. They could be our own, they could be from previous generations and handed down to us, or they could be a startling mixture of both. Then Williams notices that we are "sifted from (our) loss." This line puzzled me on my first reading of the poem, but I've come to believe that it represents both a separation from our losses and a marking by these losses. The inability to forget is both the greatest blessing and most painful curse of being human. What we had and lost clearly reminds and remains with us. Finally, Williams concludes that we are hopeless; this is his diagnosis. If we, as a people, are as good at denial as Robert Bly surmises then we must possess hope, even if it is a miniscule sliver of hope. At the root of denial is the faint belief that someway, somehow things will get better. It might be a weak, roundabout philosophical argument on my part, but I'm holding out hope that CK Williams is wrong about us, and I'm willing to accept Bly's ideas on American denial to fortify my argument.

From Williams' viewpoint, the hopeless man decomposes in a clear, biological manner. "The core / softens. The pure flesh softens / and melts. There are thorns, there / are the dark seeds, and they end." It does sound rather similar to the aging process we go through as humans, minus the part about thorns. As the body ages, the physical changes include a softening of the skin, weight gain in the center, age spots on the skin, wrinkles, less energy and strength, even the loss of memory and mental function. But do we lose our ability to feel? If our core is softening then we could assume that Williams is targeting our hearts with that line. The heart is widely accepted as our symbolic emotional center. If our hearts soften then we lose the ability to feel. The implications of such a change on a human being are incredibly wide reaching; no more romance or love of any kind, no more regretting past indiscretions or hurtful words better left unsaid, no more thoughts about the legacies we leave for future generations. All of those results aside, consider that when our "core softens" we also lose the ability to live in denial. There would be no reason to deny anything; we would become robotic. It would make complete sense that we would seems to be swallowed by the ground with our thorns and dark seeds, unceremoniously written off with the line "and they end."

I've given this poem a great deal of thought, so much thought that at times I knew I was thinking too hard about the poem and reading things into the poem, but in the end I couldn't let it go without a fight. Seemingly gritty and simple, the poem is multilayered and imbued with complicated philosophical questions. Like many great questions and like many great poems, we don't need a definitive answer to enjoy CK Williams' It Is This Way With Men. All we need is to draw upon our own experiences, the times when we felt like some forces in the world were pounding us into the Earth like nails, or the times when we took a moment to look around us and see others pushed to their breaking points in dire conditions. The wealth of experiences we carry with us as human beings are not all rosy, but the pain is what makes it all real. We have cultivated the ability to deny many things, but because of the balance of good and bad, joy and pain, we read this poem and realize that there is no denying that at times this poem will be true for us and at times it will be as far from the truth as humanly possible.

What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, And Where, And Why --- Edna St. Vincent Millay

2010-04-03T14:15:00.000-07:00

WHAT LIPS MY LIPS HAVE KISSED, AND WHERE, AND WHY (Sonnet XLIII)

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

---Edna St. Vincent Millay

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why

In listening to a recent poetry podcast about notable winter poems, I was surprised when the conversation turned to Edna St. Vincent Millay and her poem "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why." The commentators on the podcast discussed how Millay has somewhat of a less than stellar reputation among academic poetry readers. You can take "academic" out of the last sentence and insert snobby in its place if you would like; I was just trying to be polite. For some reason Millay's poetry has not stood the test of time. Successive generations have not only found reasons to dismiss her poetry, but they've seemingly searched for reasons. I'm not in the camp that feels Millay was a temporary curiosity. She wrote countless poems that are just as stirring today as they were in the first part of the previous century. Today we are privileged to look at this wonderful sonnet of regret and bewilderment courtesy of the unappreciated Edna St. Vincent Millay.

From the beginning this is a poem of questions…and equally a poem where answers are absent. Starting with the image of the lips she has kissed, the poet launches back into memory asking what, where and why. Almost immediately she responds with uncertainty: "I have forgotten, and what arms have lain / Under my head till morning." Millay's syntax is worth a closer look. Notice how she admits her ignorance and lacking memory, only to resume the list with another concrete image of lovers arms under her head as she sleeps. By breaking up her initial list to admit she has "forgotten," Millay infuses the poem with a back and forth tension. Admittedly, the syntax also must work in congruence with the sonnet's rhyme scheme. Honestly, the end words that compose the infrastructure of the poem's rhyme scheme are far from exotic, yet this is a poem where the rhymes are organic and unassuming. When a poem can execute a rhyme scheme this seamlessly without sacrificing the poem's tone, diction, or theme it is a masterwork and worth studying. The natural rhyme scheme also enables the poem's tense inner struggle to move forward by moving backward into the past: "the rain / is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh / Upon the glass and listen for reply." The ghosts of past lovers in the cold, damp evening rain fall upon our poet, who claimed to have "forgotten." Millay uses rain as a transformative force to evoke the past and rustle the ghosts from the tidy spots where each of us tucks them away. When something—anything—triggers your past and you are presented with long buried memories of former love how real does it feel?

Millay's trip through her past is not that of a valiant hero returning home. Her heart "stirs a quiet pain / For unremembered lads that not again / Will turn to me at midnight with a cry." The fact that Millay will hear their cries at midnight implies that she is anxious and sleepless over the disruption of her present life with echoes from her past. At this particularly tense moment the poem turns again, this time shifting to a "lonely tree" in winter in a very clear metaphor. Like Millay who forgot her lovers, the tree does not know "what birds have vanished one by one," but the distance from herself afforded by the metaphor allows her to use the tree to admit that it "knows its boughs more silent than before." It is a metaphorical revelation that sets up the poem's sharp and emotion laden ending. At the point where traditionally a sonnet turns, Millay succumbs to the truth: "I cannot say what loves have come and gone, / I only know that summer sang in me / A little while, that in me sings no more." The identity of the lovers, the specifics of their features, is ultimately not what she, or any of us, need to concern ourselves with. Even though details are crucial to reality, the end impact is something that can't be replicated: emotional recall. Where Millay's emotional state was balanced at the beginning of the poem, she is certainly fatigued by the end. This fatigue isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does bring with it an honest pain. Admitting to herself that the full warmth of summer that we associate with being in love has long ago left her is very brave. Millay's courage exists in making herself vulnerable and sharing her unfulfilling truth with the world by writing and publishing the poem. The next time a poetry blueblood stoops to disparage Edna St. Vincent Millay I hope he or she will pause and remember this poem and numerous others where Millay crafts startlingly powerful lines and images.

The Changed Man --- Robert Phillips

2010-04-01T04:08:00.000-07:00

THE CHANGED MAN

If you were to hear me imitating Pavarotti
in the shower every morning, you'd know
how much you have changed my life.

If you were to see me stride across the park,
waving to strangers, then you would know
I am a changed man—like Scrooge

awakened from his bad dreams feeling feather-
light, angel-happy, laughing the father
of a long line of bright laughs—

"It is still not too late to change my life!"
It is changed. Me, who felt short-changed.
Because of you I no longer hate my body.

Because of you I buy new clothes.
Because of you I'm a warrior of joy.
Because of you and me. Drop by

this Saturday morning and discover me
fiercely pulling weeds gladly, dedicated
as a born-again gardener.

Drop by on Sunday—I'll Turtlewax
your sky-blue sports car, no sweat. I'll greet
enemies with a handshake, forgive debtors

with a papal largesse. It's all because
of you. Because of you and me,
I've become one changed man.

---Robert Phillips

The Changed Man by Robert Phillips

In those carpe-diem moments where the past and future stretch out nicely and the present slows to a standstill, seemingly with the whole wide world waiting on you to make a decision, one key element is so often neglected. Whether we seize the day or let it slip away, far too often we fail to express gratitude. There is so much to be thankful for: the moment, the experiences that lead you there, the skills and talents you possess, the good weather, the bus being on time, the free ticket to the concert or game or museum where you'll bump into a long lost friend or a soon-to-be love of your life. Along the way there are many features that factor into our stations in life, particularly the people who nudge us in the right direction and help us to see elements of ourselves that we couldn't see on our own. Robert Phillips is "The Changed Man" because he decided to make changes to his life, but he would never have made those changes without a catalyst, someone who supplied him with a small amount of courage that would grow fearless inside of him. This poem is about thanking those who help us along the way, not just by saying thank you but also by living our gratitude.

We must start with the poem's tone. Comfortable and conversational, the poem speaks in such a direct and intimate manner that readers cannot do anything but assume the role of Phillips' "you" character. The tone of the poem levels the playing field immediately by breaking down the distance between readers and the poet's influential "you." Of course he is writing this poem to his beloved, but we are given an all-access pass. How else would we know he imitates "Pavarotti / in the shower every morning" or more importantly, why he does this? Because the tone is utterly personal, the emotional reveals in the poem slap readers with tremendous, yet subtle force. There is nothing remarkable about "striding across the park, / waving to strangers," and yet this comparison to Scrooge is heartwarming on the surface, but unwittingly complex. "Feather- / light, angel-happy, laughing the father / of a long line of bright laughs" and somewhere in this description it ceases to describe Scrooge and the image of our poet-speaker rounds out in the minds of readers. I would argue the images pack such a punch because of how they interact with the poem's tone. A veritable tidal balance is at work here with the personal tone pulling us in, while the quotidian images and actions push us back to the universal, only to tug us back again with underlying emotional significance. Still, this current is anything but choppy, in fact it feels perfectly natural.

Just when we're thinking the homage to A Christmas Carol is running a bit thick, Phillips abruptly shifts gears with a mind-numbing, soul-rocking compliment. "Because of you I no longer hate my body." For the depressed and the weak, for the fearful and the ashamed, for the sick and the guilty, sometimes the incarnation of all they hate about being alive is the vessel they are traveling the world in. It is too painful to ask you to put yourself in these places of these fellow human beings, although some of you may know their plights very well---hell, some of you might have been in these stages in the past or are in them now. Take a deep breath and imagine what it is like to love yourself…completely…without judgement. It is a beautiful thing, possibly the most beautiful thing. This is the blessing his beloved has given Phillips; no wonder he would proclaim the role this loved one has played in his immense transformation. "Because of you I buy new clothes. / Because of you I'm a warrior of joy. / Because of you and me." There's an earnest vigilance to the poet's joy, a commitment that isn't ostentatious but runs distinctly through his bones and his whole being as something immeasurable and outside the bounds of science, yet just as sustaining as breath and water.

Yes, there are religious and spiritual undertones in this poem. Bells should toll within the cathedral of your soul when you read the lines "dedicated / as a born-again gardener" and "I'll greet / enemies with a handshake, forgive debtors / with a papal largesse." But these religious issues could fill a whole essay on their own. Instead, I'm turning my focus to how the end functions as a final movement sailing swiftly upon the poem's tidal balance. The poet asks the person responsible for his changes to "Drop by / this Saturday morning and discover me." He goes on to also recommend a chance visit on Sunday, almost as if he anticipates it might be challenge getting his beloved catalyst for change to visit him. This part of the poem is mysterious and I'm quite curious about the distance it assumes between the poet and his beloved. In fact, it makes me wonder if I've assumed things all wrong. Is this person responsible for his change an actual representative of romantic love? Could it be a mentor? A father figure? A young soul rejuvenating his old tired one? As the questions shuffle us further from certainty on the relationship between the poet and his "you" character, we have that saving current, once again, pulling us back to the poem's clear depth. The gardening and the car waxing are by-products of a life and attitude change that the poet is unabashedly living out with each passing day. Recognizing how he arrived at such a path, he must share with the person most responsible, but he also shares with all of us, that "It's all because / of you. Because of you and me, / I've become one changed man."

And so it begins...National Poetry Month 2010

2010-03-31T19:02:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I'll post the first of 15 poems and essays and in doing so I'll kick off the third year of We Convince By Our Presence. Yes, you read that correctly---only 15 poems this year. Real life has caught up to me and I just don't have it in me to post 30 brand new, high quality essays to go with my favorite poems for every day in April. It's a little disappointing, but I realize this will benefit the blog in the long run. I plan to post a new entry every other day. We'll explore some exciting, thought provoking, and emotional poems by an amazing collection of poets including Rainer Maria Rilke, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Ted Kooser. Please join me on this great journey through the beautiful and stirring art of poetry.

Wrapping Up National Poetry Month 2009...and looking ahead to 2010

2009-06-01T20:12:00.001-07:00

A month has passed since I posted the last of my National Poetry Month blog essays for 2009. It seems longer than a month, far longer. Even so, this time away was necessary to digest all of this years poems. Time apart from something we know and love teaches us a great deal. An athlete who trains daily will surely notice decreases in strength and stamina if he or she takes a month long break. A couple who spends a month apart will notice intricate details, some good and some bad, about themselves, their partner, and their relationship. A refugee who finally returns safely to his or her homeland will possess a dramatically altered perspective on life at home and abroad. We convince by our presence, but sometimes absence can be just as stirring.

e.e. cummings said “to destroy is the first step in any creation.” Gertrude Stein believed that “it takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.” For William Butler Yeats it wasn't a question of inactivity; he knew that you “do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.” Randall Jarrell offered an explanation about poetry that fits for pretty much any vocation, from family man to rock star, he wrote, “a good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lighting five or six times.” Each of these quotations contains strings of truth and if we braid them together we might be able to come to a lasting conclusion. If we take Jarrell's consistency, luck, and lowered expectations, Yeats' carpe diem-ness, Stein's patience and focus, and cummings' courage to be truly ruthless and different in creating---well, then we've got something transcendent and epiphanous. We have combinations that seemingly should not exist together: we have absence and presence.

Each year that I continue this blog I feel clouds gathering over head with rumbles of thunder. With your help one of those bolts of lightning that Jarrell spoke of will come my way. April 2010 is a long way away, but my preparation for next year's National Poetry Month blog begins now. I've depleted my stash of favorite poems, writing on over 60 of my favorites in the last two years, and as a result I've come up with a unique experiment for next year. It will raise the level of audience interactiveness on my blog to an all-time high. Take a moment to reread your favorite poem—think about why you love it, how it strikes you and has stayed with you long after reading it, what it has taught you or made you see differently. After you've done this brief exploration, I challenge you to send me a quick note with the name of your favorite poem and the poet responsible for writing it. If I'm able to collect enough of “your favorite poems” then my plan is read them all and write essays based on your favorite poems...and if you decide to include some comments with your favorite poem then I'll certainly make sure they are also included alongside my essay on your favorite poem. The challenge has been delivered!

Take your time, but please know that I'm looking forward to hearing from each and every one of you.

O Me! O Life! - Walt Whitman

2009-05-01T20:44:00.000-07:00

O ME! O LIFE!

O me! O life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill'd with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I,
and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the
struggle ever renew'd,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see
around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest of me
intertwined,
The guestion, O me! so sad, recurring---What good amid these,
O me, O life?

Answer
That you are here---that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

---Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman's O Me! O Life!

Year two of my national poetry month blog has come to an end. Who better to cap it all off than Walt Whitman! The Father of American Poetry, Walt wrote as he lived—with care and curiosity, a relentless spirit forever discovering a higher plane of goodness in humanity. With a penchant for long lines and anaphora, Whitman wrote his way into literary history with his iconic Leaves Of Grass, a collection of poems revised throughout Walt’s life and representing his life’s work. I could go on heaping accolades upon Walt, but that might take a while and I’d surely lose my audience. Instead, let’s take a look at one of his poems, O Me! O Life!

I fully expect that some people will read O Me! O Life! and think it’s contrived, fanciful, and formulaic. After all, the poem is a single sweeping question with a couplet answer; there really isn’t much to it. Those are the arguments against the poem; here are the arguments for O Me! O Life! Rarely do we get a Walt Whitman poem that resolves itself within twenty lines. Sure, Walt composed a fair amount of poems totaling a handful of lines or less, but when most well-versed readers think of Walt Whitman they immediately visualize pages upon pages of words all composing a single poem—Song Of Myself. A contrast in style or a microcosm of his larger works, O Me! O Life! tackles the essential question of human existence and what exactly we are to do with our lives. Walt’s stirring answer serves as an invocation to readers after a disproportionately long list of negatives that discourage us from living the full lives that we’re capable of.

“O me! O life! of the questions of these recurring” is how Whitman launches the poem into an abundance of gripes and grievances. His list is cleverly constructed, as “the endless trains of the faithless” and “cities fill’d with the foolish” give way to Walt “forever reproaching” himself. He inserts himself into the meat of the poem by asking “for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?” This incarnation of Walt views life not as an opportunity, but as “the struggle ever renew’d.” He can’t help but notice “the plodding and sordid crowds” and his place among them. They are a sad bunch, looking at their time on earth as “empty and useless years,” and even sadder is how Walt naturally sees himself “with the rest me intertwined.” From this realization, Walt arrives at the question steering the poem towards its eventual startling answer, “The question, O me! So sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?”

After abruptly ending the first section of the poem, Walt gives readers some white space on the page, perfect for pondering the question he has just posed. This white space allows for pause before the answer: a simple, yet spirited refutation of all we’ve read in the poem thus far. With all the “poor results” Walt surveyed in the initial portion of the poem, the about-face that he delivers with his answer is surprising. But it shouldn’t be surprising; here comes the unabashed hopefulness that characterizes Whitman’s writing. “That you are here—that life exists and identity, / That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” This is Walt’s verse—encouraging others to live in spite of the many difficulties surrounding us. Earlier this year when I began preparing my essays for this year’s version of my national poetry month blog, I chose to close out the month with this poem. The final lines are not just an answer to the questions Walt raises in the poem, but they are what I hope you will take with you as you go forth and contribute your own verse. There is no reason to be timid or hesitant, no reason to not say hello to each stranger you meet, no reason to ignore the person in need beside you, and no reason to downplay your own successes earned through hard work. Each day presents more opportunities to contribute your own verse to the powerful play going on all around you. Don’t worry about the audience; be bold, be courageous, be imaginative, and share your own story with the world. Trust me (and Walt), the world will be a better place if you follow that advice.

Origami - Greg Williamson

2009-04-30T20:39:00.000-07:00

ORIGAMI

The kids are good at this. Their nimble fingers
Double and fold and double fold the pages,
Making mimetic icons for all ages.
The floor of the school is littered with dead ringers:

Songbirds that really flap their wings, rare cranes,
Bleached bonsai trees, pale ghouls, two kinds of hats,
Dwarf stars, white roses, Persian copycats.
Small packet boats, whole fleets of flyable planes.

Some of the girls, some of the older ones,
Make effigies of boys and…”Goodness sakes!”
They ask what I can make. “I make mistakes.”
“No, really, Mr. Greg!” They don’t like puns.

I tear out a page and say, “I’ve made a bed.”
They frown at me. I’ll have to lie on it.
“See, it’s a sheet.” But they’re not buying it,
And seem to imply (“You’re crazy!”) it’s all in my head.

I head for home, where even more white lies
Take shape. The page is a window filled with frost,
As unformed thought, a thought I had, but lost.
The page is the sclera of someone rolling his eyes

As it becomes (you’ll recognize the trick)
Tomorrow morning, laundry on the line,
The South Pole, circa 1929,
The mainsail of the Pequod, Moby Dick,

The desert sand, the shore, the arctic waste
Of untold tales, where hero and author together
Must turn, out of the silence, into the whether-
Or-not-they-find-the-grail. Not to your taste?

The page is a flag of surrender. I surrender
To the rustle of programs before a serious talk,
The sound of seashells, seas, the taste of chalk,
The ghost of snow, the ghost of the sky in December,

And frozen surfaces of ponds, which hide
Some frigid stirring, something. (What have I done?)
It’s the napkin at a table set for one,
The shade drawn in a room where someone died.

The pages keep on turning. They assume
More shapes than I can put my fingers on.
A wall of silence, curtains, doors, false dawn,
The stared-at ceiling of my rented room.

“You crazy, Mr. Greg.” The voices call;
the sheet on the unmade bed is gone awry.
I sit at my little desk in mid-July,
Throwing snowballs at the Sheetrock wall.

---Greg Williamson

Greg Williamson’s Origami

One of the exercises I used to give my students was to summarize a whole poem into a single sentence. It’s a bear of an assignment, but it forces you to read, think, analyze, and then take the product of your thoughts and filter it into a strong and brief statement. It didn’t matter if the student was looking at one of their own poems or one of Shakespeare’s, this assignment shocked the hell out of them. They figured that one sentence would be a piece of cake. They’d read the poem once, then write a one-line summary and they’d be done. As Lee Corso says, Not So Fast, My Friends. With an assignment like this, requiring an economical use of words, the expectations are high and the margin for error is slim. All of this talk about what I’ve come to call the Smushed Poem Assignment has me motivated to try it today. Let’s take a look at Greg Williamson’s wildly creative Origami and hopefully by the end of our examination I’ll have a good solid sentence for the poem.

You’ve heard countless phrases about first impressions so I won’t dare giving you another, but I will ask you this: what’s the first thing you noticed as you read this poem? If you’re a smart ass then you’re chomping at the bit to tell me you noticed the title first. That’s not what I had in mind. The detailed descriptions of the kids creating their origami creatures and items are well written in the first few stanzas, but almost immediately I noticed the rhyme scheme. The rhymes are nearly perfect throughout the poem and quite often they are end stopped. This is a recipe for formulaic and metered verse that might drift off into the droll of Old English drinking songs and nursery rhymes. But Greg Williamson avoids the fate of conventional rhyme schemes by balancing the rhymes with a healthy blend of varied images, lively characters, and fresh, true dialogue. These features are very difficult to pull off in a poem that is constructed with a rhyme scheme, yet when they fit a poem organically they propel the reader through the poem.

Combining the poem’s title with the first stanza, Williamson wastes no time giving readers the necessary particulars to immerse themselves in the poem’s world. There are a group of children folding the paper to make origami figures. Paper litters the floor from failed attempts and some stirring successes. Williamson devotes the whole second stanza to providing a great list of the imaginative things the kids have created. We find ourselves endeared to Williamson for the way he treats the failed attempts as something unique, and thus a masterpiece in its own right:

Songbirds that really flap their wings, rare cranes,
Bleached bonsai trees, pale ghouls, two kinds of hats,
Dwarf stars, white roses, Persian copycats.
Small packet boats, whole fleets of flyable planes.

In the next two stanzas Williamson introduces dialogue in the form of a short interchange between himself and some of the children. His answers are witty and self-deprecating, the type of thing an audience might love. “They ask what I can make. ‘I make mistakes.’ / ‘No, really, Mr. Greg!’ They don’t like puns.” Letting his mind do the work, as opposed to his hands, Williamson responds to the children’s prodding by ripping loose a single sheet of paper. He holds it before them and says “I’ve made a bed.” If they didn’t like his line about making mistakes then it should come as no surprise that Williamson is greeted with frowns. It doesn’t bother him though; he resolves to take this “bed” he’s made and “lie on it.” With one last attempt he says to the kids “See, it’s a sheet. But they’re not buying it, / And seem to imply (“You’re crazy!”) it’s all in my head.” This will be an important link to the rest of the poem, a point of departure into Williamson’s constantly churning imagination.

We often think of children as possessing untouched and limitless minds, but in this poem it appears to be Mr. Greg who is tapped into a steady stream-of-consciousness. After working with the children, our speaker returns home where “even more white lies.” He won’t be folding this white to resemble a spear or a one-legged crane, but he will be laboring just as hard to get words onto the page. The blank page is daunting; he sees it as a “window filled with frost, / As unformed thought, a thought I had, but lost.” And this is where he begins to pick up steam, next the page is someone rolling their eyes, which seamlessly shifts into “Tomorrow morning, laundry on the line, / The South Pole, circa 1929, / The mainsail of the Pequod, Moby Dick.” Are you beginning to see what I mean about stream-of-consciousness? One image segues into the next, sometimes with strong connections, while others are lucky to have a mere flicker of similarity. Realizing that it might be a little difficult and disorienting at first for readers, Williamson gives us a small bit of encouragement, telling us “you’ll recognize the trick.” The writing style keeps readers swimming within their minds, trying to keep up with the poem’s path, but boy is it fun, nearly as much fun as the children seemed to be having with their origami earlier in the poem. Dare I say Williamson is crafting poetic origami in this poem.

One of the things that differentiates this poem from others that are swept up with the creative spirit is how Williamson is caring and attentive to his readers. We just made note of his aside to readers that they’ll recognize his trick and how he constructs his links of images, but he also tries to give us variety to appeal to a wider audience. As the poem moves into a realm “Of untold tales, where hero and author together / Must turn, out of the silence, into the whether- / Or-not-they-find-the-grail,” Williamson quickly follows this up with a question to his readers: “Not to your taste?” This allows him to make an abrupt turn and pull back in the readers he might have been losing. He takes the poem more introspective with the white page as his surrender, as “the napkin at a table set for one, / The shade drawn in a room where someone died.” Ultimately, it is not surrender that overcomes Williamson, but a sense of the awesome depth of imagination. He acknowledges the pages and their images “assume / more shapes than I can put my fingers on.” There exist an infinite web of connections within the world, all waiting for a writer to pluck them free and toss them onto the page. When this happens then “the pages keep on turning.” We’ve been in the outer limits of Williamson’s wide open mind, but the journey is coming to an end, returning to his own house where all of this thought originates from: “The stared-at ceiling of my rented room” where he hears again “You crazy, Mr. Greg” as he notices “the sheet on the unmade bed is gone awry.” His day¾events, words, thoughts, gestures¾is stringing itself together like hands reaching out to each other to be held. With these forces pulling together, with this wonderful synergy, Williamson sits down at his “ little desk in mid-July, / Throwing snowballs at the Sheetrock wall.” He is ready to dismantle impossibilities, he is juiced with creativity.

Having reached the end of our deep reading of the poem and having originally promised a tightly constructed and well thought out sentence to summarize the poem, here is my best effort (it’s a little long winded :)) to fulfill that most difficult assignment: The genius of creativity is that it follows no rules except for those that you create, and even those are your personal sense of how best to coax awareness so that in seeing a sheet of paper you look beyond its physical form and see ten thousand things no one else could spot.

How It Is - Maxine Kumin

2009-04-29T20:23:00.000-07:00

HOW IT IS

Shall I say how it is in your clothes?
A month after your death I wear your blue jacket.
The dog at the center of my life recognizes
you've come to visit, he's ecstatic.
In the left pocket, a hole.
In the right, a parking ticket
delivered up last August on Bay State Road.
In my heart, a scatter like milkweed,
a flinging from the pods of the soul.
My skin presses your old outline.
It is hot and dry inside.

I think of the last day of your life,
old friend, how I would unwind it, paste
it together in a different collage,
back from the death car idling in the garage,
back up the stairs, your praying hands unlaced,
reassembling the bits of bread and tuna fish
into a ceremony of sandwich,
running the home movie backward to a space
we could be easy in, a kitchen place
with vodka and ice, our words like living meat.

Dear friend, you have excited crowds
with your example. They swell
like wine bags, straining at your seams.
I will be years gathering up our words,
fishing out letters, snapshots, stains,
leaning my ribs against this durable cloth
to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.

---Maxine Kumin

Maxine Kumin's How It Is

Desperation—which at its base is fear—motivates us to do things we normally wouldn't even consider. Rational thought scurries away like a child's ball disappearing down a street sewer. Limits shrink and everything is possible...at a cost. In Maxine Kumin's How It Is the cost has already been charged and the poem's speaker, unhinged by grief, is desperate to revisit a recently deceased friend. The sorrow and longing are so intense that she resorts to trying on her friend's clothes. We do strange things when we lose someone we love, but they're not strange within that moment. These desperate acts are what we have at our disposal; they may not bring our loved ones back, but on some level we gain comfort—and if we're very fortunate—understanding.

There's no beating around the bush in this poem; Kumin makes sure we know the path she'll follow with a definitive first line: “Shall I say how it is in your clothes? / A month after your death I wear your blue jacket.” Eerie and indeed desperate, the poem's speaker puts herself into her friend's physical confines as a means of conjuring her, or at least a fleeting connection. When the speaker's dog recognizes these clothes and grows “ecstatic” we see his enthusiasm as innocent and lively—the exact emotions our speaker lacks. The nuances of life—“In the left pocket, a hole. / In the right, a parking ticket”—may appear minuscule, but they startle us out of our grief with pressures of reality. Before moving forward, Kumin is sensitive to her heart, feeling “a scatter like milkweed, / a flinging from the pods of the soul.” This grief will not go gently and so she pushes herself with the untamed fuel of desperation. “My skin presses your old outline. / It is hot and dry inside.” Kumin describes the action with the emotionless precision of a scientist writing a lab report.

After one stanza of trying on her friend's clothes, and essentially trying on her former life, our speaker unravels more of the intricacies of her friend's life. She starts with her final day, thinking “how I would unwind it, paste / it together in a different collage.” As counterintuitive as it might seem to soften death, which normally is as malleable as cement, Kumin slices scenes from her friend's final day as if they are warm slices of pie. This way she is able to create art in dying. Her friend doesn't end in “the death car,” but starts with it “idling in the garage.” Her “praying hands unlaced” find themselves put back to work “reassembling the bits of bread and tuna fish / into a ceremony of sandwich.” The good parts of life return in “a space / we could be easy in, a kitchen place / with vodka and ice, our words like living meat.” Never has there been a more fitting adjective than “living;” just as meat is the dead flesh of an animal taken in by humans for sustenance, it provides new life to Maxine Kumin. Undoubtedly what she finds is not real life, but remember that Kumin is desperate for any more time with her friend, any at all.

By the time we reach the final stanza Maxine Kumin has gone to great lengths to measure how life was for her friend. With this fresh knowledge, she presses on with a message for her deceased friend—a gritty tribute born out of experience. Kumin declares “Dear friend, you have excited crowds / with your example.” Because of their friendship, Kumin knows “I will be years gathering up our words, / fishing out letters, snapshots, stains.” Their time together has left her with an immense collection of emotion, a mansion of moments that she'll explore for the rest of her life. If these treasures aren't enough to stir her memories to vividness, we already know that she is not afraid of desperation. If all else fails we can expect to find Maxine Kumin “leaning my ribs against this durable cloth / to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.” Who can blame her? To have one more moment with a lost loved one nothing seems outlandish or crazy; desperation actually seems sane.

To Be In Love - Gwendolyn Brooks

2009-04-28T20:23:00.000-07:00

TO BE IN LOVE

To be in love
Is to touch things with a lighter hand.

In yourself you stretch, you are well.

You look at things
Through his eyes.
A cardinal is red.
A sky is blue.
Suddenly you know he knows too.
He is not there but
You know you are tasting together
The winter, or light spring weather.

His hand to take your hand is overmuch.
Too much to bear.

You cannot look in his eyes
Because your pulse must not say
What must not be said.

When he
Shuts a door—

Is not there—
Your arms are water.

And you are free
With a ghastly freedom.

You are the beautiful half
Of a golden hurt.

You remember and covet his mouth,
To touch, to whisper on.

Oh when to declare
Is certain Death!

Oh when to apprize,
Is to mesmerize,

To see fall down, the Column of Gold,
Into the commonest ash.

---Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks' To Be In Love

Working against our expectations is one of the more devious and creative paths a poem, or for that matter any piece of art, can follow. We believe, and because of those beliefs, formed out of our experiences, when a situation arises with familiar circumstances and characteristics we know what will happen next. But when our expectations are shattered, when our truths melt like chocolate on a hot day, we are lost. Uncomfortable and distressing, in these moments we are put in a position to learn a great deal about ourselves. This is the practical side of surprise, taking the suspense and mystery and melding it into a significant lesson. Gwendolyn Brooks gives us a chance to learn about ourselves with her unusual poem To Be In Love.

“To be in love / Is to touch things with a lighter hand.” Brooks begins the poem with this beautiful couplet. It's a simple way of describing the euphoric state of being in love, and yet it fits. A softer, gentler touch allows for more sensation, a deeper feeling. Being in love brings about this growth: “In yourself you stretch, you are well.” It changes you in a profound way—you become a better version of yourself, more in tune to the world because looking after the happiness of another person has become your lifework. It is your masterpiece. “You look at things / Through his eyes.” Brooks presents a proactive view of being in love, a view that looses us from the confines of our own bodies and allows us inside the intimate sections of our loved one's mind and soul. The sustainability of this connection seems natural and without fail. “He is not there but / You know you are tasting together.” Of course we will have impediments separating us from those that we love, but because we are in love we share a connection that can travel the distance that separates us. We expect that love harbors and fosters these uber positive conceptions. As Gwendolyn Brooks delineates poetically the virtues of being in love, we read and nod along. We remember our own unrivaled highs of being in love. This is how she establishes the grounds for surprise. This is how the first act is written and ends.

Surely if I gave you a choice you would choose love over loss. As we revel in the delights of being in love we are a breeze, a footstep, a mere hiccup from the hellacious lows of losing it all. What once was special and gave us goosebumps will just as soon be the most painful memory, keeping us awake at night, morphing us into a version of ourselves we don't like and can't control. “His hand to take your hand is overmuch. / Too much to bear.” Brooks catapults us between the natural landscape of love and loss with a seamlessness that is a testament to her velvety smooth poetry. But even as her poetry itself is smooth, the subject matter is rife with bumps on our way down to the lowest point. Life is difficult in the shadows of love. Brooks warns us “You cannot look in his eyes / Because your pulse must not say / What must not be said.” Grown of pride, this declaration focuses on the body's ability to betray the heart. It could be something as simple as a lifted eyebrow, a forced smile, or a slow gulp for air. These are enough to say, in body language, what pride prohibits us from saying; we must not give any satisfaction to the source of our pain. It is macho (although not limited to men), it is stupid, and it is unavoidable. And to think just moments ago we knew the joyous nature of being in love. And to think we thought we were reading a poem about love and being touched “with a lighter hand.” Now, “When he / Shuts a door— / Is not there— / Your arms are water.” Just as love loosed us and allowed us inside the mind of the one we love, we are also loosed when love deserts us—our body, including our heart, exists beyond our control.

So what comes next? After highs and lows how do we rebound to a normal existence? Stuck within an emotional turbulence that we helped create, we “are free / with a ghastly freedom.” In this moment of the poem we are a millennium from the opening lines that laid out the beauty of being in love like a warm quilt covering our whole body on a snowy night. When Gwendolyn Brooks gave us the chance to be in love we took it, assuming and expecting it would be romantic. We didn't take into account the terrible aftermath of loss and the stages of love that none of us want to travel. Suddenly, we “are the beautiful half / Of a golden hurt.” My eyes fill with tears and my heart slows to its gentlest beating when I read that line. It touches me like few others I've ever read and it remains with me like those inexplicably persistent random memories from childhood. I'm overcome by the line's duality: soul-altering beauty and mind-shattering pain. Are we to “remember and covet his mouth, / to touch, to whisper on,” if doing so will blanket every millimeter of our bodies with dread? In that moment of utmost pain we very well might wish our pain out of existence, saying I wish this had never happened. I wish I'd never been in love. Once again we prove how foolish and prone to emotional swells we are. These words are not a spell reversing time, cleansing our hurt, and restoring our deep wounds to before they knew such sorrow. What these words represent is the ultimate lesson embedded in the middle of surprise: we admit defeat by love and that we want no more of it, still we live on in search of love. The process will begin for each of us again. This is an expectation, not a myth; not the “Column of Gold” but the “commonest ash.” Made of what is common, we earn and savor the touches of gold that come our way.

How Things Work - Gary Soto

2009-04-27T21:08:00.000-07:00

HOW THINGS WORK

Today it's going to cost us twenty dollars
To live. Five for a softball. Four for a book,
A handful of ones for coffee and two sweet rolls,
Bus fare, rosin for your mother's violin.
We're completing our task. The tip I left
For the waitress filters down
Like rain, wetting the new roots of a child
Perhaps, a belligerent cat that won't let go
Of a balled sock until there's chicken to eat.
As far as I can tell, daughter, it works like this:
You buy bread from a grocery, a bag of apples
From a fruit stand, and what coins
Are passed on helps others buy pencils, glue,
Tickets to a movie in which laughter
Is thrown into their faces.
If we buy goldfish, someone tries on a hat.
If we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom.
A tip, a small purchase here and there,
And things just keep going. I guess.

--- Gary Soto

Gary Soto's How Things Work:

We have control over our attitudes, over how we approach each day, over how we interact with others, over how we exercise our minds and bodies. Certainly, we have some mechanisms of control in our lives, but these pale in comparison to the large bulk of unknowns each of us encounters. We don't have control over the price of milk or which way the tides roll. We can't control when the sun rises or when we will receive a letter from a friend. These, and many other, surprises appear in our lives and we must adapt. The adaptability of human beings is fairly underrated. Yes, we've all heard about how we resist change, but if we absolutely must make changes then we do it. The smoothness of these transitions are attributable to analytical skills. If we can see the bigger picture then we just might understand why changes need to be made and why we must be flexible. Gary Soto flexes these all-powerful analytical skills in his poem How Things Work, explaining to his daughter (and all of us readers) how the economy works on a very personal level. Thankfully Soto doesn't bog down in a detailed cost-benefit analysis or burden us with high economic jargon; he goes to the root of our human interactions with money, the necessities for survival and the items that make life livable.

From the very first line, Soto's tone is very matter-of-fact and confident in the poem's subject matter. “Today it's going to cost us twenty dollars / To live.” The items are compiled into a random list with their price tags trailing behind the poetic string of images. Taking the list as a whole—a softball, a book,coffee, sweet rolls, bus fare, rosin for his mother's violin— Soto gives us a rounded picture of who he is a person. It might not be fair, but we can draw certain assumptions based upon the purchases that someone makes. Soto avoids this venue for social debate and sticks within the confines of his poem. This is not to say that later in the poem Soto won't make a clear and powerful argument on socio-economic issues. For now, Soto keeps on track, simply stating “We're completing our task.” Still, Soto demonstrates how completing our tasks has unavoidable and far-reaching impacts. “The tip I left / For the waitress filters down / Like rain, wetting the new roots of a child.” In showing our inter-connectedness, Soto blends poetry with political thought, but unlike some blatant, in-your-face poems Soto's How Things Work is natural. Nothing in this poem seems forced or for effect and for that simple reason I've grown to love this poem.

How Things Work has one clear shift, coming near the poem's middle section. When Soto directly addresses his daughter, he makes readers privy to the reason that he cares about issues much larger than himself. He is not overbearing in his interpretation, instead telling his daughter and readers “As far as I can tell, daughter, it works like this.” There's an acknowledgement in that statement that the upcoming ideas are based upon Soto's own experiences and, thus, could be limited. Even so, he doesn't lose much in self-assuredness, moving forward with his poetic-economic theory:

You buy bread from a grocery, a bag of apples
From a fruit stand, and what coins
Are passed on helps others buy pencils, glue,
Tickets to a movie in which laughter
Is thrown into their faces.

It makes perfect sense! See, poetry can explain even the most complex topics. I'm getting fired up right now just thinking about the other things poetry could explain and the problems poetry could solve. With poetry we have the control to break down the mysteries of the universe. All right, I might be getting a little carried away.

Soto's zig-zagging path of money takes us through indelible images, ending on a strangely aggressive movie where “laughter / Is thrown into their faces.” This is the one image in this poem that I struggle with. Is this a critique of modern, popular entertainment and it's skewed focus on poor people? Rather than answer that question I'll provide an alternate view: I'm reading too much into this image. The laughter could very well be thrown in their faces because the movie has a cheesy laugh track and doesn't allow viewers their own freedom to decide when they want to laugh. The forced laughter is not the poem's endpoint. Soto provides a few more examples of his poetic-economic theory: “If we buy goldfish, someone tries on a hat. / If we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom.” We cannot escape our connection with the well-being of our neighbors here and halfway around the world. I considered highlighting this poem earlier this month in my blog because it seemed apt with the state of our local, national, and global economy. I chose to save How Things Work for the end of the month because it provides a positive message in showing how simple and human our problems and solutions are. We hear commentators use large words about the economic meltdown and we hear them debate the merits of varying levels of bailouts. The words these knowledgeable and intelligent people use are nuanced to economic theory, they are designed to prescribe the climate within our economy, yet they serve to exclude, confuse, and complicate matters. Gary Soto has a large vocabulary and he very easily could have exercised it in How Things Work, but he didn't. He used control and restraint to achieve a bigger impact by reaching the largest audience possible. That's not to say he doesn't dazzle us with masterful poetic skill in this poem. Gary Soto uses poetry to explain how things work, to explain that ultimately “things just keep going. I guess.”

Eating Together - Li-Young Lee

2009-04-26T20:02:00.000-07:00

EATING TOGETHER

In the steamer is the trout
seasoned with slivers of ginger,
two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil.
We shall eat it with rice for lunch,
brothers, sister, my mother who will
taste the sweetest meat of the head,
holding it between her fingers
deftly, the way my father did
weeks ago. Then he lay down
to sleep like a snow-covered road
winding through pines older than him,
without any travelers, and lonely for no one.

---Li-Young Lee

Li-Young Lee's Eating Together

I find it interesting to look at this poem with Li-Young Lee's Eating Alone. They are clearly different poems, and yet I feel, in some ways, they serve as companion pieces. We get the struggle of loneliness and loss full force in Eating Alone, while Eating Together has slivers of compassion and the family dynamic. Strangely enough, Eating Together is the poem that proves the necessity of sharing meals with others; the family gathers to eat in the aftermath of losing their patriarch. Lee's father, who we already know a good deal about from Eating Alone, makes more than a ghostly cameo in this poem. He is the powerful figure influencing their dining habits even after he's left the earth. That's a sure sign of someone who has left an impact!

“In the steamer is the trout / seasoned with slivers of ginger, / two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil. / We shall eat it with rice for lunch.” Well okay, Li-Young Lee has me hungry, anyone else? It's a straightforward description of a delicious meal. In reading these lines I can sense the precision in the food preparation. The exact number of sprigs of green onions, the carefully sliced slivers of ginger, the washed and cleaned trout. I also enjoy how Lee strongly calls us to the table: “We shall eat it with rice for lunch.” It's matter-of-fact and invites no questions, almost a father would say to his picky children. And who is being called to lunch? “Brothers, sister, my mother who will / taste the sweetest meat of the head.” Lee doesn't use fanciful adjectives or drawn-out phrases, but he still supplies readers with a clear picture of his family. We know there are a good amount of men in the family, as well as a lone sister. We know the hierarchy of the family, with the mother finding the sweetest meat, the most prized part of the meal, on her plate. And when she eats this meat the poem's hidden subject is revealed: her husband, the children's recently deceased father.

It is in the way that the mother eats her food that she invokes memories of her husband. “Holding it between her fingers / deftly, the way my father did / weeks ago.” Some people say that over time husbands and wives start to dress alike and they even start to look alike; maybe they start to eat alike as well. Lee has already shown us in his other poems that the littlest things can trigger much grander memories. His mother's eating habits are the launching pad for confronting the reality of the situation. They are gathered, as a family, to share a meal for one of the first times without an integral member of their family. In his absence they see his immense impact on themselves. Lee is careful not to go down that sentimental road, instead he steers the poem directly toward the father and away from his surviving family members. When Lee writes, “Then he lay down / to sleep like a snow-covered road / winding through pines older than him, / without any travelers, and lonely for no one,” he is giving his father a poetic burial, a eulogy that guides him through peaceful images to a final resting place. Certainly it is heartbreaking, and yet I can't help but see the blatant love in these lines. It is a love that sprouts from simple roots, just as the food they are sitting down to eat arrived on their plates. And this love was fostered in moments like the one they are sharing in this poem: all of them gathered together to eat and talk, to capture their days and commemorate the people and times they have lost.

Oops...I missed a day.

2009-04-26T20:00:00.000-07:00

This weekend I made an out-of-town-trip. It was fantastic! I thought I had done all the preparation necessary to still post my blog remotely this weekend. Unfortunately, I ran into some technical difficulties that made it nearly impossible for me to post a blog entry on Saturday. As a result I am one day short on my blog entries for the month. To offset this shortcoming I will be posting one more entry on May 1st.

All the best,
Matt

Eating Alone - Li-Young Lee

2009-04-24T09:20:00.000-07:00

EATING ALONE

I've pulled the last of the year's young onions.
The garden is bare now. The ground is cold,
brown and old. What is left of the day flames
in the maples at the corner of my
eye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes.
By the cellar door, I wash the onions,
then drink from the icy metal spigot.

Once, years back, I walked beside my father
among the windfall pears. I can't recall
our words. We may have strolled in silence. But
I still see him bend that way—left hand braced
on knee, creaky—to lift and hold to my
eye a rotten pear. In it, a hornet
spun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening juice.

It was my father I saw this morning
waving to me from the trees. I almost
called to him, until I came close enough
to see the shovel, leaning where I had
left it, in the flickering, deep green shade.

White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas
fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame
oil and garlic. And my own loneliness.
What more could I, a young man, want.

---Li-Young Lee

Li-Young Lee's Eating Alone

Sharing meals with others is common practice for humans. So common, in fact, that eating alone carries a stigma of social awkwardness. Look at that guy at a table by himself—he must be lonely. Where is his family, his friends, anyone who knows and cares about him? Why has everyone deserted him? Alright, maybe I'm being a little melodramatic, but there definitely is a tendency to look at someone dining alone and consider that person to be unhappy and worthy of pity. If you can get over the initial weirdness of eating alone—lifting your head and putting down your fork to describe a funny moment from your day, only to realize there's no one there to listen—then you'll come to understand valuable lessons about yourself and life in general. You'll be better calibrated to your natural instincts and the routines that you follow, and in Li-Young Lee's case you'll recognize the ghosts of memory milling about in your life waiting for you to notice them.

Stacked upon each other like stones forming a rough wall, the images in the first stanza are unyielding and cold. “I've pulled the last of the year's young onions. / The garden is bare now.” His hands are in the farewell to the warmth and bounty of the growing season. He ushers this time of the year out with his final act of gardening. There is sorrow and loss in this is goodbye and our speaker seems to be unable to capture the things around him before they slip away. “What is left of the day flames / in the maples at the corner of my / eye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes.” Lee creates the blink-of-the-eye departure of the cardinal with a speedy and choppy sentence construction. The comma that separates “I turn” and “a cardinal vanishes” acts as a jump cut does in movies and television. The poem's speaker looks for signs of life—the cardinal, the day within the maple tree, the onions—yet when he senses they are with him he tries to acknowledge their presence and in doing so he scares them away.

Moving into memory, the second stanza takes us “years back” to a time when our speaker “walked beside” his father “among the windfall pears.” I must pause and mention how beautiful an image that is: father and young son walking together silently among pears blown from the tree limbs. With these lines, Lee has crafted a very photogenic scene within the poem. It is the father and son's togetherness that matters. Lee “can't recall” if they shared any words, but he does remember his father leaning down “to lift and hold to my / eye a rotten pear.” The little things we commit to memory are fascinating, how they remain in our minds even as we lose large and more traditionally useful pieces of information. This scene stuck with Lee because in the pear his father presented to him “a hornet / spun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening juice.” Like Lee at the end of the poem, the hornet was eating alone. He was intoxicated, possibly infuriated, by the pear, a lovely treat to satisfy his base urges.

“It was my father I saw this morning / waving to me from the trees.” We were with Lee in the morning, this was the poem's first stanza. He certainly appeared a little unnerved and spooked, but enough to have seen the ghost of his father? I'm not one for solving poems as if they are old fashioned capers—it's preposterous to believe that you must approach a poem like Sherlock Holmes. Still, I want to examine some of the possibilities in Lee's reflection that he saw him father in the morning. 1. He simply could have seen some thing or things that eerily reminded him of his father and he is taking it a step further to assume his father was with him. 2. His attempts to capture what was slipping away—the day, the cardinal, the remainders of the growing season—was actually an attempt to conjure his father. 3. He looks at the cardinal as his father. Just when he sees the bird it “vanishes.” 4. This one is similar to the first idea, but he is in the same place, same time of the year where he walked with his father and he can't escape his father's presence, feeling it still resides here and inside Lee. A fifth and final explanation comes later in the third stanza itself. “I almost / called to him, until I came close enough / to see the shovel, leaning where I had / left it, in the flickering, deep green shade.” Lee's father could have been a mirage; from afar Lee saw the shovel against the tree and believed it to be his father. All of these explanations illustrate the depth of emotion that this poem contains. As teachers are known to say, there is no right answer, but we can draw a conclusion: Lee misses his father, most of all when he is farming and eating the fruits of his labor. The tasty list of food that ends the poem is punctuated by a stinging self critique: “And my own loneliness. / What more could I, a young man, want.” Earlier I mentioned the merits of eating alone; Lee has discovered much about himself through eating alone. That doesn't mean he has to be happy with this discovery.

To The Roman Forum --- Kenneth Koch

2009-04-23T21:56:00.000-07:00

TO THE ROMAN FORUM

After my daughter Katherine was born
I was terribly excited
I think I would have been measured at the twenty-five-espresso mark
We—Janice, now Katherine, and I—were in Rome
(Janice gave birth at the international hospital on top of Trastevere)
I went down and sat and looked at the ruins of you
I gazed at them, gleaming in the half-night
And thought, Oh my, My God, My goodness, a child, a wife.
While I was sitting there, a friend, a sculptor, came by
I just had a baby, I said. I mean Janice did. I'm—
I thought I'd look at some very old great things
To match up with this new one. Oh, Adya said,
I guess you'd like to be alone, then. Congratulations. Goodnight.
Thank you. Goodnight, I said. Adya departed.
Next day I saw Janice and Katherine.
Here they are again and have nothing to do with you
A pure force swept through me another time
I am here, they are here, this has happened.
It is happening now, it happened then.

---Kenneth Koch

Kenneth Koch's To The Roman Forum

Without motive or expectation, without distortion or distinction, sincerity is fresh as the cool morning air. Sincerity is so difficult for some folks because it requires vulnerability, and thus it requires trust. Who is to say that in being sincere you'll not be taken advantage of, or judged, or made to feel bad about yourself? Fear of being sincere is rarely talked about, and yet it drives so many of us to create versions of ourselves that are fabricated, versions with stiff hearts that limit expressions of emotion, versions of ourselves that have built protection to weather the harsh cruelties that life, and our fellow humans, will most certainly supply us with. It takes courage and resolve to be sincere, to open yourself up to the world and to let others into the tender parts of yourself. Sincerity is natural early in life, and then it fades as a concurrent side effect of growing up, but some adults retain it. Kenneth Koch retained, and possibly rediscovered, his sincerity with the birth of his daughter Katherine. He documents this amazing moment in his life in his poem To The Roman Forum. Filled with overwhelming joy and attempting to digest the gravity of his new situation, Koch retreats for a respite at the ruins of the Roman Forum. His sincerity as he ponders what the moment means and what it will come to mean later in life is magical. I hope to someday have children and when those moments arrive in my life I also hope to have a moment to myself like Kenneth Koch does in this poem, a moment of wonder and serenity, and absolute sincerity.

Every time I read this poem I'm struck by how honest this poem is. You read the poem and feel like you're inside Kenneth Koch's brain, navigating the curves and straightaways of life with him. This unfettered access is a product of his sincerity. Pretty soon I'm going to get sick of using that word, sincerity, over and over again in this essay, but not yet. Koch is excited and honest in the first few lines of the poem, sharing with readers the root of his excitement (his daughter Katherine's birth) and how it made him feel and act (“I think I would have been measured at the twenty-five-espresso mark”). The espresso comment also serves to set up the poem's location, which we learn is Rome in the poem's next line. As if we are friends or family members, Koch informs us of the exact hospital and location where Janice, his wife, gave birth. We feel included and invited into this important event in the Koch family. It is such a personal event, but somehow Koch beckons us in without being showy or artificial. And we accept, moving with him to “the ruins of you,” Koch's clever way of linking the poem's title: To The Roman Forum. We might assume that the poem would be addressed to his wife or new daughter, but Koch addresses it to the ancient and crumbling Roman Forum. It is where his epiphany takes place and so this spot acquires a gigantic significance in his life. Koch gazes at the ruins “gleaming in the half night” as he thinks “Oh my, My God, My goodness, a child, a wife.” Koch's is a special joy, a kind I've been told is without comparison.

The poem impresses me with a strong command of voice, so strong that Koch is able to transcend grammar within parts of the poem. The lines themselves are distinctly long at times and could easily use periods between them, but Koch does not utilize periods, instead allowing sentences early in the poem to exist as separate, yet linked entities. Where he really gets the voice thumping along is when Koch's sculptor friend passes by. The conversation they share is embedded within the poem without quotation marks or clearly delineated speech passages. Koch uses voice and sentence structuring to convey this conversation in a very clear manner. Take a second look at this passage within the poem, paying attention to how the short sentences imitate the pauses and the back-and-forth in this brief conversation:

I just had a baby, I said. I mean Janice did. I'm—
I thought I'd look at some very old great things
To match up with this new one. Oh, Adya said,
I guess you'd like to be alone, then. Congratulations. Goodnight.
Thank you. Goodnight, I said. Adya departed.

Yes, he does mark of some of the spoken words with “said” as a way of attributing phrases to our two speakers in the conversation. Still, it's an impressively succinct way of writing this exchange with no cumbersome extra words or phrases. The end result is that this part of the poem moves fluidly into the end. After looking at the remains of the Roman Forum, Koch determines, as he returns to Janice and Katherine, that “they have nothing to do with you (Roman Forum).” He concludes “a pure force swept through me another time” and that there is immense personal and larger history in this place and this moment, that “I am here, they are here, this has happened. / It is happening now, it happened then.” Opening up in the last two lines is a daring way to end the poem. It shows Koch's new sense of vision, possibly gained in his reflective moment on becoming a father. He is casting out his net and hoping to tug in something to keep him in this moment, to retain the joy and love that have made this moment swell with warmth and amazement inside of him. His sincerity will collect the many pieces comprising this moment and carry them within him throughout the rest of his life. This is one of the positives of being sincere: with sincerity the moments of beauty you create will never escape you.

My Nightingale - Rose Auslander

2009-04-22T20:04:00.000-07:00

MY NIGHTINGALE

My mother was a doe in another time.
Her honey-brown eyes
and her loveliness
survive from that moment.

Here she was---
half an angel and half humankind---
the center was mother.
When I asked her once what she would have wanted to be
she made this answer to me: a nightingale.

Now she is a nightingale.
Every night, night after night, I hear her
in the garden of my sleepless dream.

She is singing the Zion of her ancestors.
She is singing the long-ago Austria.
She is singing the hills and beech-woods
of Bukowina.
My nightingale
sings lullabies to me
night after night
in the garden of my sleepless dream.

---Rose Auslander

Rose Auslander's My Nightingale

Last night we looked at Dylan Thomas writing about his father; tonight we shift to Rose Auslander writing about her mother. Parents serve as emotionally charged and deeply reflective topics for poems. Besides giving us life, they infuse our lives with subtle characteristics that evolve significantly as we grow in mind and body. But Rose Auslander's My Nightingale is about more than a mother's continued presence, even after death, in her daughter's life. This poem came to me by way of Edward Hirsch's majestic Poet's Choice. Author of How To Read A Poem, and quite a talented poet, no one writes about poetry better than Edward Hirsch. Honestly, it's not even close. He is blessed with the ability to bring any poem—no matter how complex—to all people. The idea for my blog came after reading Edward Hirsch; I model my blog entries after the tightly written essays collected in Poet's Choice. Hirsch is a genuine student of poetry, searching every inch of the globe and trekking back deep in history to reveal great poems. His focus on women and war lead him to Rose Auslander and her poem My Nightingale, which Hirsch places on his “shortlist of the most radiant mid-twentieth century poems.” Who am I to argue with my idol, I agree.

What makes this poem radiant? The ghostly images that float through the poem bouncing from dreams to the harsh reality of WWII Germany. “My mother was a doe in another time.” Such a beautiful opening image. I see Auslander's mother as a doe stopping to lick the morning dew from grass in a fertile valley, even before “her honey-brown eyes / and her loveliness / survive from that moment.” The diction ending that first stanza is ominous; “survive from that moment” foreshadows tense times ahead. But first Auslander revisits memories to round out the description of her mother. “Half an angel and half humankind— / the center was mother.” The mother as a center is an idea that many of us can associate with. What Rose Auslander comes to find is that at her mother's center is “a nightingale.” This was the reply when Rose “asked her once what she would have wanted to be.” I find this answer to be very imaginative, almost with the unbridled imagination that children possess. As life goes on our minds fill with logic and statistics, striping the power of creativity from our minds and in its place inserting burdens. Just from that answer I know that Rose's mother was a fun woman.

“Now she is a nightingale. / Every night, night after night, I hear her / in the garden of my sleepless dream.” Beautifully haunting, those lines delicately combine conflicting images. Curiously, it is a dream that is sleepless and not a nightmare. Just as perplexing is the idea of a garden of sleepless dreams. Gardens, where life grows, has also become the spot where Auslander's mother resides as a nightingale. And just what is this nightingale singing? She is singing her family history and journeying through the sorrows that have befallen them, “singing the Zion of her ancestors.” These songs reverberate in Rose Auslander's garden of her sleepless dream. These songs keep her family alive. Sincere, yet strained with longing, these are not songs, Auslander terms them “lullabies.” But unlike lullabies putting children gently to sleep, these songs keep Rose Auslander awake. Now I see why her dreams are sleepless; who amongst us would be able to sleep with our deceased mother singing to us “every night, night after night.”

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night - Dylan Thomas

2009-04-21T19:37:00.000-07:00

DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

--- Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Take a guess at the year this poem was written? 1865, 1910, 1727, 1643...For those of you who cheated and googled Dylan Thomas to get the answer you already know that all of those guesses are incorrect. Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night was published fifty-seven years ago in 1952, a year before Thomas himself would “rage against the dying of the light” and succumb to alcohol poisoning on the streets of New York City. I mention the year to show that this poem really wasn't written that long ago, although formally the poem is much older. Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night is a villanelle—a poetic form originating in 16th century France. Last year in this blog I wrote about another of my favorite villanelles, Elizabeth Bishop's One Art. The villanelle is without a doubt the most difficult poetic form to pull off with conviction and sincerity. Requiring multiple refrains, the villanelle operates on a strict scale of repetition and rhyme. The initial stanza sets the poem's groundwork, with the first and third lines not only rhyming, but serving as refrains throughout the rest of the poem. The second line in the initial stanza is also integral to the poem's design, with its end word providing the rhyming template for all other second lines in the poem. If all of this poetic shop-talk is confusing and you're a visual learner take a look above at the poem we're focusing on today. Dylan Thomas is not necessarily a poet I'd associate with formal mastery, but Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night is a flawless villanelle, both for its formal components and the overwhelming emotional buttons it pushes with an unrivaled ferocity.

Dylan Thomas wrote “My poetry is, or should be, useful to me for one reason: it is the record of my individual struggle from darkness towards some measure of light.” Certainly there's plenty of darkness and light in Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. Right off the bat we learn this poem is about the close of life, a time when “Old age should burn and rave at close of day.” Thomas does not preach an easing into the afterlife; his philosophy, before all is said and done, will apply to wise men, good men, wild men, grave men, and the one man this poem is explicitly for, Thomas' own father. The poet has the same message for all of these people: “Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Keeping in mind what Thomas had to say about his poetry, I can't help but believe this poem is not only his struggle with the impending loss of his father, but also his realization of his own mortality.

Examining the types of folks who Thomas invokes will help us to better understand the ideas that drive Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. First we have the wise men, who “at their end know dark is right.” They have the vision to know that the end is coming and their power to change the result is insignificant. But “because their words had forked no lightning they / Do not go gentle into that good night.” The good men lament “how bright / their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay.” They see their lives in terms of the nature's beauty and the cycles of the sea, but like the wise men before them they “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Of course the wild men will fight their fate; heck, they even “caught and sang the sun in flight.” What a massive undertaking that would be! But this strength is tempered by knowledge arriving “too late” in life and so they too “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Even the grave men, who already have their thoughts shifting to death and “see with blinding sight,” they “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” These men are indicative of different temperaments and stages in life, yet they all approach the end of life with the same passionate attempt to squeeze every last moment, to prolong the one life they each have. And prolonging life is exactly what Thomas implores his father to do in the final stanza. Even if he can't do the impossible and live on through the dire stages of illness, Thomas wants his father to fight, to “curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.” It might be selfish because he cannot imagine a world without his father and it might be a futile pep talk to an already weakened man, but Thomas takes an all-too-real situation that each of us will face and filters it through poetry to create one of the most impassioned and forceful poems in the history of the English language.

Loneliness - Tomas Transtromer

2009-04-20T20:59:00.000-07:00

LONELINESS

I.

One evening in February I came near to dying here.
The car skidded sideways on the ice, out
on the wrong side of the road. The approaching cars---
their lights---closed in.

My name, my girls, my job
broke free and were left silently behind
further and further away. I was anonymous
like a boy in a playground surrounded by enemies.

The approaching traffic had huge lights.
They shone on me while I pulled at the wheel
in a transparent terror that floated like egg white.
The seconds grew---there was space in them---
they grew big as hospital buildings.

You could almost pause
and breathe out for a while
before being crushed.

Then a hold caught: a helping grain of sand
or a wonderful gust of wind. The car broke free
and scuttled smartly right over the road.
A post shot up and cracked---a sharp clang---it
flew away in the darkness.

Then---stillness. I sat back in my seat-belt
and saw someone coming through the whirling snow
to see what had become of me.

II.

I have been walking for a long time
on the frozen Ostergotland fields.
I have not seen a single person.

In other parts of the world
there are people who are born, live and die
in a perpetual crowd.

To be always visible---to live
in a swarm of eyes---
a special expression must develop.
Face coated with clay.

The murmuring rises and falls
while they divide up among themselves
the sky, the shadows, the sand grains.

I must be alone
ten minutes in the morning
and ten minutes in the evening.
---Without a program.

Everyone is queuing for everyone else.

Many.

One.

---Tomas Transtromer, translated by Robin Fulton

Tomas Transtromer's Loneliness

There is something to be said for the unexpected. Experiences and instincts are often reliable and because of this reliability when a surprise arises we are unsure of the situation. What we know to be true is proven false. This might lead us to doubt ourselves and question the world around us. When the unexpected occurs in a poem it can be disorienting, but it can also be refreshing. Tomas Transtromer's poetry is riddled with the unexpected. Characterized by jolts of imagination, Transtromer's images are more unique than any other poet I've ever read. The similes and metaphors that populate Loneliness are fitting examples of Transtromer's startling sense of comparison. The unexpected lives quite naturally within the poetry of Tomas Transtromer; how else could we explain a poem about loneliness, a state associated with sorrow and deprivation, that ultimately shows how life is lacking without time spent by ourselves.

Loneliness is a poem of two distinct parts. The first section describes a frightening near-death car accident: “One evening in February I came near to dying here.” Through this viewpoint, the poem's speaker is alone with his mortality. This version of loneliness, in which the speaker finds himself powerless, is terrifying. “The approaching traffic had huge lights” and as it closes in on our speaker we clearly come to identify these cars as agents of death. On a more elementary and nostalgic level Transtromer compares the speaker's situation to being “a boy in a playground surrounded by enemies.” How this fear is articulated is one example of Transtromer's gift with crafting wondrous similes and metaphors. With the lights of the fast charging cars upon him, our speaker is alone in his fight to steady himself and his own automobile. He jerks the wheel “in a transparent terror that floated like egg white.” Comparing the fine line of life and death to something as delicate as an egg white is amazing, but the simile acquires its genius when we realize that the egg white comes from an egg. He's taken this fear over death and aligned it with the flimsy center of something meant to give new life. How wonderful is that? It's such a deft touch that we almost feel an unexpected calm in our speaker's moment of disarray. But our speaker feels this as well, admitting that “you could almost pause / and breathe out for a while / before being crushed.” And just as it appears our speaker is destined for a horrible fate, “a helping grain of sand / or a wonderful gust of wind,” something minuscule allows the car to break free and “scuttle smartly right over the road.” This section, which documents the horrible alone that we face at the end of our lives, concludes with our speaker in a trance of “stillness” and bystanders braving the “whirling snow / to see what had become of me.”

The second section of the poems flips the coin to show readers an utterly different side of the same emotional state. Loneliness is not laced with fear in this part of the poem, but instead it focuses and centers our speaker. He needs time alone to become the best version of himself. Transtromer begins the section by taking a walk through desolate frozen fields where he has “not seen a single person.” It would seemingly be a desolate loneliness, but as we learned earlier Transtromer loves to splash the unexpected in his poems. He tells us “In other parts of the world / there are people who are born, live and die / in a perpetual crowd.” This sincere stanza reverses the poem's tone. Where others would have been a great comfort to our speaker in the first part of the poem, now they are “a swarm of eyes.” Away from “the murmuring,” Transtromer declares that he “must be alone / ten minutes in the morning / and ten minutes in the evening. ---Without a program.” He wants to break from the “many” to find his himself as “one.” It is a simple desire vested in the clarity that accompanies simplicity. He seeks out his loneliness, viewing time spent with himself and no one else as sustenance.

So what are we to think of loneliness? Tomas Transtromer has given us two opposing views, both presented with imagination, emotion, and sincerity. Our expectations have been toyed with and if you're like me you're scratching your head. I'm not sure we are meant to decide on one part of the poem as being superior to the other. Instead, I'm comfortable thinking that Transtromer intended to show the complexity of loneliness, to surprise us yet again by proving that it's more than an emotion of sadness and longing.

Twenty One Love Poems, Poem #2 - Adrienne Rich

2009-04-19T20:02:00.000-07:00

TWENTY-ONE LOVE POEMS

II.

I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.
Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,
you've been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed:
our friend the poet comes into my room
where I've been writing for days,
drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,
and I want to show her one poem
which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,
and wake. You've kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone...
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,
which carries the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air.

---Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich's Twenty-One Love Poems, Poem II

Since the inception of poetry there have been a handful of topics poets have gravitated towards, foremost among them love. It makes perfect sense, right? Not only have pop-songs and happily-ever-after romances indoctrinated us into the world of love-conquers-all, but if we're blessed enough to have a caring family when we enter this world then we are very quickly introduced to the transformative beauty of love. It takes a brave soul to write a love poem. Trying to capture something as restless and free-spirited as love seems like an impossible task at first glance, yet throughout history some of the best pieces of writing, including poems, have been motivated by love. Adrienne Rich's second poem in her sequence Twenty-One Love Poems is another link in the astounding chain of love poetry, a chain that includes Shakespeare, Whitman, and, without a doubt, Pablo Neruda. Rich's contribution is all her own: part ars-poetica, part love poem.

“I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.” This straightforward first line of the poem includes a few things worth focusing on. Rarely is the impact of a single word on a whole poem as visible as Rich's usage of “up” in this initial sentence. 'I wake in your bed' is a quick moving way to begin the poem, almost hurried. This start also evokes a somewhat archaic tone, a voice that echoes long ago. “I wake up in your bed,” might not seem much different, but the inclusion of the word “up” has positive connotations. These good vibes stretch to the next sentence where “dreaming” represents a wonderful way to usher in a new day. But there was a separation of these two lovers “much earlier” when “the alarm broke” them from sleep and “each other.” The lover of the poem's speaker has been at “a desk for hours,” working through the early morning, while the speaker dreams love through the lens of poetry. She has been “writing for days” when their friend, the poet, “comes into the room.” This room is a beautiful in a way that only a writer can appreciate: “drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere.” This is pretty much the opposite of writer's block. Amongst this mess of productivity, there is a single poem that our speaker wants to show off. She declares “it is the poem of my life.” And just when she is poised to give this lifework up to an audience, she freezes, or as Rich puts it “But I hesitate, / and wake.” At this moment when a personal triumph is averted by fear, notice that Rich's speaker doesn't “wake up,” instead she “wake(s).” That might be the best piece of evidence for the point that I began this paragraph with.

Awakened by kisses, our speaker tells her beloved “I dreamed you were a poem, / a poem I wanted to show someone...” For most poets, the idea of displaying a poem in its early form is terrifying. We want to polish up the rough edges before unleashing it on the world. It's motivated somewhat by ego; we don't want anyone to think less of us or our writing ability because of a poem released prematurely. And it's also motivated by a quest for perfection: the perfect word, the perfect voice, the perfect line break and form. We believe that if we pour all of ourselves into writing and revising a poem that our sweat will earn a tiny taste of that perfection we're striving for. I'm not saying any of these ideas are right, but to better understand the actions of Rich's speaker it is important to note these things. When she wants to show this poem of her lover to someone it is an astounding tribute of love. From laughter she returns to dreams, but now that she has confronted the truth of her feelings she can elucidate them further. She has “the desire to show you (her lover) to everyone I love, / to move openly together / in the pull of gravity.” The weight that accompanies gravity “is not simple,” as Rich's speaker acknowledges, but she commits to this undertaking. It's a commitment built by love, an emotion as natural as “the feathered grass” and “the upbreathing air.”

This Is How Memory Works - Patricia Hampl

2009-04-18T22:24:00.001-07:00

THIS IS HOW MEMORY WORKS

You are stepping off a train.
A wet blank night, the smell of cinders.
A gust of steam from the engine swirls
around the hem of your topcoat, around
the hand holding the brown leather valise,
the hand that, a moment ago, slicked back
the hair and then put on the fedora
in front of the mirror with the beveled
edges in the cherrywood compartment.

The girl standing on the platform
in the Forties dress
has curled her hair, she has
nylon stockings---no, silk stockings still.
Her shoulders are touchingly military,
squared by those shoulder pads
and a sweet faith in the Allies.
She is waiting for you.
She can be wearing a hat, if you like.

You see her first.
That's part of the beauty:
you get the pure, eager face,
the lyrical dress, the surprise.
You can have the steam,
the crowded depot, the camel's-hair coat,
real leather and brass clasps on the suitcase;
you can make the lights glow with
strange significance, and the black cars
that pass you are historical yet ordinary.

The girl is yours,
the flowery dress, the walk
to the streetcar, a fried egg sandwich
and a joke about Mussolini.
You can have it all:
you're in that world, the only way
you'll ever be there now, hired
for your silent hammer, to nail pictures
to the walls of this mansion
made of thinnest air.

---Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl's This Is How Memory Works

Each of us has moments that we'd like to live again, moments where all facets of life join in a seamless communion providing a scintillating taste of perfection. We live through monotonous days and struggle through sorrow's depths for the moments we'd like to live again. Of course, some of these banner moments are inherently tied to large accomplishments and achievements: graduations, weddings, births, job opportunities. Yes, these events are tremendous and noteworthy, but we can see them coming; there's prior warning. I'm partial to the moments that arrive unexpectedly like a forgotten ten dollar bill in the pocket of an old coat. With a tinge of mystery, the instant when all things converge into one is beyond any description I could offer. Instead of analyzing the moment with incisive language, Patricia Hampl's This Is How Memory Works takes readers into the moment. She equips us with the little details that we seem to remember, even as we wonder why we remember them. Hampl makes it clear that memory is fluid and we have the vision to look into our past and breath life back into it, plucking out the glances, the spoken words, and the everlasting emotion. As we learn in This Is How Memory Works, “You can have it all: / you're in that world,” but are memories completely adequate in transporting us back to the original moment, do they give us all of that world?

From the get-go, we are in the moment. It's not an “I” character in the poem, but a second person “you.” This empowers the reader to become the poem's main character. It is a tremendously forceful, although somewhat dangerous way to begin the poem. By making this decision to thrust readers into the poem, Hampl must fully immerse us in the place and time. She does this quite skillfully with sensory specifics. She has us notice “the smell of cinders” and “a gust of steam from the engine swirls / around the hem of your topcoat.” From holding a “brown leather valise” to slicking back “the hair and then put(ting) on the fedora,” our hand becomes a focus. We, as readers, are given tasks that we just performed. We are given possessions, a “mirror with the beveled / edges in the cherrywood compartment.” It is not a mirror with beveled edges, but it is a mirror with the beveled edges---a specific mirror that has some significance to us. Some readers might this sly and want to rebel against being molded into a character by the poet, but Hampl makes it work. She sells out (that's a compliment) and doesn't even think about going back.

After the first stanza plunks us into our character, the second stanza begins to establish the parameters of this moment. We come to see why this memory is special and remains with us. There is a “girl standing on the platform / in the Forties dress.” We remember details about her clothes, although it doesn't come easily: “she has / nylon stockings---no, silk stockings still.” The time and place become an even larger area of emphasis, with the train station looming as a site of reunion. Knowing we're in the forties and with mentions of her “sweet faith in the Allies,” the puzzle pieces are finding their grooves quite nicely. Hampl delivers the line “She is waiting for you” almost as sweeping final brush stroke. Our character is a man, presumably a soldier returning from WWII, to the woman he loves. Because it is a memory saved over years, we might also assume the woman would turn out to be the love of this man's life. That is certainly not fact, but there are hints to lead us in that direction. Another important line is the second stanza's final line: “She can be wearing a hat, if you like.” Hampl is issuing a directive that some of the details in memories are up to us, that we can shift them to our liking, that truth is contained in the essence of the moment, not in the minutiae. I struggle with this idea, particularly because it was the sensory details in the first stanza that pressed us into our character.

With all of the set-up out of the way, we arrive at the moment in the third stanza. It's written in such a way that I see it clear as a scene on a towering movie screen. “You see her first” triggers the man to stand tall and peer through the crowds until he spots her. This right here is the moment, how he gets a glance of her before she realizes. We're allowed into this moment he owns, realizing with him that his private view of the woman he loves, seeing her first, well “that's part of the beauty: / you get the pure, eager face, / the lyrical dress, the surprise.” I'm in awe of these lines and how they simply and wholly capture a once-in-a-lifetime moment; Hampl does a superb job writing this memory back to life. And because of the moment's importance in our character's life, he remembers the quotidian elements surrounding him: “the steam, / the crowded depot, the camel's-hair coat, / real leather and brass clasps on the suitcase.” It is his memory; if he wants he “can make the lights glow with / strange significance.” The lights are already lit, but he (and we as readers) can decide if they take on some lasting meaning. It's almost impossible to believe, but we have some control over our memories.

The poem concludes with a focus on this idea of control over our memories. “The girl is yours” and “you can have it all: you're in that world.” Still, whatever control we have over our memories is inconsequential. We can alter some of the minor details or draw conclusions about how something small was ultimately a symbol of things to come. This is the equivalent of sending a soldier off to war with a bee-bee gun. Largely powerless and ornamental, “the only way / you'll ever be there now” is in the necessary task of remembering so as not to forget. Hampl has us take a “silent hammer” and “nail pictures / to the walls of this mansion / made of thinnest air.” It's a fitting metaphor to end the poem: memory pictures within the house of our minds.

When you strip everything extraneous away it's not a question of if memories can take us back to those joyous moments that passed by like moon rockets, but more so it's a question of if we have anything else at our disposal. There is nothing I know of besides memories that allows us to relive events gone by. And as we age, even our memories that we hold tight become frayed around the edges, discolored and disfigured at certain parts. It's been said before, but I'll say it again: no one is immune to time. Knowing this, we embrace what we do have: the majestic bittersweet construct of memory.

His Running My Running - Robert Francis

2009-04-17T21:15:00.000-07:00

HIS RUNNING MY RUNNING

Mid-autumn late autumn
At dayfall in leaf-fall
A runner comes running.

How easy his striding
How light his footfall
His bare legs gleaming.

Alone he emerges
Emerges and passes
Alone, sufficient.

When Autumn was early
Two runners came running
Striding together

Shoulder to shoulder
Pacing each other
A perfect pairing.

Out of leaves falling
Over leaves fallen
A runner comes running

Aware of no watcher
His loneness my loneness
His running my running.

---Robert Francis

Robert Francis' His Running My Running

Lately I've become prone to hitting the snooze button once or twice each morning. This means that I eat up precious minutes with extra snippets of sleep. Twelve minutes, hit the snooze, then another twelve minutes. Before I know it the time I'd allotted to my morning run is completely gone. It's a damn shame when this happens. Scientific studies have proven that morning exercise stimulates us and improves our moods, giving us energy for the rest of the day. When I'm not lazy I roll from bed, get dressed, grab my Ipod, and lace up my running shoes. Pitch black and stiffly cold, I shake, stretch, and then launch myself into the morning, pounding one foot after the other. Running is therapeutic, allowing me to erase whatever happened before and whatever will happen later. It is time reserved strictly for myself and sometimes, when running, I feel perfectly in-sync with who I am and who I want to be. This connectedness is built upon rhythm. Just as a poet seeks out rhythm in combinations of words, so does a runner search for their natural rhythm. Robert Francis knew this well, sharing the rhythm of writing and running in his poem His Running My Running.

It's tough to read this poem and overlook the form. Francis is noted for his tight and precise poems, often driven by natural rhythms. In His Running My Running, Francis repeats not only words within the same line (Mid-autumn late autumn / At dayfall in leaf-fall), but he also creates lines with repetitive sequences of syllables and stresses (How easy his striding / How light his footfall / His bare legs gleaming). The repetition of words and phrases combines with the sporadic end rhymes to form a loose, yet concentrated structure. This structure mirrors the whole body engaged in the cycle of running: churning legs, pounding feet, heavily beating heart, contracting lungs, fuzzy head, spasming muscles. I'm not going out on any limbs here, but I believe Francis intended the poem to read like a good, long run: rising and falling repeatedly, balanced and measured, but as a whole one long breath, in then out.

In Francis' portrayal, running is not a social activity. The runner at the center of the poem “Emerges and passes / Alone, and sufficient.” In this accomplishment there is not a sense of joy, but a subtle pride. The runner doesn't seek out others, but instead settles into solitude and in this state finds satisfaction. It wasn't always this way. The poem's speaker, the lone runner, reminds us “ When Autumn was early / Two runners came running / Striding together / Shoulder to shoulder / Pacing each other / A perfect pairing.” I find it very interesting that Francis drops this “pairing” just as soon as they are introduced. They've unexpectedly been separated without explanation, yet they exist together in memory. He's created the mystery of the runner's partner and where this integral person has disappeared to, why this person has disappeared leaving our runner alone.

Ultimately, the poem returns to the lone runner “Aware of no watcher.” The poem's speaker sees so much of himself in this lone runner: “His loneness my loneness / His running my running.” Their kinship is remarkable. They share the poem's rhythm, a rhythm we previously established as emblematic of the act of running. I see how a poet could equate writing and crafting a poem to running. Both are lonely activities completed in solitude, but with the world all around you. Both bring you close to others---whether it is your audience, fans, or other poets and runners---only to pull you back to your own private world. And both activities are invigorating, stirring your consciousness so that you, alone, consider the largest issues: how far you can go, what you can sustain, all that you are capable of, and if you've made the impossible possible. Yes, poets and runners are the same breed and maybe we didn't need Robert Francis to illustrate this for us in His Running My Running, but I'm sure glad that he did.

We Are Virginia Tech - Nikki Giovanni

2009-04-16T16:42:00.000-07:00

WE ARE VIRGINIA TECH

We Are Virginia Tech. We are sad today and we will be sad for quite a while…We are not moving on. We are embracing our mourning. We are Virginia Tech.

We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly. We are brave enough to bend to cry. And sad enoughto know we must laugh again. We are Virginia Tech.

We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it. But neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS. Neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by a rogue army. Neither does the baby elephant watching his community be devastated for ivory. Neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water. Neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy. We are Virginia Tech.

The Hokie Nation embraces our own and reaches out with open hearts and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong and brave and innocent and unafraid. We are better than we think, and not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imagination and the possibilities.

We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears, through all this sadness. We are the Hokies!

We will …prevail! We will prevail! We will prevail! WE ARE VIRGINIA TECH

---Nikki Giovanni

Nikki Giovanni's Speech We Are Virginia Tech

It's hard to believe it's been two years. Two whole years since that bleak and numbing April day. In my line of work I've read thousands of essays by high schoolers trying to describe the most important event in their lives. Often these students describe a painful loss, and yet they struggle to go beyond the obvious. I can't fault them. Suffering an unexpected and unwanted loss paralyzes us. We feel angry; we feel the world is unfair; we feel God wronged us; we feel hopeless; we feel powerless; we feel unbearable sadness; we feel guilt; we feel unsure about what we thought to be true. Having our beliefs tested is one of the things that makes us human. That might be a pessimistic view of life, but at some point each of us will arrive at a moment where what we believed---the central tenants of the way we have lived our lives---will be shattered. In the aftermath, there is no shortage of things to analyze and dissect. After all the stages of grieving have taken their course we are left with ourselves and what we believe.

I'm not going to break down Professor Giovanni's speech as a poem. It's more than a poem, so much more. Clearly, she wrote as a poet, threading metaphors and similes, listening to her language, digging for difficult images, and crafting a resounding and stirring refrain. But I can't dissect this piece of writing. What she wrote about is personal; what she wrote about is me. I am Virginia Tech, and I know thousands of folks who that phrase applies to. Together, we are Virginia Tech. And all of us that are a part of this global community, stretching far beyond our beloved Blacksburg, needed her words two years ago. I've never seen the power of the written word, the power of poetry, like I did in Professor Giovanni's speech. What courage and strength it took to speak for our whole community, to remind us in a line echoing Whitman that “we are better than we think, and not quite what we want to be.” For those out there who believe poetry is dying, notice that Professor Giovanni, a poet, delivered her words and coaxed our community to feel pride and togetherness, to remember who we were and what we were together capable of. It's often said, sometimes in a derogatory manner, that poets are dreamers---Let it also be said that when tragedy strikes, poets summarize our grief so that it might be just a little more manageable, and as Professor Giovanni showed us, poets reignite and galvanize our ability to dream.

This past weekend I was in Blacksburg for Easter. Mass was held in the Commonwealth Ballroom in Squires Student Center. Walking around before mass, I went from one glass case to the next, all containing items relating to April 16th 2007. It was a museum of sorts to the tragedy: to the people we lost, to the people who worked to save lifes, to the people who lost someone, to the students, to the faculty, to the staff, to the alumni, to the whole Virginia Tech community. There were quilts. There were beautiful, life-like drawings and painting of all 32 victims. There were cards and banners with supportive wishes and words from around the globe. The only thing I could think as I walked from “exhibit” to “exhibit” was this: I don't know that we'll ever heal, and I'm not sure this isn't how it's supposed to be. I can only speak for myself, and I am just one of many Hokies, but I wonder if it still hurts and it will always hurt because if we completely heal then we might be susceptible to forgetting. To forget the tragic event itself would not be a bad thing, but to forget the people we lost---the shining examples of why our community is so special---well, that would be a travesty. We continue to invent the future and we prevail in so many ways, but these tasks will forever be in-progress. Without a conclusion in sight, not wanting to conclude, we remember and we repeat “We are Virginia Tech.”

Kevin Young - Boasts

2009-04-15T16:51:00.000-07:00

BOASTS

Wouldn’t be no fig leaf
if I was Adam

but a palm tree.

* * *

Once I danced all
night, till dawn

& I---who never
did get along---

decided to call a truce---
my body

buckets lighter,
we shook hands

& called it blues.

* * *

Mama, I’m the man
with the most

biggest feet---
when I step out

my door to walk the dog
round the block

I’m done.

---Kevin Young

Kevin Young's Boasts

It was time for humor on this blog and with Boasts Kevin Young gives us a few reasons to laugh. Last year I focused on how Kevin Young builds an emotional charge, while also rhythmically building the blues in his poem Song Of Smoke. This year we get to see that same rhythmic skill on display, but Young compliments it by flexing his comedic muscles. A boastful and boisterous speaker bombards readers with tales of his physical prowess. It's up to readers to decide how reliable our speaker is in this poem, but it's also up to readers to decide if that really matters. Honestly, would you enjoy this poem any less if you knew the speaker was essentially talking himself up? Boasts is a great example of a poem that doesn't require deep analysis or prodding at hidden meanings to enjoy. All you have to do to enjoy this poem is read it, preferably aloud; trust me, it's a poem that begs to be read aloud. I dare you to read this poem out loud and not break into the cocky voice that Kevin Young so clearly equipped this poem with.

Any doubt about what type of poem Boasts is going to be is answered in the first three lines. “Wouldn't be no fig leaf / if I was Adam / but a palm tree.” Oh, so that's how it's gonna be. I see. The brash voice is unavoidable, and yet it has a strangely attractive quality to it. Not only is the voice blatantly witty and funny, but I find myself attracted to the voice (and the poem) because it's inherently insecure. If these boasts are true then why toot your own horn? Without attention and validation from others, our speaker is not fulfilled. Sure this is shallow, but aren't we all on some level. That human quality grounds the speaker for me, even as he tries so hard to distinguish himself from everyone else.

Showmanship in music is common, especially in the blues, where a level of mystery and mythology validates blues musicians. I've read a fair amount of articles and book chapters about Robert Johnson, WC Handy, Son House, and plenty of other early blues musicians and I can't tell you what in their pasts was truth and what was invented. Besides having funky nicknames, it seems you had to have a murky past to be a good bluesman. Kevin Young allows the speaker in Boasts to create his own past:

Once I danced all
night, till dawn

& I---who never
did get along---

decided to call a truce---
my body

buckets lighter,
we shook hands

& called it blues.

Internal strife and battling oneself is not a foreign concept to the blues, although such struggle is normally preceded by longing for a woman or booze. In this case, Kevin Young steers his speaker clear of those time honored blues instigators. The culprit instead seems to be good old fashioned hubris. A night of challenging himself to dance on through the pain, exhaustion, and “buckets” of sweat ultimately ends in a “truce” that places our speaker on the same level as the almighty blues. To some blues purists this might sound heretical, but to me it appears Young's speaker is offering a tribute to the form.

After a moment of admiration through immersion, the blues gives way to the boasts that led the poem off. Our speaker returns to declaring the dominance of his physical features: “Mama, I’m the man / with the most / biggest feet---” You don't say? Well good for you speaker, but there's got to be some reason Kevin Young has you telling us that, making it nearly impossible to read this poem and not become distracted by the sexual innuendos. The reason for these sexual boasts about his decidedly male body part comes into focus with the poem's very abrupt ending. So this is just my theory and please feel free to disagree with me, but I'm convinced that the end of the poem is Kevin Young's very clever way of metaphorically simulating premature...well let's just say performance. I think you catch my drift. After all these boasts about his parts, the speaker reaches the brief poem's conclusion and ends with a final “I'm done.” Nothing more, just that. Even if it was unintentional of his part, Kevin Young links the poem's form and subject matter in a uniquely human way. I know that the last metaphor about walking the dog around the block could be viewed differently, but I've presented my case and I'm sticking to it.

Dorothy Parker - Resume

2009-04-14T18:03:00.000-07:00

RESUME

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

---Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker's Resume

As we approach the middle of the second year of my National Poetry Month blog I'm beginning to notice myself evolving as a blogger. One thing in particular is bothering me: how long will I be able to keep this going. Sure, I have enough poems to write about to complete this year and I probably have enough to start next year's blog, but what about after that? At what point will I run out of poems that I consider to be my favorites? When will I start including poems that I kinda sorta like, poems that I'd halfheartedly check the “YES” box to if a note was passed my way during class asking if I'd read them? Thankfully that's a problem for another day. Today's problem is no less complex: as I write this essay that will eventually delve into Dorthy Parker's Resume, I'm wondering about your expectations, as an audience, for these daily blog entries. Do you expect to log on and be greeted with a poem you've never read before? Do you expect my analysis to unlock the essence of the poem for you? Do you hope that I'll write less about the technical side of poetry and more about the emotional side?

At some point all artists wonder about their audience and this can be a very dangerous thing. Breaking it down to the ground level, I'm not painfully worried about the questions I posed in the previous paragraph. I know what's at the heart of this blog; I know the reasons I'm writing these essays. Part of me feels like it's a cop-out to choose Resume or The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock because they are enormously famous poems with loads already written about them. If you're expecting something original from my blog and you see one of those poems featured you might be disappointed. At the same time, these poems are very, very good; that's why they're in countless anthologies and that's why they're being studied in classrooms all over the world as I type this very sentence. I might not always unearth the newest, grandest poem for you. In fact, I might issue some poems you've read a handful of times, poems you consider to be stale and unimaginative. In that case, I hope I've done enough over the course of the blog's history to implore you to read on, if for no other reason than to understand why I have a crush on the poem.

In the mold of intelligent, quick-thinkers like Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker had a way with turning witty phrases. Books have been filled with her quotable words, spoken and written alike. I'm fascinated by Wilde, Twain, Parker, and thinkers like them; their brains seem wired to snap out phrases that will resonate into eternity. In our modern world of press conferences and pre-written statements anyone can be made to sound articulate and moderately smart, but still only a select few rise above with effortless and natural responses. Dorothy Parker was one of those originals and, although it's a poem that could have been revised thoroughly before publication, what we have with Resume is eight lines of tightly constructed rhymes, powerful images, and one witty and startling turn at the end.

There's an unfortunate tradition of suicide among poets. The list is so long in fact that I'm afraid I could fill a whole page with talented poets who left the world by their own hands. I'm not sure why poets have seemingly been more prone to mental illness and depression than other careers. Surely someone has studied this trend and written about it before. I'd be willing to bet that Dorothy Parker is one of the first people to write a good poem about suicide with gallows humor. She takes the topic of suicide and dissects it by examining the deficiencies of all the ways a person can kill himself or herself. Some of her reasons are logical: “Razors pain you,” while others are far-fetched: “Rivers are damp” and “Guns aren't lawful” (why exactly would a woman who wants to kill herself care about the legality of it all or that she might get a little wet?). In reality, the first and last lines of the poem might be the most logical, while the others in between are where the absurdity accumulates. Dorothy seems to be asserting what's the point in forcing death to come, when it will naturally come for us some day.

Taking a closer look at the technical aspects of the poem illuminates why this poem works so well. Obviously the poem is very ordered with end rhymes, syllables counts, and subject then verb lines. The stiffness of the form could easily make the poem itself seem stiff, but Parker avoids this fate by infusing voice and pace into the poem. A driving pace moves the poem through the list of ways to kill yourself, ultimately reaching a final line that makes the poem brilliant and brings to light the poem's voice at the same time. Before “You might as well live,” the poem is a puzzling list of harmful agents, but with that final line everything ties together. It is the cliched missing piece. Read the poem without the final line and you have nothing but a depressing list of ways to kill yourself. Knowing that the final line is key to the whole poem, let's look a little closer at the key to the final line: “might.” You might as well live. It's not you “have” to live or you “must” live. It's not a passionate call to live; instead, it's a nonchalant, almost indifferent resignation. Since you've got nothing else better to do and since the alternative is downright hideous, well, I guess you might as well live. It's a very sly bit of reverse psychology on Dorothy Parker's part, the same type of sly wit that characterized her entire writing and speaking career.

What The Chairman Told Tom - Basil Bunting

2009-04-13T18:42:00.000-07:00

WHAT THE CHAIRMAN TOLD TOM

Poetry? It's a hobby.
I run model trains.
Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons.

It's not work. You don't sweat.
Nobody pays for it.
You could advertise soap.

Art, that's opera; or repertory―
The Desert Song.
Nancy was in the chorus.

But to ask for twelve pounds a week―
married, aren't you?―
you've got a nerve.

How could I look a bus conductor
in the face
if I paid you twelve pounds?

Who says it's poetry, anyhow?
My ten year old
can do it and rhyme.

I get three thousand and expenses,
a car, vouchers,
but I'm an accountant.

They do what I tell them,
my company,
What do you do?

Nasty little words, nasty long words,
it's unhealthy.
I want to wash when I meet a poet.

They're Reds, addicts,
all delinquents.
What you write is rot.

Mr Hines says so, and he's a schoolteacher,
he ought to know.
Go and find work.

---Basil Bunting

Basil Bunting's What The Chairman Told Tom

Ezra Pound wrote of Basil Bunting that he “simply will not melt himself into the vile patterns of expediency.” That's far better than “he was a good guy.” I'm pretty sure Pound used expediency with a specific definition in mind: actions in the interest of self gain as opposed to what is just and right. If that's true then Pound was paying Bunting quite a compliment, a fitting compliment when viewed in the context of “What The Chairman Told Tom.” The poem is a bitingly sarcastic take on the vocation of poetry. A successful, albeit staid and uncreative, businessman is the character at the center of the poem. His voice―the Chairman's voice―challenges poor Tom and his love of writing poetry. The challenge hinges upon the belief that poetry is not serious business, it's merely a release, an escape from the real world. This Chairman character is a misguided fool and I imagine he would've been prone to fits of expediency.

“Poetry? It's a hobby.” Sure, this opening line is true. For some folks writing and reading poetry occupies the extra minutes that would stack up unfavorably in their lives without a solid hobby. And for others poetry is essential, a day without it would be cause for illness and despair. I can't imagine anyone feeling that way about a day without model trains or breeding pigeons, the hobbies the Chairman compares poetry to in the poem's first stanza. Maybe that's an unfair assertion on my part, particularly because I've never bred a pigeon or collected model trains. That naïvete is valuable and I will use it moving forward, starting right now. The Chairman's views on poetry are attributable to his lack of experience with poetry, very similar to my views on pigeon breeding and model train running. He assumes poetry is “not work” because “you don't sweat” when writing it or reading it. In looking at other art forms, such as opera, he sees no threads of commonality. When these arguments and analysis are exhausted, the Chairman turns to fearful name-calling and stereotyping: “They're Reds, addicts, / all delinquents.” But for somebody who lacks experience, the Chairman has one thing right about poetry: “Nobody pays for it.”

So the question that Basil Bunting indirectly raises is this: how does a person like the Chairman come to detest something he barely knows? More importantly, how can we get him back on the straight and narrow, reading poetry and appreciating it for all it has to offer? Let's tackle that first question. His hatred for poetry could have started at a young age. In class he could have had an assignment to read and interpret a poem, only to find the assignment impossible. The words were strangely placed,the punctuation was odd, the lines weren't broken as they are in every other book, and there wasn't a clear story. The poem was indecipherable, but this statement diagnoses the problem for us. Poems aren't meant to be deciphered. It's fulfilling to understand poems, but they can just as easily be enjoyed for displays of imagination, figurative language, and the types of things that resist explanation. That provides us a natural segue way to our next question. Old habits are tough to break. Changes are never easy to embrace. For someone like the Chairman who values the bottom line, poetry must provide a tangible assets. It must be worth his paying “twelve pounds a week” and not feeling like he's wasted his money on a shoddy investment. I'm not sure I can produce a blockbuster profit with any poem, but I can show how poetry is one of our oldest art forms and how it is at the root of communication and story telling, how without poetry many of our histories would be lost, and how some of the greatest minds to ever live turned to poetry to soothe their souls.

Would this argument be enough to change the Chairman and others like him? I doubt it. People who resist trying something like poetry will remain steadfast in their reasons until they seek poetry out on their own. They can hide behind their “three thousand and expenses, / a car, vouchers,” for only so long before they come face to face with what they're afraid of. In the case of the Chairman, he encounters poetry and his reaction is predictable: “What do you do? / Nasty little words, nasty long words, it's unhealthy.” These insults give way to my favorite line in the poem, a line I imagine Bunting viewed as the crown jewel of this poem: “I want to wash when I meet a poet.” Considered to be somewhat of an outsider himself, Bunting knew what it was like to have a stigma associated with being a poet. From stringy haired dreamers hopped up on drugs to beret and turtleneck wearing coffee drinkers with fingers ready to snap, these are out-dated and inaccurate stereotypes. Poets are hard workers, so hard in fact that they might spend a lifetime crafting a single poem or collection of poems, just as Walt Whitman. Creativity is not a synonym to hard work. So when the Chairman tells Tom at the end of the poem “Go and find work,” the horrible irony is that Tom found his work long ago in poetry, even if something else pays Tom's bills.

The Second Coming - William Butler Yeats

2009-04-12T20:13:00.000-07:00

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

--- William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats' The Second Coming

Happy Easter to all of you who celebrate today's holiday! In the spirit of Easter and the end of a long Lenten season, I had a few poems at my disposal to write about today. A handful of poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Catholic priest and wholly original innovator of the English language, were in consideration. Carrion Comfort and God's Grandeur are fantastic poems worth exploring, but I chose to go in a different direction. William Butler Yeats is not only one of the most famous and skilled writers of the 20th century, but he's also one of the poet's I've learned the most from. Reading Yeats is never easy, but the payoff is staggering. After I'd narrowed today's selection down to Yeats I still had some work ahead of me.

Originally I settled upon Easter, 1916, a poem in which Yeats details the Easter Rising of 1916 which saw Irish nationalists rebel against the British government. The leaders behind the rebellion were friends of Yeats and his personal knowledge of them and the situations contained in the poem add an intimate texture to his account of the events. Suppressed in just about a weeks time, the Easter Rising would ultimately lead to the horrific punishment of execution by firing squad for many of the Irish nationalists Yeats was friends with. Easter, 1916 is an honest and, at times, heart breaking dissection of the nationalists and their cause. Yeats crafts an extended metaphor using hearts and stones that reaches these lines: “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart.” Shining a light upon their sacrifices, Yeats immortalizes MacDonagh, MacBride, Connolly, and Pearse, he “writes it out in a verse,” ending the poem with a haunting refrain: “Wherever green is worn, / Are changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.” Still, the poem is not a propaganda piece; Yeats is not afraid of holding the Irish nationalists to a higher standard and raising concerns. Easter, 1916 is worth your time, please do yourself a favor and read the poem and the history behind it. But, now, we'll turn our attention to the poem I chose for this Easter Sunday: The Second Coming.

It takes very few lines to realize The Second Coming is not an optimistic and hopeful look at the return of Christ. Yeats tackles the faults of the world, including those of organized religion, specifically Catholicism. When Yeats wrote The Second Coming, World War I had come and gone, changing the world forever with an efficient and sweeping ability to mass produce painful death. This evolving barbarism changed all people in the world, including Yeats. With the Anglo-Irish War just around the corner and tensions always rising, Yeats had valid reason to fear the worst. Those fears forged with his amazing poetic skills and created The Second Coming. It certainly isn't the most uplifting poem I could have chosen to focus on for this Easter Sunday, but as Yeats himself wrote in the poem “Surely some revelation is at hand.”

If you just read The Second Coming for the first time you probably noticed some phrases or lines that you've heard before. The most famous among them might be “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” (Yeats is an oft quoted poet in movies, songs, and books---Cormac MacCarthy and The Coen Brothers surely know the first line of Yeats' poem Sailing To Byzantium is “That is no country for old men.”) Rest assured, I did not include this poem just because it is famous. I included The Second Coming because it contains some of the most powerful images in the history of literature. From the initial “turning in the widening gyre” to the “rough beast” that “slouches towards Bethlehem to be born,” Yeats layers images that resonate in a historic and religious context. He posits that we are lost in the end of history, lost in the end of this cycle of Christianity, lost as “the falcon cannot hear the falconer.” The world is amiss with “mere anarchy” unleashed upon it. Where will hope arrive from? The second coming? Yeats teases us with this hope, asking “Surely the Second Coming is at hand,” only to quickly delineate the horror that accompanies such an arrival. The beast of the apocalypse, as foretold in the Gospel of John, makes an appearance. As Yeats describes, “A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.” Again I ask, where will the hope arrive from? Will hope arrive at all?

Here's the conclusion Yeats comes to: “but now I know / That twenty centuries of stony sleep / Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.” This statement casts strong doubts upon Catholicism and Christianity, upon the second coming of Christ. I know that Yeats lost faith in government and he lost faith in certain causes during his life, but there's still a part of me that senses hope in Yeats' hopelessness. This hope is not contained in the poem, but rather in the intentions for the poem and impact it had (and still has) upon readers. Reading The Second Coming is an intense exercise in belief. If you believe we are so forgone as a people that we've brought upon the apocalypse then you see the beast slouching toward Bethlehem and you buy Yeats' assertion that “The best lack all conviction.” If you believe the scenario Yeats presents is a worst case view of the world and that the “blood-dimmed tide” is reversible, that darkness can be eased out with light, then you see the question mark in the final lines as a crucial indicator of uncertainty. With uncertainty, the poem becomes a call-to-action, a frightening motivator to change what some believe to be unchangeable. The message I heard at today's Easter mass is what I choose to follow: We can choose to have faith, even in times of despair, especially in times of despair, and that faith will bring about the fullness of life that cannot happen when we dwell upon the odds stacked against us and the evil amongst us.

Men At Forty - Donald Justice

2009-04-11T19:27:00.000-07:00

MEN AT FORTY

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father's tie there in secret

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

---Donald Justice

Donald Justice's Men At Forty

A renowned teacher of poets, and a hell of a poet in his own right, Donald Justice has been called "a poet of restraint." That word, restraint, seems to carry a negative connotation, as if Justice didn't allow himself the freedoms that some of his contemporaries reveled in. Admittedly, I've most often heard restraint in regards to people who need it because they've lost control of their lives. Something occurred to rob them of their sense of what is right and as a result they lack the judgement or know-how to make positive decisions. I'm more inclined to approach restraint from a different angle, especially when using it as a praising adjective, and say that Donald Justice was more so a poet of balance. Where restraint reels you in, balance focuses on why a diverse array is healthy. Where restraint scolds you, balance calms you. And where restraint limits you, balance opens up new possibilities by reminding you there are many paths worth following, paths that lead us through the complicated middle ages of adulthood.

Published in 1967, when Donald Justice was a ripe forty two years of age, Men At Forty delivers an unflinching snapshot of the male middle age. Bittersweet and haunting, the poem's greatest accomplishment might be how it carries these qualities without straying from reality. Justice reinforces the belief that memories tether us to the past, dreams carry us into the future, and the present can be stable or slippery beneath us, depending upon the day. For the men in Justice's poem they can't even rest on stairs without having them move "Beneath them now like the deck of a ship." But while this movement is disorienting because it denies the men any constancy and solid footing, Justice is quick to point out "the swell is gentle." Years of experience have provided the men with valuable knowledge, yet as the world progresses and changes around them they realize that they will never be perfect. Youth and wisdom are opposite trains, passing each other on their journeys to distant coasts. Even as the smooth innocence of childhood is irrevocably smashed, we cling to the pieces that remain: "The face of the boy as he practices tying / His father's tie there in secret." Recalling themselves as boys, the men in this poem also remember the sense of wonderment over their own fathers. How shaving was more than a grooming task, but a ritual of manhood with a distinct "mystery of lather." Justice breaks these men from their nostalgia with the sharpened claws of truth, declaring "They are more fathers than sons themselves now." The transition has happened without their knowledge or consent. And now, "Something is filling them." They might not want to delve into the nature of what this something is, but Justice was forty two when he wrote this poem. He was one of them, a man unable to accept the terms of his own mortality and unwilling to roll over to the constraints that society expected him to welcome without question. I can't tell you exactly why Donald Justice wrote this poem, but I imagine it was somewhat therapeutic to give words and images to what he was feeling so that the something became the "twilight sound / Of the crickets, immense."

From a technical standpoint, Men At Forty is similar to Anna Akhmatova's Evening which I looked at a few days ago: both are poems worth studying for accomplished and up-and-coming writers alike. Starting at the beginning, Justice supplies readers with a first stanza that clearly sets the tone for the poem. The subject matter is middle aged men, specifically their uncertainties and insecurities. To capture these insecurities, Justice employs hard enjambments in the first stanza. There is clear irony in ending a hardly enjambed line on the word "softly." I imagine Justice writing that line with a little spark in his eye and an under-his-breath chuckle. Beyond the line breaks, the poem is superb in its form. The quatrains are fluid in their AABC rhyme scheme, only breaking in the poem's beautiful final stanza. The lines vary in length greatly, but each word has been chosen and placed precisely where it needs to be. Justice's level of craftsmanship with this poem is abundantly clear; notice how he swings the pendulum of time back and forth more than once during the poem. These oscillations are dependent upon the strength of his images. Justice gives readers men learning new tricks in closing softly "doors to rooms they will not be / Coming back to." He shows us solid ground moving under the men like a ship. Justice uses a mirror to transport the men back to their childhoods and to draw parallels between where they are at now in their lives and where their fathers were back then. Finally, he quantifies the insecurities the men are feeling as the noise of crickets, but more importantly that noise is "Filling the woods at the foot of the slope / Behind their mortgaged houses." Justice takes a simple image and coaxes a story to unfold out of it. He very easily could have left it at crickets chirping, but he pushed himself to the heart wrenching end of these men in their mortgaged houses. This is the work of a balanced poet and a man who needed to write this poem to test himself, but also to speak for others like him, others searching for something beyond the admirable quality of restraint.

Ordinary Life - Barbara Crooker

2009-04-10T21:46:00.000-07:00

ORDINARY LIFE

This was a day when nothing happened,
the children went off to school
without a murmur, remembering
their books, lunches, gloves.
All morning, the baby and I built block stacks
in the squares of light on the floor.
And lunch blended into naptime,
I cleaned out kitchen cupboards,
one of those jobs that never gets done,
then sat in a circle of sunlight
and drank ginger tea,
watched the birds at the feeder
jostle over lunch’s little scraps.
A pheasant strutted from the hedgerow,
preened and flashed his jeweled head.
Now a chicken roasts in the pan,
and the children return,
the murmur of their stories dappling the air.
I peel carrots and potatoes without paring my thumb.
We listen together for your wheels on the drive.
Grace before bread.
And at the table, actual conversation,
no bickering or pokes.
And then, the drift into homework.
The baby goes to his cars, drives them
along the sofa’s ridges and hills.
Leaning by the counter, we steal a long slow kiss,
tasting of coffee and cream.
The chicken’s diminished to skin & skeleton,
the moon to a comma, a sliver of white,
but this has been a day of grace
in the dead of winter,
the hard knuckle of the year,
a day that unwrapped itself
like an unexpected gift,
and the stars turn on,
order themselves
into the winter night.

---Barbara Crooker

Ordinary Life by Barbara Crooker

Today I took my blog on the road, writing from the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Department of Motor Vehicles location in Fredericksburg, Virginia. I’m waiting for number D461 to be called so that I can change the registration on the Honda I inherited in a trade with my parents this past fall. This should be an ordinary task, but life is teaching me otherwise. A teenage girl just walked by with her brand new license. She laughed with her mother about how red her face is in the picture. An older gentlemen is arguing, no he’s reasoning with a clerk about taking a vision test. He can see the clerk has brown hair, a ring on her finger, and a scar on her cheek. He’s got me convinced. Outside a tow truck is cranking a car up onto its back. The car’s tail is crunched from an accident in the parking lot; I love irony. Nothing about this day of waiting has been ordinary. I should have know better, we should all know better: life is never ordinary.

In her poem “Ordinary Life,” Barbara Crooker proves that the moments that seem unimportant are often the greatest reminders of how splendid it is to be alive. We cultivate such high expectations for ourselves. This is part of being human. High expectations are not bad, assuming we also cultivate a clear sense of perspective. It’s easy to dismiss the daily activities that lack pizazz because we come to expect dazzling greatness, but a healthy dose of perspective will guide us to the magic in the mundane. Crooker’s perspective in “Ordinary Life” is wholeheartedly in tune with her world. She delights in little victories, pausing to notice the remarkable features of her life.

“This was a day when nothing happened,” the use of this understated line to kick off the poem
is clever. The whole poem cuts against this initial thesis, carefully unearthing sparks of grace that surround and infuse our speaker’s life. It’s simple, as simple as “the children went off to school / without a murmur, remembering / their books, lunches, gloves.” This must be a parent’s dream! And our speaker gets to follow it up with a morning of block building with her baby, lunch, naptime, and cleaning the cupboard, “one of those jobs that never gets done.” If we’re fortunate, we’ll earn a handful of grand sweeping victories; undoubtedly these banner moments are special, but they represent five, maybe ten days in an entire lifetime. One of life’s greatest travesties is not appreciating the nuances of being alive. For example, they just called D453 here at the DMV; rather than lament wasting a beautiful Saturday, I’m excited at the progress I’ve made. When I arrived they were calling D440. We’re getting closer to my D461, which means I’ll need to speed up this essay!

Shapes are one the earliest lessons we learn as small children. Circles, squares, triangles, and dodecahedrons…just kidding. Whether it’s “All morning, the baby and I built block stacks / in the squares of light on the floor” or “(I) then sat in a circle of sunlight / and drank ginger tea,” Crooker reminds readers that the lessons of our childhoods remain with us, whether it is simple shapes or the unbreakable roots of love. Our speaker notices those roots spreading now as a parent, even if that means her responsibilities have changed tremendously since childhood. While her children return from school with “the murmur of their stories dappling the air,” she “peels carrots and potatoes without paring (her) thumb.” Our lives and the minutiae which composes them may diverge at certain times, but there are always commonalities drawing us back together. The mother and children’s shared love for their father/husband unites them to “listen together for (his) wheels on the drive.” The ties that bind us together as families, friends, and human beings arise from humble necessities, beliefs, and traditions: we all have to eat dinner and so the whole family gathers for “grace before bread.”

Crooker concludes the poem with gentle details and images, easing readers to the close of her “ordinary” day. The homework her children “drift into”; the baby drives his cars “along the sofa’s ridges and hills”; a stolen “long slow kiss, tasting of coffee and cream.” None of these moments are ordinary to the person who has no one in his or her life, just as a moment of silent loneliness would be foreign to the poem’s speaker. So what do you take from this poem to mold your perspective to see wonder in the quotidian elements of life? Look at how Crooker summarizes her day near the end of the poem: “a day of grace / in the dead of winter, / the hard cold knuckle of the year.” What constitutes a day of grace will be different for each of us, but we all have the ability to make every day soar with grace and amazement. Remarkably, the automated voice just called my number at the DMV. D461 is flashing in red above an open counter. The clerk hunches over the counter and asks what I need. He’s clearly counting down the minutes till his shift is over. I’ll get my new license plates and registration, but first I have to ask him how his day has been, has it been ordinary?

Evening - Anna Akhmatova

2009-04-09T20:19:00.000-07:00

EVENING

In the garden there were snatches of music
Wordless, melancholy.
The sharp fresh odors of the sea
Rose from oysters on cracked ice.

He said to me,
“I am faithful friend,”
And touched my dress:
Unlike an embrace
The touch of that hand.

So one pets a cat or a bird
So one looks
at well-built circus riders.
And in his tranquil eyes there was laughter
Under lashes of light gold.

And behind the drifting smoke
The voices of nostalgic violins sang
“Give thanks, thanks to the Gods—
For the first time
You are alone
with your love.”

--- Anna Akhmatova, translated by Lenore Mayhew

Anna Akhmatova's Evening

Forgive me if this sounds like Charles Dickens, but in the best of times and worst of times we unintentionally capture minutiae and store it in the deepest confines of ourselves. So deep, in fact, that it takes just a sliver and we're transported back to that tragic or terrific period in our lives. It could be the song playing on the radio when the phone call reached you delivering the news that your parents died in a car crash. Before, you paid no attention to the song; it was a song, nothing more. Now, you'll avoid it at all costs. If you're listening to the radio in your car and it comes on you turn the station immediately. If you're in a bookstore, browsing the magazines, and the song comes on you run toward the exits. One line of lyrics and your day is ruined. One string of notes is enough to dismantle you, returning you to that moment and undermining years of rebuilding yourself from the rubble of grief.

These slivers of the past that reemerge in our present are not all bad. You're taking your dog for a walk. He pulls you frantically from one scent to the next, until he finds a pine cone to nibble on. Just then, a butterfly lands upon his wet nose; he stops, the butterfly stops, even time seems to stop. It's a frozen moment. An older woman walking past on the sidewalk smiles at you as she says, “Well isn't that precious.” And suddenly you're back in your grandmother's house and she's serving you a fresh cookie, the kind that's round and blanketed with powdered sugar. You like to call them “golf balls.” As you eat them the powdered sugar accumulates on your cheeks and behind you your grandmother says to herself, “Look at him, he's precious.” You love that word, precious; hearing it makes you proud and rejuvenates you. There is no happiness greater than this. In life, we take the bad with the good; if we live long enough there will be plenty of both, and plenty of seemingly harmless things, which, because of the people we've known and experiences we've had, trigger quick trips to opposing ends of humanity.

One of her early poems, Evening is representative of Anna Akhmatova's highly personal writing about love. Later in life, after seeing her writing banned and many of her loved ones executed by the Soviet regime, Akhmatova's poetry took on Stalin's state of terror, challenging the politics that took so much from her. Knowing the pain she would experience as her life progressed, I find this poem to be my favorite of Akhmatova's. Her innocence is on display in a vulnerable, public manner. She's relentless in her ability to capture the reality of the situation, a trait that will serve her well later in life as her poetry tackles serious topics. The seeds of her future as a writer exist within this poem. Another quality of Akhmatova's that I admire is her devotion to depicting the senses. I know that in reading an Anna Akhmatova poem I'll hear and smell, I'll see and feel, and sometimes I'll even taste. This attention to the senses is critical to creating a piece of writing that invokes the slivers of life, good and bad, discussed at the onset of this essay. For these qualities, and countless others, Akhmatova's a poet to be studied in depth.

Evening is a pristine recollection of the inception of love. In this poem Akhmatova documents the exact moment when she felt love, when she knew this man was, for her, perfect. I'm overcome by how sharp and real her sensory recollections are in this poem. Unlike some poems about the origins of love, nothing is sugarcoated. The music arrives in “snatches” and is “wordless, melancholy.” It smells like the sea with the overpowering scent of “oysters on cracked ice.” These are not details that foreshadow romance. Even when he makes contact with her, touching her dress, it's “Unlike an embrace / The touch of that hand.” Akhmatova goes a step further, comparing his touch to one petting “a cat or a bird.” It's bizarre, and yet something is building within the poem.

The crisp details indicate that they are written so firmly in her memory for a reason. As the poem turns toward its haymaker of an ending, we learn why she has carried this minutiae. “In his tranquil eyes there was laughter / Under lashes of light gold.” We identify the slivers that just might set her off, years later, with joy as she eats a cannoli at a cafe or dances a waltz. Earlier in the poem the music was plain and sad, but now the “nostalgic violins” speak to Akhmatova, singing “Give thanks, thanks to the Gods— / For the first time / You are alone / with your love.” This is stunning. I admire how Akhmatova enjambs each of these final lines, breaking them so that suspense builds until we're tingling with her, returning to the precipice of love, retrieving the exact moment of our own initial love. It represents the culmination of a very quick turn in the poem, a quickness that amplifies the impact these final lines have, while also replicating how quickly love comes upon us when we're unexperienced and naive. I've read this poem many times and each time I feel like first two thirds of the poem are waiting in line, but the final third is swishing down the water slide that you waited in line for.

T.S. Eliot --- The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock

2009-04-08T20:14:00.000-07:00

THE LOVE SONG OF J ALFRED PRUFROCK

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--
[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all---
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all---
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all---
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

. . . . .

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

. . . . .

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet--and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"---
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all."

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor---
And this, and so much more?---
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all."

. . . . .

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous---
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old . . .I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

---T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot's The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock

Deja vu. The sensation of having experienced something before as it currently unfolds in the present. It's jarring when this happens, but there's also a strange comfort in deja vu. The situation triggers something in your memory which assures you that you're in familiar territory. Other clues indicate that the moment is fresh, free from any remnants of the past. It's a paradox, and apparently it's quite common: studies have shown that 70% of people report having an experience of deja vu. On my first reading of “The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock” that eerie sense of deja vu swelled within me and, like Prufrock, “I was afraid.” With each subsequent reading of the poem a different line or image rattles and clangs within my subconscious. I'm convinced that parts of this poem were within my brain before I read it. Why, exactly, do I believe this to be true? Because Eliot's voice cuts through all the useless junk in the world to speak directly to me; because the images are haunting and dreamlike; because the characters are nearly ghosts; because so many of the poem's lines are not decoration or dressing, but instead gritty, gutty refrains; because I read the poem and hear it in my own voice. Who knows, it could be any, all, or none of those reasons.

“Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table.” And so begins Prufrock's Love Song---rhythmic, lyrical, a call to action on a night compared to a drugged patient. Not exactly what you'd expect from a “love song.” Even so, Eliot delivers early stanzas that guide readers through “one-night cheap hotels / and sawdust restaurants.” He does this, or his narrative character of J Alfred does this, to lead us “to an overwhelming question...” What might that question be---Eliot teases readers with this declaration of importance, replying, “Oh do not ask, What is it? / Let us go and make our visit.” Where this visit takes readers is through the room where “women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo,” the place where Prufrock will ask stirring questions, the kind we all think but very few of us have the courage to answer.

After inundating readers with yellow, a color associated with cowardice, Eliot repeats “there will be a time,” a time for the yellow smoke and fog, and “a time to murder and create.” These lines clearly evoke the verses from Ecclesiastes where Solomon describes the seasons of life (the same verses that The Byrds, by way of Pete Seeger, would make into a hit record in the 1960's). Within this familiar territory, Eliot introduces one of the ideas that will be repeated throughout the poem: indecisions, visions, and revisions. Each unanswered question that Prufrock poses swells with indecision, but he's quick to present visions and subsequent revisions, even if they're contradictory. One of my favorite of his questions is “Do I dare / Disturb the universe?” Assertive and overarching, this question ironically follows lines in which Prufrock laments his aging, replete with an obligatory “bald spot in the middle of (his) hair.” But he will quickly see the value of his age, the wisdom of having known “the evenings, mornings, and afternoons,” that allows him to not sound foolish in positing “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” And just as quickly he'll swing back to fearing death, particularly a premature death before accomplishing the things he's capable of accomplishing.

After all the years and experiences; after all the people he's known, loved, and lost; after all he's touched in this world, Prufrock has decided this is his chance. “Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?” Just what is at stake in this moment? His place. His purpose. His mortality. I think it's fair to say that all of these are solid answers and if you gave me enough time I could come up with plenty more, but let's focus upon these three for right now. Prufrock is concerned about his place in the world, confused about his purpose, and downright terrified about his mortality. He confirms these things in one of the poem's most quoted passages, “I am no prophet—and here's no great matter; / I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, / And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, / And in short, I was afraid.” It's impossible to read those lines and not share Prufrock's fear.

In a moment of rare clarity, lacking his trademark indecision, Prufrock sets aside his questioning to declare “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” The exclamation point is crucial to this sentence. It takes this line from a whisper to a shout. Imagine Prufrock (possibly a proxy for Eliot...) slamming his fist against his desk or against a wall, overcome with frustration. So much of his life wasted, or so he believes; so much of the poem mere talk, or so he believes. But this direct speak from Prufrock is short-lived. Eliot returns Prufrock to his verbose and neurotic ways, while also taking some fun liberties with the character. After comparing himself to Lazarus, Prufrock moves on to the fertile ground of Elsinore, comparing himself not to Hamlet, but Polonius:

no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

With that description, Eliot proves he not only knows his Shakespeare well, but he also knows his own character of J Alfred Prufrock better than Prufrock knows himself.

I contemplated moving onto the mermaids, peaches, rolled trousers, and other features that end the poem, but I decided against it. Wrapping up by returning to deja vu seemed more appropriate. At certain times in my life the questions Prufrock asks of himself pop up and the poem's refrains dribble from my tongue like drips from a leaky faucet. I could take days, weeks even, trying to figure out why this poem has me enchanted. While some folks might prefer Eliot's image driven masterwork “The Waste Land,” I'll always remain partial to “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.” It has me in it's firm grip each time I read it; it had me in it's grip even before I read it for the first time. This is the nature of deja vu. I wonder how J Alfred Prufrock would react to a little taste of deja vu? Would he calmly say “For I have known them all already.” For some reason I think he'd go a little further than that.

Richard Brautigan --- It's Raining In Love

2009-04-07T18:52:00.000-07:00

IT’S RAINING IN LOVE

I don’t know what it is,
but I distrust myself
when I start to like a girl
a lot.

It makes me nervous.
I don’t say the right things
or perhaps I start
to examine,
evaluate
compute
what I am saying.

If I say, “Do you think it’s going to rain?”
and she says, “I don’t know,”
I start thinking: Does she really like me?

In other words
I get a little creepy.

A friend of mine once said,
“It’s twenty times better to be friends
with someone
than it is to be in love with them.”

I think he’s right and besides,
it’s raining somewhere, programming flowers
and keeping snails happy.
That’s all taken care of.

BUT
if a girl likes me a lot
and starts getting real nervous
and suddenly begins asking me funny questions
and looks sad if I give the wrong answers
and she says things like,
“Do you think it’s going to rain?”
and I say, “It beats me,”
and she says, “Oh,”
and looks a little sad
at the clear blue California sky,
I think: Thank God, it’s you, baby, this time
instead of me.

---Richard Brautigan

Richard Brautigan's “It's Raining In Love”

Baby Boomers. The Greatest Generation. Generation X. The Millenials. Taking the years of birth, we narrow down the trends and events that shaped the way of life during the formative years of a large population of people and assign them a name. I mention these ideas about generations because Richard Brautigan's “It's Raining In Love” is emblematic of what I would call the Hyper-Analytical Generation. Brautigan was born in 1935, but his poem is a harbinger of the thought process that's rampant these days. Unbridled floods of information arrive on command because of technology, making patience a dying breed and turning the most innocent and spontaneous of actions, gestures, and conversations into prime targets for dissection and analysis. What does it mean that she didn't post a reply to my witty joke about her status on Facebook? It's been nearly ten minutes since I texted him, why hasn't he texted me back? I googled myself and you'll never believe the pictures that came up... These are some of the musings of the Hyper-Analytical Generation, although I'm thinking that maybe they're the Hypertechnolytical Generation. Without a doubt, this current generation would love Richard Brautigan's “It's Raining In Love.”

“It's Raining In Love” is scattered. While that's sometimes a criticism, it works remarkably well in this poem. The poem's speaker attempts to find logic in his illogical behavior. As he dissects his mental state, the poem's form changes pace between stanzas, dropped lines, white space, and one large all-caps “BUT.” Love can make us do strange things and in Brautigan's world the quest for love is rooted in things that have nothing to do with attraction or love. When he begins to “like a girl / a lot” he “distrusts” himself and doubts his instincts. The things he would accept as normal start to raise his suspicions and he can't help but “examine, / evaluate / compute.” Everything is shifted beneath a precise and powerful microscope. The perfect example that Brautigan provides, and possibly the most telling lines of the whole poem, focuses on the harmless and common place topic of weather: “If I say, 'Do you think it’s going to rain?'/ and she says, 'I don’t know,' / I start thinking: Does she really like me?” This is the epitome of over-analyzing, a trait emblematic of the current generation. Still, the two lines that follow are just as important. When Brautigan declares, “In other words / I get a little creepy,” he makes it clear that he's not at peace with his behavior. The obsessiveness, the reading-into things, the looking for clues and signs---the faintest possibility of love, and wanting it so badly, has completely transformed our speaker. It isn't that he's become a version of himself he doesn't recognize, but rather he's become a version of himself he recognizes all too well.

Sage advice in the middle of the poem relays that friendship is “twenty times better” than love. Friendship doesn't change you within your core the way that love does. Is this true? I'm not sure that I agree with Brautigan, or his friend supplying the advice, but I understand what they mean. I see that normal things like “rain” happen without connotation in the world of friendship, that flowers are flowers and snails are snails in this world. This is a place where things are “taken care of.” Whereas in a world of love, or potential love, the flowers could be untouched and not displayed indicating a fading love, and the snails slithering along unaware that they could be crushed at any moment are metaphors and microcosms of us. When a friend sighs it's nothing, but when the object of your affection sighs what does it mean...

Just when I think I've got this poem figured out, Brautigan spins it on its axis. After being the love-starved and heart-sick one, he decides to explore the other side of the romantic equation. “BUT / if a girl likes me a lot / and starts getting real nervous.” It's hard not to like this reversal, particularly because it contains so much reality. We play these roles in our own lives, getting to know what it feels like to love, be loved, and the horrible agony of un-love. Moments before, our speaker was a mess over the smallest things a woman did. Now, he's got an admirer and his slightest action will have a disproportionate impact upon her happiness. I'm not sure he meant to do this, but Brautigan clearly shows how little control we have over our lives and how inherently our happiness is tied to others. Thinking back upon the earlier discussion about the current Hyper-Analytical Generation, maybe their attempts to analyze are more about seeking some semblance of control, some belief in the power of their actions, thoughts, and words. All of this so that we don't end up like the poor girl at the end of the poem looking “a little sad / at the clear blue California sky.” Or even worse, so that we don't end up thinking “Thank God, it’s you, baby, this time/ instead of me.”

Maya Angelou - Still I Rise

2009-04-06T17:48:00.000-07:00

STILL I RISE

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

---Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou's Still I Rise

Without fail, each time I read this poem and reach the final “I rise,” I'm compelled to hit the world head-on with every ounce of fight I've got. One of language's many complicated powers is its ability to act as a catalyst for change. We could easily say that a poem is just a bunch of words made to sit in the poet's waiting room of a mind until he or she calls their names and plucks them onto the page. The concept of the audience makes this untrue. The size, shape, intelligence level, socioeconomic status, or likeability of the audience is irrelevant. What matters is that in this exposure to the public world the piece of art (in our case, the poem) evolves beyond the artist's mind. I imagine the poem tossed into water, thrashing about until it learns that it can tread water or in some cases it just might be a natural swimmer. Staying with the sink-or-swim metaphor, swimming---when done right---sees the swimmer fall into a rhythm. Maya Angelou digs into her own personal history and the history of her people, unearthing a poem that is resoundingly courageous. “Still I Rise” is without a doubt a natural swimmer.

After the first stanza, much of the poem has been established. We know the gravity of the poem's subject: history's “bitter, twisted lies.” We also know that even vile aggression and seething hatred will not work because “like dust” our speaker will rise. Just as important, we know the poem's rhythm: the ABCB rhyme scheme, the assured voice, the seven to nine syllable lines, and the stresses at the end of lines. Almost immediately, we, as readers, are a part of this poem. Maya Angelou confidently crafts a tight first stanza that invites us in and hooks us at the same time.

Now that all that praise for the first stanza is out of the way, let me show you why I've included this poem in my all-time favorites. It's a rather simple, yet “sassy” two line sequence: “'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells / pumping in my living room.” Absolutely brilliant. I love everything about that simile; thankfully, Angelou doesn't cut herself off there---later we get to hear about her gold mines and diamonds. The unexpectedness of the simile is disarming, but at the same time it acts as a wooden spoon turning the large vat of creativity in my own mind. The simile is helped along by the “o” sounds (you, gloom, room) at the ends of the lines in this stanza. In repeating these shared sounds Angelou creates an escalating taunt or dare. If you don't want the poet's voice to be sassy then it irks you to no end and the simile with oil wells might be enough to stop you from reading on. But if you're like me then this simile and the lines surrounding it are a call of resiliency, a dare to push further and uncover more than oil wells within our speaker, far more indeed.

What else is contained in the poem's speaker? Angelou has already told us that she'll rise, but in the third stanza she ties the human spirit to nature and the natural elements that rise and fall without variation. From these examples she cycles the poem through the “breaking” of her spirit. “The bowed head and lowered eyes / shoulders falling down like teardrops.” These low points are necessary if she is going to rise, if any of us are destined to rise. We don't have to enjoy them, but we must make them useful by learning from them. Only then will we be able to deflect violence and say “You may kill me with your hatefulness, / but still, like air, I rise.”

Earlier I pointed out history and humanity as key themes within “Still I Rise.” I also took a whole paragraph to single out the oil well simile as a personal favorite of mine. Two other times in this poem Angelou likens herself to valuable commodities: gold and diamond mines. It's no coincidence that these are the valuables many people have fought and died over. These are meant to plant a seed in our minds to get us thinking quite heavily about history so that when the poem reaches “the huts of history's shame,” we can no longer avoid the poem's larger context: the ways in which people have been denied the dignity of basic humanity throughout history, specifically the plight of Africans made into slaves. Theirs is “the past that's rooted in pain.” Upon confronting the issue, Angelou decides to leave behind “nights of terror and fear / I rise / Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear / I rise.” She takes the lessons and treasures of her ancestors' sacrifices and moves forward. She will not forget that she remains “the dream and the hope of the slave.” This declaration carries more weight when you consider how it touches the poem's audience. We already determined the essential nature of the audience to a poem; in Angelou's case the audience is not just all of us reading the poem, but a collection of ancestors, known and unknown, who make her life and her art possible. For a long time I wondered why she repeated “I rise” three times to end the poem. Now, it's clear: once or twice is not enough to carry the power of whole generations extinguished before they could fully rise.

Swept --- Hayden Carruth

2009-04-05T19:51:00.000-07:00

SWEPT

When we say I
miss you what
we mean is I’m
filled with

dread. At night
alone going
to bed is
like lying down

in a wave. Total
absence of light.
Swept away to
gone.

---Hayden Carruth

Hayden Carruth's Swept

Thirty five words. Twelve Lines. Four sentences. Three Stanzas. Hayden Carruth was focused in his poem “Swept.” No line contains more than four words and no line exceeds five syllables. All signs point to describing this poem as simple, but that would be a tremendous mistake. In fact, it’s some of the most complex pieces of writing that scrub away the excess to reveal vulnerable roots. Carruth dug into his pain and sorted it into orderly, straightforward lines. That is truly amazing. Consider a moment of your own pain and you’ll see how daunting the nature of this task is. Hayden Carruth directs “Swept” through the what, the why, and the how, and when the poem crashes it does so completely and unabashedly, so natural in its destruction.

While Carruth employs tidy lines in “Swept,” the tightness is offset by a hazy introduction of characters and tense line breaks. Carruth begins “When we say I / miss you what / we mean is I’m / filled with.” The line breaks are disorienting, but not without purpose. Notice how the first and third lines end on Carruth’s “I” character. He becomes the center, one of the poles through which the poem’s emotion will charge to and from. In this shift, the “I” is separated from the “we” so that the “I” and “you” will become the core relationship. Are we confused yet? A man is the “I,” with his wife he forms the “we,” and his lost love is the “you.” Or maybe the man is the “I,” with his wife he forms the “we,” and his deceased child is the “you.” I could propose a few more of these character combinations, but that would just serve to illustrate my point: it’s up to the reader to decide who the people inhabiting this poem are. Hayden Carruth has his version and that doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be your version too.

Before going further into the poem it’s important to return to the line breaks. Check out how the lines in the first stanza (and first line of the second stanza) are broken (or enjambed). Then scan to the right and check out a sterilized version I created with a few small edits. Seeing these two versions side-by-side illustrates how powerful the line breaks are in keeping readers off kilter. The confusion in Carruth’s version mirrors the confusion that accompanies horrible pain.

Carruth’s Version
When we say I
miss you what
we mean is I’m
filled with

dread.

My Edited Version
When we say
I miss you
what we mean
is I'm filled

with dread.

Now let’s move on to the meat of the poem. In the course of a few lines “we miss you” is translated to mean “I’m filled with dread.” As readers, we fall squarely into the “I” character’s viewpoint. He uses the second stanza to move from dread to sleeping alone at night. This movement from sharp emotion to an image of the aftermath seems like a wave…which strangely crashes upon us in the first line of the final stanza: “At night / alone going / to bed is / like lying down // in a wave.” The painful longing slams down upon Carruth’s speaker each night as he goes to sleep. He misses the “you” character terribly and this yearning is the emotion he sends out into the world, hoping it will reach her. But days, months, maybe even years of this practice have left him broken. How could making a routine of heartache not leave a human being in shambles? The ending is remarkably understated, just as a wave receding back to where it came from. “Total / absence of light. / Swept away to / gone.” We lose some of ourselves in the relationships that disintegrate and end before our liking. We even lose some of ourselves in the relationships that merely cool over time. In each of these losses a part of us is swept away. I’m not sure where it goes, but we’ll spend our days chasing the pieces that left us. Hayden Carruth knew this chase well. As Galway Kinnell points out: “This is not a man who sits down to 'write a poem'; rather, some burden of understanding and feeling, some need to know, forces his poems into being.”

Rainer Maria Rilke --- "I Live My Life In Widening Circles"

2009-04-04T13:39:00.000-07:00

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I've been circling for thousands of years
and I still don't know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

--- Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke’s “I Live My Life in Widening Circles”

On an afternoon this past September as I was killing hours before an evening college fair, I stumbled upon a bookstore and found a copy of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book Of Hours: Love Poems To God. I had read Rilke’s iconic Letters To A Young Poet a handful of times, but sadly I had not gone beyond the notable poems that repeatedly represent Rilke in anthologies. I stiffly sat in a hard backed chair flipping open to the book’s table of contents. Normally, I pick out the poems with the most exciting titles to read first. After a few warm-up poems, I came upon an eight-line masterpiece that whipped my mind and soul into a funnel cloud. Immediately, I flipped open my bag and pulled out a pen and paper. I feverishly wrote the poem down so that I could take it with me (I was a little tight on cash at the time, otherwise I would have bought the book right then). That night, as I talked to high school seniors about their college options, I was supremely distracted. Rilke’s poem continued to speed through my mind as if it was on an escalator continuously riding up and down inside of me. When I returned to my office, I tacked the poem up on my corkboard beside my desk. It’s still there; I read it first thing every morning before I turn my computer on.

Why does this poem resonate with me? It’s not very long and the diction seems to be fairly simple and straightforward (although some people might consider “primordial” to be an exotic word). The poet doesn’t do much to physically distinguish the first person speaker in the poem. And it ends with an unanswered question. Yes, these features are the kiss of death for most writers, but not for Rainer Maria Rilke. “I Live My Life in Widening Circles” is an early flash of brilliance in a rich and passionate career. It’s a success that announces future successes. Pushing the platitudes aside for a moment to answer this paragraph’s original question, the poem resonates with me because it’s fearless. From the first lines that declare an admirable, albeit challenging credo, to the final lines that broach a question directed at the roots of the speaker’s own existence, the poem does not flinch. Line-for-line, word-for-word, it’s an overwhelming force. It would behoove us to examine how Rilke establishes this power.

“I live my life in widening circles / that reach out across the world.” This sentence kicks off the poem, evoking the image of expanding spheres similar to the ripples that form in a pond. The speaker is at the center of these circles and his will seems to guide them to stretch and include more of the world. In doing so, he exposes himself to new experiences and people---exhilarating and frightening at the same time. But as we have previously established, there’s not even the faintest trace of fear. Instead, these opening lines link with the following lines to form a valuable life model: “I may not complete this last one / but I give myself to it.” The speaker identifies the gravity of his task. The costs will be monumental, possibly more than he can afford to give, still he knows widening his circles is not about the end result, but about the process: the people he meets along the way, the good he does for his fellow man and woman, the skills he learns, the art he creates, the love he gives and receives, and the unending quest for understanding. There will be days when he accomplishes none of these things; we all have days like these. And there will be days that he wishes will grow longer with extra minutes and hours, days when his thoughts are colorful and unending as a magician’s handkerchief. How great to live our lives in circles that widen to include more people, more ideas, more experiences, rather than to live in contracting spaces that seek to cut us off.

Thus far we’ve focused on exposing ourselves to more experiences, but there’s important value in solitude as well. Strangely, solitude is possible within Rilke’s widening circles. How do I know this? The poem’s second stanza is proof enough. Rilke expresses thoughts of a man who has invested in an intense self-examination. This practice of researching our own souls comes only after we are able to engage in moments of solitude---silent, freeing, centered, and mindful. Within his widening circle, Rilke’s solitude leads him to notice his own trajectory and to ask meaningful questions: “I circle around God, around the primordial tower. / I've been circling for thousands of years / and I still don't know: am I a falcon, / a storm, or a great song?” Just when I thought my interpretation of Rilke’s first person speaker at the center of the circles was safe, it’s thoroughly dismantled.

This poem is from a book with the subtitle “Love Poems to God,” so it should come as no surprise that God is at the center and our speaker is the circle widening around God. This circling has our speaker perplexed and he wants to better understand who he is and what he should be doing. He narrows it down to three metaphorical interpretations. First, he could be a falcon returning to the falconer (does anyone else hear the strains of Yeats “Second Coming”). Second, he could be a storm clouding around the “primordial tower” of God. This pessimistic view darkens his judgements and abilities, acknowledging the stain of sin that humans bear. The final interpretation is my favorite: he is “a great song.” It’s beautifully poetic to imagine that we are songs swirling beneath and around God, that our lyrics and melodies bring him some joy. On the flip side, when we’re out of key we’re tough to listen to and sometimes our songs are repetitive, uninspired, and vulgar. Ultimately, Rilke ends the poem without deciding upon one of the three interpretations. We, as readers, are tasked with that decision, just as we are tasked with living our lives in widening circles and embracing the beauty that comes with circling this earth, circling each other, and circling a higher power.