3.31.15

David Lehman is a poet from New York. His accolades are impressive, check them out. This tells me he is supposed to be good. I am rather inclined to agree. (Good != I like it. But I rather do, so there). An item of note, in his biography I note that many of his works are cited as "scribner", as in the digital publication platform. Good news for us regular ole poets, and for availability/accessibility of poetic works. 

Here are a few of his poems that I think are fairly wide-ranging. Most sourced from Poets.org, and the Poetry Foundation's website.



The Matador of Metaphor




The grapefruit in the Florida orchard
has ripened into a globe in Hartford
for him to look at, not to eat.
If he had a tin can he would beat
it as a drummer in a band beats
his drum and steadily with a swish
and sometimes a gong. It’s his wish
to escape from gray walls and sky
into a Denmark of the inner eye
or a bullring south of the border
or a sky espied from the trenches
of a battlefield in Flanders. Wenches
wander into his wonderland. Order
is disorder squared. We are nowhere
else but here, yet live we do in metaphor
like that elegant square-shouldered matador.

Poem in the Modernist Manner



They were cheap but they were real,
the old bistros. You could have a meal,
drink the devil’s own red wine, and contemplate
the sawdust on the floor, or fate,
as the full-fed beast kicked the empty pail.

The conspiracy of the second rate
continued to reverberate.
Everyone wanted to get his licks.
Everyone said it was a steal.

So the girl and I stayed out late.
We walked along the shore
and I campaigned some more.
And the city built with words not bricks
burned like a paper plate.

Postscript

He wrote the whole novel in his head, 

Sentence by sentence. It took him all day. 

Then he took out a wide-ruled yellow legal pad 

 With three pink vertical lines marking the left margin, 

 And from his breast pocket he extracted 

 A disposable plastic fountain pen, 

 And near the top of the page he wrote the word ODE

 In black ink, all caps. For a few minutes he did nothing. 

 Then he skipped three lines and wrote, 

“It was the greatest birthday present he had ever received: 

 The manual Smith-Corona typewriter 

 His parents gave him on the day he graduated from high school 

 After they took him to the Statler Hilton for lunch, 

 Where they had cold poached salmon, his father’s favorite.”

Which one do you like best? 

3.27.15

Speaking of snapshots, here is another one that I liked. When I was younger I really liked the imagist school of poetry, some sort of wonderful truth being distilled out of a moment that passes us. No idea why I liked it so much, but things in that vein still tend to catch my eye.




The Carolina Wren



Laura Donnelly



I noticed the mockingbirds first,
not for their call but the broad white bands,

like reverse mourning bands on gunmetal
gray, exposed during flight

then tucked into their chests. A thing
seen once, then everywhere—

the top of the gazebo, the little cracked statue,
along the barbed fence. Noticed because

I know first with my eyes, then followed
their several songs braiding the trees.

Only later, this other, same-same-again song,
a bird I could not see but heard

when I walked from the house to the studio,
studio to the house, its three notes

repeated like a child’s up and down
on a trampoline looping

the ground to the sky—
When I remember being a child like this

I think I wouldn’t mind living alone
on a mountain, stilled into the daily

which isn’t stillness at all but a whirring
gone deep. The composer shows how

the hands, palms down, thumb to thumb
and forefinger to mirrored finger, make

a shape like a cone, a honeybee hive, and then
how that cone moves across the piano—

notes in groups fluttering fast back-and-forth
and it sounds difficult but it isn’t

really, how the hand likes to hover each patch
of sound. Likes gesture. To hold. Listening

is like this. How it took me a week to hear
the ever-there wren. And the bees

are like this, intent on their nectar,
their waggle dance better than any GPS.

A threatened thing. A no-one-knows-why.
But the wrens’ invisible looping their loop—

And I, for a moment, pinned to the ground.
Pinned and spinning in the sound of it.

3.25.15

Some snapshots, since I can't manage to put together something more comprehensive. Yes, these are both from my poem-email-a-day. It's a great resource. 



Time Passes


Joy Ladin



Time too is afraid of passing, is riddled with holes
through which time feels itself leaking.
Time sweats in the middle of the night
when all the other dimensions are sleeping.
Time has lost every picture of itself as a child.
Now time is old, leathery and slow.
Can’t sneak up on anyone anymore,
Can’t hide in the grass, can’t run, can’t catch.
Can’t figure out how not to trample
what it means to bless.






Still Life

Carl Sandburg



Cool your heels on the rail of an observation car.
Let the engineer open her up for ninety miles an hour.
Take in the prairie right and left, rolling land and new hay crops, swaths of new hay laid in the sun.
A gray village flecks by and the horses hitched in front of the post-office never blink an eye.
A barnyard and fifteen Holstein cows, dabs of white on a black wall map, never blink an eye.
A signalman in a tower, the outpost of Kansas City, keeps his place at a window with the serenity of a bronze statue on a dark night when lovers pass whispering.

3.23.15

For when you are trying to stay afloat:




This Is My Call for Apologies


Amy Lingafelter



Like seeing a hot air balloon.
It’s just like seeing a hot air balloon.
No helium or flame or 8 passenger basket.
No passengers possibly drinking champagne.
No pilot or ballast,
nor buoyancy, nor balloonist enthusiast
entering national contests.
No ballast, I cannot stress this
enough, no ballast,
no ballast, no ballast.
No science! No cause,
no one getting involved or getting the blues.
No weddings, engagements, company picnics
or a back yard party,
for who balloons
for a back yard party?
No one richer than me.
Nothing shaped like a monkey
or a chili pepper or a bee,
or a Volkswagen bug.
No brand loyalty.
No weddings!
No envelope roll-up,
not without help,
good help on the ground
is the most important thing.
No prior knowledge
of previous passengers,
a Duck, a Sheep and a Chicken,
nor knowledge of hot air.
No flat land to worry about,
no splash-n-dash or discreet pilots
or pilots having to act discreet,
only interfering with the hot air.
No jobs like that,
struggling to be all day out of the way.
No hot air.
Nothing in the way.

3-15-15

Weekend Words:

3-2-15

Everyone is building a garden

while I push the earth with my toe.

The signposts and placards

are not meant for me.

When there are dice involved,

I prefer to look the other way.

I am so unsatisfied by sleep,

instead I lay and twitch, to reach

what is unattainable by day.

I tell time by footprints, the day

of the week is a cupped shell.

I smile at the standing water, but faces

are a molten sea of flowers.

3.12.15

A little something I bookmarked to share with you about where writing takes you. It's via Hugo House, by Joan Leegant: The situation and the Story. Definitely go read it, perhaps take the prompt as well.

It reminds me of one of my long-time favorite quotes from Adrienne Rich: "Poems are like dreams. In them you put what you don't know you know".  

I liked this idea, because it makes me feel like there is still hope that I have something to say that I haven't found yet.

3.9.15

Once again, Jeopardy has inspired me. One contestant (and the eventual champion!) Jen Jabaily-Blackburn is a poet, with an MFA from the University of Arkansas. We have something in common, at least where Jeopardy is concerned: "True to her wordsmith nature, Blackburn excelled especially when the questions were word-related, like those in a category where the correct response was a word or phrase with three Bs, or when a question had to do with etymology." That might be pitching myself a little too highly, but I do tend to do the best at the word-categories.

She made the "Best New Poets of 2014" list from Best New Poets project for her poem For Gene Kell, and works in the Poetry center at Smith. Here are two of Jen's poems that were featured in the journal Unsplendid, which specializes in "received and nonce forms", which are on the metered and formal-ish side of the spectrum.  



Ars Poetica: Oxford

A pleasure boat's corroded bones
            submerged within the Thames
rust beside a bluish thought
            fettered by its limbs.

Some houses rot from floor to eave,
            some fires waste unfed.
All vistas viewed from passing cars
            first clear, then blur, then fade.

A falcon gliding overhead
            hauls up its kicking quarry:
unsettling as an unbound book,
            as difficult to carry.




Love and the Lover's Heart



(after Dante)

If you've found yourself awake at 3 AM
            trying to drink whiskey, but missing your mouth,
surfing the tube, crying God Damn, then you've been
            in love, and you will know what I'm talking about—

the hours spent watching shills pitch state-of-the-art
            carving knives (and, bless you, you'll probably buy ‘em)
when sleep should come, but won't. A broken heart
            can make a person hear things: her Honda's tires

sneaking up your drive, her harelike foot-
            falls bounding up your house's buckling porch,
            the pulsing tick of her favorite antique watch

…or Love himself might blow into the room
            and pluck your lovely girl from out his pocket
            to feed her your racing, bloody heart—
                                                                              and she'll like it. 

3.5.15

Despite my copmlaints about social media, it is good at equalizing. Talented, creative, and sometimes famous individuals have profiles and will be "friends" with ordinary ole' folks like me. Sometimes this is nothing more than the novelty, like enjoying George Takei's humor, but some of it can be very beneficial, exciting, and inspiring. 

I have "liked" the Hugo House in Seattle, and get exposed to fantastic writers and events that I wouldn't otherwise have known about. Writers, poets especially I feel, can be somewhat insular, so it's nice to know these events are out there (not that I have attended one yet...oops). 

Martha Silano is teaching a course on "stealing, sampling, absconding" at the Hugo House currently, learning about how to "play" with appropriated text. How fun! She doesn't have a Wikipedia entry, but her blogger profile (another equalizer!!) shows her to be a Seattleite and working in education. She has books published and contributes to online sources as well. Check out her blog--I particularly liked the post about looking back at handwritten drafts of poems. 

Here is the poem that Hugo House's page featured: Song of Weights and Measures. 

For there is a dram.

For there is a farthing.

A bushel for your thoughts.

A hand for your withered heights.

For I have jouled along attempting

to quire and wisp.

For I have sized up a mountain’s meters,

come down jiffy by shake to the tune

of leagues and stones.

For once I was your peckish darling.

For once there was the measure

of what an ox could plow

in a single morning.

For once the fother, the reed, the palm.

For one megalithic year I fixed my gaze

on the smiling meniscus, against the gray wall

of graduated cylinder.

For once I measured ten out of ten

on the scale of pain.

For I knew that soon I’d kiss good-bye

the bovate, the hide and hundredweight.

For in each pinch of salt, a whisper of doubt,

for in each medieval moment, emotion,

like an unruly cough syrup bottle,

uncapped. For though I dutifully swallowed

my banana doses, ascended, from welcome

to lanthorn, three barleycorns at a time,

I could not tackle the trudging, trenchant cart.

For now I am forty rods from your chain and bolt.

For now I am my six-sacked self.

From another source, I also liked this poem, If you could be anybody, Who would you be? Enjoy the richness.

And that’s when she gave him her answer: Hapshepsut, the only female 
pharaoh, who by the luck of her father’s early death managed to rule 

for twenty-two years. Or else, if not her, then the last person who died 
with the secret recipe for embalming bodies, which wine, which incense,

when resin, when honey, when rubbing with grease, which thorny tree 
of the Borage. That’s when she gave him or maybe Thomas Edison 

on the day he invented the phonograph—telegraph tape, set at high speed, 
emitting human speech. Paper speaking! Carbonate, bicarbonate, chloride, 

sodium sulfite, who knows what else. Traveled to distant lands for their henna 
and ochre. That’s when she fessed up: Tanya Harding and Olga Korbut. Also, 

Nadia Comeneci the day she received that perfect score. Also, she told him, 
Botticelli’s Venus. Does it have to be a person, she asked, or could she be 

the pink shell? The creamy cockatiel, the yellow dewlap of the dewlapped lapwing? 
The emu settling down, in the dirt path, for a late-morning nap? In that case, she said, 

I’ll be the light breeze, the glass of wine sweating in the late-June air; actually, 
make that the 638 wineries of Washington State, every one of Klickitat County’s 

turbines slicing the wind through the cottony gospel of cottonwood fluff. 
But she wasn’t only Washington State; she was also a beaver’s persistent teeth. 

Gold, silver, bronze; floor, bars, or beam: who even remembers, and anyway 
she’d rather be the chalk dust lifting after the champion lifts her hand to signal 

she’s ready to vault. Or the moss between the patio bricks; a moose, an alpha wolf, 
a stealth. Nothing camouflaged, nothing too outrageously flamboyant, nothing 

requiring slaughter or stench. I’ve decided, she said, and that’s when she gave him that
impossibly loose-lipped flower, white destined to dirty brown, to flop on the ground 

for the girls to load their buckets for petal soup, cuz who’d give a camellia less 
than a ten, who’d reject a blossom, though why hadn’t she answered nobody 

but nobody else, because really she loved her own aorta, her own prismatic ulnas, 
was most content in her own cage, with the twenty-six bones of her own foot. Not 

platypoid, not tarantula-ized, just a gal sporting a gray-edged halo, just a smidgen spooked by

King Tut’s bulbous belly, his knocking knees, his ghostly glowing teeth.

3.2.15

I found this fantastic article via a librarian friend on facebook. Facadebook? It really is my nemesis. (an aside--I was lamenting privately that the content on social media seems to be overwhelmingly related to the "lower" cultures of music, writing, acting, etc, showing pop fiction, current film, top 40 and meme-as-news over pretty much any other genre of well-though-out, classical (not necessarily in style!), analytic media. Maybe your feeds are more cultured than mine, but I wonder why I don't see more articles like this)

The Word-Hoard by Robert MacFarlane is the article in question. He writes about his and other's collections of words that are unique to place and dialect. These lexicons (lexica?) reflect uniqueness of plant and animal life, and give color to our understanding of locations and people. It is a long article, but worth reading. I often hear my peers lament that other languages are so much more expressive and evocative than English. Well, these words that MacFarlane has identified for sharing are often from dialects of the very same, but ones that would be tough for a modern American English speaker to understand. Still, they can add beauty and value to our world. From the article, something I particularly liked:

Yet it is clear that we increasingly make do with an impoverished language for landscape. A place literacy is leaving us. A language in common, a language of the commons, is declining. Nuance is evaporating from everyday usage, burned off by capital and apathy. The substitutions made in the Oxford Junior Dictionary – the outdoor and the natural being displaced by the indoor and the virtual – are a small but significant symptom of the simulated screen life many of us live. The terrain beyond the city fringe is chiefly understood in terms of large generic units (“field”, “hill”, “valley”, “wood”). It has become a blandscape. We are blasé, in the sense that Georg Simmel used that word in 1903, meaning “indifferent to the distinction between things”.

and

Why should this loss matter? You can’t even use crizzle as a Scrabble word: there aren’t two “z”s in the bag (unless, of course, you use a blank). It matters because language deficit leads to attention deficit. As we deplete our ability to denote and figure particular aspects of our places, so our competence for understanding and imagining possible relationships with non-human nature is correspondingly depleted. To quote the American farmer and essayist Wendell Berry – a man who in my experience speaks the crash-tested truth – “people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love, and to defend what we love we need a particularising language, for we love what we particularly know.” 

So, on to the thing we do. Here is a poem Old Tongue by Jackie Kay. At the link you can also listen to her reading to get the richness of the words. This was suggested to me by someone on a forum, where we were sharing fun with colloquialisms.



When I was eight, I was forced south.
Not long after, when I opened
my mouth, a strange thing happened.
I lost my Scottish accent.
Words fell off my tongue:
eedyit, dreich, wabbit, crabbit

stummer, teuchter, heidbanger,
so you are, so am ur, see you, see ma ma,
shut yer geggie or I’ll gie you the malkie!

My own vowels started to stretch like my bones
and I turned my back on Scotland.
Words disappeared in the dead of night,
new words marched in: ghastly, awful,
quite dreadful, scones said like stones.
Pokey hats into ice cream cones.
Oh where did all my words go—
my old words, my lost words?
Did you ever feel sad when you lost a word,
did you ever try and call it back
like calling in the sea?
If I could have found my words wandering,
I swear I would have taken them in,
swallowed them whole, knocked them back.

Out in the English soil, my old words
buried themselves. It made my mother’s blood boil.
I wanted them back; I wanted my old accent back,
my old tongue. My dour soor Scottish tongue.
Sing-songy. I wanted to gie it laldie.

I imagine there are a lot of poems that connect us to words that are locative, colloquial, or otherwise little-used. Is there a poet who represents your local dialect?