It started as a poem every day for a year:
like a dance marathon crossed with a library sit-in.
Some poems are mine, many are not, all praise to the respective copyright holders.
Recently I've been thinking (along with much of the country) about politics, protest, co-opting movements, turning aims against themselves, ownership of a cause, invoking freedom to quash freedom, dividing to conquer. There's been the Ground Zero Mosque, Glenn Beck's cover-band rendition of the March on Washington and general ideological demagoguery that makes the Kardashians look thoughtful and the Juggalos seem well-mannered. Or is it the other way around?
At any rate, I'm feeling current events whiplash.
It's made me exhausted because I don't have many clear answers. I have some ideals, maybe a principle or two, but everything's complicated. Nobody is completely in the right and nobody is plotting to conquer the world from their hollowed-out volcano. I think Frank Capra himself would shrug and mumble that he's out of answers, too. Everything is more difficult than you would think.
Maybe it's simpler, too. Here's something that felt completely inappropriate to the current moment. If you could write haiku as poems of protest, they might go like this. And if it's 100% not apropos, you know it must have something to offer us right now.
Hottoba no
Shida Yaba
Behold! Violets bloom within The fence of the forbidden ground.
Steve Almond is an awesome writer. But not his poetry. No, that is some pretty horrible dreck that makes even casual poetry listeners perk up their ears and say, "Am I crazy or is that just plain awful?"
Fortunately, Almond knows it. And will tell everyone within earshot about it, as in this piece about his experience as a short story writer temporarily converting to the Church of Poetry. A sample:
"I was going to be a new kind of poet, not obscure and effete, but gritty and plainspoken."
"I quickly mastered the poet voice, a sonorous patois with precise enunciations and dramatic half pauses that stressed the gravity of each syllable. Years later, I would crack up friends by reading, say, the ingredients on a soda can in my poet voice."
"I completed the manuscript within a few weeks and forced no fewer than four actual poets to read it. Their response was, in retrospect, idiotically generous. There was an awful lot of red ink to be parsed, but in my version of things, these were quick fixes. I was going to be a famous poet, without even committing suicide."
Before you read the sample poem, you really have to listen to this podcast: Poetry Off the Shelf: Seven Essential Dreams Revisited. It's relatively short (fifteen minutes at the most) and pretty hysterical, trust me on this.
I'll wait.
“I Hate Indian Summer”
Steve Almond
I hate Indian Summer, with its glib promises like the early hours of love before anyone burps or tells the truth. I hate Indians for that matter, their spent nobility and chirping casinos, the wrongs they drag behind them like a doom we must forever heed. You hear so much about the light is the annoying part, the coppery light, the autumnal light, the hue of dying leaves under the full moon. God, I hate the full moon, its fat romantic doubletalk and dopey yellow winks. Would you believe I’m in love? Fallen hard for some tootsie who writes pamphlets about Indian Summer and Indians and full moons, who has nothing in common with me but an occasional bad mood and a taste for chicken mole, who won’t let me be even when I plead with her to never leave.
A note from the poet: "You will notice a couple of things. First, the weird indentation. Is there some greater aesthetic purpose? I very much doubt it. Second, that I am a bigot willing to say stupid things about Indians in an effort to sound edgy. Third, that utterly nonsensical final couplet. What can I say? I hate to disappoint my fans."
It's almost the end of summer, which is about when I emerge from the angry, sleepy stupor hot days put me in. Cold fronts finally broke the back of the Pacific Northwest's August. I think less about moving someplace cooler like, say, one of the smaller moons of Neptune.
And in celebration, I'll grudgingly give summer its due. Here's a poem from a collection of Imagist work - I love the specificity and conciseness that avoids being ordinary. (Amalfi is a seaside Italian town.)
Amalfi
Richard Aldington
We will come down to you, O very deep sea, And drift upon your pale green waves Like scattered petals.
We will come down to you from the hills, From the scented lemon groves, From the hot sun. We will come down, O Thalassa, And drift upon Your pale green waves Like petals.
I took the Collected Plath with me on a flight last weekend. It's organized chronologically so you start with her work around age 23, just finishing at Oxford College. The early stuff is alright - precocious with both positive and negative effects, darkly whimsical but very uneven.
This poem is the first thing in the collection that hints at the comedy and danger of her later work - it's definitely "minor" Plath in the way that Dürer's "Young Hare" is minor. It's not a masterpiece, but there's every sign of its creator on the way to mastery.
It's also vaguely reminiscent of Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" where the protagonist comes to believe he is the only human in the universe and everyone else is a replacement robot facsimile.
Soliloquy of the Solipsist
Sylvia Plath
I? I walk alone; The midnight street Spins itself from under my feet; When my eyes shut These dreaming houses all snuff out; Through a whim of mine Over gables the moon's celestial onion Hangs high.
I Make houses shrink And trees diminish By going far; my look's leash Dangles the puppet-people Who, unaware how they dwindle, Laugh, kiss, get drunk, Nor guess that if I choose to blink They die.
I When in good humor, Give grass its green Blazon sky blue, and endow the sun With gold; Yet, in my wintriest moods, I hold Absolute power To boycott any color and forbid any flower To be.
I Know you appear Vivid at my side, Denying you sprang out of my head, Claiming you feel Love fiery enough to prove flesh real, Though it's quite clear All you beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear, From me.
the crystal goblet and the wine. You are the dew on the morning grass and the burning wheel of the sun. You are the white apron of the baker, and the marsh birds suddenly in flight. However, you are not the wind in the orchard, the plums on the counter, or the house of cards. And you are certainly not the pine-scented air. There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air. It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge, maybe even the pigeon on the general's head, but you are not even close to being the field of cornflowers at dusk. And a quick look in the mirror will show that you are neither the boots in the corner nor the boat asleep in its boathouse. It might interest you to know, speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world, that I am the sound of rain on the roof. I also happen to be the shooting star, the evening paper blowing down an alley and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table. I am also the moon in the trees and the blind woman's tea cup. But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife. You are still the bread and the knife. You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine."
Collins begins the poem at 1:55.
And now behold a former poet laureate get his heinie handed to him by a toddler. And as a bonus, the tyke takes on Tennyson.
Here's one that definitely doesn't go where you think it's going to. Goldbarth, you'll recall, also wrote a fantastic poem with some choice descriptions of old people's poop. But he's got something less scatological and more theological in mind here.
1400
Albert Goldbarth
Saps, and the anal grease of an otter, and pig's blood, and the crushed-up bulbous bodies of those insects that they'd find so thickly gathered on barnyard excrement it makes a pulsing rind, and oven soot, and the oil that forms in a flask of urine and rotting horseflesh, and the white of an egg, and spit-in-charcoal in a sluggish runnel of gray the mixed with the harvested scum of a bloated tomato, and steamed plant marrows beaten to a paste, and orange clay, and auburn clay, and clay bespangled with the liquid pearl of fish scales stirred in milt, and suet, and glue boiled out of a hoof, and ash, and grape-like clusters of fat grabbed out of a chicken carcass and dried in the sun until it became inert and yet still pliable, and lime, and the pulp of the cherry, and the pulp of the cherry immersed in egg, and coral in powder, and silver flake, and fig, and pollen, and dust, and beeswax, and an iridescence scraped with infinite care from the wings of hundreds of tiny flying things, and salted iridescence, and human milk, and ores, and gall, and stains expressed from teas, and gobs of squeeze-off from the nettings of cheese, and rouge, and kohl, and luster, and oyster, and less; and so from these they made their paints: and then their Gods and their saints.
I've really begun to enjoy his work. He's got sardonic humor (for which he won the Mark Twain Award) and a real command of language without pretense or pomp. I don't mind big words, but I mind when they become a secret passcode barring you from entrance into a super-secret big boys' club. If words are there to shut readers out instead of letting them in, enjoy your damp basement that smells like each other's farts.
I like collecting random books of poems. Sometimes you have to take a chance, just pick something up without even cracking the spine and see what comes out of it. This is usually easier to do when the books are cheap.
Here's one probably from a library book sale or a forgotten corner of a Goodwill. It's by Ned O'Gorman who apparently is not as obscure as I thought. And by that I mean he has a Wikipedia entry, which is about the minimum requirement for 15 minutes of Warhol fame.
Here's something from The Night of the Hammer, his first collection.
To My Father
Ned O'Corman
O thou sweet dumb-bell
deceiver of my christmases,
plaything, tricker of tricksters,
genitor, speller, grace of the kitchen,
feller of trees, gallant, delineator,
simpleton, follower of girls,
renown of manner, dominus and calamitatum,
I come to you careless and bright from games
with thy paternity.
O thou beauty, brightness,
bearer of horses and flaring pennants,
I've followed you among
dark terraces and lawns, where dragged
in speculation I read you out
and busy with gesture and kiss I sang
of filial increase. I come to you
clamoring and quick, your oracle
and fragment.
O fisher, pillager,
I ask that you receive me
after years of silence among
the wars of parents and their love
fraught with stratagem, where boyhood dark
as a cove bruited with light. Study me
with tape and rule, fix yourself along
this alphabet and learn, my father,
my face.
I love the ambiguity and vivid images, one spilling into another quickly with hardly a break. Supplications to a father have always struck me as prayers to a stern and remote god. Or is my religion and/or lineage showing?
I give you another example from the back catalog of my obsessions.
Charles Simic grew up in the former Yugoslavia, moved to the US at a young age, was poet laureate for a while, has amassed pretty much every poetry award you can get, and introduced quite a few eastern European poets to mainstream American academia.
He can be devastating when he wants to be. The only other WWII poems this effective may be "The Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner" and "Aerial Bombardment." (I'm discounting Plath & Sexton, for whom war poetry is problematic.)
Prodigy
Charles Simic
I grew up bent over a chessboard.
I loved the word endgame.
All my cousins looked worried.
It was a small house near a Roman graveyard. Planes and tanks shook its windowpanes.
A retired professor of astronomy taught me how to play.
That must have been in 1944.
In the set we were using, the paint had almost chipped off the black pieces.
The white King was missing and had to be substituted for.
I’m told but do not believe that that summer I witnessed men hung from telephone poles.
I remember my mother blindfolding me a lot. She had a way of tucking my head suddenly under her overcoat.
In chess, too, the professor told me, the masters play blindfolded, the great ones on several boards at the same time.
Well, it's the start of Round Two! It all gets much faster from here on in. Have I mentioned how much I appreciate the time you take to vote? Thanks for your feedback - it makes the whole thing much more fun. So here is the next match-up, fortunately two shorter ones.
In the Quiet
Matt Quarterman
I’m waiting for something, but I think the waiting is what I’m waiting for. I’m listening in the silence, but the silence is what I’m waiting expectantly, hoping to hear. The stillness and the passing of time are also things to taste and touch. And if the taste is tasteless, the touch unfeeling, this is just the taste of water, the touch of air. To feel the flavor of water on your tongue, to let your skin prickle in the grip of air is to tune your senses finely, to calibrate them to the highest power. So I wait silently and let the still time be the thing I wait for in the quiet, in the dark.
Animals After the Fall
Matt Quarterman
At night the garden curls into a ball,
crustacean lost inside the flowered leaves.
Scavengers crawl through its roots to fall
upon her carapace, where rodents grieve.
What knowledge does the mouse have of the owl?
Perhaps the taste of fear, the cautious scent
is all the prey can have. The hunter’s scowl
gives rise to wisdom lost on innocence.
And in the final view the predator
possesses all the knowledge of his catch
except that hidden lesson caught mice learn:
surrender without pity or reproach.
Two hearts throb slowly, warm and self-aware
but ignorant of loves the other bears.
So I'll say this, realizing full well that I run the risk of sounding both completely obvious and like a conservative throwback - I love last lines of poems. When they land just right, twisting and turning your head around like a Christopher Nolan film, delivering that knockout punch that leaves you reeling... There's nothing like that.
It sounds obvious because it's such a common device. Sometimes it seems like every poem in the world is trying to do that same thing. From Frost repeating "And miles to go before I sleep" to Eliot's "I do not think they will sing to me," it seems like you always want to strive for that. Nobody wants to go out with a whimper or fizzle, you save the good stuff for the end.
Still, it can be nearly impossible to pull of a good ending. (Just ask Stephen King and the many, many screenwriters who've adapted his books. Or, for that matter, the much-maligned M. Night Shyamalan.) Former Poet Laureate Kay Ryan kicks this down the stairs - without the last two lines, I wouldn't care. It's only after that KO that I realize the poem was never about a turtle.
I guess that's obvious, as well. If I had to define poetry, I'd say that it's something that's not about what it's about. I think that's what we mean by "poetry in motion" or "pure poetry" as similes for athletic achievement, architectural grace or beauty in design. It's all the other things that crowd around in the margins and corners of the thing that is what it's REALLY about.
Now I'm not making any sense. Maybe this will make things clearer.
Turtle
Kay Ryan
Who would be a turtle who could help it? A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet, She can ill afford the chances she must take In rowing toward the grasses that she eats. Her track is graceless, like dragging A packing-case places, and almost any slope Defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical, She’s often stuck up to the axle on her way To something edible. With everything optimal, She skirts the ditch which would convert Her shell into a serving dish. She lives Below luck-level, never imagining some lottery Will change her load of pottery to wings. Her only levity is patience, The sport of truly chastened things.
I've been reading some short stories by Borges and it's freaking me out in wonderfully awesome ways. It's like science fiction minus the science: philosophy fiction or thought experiment fiction. He's a poet as well, though much more famous as an author partially because his poetry while competent, is unremarkable. Since this is a poetry blog, this will have to do. But if you're a fan of Inception, The Fountain or Tarsem's The Fall you should check his short stories out.
We are the time. We are the famous
Jorge Luis Borges (trans. unknown)
We are the time. We are the famous metaphor from Heraclitus the Obscure. We are the water, not the hard diamond, the one that is lost, not the one that stands still. We are the river and we are that Greek that looks himself into the river. His reflection changes into the waters of the changing mirror, into the crystal that changes like the fire. We are the vain predetermined river, in his travel to his sea. The shadows have surrounded him. Everything said goodbye to us, everything goes away. Memory does not stamp his own coin. However, there is something that stays however, there is something that bemoans.
Many of Stephen Crane's turns of phrase have gotten stuck in my head over the years. Some of them I forgot I ever knew like, "the fall to doom a long way down" which I ripped off for a song lyric a few years back. His poems are so short, so cynical, so sharp. Here's one of my favorites - for some reason it reminds me of "Fight Club."
Many workmen
Stephen Crane
Many workmen Built a huge ball of masonry Upon a mountain-top. Then they went to the valley below, And turned to behold their work. "It is grand," they said; They loved the thing.
Of a sudden, it moved: It came upon them swiftly; It crushed them all to blood. But some had opportunity to squeal.
