Month: September 2009

Lured into a Line

I have been bitten by Marissa’s meme (even if I have just now had time to copy):

Give me the title of a poem I’ve never written, and feedback telling me what you liked best about it, and I will tell you any of: the first line, the last line, the thing that made me want to write it, the biggest problem I had while writing it, why it almost never got offered to magazines, the scene that hit the cutting room floor but that I wish I’d been able to salvage, or something else that I want readers to know.

Also, like Marissa, I ask that you don’t comment with stuff you wouldn’t want me to run with. Because I will run.

Ready? Set?

“We have surrounded ourselves with things that perish”

The to-read stack currently includes the July/August issue of Star*Line and Carolyn Miller’s Light, Moving. The Star*Line has Duane Ackerson’s “The Bermuda Triangle,” which had me grinning with glee both because of the conceit (“…Having sucked nourishment from WWII aircraft / down to the bones, / it leaves the warm waters of the Gulf…”) and because I’m a sucker for allusions to Galileo’s E puor si muove, which, yes, here, perfect. It’s going on my Rhysling short-list.

The Miller: the subject line’s from her poem “Christmas Day” (and isn’t that a choice juxtaposition? – as is the line “the bitter perfume of the Christmas tree”) (for the non-carolers reading this: the third king sings about the Crucifixion as he offers myrrh to the newborn Christ). There’s another poem titled “To Dr. Williams” that opens with

This is just to say
I never understood
why the plums were in

the icebox. Although
I like to think
of biting into chilled…

The poem I lingered over today was “Note to the New World,” which is making me want to reread Alison Luterman‘s “Morning in the Mission: Grandpop Comes to Visit” (my copy of The Largest Possible Life is at home, where I am not) – both poems are set in San Francisco’s Mission District; both celebrate the vibrant beauty of this here world in tandem with memories of a beloved man who “would have loved the day, filled as it was / with the fumes of poppies, smells of Mexican food…”

I have also been listening a lot to the first two songs on an EP by a Brooklyn group called The Paper Raincoat (Alex Wong was in Nashville last month as the drummer in the Vienna Teng Trio – a terrific show I happened to catch with Joanne). Both songs (“Sympathetic Vibrations” and “Brooklyn Blurs”) are on the group’s MySpace jukebox; musical goodness aside (I really like the bridge in “Vibrations,” there’s a goofy quote from “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” in the mix, and some brilliant arranging in “Blurs”), the lyrics are spot-on. And they’re relevant to this post because they share with Miller and Luterman that sense of being ambushed by the beauty of everyday life.

…Which is my core sensibility as well, although it has just occurred to me that that shows up much more in my letters than in my poems. Must reflect on that some other time. For now, I’m also haunted by “Brooklyn Blurs”‘s refrain of “… I can’t believe that I’m still standing here / I am a ghost to everyone I know.” (And as much as I know that that isn’t remotely true in the slightest, at the moment I can’t let go of how true it feels. Which means I’m due for a long swim, a bottle of Gewurtztraminer, and a full night of self-medicating word-slamming.)

Two Days Too Late

Here’s your Poetry Friday, in some other time zone, or worldview: a beautiful poem by Judith Wright.

In Praise of Marriage

Not till life halved, and parted
one from the other,
did time begin, and knowledge;
sorrow, delight.
Terror of being apart, being lost,
made real the night.
Seeking and finding made
yesterday, now, and tomorrow;
and love was realized first
when those two came together.

So, perilously joined,
lighted in one small room,
we have made all things true.
Out of the I and the you
spreads this field of power,
that all that waits may come,
all possibles be known—
all futures step from their stone
and pasts come into flower.

(I do confess that I think this beauty can happen without marriage and without duality but that does not detract from Wright’s beauty.)

Also, for those of us who insist that poetry is not dead, Wright writes in her foreword to A Human Pattern:

For many years, a notion has been around that poetry is dying, if not dead. It hasn’t died, and unless a dislike generated in school and university days prevails, it won’t die.

But it is certainly in danger, just as the earth itself is in danger, from the philosophies generated by greed. Materialism, positivism, and behaviourism are foes of both poetry and the survival of the earth. They have ruled during my lifetime; but I think they are on the way out.”

“although they fly apart at speeds of light”

Julie Kane’s “Particle Physics” at Poetry Daily invokes both baseball and eternity.

(As does Nancy Willard’s Things Invisible to See, which I’ve given as a “you must read this” gift at least twice. And which in turn reminds me of Steve Kluger’s Last Days of Summer, which I once loaned to a baseball-loving minister who told me later she’d enjoyed it enough to give a copy to another friend as a present, and yes, knowing that pleases me mightily.)

Poetry Friday: Night Light

Because today ripened and bloom autumnal chill, and because it is September 11th and I cannot help but think of war, although I do not wish to, I turn to Nancy Willard‘s poem “Night Light”.

This poem appeared in her book Household Tales of Moon and Water. When I was privileged to hear Willard read at the West Chester Poetry Conference a few years ago I forgot to bring along my copy. Instead, I brought her (then) new book up and explained that I had intended to have her sign Household Tales; she generously inscribed her new book thus:

This poem is in quatrains, except for the exceptional ending; I return to it for the repetition and for the thoughts, not the least of which is “its one trick: / it turns into a banana.”

Night Light

The moon is not green cheese.
It is china and stands in this room.
It has a ten-watt bulb and a motto:
Made in Japan.

Whey-faced, doll-faced,
it’s closed as a tooth
and cold as the dead are cold
till I touch the switch.

Then the moon performs
its one trick:
it turns into a banana.
It warms to its subjects,

it draws us into its light,
just as I knew it would
when I gave ten dollars
to the pale clerk

in the store that sold
everything.
She asked, did I have a car?
She shrouded the moon in tissue

and laid it to rest in a box.
The box did not say Moon.
It said This side up.
I tucked my moon into my basket

and bicycled into the world.
By the light of the sun
I could not see the
moon under my sack of apples,

moon under slab of salmon,
moon under clean laundry,
under milk its sister
and bread its brother,

moon under meat.
Now supper is eaten.
Now laundry is folded away.
I shake out the old comforters.

My nine cats find their places
and go on dreaming where they left off.
My son snuggles under the heap.
His father loses his way in a book.

It is time to turn on the moon.
It is time to live by a different light.

Fire No Guns, Shed No Tears

It’s pretty obvious that I love repetition in my poetry. Every quatrain in “The Marian Lee” opens with the same line; the quatrains and the tercets are all mono-rhyme. Each quatrain in “Wear the Lightning” ends with the same phrase.

So I am delighted by the form of Stan Roger‘s “Barrett’s Privateers”.

The second line of every verse (in which all sing) is “How I wish I were in Sherbrooke now!” From the poet’s point of view this isn’t too bad a line to repeat, both from the stance of (1) having it accumulate meaning as the song/story progresses and (2) having only one line into which to get to the point where repeating it would make sense. In fact, in this case, there are a number of instances where the cognitive dissonance between the first line of the verse and “How I wish I were in Sherbrooke now!” is a wonderful frisson, which grows as you gain insight into the story (and listen to it repeatedly).

There are only three free, or variable, lines in each verse: the first one, and the two lines sandwiched between “How I wish I were in Sherbrooke now!” and the following:

God Damn them all! I was told
We’d cruise the seas for American gold
We’d fire no guns, shed no tears
Now I’m a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett’s privateers.

Admittedly, Rogers gives away the whole story in the first verse when we get to this utterly huge repeton. But the point is, of course, to watch the tragedy unfold, and to ramp up the volume and the harmony along with the inevitability. Rogers is amazing.

From a poet’s point of view, I am gleeful: how does he manage to propel the story along with only two lines before we crash back into the whole group singing “God Damn them all!”???

It’s a reminder that you can probably say it in fewer words, that there is room in the form if you find the right words. Of course, it probably helps to have such an extraordinary repeton.

Full Moon Tonight

I am in a mood for Judith Wright poetry, to rail against the world and still find beauty. And the full moon tonight stops me turning pages at:

Old Woman’s Song

The moon drained white by day
lifts from the hill
where the old pear-tree, fallen in storm,
puts out some blossom still.

Women believe in the moon.
This branch I hold
is not more white and still than she
whose flower is ages old;

and so I carry home
this branch of pear
that makes such obstinate tokens still
of fruit it cannot bear.

Wright’s poem is in quatrains (four-line stanzas) with a rhyme scheme of ABCB, meaning that the second and fourth lines rhyme and the first and third have no relation to each other or to the even-numbered lines. I’d identify this piece as “heterometrical” because I think the lines are mostly iambic but rarely do they contain the same number of iambic feet. I like this “form” because it allows the reader to experience the rhythm of the poem and allowes the writer to use the visual effect of line breaks.

To me this poem speaks of the futility of beauty, and more: the persistence of beauty in spite of said futility.

The first line of the second stanza shocks me with its end-stopped-ness and its implications: men don’t? What is there to believe? What does that belief gain you or subtract from you? Lots of moonlit paths to pursue.

And what does the title tell me? That this is not the epiphany of a young woman, although the poem, by its existence, lends this epiphany to those of any age or identity. But it is the voice of a woman who feels she is past her prime and may be looking for a reason to keep going.

It’s a beaut.

Poetry Friday is hosted today by Crossover.