American Author Challenge: Poetry

Adrienne Rich, Robert Frost, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins

**This is part of our American Author Challenge 2016. Poetry will be read in April. The general discussion thread can be found right here:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/209611

Full Disclosure: I know very little about poetry. I would barely qualify as a rank amateur. That said- I could use your assistance. Could some of you, more knowledgeable and seasoned LTers, recommend a couple of books each, so I can keep a list, that the novices, in the group, can use as a guideline. Maybe you could also, leave a very brief description, showing the level of accessibility. I know I am not the only one, who is a poetry-slacker and we could use all the help we can get.

I will try to post the suggestions, right in this spot, for easy access. Thanks in advance.

Naomi Shihab Nye- Words Under the Words (Ro)

>3 msf59: I'm not much of a poem-ophile either. So, my question is: what defines an American poet? I just received an ER book of poetry by an author who lives in the US, and writes for US publications but was born somewhere in Europe and educated in Canada. Does she qualify as an American poet?

Hi, Lois! Probably the same loose guidelines, we have with any American authors. Should they have lived here, at least 10 years? We can put it up for discussion.

I'm also an amateur when it comes to poetry Mark but one work I recommend is by Naomi Shihab Nye. She is of Palestinian descent but spent much time in the Hill Country of Texas. Her poetry feels like home to me. My favorite is Words under the words published in 1995.

I know Joe and Debbi will be able to recommend for this month.

I found an anthology I plan to read in April: Take Hold!: An Anthology of Pulitzer Prize Winning Poems. I also considered John Brown's Body by Stephen Vincent Benet since it's a Pulitzer winner. I may try to squeeze in something by Ogden Nash since he was my father's favorite poet.

>6 luvamystery65: Thanks for chiming in, Ro. The Nye Sounds like a good one. I posted it, up there.

>7 cbl_tn: Good to see you, Carrie. Glad you'll be joining us.

Mark, as you know I read a fair amount of poetry as well as doing some fairly gauche scribbling of my own so I have long been looking forward to the cruellest month. I will steer clear of a couple of poets this coming month Auden and Eliot for whom a case for nationality can be argued one way or another.

I will be reading:

What Work Is by Philip Levine



I think this would appeal to you with it's working man sensibilities. I will also be dipping into an anthology I have called Six American Poets as I can get a dose of Whitman, Frost, Dickinson, Williams, Hughes & Stevens



If I have time I will choose something from one of the following whose work is on my shelves:

Rae Armantrout
Elizabeth Bishop
Galway Kinnell
Frank O'Hara
Mary Oliver
Carl Phillips
Sylvia Plath
Charles Simic
Natasha Trethewey

or

Richard Wilbur

I have read two poetry collections in the past few years that I would recommend - Blue Horses by Mary Oliver and Aimless Love by Billy Collins.

Not sure what I'll be reading yet - I have requested two from the library, so whichever comes in first. I requested Ballistics by Billy Collins and A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver.

>7 cbl_tn: Ahhh, Carrie, it must be that "great minds" syndrome. I have a copy of John Brown's Body that I have been thinking about for April's AAC. The poet, I've discovered, was born in nearby Bethlehem. And I like Ogden Nash:

The cow is of the bovine ilk
One end is moo, the other milk

Hiya, Mark. Good for you for doing this. Great suggestions already. I love your four up top.

A few that I don't think have been mentioned:

John Berryman
Allen Ginsburg
Naomi Shihab Nye (Palestinian father, American mother, calls San Antonio home) (oops, Ro got that one)
Yusef Komunyakaa
Sharon Olds

Thanks for the suggestions everyone. I will add them to the top, later today.

This should be a lot of fun. I am glad we went with it.

I will second the recommendation for Mary Oliver. I absolutely love her, and she is as accessible as it gets. I'm also fond of two poets with local ties to Northeastern/Central Pennsylvania. Jay Parini (who also writes fiction and biography, and who held his own in a battle of wits and philosophy with Christopher Hitchens a few year back that I wish I could share with everyone; it wasn't recorded as far as I know.) and Sascha Feinstein. As with most poetry, some of their works for me and some of it doesn't. Feinstein is also a jazz expert, so if that's your bag, he might have something to say to you. He has edited 2 anthologies of jazz poetry.

I picked out a book a long time ago (well, a few months, anyway) when I saw what April held for your American Author Challenge.

Endpoint and Other Poems by John Updike

I haven't read the book, but I did come across a rave review. It has 4 stars on LT. And I believe it is the last book that he published before his death.

So that's what I'm reading. :)

Karen O.

I have two very large anthologys The Norton Anthology of Poetry and Poems That Live Forever. They are both too overwhelming to read the whole thing, so what I think I plan to do is read a selection of poems from those two books, choosing the authors that all the rest of you are either reading or recommending. I'll use the touchstone author list above. I figure, if I can manage one author every other day I could check out 15 authors new to me. I don't usually read poetry.

I'm thinking that I own a book or two of Robert Frost poetry so I will read one of those.

One of my favorites is The Road Not Taken. Awhile back, I picked up a book analyzing this poem and so I may read The Road Not Taken by David Orr. It's subtitled: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong. Perhaps throw in the Jay Parini bio of Frost, too.

I note that this Sat, March 26th, is the 125th anniversary of Frost's birth.

>1 msf59: well I have volumes of all of the poets pictured here, so I'll dip a little. I'll also revisit Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou (her inauguration poem probably), then maybe a few others, I have several American anthologies. And not to forget Raymond Carver ('Gravy' is an all time favourite), and his wife Tess Gallager. Then there is Poe, Dickinson... Oh my, and on and on...

I picked up an audio of Billy Collins Live at the last FOL sale so I'll be listening to that for sure.

I decided to try a recent Pulitzer winner so I have Late Wife: Poems by Claudia Emerson out from the library. It seems to be about divorce and moving on.

If I have time, I'll try a second Pulitzer winner, Life on Mars: Poems by Tracy K Smith. Her father was an engineer who worked on the Hubble telescope. This collection apparently has somewhat of a science fiction/space metaphor ongoing.

Mark, as you know, I'm hardly a poetry reader although my father was a published poet. Huh. Maybe I'll read one of his chapbooks that I have lying about the house.

I have Three Books: Body Rags; Mortal Acts, Mortal Words; The Past by Galway Kinnell that I'll read from. I guess I could potentially count it as three books.... Heh. It does consist of three collections that were independently published.

I would also like to read some Frost and some Dickenson.

And Words under the words appeals! If her work feels like home to Ro! :-)

I'll likely read Longfellow's Tales of a Wayside Inn. I may read some Don Marquis as well.

I saw this posted on the Huffington Post:

"14 Brilliant Women Poets To Read On World Poetry Day".

1. Patricia Lockwood
2. Monica McClure
3. Tracy K. Smith
4. Aja Monet
5. Leigh Stein
6. Jenny Zhang
7. Dorothea Lasky
8. Kate Tempest
9. Morgan Parker
10. Erika L. Sánchez
11. Erika Meitner
12. Solmaz Sharif
13. Jamila Woods
14. Aimee Nezhukumatathil

I am not familiar with any of these authors, so I am not sure, which ones are american. Does anyone have any thoughts?

That's quite a list to explore, Mark. They are all American except Kate Tempest, who is English, and Solmaz Sharif, who was born in Turkey, but was educated in and lives in the US.

>22 msf59: Yikes, aside from Caroline, I probably have the largest poetry collection in the group and I have precisely nothing by any of the 14 poets listed! The world is a big, big one, isn't it?

I'm going to read some selections from Good Poems, American Places, collected by Garrison Keillor. The poets span from the 19th to the 21st century; many familiar, but many are new to me. The collection is organized into 15 sections, with group headings like "On the Road"; "City Life"; "A Sort of Rapture"; "Snow"; "Out West", etc.

>22 msf59: Oh my gosh, it's great to see Jamila Woods on that list.

We've known her since she was a young teen starting out at Young Chicago Authors. No books out yet that I know of, but she has a beautiful voice and is releasing a CD soon. (She's been featured with Macklemore on TV recently. No books yet that I know of, but you can connect to three of her poems here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/jamila-woods. She's a sweetheart, too.

Tracy K. Smith is a big deal prize winner. I've read some of hers in magazines, but plan to get one of her books soon.

My next one is Lighthead by Terrence Hayes.

I don't think anyone has mentioned Julia Alvarez. I recently read The Woman I Kept to Myself and it's wonderful.

Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks who won the Pulitzer for her poetry in 1950 for Annie Allen, and Langston Hughes is great too.

Here's a brilliant work for you to ponder over, from the utterly marvelous Holly Wendt. My personal prejudice notwithstanding, I think that this is very very good, indeed.

>23 laytonwoman3rd: Thanks for your comments, Linda. Glad to hear most of those authors are Americans.

>24 PaulCranswick: Thanks, Joe! I will have to search for both of those authors.

>27 nittnut: I have also heard good things about Julia Alvarez. Thanks for including her.

>28 laytonwoman3rd: Wendt sounds wonderful, Linda. Thanks.

>29 msf59: I must tell Holly her new name is "Wonderful Wendt"!! She will like it.

>22 msf59: Wonderful list!

I am reading Why Be Normal When You Can Be Happy? by Jeanette Winterson and she talks about her love of poetry, largely because, as a child, she found that she could memorize and "keep" poetry more easily (this in a household where she was forbidden access to books). I love this passage and Joe suggested I share it here:

...when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language -- and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers -- a language powerful enough to say how it is.

It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.

>32 EBT1002: Wonderful, Ellen. Just wonderful.

I've just been notifed that I will receive an ER copy of Jay Parini's New and Collected Poems: 1975-2015. Hot diggety! Hope it arrives in time for me to read some of it in April.

>32 EBT1002: I love that quote, Ellen! Thanks so much for sharing it.

Barking by Jim Harrison (who passed away earlier this week)

http://www.outsideonline.com/1893296/last-lion

The moon comes up.
The moon goes down.
This is to inform you
that I didn’t die young.
Age swept past me
but I caught up.
Spring has begun here and each day
brings new birds up from Mexico.
Yesterday I got a call from the outside
world but I said no in thunder.
I was a dog on a short chain
and now there’s no chain.

Source: Poetry (September 2008).

A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver (4 stars), library hardback, poetry - read for Mark's AAC

So I just picked this up from the library today - I had requested it for next month's poetry read for Mark's AAC. I took it out to the deck with me to just read one or two of the poems and get a feel for it, but I ended up just reading straight through. Really lovely collection of poetry mostly themed on nature. I loved the final lines of "Hurricane" which read:

"For some things there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me."

Probably my favorite was "I Happened to be Standing", but I also loved "The Poet Compares Human Nature to the Ocean From Which We Came". It's short, so here it is for you:

"The sea can do craziness, it can do smooth,
it can lie down silk breathing
or toss havoc shoreward; it can give

gifts or withhold all; it can rise, ebb, froth
like an incoming frenzy of fountains, or it can
sweet-talk entirely. As I can too,

and so, no doubt, can you, and you."

>37 Crazymamie: I read that collection last year and absolutely loved it.

I picked up 19 Varieties of Gazelle by Naomi Shihab Nye at the library today. I'm looking forward to reading it in April.

There seems to be an American Poets Continuum Series .....

I nearly forgot about one of my favorites! Donald Hall. I love his collection, Without.

My "review" from 2011:

Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, both well-known poets, had a long and happy marriage despite a substantial age difference, his multiple bouts with cancer and her clinical depression. Then, she was diagnosed with leukemia, endured a long treatment and eventually died in 1995. These poems chronicle the time of her illness and the period after her death, and are incredibly moving.

Some favorite bits:

"Dying is simple," she said.
"What's worst is...the separation."
When she no longer spoke,
they lay alone together, touching,
and she fixed on him
her beautiful enormous round brown eyes,
shining, unblinking,
and passionate with love and dread."
(from "Her Long Illness")

Tonight the Andover fireworks
will have to go on without me
as I go to bed early, reading
The Man Without Qualities
with insufficient attention
because I keep watching you die.
Tomorrow I will wake at five
to the tenth Wednesday
after the Wednesday we buried you.
(from "Independence Day Letter")

I grew heavy through summer and autumn
and now I bear your death. I feed her,
bathe her, rock her, and change her diapers.
She lifts her small skull, trembling
and tentative. She smiles, spits up, shits
in a toilet, learns to read and multiply.
I watch her grow, prosper, thrive.
She is the darling of her mother's old age.
("Postcard: January 22nd")

This book was published on the third anniversary of Kenyon’s death and lays bare Hall’s pain, both at what she endured and at her eventual death. It is a beautiful, 80-page volume of naked grief and lonely mourning.

>40 katiekrug: Terrific. Thanks for posting those.

>37 Crazymamie: Love that volume of poetry.

>40 katiekrug: Visceral, gripping and extremely moving. I hope I can love as long and as well.

>42 PaulCranswick: Statistics would suggest that you are more likely to need someone to love YOU so well...I hope for easier endings for all of us. But imagine being able to turn such pain and grief into something comforting and beautiful.

>43 laytonwoman3rd: Thanks for that cheerful little missive Linda! Hani says she wants us to go together, I am not so keen on before or after so I'll take her ideal as the best alternative.

>44 PaulCranswick: Yes, well, my experience bears out the statistics...both my mother and my mother-in-law have been widows for over 10 years; all four of our grandmothers outlived their husbands by decades (although 2 of them married much older men, so that probably doesn't count); the assisted living facility where my uncle lives has about 3 times as many women in it as men (he's only alone because his wife's death was accidental)...you do see my point! I agree though, that between going first and being left behind, there isn't any "better" alternative.

BTW, Voyage of the Sable Venus by Robin Coste Lewis was the 2015 National Book Award Winner for Poetry and is a 5 star book on Amazon. I was blown away by a lot of the poems. The title poem has worked better for others than it did for me, but it certainly was interesting.

At Mamie's suggestion, I'll post the link to Billy Collins's humorous poem, "Victoria's Secret": http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/cae_core/links/collinsvictoria.htm. Should improve your day.

>40 katiekrug: Wow. I'll be looking for some of his works for April.

>40 katiekrug: The Hall poem is gorgeous, Katie. Thanks for sharing and it fits in very well with my current read The Hummingbird, which I am really enjoying.

I have You & Yours by Naomi Shihab Nye from the library.

I'll be reading Aimless Love for this month's AAC. I bought the Billy Collins book at The Tattered Cover in Denver a few weeks ago specifically for National Poetry Month. I plan to share a few of his poems on my thread. Ha! Turns out that the first poem I read is a favorite!

Well I'm reading poetry, but not American. However, I will pull an American volume from the shelf to read this weekend.

I am reading my favorite poet this month: Wendell Berry. His work is rooted in America, specifically his life in Port Royal, Kentucky, where he has farmed on land owned by his family for generations. He is a poet, novelist, and environmentalist. The Poetry Foundation has a wonderful biography and selection of his poems. I'll be reading This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems. For 35 years, Berry has been publishing a series of poems written around his solitary Sunday walks around the farm. If you are looking for wonderfully peaceful, accessible, gentle poetry, I'd recommend Berry!

^Looking forward to these. I will start The Dream of a Common Language today.

I am reading What Work Is by Philip Levine and one of the poems made me immediately think of Mark.

"Coming Home from the Post Office"

....When I closed
my eyes I saw cards, letters,
small packages, each bearing
a particular name and some
burden of grief or tidings
of loss. Names like my own
passed moment by moment
into the gray sacks that slumped
open mouthed.

One thing I don't understand is that when I put up the touchstone for the Levine book the first option it comes up with is The Hunger Games.....WTH?

Garrison Keillor read "April in Maine" by May Sarton yesterday on The Writer's Almanac.

April in Maine

by May Sarton

The days are cold and brown,
Brown fields, no sign of green,
Brown twigs, not even swelling,
And dirty snow in the woods.

But as the dark flows in
The tree frogs begin
Their shrill sweet singing,
And we lie on our beds
Through the ecstatic night,
Wide awake, cracked open.

There will be no going back.

"April in Maine" by May Sarton from Collected Poems. © W.W. Norton & Company, 1993. Reprinted with permission.

I love May Sarton, and was sure I had a volume of her poetry, but I looked for it last night, and apparently I don't own it. So I pulled Tony Hoagland's Donkey Gospel, Nancy Willard's In the Salt Marsh and James Tate's Worshipful Company of Fletchers from the shelf, and will read a poem or two from each every day.

ETA: I did find the Sarton poetry volume, a private mythology, and it wasn't in my catalog, for some reason. Oversight corrected!

"Night-life. Letters, journals, bourbon
sloshed in the glass. Poems crucified on the wall,
dissected, their bird-wings severed
like trophies. No one lives in this room
without living through some kind of crisis...

...But I can’t call it life until we start to move
beyond this secret circle of fire
where our bodies are giant shadows flung on a wall
where the night becomes our inner darkness, and sleeps
like a dumb beast, head on her paws, in the corner."

^ Origins and History of Consciousness by Adrienne Rich (the first and last stanza)

>55 PaulCranswick: Ooh, I love the "postal" poem, Paul. Those are a rarity, right?

>56 laytonwoman3rd: I like the Sarton poem, Linda. I am not familiar with her. What is your favorite of her works?

>58 msf59: I enjoyed Sarton's novel, As We Are Now, which goes well with the reading of Being Mortal. Her journals are interesting, especially House by the Sea. She is not a cheery sort, be warned.

>59 laytonwoman3rd: Thanks for the recs, Linda. I do not mind non-cheery...at least in print. It is the two-legged kind that is a turn-off for me.

I thought Lighthead by Terrance Hayes, the 2010 National Book Award winner, was a great collection. But the length of his poems makes them a bit hard to excerpt. Here's the ending part of one called "Carp Poem":

. . . I reach the tiny classroom
where two dozen black boys are dressed in jumpsuits orange as the carp

I saw in a pond once in Japan, so many fat, snaggletoothed fish
ganged in and lurching for food that a lightweight tourist could have crossed

the water on their backs so long as he had tiny rice balls or bread
to drop into the mouths below his footsteps, which I'm thinking

is how Jesus must have walked on the lake that day, the crackers and crumbs
falling from the folds of his robe, and how maybe it was the one fish

so hungry it leaped up his sleeve that he later miraculously changed
into a narrow loaf of bread, something that could stick to a believer's ribs,

and don't get me wrong, I'm a believer, too, in the power of food at least,
having seen a footbridge of carp packed gill to gill, packed tighter

than a room of boy prisoners waiting to talk poetry with a young black poet,
packed so close they'd have eaten each other had there been nothing
else to eat.

Tony Hoagland gets all the points from me today---loved the poem "Totally", loved the concept and the execution...AND he made me go look something up.

Illustrative excerpts:

that's how it goes when your head and heart
are in different time zones--
you often don't find out till tomorrow
what you felt today.
...

I am thinking of the book I mean to read
when I get home--you might say
my here is disconnected from my now,
so never am I entirely anywhere,

or anyone. But I won't speak cruelly
of myself: this dividedness is just what
makes our species great: possible for Darwin

to figure out his theory of selection
while playing five-card stud,
for surgeon Keats to find a perfect rhyme
wrist-deep in the disorder
of an open abdomen.

>62 laytonwoman3rd: Oh, I'm glad you brought up Tony Hoagland, Linda. I like his poetry a lot.

I recently re-read this powerful book by a wonderful American poet.


A Wreath for Emmett Till by Marilyn Nelson

This is a re-read for me. Because I own so many books, and have the habit of going to the library to check out more than I can read in the allotted time, I don't usually read a book more than once. But, because I first read this prior to immersing myself in learning about the Civil Rights movement, I wanted to get clearer insights regarding one of the major events that sparked and propelled Civil Rights forward.

His father was killed in the service because of an accusation of making advances, perhaps raping a white woman. How strangely tragic it was that things came full circle for poor Emmett Till.

Emmett Till was what some would say "a mommy's baby." He did not know his father, but had step fathers, some who were important in his life. But, after the relationships faded, Emmett and his mother were dependent on each other.

Close to his mother and family, he was an attractive, over weight, fun loving prankster of a boy. Some noted that while he could be shy, he also loved to be the center of attention. At times, his dare devil attitude and behavior resulted in trouble. Terribly, when at 14 he visited Money, Mississippi, his behavior resulted in death.

A wonderful poet, the author cleverly, expertly uses sophisticated poetry to express the sadness, and horror that resulted when Emmett and cousins defied Uncle Moses rules and, unknown to his Uncle, visited Bryant's store.

As the end of one poem becomes the beginning of the next, Marilyn Nelson uses the significance and meaning of various flowers, including Rosemary for remembrance, and rue, yew and cypress for grief.

No one knows for sure what happened on August 28, 1955. Did the fun loving jokester from Chicago suburbs forget that he was thick in the delta of bigotry. Did he, as Bryant's wife reported, make illicit comments to her, touching her hand while smiling and collecting his change from a bubble gum purchase?

What is know is that four days later, at approximately 2:30 a.m. Roy Bryant, Carolyn's husband, and his half brother J.W. Milam kidnapped Till from Emmett's Uncle Moses Wright's home.

The dramatic poetic form of the beating beyond recognition and the shot gun hole left in his head, renders this imagery difficult to absorb.

Read this and weep for a boy too soon gone. Cry for the ugly hatred and bigotry in a culture that could not abide by any one whom they thought did not know their place.

Five Stars

I started reading 19 Varieties of Gazelle last night. Her work didn't really resonate for me but it might have been that I was reading at 2am while experiencing insomnia. I'll keep reading it, preferably when I'm a bit less sleepy, to see how the collection develops.

I also went to my favorite used bookstore, The Magus, and bought Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot and two collections by Adrienne Rich.

I forgot to look for Donald Hall.

>61 jnwelch: >62 laytonwoman3rd: Thanks, for sharing the poems, Joe & Linda. I liked them both and have not heard of either author.

>64 Whisper1: Sounds very good, Linda. Looking forward to it.

Has anyone signed up for- Knopf Poem-a-Day 2016? If not, here is the link:

http://knopfdoubleday.com/2016/02/12/42862/?ref=PRH57E1396A43B4&cdi=13F0CB1D...

I just signed up.

And here is a short interview with Mary Oliver:

https://soundcloud.com/beaks-and-geeks/mary-oliver?ref=PRHB6FCA764DF&aid=ran...

Look at me, getting all poetry like!! Grins...

Thanks Mark! What an interesting thread.

I have picked up a slim volume of light verse by Phyllis McGinley who was, apparently, popular around the mid-20th century. I received this book as a gift from my father (who was always trying to get me to read more poetry) for Christmas in 1994! I am enjoying it so far, though there is not much depth to many of her poems. Still, they are light and fun.

The volume opens with "Apologia:"

When I and the world
Were greener and fitter,
Many a bitter
Stone I hurled.
Many a curse
I used to pitch
At the universe,
Being so rich
I had goods to spare;
Could afford to notice
The blight on the lotus,
The worm in the pear.

But needier grown
(If little wiser)
Now, like a miser,
All that I own
I celebrate
Shamefacedly--
The pear on my plate,
The fruit on my tree,
Though sour and small;
Give, willy-nilly,
Thanks for the lily,
Spot and all.

>67 msf59: Oh, yes, thanks for posting that link. I've been getting the Knopf poem of the day for several years now, and it's a great way to get acquainted with poets you never heard of.

>67 msf59: Thanks for posting those links, Mark. I didn't know about the Knopf Poem-a-Day, and signed up.

I know I've touted the poetry of Don Freas before. Here's what he has to say about finding the poetry that works for you.

And here's a poem that makes me smile, in a very rueful way. I used to have this posted in my office at work.

Afraid So

Is it starting to rain?
Did the check bounce?
Are we out of coffee?
Is this going to hurt?
Could you lose your job?
Did the glass break?
Was the baggage misrouted?
Will this go on my record?
Are you missing much money?
Was anyone injured?
Is the traffic heavy?
Do I have to remove my clothes?
Will it leave a scar?
Must you go?
Will this be in the papers?
Is my time up already?
Are we seeing the understudy?
Will it affect my eyesight?
Did all the books burn?
Are you still smoking?
Is the bone broken?
Will I have to put him to sleep?
Was the car totaled?
Am I responsible for these charges?
Are you contagious?
Will we have to wait long?
Is the runway icy?
Was the gun loaded?
Could this cause side effects?
Do you know who betrayed you?
Is the wound infected?
Are we lost?
Can it get any worse?

by Jeanne Marie Beaumont

Yup, can see that would bring a smile Linda.

>72 laytonwoman3rd:, >73 laytonwoman3rd: "Like"

I finished reading the collection 19 Varieties of Gazelle by Naomi Shihab Nye. The collection was uneven in terms of impact. Definitely some wonderful gems but also a number of poems that left me unaffected. Still, I think she is a poet worth reading and I am aware that some of her poems touched me more deeply on second reading.

Here is a favorite, also posted on my own thread:

LUNCH IN NABLUS CITY PARK

When you lunch in a town
which has recently known war
under a calm slate sky mirroring none of it,
certain words feel impossible in the mouth.
Casualty: too casual, it must be changed.
A short man stacks mounds of pita bread
on each end of the table, muttering
something about more to come.
Plump birds landing on park benches
surely had their eyes closed recently,
must have seen nothing of weapons or blockades.
When the woman across from you whispers
I don't think we can take it anymore
and you say there are people praying for her
in the mountains of Himalaya and she says
Lady, it is not enough, then what?

A plate of hummus, dish of tomato,
friends dipping bread ---
I will not marry till there is true love, says one,
throwing back her cascade of perfumed hair.
He says the University of Texas seems
remote to him
as Mars, and last month he stayed in his house
for 26 days. He will not leave, he refuses to leave.
In the market they are selling
men's shoes with air vents, a beggar displays
the giant scab of leg he must drag
from alley to alley,
and students argue about
the best ways to protest.

In summers, this cafe is full.
Today only our table sends laughter into the trees.
What cannot be answered checkers the tablecloth
between the squares of white and red.
Where do the souls of hills hide
when there is shooting in the valleys?

What makes a man with a gun seem bigger
than a man with almonds? How can there be war
and the next day eating, a man stacking plates
on the curl of his arm, a table of people
toasting one another in languages of grace:
For you who came so far;
For you who held out, wearing a black scarf
to signify grief;
For you who believe true love can find you
amidst this atlas of tears linking one town
to its own memory of mortar,
when it was still a dream to be built
and people moved here, believing,
and someone with sky and birds in his heart
said this would be a good place for a park.

"We want to live like trees,
sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,
dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,
our animal passion rooted in the city."

- Twenty-One Love Poems

"The leafbud struggles forth
toward the light of the airshaft this is faith
this pale extension of a day
when looking up you know something is changing
winter has turned though the wind is colder
Three streets away a roof collapses onto people
who thought they still had time Time out of mind

I have written so many words
wanting to live inside you
to be of use to you

Now I must write for myself for this blind
woman scratching the pavement with her wand of thought
this slippered crone inching on icy streets
reaching into wire trashbaskets pulling out
what was thrown away and infinitely precious

I look at my hands and see they are still unfinished
I look at the vine and see the leafbud
inching towards life

I look at my face in the glass and see
a halfborn woman".

-Upper Broadway

"My heart is moved by all I cannot save; so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely

with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world."

-Natural Resources

^All from The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich I was very happy with this collection and I thank Joe for the recommendation.

>34 laytonwoman3rd: The Parini volume arrived today. I'm very excited. He's a home-town boy around here, and his talent is broad and varied.

ETA: The first poem is titled "Spring Snow" . How freakin' appropriate!

I finished my poetry collection for this month (The Love Letters of Phyllis McGinley). Here's one I liked:

Midcentury Love Letter

Stay near me. Speak my name. Oh, do not wander
By a thought's span, heart's impulse, from the light
We kindle here. You are my sole defender
(As I am yours) in this precipitous night,
Which over earth, till common landmarks alter,
Is falling, without stars, and bitter cold.
We two have but our burning selves for shelter.
Huddle against me. Give me your hand to hold.

So might two climbers lost in mountain weather
On a high slope and taken by the storm,
Desperate in the darkness, cling together
Under one cloak and breathe each other warm.
Stay near me. Spirit, perishable as bone,
In no such winter can survive alone.

^ "Like"

Here's a review of Life on Mars, which I just finished.

There is a sci-fi tilt to Tracy K. Smith’s book of poetry, Life on Mars; her father was an optical engineer who worked on the Hubble telescope. He'd "read Larry Niven at home and drink scotch on the rocks,/ His eyes exhausted and pink." A good part of the book reflects her reactions to his death in 2008. She also takes a celestial-eye view of our foibles ("I spent two years not looking/Into the mirror at his office") horrors (the "father in the news who kept his daughter/ Locked in a cell for decades") and irrationalities ("I didn't want to believe/ What we believe in those rooms").

I hoped to find the remarkable title poem, Life On Mars, somewhere online, but no luck. It starts like this:

Tina says what if dark matter is like the space between people
When what holds them together isn't exactly love, and I think
That sounds right - how strong the pull can be, as if something
That knows better won't let you drift apart so easily, and how
Small and heavy you feel, stuck there spinning in place.

Life can treat us roughly and horribly.

I knew which direction to go
From the stench of what still burned.
It was funny to see my house
Like that - as if the roof
Had been lifted up and carried off
By someone playing at dolls.

***

Tina says we do it to one another, every day,
Knowing and not knowing. When it is love,
What happens feels like dumb luck. When it's not,
We're riddled with bullets, shot through like ducks.

Is it all due to dark matter? Or something else? It's well worth your tracking down that title poem to find out what she says.

This excellent one, beautifully titled, "My God, It's Full of Stars", can be found online. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/243880 Here's part of it:

Maybe the dead know, their eyes widening at last,

Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on

At twilight. Hearing the engines flare, the horns

Not letting up, the frenzy of being. I want to be

One notch below bedlam, like a radio without a dial.

Wide open, so everything floods in at once.

And sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time,

Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke.

The title of the book comes from the David Bowie song, and his Ziggy Stardust persona pops up in the poems. So does the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and other cultural artifacts. This is a poetry book that's easy to enjoy, while giving the reader lots to ponder. I love this question she raises at the end of "No-Fly Zone"

You lie there kicking like a baby, waiting for God himself
To lift you past the rungs of your crib. What
Would your life say if it could talk?

This is one of my most favorite poems. I'll just leave it here...

Mara Mori brought me
a pair of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder's hands,
two socks as soft as rabbits.
I slipped my feet into them
as if they were two cases
knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin,
Violent socks,
my feet were two fish made of wool,
two long sharks
sea blue, shot through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons,
my feet were honored in this way
by these heavenly socks.
They were so handsome for the first time
my feet seemed to me unacceptable
like two decrepit firemen,
firemen unworthy of that woven fire,
of those glowing socks.

Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere as schoolboys
keep fireflies,
as learned men collect
sacred texts,
I resisted the mad impulse to put them
in a golden cage and each day give them
birdseed and pieces of pink melon.
Like explorers in the jungle
who hand over the very rare green deer
to the spit and eat it with remorse,
I stretched out my feet and pulled on
the magnificent socks and then my shoes.

The moral of my ode is this:
beauty is twice beauty
and what is good is doubly good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool in winter.

Pablo Neruda

Is it okay to post a poem I wrote this month?

>83 dianeham: Go for it, Diane!!

>83 dianeham: That's a great idea!

"When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?"

-When Death Comes by Mary Oliver

The rest of the poem, can be found here:

http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/mary_oliver/poems/15793

>73 laytonwoman3rd: Thanks for posting this poem!

My mother's birthday was in April, and this was her favorite poem (and posted here for ladies with an April birthday):

Always Marry an April Girl

Praise the spells and bless the charms,
I found April in my arms.
April golden, April cloudy,
Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy;
April soft in flowered languor,
April cold with sudden anger,
Ever changing, ever true --
I love April, I love you.

--Ogden Nash

>81 jnwelch: your bullet got me... Off to the A place...

>89 dianeham: Hey, what happened, Diane? Cold feet?

I am enjoying my Mary Oliver collection...

^Hooray for Poetry Month! I bought my first volume of poetry, A Thousand Mornings and I picked up 2 volumes from the library, one called Trapeze: Poems from Deborah Digges. I do not remember who recommended this one. Has anyone read her? And Life on Mars, which Joe raved about. It looks like I am set for the rest of the month.

>91 msf59: yes, i got self-conscious. I'll try a different one. I wrote one in honor of the Easter Rebellion

>93 dianeham: I look forward to reading it, Diane!

>93 dianeham: Hope you try again, Diane! Sorry, I wasn't on for a few days. It happens, but we are all friends here.

>89 dianeham:>93 I found your poem intriguing and would really like to read it again, Diane. Eager to read your Easter Rebellion poem too . . .

I liked your poem, Diane!

Still dipping in and out of several collections. I bought a new Mary Oliver, Blue Horses, last weekend, and expect to get right through to the end of it today.

"Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled --
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery..."

-an excerpt from The Ponds- Mary Oliver

The complete poem can be found here: http://www.best-poems.net/mary_oliver/the_ponds.html

Shrike

How brightly you whistle, pushing the long, soft
feathers on your rump down across the branch,
like the apron of a butcher, as you impale a cricket
on a meat hook deep inside my rhododendron.
Poor cricket can hardly stand the whistling,
not to speak of the brownish-red pecking
(couldn’t you go a little easy?), but holds up
pretty good in a state of oneiric pain.
Once, long ago, when they were quarrelling about money,
Father put Mother’s head in the oven.
“Who are you?” it pleaded from the hell mouth.
Upstairs in the bathroom, I drank water right out of the tap,
my lips on the faucet. Everything was shaking and bumping.
Earth was drawing me into existence.

-Henri Cole

^Has anyone read Henri Cole?

I don't know Henri Cole.....hmmmm.

I have finished two collections of poetry so far this month: Blue Horses by Mary Oliver, and In the Salt Marsh by Nancy Willard. Loved both of them. Here's the title poem from the Willard collection:

In the Salt Marsh

How faithfully grass holds the shape of the sea it loves,
how it molds itself to the waves, how the dried salt
peaks into cowlicks the combed mane of the marsh.
Tousled by tides, it pitches tents, breaks into turrets
and coxcombs and whorled nests and green baskets
for the bleached armor of fiddler crabs, like earrings
hung by the sea on lobes of darkness. Could I lay my ear
on that darkness where the tide's trowel smooths islands
and scallops the sand, moon-tugged, till it slows
and turns? Could I keep the past in the present's eye?
Could I know what the grass knows?

I think your leap in the dark has paid off big time Mark - Poetry April in the AAC appears to be a rip roaring success.

I have managed two collections so far:

What Work is by Philip Levine

and

A New Selected Poems by Galway Kinnell. (isn't it good his mom called him Galway and not Fu?)

both well worth the trouble but especially the Levine which I think you would love.

I love this thread and the different poets I am becoming acquainted with.

I am enjoying the Billy Collins book I bought in Colorado. I have it handy on an end table for those odd minutes while I'm waiting for the timer to go off while I'm cooking, etc. My most recent favorite from Aimless Love is this short one that makes me smile…

Oh, My God!

Not only in church
and nightly by their bedsides
do young girls pray these days.

Wherever they go,
prayer is woven into their talk
like a bright thread of awe.

Even at the pedestrian mall
outbursts of praise
spring unbidden from their glossy lips.

>101 laytonwoman3rd: Love the Nancy Willard! My library doesn't have it, I may have to wishlist it.

>103 Donna828: What a fabulous poem Donna! So apt.

I am waiting for a Mary Oliver collection. I have the Pablo Neruda, but he's SOUTH American, so I am not sure he counts... Lol

Three Weeks

"Three weeks longing, water burning
stone. Three weeks leopard blood
pacing under the loud insomnia of stars.
Three weeks voltaic. Weeks of winter
afternoons, darkness half descended.
Howling at distance, ocean
pulling between us, bending time.
Three weeks finding you in me in new places,
luminescent as a tetra in depths,
its neon trail.
Three weeks shipwrecked on this mad island;
twisting aurora of perfumes. Every boundary of body
electrified, every thought hunted down
by memory of touch. Three weeks of open eyes
when you call, your first question,
Did I wake you . . ."

Anne Michaels is a Canadian novelist and poet. Is anyone familiar with her work?

Has anyone read Anne Sexton? I see that her collection Live or Die: Poems won a Pulitzer.

>103 Donna828: Glad you are liking the thread, Donna! This may end up being one of my favorites. Everything seems to be so new and fresh. I also loved Aimless Love. I think that was my first full collection of poetry.



^I speaking of Mary Oliver, I see she has a new collection, "Upstream: Essays and Poems" coming out in October. Smiles...

I remember reading Anne Sexton in college.

Ditto. I also got to see her perform, which must mean I'm pretty old by now. She's got some outstanding poems, like "Courage":

It is in the small things we see it.

The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.

The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.

The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.

When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
comver your heart.

You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.

Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.

The whole poem here: http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2000/11/09

Thanks to Knopf's Poem-a-Day, this showed up in my email this morning and hit me hard.

Directly by Sharon Olds

Then, one late afternoon,
I understand: the harm my father
did us is receding. I never thought
it would happen, I thought his harm was stronger than that,
like God’s harm—flood, or birth without
eyes, with mounds of tissue, no retina, no
pupil, the way my father on the couch did not
seem not to be using eyes
but not to have them, or to have objects
for eyes—Jocastal dress-brooches.
But he had not been hated, so he did not hate us,
just scorned us, and it is wearing off.
My son and daughter are grown, they are well
as if by some miracle. The afternoon has a
quality of miracle, the starlings all facing
the west, his grave. I come to the window
as if to open it, and whisper,
My father’s harm is fading. Then,
I think that he would be glad to hear it
directly from me,

so I come to where you are, bone
settled under the dewed tangle
of the blackish Northwoods moss like the crossroads
hair of a beloved. I come to you here
because it is home: your done-with body
broken back down into earth, holding
its solemn incapable beauty.

>109 katiekrug: Powerful. Sharon Olds is really good. I liked her The Gold Cell and The Dead and the Living.

I thought this was clever from the 4/3/16 NY Times Book Review:

>109 katiekrug: I really like the Olds poem, Katie. Very, dark. Thanks, for sharing.

I have also been enjoying the Knopf's Poem-a-Day. A nice way to learn about new authors.

>110 jnwelch: That's a good one, Joe. Like the Free Verse.

"I don’t know
lots of things but I know this: next year
when spring
flows over the starting point I’ll think I’m going to
drown in the shimmering miles of it and then
one or two birds will fly me over
the threshold..."

-excerpt from Two Kinds of Deliverance

"The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things; I lay
on the grass listening
to his dog voice,
crow voice,
frog voice; now
he said, and now,

and never once mentioned forever..."

-excerpt from One Or Two Things

Yes, the Mary Oliver love-fest continues.

>112 msf59: LOL, Mark, I just came here to post that I read my poetry, and decided that I officially do not like Mary Oliver. I read Blue Horses, and she really did not give me enough to chew on.

Different strokes for different folks. I would like to pick up some more poetry this month But I am not sure I will get time.

If I do, I'd like to read more by this author:

Here
Kim Addonizio, 1954

After it ended badly it got so much better
which took a while of course but still
he grew so tender & I so grateful
which maybe tells you something about how it was
I’m trying to tell you I know you
have staggered wept spiraled through a long room
banging your head against it holding crushed
bird skulls in your hands your many hearts unstrung
unable to play a note their wood still beautiful
& carved so elaborately maybe a collector would want them
stupid collectors always preserving & never breaking open
the jars so everyone starves while admiring the view
you don’t own anyone everything will be taken from you
go ahead & eat this poem please it will help

Okay, here's a poem I wrote recently.

Q Celts

We removed one letter and substituted another - as did they but in reverse. But one letter is never one letter only. Losing one letter changes the entire aibítir (the group of symbols beginning with ABC). Once q was chosen over p, we also used f instead of g. And a instead of o. Everyone we knew shared this - from Ireland to the Isle of Man to Scotland.

I wondered if this was why my grandfather always had Manx cats because they understood him better.This language that certainly dates back to the 5th Century BC. This language of more than an entire - although small country.

How does a language become illegal? Like a color. Like a way of riding a horse. Listening to a story. Or the naming of your children? My father’s uncles hid out in the hills and avoided the British. If you let one buy you a drink, you were gone to the wars.

What could a ten year old boy do against that? Against his uncle taken from his bed in the night and tied to a post? Beaten in the front yard. English prisoners set free with lorries and rifles. You could hear them coming over the hills, through the valleys, for miles and miles. Shooting anything that moved. Cattle. Dogs. Anyone too slow or stubborn to hide.

The ten year old boy did the only thing he could. He learned the outlawed language. He spoke it at home. He spoke it at school. And when the free state was finally won they acknowledged it. They gave the boy a medal. Not for fighting, not for killing, not for hiding in the hills. For speaking his native tongue - loudly and clearly. For speaking up quite assuredly.

Diane Hamilton

>114 dianeham: I'm no expert, but I think your poem is wonderful.

As one of the group's poetry nuts, I am rather pleased with how popular this months AAC choice has proven. In keeping with the trend of putting up a poem from our reading here is 'The Fly" by Galway Kinnell

The Fly

by Galway Kinnell

The fly
I've just brushed
off my face keeps buzzing
about me, flesh-
eater
starved for the soul.

One day I may learn to suffer
his mizzling, sporadic stroll over eyelid or cheek,
even hear my own singing
in his burnt song.

The bee is the fleur-de-lys in the flesh.
She has a tuft of the sun on her back.
She brings sexual love to the narcissus flower.
She sings of fulfillment only
and stings and dies, and
everything she ever touches
is opening, opening.

And yet we say our last goodbye
to the fly last,
the flesh-fly last,
the absolute last,
the naked dirty reality of him last.

>114 dianeham: I agree with Jenn. . . Thanks for sharing your poetry Diane.

>113 banjo123: I like the Addonizio poem, Rhonda. Nice and dark. I hope you can give Oliver another go.

>114 dianeham: Bravo, Diane. I am also no expert but that was impressive. Thanks for sharing. And feel free to share more.

>116 PaulCranswick: Are we going to be graced with any of your poetry, Sir Cranswick?

>114 dianeham: I like it!

Thank you for the kudos.

INDEPENDENCE DAY LETTER

Five A.M., the Fourth of July.
I walk by Eagle Pond with the dog,
wearing my leather coat
against the clear early chill,
looking at water lilies that clutch
cool yellow fists together,
as I undertake another day
twelve weeks after the Tuesday
we learned you would die.

This afternoon I'll pay bills
and write a friend about her book
and watch Red Sox baseball.
I'll walk Gussie again.
I'll microwave some Stouffer's.
A woman will drive from Bristol
to examine your mother's Ford
parked beside your Saab
in the dead women's used car lot.

Tonight the Andover fireworks
will have to go on without me
as I go to bed early, reading
The Man Without Qualities
with insufficient attention
because I keep watching you die.
Tomorrow I will wake at five
to the tenth Wednesday
after the Wednesday we buried you.

by Donald Hall from Without: Poems, a tribute to his wife whom he lost to cancer in 1995.
This is a heart-rending and beautiful collection that reads as one work altogether.

>118 msf59: Well dear chap I suppose the easiest cop out for me would be to hide behind nationality!

I will have read things by a number of American poets this month and will look to scribble something in homage to one of them as a BIG thank you to you for doing this this month. I know it is not your comfort zone, Mark, so I am really impressed at the enthusiasm you have engendered for the dreaded verse.

By the way as I was showing Piyush around Kinokuniya Bookstore in KL, he was quick to point out to me that he wasn't looking for any poetry. Shame that as I was up for a little shuftie amongst their current selections.

OK Mark - this is for you and I must admit that it was written in about eight minutes flat so errors and mistypes and clunking images are apologised for.

Sort of written a la american free verse style in plain language with the odd fractured simile or metaphor attempting to raise it just above prose.

What Johnny Cash sang

Johnny sang from sea to shining sea -
and the ships sailed into Ellis Island
and a melting pot melted
and armenians, paddies, italianos,
and jews and poles and russians
came and placed their stamp on unwashed
city streets;
making a beehive of workers with no Queen.

Johnny sang from sea to shining sea
and the ships sailed into San Francisco
with the coolies and the asiatics
and their trade and their actors
sweated on the railways,
not always cross-legged on the casting couches.

Johnny sang from sea to shining sea
and the wagons rolled across the plains
and the prairies
Germanic and Nordic ploughing a furrow
and energising a rice bowl and a wheat field
from unpromising circumstances.
and the Hamish and the Quakers and
the Mormons and the Shakers
were not shook from their belief
as they trod unorthodox pathways.

Johnny sang from sea to shining sea
and the slave ships entered
chains and locks cutting through skin
into bone
and the cotton fields were plucked
on the backs of unpaid labour
and America awoke slowly through
the paining cannons of Gettysburg
and the white hoods a-burnin'
and the bus seat of Rosa Parks
to a nation to be proud of
and where women and man
and black and white and yellow and red
could call each other brother and sister

the five tribes were civilized -
some may feel that The Great White Father
screwed most of the rest of them over,
but I would rather not comment.
they were concentrated on reservations
so the wild empty spaces could be reserved
for others
to make a new home of.

PC 23/4/16 2:03 am

I gave Without: Poems by Donald Hall five enthusiastic, heartbroken stars.

>121 EBT1002: I am going immediately to find Without: Poems -- thank you for bringing it to our attention!

Karen O.

I read Endpoint and Other Poems by John Updike for this challenge. I hadn't even realized that Updike had written poetry, so this was an extra blessing. Here's my review:

Bittersweet little collection of poems from Updike, written during his last years of life, assembled only weeks before he died. His final book. The opening set, "Endpoint," does seem like his analysis and farewell, and he is courageous in confronting the end of his life, and inspirational to his readers who may be dealing with their own mortalities.

The poems that follow "Endpoint" are a great assortment of funny, profound, "homely" (as in "the day-to-day") and "global" (he did his share of traveling). Updike isn't afraid to make a poem talking about the dirt and smudges of life. Very truthful and brave.

Here's one of my favorite stanzas, from "Endpoint":

Be with me, words, a little longer; you
have given me my quitclaim in the sun,
sealed shut my adolescent wounds, made light
of grownup troubles, turned to my advantage
what in most lives would be pure deficit,
and formed, of those I loved, more solid ghosts.

I hope you find and enjoy Hall's collection, Karen.

I love that stanza from "Endpoint." It is lovely tribute to the power of words, written or read.
ETA: And neither did I know that John Updike wrote poetry!

Very nice, Paul! ***Applause***

You & dianeham are inspirations to us all.

>121 EBT1002: I love the Hall, Ellen. I have requested Without: Poems. You have done your job, my friend.

>123 PaulCranswick: Thanks, Paul! Very impressive, especially considering you knocked it out, in just a few minutes. You look like a natural. Have you ever tried to publish anything?

I see that Elizabeth Willis was a Pulitzer finalist, for poetry, with ALIVE
NEW AND SELECTED POEMS. Has anyone read her?

>129 msf59: Thanks Mark. I have published in poetry publications/magazines a long time ago. Maybe when I am not working full-time.

>123 PaulCranswick: like!

>132 brenpike: Thanks Brenda......*Blushes*

Liking the poems from Diane and Paul. Ellen got me, and I'm another one adding Without: Poems to the WL.

Adding my thanks to you, Mark, for this successful month of reading poetry.

>123 PaulCranswick: *picks lower jaw up off the floor* That's worth polishing and submitting somewhere, Mr. C. We'll excuse you for brief periods while you work on that, OK?

>135 laytonwoman3rd: Hahaha Linda - we better tell the Sao Tomeans because I am supposed to be building schools for them!
I will get round to editing some of my stuff with a view to publication at some stage. Had someone willing to take it a while ago but I simply have too many things going on at once.

Scribbling is an art form best practiced with the benefit of a nest egg to support it!

Diane's poem was extremely vivid and evocative. IMO far better than some of the duff stuff I have read in the last few years that had critics raving more because they were too ashamed to admit they couldn't understand the bloody stuff. Poetry should speak to those receiving it and not be so obscure that you are left mystified.

Diane's spoke clearly to me.

>136 PaulCranswick: thank you so much, Paul.
>123 PaulCranswick: Your poem gave me goosebumps it's like an ironic I Hear America Singing.

>137 dianeham: Thanks Diane. A little of what I was aiming at certainly - sort of Johnny Cash without the black suit and the republican politics.

>138 PaulCranswick: sans the republican politics is most welcome. I see we have a few books in common.

>139 dianeham: Well Diane, apart of course from poetry, of which we both have an reasonable collection, we share an interest in Ireland too. My maternal side hail three generations ago from Donegal so I cannot very well help myself. xx

I love that so many folks are seeking out Donald Hall's Without: Poems!! Of course, part of me worries that the collection won't ring as true for other readers but I know that, even if such is the case, it's okay. I also want to go on record giving Katie credit for turning me on to his poetry.

I've finished another collection, Tony Hoagland's Donkey Gospel. Pretty good, rarely bewilders me, but I think (casting my mind back a few years) that I liked his What Narcissism Means to Me better. For subject matter, in general I prefer the Oliver and Willard poems I read earlier this month.

I finished "The Swallows" by our new DIL, Adriana Ramirez, http://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1?ie=UTF8&text=Adriana+E+Ram..., and liked it a lot. She writes about the difficulties of being a naturalized American citizen, about body perceptions, her parents, and various other topics that hit home for me. Her "The Naming of Things" is a knockout, and she gave a TED talk based on it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTKBQIQ2bCc

Since Diane and Paul have posted poems, I thought I'd post one of mine, which seems well-suited to LTers.

A Good Book

Here goes:
Miles Vorkosigan, the pluckster,
Any time. A mystery set in
Asia, most rainy days and
Train rides. Easy Rawlins, Fearless
Jones, Socrates Fortlow, R.L., every
Difficult day. Sharpe and Harper,
Wherever they march again. John
Berryman, shaking that word cup.
Billy Collins, shoveling snow and
Drinking cocoa. James Wright
Dragging a hand in the black river.
Robert Bly, fresh snow on the mailbox.
Sharon Olds when I cut myself,
Homer, when life needs to be bigger.
Spenser and Hawk, for a snack.
Wodehouse, when it's bubbly time, with
Music hall on the radio.
Dean Young for surprises.
Dickens, for family and a
Blanket by the fire.
Harry Potter to cheer and find out.
Jane Austen, to travel slowly, and
Patiently, correctly, find satisfaction.
William Gibson, for Sarah Sze in words.
Haruki Murakami, for unsettling shapes in a darkened room,
Neruda for passion. Yeats for
Fife and fairy and bee-loud glade.
T.S. Eliot for a hand at the
Shade, above the early morning
Slowly stirring street.

>143 jnwelch: Nice Joe. And suitably covered many of the late century American poets on topic, on point, in tune, influences with heart on sleeve. I like the thought of Berryman's word cup, although for the poor chap it was probably half empty rather than half full atop that bridge and still composin'.

>143 jnwelch: An alternate title could be 'Book bullets' - the first ones in poetry form. Good work.

>144 PaulCranswick: Ha! Thanks, Paul. I know, Berryman was so talented, and so, apparently, tormented.

>145 charl08: Oh, you made me laugh, too, Charlotte. Yeah, I hoped that it might send a person or two to check on the books. I love these, can you tell? :-)

>134 jnwelch: Very nice, Joe, and I agree with Charlotte that your poetry is really an alternate format book bullet barrage. :-)

>147 EBT1002: :-) Thanks, Ellen. Sometimes we need to get creative with our BBs, right?

>143 jnwelch: Thanks for the link - great Ted talk. :)

>143 jnwelch:



Great job, Joe! Love all the name-dropping. A lovely stroll through your Biblio-World. Thanks for sharing.

>143 jnwelch: Like!

>149 nittnut: Oh good, Jenn. :-) You're welcome. That's the first way we got to know Adriana - our son said you can see the woman I'm dating (now he's married to her) if you look up her TED talk. We were mighty impressed.

>150 msf59: Thanks, buddy! I got a kick out of "A lovely stroll through your Biblio-World". :-) My pleasure.

>151 brenpike: Thank you, Brenda!

>40 katiekrug: etc. I finished Without: Poems by Donald Hall, and am so grateful to you folks who brought it to my attention. I haven't read a boatload of poetry, but I'm pretty certain I'll be reading more of Mr. Hall.

Also have Mary Oliver American Primitive in hand, and am loving that too. The AAC April Poetry has been such a treat--great idea, Mark! And thank you!

Karen O.

>153 klobrien2: Yes, Karen, I am very happy with the poetry response this month. And I was going into this, with a bit of trepidation. LOL. It really opened doors for me and I have a feeling those doors will stay open.

I also requested Without: Poems and it is ready at the library.

>153 klobrien2: - So glad you enjoyed it, Karen. I'm happy more people are discovering this little gem.

^My poetry reading continues, as I just cracked open Life on Mars. Joe recently warbled about it and I was intrigued by the Sci-Fi elements.

I couldn't find my copy of Life on Mars at home, so I assume that it's at my parents' house. I'll spend a week with them starting on Saturday, so I'll read it while I'm there.

I finished Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay, which won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, which I liked, and I've started Failure by Philip Schultz, the winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, which so far I like even better. I'll review both books soon.

I would say the poetry challenge in the AAC has been a tremendous success! I profess to be a lover of poetry, but this month has pushed me to read more poetry than I have probably read in the last two years. I'm going to try to keep one volume in the rotation all the time from now on.

>158 laytonwoman3rd: That is my way too Linda!

Next month my reading plans are as ambitious and unattainable as usual but I have lined up three poetry volumes (although I will be back at least to my British roots with two of the three). I have lined up:

High Windows by Philip Larkin (1960's Larkin was Larkin in his pomp)
Belfast Confetti by Ciaran Carson (the troubles and what is modern Northern Irish life)

but also

Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey (a Pulitzer winner).

>158 laytonwoman3rd: I'm going to try to keep one volume {of poetry} in the rotation all the time from now on That's what I do, too, Linda. I've found it works really well. Sunday usually is my poetry reading day.

Thanks to Ellen, Without: Poems is my next one.

Donald Hall's son Andrew went to my elementary school in Ann Arbor. His father visited the school and talked to us all. Unfortunately, I was too young to appreciate it.

>161 jnwelch: Ooh, I love small world connections like that.

I know I've mentioned this before, but I once played basketball with the son of James Dickey. Their family was visiting ours (our fathers were, maybe not friends, but colleagues) and Charles and I spent a bit of time in the driveway taking shots. He was about a foot taller than me.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I just put Life on Mars on hold at the library. It will be too late for reading in April but the Poetry Month should live on, in my opinion. Thanks for doing this, Mark. It was a good thing.

I was going to sit April out for the AAC because it was poetry. I didn't even star the thread. I found it and caught up.

I decided to give Billy Collins a try after reading one of his poems on an post. You got me with that one, Joe. Sailing Alone Around the Room was interesting but many of the poems didn't really grab me. I liked this one because it spoke to my interests and gave me clues about the writer.

The Iron Bridge

I am standing on a disused iron bridge
that was erected in 1902
according to the iron plaque bolted into a beam,
the year my mother turned one.
Imagine – a mother in her infancy,
and she was a Canadian infant at that,
one of the great infants of the province of Ontario.

But here I am leaning on the rusted railing
looking at the water below,
which is flat and reflective this morning,
sky-blue and streaked with high clouds,
and the more I look at the water,
which is like a talking picture,
the more I think of 1902
when workmen in shirts and caps
riveted this iron bridge together
across a thin channel joining two lakes
where wildflowers now blow along the shore
and pairs of swans float in the leafy coves.

1902 – my mother was so tiny
she could have fit into one of those oval
baskets for holding apples,
which her mother could have lined with a soft cloth
and placed on the kitchen table
so she could keep an eye on infant Katherine
while she scrubbed potatoes or shelled a bag of peas,
the way I am keeping an eye on that cormorant
who just broke the glossy surface
and is moving away from me and the bridge,
swiveling his curious head,
slipping out to where the sun rakes the water
and filters through the trees that crowd the shore.

And now he dives,
disappears below the surface,
and while I wait for him to pop up,
I picture him flying underwater with his strange wings,

as I picture you, my tiny mother,
who disappeared last year,
flying somewhere with your strange wings,
your wide eyes, and your heavy wet dress,
kicking deeper down into a lake
with no end or name, some boundless province of water.

From my thread:

A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978-1981 by Adrienne Rich




Simply a beautiful collection of poems, emblematic of Adrienne's feminist approach to her poetry, deeply steeped in a sensitivity to the politics of oppression.

>163 Familyhistorian: Oh, I'm sorry Sailing Alone Around the Room didn't work for you, Meg. It's my first strikeout with that one. Hmm. It's the one I normally recommend when non-poetry readers want to give someone current a try, because he's so accessible. I may have to rethink that!

>164 EBT1002: Love that one, Ellen. Nice review over on your thread.

>165 jnwelch: But it did work for me, Joe. There were poems in there that I connected with, probably more than I would have found in most collections of poems. I really liked Iron Bridge as I could see all the clues to the poet's background which were scattered throughout - it spoke to the researcher in me as well as touching on the grief of loss.

>166 Familyhistorian: Ah, okay. Phew! Glad to hear it, Meg. Yes, that's a good one, all right.

I was going to read Dog Songs, but Dream Work arrived first. I liked it. Here's one I liked a lot:

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice – – –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
‘Mend my life!’
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.

You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations – – –
though their melancholy
was terrible. It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice,
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do – – – determined to save
the only life you could save.

>168 nittnut: "Like"

I think this poem speaks to most of us here on LT. ; )

“Bookshelf,” by Robert William Service

I keep collecting books I know
I’ll never, never read;
My wife and daughter tell me so,
And yet I never heed.
“Please make me,” says some wistful tome,
“A wee bit of yourself.”
And so I take my treasure home,
And tuck it in a shelf.

And now my very shelves complain;
They jam and over-spill.
They say: “Why don’t you ease our strain?”
“some day,” I say, “I will.”
So book by book they plead and sigh;
I pick and dip and scan;
Then put them back, distrest that I
Am such a busy man.

>156 msf59: I too bought this after Joe's recommendation, but it is as yet unread. I've been reading some poetry, but not American poetry in April.

>170 Berly: love it, and so true!

>170 Berly: Nice!

>171 Caroline_McElwee: Oh good, Caroline. I hope you like Life on Mars when you get to it.

A bit late with this. I did read a poetry collection for the April American poetry month. I read Double Shadow by Carl Phillips. Poetry isn't my usual thing but I can see why Phillips is billed by some as “one of America’s most original, influential, and productive of lyric poets”.

I'm late in getting my April reads listed, but wanted to say how much I've enjoyed reading the poems posted on this thread.

My book was Why I Wake Early by Mary Oliver. I really enjoyed it.

Per Mark's suggestion, I'm continuing with the poetry. I'm currently reading Without: Poems, rec'd by Ellen, and it's very good.

"Sometimes, what I see is a library in a rural community.
All the tall shelves in the big open room. And the pencils
In a cup at Circulation, gnawed on by the entire population.
The books have lived here all along, belonging..."

Excerpt from "My God it's Full of Stars"

"Out where the houses are low to the ground,
Dwarfed by overgrown trees and the ancient poles
whose wires carry gossip from kitchen to kitchen,
The dogs run in packs, like children. The true children
Live indoors like sullen sages..."

Exerpt from "No-Fly Zone"

I also love her description of Levon Helm, in "Alternate Take":

"While he drives donuts through my mind's back woods with that
Dirt-Road voice of his, kicking up gravel like a runaway Buick..."

^I loved Life on Mars: Poems, my 3rd collection in the past 6 weeks. It really grew on me. I want to thank Joe, for pointing me in the right direction. He is a perfect navigator.

>175 jnwelch: I also have a copy of this one, waiting in the wings, Joe!

I hope everyone continues to share the poetry love. Let's keep this train rolling...

Trapeze

"See how the first dark takes the city in its arms
and carries it into what yesterday we called the future.

O, the dying are such acrobats.
Here you must take a boat from one day to the next,

or clutch the girders of the bridge, hand over hand.
But they are sailing like a pendulum between eternity and evening,

diving, recovering, balancing the air.
Who can tell at this hour seabirds from starlings,

wind from revolving doors or currents off the river.
Some are as children on swings pumping higher and higher.

Don't call them back, don't call them in for supper.
See, they leave scuff marks like jet trails on the sky."

-Deborah Digges

^I am enjoying my current collection of poetry, Trapeze: Poems. I am keeping the love going...

>178 msf59: "Like" I'll have to find more by this poet, Mark.

Right now, I can't find one in Without: Poems to excerpt here. It's heavy stuff, too heavy for here, from me, anyway. But so good.

"...Always the weather,
writing its book of the world,
returns you to me,
Ordinary days were best,
when we worked over poems
in our separate rooms,
I remember watching you gaze
out the January window
into the garden of snow
and ice, your face rapt
as you imagined burgundy lilies..."

^Excerpt from "Letter With No Address"- Without: Poems

Thanks again to Ellen for turning me on to this Donald Hall collection.

^Love that one. I can just see them.

"... Looking south
from your stone, I gaze at the file
of eight enormous sugar maples
that rage and flare in dark noon,
the air grainy with mist
like the rain of Seattle's winter.
The trees go on burning
Without ravage of loss or disorder.
I wish you were that birch
rising from the clump behind you,
and I the gray oak alongside..."

-excerpt from Letter in Autumn, Without: Poems

"ARTS"

"You better start walking before you're born
As with dancing you have to learn the steps
and after that free-form may be the best
Stevens said techniques the proof of seriousness,
though the grace of a Maserati's limited to itself.
There is a human wildness held beneath the skin
that finds all barriers brutishly unbearable
I can't walk in the shoes cobbled for me
They weren't devised by poets but by shoemakers."

-Jim Harrison

I have been reading Harrison's collection, Songs of Unreason. I have read several of his novels and a bit of his short fiction, but have never tried his poetry. Strong stuff. Has anyone else read his poetry?

"The mystery of remembering has added its own light to the garden. Whatever existed then has deepened, been forgotten or restored in some other form.
We planted our voices. We planted the things we feared and hoped they'd go away. We ourselves were going away, but each day felt like a whole world, rich and round and thick with dreams. Where are all those days no one took a picture of? Maybe they're in your album."

-excerpt from "Loose Leaf": Words Under the Words

"At night we propped our feet by the fireplace
and laughed and showed photographs and the fire remembered
all the crackling music it knew. The night remembered
how to be dark and the forest remembered how to be mysterious
and in bed, the quilts remembered how to tuck up under our chins.
Sleeping in that house was like falling down a deep well, rocking in a bucket all night long."

-excerpt from "Remembered"- Words Under the Words

^Yes, I started another collection and as you can tell, it is all ready speaking to me...

>183 msf59: Nice!

This weekend I'll be starting Tony Hoagland's newest one, Application for Release from the Dream.

I think you might have inspired me to have a weekend poetry book Joe. I either binge on poetry, or have a dearth of it. I'll have a go.

>186 Caroline_McElwee: I wanted the poetry reading to continue, Caroline, so I am trying to keep a volume, at hand, at all times. They are so easy to dip in and out of, that it works beautifully. I have not been disappointed yet, although I give my LT pals, most of the credit, due to excellent recommendations.

Keep it going!

>186 Caroline_McElwee: Great, Caroline! The weekend poetry reading has worked well for me. Please let us know how it goes.

"Why do your poems comfort me, I ask myself'
Because they are upright, like straight-backed chairs.
I can sit in them and study the world as if it too
were simple and upright.

Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words
and not one of them can save me,
Your poems come in like a raft, logs tied together,
they float.
I want to tell you about the afternoon
I floated on your poems..."

-excerpt from "You Know Who You Are", Naomi Shihab Nye, Words Under the Words

>189 msf59: lovely, and love the image too. I can imagine myself in that raft.

>184 msf59: & >189 msf59: Glad you finally got around to my recommendation Mark. ;-) >6 luvamystery65:

Seriously, whatever prompted you to read Words Under the Words it means so much to me personally, that I am thrilled when others love it too.

>191 luvamystery65: I am so glad you claimed credit, Ro, because I thought Ellen recommended her and she said hadn't but wanted to read her too.

Thanks so much for bringing her to my attention.

"There are moments when history
passes you so close
you can smell its breath,
you can reach your hand out
and touch it on its flank,

and I don't watch all that much Masterpiece Theatre,
but I could feel the end of an era there..."

"I was reading a book about pleasure,
how you have to glide through it
without clinging,
like an arrow
passing through a target,
coming out the other side and going on..."

"...and we sat in quiet pleasure on the shore of night,
as a tide came in and turned and carried us,
folding chairs and all,
far out from the coastline of America
in a perfect commercial of our lives..."

^These excerpts are from What Narcissism Means to Me by Tony Hoagland. Thanks to Joe for turning me onto to another terrific poet. I have only read half of it, so more joy to come.

Ha! So glad you're enjoying What Narcissism Means to Me, Mark. He's a good 'un, isn't he? Goes down easy, like a fine craft beer. :-) Nice excerpts!

"And sometimes, sitting in my chair

I can feel the absence stretching out in all directions–

like the deaf, defoliated silence

just after a train has thundered past the platform,

just before the mindless birds begin to chirp again

–and the wildflowers that grow beside the tracks

wobble wildly on their little stems,

then gradually grow still and stand

motherless and vertical in the middle of everything."

-excerpt from "Two Trains"

“Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It’s been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.”

-both excerpts from What Narcissism Means to Me.

I really liked this poetry collection. Once again, Joe was spot-on on with his recommendation.

"She tried to slip her feelings into random moments
of the alreadiness of her ongoing and uncooperative
life, as though they weren't her moments
but moments that belonged to another person, as
though they were on loan to her
from the library of moments."

-This Poem Is a House

I am enjoying this slim novel of verse. Has anyone heard of Ken Sparling?

Plus who can't resist, "Library of Moments"? Is that beautiful or what?

>195 msf59:, >196 msf59: "Like"

I'll look forward to your continued take on Ken Sparling, who is new to me.

>196 msf59: I can't resist 'the Library of moments', I may have to nab myself a copy of that volume, Mark.

No, Joe, I've still not got to my planned poetry Sunday's yet. I will.

RIP Geoffrey Hill, by the way. I have not read much of his work, but under recommendation I did buy both his Collected poetry, and his collected prose a couple of years ago, so I've hauled them nearer my reading chair.

I love the portrait of him in this obit:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/01/geoffrey-hill-obituary

Tee hee

>199 msf59: Circulating that one among our poetry-loving family, Mark. :-)

"Through what precinct of life’s forest are you hiking at this moment?
Are you kicking up leaf litter or stabbed by brambles?
Of what stuff are you made? Gossamer or chain mail?
Are you, as reputed, marvelously empty? Or invisibly ever-present,
even as this missive is typed? Have you been to Easter Island? Yes?
Then I’m jealous. Do you use a tongue depressor as bookmark?
Are you reading this at an indecent hour by flashlight?
Plenty of scholarly ink has been spilt praising readers like yourself,
who risk radical dismantling, or being unmasked, by rappelling
deep into sentences. Your trigger warnings could be triggered every
second, yet you forge on, mystic syllables detonating in your head,
the metal-edged smell of monsoon-downpour on hot asphalt
raising steam in your imagination. You hold out for the phrase
with which the soul resonates, am I right? Reading, you’re seized
by tingly feelings, a rustling in the brain, winds that tickle your scalp,
bubbles erupting from a blow hole at the back of your neck.
You forget the breathy woman talking softly on TV across the lobby
(via TiVo you’ve saved her for later.) Birds outside are cracking jokes
and cackling. Reader, smile to yourself, rock the cradle, kiss
everyone you wish to kiss, and please keep reading. It beats
fielding threatening phone calls for $15 an hour which is what
yours truly is meant to be doing right now, instead of speculating
on the strange and happy manifestations of, you, dear reader, you."

Dear Reader, Amy Gerstler

Has anyone read Gerstler?

>201 jnwelch: Glad you liked it, Joe! It looked like a good one to share.

>202 msf59: "Has anyone read Gerstler?" Well, I have now! Thanks for sharing that. I like it.

>202 msf59: loved it, thanks Mark.

>202 msf59: Ha! Great. She's new to me, buddy.

-This Poem Is a House by Ken Sparling

“History sat for her like a cat on a living room rug.
It would get up and confront her occasionally, but in
general it was a warm presence
she was only vaguely aware of...”

“The girl is gone, he tells himself. She's left me
with this sadness. This sadness is my new friend that
will hang out with me and we can watch TV together.
This sadness will leave
me sometime, same as the girl. I wonder
what I'll be left with then.”

This is an odd little novel, told in verse, following the lives of “boy” and “girl”. They grow up together, have a relationship and eventually separate. What it is all about, I am not always sure. It involves moving furniture and eating toast. But it also contains flashes of brilliant prose, that really resonates, so it is an offbeat little book, I do recommend.

Roman Candle

"Listening to Elliot Smith
reminds me of the time
I was girlfriend to a junkie
and we lived in darkness
except for afternoon trips to a diner
where he nodded out over eggs
and I felt mortified each time
even though most meals
were interrupted by me
running into the bathroom
to vomit

At some point we changed places
but I didn't notice until
I was on top of mailboxes
a block away from my apartment
because I had fallen asleep again
while driving."

-Witch Hunt by Juliet Escoria

^This is my current poem collection and it looks like a good companion piece to my next read Last Exit to Brooklyn.

Nice ones, Mark. I should pitch in. I was quite taken by Maggie Smith's poem "Good Bones', second below, and then found others I liked, like "Hawk-Kite" (btw, she's not the famous British actor):

Hawk-Kite

The girl seems to fly
the hawk above her, a kite of feathers

and flesh and bones. She doesn’t feel
the invisible string in her hand

but must hold it. When she runs,
the hawk-kite sails with her.

When she stands still in the field,
he hovers above her, projecting

his shape like a haunting, an overlay
of feathers printed on her skin.

Wearing the black lace of another’s
shadow all the days of her life

changes her. The girl looks down
at her own pale arm and sees wings.

***

Good Bones

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

I love that this thread is staying alive -- to help me find more poets to explore.

not a new poet at all but a poem i want to offer. thanks oh ye Great Unhinged for guiding me here.

MOCKINGBIRDS
by Mary Oliver

This morning
two mockingbirds
in the green field
were spinning and tossing

the white ribbons
of their songs
into the air.
I had nothing

better to do
than listen.
I mean this
seriously.

In Greece,
a long time ago,
an old couple
opened their door

to two strangers
who were,
it soon appeared,
not men at all,

but gods.
It is my favorite story--
how the old couple
had almost nothing to give

but their willingness
to be attentive--
but for this alone
the gods loved them

and blessed them--
when they rose
out of their mortal bodies,
like a million particles of water

from a fountain,
the light
swept into all the corners
of the cottage,

and the old couple,
shaken with understanding,
bowed down--
but still they asked for nothing

but the difficult life
which they had already.
And the gods smiled, as they vanished,
clapping their great wings.

Wherever it was
I was supposed to be
this morning--
whatever it was I said

I would be doing--
I was standing
at the edge of the field--
I was hurrying

through my own soul,
opening its dark doors--
I was leaning out;
I was listening.

Mary Oliver is (was) the writer-in-residence at Sweet Briar College, in Virginia. She received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1984 for her book American Primitive.

Copyright © 1994 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; February 1994; Mockingbirds; Volume 273, No. 2; page 80.

>202 msf59: oh Mark. how perfect. i have some lovely catching up to do and what a place to start.

>211 mirrordrum: I love Mary Oliver. I mean this seriously.

Animals in Winter

"My first winter somewhere cold and
animals staying alive seems impossible
because I thought "hibernation meant
holing up somewhere and going to sleep
for a long while
which, as a human, is just called
giving up.

Turns out it means hearts beating
half as fast and
body temperatures
falling near freezing.
Cold veins, a slow heart-
a means to survive."

I finished Witch Hunt. I liked some of these poems but many missed the mark. I was hoping for more. I have been very lucky with my poetry selections, so I was due to whiff one.

>211 mirrordrum: I love that one, Ellie. Thanks for sharing. I have not read a lot of Oliver yet but I am all ready a fan.

i was reading Oliver's >211 mirrordrum: poem that is mindfully about mindfulness. then i reread Good Bones for the umpteenth time mindfully. and thought how Oliver's work is to keep nothing hidden, to open her eyes. this place is a shithole it is beautiful. even if the stone finds the mockingbird, in that spinning, tossing, flight they have kissed the joy. in that infinity, joy was endless. in the stone's moment, infinite sorrow. electrons make their transitions and it is now again forever. Thich Nhat Hanh teaches children to walk in mindfulness saying with alternating steps "oui" "merci." yes. thank you. yes. thank you. yes.

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.

William Blake

i should say that i have never had children except the children of dreams.

>213 laytonwoman3rd: me too, Linda, seriously. i have loved Mary Oliver since i found her first book in a hole-in-the-wall bookstore in the 60s. out of print now. my boss, a poet and critic, said she was okay, for a woman. she's been my life's companion.

"okay, for a woman". So I know what I think of your boss as a critic now.

>218 laytonwoman3rd: yeah. he was kinda sad. he did introduce me to Black Elk speaks, though. i love that you didn't say you didn't like him but only that you had thoughts about him as an art critic. i really, really like that! and i thought highly of him but not highly enough to diss MO. ;-)

>212 mirrordrum: Beautiful one, Ellie. She's a wonderful celebrant of life.

>214 msf59: Thoughtful one, Mark. I like the way he understates it and lets the reader make the connection.

I'm LOVING Seamus Heaney's translation of Aeneid VI, apparently the last writing he did. The Guardian provided this excerpt:

"Then when they came to the fuming gorge at Avernus
They swept up through clear air and back down
To their chosen perch, a tree that was two trees
In one, green-leafed yet refulgent with gold.
Like mistletoe shining in cold winter woods,
Gripping its tree but not grafted, always in leaf,
Its yellowy berries in sprays curled round the bole –
Those flickering gold tendrils lit up the dark
Overhang of the oak and chimed in the breeze.
There and then Aeneas took hold of the bough
And although it resisted greedily tore it off,
Then carried it back to the Sibyl’s cavern. "

This is the famous "golden bough" that will get him entry to the underworld.

'... refulgent with gold' ain't that grand.... (in the Irish sense, rather than posh or showy).

caught me, too, Caroline.

i misread "And although it resisted greedily tore it off," as "And although it resisted greedily, tore it off." actually, i like it both ways.

beautiful, Joe. thanks for the explanation at the end. *blush*

>221 Caroline_McElwee: Ain't it, Caroline? :-)

>222 mirrordrum: Isn't that beautiful, Ellie? Believe me (as I told Madame MBH), reading this made me realize I need to study and improve my chops on Greek and Roman myths. I know a lot less than I thought I did. I'm googling a good bit while reading through.

One of my favourite Mary Oliver poems:

Bone



1.

Understand, I am always trying to figure out
what the soul is,
and where hidden,
and what shape
and so, last week,
when I found on the beach
the ear bone
of a pilot whale that may have died
hundreds of years ago, I thought
maybe I was close
to discovering something
for the ear bone

2.

is the portion that lasts longest
in any of us, man or whale; shaped
like a squat spoon
with a pink scoop where
once, in the lively swimmer’s head,
it joined its two sisters
in the house of hearing,
it was only
two inches long
and thought: the soul
might be like this
so hard, so necessary

3.

yet almost nothing.
Beside me
the gray sea
was opening and shutting its wave-doors,
unfolding over and over
its time-ridiculing roar;
I looked but I couldn’t see anything
through its dark-knit glare;
yet don’t we all know, the golden sand
is there at the bottom,
though our eyes have never seen it,
nor can our hands ever catch it

4.

lest we would sift it down
into fractions, and facts
certainties
and what the soul is, also
I believe I will never quite know.
Though I play at the edges of knowing,
truly I know
our part is not knowing,
but looking, and touching, and loving,
which is the way I walked on,
softly,
through the pale-pink morning light.

>224 Caroline_McElwee: oh my. one of Mary Oliver's i don't know. how tremendous. what's the volume, do you know?

"Though I play at the edges of knowing,
truly I know
our part is not knowing,
but looking, and touching, and loving,
which is the way I walked on,
softly,
through the pale-pink morning light."

from this stanza alone, i would know it is hers. she does like enjambment.

I just discovered Mary Oliver -- at least I don't remember reading anything by her before. I just read Felicity. It won't be my last time to read her poetry. I discovered we have quite a few of her works at the library so I'll try to space them out a bit, but I can't wait to read more.

>225 mirrordrum: I have it in a volume called Wild Geese Ellie, it's a UK edition by Bloodaxe.

I really gently enjambment too.

>226 thornton37814: ooh, that's a late one, Lori. American Primitive won the Pulitzer, though i don't know that it's my favorite. her NBA winner New and selected poems, Volume One would be a fine place to start.

>227 Caroline_McElwee: i own that volume but got it after books became difficult to access so don't know it well. thanks for the answer.

this is a favorite by Vincent Millay (she referred to herself as "Vincent" and was called that by others) it's from A few figs from thistles i think.

Portrait by a neighbor

Before she has her floor swept
Or her dishes done,
Any day you'll find her
A-sunning in the sun!

It's long after midnight
Her key's in the lock,
And you never see her chimney smoke
Til past ten o'clock!

She digs in her garden
With a shovel and a spoon,
She weeds her lazy lettuce
By the light of the moon,

She walks up the walk
Like a woman in a dream,
She forgets she borrowed butter
Any pays you back in cream!

Her lawn looks like a meadow,
And if she mows the place
She leaves the clover standing
And the Queen Anne's lace!

Edna St. Vincent Millay

fwiw, when Mary Oliver was in her late teens, she went to Steepletop to help Vincent's sister sort out her work. wow.

"...Then everybody wept,
Or sat, too exhausted to weep,
Or lay, too hurt to weep.
And when the smoke cleared it became clear
This had happened too often before
And was going to happen too often in the future
And happened too easily
Bones were too like lath and twigs
Blood was too much like water
Cries were too like silence
The most terrible grimaces too like footprints in mud..."

-excerpt from "Crow's Account of the Battle"- Ted Hughes

>230 mirrordrum: I love that, Ellie! Where is the perfect place to start with Vincent Millay?

A Call For August

"There is a blue fragrance, essence of dusk.
The smoke of last things lingers on old clothes.
Sun has become as rare as goldenrod.
I call for August, but no answer comes.

Autumn awaits across a worn doorsill.
I need you to make sense of falling leaves,
When death paints a rich picture ot itself,
And shadows measure out the long way home."

-Sandra Fowler

Loving the poem postings! I want to re-read Crow.

Here's a Billy Collins one that Debbi shared with her storyteller's group yesterday:

ADVICE TO WRITERS
by Billy Collins from Sailing Alone Around the Room

Even if it keeps you up all night,
wash down the walls and scrub the floor
of your study before composing a syllable.

Clean the place as if the Pope were on his way.
Spotlessness is the niece of inspiration.
The more you clean, the more brilliant
your writing will be, so do not hesitate to take
to the open fields to scour the undersides
of rocks or swab in the dark forest
upper branches, nests full of eggs.

When you find your way back home
and stow the sponges and brushes under the sink,
you will behold in the light of dawn
the immaculate altar of your desk,
a clean surface in the middle of a clean world.

From a small vase, sparkling blue, lift
a yellow pencil, the sharpest of the bouquet,
and cover pages with tiny sentences
like long rows of devoted ants
that followed you in from the woods.

>232 msf59: hey Marky. Vincent can be very droll and yet there's always that bit of stronger substance. you can find hints of her in Mary Oliver.

Renascence, from the volume of the same name, was the first poem for which she won an award and a following. it was written while she was at Vassar. my favorite of her Vassar years is Interim. it's quite long so i won't put it here. that she wrote it in her early 20s is stunning. with so many poets, i'd go for Edna St. Vincent Millay: Collected Lyrics and either A few figs from thistles or The buck in the snow.

just to encourage you about Interim, it's dark. it has the word "dark" in it twice in the same sentence. :-)

this is a short one i love and have to keep re-memorizing.

Recuerdo

We were very tired, we were very merry --
We had gone back and forth all night upon the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable --
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on the hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.
We were very tired, we were very merry --
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and the pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

and probably her most famous

First Fig

my candle burns at both ends;
it will not last the night;
but oh my foes and ah my friends
it gives a glorious light.

(from memory--i hope i got it right.)

she died sitting on the stairs at Steepletop at the age of 58. her later work is much more politicized than the early work.

>231 msf59: amazing. i've got to read more of Ted Hughes.

>233 msf59: yes.

>234 jnwelch: i would like to think that's where all our ants come from. :-)

"It gives a lovely light". I will go to Steepletop one of these days.

>237 laytonwoman3rd: thanks, Linda. i shouldn't be so lazy. i got the "oh" and "ah" reversed, too, and it matters.

imagine being a young poet of Oliver's caliber, i think she was in her late teens, early twenties, and having the chance to go and live at Steepletop.

>234 jnwelch: I like that, Joe! Thanks! I still have Horoscopes for the Dead waiting nearby. Hope I can crack it soon.

>235 mirrordrum: I really like that one. Thanks, Ellie! I requested a Vincent Millay from the library. Looking forward to giving her a spin.

It is great Mark that you have helped enthuse the group with the wonders of the world of poetry. I know so many came to it with trepidation if not reluctance and I am really pleased that it has been such a wonderful success.

As someone who reads a couple of dozen anthologies a year I am delighted that I will be ploughing a less lonely furrow in future.

This is Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

OK don't laugh. this is an old favorite of mine.

A Cat Named Sloopy
Rod McKuen
from the book “Listen To The Warm”

For a while
the only earth that Sloopy knew
was in her sandbox.
Two rooms on Fifty-fifth Street
were her domain.
Every night she’d sit in the window
among the avocado plants
waiting for me to come home
my arms full of canned liver and love.
We’d talk into the night then
contented
but missing something,
She the earth she never knew
me the hills I ran
while growing bent.

Sloopy should have been a cowboy’s cat
with prairies to run
not linoleum
and real-live catnip mice.
No one to depend on but herself.
I never told her
but in my mind
I was a midnight cowboy even then.
Riding my imaginary horse
down Forty-second Street,
going off with strangers
to live an hour-long cowboy’s life,
but always coming home to Sloopy,
who loved me best.

A dozen summers
we lived against the world.
An island on an island.
She’d comfort me with purring
I’d fatten her with smiles.
We grew rich on trust
needing not the beach or butterflies
I had a friend named Ben
Who painted buildings like Roualt men.
He went away.
My laughter tired Lillian
after a time
she found a man who only smiled.
But Sloopy stayed and stayed.
Winter.
Nineteen fifty-nine
Old men walk their dogs
Some are walked so often
that their feet leave
little pink tracks
in the soft gray snow.
Women fur on fur
elegant and easy
only slightly pure
hailing cabs to take them
round the block and back.
Who is not a love seeker
when December comes?
even children pray to Santa Claus.
I had my own love safe at home
and yet I stayed out all one night
the next day too.

They must have thought me crazy
screaming
Sloopy
Sloopy
as the snow came falling
down around me.

I was a madman
to have stayed away
one minute more
than the appointed hour.
I’d like to think a golden cowboy
snatched her from the window sill,
and safely saddlebagged
she rode to Arizona.
She’s stalking lizards
in the cactus now perhaps
bitter but free.
I’m bitter too
and not a free man any more.
But Once upon a time,
in New York’s jungle in a tree,
before I went into the world
in search of other kinds of love
nobody owned me but a cat named Sloopy.
Looking back
perhaps she’s been
the only human thing
that ever gave back love to me.

Nice to see the joint hopping!

>235 mirrordrum: Thanks, Ellie. I've not read much of Vincent other than First Fig, and I like that Recuerdo a lot. You've inspired me; I'll try to track down more.

>240 PaulCranswick: A wonderful classic, Paul. I was hoping you'd post it here.

>241 RBeffa: My high school memories of McKuen are mawkish, Ron, but that's a good 'un. I can see why it's a favorite.

As Paul knows, I'm a John Berryman fan. Here's one of his Dreamsongs:

Dream Song 14
By John Berryman

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

>242 jnwelch: Joe as you know I am slowly going through The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry which is a book I would recommend to anyone interested even a little in the subject.
I am reading the poets three at a time (as the old penguin poets books used to pair them in threes) and today is:

Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman and Randall Jarrell

Dream Song No. 14 is in the anthology.

A couple of years ago I scribbled a poem aping the style of Berryman which I will seek out and re-post.

>234 jnwelch: love that Joe. Both about ritual and sacredness of creativity, but also displacement.

>242 jnwelch: & >243 PaulCranswick:

This was my play on Berryman's style sort of Britified and with a bit more alliteration than the great man would have allowed his students.

I called it Dream Song #78 as Berryman's famous collection had 77!

In Berryman the alter-ego is called Henry - I used Richard. It is meant to be a homage and not intended as presumptious.


Richard dogs every step his words will take
from mouth to page parks upon the wrong tree barks;
Cleft, unmeaning but shall still parade
on leash insensate vowels that break
and shine so brightly til they fade
de-fluoresce, decompress and just once spark.

Walking down oaken clad streets
pounds a rhythm of three beats.
Once, the gait of loping words.
Twice, the same will fall and rise and slant.
Thrice derivatives, unimaginables, absurds;
the proud and loud, matter-eyed and scant.

Dickie takes the mantle, pulls the cord
of leash; a yelp of pain is caught and lost -
leaf-blown park and pavement dogged
with pages scribbled the mind had scored
to obfuscate; thinking clogged;
a cavity unflossed.

>242 jnwelch: wow. :-)

>245 PaulCranswick: and yet again, wow!

envy, writ large.

somebody mentioned Sylvia Plath. the only book i still have somewhere is Colossus and Other Poems. oh, no, i have Ariel too. this poem from Colossus makes me glad i never lived in her brain. very good and very Plath.

Suicide Off Egg Rock

Behind him the hotdogs split and drizzled
On the public grills, and the ochreous salt flats,
Gas tanks, factory stacks- that landscape
Of imperfections his bowels were part of-
Rippled and pulsed in the glassy updraught.
Sun struck the water like a damnation.
No pit of shadow to crawl into,
And his blood beating the old tattoo
I am, I am, I am. Children
Were squealing where combers broke and the spindrift
Raveled wind-ripped from the crest of the wave.
A mongrel working his legs to a gallop
Hustled a gull flock to flap off the sandspit.

He smoldered, as if stone-deaf, blindfold,
His body beached with the sea's garbage,
A machine to breathe and beat forever.
Flies filing in through a dead skate's eyehole
Buzzed and assailed the vaulted brainchamber.
The words in his book wormed off the pages.
Everything glittered like blank paper.

Everything shrank in the sun's corrosive
Ray but Egg Rock on the blue wastage.
He heard when he walked into the water

The forgetful surf creaming on those ledges.

i also appreciate The bull of Bendylaw, also from Colossus. i always think of Theseus and the bull from the sea.

>247 mirrordrum:

that landscape / Of imperfections his bowels were part of

Her end was always going to be that way wasn't it? Brilliant but flawed. Hughes obviously took and deserved some approbation for his infidelities but she couldn't have been an easy bedfellow.

>244 Caroline_McElwee: Oh good, Caroline. Isn't that a great one? I love his Dream Songs, and that's one of my favorites.

>245 PaulCranswick: Nice! Isn't it great when a poet inspires you to write like that? A cavity unflossed.

>246 mirrordrum: Love the wows! >247 mirrordrum: Thanks for posting this, Ellie. She was special. Sun struck the water like a damnation. !! No flowery world for Sylvia. I also like "The Bull of Bendylaw", and it reminds me of Theseus and the bull from the sea, too - and Mary Renault's The Bull from the Sea.

A bull-snouted sea that wouldn't stay put,

>248 PaulCranswick: oh god yes, Paul. maybe one reason i like the bull of Bendylaw is b/c everything isn't already corroding. menacing, yes, but active, "Pellmell, blueblack." to me, that's a pure, sure thing.

>241 RBeffa: missed yours, Ron. that first stanza reminds me of those vids on YouTube of assorted test animals rescued from labs who encounter grass for the first time and are afraid of it. ain't it great to have poems one remembers as favorites after, well, in my case 50 years or more. the meaning changes, too.

and you live in Vallejo? really? the number of times i've driven through Valley Joe (sic) from Berkeley headed for Davis or Sacto.

>249 jnwelch: i'll be looking for more dreamsongs, Joe, though not tonight, not tonight.

"...Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His words were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assassin's attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
His glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap..."

-excerpt from "Lovesong"

"...And a blackbird sitting in the plum tree
Shakes and shakes its voice.
And I too am a ghost. I am the ghost
Of a great general, silent at my chess.
A million years have gone over
As I finger one piece.

The dusk waits.

The spears, the banners, wait."

-excerpt from "Crow Paints Himself into a Chinese Mural"

I finished Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow. This is not an easy collection and I was baffled by much of it. It may not have been a good place to start with Ted Hughes, but there were still plenty of brilliant shards of verse to marvel at.

>250 mirrordrum: Yep Vallejo. Here's the view from my back fence and the bridge you must have crossed many times.

Davis is my alma mater. BS Genetics, 1975

>242 jnwelch: >245 PaulCranswick: Thanks for sharing the John Berryman. I will have to give him a go.

>247 mirrordrum: Thanks, Ellie! I will have to give Plath a try. The list is getting bigger and bigger.

^I want to thank everyone for keeping this thread going. I think it inspires and enlightens. And my poetry T.R.'s is growing larger all the time.

I will probably continues this thread to a part 2, if necessary and I am mulling over, continuing the April Poetry for next year's AAC, as well. That is, if everyone wants another AAC year.

>254 msf59: although I am playing light with the AAC this year I enjoy browsing every thread, so of course we want another year of the AAC. I am a very slight reader of poetry - it just isn't my thing for intense consumption - but I do read a few poems just about every month. This thread and the tendrils it has spread out has been a great source of poetry exposure for me. I would like to see it continue next year as a yearlong supplement to the AAC, like it has this year.

Thanks Mark

>256 msf59: Excellent sentiment.

What Ron said re the AAC. I've had to dip in and out, but I think everyone enjoys it.

Good idea to keep this thread going. This is the first time I've seen a poetry thread keep its momentum. Nice job!

>255 RBeffa: >257 jnwelch: Thanks, Ron & Joe. Glad you guys are up for keeping this train going.

>252 RBeffa: >250 mirrordrum: cross it many times i did, Ron. Bay Bridge far oftener. thanks for the shot. totally unrecognizable surround. my Dad grew up in Davis in a part of town no longer extant. he received his BA degree from Cal-Berkeley where i earned my PhD. i have a lot of wonderful memories about Davis in the summer with my parents and the Davises. connections like this are great fun.

i love this thread. it's giving me access to poetry that, in frustration, i've sort of abandoned. it's so uplifting and fulfilling. thanks to you all.

i say huzzah let's have a second thread. the only disadvantage is having to gee and haw to find things on this thread. go for it!

>254 msf59: Mark, I think that it goes without saying that I am up for

1 Another AAC
and
2 Another Poetry month

Oh and by the way >253 msf59: I am very flattered mate as it was written slightly aping his style but the poem in >245 PaulCranswick: is one of mine!

>260 PaulCranswick: LOL. Hey, I liked the poem what can I say?

I will probably do a vote on the AAC issues, later in the year. I do not mind doing it but I just want to make sure folks want to continue. We probably won't run out of american authors for quite some time.

"if everyone wants another AAC"....silly. Of course they do. Pffff. AND poetry with it. Carry on.

>262 laytonwoman3rd: I guess that takes care of that...grins.

>254 msf59: I'm probably going to add a poetry category in my Category Challenge next year. I really enjoyed the Mary Oliver book I picked up. Of course, I want to read British poetry also for that challenge, but if you have a poetry month in the AAC, it will be an encouragement to pick up a volume of American poetry that month.

>261 msf59: I was quite pleased with that one too Mark. As I recall I typed it straight down with only some minor final tweaks.

>264 thornton37814: There is every possibility that I will reprise the BAC next year (like Mark, if there are enough interested) and I would certainly utilise the dictum of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery by having a BAC poetry month. If Mark takes April I will not of course - possibly an autumnal slot in October.

I think Linda's "silly" and "Pfff" in >262 laytonwoman3rd: says it all and seals the deal, Mark. :-)

>265 PaulCranswick: That would be fun, Paul!

“...and yes, you guessed it
the birds up in the trees
have little human faces
and they are all talking amongst themselves
about the cloudy weather
and the bushes laden with berries
as if none of it were the least bit funny.”

-excerpt from “Night and Day” (I thought of the 75ers)

“The woman looks up from her book.
The man takes a sip of his drink.
Then there is nothing but the sound of their looking,

the lapping of lake water, and a call of one bird
then another, cries of joy or warning—
it passes the time to wonder which.”

-excerpt from “The Chairs That No One Sits In”

I finished Horoscopes for the Dead. Thanks again to Joe. This is my second Billy Collins and he is quickly becoming one of my favorites.

>268 msf59: oh, excellent Marky.

since i can't do books anymore, i've decided to explore the works of Pulitzer prize winners' works available online. starting with Vijay Seshadri, the 2014 winner for 3 Sections: Poems. i thought of you while reading this one, Mark. not sure quite why. it's dark but in a very different way from the ones you usually pick. see what you think. oh, it's based on the Mahabharata.

The Long Meadow

Near the end of one of the old poems, the son of righteousness,
the source of virtue and civility,
on whose back the kingdom is carried
as on the back of the tortoise the earth is carried,
passes into the next world.
The wood is dark. The wood is dark,
and on the other side of the wood the sea is shallow, warm, endless.
In and around it, there is no threat of life —
so little is the atmosphere charged with possibility that
he might as well be wading through a flooded basement.
He wades for what seems like forever,
and never stops to rest in the shade of the metal raintrees
springing out of the water at fixed intervals.
Time, though endless, is also short,
so he wades on, until he walks out of the sea and into the mountains,
where he burns on the windward slopes and freezes in the valleys.
After unendurable struggles,
he finally arrives at the celestial realm.
The god waits there for him. The god invites him to enter.
But looking through the glowing portal,
he sees on that happy plain not those he thinks wait eagerly for him—
his beloved, his brothers, his companions in war and exile,
all long since dead and gone—
but, sitting pretty and enjoying the gorgeous sunset,
his cousin and bitter enemy, the cause of that war, that exile,
whose arrogance and vicious indolence
plunged the world into grief.
The god informs him that, yes, those he loved have been carried down
the river of fire. Their thirst for justice
offended the cosmic powers, who are jealous of justice.
In their place in the celestial realm, called Alaukika in the ancient texts,
the breaker of faith is now glorified.
He, at least, acted in keeping with his nature.
Who has not felt a little of the despair the son of righteousness now feels,
staring wildly around him?
The god watches, not without compassion and a certain wonder.
This is the final illusion,
the one to which all the others lead.
He has to pierce through it himself, without divine assistance.
He will take a long time about it,
with only his dog to keep him company,
the mongrel dog, celebrated down the millennia,
who has waded with him,
shivered and burned with him,
and never abandoned him to his loneliness.
That dog bears a slight resemblance to my dog,
a skinny, restless, needy, overprotective mutt,
who was rescued from a crack house by Suzanne.
On weekends, and when I can shake free during the week,
I take her to the Long Meadow, in Prospect Park, where dogs
are allowed off the leash in the early morning.
She’s gray-muzzled and old now, but you can’t tell that by the way she runs.

© 2004, Vijay Seshadri
From: The Long Meadow

>269 mirrordrum: "Like"

Echolocation

The whales can’t hear each other calling
in the noise-cluttered sea: they beach themselves.
I saw one once— heaved onto the sand with kelp
stuck to its blue-gray skin.
Heavy and immobile

it lay like a great sadness.
And it was hard to breathe with all the stink.
Its elliptical black eyes had stilled, were mostly dry,
and barnacles clustered on its back
like tiny brown volcanoes.

Imagining the other whales, their roving weight,
their blue-black webbing of the deep,
I stopped knowing how to measure my own grief.
And this one, large and dead on the sand
with its unimaginable five-hundred-pound heart."

-Sally Bliumis-Dunn

>269 mirrordrum: Thanks, Ellie! I really like The Long Meadow. Thanks for sharing.

I have not had much time to read any poetry but I plan on getting to some soon.

Grandfather’s Hands


"Your grandfather’s hands were brown.
Your grandmother kissed each knuckle,

circled an island into his palm
and told him which parts they would share,
which part they would leave alone.

She wet a finger to draw where the ocean would be
on his wrist, kissed him there,
named the ocean after herself.

Your grandfather’s hands were slow but urgent.
Your grandmother dreamt them,

a clockwork of fingers finding places to own–
under the tongue, collarbone, bottom lip,
arch of foot.

Your grandmother names his fingers after seasons–
index finger, a wave of heat,
middle finger, rainfall.

Some nights his thumb is the moon
nestled just under her rib.

“Your grandparents often found themselves
in dark rooms, mapping out
each other’s bodies,

claiming whole countries
with their mouths.”

― Warsan Shire

>271 msf59: outstanding. thanks, Mark.

>274 msf59: beautiful. makes me want to try to transcribe a poem Mary Oliver published in her first volume, No Voyage about her grandmother. it nearly breaks my heart--she did that a lot in that first volume--and i think it worth sharing because she was quite young. in her 20's i think.

>275 mirrordrum: Hi, Ellie! Glad you like the poems. Reading Blonde has taken up the bulk of my reading time but I am nearing the end of that one, so I can get back to my poetry reading, which is stacking up, including a Millay collection, you suggested.

Have you signed up for the Poem-a- Day email? That is where I got both of those.

>276 msf59: hey, Mark. i signed up for it a few days ago. i liked today's but will need help translating the last part of the last line. i liked the bit where he says he's been called to write sonnets. made me smile. if you get those, i'll stick to posting Pulitzer winners from time to time so's we don't get our rigging fouled. where'd that metaphor come from? oh, i know. i was just listening to HMS Surprise. hasta mañana, hombre.

You got me curious, Ellie. Here's No Voyage. Good one.

No Voyage

I wake earlier, now that the birds have come
And sing in the unfailing trees.
On a cot by an open window
I lie like land used up, while spring unfolds.

Now of all voyagers I remember, who among them
Did not board ship with grief among their maps?—
Till it seemed men never go somewhere, they only leave
Wherever they are, when the dying begins.

For myself, I find my wanting life
Implores no novelty and no disguise of distance;
Where, in what country, might I put down these thoughts,
Who still am citizen of this fallen city?

On a cot by an open window, I lie and remember
While the birds in the trees sing of the circle of time.
Let the dying go on, and let me, if I can,
Inherit from disaster before I move.

O, I go to see the great ships ride from harbor,
And my wounds leap with impatience; yet I turn back
To sort the weeping ruins of my house:
Here or nowhere I will make peace with the fact.

This one gives me the shivers.

Palmetto Moon
by Monet P. Thomas

In Charleston, black folks know ghosts
are always among them on the cobblestone

streets jagged outlines in salt, their shackles
rusted. In Charleston, black children grow

blacker under the southern sun —
ever the watchful eye of all our misdeeds.

In Charleston, white oaks are not just trees
but platforms, shelters, the bearers of rope.

Standing on the shoreline of the port,
listen, will you, to the gentle waves
that brought the ships in.

>279 laytonwoman3rd: It is haunting, but as someone whose favorite Southern city is Charleston, I really like it.

>279 laytonwoman3rd: Powerful, Linda, thanks.

Mark got me thinking about W.B. Yeats. Here's a charmer by him.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

>282 jnwelch: An old favorite of mine, as well.

>282 jnwelch: Lovely, Joe!

Joe, I see your "Lake Isle of Innisfree" and raise you a "When You Are Old" (my favorite Yeats):

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

>282 jnwelch: one of my old favourites too. I don't know if you can get it in the US, but the BBC did a wonderful 90 minute documentary on Yeats earlier this year, with lots of readings of his work.

>285 katiekrug: Ha! I LOVE "When You Are Old", Katie. I thought of that one, too. Maybe we'll get around to "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" at some point. :-)

>286 Caroline_McElwee: Ooh, I'd be interested in that, Caroline, thanks. I'll look for it.

>285 katiekrug: He wasn't always so cosy about old age of course. These are the opening verses of Sailing to Byzantium

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
– Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon‐falls, the mackerel‐crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

A marvellous poet and Innisfree & When You are Old are certainly amongst his best. My own favourite is probably Easter 1916, but I often take down his Collected Poems and wallow in his brilliance.

>271 msf59: That is heartbreaking.

You all have convinced me to obtain a copy of Yeats Collected Poems. Thanks for the nudge!

>290 EBT1002: Good! He's worth it.

Here's his The Second Coming, a powerful one.

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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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?

What I'm struck by is how many great novel titles are lines imbedded in Yeats poems!

>292 EBT1002: Ha! Yes! I was thinking the same thing as I posted it. So many ended up as book titles.

One of mine, posted months ago, is an echo of this one. This one gets me every time.

>292 EBT1002: Yes, indeed. Robert B. Parker "stole" many of his from Yeats.

I just finished Sharon Olds' excellent collection, Strike Sparks. I liked this comment from Jesse Kornbluth: "Parents, lovers/husbands, children. Sharon Olds deals mostly — I could almost say: deals only — with the big topics. At least, the big topics if you have parents, husbands/lovers and kids. And she deals with them so directly, so bluntly, that it may come as a surprise to those who do not know her writing that she is a poet, and, for my money, the best we have."

Here's the one from which the title is taken:

I Go Back to May 1937

By Sharon Olds

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,
the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips aglow in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

>278 jnwelch: how marvelous to see that. "here or nowhere i will make peace with the fact" is a line i've carried in my head for, oh, well nigh 40 years.

>279 laytonwoman3rd: oh god, Linda. that last stanza.

>280 thornton37814: indeed, Joe, a favorite of mine. i like how it starts with such clear movement. i can both feel and see it. afternoon, possibly. light at an angle, anyway. there are curtains blowing into the room from a window to the left of an open door. i see a man wearing a hat (?) standing up, arms pushing up from the chair arms and i feel the tension of standing in my thighs. the intention is clear. it's all pulled by the rest of the poem, the "bee loud glade." don't ask me.

>285 katiekrug: i was going to post that one t'other day, Katie, and didn't b/c it's not American. isn't it wonderful? i remember a friend of my parents' writing me in college and ending with "well, baby, i've got to go now for i am old and grey and full of sleep." i loved it but had no idea of its provenance. i've also, obviously, never forgotten it.

>288 PaulCranswick: >285 katiekrug: i don't find "when you are old" cozy nor Byzantium without hope, if the soul can just get up and get out of the drudgery. i'm never sure exactly why Byzantium. culture? beauty? better singing? food for the soul? Greeks before Philip II? help, oh ye of greater knowledge.

>291 jnwelch: always my favorite. always. i've felt through much of this US election cycle that we're there. again.

>295 jnwelch: damn, Joe. that's a keeper. my parent's generation. rings true though the story line is a bit different. but it's the age old story, as you know if you live long enough. but why paper dolls and "like flint?"

and now for something completely different, a favorite of mine from W.H. Auden. i'm quite sure that i understand very little but i'm haunted by the last stanza. have been for years.

The Fall of Rome By W.H. Auden For Cyril Connolly

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

>296 mirrordrum: Ha! Paper dolls and "like flint" is the part I always trip over with this one, Ellie. I'm sure that's the way she saw it inside, but I wish she had worked a bit to marry up the images. The "and I will tell about it" saves everything and carries the day for me.

The Second Coming is such an amazing poem, isn't it? It's like he was visited by an angel or something. A scary gift, but what a gift.

Here's a fun Paris Review article about the many book titles that have come from it: http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/04/07/no-slouch/

Speaking of fun, >297 mirrordrum: is. Who knew Caesar's bed was as warm as an unimportant clerk? :-) I want to read more of Mr. Auden. I'm among the many bowled over by his "stop all the clocks poem", so movingly read in "Four Weddings and a Funeral":

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 for ever: 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 wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

this thread makes me very happy. :-)

>298 jnwelch: >296 mirrordrum: thank goodness you too sometimes trip, Joe. :-)

Auden is so ineluctably himself. he can be herky-jerky and a bit pompous and something always catches me. i still have his book on my shelf.

i hadn't read "Stop all the clocks" for ages and had forgotten it. wonderful. thank you. :-)

i do wish i could read the original or had translation alternatives for the following Szymborska. i don't know where my book of her poems has gone. *frown*

Under One Small Star

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all.
Please, don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths.
I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five a.m.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.
Pardon me, deserts, that I don't rush to you bearing a spoonful of water.
And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage,
your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,
forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.
My apologies to the felled tree for the table's four legs.
My apologies to great questions for small answers.
Truth, please don't pay me much attention.
Dignity, please be magnanimous.
Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from your train.
Soul, don't take offense that I've only got you now and then.
My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere at once.
My apologies to everyone that I can't be each woman and each man.
I know I won't be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

Wislawa Szymborska

and just one more. i like this translation better than others i've found.

The title “Autotomy” is a biological term for the capacity of certain living things, to give up wholeness in order to preserve life. - See more at: http://www.entropy.in/autotomy/#sthash.CCOHKTbX.dpuf

Autotomy

In danger, the holothurian cuts itself in two:
It abandons one self to a hungry world
and with the other self it flees.

It violently divides into doom and salvation,
retribution and reward, what has been and what will be.

An abyss appears in the middle of its body
between what instantly become two foreign shores.

Life on one shore, death on the other.
Here hope and there despair.

If there are scales, the pans don’t move.
If there is justice, this is it.

To die just as required, without excess.
To grow back just what’s needed from what’s left.

We, too, can divide ourselves, it’s true.
But only into flesh and a broken whisper.
Into flesh and poetry.

The throat on one side, laughter on the other,
quiet, quickly dying out.

Here the heavy heart, there non omnis moriar –
just three little words, like a flight’s three feathers.

The abyss doesn’t divide us.
The abyss surrounds us

© By Wislawa Szymborska

– Non omnis moriar, “Not all of me will die,” are the opening words of Horace, Ode 3.30. By Polish poet Zuzanna Ginczanka

we're at 300 posts. i wonder if we should start a new thread?

>300 mirrordrum: "this thread makes me very happy. :-)"

I think your wish will come true, Ellie! I still have to go back and catch up.

>298 jnwelch: - Gets me every time.

>295 jnwelch: great poem Joe. I've read some of Olds's work and like the bluntness. The 'paper dolls' and 'like Flint' worked for me because they were in opposition, but at the same time spoke of vulnerability and hardness, which can be experienced together, in different ways.

>299 mirrordrum: Yes! She's a good 'un, that Wislawa. "Under One Small Star' is amazingly well done, and one of my favorites of hers. How to do that repetitive questioning and make it always interesting, always progressing - remarkable. "Autonomy" - do I dare say "sea cucumber" might be a better translation choice than holothurian? I'm sure there's a reason for holothurian derived from the original, but IMO it blocks the reader (have to look it up), rather than inviting the reader in, as sea cucumber would.

Rarely used words are fine in poems as far as I'm concerned, but here it's critical, and placed right at where the door to the poem opens. Ah, great poem anyway; that's just my two cents.

This thread fills fast with great poetry and comments, doesn't it? Mark plans to set up a new one.

>302 katiekrug: Me, too, Katie. Every time.

>303 Caroline_McElwee: What a good point, Caroline. I like her bluntness, too, and that's a great reading of what is, for me, a bump in the pavement of a line (a root sticking up in the path?). I'll try to take your view next time I'm about to trip over it.

>303 Caroline_McElwee: it's the visual i stick on, Caroline and also "i take them up like the male and female paper dolls." suggests specific dolls. i like your take on it, though. i have trouble b/c of my brain's insistence on the visual: the paper dolls bending, crushing slightly as she holds them to "bang" them. she's the spark struck or the result of the spark struck from two essentially featureless, 2-D dolls whom she causes (allows?) to make love.

>304 jnwelch: yeah, i know nahsomuch with the holothurian thingy but i really didn't like the rest of translation that used sea cucumber. and it's "autotomy" not autonomy and i read it wrong every damn time. i wonder if the words are similar in Polish.

>305 mirrordrum: Oops. Automy. They're making us work hard. :-)

As promised the new poetry thread is up. Stop by and keep spreading the joy: http://www.librarything.com/topic/230813#