AMERICAN AUTHORS CHALLENGE--MARCH 2023--POETRY

A lot of people—mostly poets, of course—have tried to define poetry, or explain why it matters. Some examples:

British poet, Thomas Gray: "Poetry is thoughts that breathe, words that burn."

Robert Frost: "Poetry is when emotion has found its thought, and thought has found its words."

Lawrence Ferlinghetti: "Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations."

Maya Angelou tells us that "Poetry can tell us what human beings are. It can tell us why we stumble and fall and how, miraculously, we can stand up."

But my favorite is Carl Sandburg’s quite poetic definition: "Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance."

From Anne Bradstreet, the first woman to be considered an accomplished New World (American, for our purposes) poet, to Ada Limon, current Poet Laureate of the United States; from Thomas Morton and Phyllis Wheatley to Robert Pinsky and Mary Oliver, poets on the American continent have stirred us up, and soothed our souls. Langston Hughes can make us see America one way, Walt Whitman or Wendell Berry another. Billy Collins can make us laugh. If you’d like a longer treatment of what the genre can do for us, I commend you to the work of a fine poet and teacher, Jay Parini, who minces no words in his Why Poetry Matters.

Finally, poetry lovers, if you haven’t discovered the PBS series, Poetry in America, I highly recommend it. Members can stream all three seasons.

I hope to be reading from Parini, Limon, Oliver, Berry, Sascha Feinstein, Lucille Clifton, Yusef Komunyakaa, Margot Douiahy and others this month. Who’s on your list?

I am not a fan of poetry, but I think I have some Ogden Nash books I could choose from.

>2 fuzzi: Just the other day I thought of "Piano Tuner, Untune Me That Tune" from Versus and:

The People Upstairs

The people upstairs all practice ballet.
Their living room is a bowling alley.
Their bedroom is full of conducted tours.
Their radio is louder than yours.
They celebrate week ends all the week.
When they take a shower, your ceilings leak.
They try to get their parties to mix
By supplying their guests with Pogo sticks.
I might love the people upstairs wondrous
If instead of above us, they just lived under us.

--Ogden Nash, from Versus

I'm not much into poetry (except some song lyrics) but I've heard so much about Mary Oliver that I'm going to give her a try. Devotions is waiting for me at my library.

I'm going to read Clarence Major's Sporadic Troubleshooting, which Mark (Msf59) recommended on the poetry thread. Hopefully I will manage a reread of Ada Limon's The Carrying too.

I am planning on Howl and other Poems by Allen Ginsberg. I don't read poetry often. I appreciate some poetry but I don't go out seeking poetry.

>3 kac522: I have a couple volumes of Ogden Nash---always fun to dip into.

>4 Carmenere: Oliver is a good choice for people who think they don't like poetry. And for people who do.

>5 Caroline_McElwee: The Carrying is waiting for me at the library. I'll probably pick it up tomorrow.

>6 Kristelh: I'll be interested to see how you get on with Ginsberg. I last read him in college, fifty years ago.

>1 laytonwoman3rd: Forgot to say I love the quotes Linda, that Sandburg one is gorgeous.

>7 laytonwoman3rd:. Linda, I have to say that I do not expect to like it at all. I’ve read William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac and did not like either one but I ran across this book when searching for something else and I thought I might as well finish off this trio of the Beat Generation.

>8 Caroline_McElwee: I think Sandburg is somewhat neglected these days, Caro. I remember being quite taken with him in high school, and learning he had died from seeing a newspaper headline while on vacation on Cape Cod with my parents in 1967. I think that was the first time I was aware of any artist as a person who actually existed in the same world as I did.

>9 Kristelh: One of my high school friends, who was attending a different college from mine, wrote me about going to a Ginsberg reading during our freshman year. She was very taken with him, so I tried to read a bit of it, but it didn't gel with me even then. None of my classes (and I was an English major) ever addressed his work in four years--possibly that made the difference for her.

I love good, resounding poetry and so -
with one of the best opening lines ever:

This is the forest primeval

I decided after seeing this Challenge last year
to read all of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poems, a dense 644 pages.

Midway through, what fun - not just EVANGELINE,
but
Listen My Children and You Shall Hear of the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere!

Under a spreading Chestnut-Tree
The Village Smithy stands

and, a favorite Christmas Hymn =

I HEARD the Bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play...

^^^^^^^^

with allowance for:

But at anchor, carved and gilded,
lay the dragon-ship he builded...

>11 m.belljackson:, all of these are so familiar.

>13 laytonwoman3rd: Yes, I once could recite several of them by heart.

Since I usually have a poetry collection going, I will definitely chime in. I am currently enjoying The Best of Robert Service, which Joe recommended. I unabashedly prefer more contemporary poetry but this older collection contains some gems.

If you are looking for recommendations, I recently read and loved both Sporadic Troubleshooting: Poems by Clarence Major and On the Bus with Rosa Parks: Poems by Rita Dove.

I will be reading Stephen Dunn and Natasha Trethewey this month, both poets I have read and appreciated.

>14 msf59: I think it's a stretch to call Robert Service an American poet, even though he often took the Canadian frontier as his subject. Take a look at this performance of The Cremation of Sam McGee for the fun of it.

>15 PaulCranswick: I don't know Dunn. Must check him out.

For more modern reading, I've ordered The Drum that Beats Within Us.

I’m reading Best American Poetry 2021, to get a bit of variety.

I will be watching this thread carefully for ideas in what to read next!

Karen O

>16 laytonwoman3rd: Sorry about that, Linda. I assumed that Service was American. As I am reading along I realize that the poems start taking on a Yukon theme. Very Jack London like. Service was born in England and relocated to BC. Sounds like a fascinating guy. I should read a bio on him.

The video presentation of "The Cremation of Sam McGee" is fantastic. Thanks.

>19 msf59: I made that assumption myself, Mark. Many years ago, my parents took a trip to Alaska, and came back with a volume of his work, which is now on my poetry shelf. I don't remember when I discovered he wasn't an American, but it was a surprise.

Oops. I just packed up my poetry pending emptying the bedroom for painting. I'll have to see if I can sneak a book out of the box. As I was packing, I realized I hadn't read any of them in years, although I do read epic poetry aloud with a group on Zoom. Unfortunately, Ovid doesn't qualify as U.S. based.

I read this last month, so sneaking it over.

On the Bus with Rosa Parks (Rita Dove) (19/02/23) ****



Some insightful poems by Dove. My favourite 'Maple Valley Branch Library, 1967', and the series of the volume title, from which the following comes:

Rosa (1999)
By Rita Dove

How she sat there,
the time right inside a place
so wrong it was ready.

That trim name with
its dream of a bench
to rest on. Her sensible coat.

Doing nothing was the doing:
the clean flame of her gaze
carved by a camera flash.

How she stood up
when they bent down to retrieve
her purse. That courtesy.



Thanks to Mark (msf59) for putting this on my radar.

*****

Well into the Clarence Major volume.

I finished Shore Road to Ogunquit by Harold Plotkin, with photographs by Ernst Halberstadt. It didn't impress me. Maine is always an appealing subject. An industrialist/poet is an intriguing prospect. Black and white photography is one of my favorite forms of artistic expression. This collection offers all those things, but sadly none of them work. I found the poetry clunky, uninspired and often formatted in ways that didn't do anything to illuminate the thoughts. (I'm not talking about rhyme schemes or cadences, but the physical placement of the words.) The book is nicely made, with heavy textured paper; but that does not lend itself to clear reproduction of the accompanying photos, which are muddy sometimes to the point of abstraction.

I'm trying to pick one poet a week this month to concentrate on. This week it's been Ada Limon, the current US Poet Laureate. I'm working my way through The Carrying, and unfortunately, it is work. Not that I don't see her talent. A common theme running through them is the need to nurture, the poet's apparent inability to bear a child, the ambivalence of a woman toward her own body. This collection will definitely speak to many readers in a vital way. I'm just not one of them, and that's no reflection on the poems or their creator.

I am also reading Donald Hall's Old Poets; not all of his subjects are American, but the section on Robert Frost is fascinating. I'll be reading Frost himself next as I clearly don't know him well enough.

Added THE DRUM THAT BEATS WITHIN US which, half way through, divides peacefully between love and endings...

>24 laytonwoman3rd: Interesting Linda. I gave it 5*'s when I read in 2018. Didn't paste a review on the book page, so need to find my review in my 75ers thread. Am about to start a reread.

I am not a poetry person; I don't understand stanzas, but I do understand paragraphs. So here is my half-fulfillment of this month's challenge:

What she liked was candy buttons, and books, and painted music (deep blue, or delicate silver) and the west sky, so altering, viewed from the steps of the back porch; and dandelions.

She would have liked a lotus, or China asters or the Japanese Iris, or meadow lilies--yes she would have liked meadow lilies, because the very word meadow made her breathe more deeply, and either fling her arms or want to fling her arms, depending on who was by, rapturously up to whatever was watching in the sky. But dandelions were what she chiefly saw. Yellow jewels for everyday, studding the patched green dress of her back yard. She liked their demure prettiness second to their everydayness; for in that latter quality she thought she saw a picture of herself, and it was comforting to find that what was common could also be a flower.

So begins Maud Martha (1953), the only novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000). It is the story of a young girl's growing into womanhood. Brooks tells us after the title page: "Maud Martha was born in 1917. She is still alive." The book is structured into 34 short vignettes, mostly chronological, of Maud Martha's life, from girlhood to womanhood, on Chicago's South Side. These were lovely, touching, thoughtful and full of poetic phrases like the opening. Childhood games, skin color envy, awkward first dates, an ambivalent husband, seedy first apartments, childbirth, crazy neighbors and the inevitable encounters with racist white people are only some of the many and varied moments in Maud Martha's life.

A real gem. I borrowed this from the library, but I need to find a copy to own and re-read.

Just finished Stephen Dunn's wonderful What Goes On : Selected and New Poems 1995-2009 and struggle to choose a poem to share from it.

But I have gone for :

The Last Hours

There’s some innocence left,
and these are the last hours of an empty afternoon
at the office, and there’s the clock
on the wall, and my friend Frank
in the adjacent cubicle selling himself
on the phone.
I’m twenty-five, on the shaky
ladder up, my father’s son, corporate,
clean-shaven, and I know only what I don’t want,
which is almost everything I have.
A meeting ends.
Men in serious suits, intelligent men
who’ve been thinking hard about marketing snacks,
move back now to their window offices, worried
or proud. The big boss, Horace,
had called them in to approve this, reject that–
the big boss, a first-name, how’s-your-family
kind of assassin, who likes me.
It’s 1964.
The sixties haven’t begun yet. Cuba is a larger name
than Vietnam. The Soviets are behind
everything that could be wrong. Where I sit
it’s exactly nineteen minutes to five. My phone rings.
Horace would like me to stop in
before I leave. Stop in. Code words,
leisurely words, that mean now.
Would I be willing
to take on this? Would X’s office, who by the way
is no longer with us, be satisfactory?
About money, will this be enough?
I smile, I say yes and yes and yes,
but–I don’t know from what calm place
this comes–I’m translating
his beneficence into a lifetime, a life
of selling snacks, talking snack strategy,
thinking snack thoughts.
On the elevator down
it’s a small knot, I’d like to say, of joy.
That’s how I tell it now, here in the future,
the fear long gone.
By the time I reach the subway it’s grown,
it’s outsized, an attitude finally come round,
and I say it quietly to myself, I quit,
and keep saying it, knowing I will say it, sure
of nothing else but.

>27 kac522: I love your rave for Maud Martha and am heeding the call to find a copy of it. Thanks for the heads up!

Karen O

>29 klobrien2: Same here. I have enjoyed Brooks's poetry in the past, and did not know she had written a novel. >27 kac522: Thanks, Kathy!

Rock 'n Roll is Poetry with Music.

>29 klobrien2:, >30 laytonwoman3rd: It is probably more of a novella than a novel. I had never heard of it either until I saw it reviewed (and raved) by a London booktuber, of all places.

Back Garden

You crack a smile wide open.
I hear thunder in the sunshine.
Perfect breezes blow wild roses,
and I am lit to sense these surroundings.

You pick up your guitar
and play songs to the sparrows and robins.
Crows mob your evenings
like fans clamouring to hear you sing.

The garden grows peaceful
with the critters quieting for the night.
But some animals don’t need light.
They scratch around our midnight.

-PJ Thomas

^This one is part of a collection called "Waves", which I received from Early Reviewers. It was much lighter than my usual fare but I appreciated the nature aspect of many of the poems, although they didn't exactly rock my world. Thomas is a poet from Wisconsin.

I love that people are sharing poems on this thread. I wish I had come across one I wanted to share, but so far...meh.

>34 laytonwoman3rd: AND...just like that...I picked up Scranton Lace by Margot Douaihy, who has local origins, and was hit with a poem I will want (and need) to read again and again. It is a pantoum, a new form for me, and one I find enormously intriguing, like a word dance.

Donald Justice's Pantoum of the Great Depression is a lovely example.

It was originally a Malay form, PaulCranswick! Brought to American attention by John Ashbery, so saith the Academy of American Poets. Here endeth today's lesson.

I've read the three who stand for the beat generation; William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, and now Ginsberg's Howl and other Poems. This book of poems was published by Northern Lights (San Francisco) in 1956. I am not a fan of the Beat Generation. In summarizing the poems they are understandable and representative of the author. The book was challenged as obscene with language and references to homosexuality. The author was found not guilty.
Poems included:
1. Europe, Europe
2. America
3 "Howl", which is considered to be one of the principal works of the Beat Generation
Footnote to Howl
4. Strange New Cottage
5. In Back of the Real
6. "Transcription of Organ Music",
7. "Sunflower Sutra",
8. A supermarket in California
9. Beat Poetry at Royal

These were read by Ginsberg. It was a live audience and they seemed to appreciate the works. The most famous of course is Howl. I have not had any previous exposure to his works. I have a book of poetry from Northern Lights. I will have to check it to see if it has any Ginsberg.

And this concludes my reading of the Beat Generation.

Here's a poem from THE BRUCE for upcoming British Author Challenge:

A! Blind folk full off all folk
Haid ye umbethocht you enkrely
Quhat perell to you mycht apper
Ye had nocht wrocht on that maner.

(Book Editor Duncan supplies translation.)

California

Finally, friends are leaving for New England—
Haddam, CT, and, God help them, Vermont—

which means plowing, slipping, freezing
but not, they hope, burning up in Paradise

as the Golden State furiously consumes itself.
I miss them though I won’t go East again.

I can’t—not to where all the seasons differ
gorgeously in the ways they make me ill,

where it’s okay to just be fucking mean,
especially in Little Rhody, or Rogue Island,

as it was called in the eighteenth century,
recently voted home of the worst accent,

beating West Virginia. No more bubblers
for me, and nothing’s wicked where I live

among nice folks, who say, beautiful day,
because we have beautiful days (whales,

pelicans, otters, and hummingbirds), then
a week of Martian skies, this sick orange.

We catch the ash and smell of toasted trees
and buildings. After this, rain refuses to soften,

pushing down on us. I jump at loud cracks
as long-lived, dried-out firs give up the ghost.

Mind the burn scar, authorities warn. Water
and rocks and everything else have nothing

to stop them. If  you hear the mudslide, you are
already too late. But I haven’t heard it yet.

-CATHLEEN CALBERT

^I thought this was a very American poem. Just sayin'...plus, Calbert was born in Michigan and raised in SoCal.

Remember

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

-Joy Harjo

^This is from an earlier collection by Harjo- She Had Some Horses. I prefer her later work but this one is definitely a gem.



"Joy Harjo, (b. 1951) is the first Native American Poet Laureate of the U.S. As a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo is the descendant of Native Americans who were forcibly removed from their land in the 19th century Trail of Tears."

I love that one, too, Mark. It's hard to beat this bit for simple truth, though:

"She had some horses she loved.
She had some horses she hated.

These were the same horses."
JOY HARJO

(The full poem can be found here.)

Spring

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her -—
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.

-Mary Oliver

^^FYI- If you have not read Mary Oliver, please give this gifted poet a try. She was one of the first poets I was introduced to and I found her very accessible.

>42 msf59: Mary Oliver's Owls and Other Fantasies is next up on my poetry-reading schedule. She's already a favorite, and this one is my reward for trying 3 other new-to-me poets this month, none of whom will make my All Star list.

Re-read for the AAC poetry month. I still enjoyed this volume as much as the first reading. For me most of the poems worked, which is quite rare. I am usually satisfied with half a dozen or so fine pieces. This had more. One of many favourites. I love the opening lines The big-ass bees are back, tipsy, sun drunk/And heavy with thick knitted leg warmers/of pollen. So sensory and visual.



****

I have Sharon Olds' new volume Balladz in the pile, will at least start it this week, may get it under the wire.

I liked that one too, Caroline. I think I'm a bit put off by its presentation as a poem. To me, it's poetic prose, and I don't perceive the line breaks as contributing anything to its effect. That's a deficit in my own education, but I am distracted by it.

A favorite revisited:

STAY HOME (Wendell Berry)

I will wait here in the fields
to see how well the rain
brings on the grass
In the labor of the fields
longer than a man's life
I am home. Don't come with me.
You stay home too.

I will be standing in the woods
where the old trees
move only with the wind
and then with gravity.
In the stillness of the trees
I am home. Don't come with me.
You stay home too.

>46 laytonwoman3rd: I like this one, Linda. I should read more Berry.

Preparing for Residential Placement for My Disabled Daughter

My life without you—I have already
seen it. Today, on the salt marsh.
The red-winged blackbird perched
in the tallest tree, sage green branches
falling over the water. She sat there
for a long time, doing nothing.
As she lifted up to fly, the slender branch
shook from the release of her weight.
When the bird departed, it seemed
the branch would shake forever
in the wind, bobbing up and down.
When it finally stopped moving,
the branch was diminished,
reaching out to the vast sky.

-Jennifer Franklin From Poem-A-Day

"I wrote this short poem during a twelve-day residency in Cape Cod. Because I raised my twenty-two-year-old disabled daughter by myself, this was the first time since graduate school that I had uninterrupted time to write. I woke up at dawn and sat on the deck with my dog and a cup of coffee, watching the abundance of birds—swans, osprey, ducks on the salt marsh. The simple red-winged blackbird provoked this poem."

From FREDERICK DOUGLAS by Paul Laurence Dunbar:

And he was no soft-spoken apologist;
He spoke straightforward, fearlessly uncowed;
The sunlight of his truth dispelled the mist,
And set in bold relief each dark-hued cloud;
To sin and crime he gave the proper hue,
And hurled at evil what was evil's due.

>42 msf59: Right you are, Mark! I am not a fan of poetry but I am thoroughly enjoying Devotions by Mary Oliver.

Here is the APRIL thread, for Ursula Hegi, whenever you're ready.