**The April Read-a-Living-Poet Challenge

In a effort to make the case that poetry can indeed by relevant today, I thought I'd issue the following challenge:

During the month of April, read {some of} a collection by a living poet OR read an anthology of contemporary poetry by living poets. Then post your response or reaction here with perhaps a small excerpt of something you particularly like (or dislike).

I'd like to invite those of you who do not usually read poetry to especially join in. I think your responses will be interesting - we're talking about basic enjoyment here, not deep analysis.

In the US, April has been deemed "National Poetry Month" but not sure what other poetry promotions are going on elsewhere in world and when. I did hear this morning on BBC World News of a big poetry contest in the UK...

Are you up for the challenge?

I do not usually read poetry. I will sort-of-semi-pledge-I-hope to read Laura Fargas' An Animal of the Sixth Day, which was a recommendation from bobmcconnaughey.

Are there any living poets? Are any still practicing?

Robert

Great idea, avaland. I've been reading a lot of dead poets. I look forward to some recommendations.

Check out Poets.org -- the sponsors of National Poetry month. Their website is a treasure trove of living poets, poems, books, events, etc.
http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/41

For the skiddish, iit can be pointed out that many fiction authors are also poets and it can be very interesting to read their poetry when you've read their fiction. I've read poetry by JCO, Margaret Atwood, Jane Urquhart, Michael Crummey, Julianna Baggott, Ray Bradbury, Sandra Cisneros, Ursula Le Guin, Thomas Disch...etc.

Here are a couple of poets reading on YouTube

Billy Collins reading his amusing poem "forgetfulness"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrEPJh14mcU

Carol Ann Duffy's "Warming her Pearls" read by ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9N_mpW5T

Michael Crummey's "Making the Fish"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgzDYOsrAuc

Nikki Giovanni reading her "Talk to Me Poem"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9HbqMzgx

Seamus Heaney reading his "Twice Shy"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV6FZoMHskk

Margaret Atwood reading "Morning in the Burned House"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeKrB5i2cH4

Also very tentatively pledging to make the effort :) I have a colleague who adores poetry, so will prod him for some recs - I know he'll be more than happy to oblige.

Oh yay - I just bought Atwood's Circle Game and will definitely read it in April!

>3 Mr.Durick:, Mr.Durick: I stand before you, practising diligently (finishing off the manuscript of my third collection, in fact ...)

I think this challenge is an excellent idea. I read quite a lot of poetry, and will certainly read at least one collection in April.

What has struck me in thinking about this challenge is that almost all the poetry I read from my own country (New Zealand) is by living poets, whereas almost all the poetry I read from overseas is by dead poets. So maybe I'll narrow the challenge down for myself by reading a collection from a living non-New Zealand poet.

I'm defnitely in on this. I have been neglecting my poetry shamefully lately.

Maybe some of the newer US stuff... hmmmm.

Yes! (celebratory yipping) Poetry is where I dwell and it is sometimes lonely on LT as fiction seems to be the thing here. I will certainly read at least one book of poetry in April.

Like timjones (#10), I read many living poets, especially from my home country of Canada. So I too will try to read at least one living poet from elsewhere - as well as some Canadian and dead poets.

Contenders include:

Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty by Tony Hoagland - American, alive
Approaching Ice by Elizabeth Bradfield - American, alive
Waxworks by Frieda Hughes - English, alive
Transcendental Studies by Keith Waldrop - American, alive
Exilee and Temps Morts by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha - Korean-American, but dead
Nightmarker by Meredith Quartermain - Canadian, alive
Selected Poems by René Char - French, but dead
Calligrammes by Guillaume Apollinaire - French, but dead
Snow Part by Paul Celan - Romanian, but dead

So hard to choose... I will be keeping an eye on this thread to get some ideas about more adventurous world poetry reading. New Zealand poets, timjones?

I continue to search for longish narrative poems (though maybe not so long as Clarel which I may not finish for months). I'm about to start on my annual month or two-long narrative poem reading starting with Rita Dove's Sonata Mulattica and then on to Bill of Rights by Fred D'Aguilar and The Sleeping Beauty by Hayden Carruth.

Not all are by living poets, but Knopf is again hosting its April Poem-A-Day series via email. And last year’s collection (listed to the right) is available this year via DailyLit.

I'm already reading The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni, which contains all of her poems from 1968-1998 that were published in seven books. I've read the poems from the first two books, and will definitely read more from this collection next month.

I'm going to try and read Sharon Olds, whose selected poems I bought after hearing one of them on the radio.

>12 cocoafiend:, cocoafiend: We poetry fans do tend to be in the minority, so I agree that this thread is an excellent idea!

This link:

http://bit.ly/c6nGgn

should take you to a list of the 101 books tagged "New Zealand poetry" in my collection, with the highest-rated first.

My own collection lacks a lot of major New Zealand poets, though - Allen Curnow and Fleur Adcock, for example.

I've interviewed quite a few NZ poets (plus some non-poets) on my blog - there's links to these interviews at

http://bit.ly/6X4dci

I hope this helps! Let me know if you'd like to know more about particular poets on the list above.

A PS to the above - you can find a lot of NZ poets and their poems online here:

http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/

>14 detailmuse: Both poets.org (Academy of American Poetry) and Poetry Daily (poems.com) do something similar. The latter does it year round.

>12 cocoafiend: I would be interested in your recommendations for living Canadian poets. I have read Atwood & Urqhuart & Crummey (there may be others but those three are off the top of my head).

timjones, thanks for those links - fyi, the link to your New Zealand poetry tag didn't seem to work for me, but it's easy enough to click onto your profile and then on to that tag. I will add a NZ poet to my planned upcoming reading!

avaland, I have LOTS of ideas - perhaps too many... Favourites include:

- Nerve Squall by Sylvia Legris - a brilliant and inventive combination of meteorology and ornithology
- The Journals of Susanna Moodie by Margaret Atwood - which perhaps you've already read - about Susanna Moodie's life in the Canadian bush illustrated by Atwood's collages
- Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida by Roo Borson - a tribute to Basho
- Or by Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaasen - lovely lyric poetry, about nature, weather, motherhood
- Un and Yesno by Dennis Lee for compact, intense, experimental ecopoetry
- Anything by Tim Lilburn but especially Moosewood Sandhills and To the River for smart philosophical poetry about wilderness
- The T.E. Lawrence Poems by Gwendolyn MacEwen - she's dead, alas, but this book about Lawrence of Arabia is a Canadian classic and wonderful read
- Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid - an absolutely unique poetic voice relating the violent story of Billy the Kid - quite different from Ondaatje's other poetry
- Any of P.K. Page's books of glosas - she just died early this year, so I suppose no longer qualifies for this challenge, but she has used the glosa form beautifully (glosas are poems that pay homage to other people's poems, building something new out of them)
- Joy is so Exhausting by Susan Holbrook for smart, hilarious language poetry ("insert" is worth the price of the book)
- Anything by Lisa Robertson but especially Debbie: An Epic and XEclogue - deconstructions of gender and epic in gorgeous language poetry
- Nathalie Stephens's Paper City if you're feeling ambitious and are inclined to read a French Canadian woman write about gender, city life, language and translation
- Jordan Scott's Blert for an inventive exploration of stuttering (he deliberately uses sound combinations that trip up stutterers and - a stutterer himself - performs them and their difficulty at readings)
- Donato Mancini's Aethel for fun typographical poetry
- Anne Simpson's Loop - such effortless formal verse, including a lovely cycle of sonnets you hardly realize are sonnets, and that rarity in modern poetry, the terza rima
- Christian Bok's Eunoia if you want to see extreme lipogrammatic constraint in action (this book is often quite witty) or Crystallography if you prefer to experience a wide range of poetic forms, including geologic, fractal and typographical
- Derrek Hines's rewriting of Gilgamesh - a wonderful poetic interpretation of the Sumerian epic that combines a mythic story with strikingly modern imagery

Also Daphne Marlatt, Erin Moure, Alison Pick, Don McKay and Karen Houle

For a sampler pack of living Canadian poets, you could check out the recent anthology, Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry

Sorry for the lengthy list! I hope something in there appeals and if you have any questions about particular books or authors, I'd be happy to share what I know...

Thanks, cocoafiend -- I've just ordered The Diaries of Susanna Moodie, The Collected Works of Billie the Kid and Hines's Gilgamesh.

>20 cocoafiend: yes, thanks, cocoafiend. Plenty of choices there (and yes, I do have the Susanna Moodie)

#20 - Thanks for that list! I'm going to second Atwood, Ondaatje, Gwendolyn MacEwen, and P.K. Page, and check out the rest of these :)

>14 detailmuse:, Thanks for posting that, detailmuse. I've signed up for the emails and the dailylit feed. Lois, I will (try to) accept your challenge, but I confess that I have no taste for poetry. I confess that I really don't even understand what differentiates most contemporary English-language poetry that I have read from prose other than the way the sentences are broken up on the page. Am I old fashioned for thinking that there is some specific set of conventions that makes something a "poem"?

>20 cocoafiend:, cocoafiend - sorry about the link problem - it seems that one needs to go to the link I posted,

http://bit.ly/c6nGgn

and then click Search to see that list of New Zealand poets.

Your list of Canadian poetry collections is impressive!

A lot of contemporary, and some historical, New Zealand poets are represented in an anthology I co-edited, Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand (2009), available here:

http://bit.ly/3869Hh

With a couple of exceptions, those included are poets turning their hands to science fiction poetry, rather than science fiction writers turning their hands to poetry.

I'll try a new (to me) poet, Carl Dennis and his chapbook Practical Gods which, for whatever it's worth, won the Pulitzer in 2002. We'll see.

For a long, narrative poem, the throne of Labdacus Gjertrud Schnackenberg is dense, allusive and fascinating.

A good friend just gave me Michael Crummey's novel Galore which is weirdly fascinating in its treatment of 19thC (?) Newfoundland fishing culture.

24 - I struggle with poetry as well. I signed up for the emails. I'll also be reading a dead poet, Ruben Dario, described by my mother-in-law as 'the greatest voice for all the Hispanic people.'

Glad my list was useful to some of you - I worried I had gotten carried away and overwhelmed you with my enthusiasm...

timjones, thanks for the info on the poetry anthology - when I don't yet know a literary field well, I actually love anthologies as a kind of primer / sample-pack

fannyprice, I agree, there is a lot of narrative poetry out there that differs from prose in little besides line-breaks. Your question - what is a poem? - is a good one. I once started out a poetry course by asking my students exactly that and by presenting them with an assortment of things - is this a poem? how about this? We talked about sound poetry, shredded texts, lyrical perfume ads, e.e. cummings' poempicture,
"r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r" (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15402), and a snippet from a government document broken up into credible poetry-like lines. How much of it was poetry?

There was no consensus, with the exception of identifiable formal poetry - bound, as you say, by conventions like meter, rhyme, tropes, formal structures... I think in the end we were able to agree that a basic requirement for a poem was that it use a form that urged or demanded extra-close-up attention from the reader - attention on a word-by-word, line-by-line level, attention to imagery and sound effects, to the visual image of the text on the page.

Maybe it's like Duchamp's urinal, "fountain" - it's poetry if enough of us agree that it is and frame it as such...

Anyone else have thoughts on this?

From my message 3 you might properly infer that I share some of fannyprice's concern in her message 24. I think a reasonably complicated contract could make all the demands of:

a basic requirement for a poem was that it use a form that urged or demanded extra-close-up attention from the reader - attention on a word-by-word, line-by-line level, attention to imagery and sound effects, to the visual image of the text on the page

when it came time to dispute it. And that contract would strike almost nobody as a poem.

Visual image of the text on the page is a distraction. We had circulating among us in high school a physics text with ragged right justification done that way to ease reading; among the cohort there were those who called it poetry because of the justification. Meanwhile we were often told in English and, I think, French classes that poetry was fundamentally oral.

The other elements of your description can fit various prose forms just as easily as they fit poetic ones.

I read a very long time ago in a serious rhyming dictionary that what distinguishes poetry from prose is meter. Meter need not be stiff as Milton proved with Paradise Lost, but it must be there.

There seems to be a couple of really off the mark markers of poetry in the imagination of some would be acknowledged poets. Earnestness does not make a collection of words poetry. Cooing the text does not make a collection of words poetry.

Finally I would add parenthetically but I think not irrelevantly that there has been bad poetry.

Robert

>29 Mr.Durick:, ok Mr.Durick, I laughed when you said "We had circulating among us in high school a physics text with ragged right justification done that way to ease reading; among the cohort there were those who called it poetry because of the justification." (italics mine) In high school, I took a poetry writing course and worked on the school literary magazine - in both venues, it often seemed that a poem was something that people wrote and then manipulated the text justification to make it more "artsy". I remember doing the same myself. I am obviously an ass, as I remember being part of a "snark squad" of snotty pseudo intellectuals who tried to write the most "faux deep" poems we could just by stringing together incomprehensible surrealistic images. Inevitably, we were rewarded, praised and published (only in the high school lit mag of course!) for our "efforts." Perhaps this attitude is part of my issue with poetry.

And yet, I love foreign language poetry, when I can read it in the original. Some of my best-loved poems are the Russian poems I read as a child at Russian immersion summer camp. I think part of the love of those poems is situational - the parts of my past that they remind me of when I think of them now (how the pretentious boy I had a crush on pressed Vladimir Mayakovsky into my hands and told me how great socialism was, or how dreamy my grad-student professor sounded reading Lomonosov, or how much we cracked up reading Bella Akhmadulina's poem about a factory furnace because we didn't understand why anyone would fetishize industry...). But I think part of why I loved them then was because the fact that they were in a different language made it essential that I study every word and how each word fit together to create a meaning and a feeling. I think when I read English poetry, my eyes tend to gloss over it and I focus on the overall meaning, like one might read a newspaper article. I don't know how to read poetry in English.

Durrick, I don't think I can agree with you - as you do not with me. To my mind, meter is one thing that distinguishes formal poetry from other sorts of writing. Some of what I would consider poetry, however, does not make use of meter. Visual appearance on the page is important to concrete poetry, which usually distinguishes itself by far more than a ragged right edge.

I'm not sure consensus matters here though. Whether or not we can agree that something is poetry has little bearing on whether or not you or I or anyone else enjoys that particular text. Call it what you will.

(I worry that we've veered away from our purpose of celebrating poetry here and run the risk of adjudicating over it. Not everyone likes poetry - or perhaps contemporary poetry - which is fine. But suggesting (perhaps unintentionally) that contemporary poets are meaningless cooers whose literary form is nothing more than pretension - unless it adheres to the unrevised conventions of yesteryear - is maybe not in keeping with the spirit of celebration. Just a thought.)

The shape of concrete poetry distinguishes concrete poetry from other poetry not concrete poetry from prose.

A major problem I have with what is called poetry nowadays is that it is bad and does not amount to much of anything, but because the poet is earnest and contorts well and because there is some attempt to manipulate emotion the writing is called poetry and is deemed good. Throwing in a trope doesn't change a thing regarding mode or quality.

Whether a work is poetry or not is a matter of form. I suspect there is no meaning to the statement, "Formally it may not be a poem, but informally it is poetry."

Robert

Scarred as I am by definitional struggles such as "where is the boundary between science fiction and fantasy", and the even more fraught "what (if anything) distinguishes speculative fiction from literary fiction", I don't have much enthusiasm for efforts to enforce a clear separation of poetry from prose. It is a continuum, along which one passes imperceptibly into the other.

Why worry about what it is? Why not just read or listen to the work in question and decide whether you like the effect it has on you?

Agreed, timjones. I too have scars. ;) And since poetry nowadays is what this thread aims to celebrate, perhaps we might do better to focus on those living poets whose works we do enjoy, and leave those whose works we don't to others.

On that note, I am very much enjoying rereading Tim Lilburn's Orphic Politics - an "Orpheus-like descent" into illness wrought of gorgeously cadenced long lines. Lilburn is too shamanic for some, but his work is challenging, philosophical and, to my mind, always superbly written:

"I dug a slot into no address, / my knee geigered a snailheaded ghost, an unread Chaldean library below the hover of Plato's soul. / In small stone houses, violet fields were artillerying from a century ago under the floors."

I, too, carry many scars and therefore agree with Tim and Cocoa that we should perhaps leave the labelling discussion to another thread, and enjoy poetry here.

A living poet whose work I enjoy after "discovering" only in the last two years is Mark Doty. I have an unread collection on my shelves which I will read this month and comment on here.

Here is an excerpt from one of his:

"SIGNAL


LOST COCKATIEL, cried the sign, hand-lettered,

taped to the side of a building: last seen on 16th



between Fifth and Sixth, gray body, orange cheek patches,

yellow head. Name: Omar. Somebody's dear, I guess,



though how do you lose a cockatiel on 16th Street?

Flown from a ledge, into the sky he's eyed



for months or years, into the high limbs of the ginkgos,

suddenly free? I'm looking everywhere in the rustling



globes and spires shot through with yellow,

streaking at the edges, for any tropic flash of him. Why



should I think I'd see him, in the vast flap this city is?....

from http://www.markdoty.org/id13.html

#36: Love it! Which collection do you have, Andrew? I think I'll look for his books, too.

As some of you will know, I avoid poetry like the plague. I just don't get it.

However, I am willing to rise to the April challenge if only to prove to myself that poetry = bad! (ETA: perhaps I'm not going into this in the best frame of mind!)

Looking at our shelves we own three collections of poetry only one of which is by a living poet, Simon Armitage. He's one of the UK's best known poets at the moment I think - he pops up on all kinds of culture TV shows and is often in the Guardian. I think the fact that he is Northern and working-class makes him a bit of a novelty.

So how do I approach this collection? Should I read it all in one sitting? That's my natural instinct. But I'm assuming that by reading one or two a day I'll give each poem more time to sink it and it may help my appreciation.

Speaking as someone who reads quite a few poetry collections, it is very rare for me to read a collection straight through (and - a wee plug for a fellow New Zealand poet - the last collection that compelled me to read it in one sitting was My Iron Spine by Helen Rickerby).

Usually, I read the first few poems, then burrow around in the collection looking for other poems that seem promising. I think your one-or-two-a-day plan is promising.

If I have the chance, I like to read the poems out loud. If no-one's around, I attempt a facsimile of the author's likely accent!

Finally, another plug for a living author - though I don't yet have his books, poems I've read and heard by the UK's John Siddique make his work seem well worth following up.

I just want to second Tim's suggestion for reading a poems out loud. If I'm truly intrigued by a poem, I read it, then read it out loud, then reread it, then read it out loud again. Often the poem "opens up" for me in the process.

>24 fannyprice: You are a brave woman, fanny. And I see several others have stepped in answer your question. I think a taste for poetry is acquired like a taste for anything else - wine, novels, chocolate, visual art - through exposure and study (I don't mean academic study) and I think it's very individual.

I'd recommend you listen to some of the YouTube poetry readings linked in #7 and see if you like any of those. I'm with Tim Jones here: Why worry about what it is? Why not just read or listen to the work in question and decide whether you like the effect it has on you?

I want poetry to say something to me, to enlighten me or move me or make me laugh. I enjoy it most when a poet allows me to see something in a way I've never seen it before. I enjoy the succinctity of the language used and the music (the sounds and rhythm) and imagery in that language.

>30 fannyprice: Well, I didn't stipulate that it had to be in English:-)

>38 charbutton: Until recently I rarely read collections straight through, but since LT I tend to force myself to do that so I can talk about the book. Even then, a read through takes me days - sometimes weeks, because I will only read a few poems at at time (and sometimes higgledy piggledy through the book).

Collections of poetry are are not unlike music albums, imo - there's few really great songs and the rest are just ok.

>32 Mr.Durick: Well, I can agree that there is a fair amount of drek out there, but probably proportionally no more than there is in any other creative arena (fiction, music, visual art...etc).

>39 timjones: you reminded me that in Nicholson Baker's the Anthologist which I just finished reading, his character - a poet - said that he sometimes read a poem out loud in a variety of accents, which I thought hilarious.

Oh yes, absolutely -- read poetry aloud whenever possible. It's about the sound and the rhythm and tasting the words. A good poem should dance in your mouth and your head.

Personally, I find it really tough to read a collection straight through, unless the poems have some kind of narrative link.

Unfolding Bud by Naoshi Koriyama

One is amazed
By a water-lily bud
Unfolding
With each passing day,
Taking on a richer color
And new dimensions.

One is not amazed,
At first glance,
By a poem,
Which is tight-closed
As a tiny bud.

Yet one is surprised
To see the poem
Gradually unfolding,
Revealing its rich inner self
As one reads it
Again
And over again.

#42
Thanks, Jane, I really like that.

#37 Darryl:

I have read Doty's Turtle, Swan, Sweet Machine and his Dog Years. I see, going through my shelves, that I have Source, Atlantis and Heaven's Coast to look forward to.

And in the not living but living-on category, I will be reading The Odyssey in the Fagles translation.

>41 avaland:, Perhaps ignorant is a better word. The question was truly meant and I didn't mean to sound like I was bitching or complaining. Just honestly trying to engage with the idea of poetry.

Helen Dunmore's National Poetry Competition-winning poem

Why did you tell them to be quiet
and sit up straight until you came back?
The malarkey would have led you to them.

You go from one parked car to another
and peer through the misted windows
before checking the registration.

Your pocket bulges. You've bought them sweets
but the mist is on the inside of the windows.
How many children are breathing?

The malarkey's over in the back of the car.
The day is over outside the windows.
No street light has come on.

You fed them cockles soused in vinegar,
you took them on the machines.
You looked away just once.

You looked away just once
as you leaned on the chip-shop counter,
and forty years were gone.

You have been telling them for ever
Stop that malarkey in the back there!
Now they have gone and done it.
Is that mist, or water with breath in it?

Well so far not so impressed with Carl Dennis, despite his Pulitzer; however I AM liking Robert Lowell's life studies a good deal. Now I'm wondering why i didn't care for his poetry when i read it the first time a good while ago. The Lowell's in our outbuilding - where we keep our ping pong table, exercise equipment, odds and ends and overflow books so i don't have it at hand to quote, but i'll do so later. (I've been reading it while exercycling) And i'm wondering about changes in my tastes in poetry over the years in general. Of the poets i liked in my late teens and 20s - i still like Frost, Ted Hughes, James Tate (and the "classics" - eg the metaphysicals, Yeats,etc). Don't care for Brautigan, Wakoski, Plath much these days. And the incredibly mixed bag of English romantics remains a mixed bag in my mind...Coleridge, Blake, Keats yea; Byron, Wordsworth nay.

Book #32: Re: Creation by Nikki Giovanni

Re: Creation, the third book of poems written by Nikki Giovanni, was published in 1970, and consists of 42 poems written between May 1969 and July 1970. During that time she gave birth to her only child, Thomas Watson Giovanni; the book, and its first poem, For Tommy, is dedicated to him. Re: Creation includes poems about prominent African Americans such as Aretha Franklin, Lena Horne, Nina Simone. Paul Robeson and Gwendolyn Brooks, along with ones about love and loneliness. There are far fewer poems about black militancy in this book than there were in her first two books, Black Feeling Black Talk and Black Judgement, and the collection as a whole is less angry and more reflective.

My favorite is Poem for Aretha, which describes her grueling life as a popular entertainer. Giovanni urges Franklin to cut back, for the sake of her family and her own health, and pleads with her fans to be less demanding. Here is an excerpt from the poem:

and if you say you're lonely or scared or tired how they always just say "oh come off it" or "did you see
how they loved you did you see huh did you?"
which most likely has nothing to do with you anyway
and i'm not saying aretha shouldn't have talent and i'm certainly
not saying she should quit
singing but as much as i love her i'd vote "yes" to her
doing four concerts a year and staying home or doing whatever
she wants and making records cause it's a shame
they way we are killing her
we eat up artists like there's going to be a famine at the end
of those three minutes when there are in fact an abundance
of talents just waiting let's put some
of the giants away for a while and deal with them like they have
a life to lead

Aretha doesn't have to relive billie holiday's life doesn't have
to relive dinah washington's death but who will
stop the pattern

The poems in Re: Creation are contained in The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1998, and it is also available for purchase from Alibris and Abebooks.

>48 kidzdoc: Darryl, I was interested to hear Giovanni read in one of the YouTube links I posted earlier in the thread. She reads so fast - breathlessly! And I feel that in this excerpt you have posted also.

Lois, I completely missed your post with the YouTube links! Thanks for that. However, when I tried to open the link you posted it didn't work, as the last two letters of the URL were missing. Here is the correct address:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9HbqMzgxzg

I loved the poem, and her reading of it.

I'll have to ask my mother this weekend, but I think she brought me to see Nikki Giovanni when I was quite young, and that I fell head over heels for her (if I remember correctly, I would have been around 9 or 10 years old). Nikki has always been one of my favorite names for a girl since then.

I bought her newest book, Bicycles: Love Poems, at Borders a little while ago, which I see that you also have. Are you planning to read it this month? I also bought Morning Haiku, the newest collection by Sonia Sanchez, a poet from Philadelphia who recently retired from teaching at Temple University. She is also one of my favorite poets. I'll read both books this coming week.

I think I'll also plan to read Americus I by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Overlord by Jorie Graham, as I've had both of them for awhile. And, either this month or in the near future I'll read Little Green by Chun Yu, which is a "first-person memoir of a child's view of the Chinese Cultural Revolution" in poetic form.

>50 kidzdoc: I read Bicycles last month and left some commentary on my thread.

I have a fair number of new collections, so perhaps I'll just take out my literary dowsing rod and see what it points to...

Today I read Atwood's The Circle Game. Like many people here, I am not a regular reader of poetry. However, I do enjoy it - I just never pick it up. I think four years of lit classes led me to believe that poetry = academic study. I'm trying to change this, and might attempt more poetry collections throughout this year.

The reason I wanted to read The Circle Game is because I knew it contained my favourite Atwood poem, "This is a Photograph of Me":

"This is a Photograph of Me"

It was taken some time ago.
At first it seems to be
a smeared
print: blurred lines and grey flecks
blended with the paper;

then, as you scan
it, you see in the left-hand corner
a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree
(balsam or spruce) emerging
and, to the right, halfway up
what ought to be a gentle
slope, a small frame house.

In the background there is a lake,
and beyond that, some low hills.

(The photograph was taken
the day after I drowned.

I am in the lake, in the center
of the picture, just under the surface.

It is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say
how large or small I am:
the effect of water
on light is a distortion

but if you look long enough,
eventually
you will be able to see me.)

I recently assigned this poem to my grade 10 classes (15 year-olds), and they really tore into it. They loved that it wasn't formal, that it wasn't full of literary devices, that the language was simple. At first, they didn't really think that there was much going on at all. Then, we starting pulling it apart, talking about feminism and gender politics in general, and they came up with some exciting theories (sorry to gush - being a teacher is so much fun!)!

So, I wanted to read the The Circle Game to see if the rest of the poems compared to "This is a Photograph of Me", which I think is quite brilliant. Of course, there were a few uneven entries, but some were breathtaking. I should note that this was the collection that catapulted Atwood to fame in the 1960s, and it won the Governor General's Award for Poetry - so I had high expectations going in.

For me, poetry should be exactly what Lois said in Message 41: "I want poetry to say something to me, to enlighten me or move me or make me laugh. I enjoy it most when a poet allows me to see something in a way I've never seen it before. I enjoy the succinctity of the language used and the music (the sounds and rhythm) and imagery in that language." Atwood does this, IMO.

Here is another poem that made me stop in my tracks (and made me reread it several times):

"Playing Cards"

In this room we are always in:

tired with all the other games
we get out cards and play
at double
solitaire:
the only thing
either of us might win.

There's a queen.
Or rather two of them
joined at the waist, or near
(you can't tell where
exactly, under the thick
brocaded costume)
or is it one
woman with two heads?
Each has hair drawn back
made of lines
and a half-smile that is part
of a set pattern.

Each holds a golden flower
with five petals, ordered
and unwilting.

Outside there is a lake
or this time is it a street

There's a king (or kings)
too, with a beard to show
he is a man
and something abstract
in his hand
that might be either
a sceptre or a sword.

The colour doesn't matter,
black or red:
there's little choice between
heart and spade.
The important things
are the flowers and the swords;
but they stay flat,
are cardboard.

Outside there is a truck
or possibly a motorboat

and in this lighted room
across the table, we
confront each other

wearing no costumes.

You have nothing
that serves the function of a sceptre
and I have
certainly
no flowers.

#51: You did? Oh...can I blame this oversight on my advancing age? I'll head over there straight away.

#52: I love those poems, Cait; I'll come back and re-read them over the month.

I forgot to post my latest book on this thread:

The Women and the Men by Nikki Giovanni



I finished another book of poems, The Women and the Men by Nikki Giovanni, the fifth book contained within The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni. It was published in 1975, and consisted of the poems published in Re: Creation, which was published in 1970 in limited quantities, and 21 new poems. Her continued maturation as a woman and a poet were the most interesting and rewarding aspects of this collection, which is the favorite of the ones I've read so far.

An example:

Poetry

poetry is motion graceful
as a fawn
gentle as a teardrop
strong like the eye
finding peace in a crowded room

we poets tend to think
our words are golden
though emotion speaks too
loudly to be defined
by silence

sometimes after midnight or just before
the dawn
we sit typewriter in hand
pulling loneliness around us
forgetting our lovers or children
who are sleeping
ignoring the weary wariness
of our own logic
to compose a poem
no one understands it
it never says "love me" for poets are
beyond love
it never says "accept me" for poems seek not
acceptance but controversy
it only says "i am" and therefore
i concede that you are too

a poem is pure energy
horizontally contained
between the mind
of the poet and the ear of the reader
if it does not sing discard the ear
for poetry is song
if it does not delight discard
the heart for poetry is joy
if it does not inform then close
off the brain for it is dead
if it cannot heed the insistent message
that life is precious

which is all we poets
wrapped up in our loneliness
are trying to say

Rita Dove's Sonata Mulattica: Poems is a tour de force. Review here: http://www.librarything.com/work/6850813

Thanks, Jane,

sounds wonderful.

I'm only up to post 41, and need to run, but wanted to say I've always loved this poem by Billy Collins, and it seems appropriate:

Introduction To Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

link here: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/introduction-to-poetry/

Thanks all for your advice on reading poetry. Simon Armitage will be accompanying me on my journey to work tomorrow, although I guess I should leave the reading out loud until I get home!

My gawd; do I even know of any living poets? And yeah, yeah; I am talking about besides urania1!~! I do not think so. I guess that lets me out of this assignment.

Daniel! You did it to me!! You *made* me succumb to this challenge.

I happened to be at the library today. I happened to remember reading this thread. I happened to realize how much I like the poems of Billy Collins. So, yes, I'm now reading The Trouble With Poetry by Billy Collins. :)

#59 - Madeline - well then, maybe I should actually join in too... instead of just reading the thread.

I probably last read poetry in my undergrad years of English study, where we were forced to read and assess poems critically. I think it might have spoilt poetry for me. But having pledged my intention to participate in this challenge, I went and found a volume I thought I'd enjoy.

I picked up The Dream in the Next Body by Gabeba Baderoon.

The book won the Daimler-Chrysler Award for South Africa poetry in 2005. Gabeba Baderoon grew up in the Western Cape, where I live. Many of the poems relate to her experiences in the Cape, but some are based in the US where she currently resides. She teaches Women's Studies and African and African American Studies at Pennsylvania State University.

A couple of poems I’d like to share:

The Dance
Once in a museum I stood
at the entrance to a room looking
at Matisse’s Dance.
A man walked in front of me,
stopped.
He tilted his head, as though
listening more than seeing
and, for a moment ,
I saw the dance pass
through his whole body.

A Season of Modesty
Autumn here is rash. The insistent colours
and the supple light are fine but really, why add
opaque mornings roused to ripeness by the late sun
so the day swells like a purpled plum, or grape?
And the light through the leaves variegates the air.
And the leaves! Do they have to attempt
the butterfly’s design? Everyone delights, I’m sure,
in such immoderate displays, but I find it

unwise, unguarded, extreme. I would take
Autumn’s elbow and show it a more measured pace.
And soon everything will follow. The squirrels
won’t ribbon unnecessarily round trees all day,
and the smell of rain and fruit won’t seem to stem all need.

The reading experience was really enjoyable! Thank you, Lois, for the inspiration. I hope to be back before month end with more :)

I will be reading Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins and (if I can find it) District and Circle by Seamus Heaney.

For anyone struggling with reading poetry, I recommend How to Read a Poem And Fall in Love with Poetry by Edward Hirsch.

And while I'm here, let me recommend Mr. Hirsch's poetry as well. I am also rereading his first collection, For the Sleepwalkers. Here is my favorite poem from the book:

Still Life: An Argument

Listen, it only takes a moment
to move, to knot ourselves
together like the ends of a rope
longing to be knotted together,

but let’s avoid it, let’s wait.
Ropes, even the sturdiest ropes,
pull, they strain, struggle, eventually
they break. But think of it;

in a still life a knife
pauses above a platter of
meat, it only takes a second, and
poof it becomes the idea of a knife,

the drawing of a knife suspended
in the air like a guillotine
about to weightlessly drop on the neck
of a murderer and send him

shrieking into oblivion forever,
but it never happens, the knife
keeps falling and falling, but never
falls. That knife could be us.

The milk on the table is always
about to spill, the meat could be
encased in wax paper to be
protected from flies, but it’s

not, it’s unnecessary, the flies
threaten to descend on the
exposed meat, but they can’t, they’re
no longer flies, but a painting of flies,

the blood pooled on the platter
of meat never evaporates, it can’t;
look, it’s still there; and if I
never touch you, well then, we never die.

Listen, even lovers have still lives,
have whole months when they hang
together like moths on an unlit
light bulb, waiting for the bulb to light,

but if it never does then the moths
survive, meat should be allowed
to sit on the table forever
without being devoured by flies

and if that’s not possible, well
then we still have this picture,
the still life not of how it will be,
but of how it was, for the knife and the meat

and the flies, and for us the night we
hesitated together. From now on, love,
we will always be about to destroy
each other, always about to touch.

Here's a review of Hirsch's THE LIVING FIRE
New and Selected Poems, 1975-2010 from the March 28 NYTBR:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/books/review/Campion-t.html

Thanks, Jane!

--> 41

I want poetry to...make me laugh.

This poem by Billy Collins called "The Revenant" from The Trouble With Poetry made me laugh.

I am the dog you put to sleep,
as you like to call the needle of oblivion,
come back to tell you this simple thing:
I never liked you--not one bit.

When I licked your face,
I thought of biting off your nose.
When I watched you toweling yourself dry,
I wanted to leap and unman you with a snap.

I resented the way you moved...more

An FYI: A revenant is a person who returns as a spirit after death.

Book #35: Morning Haiku by Sonia Sanchez

Morning Haiku is a slim collection of haiku compositions, most of which celebrate the lives and mourn the deaths of prominent African-American musicians, singers, writers, and activists. My favorite poem is 10 haiku (for Philadelphia Murals), which pays tribute to the murals created through the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program:

10 haiku (for Philadelphia Murals)

1.
Philadelphia roots
lighting these walls
with fireflies

2.
flowers stretched
in prayer on a
cornerstone wall

3.
brownskinned
children dancing
with butterflies

4.
these children's
faces humiliate
the stars

5.
Philadelphia
painted with
blue hallelujahs

6.
winter
a warrior's face
i hear our bones singing

7.
in the open
alley a galaxy
of dreams

8.
common ground
is we, forever
breathing this earth

9.
hands
in the green light
saluting peace

10.
even in the
rain, these murals
pause with rainbows

Morning Haiku is a gentle and evocative collection of poems, one that I'll return to repeatedly for greater enjoyment and appreciation.

Those are lovely, Darryl.

I'm into another book of poetry...(when I really should be reading and reviewing my Early Reviewer book)...



Father Said: Poems by Hal Sirowitz

My husband said this poem was *not* funny. I thought it was hilarious!

The Two Ends of a Cat

Your sister says she loves the cat,
Father said, but it's your mother
who cleans her bowl & changes
her kitty litter. She does the dirty work.
Your sister does the enjoyable jobs--she
feeds and brushes her. She only deals with
the front of the cat & leaves the back half
for your mother. But a cat has both a front
& a back. By right she should be taking turns & not
leave your mother in charge of the most difficult part.

Upgraded to Serious: Poems by Heather McHugh (US, 2009).

Heather McHugh's poems are witty and very musical, with lots of wordplay - and they have energy and attitude. I admit, that with some of her poems, it takes me a few reads to "get" what she is saying and i wonder if she sometimes sacrifices some clarity with the wordplay and music. But, I also admit, sometimes I read them over again for just the sounds. This collection offers a variety of poems, some more or less of all the descriptors I've used for her work.

Here's one I liked:

LEAF-LITTER ON ROCK FACE

Things are not
unmoving (or else what

is inging for?) These things
once-living

drift toward the stone
more movingly for any human glance

that passes over them. The wind
wells up to spill a trail

of onces off the nevers,
take opaqueness from an eye

to mind, or near it.
Every rocking

takes some leaving
to a stonish spirit.
-----
(ha! you are wondering where the wit and attitude are, aren't you?)
-----
PHILOSOPHER ORDERS CRISPY PORK

I love him so, this animal I pray
was treated kindly. Let me pay as much as even
greater pig-lovers see fit

to guarantee him that. As for his fat,
I'd give up years yes years of my
own life for such

a gulpable semblable.
(My life! Such as it is, this
liberality of leaves! The world

won't need those seventeen more
poems, after all, there being
so few subjects to be treated. Three

if by subject we mean anyone
submitted to another's will. Two
if by subject we mean

topic. One if by death we wind up
meaning love. And none
if a subject must entail

the curlicue's indulgence of itself).
---------------

(and here is just an excerpt - about half - of this poem....but I think you can see where it is going)

NO SEX FOR PRIESTS

The horse in harness suffers:
he's not feeling up to snuff.

The feeler's sensate but the cook
pronounces lobsters tough.

The chain's too short: the dog's at pains
to reach a sheaf of shade. One half a squirrel's

whirling there, upon the interstate.
....

One half a squirrel's

whirling there, upon the interstate.


Here's how to keep squirrels off the Interstate, Lois:

"Squirrel Problem" by Hal Sirowitz in Father Said: Poems

Don't feed the squirrels in front of the house,
Father said. They'll think they live here,
& move into the attic. Do it in front
of the neighbor's house. Let them be
his problem. But don't let him catch you
more than once. The second time
he notices you doing it he'll accuse you
of trying to relocate the squirrels from
your house to his. They go where
the food is. That's why when I spot
an acorn near the house I quickly
get rid of it. Leaving it there would
be like giving them their welcome mat.

:)

By the way, thanks for presenting this fun challenge, Lois (and also thanks to kidzdoc who brought it over to the 75 Books Challenge in 2010 - TIOLI group). I couldn't help myself. I finally succumbed. It's been so very long since I've chosen poetry books to read.

>65 SqueakyChu: There is definitely a lot of Billy Collins's poetry that makes me laugh, so also Carol Ann Duffy. There's nothing like a good chortle, eh?

Here is one of my favorites by Billy Collins:

A Sense of Place

If things had happened differently,
Maine or upper Michigan
might have given me a sense of place—

a topic that now consumes 87%
of all commentary on American literature.

I might have run naked by a bayou
or been beaten near a shrouded cove on a coastline.

Arizona could have raised me.
Even New York’s Westchester County
with its stone walls scurrying up into the woods
could have been the spot to drop a couple of roots.

But as it is, the only thing that gives me
a sense of place is this upholstered chair
with its dark brown covers,
angled into a room near a corner window.

I am the native son of only this wingback seat
standing dutifully on four squat legs,
its two arms open in welcome,

illuminated by a swan-neck lamp
and accompanied by a dog-like hassock,
the closest thing the chair has to a pet.

This is my landscape—
a tobacco-colored room,
the ceiling with its river-like crack,
the pond of a mirror on one wall
a pen and ink drawing of a snarling fish on another.

And behind me, a long porch
from which the sky may be viewed,
sometimes stippled with high clouds,
and crossed now and then by a passing bird—
little courier with someplace to go—

other days crowded with thunderheads,
the light turning an alarming green,
the air stirred by the nostrils of apocalyptic horses,
and me slumped in my chair, my back to it all.

Not from a collection; published in Poetry magazine. Don't ask me for the date.

Darn... I knew there was something else I meant to get at the library today. Pickle. Next time I'll remember! It's going to have to be out of the library since I only realised that I have a penchant for dead poets when I perused my shelf the other day!

Charlie Rose with the US Poet Laureate:

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9342

Reminder (at least for this thread): Please, don't forget to note the collection you are reading, when you post poetry. I like to think it's okay to share a poem or two as we are reading a collection (thereby promoting said collection), rather than just posting and reposting an author's copyrighted material on the internet without attribution of some kind. Maybe, one can note a previous post if that is where the information on the collection/anthology is?

posting and reposting an author's copyrighted material

I was wondering about that. I'm reticient to post more than two poems by the same author for that reason. I'm also not sure about posting a poem in its entirety, although not all poems are written in their entirety elsewhere on the internet.

76> Yes, but reading only a portion of a poem is sacrilege! Unlike fiction or essays, you just can't excerpt a poem (unless it's something huge like Paradise Lost or The Faery Queene). Lyric poems/short poems depend upon form and the development of an idea within that form, and you have to have the entire poem to see, experience, and comprehend it.

reading only a portion of a poem is sacrilege

No! I wouldn't encourage that. What I would do, though, is what I did in post #65 where I posted the beginning of a poem with a link to the whole poem on the author's website.

However, not all poems are for all people. If I find a long poem that's not appealing to me, I'd rather read an excerpt of it to see if I like it before reading pages and pages of it.

I have just completed a collection by a living poet, although this isn't my "official" April challenge as that was to read a collection by a living non-NZ poet: that's coming up.

The collection I finished was Cornelius & Co: Collected Working Class Verse 1996-2009. I'll be reviewing it on my blog in a couple of days.

Incidentally, I'm only prepared to post poems by living poets when I have their permission to do so. Since I was sent Cornelius & Co for review, I'm comfortable with posting a poem from it here - see below.

A Left Hook

an early experience
of the left hook (admirably

tight if open-handed) came
at the beatific hand of

Monseigneur O'Dea - too
old to be a parish priest - who

about to impart the very
body & blood of Christ found I

was not holding the paten
correctly. a few years later

an equally irascible boxing
coach imparted impeccable

advice on how to throw it,
though he didn't know the bit

about feinting with Jesus.
when the good monseigneur

had his final photo taken
he bestowed a copy on our family

- old friends should be so blessed -
for a decade it sat on the mantelpiece

between a bunch of plastic grapes
& a glass bowl that snowed if shaken.

This poem is from John O'Connor's recently published Cornelius & Co: Collected Working-Class Verse 1996-2009 (Post Pressed, Queensland, 2010). I will be reviewing this collection shortly on my blog.

Here's one by one of my favorite living poets, Galway Kinnell. It's from Three Books.

St. Francis And The Sow

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Oh, that is so beautiful. We so often take for granted in living creatures just how beautiful and special each animal is, often making judgements quickly and not in a context of gentleness. That poem goes into my collection as well.

82> I'm so glad you liked it! I love Kinnell.

From a replacement copy of Absences an older book by James Tate - really the first book of really good poetry i bought back in college. ABEbooks!!!

Brainchild

scientist have injected into rats
a fear of darkness.

How can I fear anything,
I can drive with my lights off
2 miles an hour
through a blind intersection
full of rats:

one thin Man is scaling a very thin ledge
because he wants a radio.
I don't blame him;
I go faster, turn a corner.

Even my car has its own radio
and darkness
such as can be heard
or imagined when there is nothing
the light has not uncovered
for so many days
my head wants to ache.

They have to boil
11 pounds of rat brains to yield less than
1000th of a gram
of scotophobin --

but that thousandth of a gram
is a fear of darkness so pure,

I hide it in the extreme edges
of a smile, which they are
sure to find some day and bake

into one howling brainchild.

Finished another book of poetry by a living poet! I wrote a review of Mother Said: Poems by Hal Sirowitz and posted my review here. A most entertaining read!

I have been going through many of my books by living poets in this past week, trying to find suitable poems for a class assignment. So far I have reread:

Praise by Robert Hass
Wild Gratitude by Edward Hirsch
Antarctic Traveller by Katha Politt
Field Work by Seamus Heaney
Selected and New Poems by Norrman Dubie (no touchstone)
Out-of-the-Body Travel by Stanley Plumley (actually, I think he might have passed on last year)
American Primitive by Mary Oliver
The Shore by David St. John (no touchstone)
Hundreds of Fireflies by Brad Leithauser

Cariola,

could you tell us anything, even a thumbs up or down if you don't have time for more, about the collections you mention above?

Bicycles: Love Poems by Nikki Giovanni

The latest collection of poems by Giovanni, who is currently a professor at Virginia Tech. The first and last entries describe the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, in which a deranged student shot 32 people to death on campus before taking his own life. Most of the other poems are tender statements of love, with the bicycle used as a metaphor, as "love requires trust and balance". A representative example is If Only (which I'll post in its entirety here, as it is also available on the book's page on the HarperCollins web site):

If Only

If I had never been in your arms
Never danced that dance
Never inhaled your slightly sweaty odor

Maybe I could sleep at night

If I had never held your hand
Never been so close
To the most kissable lips in the universe
Never wanted ever so much
To rest my tongue in your dimple

Maybe I could sleep at night

If I wasn't so curious
About whether or not you snore
And when you sleep do you cuddle your pillow
What you say when you wake up
And if I tickle you
Will you heartedly laugh

If this enchantment
This bewilderment
This longing
Could cease

If this question I ache to ask could be answered

If only I could stop dreaming of you

Maybe I could sleep at night

#13 not alive I'm afraid, but Robert Frost has some wonderfully subtle narrative poems. I am not thinking of the Death of the Hired Hand, probably best known, but some others. There is one - afraid I don't have the title - in which a man sees his wife looking at something out the window of the stairway landing. It turns out to be the grave of their stillborn (or maybe the child died right after birth), and the poem is a sort of conversation, but very revealing of how it is between these two people.

87> OK, here are a few comments on the books listed above. I've put them in order of preference.

Field Work by Seamus Heaney. In my opinion, contemporary poetry just doesn't get much better than this. Heaney has such a wonderful connection with the land, with his ancestral home, and he's a master of language and imagery.

American Primitive by Mary Oliver. Oliver is probably the best American nature poet writing today. She has an amazing eye for detail.

Wild Gratitude by Edward Hirsch. There's something for everyone here: Hirch's subjects vary from his cat to Russian novelists.

Selected and New Poems by Norman Dubie (no touchstone). My favorites in the collection are Dubie's "persona poems," when he writes in the voice of historical or fictional characters. "Queen Elizabeth and the Bear" is a great one.

Out-of-the-Body Travel by Stanley Plumley (actually, I think he might have passed on last year). A mixed bag, some poems quite astonishing, others seeming a bit forced.

Hundreds of Fireflies by Brad Leithauser. I was not as impressed upon rereading this collection as I was years ago.

Praise by Robert Hass. Ditto.

Antarctic Traveller by Katha Politt. Some fine feminist poems here.

The Shore by David St. John (no touchstone). A very tiny collection, again, not as impressive as it was 20+ years ago.

Just finished Sharon Olds's One Secret Thing.

Why do I want to scream, "Get over it!"?

I decided I wanted to find one I hadn't read before by Alberto Rios. He is the poet whose sestina about his grandmother partially inspired me to write my own. I posted that poem last year, (http://www.librarything.com/topic/61871#1261076). Here is the new one:

Rabbits and Fire

by Alberto Ríos

Everything’s been said
But one last thing about the desert,
And it’s awful: During brush fires in the Sonoran desert,
Brush fires that happen before the monsoon and in the great,
Deep, wide, and smothering heat of the hottest months,
The longest months,
The hypnotic, immeasurable lulls of August and July—
During these summer fires, jackrabbits—
Jackrabbits and everything else
That lives in the brush of the rolling hills,
But jackrabbits especially—
Jackrabbits can get caught in the flames,
No matter how fast and big and strong and sleek they are.
And when they’re caught,
Cornered in and against the thick
Trunks and thin spines of the cactus,
When they can’t back up any more,
When they can’t move, the flame—
It touches them,
And their fur catches fire.
Of course, they run away from the flame,
Finding movement even when there is none to be found,
Jumping big and high over the wave of fire, or backing
Even harder through the impenetrable
Tangle of hardened saguaro
And prickly pear and cholla and barrel,
But whichever way they find,
What happens is what happens: They catch fire
And then bring the fire with them when they run.
They don’t know they’re on fire at first,
Running so fast as to make the fire
Shoot like rocket engines and smoke behind them,
But then the rabbits tire
And the fire catches up,
Stuck onto them like the needles of the cactus,
Which at first must be what they think they feel on their skins.
They’ve felt this before, every rabbit.
But this time the feeling keeps on.
And of course, they ignite the brush and dried weeds
All over again, making more fire, all around them.
I’m sorry for the rabbits.
And I’m sorry for us
To know this.

Alberto Ríos, “Rabbits and Fire” from The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body.

#92 - See this poem is nice. There are things getting said - I can understand them, and interpret them in different ways. There's something to work with. Not so with the two collections I've been trying to read - I can't do anything with them, nothing is making sense. It's pure frustrating confusion for me.

A Village Life by Louise Glück - which I can make occassional sense of
Versed by Rae Armantrout - this year's Pulitzer winner - I'm getting nothing...sigh.

ETA touchstone fixes

That poem in #92 is so sad, though. It's almost too painful to read. :(

Nevertheless, it expresses so much and moves that sadness and pain into the reader's heart and soul. Basically, an effective poem.

Sorry about your poetry selection, Daniel. Did you read a few poems (or excerpts) before choosing your poetry books? If not, try to do so in the future. Poetry differs so much among authors.

The best poems are the ones that resonate deeply with you no matter how popular they are or how many awards they've won. Those are the ones you won't want to forget so you quickly run to your pc (in the past, for me it had been my typewriter) and copy them down. The best poems do not need to be from known poets either. They can be from your friends, from your children, or from an anonymous person (although you'd never know whether poems such as these in book form would qualify for the Read-A-Living-Poet challenge). :)

#94 Madeline - Good idea about sampling before reading too much (although I did sample Glück and liked it). These were "impulsive library pick-ups" if that makes any sense - part of the impulse coming from this thread, and my wanting to pick-up something newly published. I don't keep track of poetry publications - and really don't know anything about poetry - so it's all guesswork. Also "pure frustrating confusion" is a common reward for me when I try poetry.

95> He's an old chestnut by now as well as a multiple prize winner: Seamus Heaney. If you haven't read his work, give him a try. I guarantee there will be no "pure frustrating confusion," yet he's a wonderful poet. A younger poet you might also want to try is Li-Young Lee.

I'm a pretty sophisticated reader of poetry, but I much prefer poetry that has some meaning. A lot of the contemporary poets are either confessional (which doesn't always move someone who hasn't had a similar experience and may sound whiny or self-indulgent) or are more interested in sounds and effects than in expressing an idea or emotion.

Here's a fun idea for Read-A-Living Poet, Daniel. I think you have young children as you frequently read and review children's books here on LT. Why not borrow a library book of poetry by Jack Prelutsky (a children's author/poet) and read those poems aloud to your children? Perhaps try The New Kid on the Block? You'll be rolling in laughter, and your kid(s) will throughly enjoy the experience. A win-win situtation for all.

Here is a poem by Catherine Wing. I'm posting it mostly as an addendum to message 96: like it or not (and I'm not a fan), her poetry plays with sound and effect.

A Small Psalm

Sorrow be gone, be a goner, be forsooth un-sooth, make like a
suit and beat it, vamoose from the heavy heavy, be out from
under the night's crawlspace, call not for another stone, more
weight more weight, be extinguished, extinguish, the dark,
that which is deep and hollow, that which presses from all
sides, that which squeezes your heart into an artichoke-heart
jar and forbids it breathe, that which is measured by an
unbalanced scale, banish the broken, the unfixable, the
shattered, the cried-over, the cursed, the cursers, the curses—
curse them, the stone from the stone fruit, let it be fruit, the
pit from the pitted, the pock from the pocked, the rot from the
rotten, tarry not at the door, jam not the door's jamb, don't
look back, throw nothing over your shoulder, not a word, not
a word's edge, vowel, consonant, but run out, run out like the
end of a cold wind, end of season, and in me be replaced
with a breath of light, a jack-o'-lantern, a flood lamp or fuse
box, a simple match or I would even take a turn signal, traffic
light, if it would beat beat and flash flood like the moon at
high tide, let it, let it, let it flare like the firefly, let it spark and
flash, kindle and smoke, let it twilight and sunlight, and
sunlight and moonlight, and when it is done with its lighting
let it fly, will'-o-the-wisp, to heaven.

Here's another fun idea for the Read-A-Living-Poet challenge:

Make a tagmash of "poetry" plus one other term (your passion or interest). I did one for Daniel: (example). Now do one for yourself. Then find a book of poetry in the list. Be sure the author is still alive! Come back to report what you thought of the book you found (and read)!

I like my idea so much I'm going to cross post it to the 75 Books challenge (TIOLI) group!

#96 Deborah - Thanks for the suggestions! From my library, I've requested: Book of my nights the newest in our library from Li-Young Lee, Electric light and Finders keepers by Seamus Heaney.

#97 Madeline - I've (finally) been reading some poetry with the kids. We do a poem a night together and then move on to a story. I've requested The swamps of Sleethe : Poems from Beyond the Solar System by Jack Prelutsky.

I'll report back here :)

...

#98 - see, I love that.

Also, Madeline - the link in #99 takes me back this page.

Hey Dan,

just for you and your kids, another wonderful collection to read with kids is by a Canadian poet, very much alive, named Dennis Lee. The title poem is already reproduced on the Canadian Poetry Online site, so I feel perfectly fine about reproducing it in its entirety here:

Alligator Pie
Dennis Lee
From: Alligator Pie. Toronto: Macmillan, 1974.

Alligator pie, alligator pie,
If I don't get some I think I'm gonna die.
Give away the green grass, give away the sky,
But don't give away my alligator pie.

Alligator stew, alligator stew,
If I don't get some I don't know what I'll do.
Give away my furry hat, give away my shoe,
But don't give away my alligator stew.

Alligator soup, alligator soup,
If I don't get some I think I'm gonna droop.
Give away my hockey stick, give away my hoop,
But don't give away my alligator soup.

--> 100

Thanks! I fixed the link. The example is not really much good, but the idea is... :)

#101 Andrew - I found Dinosaur dinner (with a slice of alligator pie) : favorite poems / by Dennis Lee ; selected by Jack Prelutsky ; illustrated by Debbie Tilley - combining suggestions! - in my library. It's now requested.

Poet and author Mary McCallum has set up a neat "live poets" initiative called the Tuesday Poem, which brings together (so far) New Zealand, US and Irish poets in posting a poem - by themselves, or by another poet - each Tuesday.

There's now a central "Tuesday Poem" blog at

http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

from which all the Tuesday Poem posts are linked (on the left-hand side).

It's a cheap holiday in other people's poetry!

In other news, I have now started my "non-New Zealand living poet" collection for this challenge, Alternate Means of Transport by Cynthia MacDonald, and I'm afraid I'm finding it hard going. Cynthia MacDonald is a fine poet, technically speaking, but the poems I've read so far - all part of one sequence - don't hold any particular appeal or interest for me.

I've glanced ahead, however, and some of the later poems in the collection look to be much more to my taste, so I shall persist and hope to be rewarded.

>99 SqueakyChu: excellent idea! I tag-mashed poetry/workplace and while it doesn't give me much, it prompts me to pick up my tbr issues of The Bellevue Literary Review and read the poems. They're often amazingly resonant.

Yesterday I started reading Dread: Poems by Ai for the challenge. I wanted to learn more about her, but I found out that she had died last month. The New York Times published an obituary about her, which I had completely missed:

Ai, a Steadfast Poetic Channel of Hard Lives, Dies at 62

I'll finish this collection this weekend, but I guess I can't post my comments here...

I just read two powerful poems from Sharon Olds's latest collection, One Secret Thing, which were posted in this past Wednesday's Borzoi Reader Poem-A-Day e-mail:

When He Came for the Family

They looked at their daughter standing with her music
in her hand, the page covered with dots and
lines, with its shared language. They knew
families had been taken. What they did not know
was the way he would pick her cello up
by the scroll neck and take its amber
torso-shape and lift it and break it
against the fireplace. The brickwork crushed the
close-grained satiny wood, they stood and
stared at him.

The Signal

When they brought his body back, they told
his wife how he'd died:
the general thought they had taken the beach,
and sent in his last reserves. In the smokescreen,
the boats moved toward shore. Her husband
was the first man in the first boat
to move through the smoke and see the sand
dark with bodies, the tanks burning,
the guns thrown down, the landing craft
wrecked and floored with blood. In the path of the
bullets and shells from the shore, her husband had
put on a pair of white gloves
and turned his back on the enemy,
motioning to the boats behind him
to turn back. After everyone else
on his boat was dead
he continued to signal, then he, too,
was killed, but the other boats had seen him
and turned back. They gave his wife the medal,
and she buried him, and at night floated through
a wall of smoke, and saw him at a distance
standing in a boat, facing her,
the gloves blazing on his hands as he motioned her back.

I'm adding One Secret Thing to my wish list.

108> I wish I had known a few days sooner . . . I just swapped my copy. It had its moments (but see 91 above).

The New York Times posted a fine review of Derek Walcott's new book, White Egrets. I'll definitely be looking for this one.

OK,

I am going crazy, obviously.

Last night, just before going to bed, I posted on this thread Sharon Olds's The Signal.

I am glad Darryl posted it above this morning and I, too, am going to be buying One Secret Thing but I am mystified about its disappearance.

#109: I bought White Egrets earlier this month and will read it soon, possibly as early as this coming week.

I didn't see your post about One Secret Thing. What didn't you like about it?

I am just not a big fan of confessional poetry--of working out one's childhood traumas in published verse. Not all of the book is like that, but much of it is. There's a bit of a running joke that Olds can't write a new book of poetry without going back to the memory of 'the chair.' And it's in this collection, too. She does have quite a way with images, however.

Thanks for the review of Walcott -- I've just been redipping my toes again into Omeros to finish my World Lit class -- what a gorgeous book, it is. I too will be on the lookout for White Egrets.

I've read through all of The Rising of the Ashes by Tahar Ben Jelloun, I think several times this month but haven't not quite decided what to post as representational of it.

The poems are an elegy for those Iraqis who died in the first Gulf war (the thousands of victims left behind after the US & its allies left), and testifies to the "displacement and killing of Palestinians in Lebanon in the Occupied Territories during the 1980s.). The poems were written originally in Arabic and translated into French. The French has now been translated into English (so the result is a double translation, which might, imo, be responsible for a bit of the flatness that I sense).

The poems are filled with grief and anger as Jelloun tries to give these anonymous dead, through his poetry, "names and a gravestone for remembrance." His introduction is also emotional. An excerpt:

"Once one has covered thousands of anonymous corpses with a blanket of ashes and sand, one cultivates forgetting.

So poetry rises. Out of necessity. Amidst the disorder where human dignity is trampled, poetry becomes urgent language.

But words pale when the wound is deep, when the well-planned chaos is brutal and irreversible. Against that, words. And what can they do?"

(actually, I think that as good as posting an excerpt from one of the poems...)

The collection I chose for this challenge was Alternate Means of Transport by Cynthia Macdonald. Here's my review:

Every so often I read a book which I can see, objectively, has many merits, but which fails to connect with me. Such is the case with "Alternate Means of Transport". The poems in this collection are sophisticated and technically accomplished. They are very New York, urban, urbane.

But though there are many poems here to sit back and admire, very few moved or excited me. I will say that I enjoyed the collection more as it went along: I couldn't get into the title sequence at all, with its puzzling obsession with hats, whereas I found the love poems in the last sequence much more engaging.

The little extract below was one I did enjoy, and it shows the wit and craft of Cynthia Macdonald's poetry to best effect:

But this is Hungary. Here M. and I live in Buda,
Looking at Pest across the river. Ginsberg
Came through last month and proclaimed himself the former,
But all the poets here agree that, sitting on a chair atop
A table, instructing them on instant meditation, he was
The latter.
(from "Letter to Richard from Budapest")

Cynthia Macdonald is a very accomplished poet, so don't let me put you off. But what can I say? This collection just didn't grab me. (3/5)

#97 Madeline - The swamps of Sleethe : Poems from Beyond the Solar System by Jack Prelutsky was a home run. Each poem is about dreadful things that might happen to us if were to visit extra-terrestrial worlds - things like freezing to death, laughing to death, being ground into spice, processed into dog food, turned into a tree, shrinking to nonexistence or turning into a mindless mechanical metallic robot on wheels. My kids absolutely love it and request it constantly.

#101 Andrew - My kids also really enjoyed Dinosaur dinner (with a slice of alligator pie) by Dennis lee. They were very excited to point out the rhymes and they especially enjoyed any poem about something threatening or dangerous.

I'm wondering if my kids aren't a little disturbed...

--> 116

Daniel, I'm glad that kids are still actively enjoying the poems of Jack Prelutsky. My "kids" that used to listen to me read Prelutsky poems are now ages 23, 27, and 29. :O

ETA: Yeah. Prelutsky poetry books are keepers.

I just finished a poetry collection, The Skin of Light by Larry D. Thomas, released in April. Larry is a friend, a big influence on my in many ways, almost a father at one point. He was the Poet Laureate of Texas in 2008. He writes short, usually single page, poems that seem to range over about anything. Texas themes are common - such as on landscapes, personalities and wild life. Other theme include bikers, religion and art. Sometimes I think if him as finding a sense of beauty in the gore of life - or maybe I'm just thinking about a poem on road kill. He's told me tries to make his work both accessible and complex in a poetic sense. I can vouch for the accessible part.

I've been pondering what to post. There are several poems clamoring around in my head that I've thought about posting here from The Skin of Light (I asked Larry's permission to post). I'm really indecisive. So, I'll post a couple samples, and one complete, but short poem (with a geologic tilt).

Opening lines from Therapy

is the art of reading,
deep within the chrysalis
of club, heart, spade, or diamond,
the unmistakable pulse
of the butterfly;

Opening lines from Palimpsest

What is the world
but parchment
for the calligraphy

of our yearning?

Blue Ice

In a glacier,
it's the oldest,
densest ice,
pale blue
as the sheet
on which we lay,
silent and blinking
long into the night
you knew I first
suspected
your affair.

>118 dchaikin: Blue Ice, wow! I think it's in the line breaks ... they feel like breath at first and then a punch.

#119 - leaves a chill, eh? It makes my teeth chatter.