Poetry

Lured into a Line

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

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

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

Ready? Set?

Two Days Too Late

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

In Praise of Marriage

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poetry Friday: Night Light

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

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

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

Night Light

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fire No Guns, Shed No Tears

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“of earnest grasping”

In the September 2009 issue of Elle, there is an article talking up Bright Star, a new movie about John Keats and his relationship with Fanny Brawne. There is also a two-page spread on pages 336-37 (unsure if it’s a feature or an ad) titled “Bright Star: The poetry of fashion” that strives mightily to assert how “the film’s fashion mirror[s] trends seen on the fall runways” (those being “bold color,” “bigger is better,” “romantic ruffles,” “thigh highs,” and “featured locks”), pairing stills of Abbie Cornish and her costumes with sketchbook and Victoria-magazine-esque background clutter (e.g., artistically arranged gloves, pearls, roses, key-on-a-string, etc.). The jaded part of me finds this hilariously insipid. The little-girl part of me unabashedly adores fashion sketches (though I found everything depicted in the spread unappealing. Back to the Ralph Lauren ads for me). The former bookseller is musing over how many tie-in editions of Keats’ poetry there’ll be (I have at least one acquaintance who’s a sure bet to buy anything with Ben Whishaw’s face on it…), and reminiscing about how there was a surge in Auden sales after Four Weddings and a Funeral. And the calligrapher is rereading “This Living Hand” and contemplating anew how to letter it.

“I wouldn’t have been sure of my answer”

During the last week of my mother’s life, I took a steno pad from one of her many stashes of office supplies and started filling it with notes and with the beginning drafts of poems, one which was published a few months later, and others which I will tear apart some other year and use to seed other poems. Perhaps. There’s a legal pad somewhere in my basement with the start of a poem I’d felt compelled to draft maybe nine or ten years ago, knowing I wasn’t going to get very far with it because I would not feel okay about publishing it while my mother was alive, and back then I expected her to live into her nineties (her mother did). There have been poems I’ve written since last spring (“A Stack of Cards” and “Missing Characters“).

(That sentence I just wrote feels so incomplete, but I lack the words to end it properly or definitively. And yes, that could be an analogy to grief.)

So: this entry is to point you to three other poets whose lines about death have recently caught my attention. First, today’s edition of Poetry Daily featured two poems by Jason Shinder, an American poet who died of cancer last year at the age of 52 or 53. The poems are bleakly beautiful (and the subject line of this post comes from “The Good Son”). The Wikipedia entry is startling: it includes a passage that is very unWiki in tone, but strikes me as written in exasperated sorrow.

He was careless with his medication; he was perpetually late to treatment; in the hours before chemotherapy, he could be found ice-skating with a date who didn’t know he was sick.

“We were all maddened by his denial about his illness,” his friend the poet Marie Howe says, “but when we read the poems and his journals after his death, we saw that he had been addressing it in a way he could never say in life.

Second, in a blog entry from earlier this year, Neil Aitken (whose Boxcar Poetry Review has published work by Mary, Jeannine, and me) quotes an interview in which he discusses his preoccupation with themes of exile

merging with the growing realization that my father was dying and that our time together would be very short. I wanted desperately to finish the book for him while he was still alive, and yet even as I was writing and revising, I was gradually sensing the book would not be done in time, and further that there would be poems that could not be written until I had dealt with his impending death.

Third, I’ve been dipping into Laurel Snyder‘s The Myth of the Simple Machines during breaks, and oh, there’s a poem in there called “The Truth,” about her and her grandmother:

…She was
horrible, my grandmother,
and that’s the truth, though
my uncle pretended. “She

was a good old girl, just
the dog done lost her bite.”
But no. “But no she

never did,” we told him.
If only she had.

And this, this…

“I love you,” I said to her as she died.

“Yes, but you love lots of people,”
she growled back faintly.
“Not enough,” I should’ve told
her then, “nowhere near.”

signal boosts – bonus tarot / poetry contest

Boost #1 (offer expires tonight): No Tell Books is offering a free tarot reading or dream interpretation to you if you purchase a book from them before the end of this weekend (August 9; publisher is based in the Eastern U.S.).

(Sorry this alert is so eleventh-hour-ish, but I’ve been much occupied with other things, so I myself only spotted the offer this morning.)

My connection: one of my poems, “Coat,” appears in The Bedside Guide to No Tell Books – Second Floor. “Because It Makes Me Ha–” appears in the first Bedside Guide. The archives of the online journal include four other poems by me.

A recommendation: Wanton Textiles by Reb Livingston and Ravi Shankar, a collection with a beautiful cover and tremendous fun both to read and react to — my copy is covered with my own scribblings (and water-wrinkled from keeping me company in my bathtub), which included the beginnings of two poems eventually published by flashquake.

No Tell’s catalog also includes a collection by Jill Alexander Essbaum, author of “On Reading Poorly Transcribed Erotica.”

Boost #2 (deadline Sept. 1): My friend Dichroic is sponsoring a poetry contest. No entry fee; maximum length = 49 lines; poems must be inspired by “must be inspired by the name of one (or more) of the Lunar maria.” First prize is a year’s membership in the Science Fiction Poetry Association (= US$21-$25, depending on where you live).

lily-livered wouldn’t look through the lens

Read Write Poem is doing a pretty neat prompt this week: you choose two words, and then go through the dictionary for words between those words (so in the example by Matthea Harvey — who has written more about this method here [pdf] — the words are “terror” and “future” and almost all of the words in the poem start with s, r, q, p, o, n, m, l, k, j, i, h, and g, in that order). Neat challenge.

I’ve had a few publications since my last post: My Poem Rocks published my poem “Self-Sufficiency“; the twitter zine Tweetthemeat published a “horror nanofiction and Nanoism published the first in a three-part serial.

Also, a few market notes:

  • I’m still looking for short fiction and poetry of 140 characters or less for Seven By Twenty. I encourage reprints, and that length is perfect for haiku, senryu, and most cinquains. I also want prose poetry, and honestly if a line or two from a longer poem stand alone and you want to submit them, I don’t care if they’re part of a longer work – and your bio can link to the longer work if it’s been published online. The point of this for me is to expose people to some cool work and authors, not to be the first to publish something.
  • The editor of Rat’s Ass Review mentioned to me yesterday that he’s still looking for poems for his second issue.

Women in Iran

Excerpts from Niloufar Talebi’s Belonging: New Poetry by Iranians Around the World.

From Reza Farmand’s “My Mother Did Not Become Beautiful”:

My mother was not able to
Avoid bearing children
Or secretly
One night
Feed her uterus
To dogs.

My mother
Could not scour away
The thick crust
Of human ignorance
As she could the burnt
Hardened rice
On the bottom of the pot.

My mother was not able to
Win her wings
And breathe the boundless
Air of knowledge.
In her,
Stews repeated themselves
Teas repeated themselves
And the bubblings of meat soup.

….

My mother was not able to
Learn a spell
Become a bird
And one dawn of day
Break out
Of the kitchen window.

…

Granaz Moussavi’s “Post-Cinderella”:

I have gone so far for you
that my foot does not fit in any lone shoe
but has to,
so much has to have gone from me
to fit into you.