Christian Wiman‘s book, Hard Night, has been sitting on my desk for months, wedged open to “Reading Herodotus” and I have been able to set nothing on top of it—or nothing stably—for that whole time. Perhaps I can exorcise the need for the poem’s presence by sharing some of it with you folks.

It opens:

Sadness is to lie uneaten
among the buried dead, to die
without feeling a fire
kindled in your honor, that clean smell
of cypress rising and the chants, heat
increasing under you, into you, an old man
whose name the feasters weep and sing.

and closes:

Close your eyes
just this side of sleep and you can almost hear them,
all the long wonder of it, the lost gods
and the languages, the strange names and their fates,
lives unlike our own, as alien and unknowable
as the first hour on this earth for a womb-slick babe
around whom the whole tribe has formed a ring,
wailing as one for what the child must learn.

and dies the entire time in between. So powerful.

If I could get all y’all to buy one poetry book in the near future (say, in celebration of spring, or National Poetry Month), at the moment it would be Alison Luterman‘s See How We Almost Fly (Pearl Editions, 2010). Today I quote to you from “The World Card,” which begins:

I always wanted the World card,
naked androgynous figure striding the globe,
adorned with laurel and lightning bolts…

and builds and builds to

…I wanted to cross the sky and come back
bearing dead stars in my hands, fossil fuel
for poems. I wanted to inhale God’s breath
till it singed my lungs; to be used up by love,
to hang from a tree by my heels.
“Be careful,” the old fortune-teller advised me shrewdly
at the shop where I paid her ten bucks
to turn the deck over in her ringed, swollen fingers.
“It’s not always a good thing, you know –”
but I wouldn’t let her finish. I didn’t want good,
good was too small. I wanted the world.

Speaking of Tarot cards, the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab has a new series to benefit the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund: Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot. I associate BPAL with poetry in part because many of the fragrance names and descriptions borrow from Poe, Swinburne, Keats, and others, and the CBLDF series is associated with Neil Gaiman. I should also note that, over the years, I’ve received some incredible responses to BPAL scents on me, and some fond memories (as well as a few “OMG scrub that off NOW!” moments — no risk, no reward) — a vial of “Embalming Fluid” came to the rescue in a too-small ScotsRail compartment after a too-long day sans showers, and there was an elevator ride where a stranger exclaimed “What IS that?” in a happily gobsmacked way in reaction to the Nanny Ashtoreth.

In other news, my sometime partner in crime Greta Cabrel has a new poem up at Thirteen Myna Birds, I have a booklet of hay(na)ku available via Open Hand Press (all proceeds donated to Haiti relief efforts), and last night I read Wendy Babiak’s The Uninvited Guest, thanks to a rec Joanne made on Twitter. (And speaking of Joanne and Twitter, I really like today’s tanka by Peter Newton on 7×20, the zine she edits, which incidentally is open to submissions…)

Butterly poised on a thistle’s down.
Lend me your wings for a summer’s day.
What care I for a kingly crown?
Butterly poised on a thistle’s down.
When I might wear your gossamer gown
And sit enthroned on an orchid spray.
Butterly poised on a thistle’s down.
Lend me your wings for a summer’s day.

I’ve put the poet’s name in the first comment.

I’ve just ordered Pat Schneider’s Another River, after reading her poems “Sound of the Night Train” and “The Patience of Ordinary Things.” The latter was posted at Carla Zilbersmith‘s blog, which I stumbled upon via Alison Luterman‘s website, which I visited earlier tonight in part because I had California on my mind.

This weekend’s rereadings included Ronald Wallace’s answer to Donald Hall. The last line totally doesn’t work for me, but it’s clearly a darling to Wallace, seeing that it titles his explication page. *shrug* That said, I bought The Uses of Adversity years ago because of his sonnets “The Student Theme” (“The adjectives all ganged up on the nouns…”) and “The Bad Sonnet” (“It stayed up late, refused to go to bed…”); this time around, what made me sit up were “God’s Handiwork” (“We like to vilify our enemies / with metaphor’s elaborate construc-/ tions. Viruses are hoodlums run amok…”) and “Statutes of Limitations,” the latter dedicated to “C.L.L., 1946-1992”:

…Oh, why did we take
the trooper’s word that what we did was wrong
and slink home embarrassed and estranged
and lose the simple we in love’s sweet song,
and see the harm in harmony? Time’s rearranged
us. I am here, and you are gone. Because,
because. Oh, there are laws. And there are laws.

Wow.

I spent a couple hours this past weekend with Donald Hall’s This Old Life (1996) and was underwhelmed. I’d read “The Night of the Day” a couple times before, over the years, and caught my breath both at its closing lines (in part because the line “older / than my dark-haired father ever got to be” leapt out at me this time, though it won’t be true in my case for another two decades) and back-of-the-book postscript (in which two more deaths are mentioned) … but the rest of the book, I just didn’t connect with, poetically or anecdotally, except for an acknowledgment of midlife fucked-up-ness (Duthie: “look, self, Donald Hall was an alcoholic mess when he was forty, and he got past it, and you don’t have it anywhere near that dire”) and a flare of momentary self-pity (Hall, on losing the 1993 National Book Award to A.R. Ammons: “I went to sleep easily, / mildly let down, and woke / at three-thirty in a murderous rage.”) In his notes to “The Old Life,” Hall snarks about autobiographical “McPoems” – “prosy little anecdotes…perfect in their narcissism.” My difficulty is that, the rave reviews on the cover notwithstanding, and the sorrows delineated in detail, “This Old Life” comes across to me as an extended collection of prosy little narcissistic anecdotes.

Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires isn’t making itself matter to me, either. Although the fact that he and Hall were both writing about being widowed did lead me to revisit Milton’s sonnet about HIS dead wife…which, in all honesty, I find not especially memorable until the last two lines. But oh my God, those last two lines.

So what have I read lately that has held up in rereading? Parts of Camille Dungy‘s first book (the second one’s due out next year and already on my shopping list). R. T. Smith’s Shades. Jack Myers’s Cirrus. Milosz’s Encounter. And (especially appreciated after a morning reading aloud about Armageddon) Milosz’s Song on the End of the World.

It’s my last night in Jerusalem, and both my physical and mental spaces are crowded with Things I Need To Think More About, never mind the perennially overstuffed closet of Things I Need To Put Into Letters (both alphabetic and correspondential) Sooner Rather Than Later.

But in the meantime, I can at least clear a couple bookmark-threads from my list by mentioning them here…

Adrian Matejka’s “Do the Right Thing” (from today’s Poetry Daily); Victoria Chang’s reaction to Matejka’s reported stance on relevance

Laura Orem on poetry and collage; Merrie Haskell on using collage as a narrative-development/revision tool; Debi Orton’s Lose the Narrative

Blackbird‘s Spring 2008 feature on Lynda Hull – oh, my. I’ve only been through a couple pieces so far — I find reading Hull and reading about her to be like one of those dense, delicious cakes you cannot gobble up frantically if you know what’s good for you. But I am so excited – it includes an audio of Hull reading “The Window,” which is my favorite poem of hers, which I am saving for when I am back on a machine that doesn’t get seizures from a/v files.

For years, I held onto the Life magazine I’d bought in some airport at the start of 1990 that included photographs of the Berlin Wall getting sledgehammered by joyful Germans. NYT Op-Ed awesomeness: What Fell Apart, What Came Together

Go read Joanne’s “Thirteen Scifaiku for Blackbirds” because it is lovely and haunting and now is the time when autumn lasts all year.