“Tomas, get to work”

Susan Scheid, within a post on Tranströmer’s hadynpockets:

In 1990, Tranströmer suffered a stroke that paralyzed the right side of his body and affected his speech. In 2007, The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry awarded Tranströmer its second Lifetime Recognition Award. Robert Hass, in his tribute to Tranströmer at the event, related that “when he had the stroke, his wife Monika . . . who is a nurse, drove into Stockholm and bought, because Tomas loved playing the piano, the entire Western literature for piano for the left hand, I’m told, and brought it back and said, ‘Tomas, get to work.’”

(via http://paper.li/WeLoveToRead/1309499372)

from this morning’s New York Times

Violence Suffocated a Father’s Poetry, but Not His Voice

The two passages that leapt out at me:

[After reading a poem about his murdered son,] Mr. Sicilia, one of the country’s most acclaimed poets, told those who had gathered that they had just heard the last poem he would ever write.

“Poetry doesn’t exist in me anymore,” he explained later in an interview.

…

He said he did not belong to any of the major political parties — “I am an anarchist, in the good sense of the word” — but had participated in demonstrations before, mostly for causes dear to the left. Until a few weeks ago, he did not even have a cellphone, but one now trilled incessantly as he made plans for the next step, including a caravan to Ciudad Juárez, the border city that is Mexico’s most violent, next month.

He admitted to being anguished that he had never received this kind of notice for his works.

the tree that bears the fruit / is not the one that was planted

Today’s conundrum subject line comes from W. S. Merwin’s “Place,” which I saw this morning both in an e-mail from Poetry Daily and in the April issue of Oprah’s magazine. (Yeah, still making my way through it.)

Also in O: an interview with Maya Angelou.

Q: How do you write?

MA: I keep a hotel room in my town, although I have a large house. And I go there at about 5:30 in the morning, and I start working. And I don’t allow anybody to come in that room. I work on yellow pads and with ballpoint pens. I keep a Bible, a thesaurus, a dictionary, and a bottle of sherry. I stay there until midday.

###

I keep meaning to mention that Mary and I have a collaboration up at Blue Print Review. This delights me.

Also, I will be reading with Jane Ormerod and Ice Gayle Johnson at Nashville’s Global Education Center on Friday, May 13, at 7:30 pm. Admission is $8. Jane and Ice Gayle are co-editors of an Uphook Press anthology that will include one of my poems.

###

Some of the poems on the tabs I’ve had open:

Life is a long song

The glory of words

New fruit

a blade into his heart

more on Orr

In the April 10 issue of the New York Times Book Review, Yeshiva University professor Gilian Steinberg takes David Orr to task for his gibe at Mary Oliver (mentioned in my previous post): “It’s fine for Orr to rank Yeats well above Oliver, a hierarchy with which I agree, but to do so in the context of asking for increased poetry readership is contradictory.

As Orr undoubtedly knows, poetry can be intimidating even to smart and devoted readers of prose. But readers cannot be encouraged to read poetry well if their choices and tastes are treated patronizingly.”

In the same issue, David Kirby reviews Orr’s Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry. It didn’t persuade me to seek out the book, but I was entertained by this parenthetical claim:

“Almost all poets, including myself, lean left,” Orr says. “There are maybe five conservative American poets, not one of whom can safely show his face at a writing conference for fear of being angrily doused with herbal tea.”

I also enjoyed Kirby’s rueful recollection of encountering readers of his poem “Broken Promises”:

Recently, I spoke with a group of high school teachers who wanted to discuss my famous poem — rather, to tell me what it meant. “It’s about your own poems!” said one teacher, and another shouted, “I think it’s about your children!” They seemed a little crestfallen when I said, no, the poem is about the promises we break, as the ­title and, as far as that goes, the poem itself says.

The teachers thought that my poem said one thing but meant another, and that it’s the reader’s job to figure out what the poet is really saying. No wonder poetry doesn’t have a bigger audience. All that code cracking. Who has the time?

I confess I have a fresh appreciation for Kirby’s attitude after sitting through Frank Bidart’s reading at Vanderbilt last week with Joanne. There were a couple of gems in the lot, and the Q&A was engaging, and Bidart is a good performer of his work — but, truth be told, I was bored by most of it, and I found myself muttering “oh, please” at the third iteration of one of his pet abstractions, and well, just not my cuppa. I didn’t feel stupid; I felt like there wasn’t enough there there for me to clothe an emperor. Judging from the lines at the book table during the reception, though, others clearly got more out of the experience. Chacun a son gout…

The other thing Kirby’s anecdote reminds me of? William Matthews’s A Poetry Reading at West Point.

*dusts off notebook, starts jotting…*

Note 1: This teacher’s description of Keesha’s House (novel for teens composed of sestinas and sonnets) is intriguing; adding it to my library list.

Note 2: I haven’t gotten past the masthead page in the April 2011 print issue of O Magazine, but I was tickled to see various staff members’ names linked to their answers to “Who Is Your Favorite Poet?” Quite a range (and, if I’m not mistaken, all 20th-21st century folk except for Kabir) — in addition to Milosz, Neruda, Angelou, Hughes, and other perennials, there’s also mention of Harryette Mullen and Matthea Harvey.

Note 3: I don’t agree with the thrust of David Orr’s critique of the issue in the March 27 New York Times Book Review, but one of his complaints — “roughly a fifth of the coverage is devoted to Mary Oliver, about whose poetry one can only say that no animals appear to have been harmed in the making of it” — made me laugh. (For the record, I personally like Oliver’s work — and the guest editor of the issue was Maria Shriver, who listed Oliver as her favorite poet. But I know of at least one other member of the collective who will concur with Orr, and God knows I’m guilty myself often enough of wanting something to be what I want rather than what it is… *wry smile*)

“Fashions are so changing!”

Earlier this year, I found a 1928 children’s songbook in a bin, it being un-resellable due to some child (or children) having scribbled all over it; also, both the illustrations and texts are severely dated. Makes them perfect for handmade cards, though, as well as just moments of marveling at the notion of getting today’s grade-school kids to sing stanzas such as these:

Fashions are so changing!
In the days of old
Young men dressed in colors,
Laced with thread of gold.

Now their clothes are solemn,
Black and brown and gray.
We should like to see them
Dressed the other way.

    – Nancy Byrd Turner, “In Days of Old” (a “reading song” set to a tune by Haydn)

On the next page, there’s a “rote song” by Abbie Farwell Brown (tune by Horatio Parker):

A candy lion’s very good,
Because he cannot bite,
Nor wander roaring for his food,
Nor eat up folks at night.
But though it’s very nice for me,
It’s not nice for him;
For ev’ry day he seems to be
More shapeless and more slim.
…And first, there’s no tail any more;
And next he has no head;
And then he’s just a candy roar,
And might as well be dead.

…okay, I could see some 21st-century ten-year-olds getting into that. The diction’s a trifle stodgy, though…

*saunters off with thoughts of riffing on just a candy roar*

Loving “Hate That Cat”

I picked up Sharon Creech’s Hate That Cat at a sale, thinking it might make a good birthday present for a friend.

Two things I didn’t realize:

(1) It’s a sequel. (Guess I’ll have to keep or donate it instead.)
(2) It’s about poetry! I’m 32 pages in and there’s already been an entry on William Carlos Williams that made me laugh.

I believe I would come out and wash my face

Today’s subject line is from James Wright’s “Yes, But,” which is mentioned in Molly Wizenberg’s A Homemade Life as the one she read at her father’s memorial service. She writes that her father “would have loved the fact that this poem allowed me to say ‘making love’ — while wearing fishnets, I should add, an edgy touch he would have also applauded — before a priest, a bishop, a rabbi, and an overflow crowd of 550 people in an Episcopal church in Bible-belted Oklahoma City.”

The poem, and more about her father, are in this 2004 post at her blog, Orangette.

I picked up the book on remainder earlier this year, on impulse. I took it to bed with me last night (having slipped on a step fourteen hours earlier and landed on it hard, I was feeling too achy to think and too sore to sleep) and it was just right — it includes a fair bit about Paris, and a powerful chapter about her father’s last days, and a cast of opinionated food-lovers that include a vegetarian composer and a Seattle menage-à-trois: “Jimmy is the baker, John is the cook, and Rebecca is the force of nature.” MW continues:

“Moll, you need two husbands,” Rebecca announced, stirring a snowdrift of sugar into her iced tea. “You can’t expect one person to be everything for you. You need at least two. At least.” I nodded. She had a point. I have thought about it many times since, and I don’t know that I entirely agree — so far, one husband is almost more than enough for me — but she did have a very good point. But that morning, the scent of melted butter was rising from the stove, and talk of husbands, singular or plural, had nothing on it.

The book also devotes pages 216-17 to “radishes and butter with fleur de sel,” MW having reminisced two pages earlier about visiting her boyfriend on West 123rd Street in NYC and how “sometimes we would wake up late and walk to get a jug of orange juice, a bunch of radishes, a baguette, and some butter. Back at home, we ate lazily at the wobbly table with the window open, the box fan blowing, and my bare feet on his lap.”

Reading this took me back to the last time I’d eaten radishes — which was indeed with toast and butter and salt, over at Holland House, with three dear friends — and it made me wish there were radishes in the house. And I went shopping earlier today, so now there are. What marvelous times these are.

I’d taken to sleeping naked. He took a good look at me before reacting.

So, “Hamiltons” won. Many thanks to everybody who commented!

In other news, Per Contra has just published my literary short story “Toy Boy.”

I’m working right now on a full-length book manuscript of poetry about the US. I saw Molly Peacock read last week, and she read her poem “Aubade,” which got me thinking about aubades, and I wrote one based on the “morning in America” Reagan ad. I’m feeling quite brilliant for that.

The Heart’s Astronomy

by Julia Ward Howe, published in Passion-Flowers, 1854

This evening, as the twilight fell,
My younger children watched for me;
Like cherubs in the window frame,
I saw the smiling group of three.

While round and round the house I trudged,
Intent to walk a weary mile,
Oft as I passed within their range,
The little things would beck and smile.

They watched me, as Astronomers
Whose business lies in heaven afar,
Await, beside the slanting glass,
The re-appearance of a star.

Not so, not so, my pretty ones,
Seek stars in yonder cloudless sky;
But mark no steadfast path for me,
A comet dire and strange am I.

Now to the inmost spheres of light
Lifted, my wondering soul dilates,
Now dropped in endless depth of night,
My hope God’s slow recall awaits.

Among the shining I have shone,
Among the blessing, have been blest,
Then wearying years have held me bound
Where darkness deadness gives, not rest.

Between extremes distraught and rent,
I question not the way to go,
Who made me, gave it me, I deem,
Thus to aspire, to languish so.

But Comets too have holy laws,
Their fiery sinews to restrain,
And from their outmost wanderings
Are drawn to heaven’s dear heart again.

And ye, beloved ones, when ye know
What wild, erratic natures are,
Pray that the laws of heavenly force
Would hold and guide the Mother star.