Alice Friman

[from Alice Friman's The Book of the Rotten Daughter]

After Shooting the Barbados Ram

Because his neighbor’s boy wanted the horns
he whacked off the top of the head
straight across
leaving the brain in the grass—
two tablespoons of squiggle
and the brain pan
lined in ivory, empty except for the flies.

I watch because I must,
not because my grinning brother-in-law
waving his bloody knife
shoves the scene in my face—the ram
strung up by the hind legs
then slit down the middle, the insides
tumbling out into a tub. The one
undescended testicle, knuckle big
and hard as love,
flushed from its hiding place at last.
The body, the hide, adding up to nothing
but a magician’s coat emptied of its tricks.
Any two-bit fly buzzy in emerald
is more than this.

But it’s the brain I come back to,
separated from the white fibrous fingers
that cradled it, suspended it
easy in a jelly. The Dura Mater.
The enduring mother, holding—
idiot or saint—whatever she’s got.
Mama the dependable, tough as bungee straps
or a stevedore’s net, hanging on
to her freight until the final dock.

I kneel in the grass,
run my fingers over the brain’s empty casing,
think of my father, gone not even a month.
A meningioma, they said. A thickening
of the outer lining. The Dura Mater.
The tough mother who never quits—
who quit. Took up weaving in her boredom,
knitting her own cells into a pile of pillows
then turned, the way milk turns,
the way any mother left alone in the dark
might turn, a pillow in her hands.

They said it was slow growing, decades maybe,
but now, having reached the pons, the bulb
at the base of the brain—.
Look, they said, how the brain struggles
in a narrowed, pinched-in space, rummages
for what it can no longer remember:
the old triggers fired off easy as pop-guns
for ninety years—pump, pump, breathe.

I kneel over the ram’s motherless brain
the way I bent over him, holding the hand
that for sixty-two years refused mine,
singing the song he never sang for me.
The crusted mouth. The lolling tongue.
The eyes unable to close
because the brain had forgotten how.
The breath still so sweet.

Sarah Maclay and Linda Bierds

[from Field, Number 69, Spring 2003]

The Marina, Early Evening
by Sarah Maclay

The sea is only a blue band,
reaching over its brother.
The sand is only a hard, brown sea.

Gulls open their beaks and nothing comes out.
One. Another. Three. The sea

is only a low cloud
wandering under its sister.
The cloud is only a high, gray sea.

The gulls seem to be praying.
They stand as still as a chess set.

Waves crawl onto the body, slither back.

Oh, the woman with red hair,
legs tall as stilts,
sings into the ocean.

Her song is only the mirror
of the broken wave.


Time and Space
by Linda Bierds

Deep space. The oblong, twinkleless stars
matte as wax pears. And the astronauts are losing heart,
the heady lisp of auricle and ventricle
fading to a whisper, as muscles shrink to infants’ hearts,
or the plum-shaped nubs of swans.
Atrophy, from time in space, even as the space in time
contracts. And how much safer it was —
ascension — at some earlier contraction, each flyer intact,

cupped by a room-size celestial globe
staked to a palace lawn. How much easier, to duck
with the doublets and powdered wigs
through the flap of a trap door and watch on a soot-stained
copper sky the painted constellations, or,
dead-center, a fist of shadowed earth dangling from a ribbon.

All systems go, of course: each moist,
diminishing heart, just sufficient at its terminus to fuel
the arm, the opening hand, to coax
to the lips a fig or pleated straw. Still, how much easier
to drift in a hollow globe, its perpetual
tallow-lit night, while outside with the mazes and spaniels

the day, like an onion, arced up in layers
to the dark heavens. How much safer to enter a time, a space,
when a swan might lift from a palace pond
to cross for an instant — above, below — its outstretched
Cygnus shape, just a membrane
and membrane away. A space in time when such accident
was prophecy, and such singular alignment —
carbon, shadow, membrane, flight — sufficient for the moment.

Laurie Sheck

[from Laurie Sheck's Amaranth]

Continuum

In my brothers’ arms I was lifted to be tossed in the water,
not to die but to be saved through disappearance.

I thought I heard them calling after me,
my absence would allow them to go on.

Because I no longer need to be touched
I deny them nothing, I watch them when they sleep

and keep them safe.
Sometimes I see their faces pressed into the water’s ceiling,

looking down and down as if to call me back.
Mostly I watch these walls.

Where my brothers live the houses hold their single pose,
the sky is luminous as snakeskin.

So often they find themselves walking near water—
that box planed smooth by sunlight.

Carl Phillips

[from Carl Phillips's Riding Westward]

Falling

There’s a meadow I can’t stop coming back to, any
more than I can stop calling it a sacred grove—isn’t
that was it was, once? A lot of resonance, trees asway
with declarations whose traced-on-the-air patterns
the grasses also traced, more subtly, below. As for
strangers: yes, and often, and—with few exceptions—
each desperate either to win back some kingdom he’d
lost, or to be, if only briefly, for once free of one. I did
what I could for them. They did—what they did . . . It was
as if we were rescuable, and worth rescuing, both, and
the gods had noticed this—it was as if there were gods—
and the sky meanwhile crowning every part of it, blue,
a blue crown . . . There’s a meadow I still go back to. It’s
just a meadow—with, sometimes, a stranger, passing
through, the occasional tenderness, a hand to my chest,
resting there, making me almost want to touch something,
someone back. I can feel all the wrecked birds—lying
huddled, slow-hearted, like so many stunned psalms,
against each other—start to stir inside me, their bits of
song giving way again to the usual questions: Why not
stay awhile here forever? and Isn’t this what you keep
coming for? and Is it? I’m tired of their questions. I’m
tired, I say to them—as, with all the sluggishness at first
of doing a thing they’d forgotten how to do, or forgotten
to want to, or had only hoped to forget, they indifferently
open, spread wide their interrogative, gray wings—

Emily Dickinson

#1046

I’ve dropped my Brain – My Soul is numb –
The Veins that used to run
Stop palsied – ’tis Paralysis
Done perfected on stone

Vitality is Carved and cool.
My nerve in Marble lies –
A Breathing Woman
Yesterday – Endowed with Paradise.

Not dumb – I had a sort that moved –
A Sense that smote and stirred –
Instincts for Dance – a caper part –
An Aptitude for Bird –

Who wrought Carrara in me
And chiselled all my tune
Were it a Witchcraft – were it Death –
I’ve still a chance to strain

To Being, somewhere – Motion – Breath –
Though Centuries beyond,
And every limit a Decade –
I’ll shiver, satisfied.


[from Cristianne Miller's Emily Dickinson, A Poet’s Grammar]

In poetry, meaning may lie as much in the interaction of semantic content and form as in a message that can be isolated from the poem. The more a poem calls attention to its formal elements by various foregrounding techniques, the more the reader is likely to learn about its meaning from them. If we assume as a norm language that calls no attention to its formal properties by deviating from the conventions of formal communication (that is, an utterance intended solely to communicate a message), then Dickinson’s poetry is richly deviant.

Stanley Kunitz

[from Stanley Kunitz's The Collected Poems]

excerpt from Revolving Meditation

Imagination cries
That in the grand accountancy
What happens to us is false;
Imagination makes,
Out of what stuff it can,
An action fit
For a more heroic stage
Than body ever walked on.
I have learned
Trying to live
With this perjured quid of mine,
That the truth is not in the stones,
But in the architecture;
Equally, I am not deceived
By the triumph of the stuffing
Over the chair.
If I must build a church,
Though I do not really want one,
Let it be in the wilderness
Out of nothing but nail-holes.

Google's endless curiosity

Discover what's interesting where at Google Trends.

the idea

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

             Wallace Stevens
             The Idea of Order at Key West

Laurie Sheck

[from Laurie Sheck's The Willow Grove]

Filming Jocasta

You must not show her face. Only the hands
where each granite planetary knuckle
slowly pales as if submerged in water, stripped down as after seizure,
those hands that now hold nothing.

And the rope: umbilical, predatory,
how it hangs so strictly from the ceiling
while her robes waft with such softness against the backdrop
of the palace walls, harsh walls. As if to say, But once
she was a child, once swaddled, innocent, even she,
the long ago and ever after faintly beating in each cell.

Then bring the camera closer, closer in,
it is important not to lie. And show how the robes are crevices
of riddled light, how innocence is touched
by fraudulence; there is no other story, other text.
No music to accompany her body. Only the slow turning of the rope.
Only that score that is no score, how silence is the voice
of damage, its taped mouth.

And her shadow on the wall, freakish curtain oddly beating
in the wind, blurred inscription of some lost intention;
let the camera hold it for a moment, then move on.
Here is the empty room, how large it is, how drafty.
And her smallness, for a moment, so pitiful within it;
the room like a mouth that can't speak, like the silence her body
has become, her body like a severed tongue.
And then let her body and the room become a city

where the hallowed laws are quiet, the gated storefronts quiet.
And all throughout the city's central district
there are rows of display cases, necklaces glittering
on velvet covered cardboard shaped like collarbones and necks.
Blue velvet, diamonds, gold. And rings lined up in rows,
hat pins poised like silver birds, white gloves
on plaster hands. City that turns and turns
on its invisible cold rope, and the shadows of the awful tapered hands.

No one has found her yet,
her body white as streetglare, the cold glow of the unbought
still poised there, waiting to be bought. Her hands frozen
as if molded, waiting. But still there is the question of her face,
the horrible purple, the messyness of crime.
The way the eyes bulge out like vats of half-spilled
paint, innards churning in the wind.
Not even eyes now, really, but the aftermath of eyes,
exploded. At least the frozen hands are whole,
as if some innocence remained within them even to the end.
But there was no innocence in the eyes.
And the hands cannot cover them.

Linda Gregg

[from Linda Gregg's Chosen by the Lion]

Aphrodite and the Nature of Art

I want a net made of iron to hold
what I am. I love artifice.
Hephaestus made the net that hoisted up
his wife, Aphrodite, and her lover.
Caught them in their gleaming hardness,
all ecstasy and soft, most secret flesh.
Good, she thought, at the root of her being
as she locked her ankles around the gardenia
that she is. While the two men yelled
at each other, the women filed out of the room
full of chaos as well as shape. Their husbands
stood amazed at what they were seeing,
the wonderful fish-like economy of her lower back,
seeing the links pressed into her body's delight
and leaving the imprint rose-colored on her
pale flesh. Hair swelling through some of the gaps
as the crippled maker raised them like a masterpiece
higher in the half-light of the vast room.

Paul Celan via Popov & McHugh

[from Paul Celan's glottal stop]

Proverb on the Wall

Defaced (a renovated angel ceases to be)
a head comes into its own,

sharpsighted,
the astral
weapon
with its stock of memory
salutes
the
lions of its thought.

Gerald Barrax

[from Gerald Barrax's From a Person Sitting in Darkness]

Whose Children Are These?

1

Whose children are these?
Who do these children belong to?
With no power to watch over,
He looks at them, sleeping,
Exhaustion overwhelming hunger,
Barely protected with burlap from the cold
Cabin. Fear and rage make him tremble
For them; for himself, shame that he can do no more
Than die for them,
For no certain purpose. He heard about the woman,
Margaret Garner, in spite of the white folks' silence.
How she killed two of hers
To keep them from being taken back.
Killed herself after the others were taken back
Anyway. So she saved
Two. He couldn't save his Ellen and Henry.
Who do these belong to?
He doesn't dare kiss them
Now, but stands dreaming,
Willing these five back
To a place or forward to a time
He can't remember or imagine.
All he can do is find the place
He knows about. Leave now
Before dawn sets the white fields raging
And murders the North Star.

2

Grandsire, I kissed, blessed, chewed, and swallowed your rage
when I stood over the five you sent, warm in their beds,
and force-fed my stunned dumb soul to believe someone
owned, someone bought, someone sold at will
our children, Grandsire, I held them, I held them
as you could not, and revered that fierce mother
whose courage and whose solution I could not.
But we have not rescued them altogether.
We moved them through one dimension, from one killing
field to another on history's flat page,
1850s' slavery to 1980s' racism and murder.
Baraka has told us "They have made
this star unsafe, and this age, primitive,"
and it is so. I stood over each child sleeping
and looked at each child and wanted to know
who decides to break our hearts one by one by one.
The Greeks named it Tyche and made a goddess of chance.
Here they call it this god's "mysterious Will."
I have the children, but we have not saved them
from this primitive star, and I can't forgive.

          10 September 1985

Which Journals Rack Up Pushcarts?

I refer you to Cliff Garstang's fascinating study.

Sarah Lindsay

[from Sarah Lindsay's Mount Clutter]

Olduvai Gorge Thorn Tree

He kept dreaming of a tree, dreaming
of a tree, dreaming of a tree
and its sound like a hush,
and it seemed he could open
his mouth when he woke and make the others
know something they didn't already know,

his tree. But he woke and he couldn't.
He kept thinking of a tree. He made a tree
of his arms and called to the others,
but all he could say, all they could say,
was tree, not that one, no, not here,
tree. They were hungry, shrugged and went on.

Later a leopard dragged him some distance
and left him on the remains of his back,
his plucked face tilted up, and a seed
fell on the stub of his tongue
in his open mouth. Took root,
sent a finger between his teeth

that parted his jaws with its gradual thickness
and lifted its arms full of leaves that fed
on what was in his braincase
and mixed with the sky, and made
a sound in the wind that was
almost what he wanted.

Alice Fulton

[from Alice Fulton's Cascade Experiment]

My Diamond Stud

He’ll be a former cat burglar
because I have baubles
to lose. I’ll know him
by the black
carnation he’s tossing:
heads, he takes me,
stems, the same. Yes,
he’ll be a hitchhiker at this
roller-rink I frequent, my diamond
stud who’ll wheel up shedding
sparks & say “Ecoutez
bé-bé. I’m a member
of a famous folded trapeze
act. My agility is legend, etc.”
keeping his jeweler’s eye on
my gold fillings. He’ll know
what I really want: whipping
me with flowers, his fingers’ grosgrain
sanded smooth, raw
to my every move. For our tryst
we’ll go to travel-folder heaven
& buff-puff each other’s
calluses in valentine tubs.
He’ll swindle the black heart
between my thighs
dress me up in ultra-
suede sheaths, himself
in naugahyde. No,
leather. He’d never
let anything touch him
that wasn’t once alive.

Susan Stewart

[from Susan Stewart's Poetry and the Fate of the Senses]

because poetic voice is informed by, often indeed formed by, the imperatives of rhythm and repetition, its volition is problematic — more problematic than, say, the production of discursive sentences in prose such as these. We will see that this doubled movement in poetic production, toward mastery on the one hand and toward being mastered on the other, has made poetry suspect as a force against reason and valued as a means of ecstasis. . . . Tactility, manipulation, and externalization remain the “touchstones” or reality . . . and the wind as a force of possession the vehicle of transport and self-transformation. . . .

What do we mean when we speak of “voice” in poetry? To indulge in such creative writing workshop clichés as that of “the poet finding his or her own voice” is to substitute a reifying and mystifying version of subjectivity for what is in fact most profound and engaging about poetic voice — that is, the plays of transformation it evokes beyond the irreducibility of its own grain, its own potential for silence. The “object” of my love for your voice emerges in the relation between my history and the uniqueness of your existence, the particular timbre, tone, hesitations, and features of articulation by which all the voices subject to your own history have shaped your voice’s instrument. In listening, I am listening to the material history of your connection to all the dead and the living who have been impressed upon you. The voice, with the eyes, holds within itself the life of the self — it cannot be another’s.

Laurie Sheck

[from The Willow Grove by Laurie Sheck]

The Stockroom

I watch the boy shoot up.
His head woozes back, eyes fluttering lightly
into what land, what dreamy repetition, separateness, deferment,
grainy black and white of this sleep that is not sleep?
He closes his eyes but I still watch. I am a child. I do not know
       who he is,

or how he’s wandered back
into the stockroom of this store. I am supposed to be up front
where it is light, helping to sell buttons, pencils, keys.
I am supposed to walk around in the safe glare,
the sharp-edged present tense.
But here in this dim room behind the aisles

the boy crawls slowly toward a wall
that used to be part of the bakery next door—brick ovens three
       feet deep
with rounded tops like quaint old-fashioned doorways,
crumbling now, and damp, his head swaying like a battered stalk.
He leans back into the oven-dark and shivers,
scratches his cheek with one hand and then the other;

he smooths his itchy skin, scaly, purplish-red.
What tense is it he drifts in? What tense in which memories rise up
disguised so they won’t stun, mixing with this musty air,
these towers of cardboard boxes held in the eerie sway
of so much want? What tense in which we sit,
the boy and I, and do not speak, the dark like a god

and our small bodies like errors
the god wants to take back again, out of his created world?
And what tense in which the musty dampness holds the ovens
like moldy unrocked cradles, eye-holes, graves,
and street-cries skip and flare above our listening, but they are
       muffled
from back here, as if they could not touch us, yet still here?

The drawers of the cash registers clack open again and again
like solved equations, while the boy breathes so softly,
his hands clutched into fists now
as if trying to protect something hidden, keep it safe.
There is the dark of his closed hands, there is the oven-dark,
and then the larger stockroom dark. I think there is no tense for this—
how he rubs his palms into his eyes

then slides his bony shoulders and thin face toward the light
of the narrow doorway, the long aisles
just out of sight, and then turns slowly back.
Land of transactions, of tactics, sirens, cries—

it is what waits outside this dark and doesn’t want to know this dark.
Aisles of clocks, of kitchenware, venetian blinds.
He looks up from the dimness and damp brick, his eyes drifting
       —where?—
before me, into what abrogation, what refusal
of earthly terror, earthly place?

Carol Peters

My friends and I have been writing prisoner's constraint poems. The poetic alphabet contains lower-case letters that have no ascenders or descenders. Mine from yesterday:

canoe winnow

         -- for Jilly Dybka: a prisoner's constraint

we earn
a worn savior
a warm mirror
a woman's reassurance

we seize
moon sneezes
maize over rice
men in mouse ears

we examine
voice over
vicious winners
verses as manumission

we mean
noise in vain
noxious suasion
names as services

we cause
air waves
iron creases
excess nerves

we vow
raw manure
race winners
reason over worms

we rouse
an inner sense
an asinine caress
an onion’s sorrow

we woo
wee-oo
oo-wee-oo

Franz Wright: this year's Easter poem

Thank you, Nick Bruno, you beat me to it.

Louise Labé via Annie Finch

[from The Body of Poetry by Annie Finch]

Sonnet 18: Kiss Me Again
by Louise Labé
translated by Annie Finch

Kiss me again, rekiss me, and then kiss
me again, with your richest, most succulent
kiss; then adore me with another kiss, meant
to steam out fourfold the very hottest hiss
from my love-hot coals. Do I hear you moaning? This
is my plan to soothe you: ten more kisses, sent
just for your pleasure. Then, both sweetly bent
on love, we'll enter joy through doubleness,
and we'll each have two loving lives to tend:
one in our single self, one in our friend.
I'll tell you something honest now, my Love:
it's very bad for me to live apart.
There's no way I can have a happy heart
without some place outside myself to move.

Larry Levis

[from The Selected Levis by Larry Levis]

Fish

for Philip Levine

The cop holds me up like a fish;
he feels the huge bones
surrounding my eyes,
and he runs a thumb under them,

lifting my eyelids
as if they were
envelopes filled with the night.
Now he turns

my head back and forth, gently,
until I’m so tame and still
I could be a tiny plastic
skull left on the

dashboard of a junked car.
By now he’s so sure of me
he chews gum,
and drops his flashlight to his side;

he could be cleaning a trout
while the pines rise into the darkness,
though tonight trout
are freezing into bits of stars

under the ice. When he lets me go
I feel numb. I feel like
a fish burned by his touch, and turn
and slip into the cold

night rippling with neons,
and the razor blades
of the poor,
and the torn mouths on posters.

Once, I thought even through this
I could go quietly as a star
turning over and over
in the deep truce of its light.

Now, I must
go on repeating the last, filthy
words on the lips
of this shrunken head,

shining out of its death in the moon—
until trout surface
with their petrified, round eyes,
and the stars begin moving.

James Meek

Thank you Jai Clare for pointing me at James Meek's novel, The People's Act of Love, long-listed for the 2005 Booker Prize. A fine read about imaginary real worlds: Siberia in the early years of the 20th century, a sect of castrates, a prison camp, cannibalism, the Czechoslovak Legion. A taste:

He touched one of the apprentices on the shoulder and the man got up and stood on a flat rock near the edge of the clearing. He stretched his arms out horizontally on either side and began to turn on one foot, quickly reacing such a speed that his body blurred, like a top, and he lost the appearance of a man. He looked to be of a lighter substance than the still world around him. I thought he might rise from the rock and begin to float up into the trees. A second apprentice walked over to him and, after some minutes spinning, the figure slowed, returned to its Earthly substance, and fell, sodden with sweat and with eyes closed, mumbling and smiling, into the arms of his fellow. . . .

At night when he couldn't sleep he'd kneel by my bed, put his hand under the blanket and stroke my ribs, running his fingertips in the troughs between them, rubbing the pit where my stomach'd been with the palm of his hand, kneading the hollow from hipbone to hipbone like a baker smearing dough. He said: "Do you want to know what I'm doing?" I said "No." He said: "I'm feeling for your heart." I lay still on my back and let him do it. I wanted to ask him for bread. I was afraid to. His fingers were rough and warm and down through the bones and flesh I could feel him shaking as he wept. Sometimes his tears fell on my face and I opened my mouth. He couldn't see in the darkness that I was drinking them. In the morning he'd take half my ration. . . .

David Wojahn

[from Mystery Train by David Wojahn]

The Assassination of Robert Goulet as Performed by Elvis Presley:
Memphis 1968

                That jerk's got no heart.—E. P.

He dies vicariously on "Carol Burnett,"
Exploding to glass and tubes while singing "Camelot."

Arms outstretched, he dies Las Vegas-ed in a tux,
As the King, frenzied in his Graceland den, untucks

His .38 and pumps a bullet in the set.
(There are three on his wall, placed side by side.)

The room goes dark with the shot, but he gets the Boys
To change the fuses. By candlelight he toys

With his pearl-handled beauty. Lights back on,
But Goulet's vanished, replaced by downtown Saigon:

Satellite footage, the Tet offensive,
Bodies strewn along Ky's palace fences.

Above a boy whose head he's calmly blown apart,
An ARVN colonel smokes a cigarette.


Elvis Moving a Small Cloud: The Desert Near Las Vegas, 1976

                after the painting by Susan Baker

"Stop this motherfucking limo," says the King,
And the Caddie, halting, raises fins of dust
Into a landscape made of creosote,
Lizards, dismembered tires. The King's been reading

Again—Mind Over Matter: Yogic Texts
On Spiritual Renewal by Doctor Krishna
Majunukta, A Guide on How to Tap the
Boundless Mental Powers of the Ancients.

Bodyguards and hangers-on pile out.
His highness, shades off, scans the east horizon.
"Boys, today I'm gonna show you somethin'
You can tell your grandchildren about."

He aims a finger at Nevada's only cloud.
"Lo! Behold! Now watch that fucker move!"

Paul Celan, Albert Camus

What stood by you
appears on every shore
mown down
into another image.

- Paul Celan
Glottal Stop
translated by Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh


A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

- Albert Camus

Ann Deagon

[from There Is No Balm in Birmingham by Ann Deagon; originally published by David R. Godine, 1978; second edition by St. Andrews Press, 1997]

Customs of the Esquimaux Women

They do not stalk the caribou
tall-boned over hard white.
Kneeling fur-trousered low to
the bleak of ice they cut one
pure hole, prise up its flat moon.
In under sea the muscled seal
like dark pigs root for air.
One woman loosens furs, dips one
bare breast into the breathing hole:
its nipple spurts a thread of scent.
Seal veer and rise, their snouts
nudge, nuzzle, strike. The woman
screams, they grapple, tug the black
clenched beast on ice, hack off
its head, the woman's cry still coming hoarse,
rhythmic.

             Nights in the igloo she crouches,
softens stiff skin between her teeth.
Beside her in a shallow stone
seal blubber flickers the whole night.

syntax

[from Sound and Form in Modern Poetry by Harvey Gross]

Syntax, the order of words as they arrange themselves into patterns of meaning, is the analogue to harmony in music. Like harmony, syntax generates tension and relaxation, the feelings of expectation and fulfillment that make up the dynamics of poetic life. Suzanne Langer remarks:

The tension which music achieves through dissonance, and the reorientation in each new resolution to harmony, find their equivalents in the suspensions and periodic decisions of propositional sense in poetry. Literal sense, not euphony, is the “harmonic structure” of poetry; word melody in literature is more akin to tone color in music. (1)

Syntax gives us the arc of “literal sense,” the articulations of meaning. Like harmony in music, syntax makes connections, strengthens ideas, and relates thematic material. Eliot himself emphasizes that music in poetry does not inhere in word melody and tone color, but in the harmony of meanings and connections:

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that all poetry ought to be melodious, or that melody is more than one of the components of the music of words. . . . The music of a word is, so to speak, at a point of intersection: it arises from its relation first to the words immediately preceding and following it, and indefinitely to the rest of its context; and from another relation, that of its immediate meaning in that context to all the other meanings which it had in other contexts, to its greater or less wealth of association. (2)

The reverberation of words, their semantic resonances, are the shifting tones in the harmony of intersections and associations.

Eliot’s syntax carries the bass line of his prosody. Through a deliberate and idiosyncratic use of repeated grammar and repeated words, Eliot achieves qualities common to both music and poetry—the feelings of arrest and motion, of beginnings and endings, of striving and stillness.

————
(1) Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge, MA, 1942), p. 261.
(2) T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New York, 1957), pp. 24-25.

Pattiann Rogers

[from Firekeeper by Pattiann Rogers]

The Family Is All There Is

Think of those old, enduring connections
found in all flesh—the channeling
wires and threads, vacuoles, granules,
plasma and pods, purple veins, ascending
boles and coral sapwood (sugar-
and light-filled), those common ligaments,
filaments, fibers and canals.

Seminal to all kin also is the open
mouth—in heart urchin and octopus belly,
in catfish, moonfish, forest lily,
and rugosa rose, in thirsty magpie,
wailing cat cub, barker, yodeler,
yawning coati.

And there is a pervasive clasping
common to the clan—the hard nails
of lichen and ivy sucker
on the church wall, the bean tendril
and the taproot, the bolted coupling
of crane flies, the hold of the shearwater
on its morning squid, guanine
to cytosine, adenine to thymine,
fingers around fingers, the grip
of the voice on presence, the grasp
of the self on place.

Remember the same hair on pygmy
dormouse and yellow-necked caterpillar,
covering red baboon, thistle seed
and willow herb? Remember the similar
snorts of warthog, walrus, male moose
and sumo wrestler? Remember the familiar
whinny and shimmer found in river birches,
bay mares and bullfrog tadpoles,
in children playing at shoulder tag
on a summer lawn?

The family—weavers, reachers, winders
and connivers, pumpers, runners, air
and bubble riders, rock-sitters, wave-gliders,
wire-wobblers, soothers, flagellators—all
brothers, sisters, all there is.

Name something else.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.

I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, lét be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size

At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
’S not wrung, see you; unforseentimes rather—as skies
Betweenpie mountains—lights a lovely mile.

Cole Swensen

[from Goest by Cole Swensen]

The Future of Sculpture (excerpt)
          Cy Twombly, Sculptures, National Gallery, Washington DC, 2001

The Future of Light

Give the box

back to the weal (the sun peeled) to a line, which is thin, to a dim
Give it back to him.
As the white brush brushes over you again you are counting time run
into the sun (until it equals)

                                                        Throw the sun into the box.
The box is painted white. By your own hand
the sun was hauled into view and proved to be
a pale thing off which the paint is flaking.

                          In Time the Wind Will Come and Destroy my Lemons
                          Rome 1987

Everything white is turning
into a white wall
                          And we . . .

Dave Smith

[from Little Boats, Unsalvaged by Dave Smith]

Most epithalamiums don't merit the ink, but here's an exception.

Oyster Beds

             On the marriage of Lael and Hunter Eley

Wicked, I called them, ridged shells soft-folded, tide-shifters,
clingers to white dull walls of homes I could never live in, so

I thought. Then slipped among the inner rooms of shells, heaps,
pier-holders, little joists, sepulchral cities of families, quiet’s

blizzards of tiny fish, too, feeling’s shapes, edge schools
that pump and nudge and woo the eye that falls upon them.

These seemed easy to understand, crowds of dreamers in blue.
But I had no taste for what dark gouged, slurped, raked, beds

of lumps like saltwater foam some god commanded to be flesh.
I knew what they were. One in summer light opened on me.

Where it lay in water’s bed, sunning, I walked, not warned.
Then the white of bone slipped out, my foot’s blood flowed,

teased stain of me large, mysterious, that left on us surrounding
touch like a first kiss. Mud shone as if torched that day. Skins

of sails cut the harbor to a room, bobbers left shoes, watches,
rings, near-naked in light, walking sand, knee-deep flirting it.

For you I’d gone forth. Now I heard old words: come on, heart,
give the thing your try, blest are willed-together ones, sweeter

opening, and chillest tides strike seed. I walked swallowing in
your uplifted loving face, by marsh and hill, lying nights alive,

rivulets of salt scaling us, life’s mouth wide. We knew it. Gulp,
you said, it’s good. We would eat, be whole together, then rise up.

David Wojahn

[from Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982 - 2004
by David Wojahn]

Radnóti in a Trench Coat

The lyric will be worked to death, on a work detail.
                   *
Worked until it’s trochees & ellipses for the State.
                   *
Worked to its Natural State, which is a trench coat filled with entrails.
                   *
Its grave could fill a soccer stadium. (Now hit delete.)
                   *
70,000 punctuation marks, virgules & a singing corpse, fortunate
                   *
to sing inside a trench coat in the Balkan snow.
                   *
Inside the pockets of the trench coat (now hit
                   *
enter), words that speak Hungarian, aligned in rows
                   *
like galley-slave oars. Row Row Row your trireme
                   *
to Actium to burn & sink. The lyric works until it drowns.
                   *
(Press undo & the program crashes.) The lyric’s brain
                   *
accommodates the bullet unsuccessfully. It comes
                   *
out the forehead & is lodged inside a tree. (Now press
                   *
exit, now press close.) Now the shovel & the black earth.


Note: Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944), a victim of the Holocaust. His final poems were found in the pocket of his overcoat after his body had been exhumed from a mass grave.

NaPoWriMo

Yes, I'm doing it, isn't everyone?

Barbara Presnell

[from Unravelings by Barbara Presnell]

What a Woman Will Give Birth To

Two years after her
so-called spell,
two years of carrying her belly like a brick
and waking up nights to voices in her head,
to the everyday feeling she was just not herself,
doctors reopened the wound.
In the closet of her sunset womb
they found a pair of rusted scissors,
one white glove, a feather from
a mockingbird, three small marbles
(one cat's eye), size 38 Washington
Dee Cee overalls, a handful of baby teeth,
the Vienna boys choir singing "Ave Maria,"
a 1905 buffalo nickel,
the one hundred and twenty-first psalm.
Not long after they cleaned her
out and closed her up,
the emptiness they left behind
killed her.

Yesterday in Asheboro, NC, I studied with Barbara Presnell in a poetry workshop sponsored by the North Carolina Poetry Society . Thank you Bette Burgess for organizing and participating, Kay Fetner for the almond-coconut cupcakes, and all the other poets who participated.

Vijay Seshadri

[from The Long Meadow by Vijay Seshadri]

Superman Agonistes

"When my X-ray eyes look through the humans
to the need inside,
glowing red and green,
my blood cells collide,

my lungs collapse,
my cortex rebels,
and my heart wraps
a bomb around itself

and threatens to kill us both.
But I can't stay away.
I have to fly down
and watch them pray,

to watch them couple,
to watch them fight,
exposing myself
to their kryptonite."

Jack Gilbert

[from Great Fires by Jack Gilbert]

Conceiving Himself

Night after night after hot night in the clearing.
Stars, odor of damp grass, the faint sound of waves.
The palm trees around hardly visible, and the smell
of the jungle beyond. Hour after hour of the drumming
on bells, while young girls danced elegantly in their
heavy golden costumes. Afterward, groping his way
back along the dirt paths through blackness, dazed
by the trembling music, the dancing, and their hands.
(Pittsburgh so long ago. The spoor of someone inside
him.Knowing it sometimes waiting for a train in snow,
or just a moment while eating figs in a stony field.)
One evening the rain spilled down and he ran into
the tent behind the altar, where dancers and musicians
crowded together in the unnatural light of a Coleman
lantern: the girls undressing, rain in their hair,
the delicate faces still painted, their teeth white
as they laughed. None speaking English, their language
impossible. The man finally backstage in his life.

Patrick Phillips

Last weekend I attended the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville and heard readings by many very good poets including Sarah Gambito, Jane Hirshfield, Charlotte Matthews, Gregory Orr, Vijay Seshadri, and Natasha Trethewey.

After the very young-looking Patrick Phillips read from his remarkable book Chattahoochee, the 2005 Kate Tufts Award winner, my friend Susan Meyers bought me a copy.

If you don't know Phillips's work, you should. The following is an excerpt from the title poem from Chattahoochee:

3

Some tragedies are comic:
a man dies for twenty-three dollars
but would’ve done it for less.
In coveralls, a ball cap, black whorls of beard,

he crouches like a catcher
to bury his jar under the magnolia.
He stamps on the mound, smoothes it with his shoe.
There is movement, of course,

order to disorder—the brown river rising,
flooding the house, the barn,
the blossoming magnolia. There is the man
wading down the steps of his porch like a Baptist,

cool water filling his pockets with mica
as he dog paddles over the place
where the shimmer should be, the glint
of the pickle jar through the Chattahoochee.

He takes a long breath before going,
then goes. A small act in the story,
one body floating downstream,
becoming a creature of water:

the brown eyes open,
the blue skin spotted with leeches,
the throat filled with pollen and leaves—
floating upstream the day the flood crests.

Only the living need a spirit
for the physics of buoyancy. For us
there’s always a message swirling in the eddy,
a voice in the movements of water.

If the drowned man must speak, then—
as his body, stripped bare, floats away—let him say this:
the oldest instinct is to find what you bury,
to come back and dig up your bones.

Jane Hirshfield

[from After by Jane Hirshfield]

Flowering Vetch

Each of the tragedies can be read
as the tale of a single ripening self,
every character part of one soul.
The comedies can be included in this as well.
Often the flaw is a flaw of self-knowledge;
sometimes greed. For this reason
the comic glint of a school of herring leads to no plot line,
we cannot imagine a tragedy of donkeys or bees.
Before the ordinary realities, ordinary failures:
hunger, coldness, anger, longing, heat.
Yet one day, a thought as small as a vetch flower opens.
After, no longer minding the minor and almost wordless role,
playing the messenger given the letter
everyone knows will arrive too late or ruined by water.
To have stopped by the fig and eaten was not an error, then,
but the reason for going.

cat photo

wow

Dana Levin

[from In the Surgical Theatre by Dana Levin]

Wings

Crushed mouse head on the picnic table—
       it is your thumb,
your tongue.
       Some part of you
hanging from the great owl’s mouth—
       What were you thinking when you took shelter here,
standing in a gray
       powder of droppings, tumors
of matted hair and bone
       rotting the floor of this abandoned barn—
Imagine,
       the crush and the blood. The live
feast
       up in the eaves, the enormous, rotting nest—

You thought it was him, you thought it was all
       him,
turning toward the hills where the hares were running,
       their yellow coats gleaming like suns in the snow,
visible,
       takeable,
fleeing
       the sharp-cocked claw—
And now you feel them,
       under your feet: the broken shells that are hers—

The great swoop and then you, little mouse,
       pinched up
by the skin of your nape,
       hovering above the white-streaked floor—
And that you wanted it, the dark fold of embrace,
       cradling you away
from the arctic wind
       whipping through these cankered walls—
The dark well
       of her open eye,
the beak, the lunge, the eating.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc

Even if you don't read Verse Daily every day, you must read it today.

Wislawa Szymborska

[from Wislawa Szymborska's View with a Grain of Sand

Autonomy

In danger, the holothurian cuts itself in two.
It abandons one self to a hungry world
and with the other self it flees.

It violently divides into doom and salvation,
retribution and reward, what has been and what will be.

An abyss appears in the middle of its body
between what instantly become two foreign shores.

Life on one shore, death on the other.
Here hope and there despair.

If there are scales, the pans don’t move.
If there is justice, this is it.

To die just as required, without excess.
To grow back just what’s needed from what’s left.

We, too, can divide ourselves, it’s true.
But only into flesh and a broken whisper.
Into flesh and poetry.

The throat on one side, laughter on the other,
quiet, quickly dying out.

Here the heavy heart, there non omnis moriar—
just three little words, like a flight’s three feathers.

The abyss doesn’t divide us.
The abyss surrounds us.

         In memoriam Halina Poświatowska

Linda Gregg

[from Too Bright to See & Alma by Linda Gregg]

The Girl I Call Alma

The girl I call Alma who is so white
is good, isn't she? Even though she does not speak,
you can tell by her distress that she is
just like the beach and the sea, isn't she?
And she is disappearing, isn't that good?
And the white curtains, and the secret smile
are just her way with the lies, aren't they?
And that we are not alone, ever.
And that everything is backwards
otherwise.
And that inside the no is the yes. Isn't it?
Isn't it? And that she is the god who perishes:
the food we eat, the body we fuck,
the loose net we throw out that gathers her.
Fish! Fish! White sun! Tell me we are one
and that it's the others who scar me,
not you.


There She Is

When I go into the garden, there she is.
The specter holds up her arms to show
that her hands are eaten off.
She is silent because of the agony.
There is blood on her face.
I can see she has done this to herself.
So she would not feel the other pain.
And it is true, she does not feel it.
She does not even see me.
It is not she anymore, but the pain itself
that moves her. I look and think
how to forget. How can I live while she
stands there? And if I take her life
what will that make of me? I cannot
touch her, make her conscious.
It would hurt her too much.
I hear the sound all through the air
that was her eating, but it is on its own now,
completely separate from her. I think
I am supposed to look. I am not supposed
to turn away. I am supposed to see each detail
and all expression gone. My God, I think,
if paradise is to be here
it will have to include her.


The Grub

The almost transparent white grub moves
slowly along the edge of the frying pan.
The grease makes the only sound, loud
in the empty room. Even the rim is cooking him.
The worm stops. Raises his head slightly.
Lowers it, moving tentatively down the side.
He seems to be moving on his own time,
but he is falling by definition. He moves forward
touching the frying grease with his whole face.

Richard Siken

[from Crush by Richard Siken]

Visible World

    Sunlight pouring across your skin, your shadow
                                                            flat on the wall.
        The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs.
You had not expected this,
               the bedroom gone white, the astronomical light
                                               pummeling you in a stream of fists.
    You raised your hand to your face as if
               to hide it, the pink fingers gone gold as the light
streamed straight to the bone,
    as if you were the small room closed in glass
                                         with every speck of dust illuminated.
    The light is no mystery,
the mystery is that there is something to keep the light
                                                                 from passing through.


This short volume of poems is as good as a great film and better than most novels published these days.

W. B. Yeats

Cuchulain Comforted

A man that had six mortal wounds, a man
Violent and famous, strode among the dead;
Eyes stared out of the branches and were gone.

Then certain Shrouds that muttered head to head
Came and were gone. He leant upon a tree
As though to meditate on wounds and blood.

A Shroud that seemed to have authority
Among those bird-like things came, and let fall
A bundle of linen. Shrouds by two and three

Came creeping up because the man was still.
And thereupon that linen-carrier said:
‘Your life can grow much sweeter if you will

‘Obey our ancient rule and make a shroud;
Mainly because of what we only know
The rattle of those arms makes us afraid.

‘We thread the needles’ eyes, and all we do
All must together do.’ That done, the man
Took up the nearest and began to sew.

‘Now must we sing and sing the best we can,
But first you must be told our character:
Convicted cowards all, by kindred slain

‘Or driven from home and left to die in fear.’
They sang, but had nor human tunes nor words,
Though all was done in common as before;

They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds.

Judy Jordan

[from Carolina Ghost Woods by Judy Jordan]

Winter
       (in memory: CNHJ)

First light shook with ax-blows to the frozen pond,
and the geese called in guttural distress
as I chopped through to the still, black water.
All day the land gave over to thaw, and snow released the cabin,
softened and eased off the ridged tin roof in foundation-shaking
       crashes
until night when Orion whistled his dogs
behind clouds mottled like weathered rock,
then the farm sighed under the new storm
and silence returned like an old sorrow.

I wish that silence held some answer or passage
to forgetting. I would go to it
with its hesitant and dangerous tacks,
its seepage into night like shadows slipping into bodies,
where it hangs like smoke,
drifts into itself as smoke will,
rises slow above trees
to the flat of the sky, rises and hangs
and, like sorrow, waits and will not fade.

Rachel Zucker

The remarkable (and funny) poet called Rachel Zucker defines both confessional and Confessionalistic Poetry in an essay posted on the Academy of American Poets website.

Thank you Anne Haines for this link.

Jane Hirshfield

[from The Lives of the Heart by Jane Hirshfield]

The Roses of the Nag Hammadi Library

Dry summers,
the deer come down
to eat my roses.
Think of a rack made of roses.
Think of a hoof,
of the long and rose-colored
muscles of foreleg and shoulder.
A leap made of roses is easier,
over the fence like a vine.
When the boys hunting nitrate
broke open a jar in the mountains
and brought home some paper—
old, very dry—their mother, who could
not read, found it good kindling.
“Imagine the flavor,” my friend said,
but kasha is kasha. The rains come,
the deer slip back into the mountains
like hungry, rose-colored smoke.
They move mouthful by mouthful; pensive,
they slowly rise.

Hopkins on Keats

[from a letter to Coventry Patmore]

"It is impossible not to feel with weariness how [Keats's] verse is at every turn abandoning itself to an unmanly and enervating luxury. It appears too that he said something like 'O for a life of impressions rather than thoughts' . . . Nevertheless, I feel and see in him the beginnings of something opposite to this, of an interest in higher things, and of powerful and active thought . . . His mind had, as it seems to me, the distinctly masculine powers in abundance, his character the manly virtues, but while he gave himself up to dreaming and self-indulgence, of course, they were in abeyance . . . but . . . his genius would have taken to an austere utterance in art. Reason, thought, what he did not want to live by, would have asserted itself presently."

William Butler Yeats

The Fascination of What's Difficult

The fascination of what's difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There's something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not hold blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road-metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up fifty ways,
On the day's war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I'll find the stable and pull out the bolt.

As Seamus Heaney says . . .
        The words fly off there like stones in a riot.

Carl Phillips

[from The Tether by Carl Phillips]

The Point of the Lambs

“The good lambs
in the yellow barn—the rest
housed in blue.” By

“the rest,” meaning those who
—the guide explained—inevitably
arrive suffering. “For

some do,” he added.
Soft.
Serious. This—like

a new lesson. As to
some among us, it was,
it seemed. The usual

stammer of heart the naïve
tend to, in the face of what finally
is only the world. What

must it be, to pass
thus—clean, stripped—
through a life? What

reluctance the mind
shows on recognizing
that what it approaches

is, at last, the answer
to the very question it knows
now, but

too late,
oh better to never to have never
put forward. What I

mean is we moved
closer,
in,

to the blue barn’s
advertisement—
flaw,

weakness. We
looked in.
Three days, four days

old. Few expected to
finish the evening it was beginning to
be already. And the small

crowd of us
shifting forward, and—
in our shifting uniformly—it

being possible to see how between
us and any
field rendered by a sudden wind

single gesture—kowtow,
upheaval—there was
little difference. Some

took photographs; most
did a stranger thing; touched
briefly, without

distinction, whichever
person stood immediately in
front of, next to. Less

for support than
as remedy or proof or
maybe—given the lambs who

besides dying, were as well
filthy (disease,
waste and, negotiating

the dwindling contract
between the two,
the flies everywhere)—

maybe the touching
concerned curbing the hand’s instinct
to follow the eye, to

confirm vision. Who can
say? I was there—yes—but
I myself touched no one.

conversation with Jane Hirshfield

from The Well

memes semem

tagged by Ana for the 4x4 Meme Project:

Four jobs I've had (in chronological order):
- radio disk jockey
- waitress at Club 47
- thesis typist
- keypunch clerk

Four movies I can watch over and over:
- don't have any
- I'm not movie-literate
- I've seen two Mel Brooks' movies twice
- I have Netflix now

Four places I've lived:
- Corfu, Greece
- Pittsburgh, PA
- Sterling, MA
- Montara, CA

Four TV shows I like:
- none
- never turn it on
- would rather be dead
- ?

Four places I've vacationed:
- Hong Kong
- Belize
- New Zealand
- Cape Cod

Four of my favorite dishes:
- poached shrimp
- sauteed shrimp
- grilled shrimp
- Chinese dumplings stuffed with shrimp

Four sites I visit daily:
- tribe.net
- wompo listserve
- noaa.gov
- Amazon

Four books I've read this year:
- Wislawa Szymborska's View with a Grain of Sand
- Jack Gilbert's Refusing Heaven
- Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters
- Ashley Warlick's Seek the Living

Four bloggers I'm tagging:
- you, and if three more of you are not bloggers, begin at once

Gertrude Stein

"Instead of giving what I was realizing at any and every moment of them and of me until I was empty of them I made them contained within the thing I wrote that was them. The thing in itself folding itself up inside itself like you might fold a thing up to be another thing which is that thing. . . . If you think how you fold things or make a boat or anything else out of paper or getting anything to be inside anything, the hole in the doughnut or the apple in the dumpling perhaps you will see what I mean."

a letter from John Keats

People say, “Read Keats’s letters.” Here’s an example of why:

I made up my Mind to stop in doors, and catch a sight flying between the showers; and behold I saw a pretty valley—pretty cliffs, pretty Brooks, pretty Meadows, pretty trees, both standing as they were created, and blown down as they are uncreated—The green is beautiful, as they say, and pity it is that it is amphibious—mais! but alas! the flowers here wait as naturally for the rain twice a day as the Muscles do for the Tide. . . . I’ll cavern you, and grotto you, and waterfall you, and wood you, and water you, and immense-rock you, and tremendous sound you, and solitude you. Ill make a lodgment on your glacis by a row of Pines, and storm your covered way with bramble Bushes. Ill have at you with hip and haw smallshot, and cannonade you with Shingles—Ill be witty upon salt fish, and impede your cavalry with clotted cream. But ah Coward! to talk at this rate to a sick man, or I hope to one that was sick—for I hope by this you stand on your right foot.—If you are not—that’s all,—I intend to cut all sick people if they do not make up their minds to cut sickness—a fellow to whom I have a complete aversion, and who strange to say is harboured and countenanced in several houses where I visit—he is sitting now quite impudent between me and Tom—He insults me at poor Jem Rice’s—and you have seated him before now between us at the Theatre—where I thought he look’d with a longing eye at poor Kean. I shall say, once for all, to my friends generally and severally, cut that fellow, or I cut you—I went to the Theatre here the other night, which I forgot to tell George, and got insulted, which I ought to remember to forget to tell any body; for I did not fight, and as yet have had no redress—‘Lie thou there, sweetheart!’ damme who’s afraid—for I had owed him so long; however, he shall see I will be better in future. Is he in Town yet? I have directed to Oxford as the better chance. I have copied my fourth Book, and shall write the preface soon. I wish it was all done; for I want to forget it and make my mind free for something new—Atkins the Coachman, Bartlet the Surgeon, Simmons the Barber, and the Girls over at the Bonnet shop say we shall now have a Month of seasonable Weather. warm, witty, and full of invention—Write to me and tell me you are well or thereabouts, or by the holy Beaucoeur,—which I suppose is the virgin Mary, or the repented Magdalen, (beautiful name, that Magdalen) Ill take to my Wings and fly away to any where but old or Nova Scotia—I wish I had a little innocent bit of Metaphysic in my head, to criss-cross this letter: but you know a favorite tune is hardest to be remembered when one wants it most and you, I know, have long ere this taken it for granted that I never have any speculations without associating you in them, where they are of a pleasant nature and you know enough to me to tell the places where I haunt most, so that if you think for five minutes after you have read this you will find it a long letter and see written in the Air above you,

Your most affectionate friend
                                       John Keats

Charles Wright

[from Negative Blue by Charles Wright]

Poem Half in the Manner of Li Ho

All things aspire to weightlessness,
                             some place beyond the lip of language,
Some silence, some zone of grace,

Sky white as raw silk,
                               opening mirror cold-sprung in the west,
Sunset like dead grass.

If God hurt the way we hurt,
                                         he, too, would be heart-sore,
Disconsolate, unappeasable.


Li Ho, the story goes, would leave home
Each day at dawn, riding a colt, a servant boy
                                                                   walking behind him,
An antique tapestry bag
Strapped to his back.
                               When inspiration struck, Ho would write
The lines down and drop them in the bag.
At night he’d go home and work the lines up into a poem,
No matter how disconnected and loose-leafed they were.
His mother once said,
“He won’t stop until he has vomited out his heart.”


[lines omitted]

Farm Life

I was discovering a duck sitting a nest in the high grass
when the missing dog burst out of the woods, raced down the hill
for Jamie who found the bleeding gash below her ribs. I followed
with hydrogen peroxide, but we could see she needed more:
we shaved around the wound, swabbed Blu-Kote in and out, and
while Jamie held, I managed two stitches with a curved needle
and the upholstery thread I earlier used on the canvas ottoman.
Mia's brave; we managed. She's resting in Jamie's bloodied lap.

Richard Wilbur

[from Singular Voices edited by Stephen Berg]

Lying
by Richard Wilbur

To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle,
When in fact you haven’t of late, can do no harm.
Your reputation for saying things of interest
Will not be marred, if you hasten to other topics,
Nor will the delicate web of human trust
Be ruptured by that airy fabrication.
Later, however, talking with toxic zest
Of golf, or taxes, or the rest of it
Where the beaked ladle plies the chuckling ice,
You may enjoy a chill of severance, hearing
Above your head the shrug of unreal wings.
Not that the world is tiresome in itself:
We know what boredom is: it is a dull
Impatience or a fierce velleity,
A champing wish, stalled by our lassitude
To make or do. In the strict sense, of course,
We invent nothing, merely bearing witness
To what each morning brings again to light:
Gold crosses, cornices, astonishment
Of panes, the turbine-vent which natural law
Spins on the grill-end of the diner’s roof,
Then grass and grackles or, at the end of town
In sheen-swept pastureland, the horse’s neck
Clothed with its usual thunder, and the stones
Beginning now to tug their shadows in
And track the air with glitter. All these things
Are there before us; there before we look
Or fail to look; there to be seen or not
By us, as by the bee’s twelve thousand eyes,
According to our means and purposes.
So too with strangeness not to be ignored,
Total eclipse or snow upon the rose,
And so with that more rare conception, nothing.
What is it, after all, but something missed?
It is the water of a dried-up well
Gone to assail the cliffs of Labrador.
There is what galled the arch-negator, sprung
From Hell to probe with intellectual sight
The cells and heavens of a given world
Which he could take but as another prison:
Small wonder that, pretending not to be,
He drifted through the bar-like boles of Eden
In a black mist low creeping, dragging down
And darkening with moody self-absorption
What, when he left it, lifted and, if seen
From the sun’s vantage, seethed with vaulting hues.
Closer to making than the deftest fraud
Is seeing how the catbird’s tail was made
To counterpoise, on the mock-orange spray,
Its light, up-tilted spine; or, lighter still,
How the shucked tunic of an onion, brushed
To one side on a backlit chopping-board
And rocked by trifling currents, prints and prints
Its bright, ribbed shadow like a flapping sail.
Odd that a thing is most itself when likened:
The eye mists over, basil hints of clove,
The river glazes toward the dam and spills
To the drubbed rocks below its crashing cullet,
And in the barnyard near the sawdust-pile
Some great thing is tormented. Either it is
A tarp torn loose and in the groaning wind
Now puffed, now flattened, or a hip-shot beast
Which tries again, and once again, to rise.
What, though for pain there is no other word,
Finds pleasure in the cruellest simile?
It is something in us like the catbird’s song
From neighbor bushes in the grey of morning
That, harsh or sweet, and of its own accord,
Proclaims its many kin. It is a chant
Of the first springs, and it is tributary
To the great lies told with the eyes half-shut
That have the truth in view: the tale of Chiron
Who, with sage head, wild heart, and planted hoof
Instructed brute Achilles in the lyre,
Or of the garden where we first mislaid
Simplicity of wish and will, forgetting
Out of what cognate splendor all things came
To take their scattering names; and nonetheless
That matter of a baggage-train surprised
By a few Gascons in the Pyrenees—
Which having worked three centuries and more
In the dark caves of France, poured out at last
The blood of Roland, who to Charles his king
And to the dove that hatched the dovetailed world
Was faithful unto death, and shamed the Devil.

Wilbur has this to say about the poem:

What I’m sure of is that a high subject, unless perhaps one is writing a hymn, should not be approached with remorseless nobility, and this poem has its comic elements, as many of mine do. Comedy is serious; it is the voice of balance; and its presence in a serious poem is a test and earnest of its earnestness.

Makes me think of Emily Dickinson's approach to high subjects.

Richard Hugo

[from Singular Voices: American Poetry Today, edited by Stephen Berg]

I dedicate this poem to Beverly Jackson.

Green Stone

All stones have luck built in. Some
a lucky line that curves a weak green back
into some age prehuman. If stones
could talk they’d tell us how they’ve survived.
They’ve been used in beautiful fences,
been weapons hurled.

The luck of a stone is part of that stone.
It’s not mystical, does not exist just on
the stone like a spell put there by some spirit
in some awkward moment—say the picnic’s
on the verge of disaster, then good wine opened
and the sun suddenly out, and oh the laughter.
But why am I digressing?
These things have nothing to do with stone luck.

I’m speaking real stones. You understand.
Rocks. Not symbols for testicles and not
some lay philosopher’s metaphysical notion
of an indestructible truth. Real stones, the ones
you find lining ocean floors or creek beds
or lying lonely on roads. Probable colors:
blue, yellow, gray, red, green, white or brown.
The luck of each is the same but each suited
to a different situation. That’s why December,
told I was dying of cancer
I picked up a green stone I liked the look of
and carried it in my pocket.
I fondled it just before I took the plane to Seattle.
I kissed it often, both sides before the plane took off,
before biopsy, before major surgery. And now
that surgery seems to have gotten every flake
of sick tissue, I keep the stone on a ledge,
where every morning the sun warms the stone.
When I’m totally recovered, another three months
they say, I’ll throw the stone back where I found it.
I won’t tell you where that is.
The same rock would not work for you no matter
how trivial your problem, how little
luck you need. Please know
I want your life to go on same as mine.
It’s just essential you find your own stone.
It lies somewhere near you now, innocent,
and your eye will spot it in one right moment.
You must hold it close to your ear, and
when it speaks to you, you must respond.

Stanley Kunitz

From his Paris Review interview:

The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.

[The full interview is not yet online but expected before too long. Most interviews before 1980 are available here.]

my life on the farm

has reduced to this (and everything else I'm not telling):

- every day twice I ride my bicycle up the steep driveway

- every day I memorize an Emily Dickinson poem

i'm on day four

Low to my problem bending,
Another problem comes --
Larger than mine -- serener --
Involving statelier sums.

I check my busy pencil,
my figures file away.
Wherefore, my baffled fingers
Thy perplexity?

how many days will I do this?

John Keats

On the Sea

It keeps eternal whisperings around
Desolate shores,—and with its mighty swell
Gluts twice ten thousand caverns,—till the spell
Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound.
Often ’tis in such gentle temper found,
That scarcely will the very smallest shell
Be lightly moved, from where it sometime fell,
When last the winds of heaven were unbound.
Ye, that have your eye-balls vex’d and tired,
Feast them upon the wideness of the sea;—
Or are your hearts disturb’d with uproar rude,
Or fed too much with cloying melody,—
Sit ye near some old cavern’s mouth and brood
Until ye start, as if the sea nymphs quired.

--

[from a letter to the Reynolds sisters, 1817]

Respects to Mrs Dilk saying . . . that had I remained at Hampstead I would have made precious havoc with her house and furniture — drawn a great harrow over her garden — poisoned Boxer — eaten her Cloathes pegs, — fried her Cabbages fricaceed (how is it spelt?) her radishes — ragouted her Onions — belaboured her beet root — outstripped her Scarlet Runners — parlez vous with her french Beans — devoured her Mignon or Mignonette — metamorphosed her Bell handles — splintered her looking glasses — bullock'd at her cups and saucers — agonized her decanters — put old Phillips to pickle in the Brine tub — disorganized her Piano — dislocated her Candlesticks — emptied her wine bins in a fit of despair — turned out her maid to Grass and Astonished Brown — whose Letter to her on these events I would rather see than the original copy of the Book of Genesis.

Miranda Field

[from Swallow by Miranda Field]

Then As September Fields of Wheat & Straw Take Fire

What’s withheld till wind parts the grasses:
Musk flooding the air, noxious-sweet — eggshell frail,
the tiny bones of the vole, its velvets stiffened,
pouchful of insects and seeds. Cold stones,
no movement in the tinfoil fallen leaves,
silence in the humus, and shadows on the hill grown long,
the death of the sun, the sun in its brief grave
waiting to be born. The cat hurries a carcass off,
but the deer won’t run through the grove.
They could be painted deer, they stand stock-still,
as if they wait, as if they want the gun, the sight’s
devotion: Such attentiveness is like a hot gold rush
of air from another content. And the jaws of stupefaction
can’t release what they close on, the fears that hound
the hunter’s child: who climbs the larcenous ladder to the shelf
is caught by the foot . . . The deer’s children — all spring long
they come so close to the windows they startle
themselves against the glass. They let us watch them
because it warms them, as when my milk won’t come
my newborn thrives on my look — undiluted, nourishing.
Body entering all awe, all shock, who’d hobble you,
who’d bleed you of your want? The striding
shadows on the hill grow long, the hunters anxious —
not hunger driving them, not prescience of winter,
but nostalgia — for the fall about to start, that trapdoor in the air:
ardor to elegy. The painter arranges the deer in the wood.
Ripe fruit. Ready. So rich, so wet the palette.
Blood and iodine, desire and its attendant
damage. The hunter’s gun is loaded. The heart of the hunter
heavy as the hunted’s. And the chambers divided:
I & thou. And the passage narrow.

Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird

[from Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird by Donald Hall]

A poem is one inside talking to another inside. . . .

Lyric poetry, typically, has one goal and one message, which is to urge the condition of inwardness, the inside from which its own structure derives. . . .

the old distinction between vates and poiein. The poiein, from the Greek verb for making or doing, becomes the poet—the master of craft, the maker of the labyrinth of epic or tragedy or lyric hymn, tale-teller and spell-binder. The vates is bound in a spell. He is the rhapsode Socrates patronizes in Ion. In his purest form he utters what he does not understand at all . . . He is the visionary, divinely inspired . . .

There is no poiein for the same reason there is no vates . . . the distinction becomes trivial when we discover the psychic origins of poetic form . . .

Yeats said that the finished poem made a sound like the click of the lid on a perfectly made box. . . . the poet improvises toward that click . . . pleasure in resolution is Twinbird. . . . a poem . . . exists as a sensual body . . . reaches us through our mouths . . . and in the muscles of our legs . . . These pleasures are Milktongue and Goatfoot . . .

From the earliest times, poetry has existed in order to retrieve, to find again, and to release. In the poet who writes the poem, in the reader who lives it again, in the ideas, the wit, the images, the doctrines, the exhortations, the laments and the cries of joy, the lost forest struggles to be born again inside the word. The life of urge and instinct, that rages and coos, kicks and frolics, as it chooses only without choosing—this life is the life the poem grows from, and reconstitutes.

Suzanne Buffam

[from Past Imperfect by Suzanne Buffam]

House

We’ve found a hospital. The sick are missing
limbs, eyes, buttons, pins, and have been welcomed
for today back to the game.

They wait all day to see the doctor,
propped against the mantelpiece, above
the tinderbox that has been turned

into a gurney for a child, overlooked
while we look for the clock. We are not
interested in plot. Our pleasure’s

in the furniture, a rearranging of the rooms
inside the head. The doctor waits
to see the lady with the nickname

appliquéd across the bodice of her spangled
fitted dress. He’ll wait all day.
No one decided this. We simply

know it as we did not know
before we opened it — before it
opened us. There is a room inside the room

inside the room we find by wanting
it, in which a single, unplugged lamp
stands in for light.

Srikanth Reddy

[from Facts for Visitors by Srikanth Reddy]

Corruption

I am about to recite a psalm that I know. Before I begin, my expectation extends over the entire psalm. Once I have begun, the words I have said remove themselves from expectation & are now held in memory while those yet to be said remain waiting in expectation. The present is a word for only those words which I am now saying. As I speak, the present moves across the length of the psalm, which I mark for you with my fingers in the psalm book. The psalm is written in India ink, the oldest ink known to mankind. Every ink is made up of a color & a vehicle. With India ink, the color is carbon & the vehicle, water. Life on our planet is also composed of carbon & water. In the history of ink, which is rapidly coming to an end, the ancient world turns from the use of India ink to adopt sepia. Sepia is made from the octopus, the squid & the cuttlefish. One curious property of the cuttlefish is that, once dead, its body begins to glow. This mild phosphorescence reaches its greatest intensity a few days after death, then ebbs away as the body decays. You can read by this light.