The Old Poets of China: A Blog Hiatus

Photo by beardymonsta

A few weeks ago, I was walking across campus and a colleague stopped to read me a poem. It's not every day that poetry happens out of the blue! It was a short poem, one of those slight Mary Oliver masterpieces that is barely there yet still finds a way to thunder through your brain with a resounding "yes!"

I've been thinking about that poem a lot recently. One of the best things about this summer was that I managed to stay offline about 50% of the time. At first, I felt a bit lost. I had nagging feelings that I could be missing something important, I could be dropping balls, or losing productivity. But after a while, a stillness settled in. My head cleared. I could focus. I finished writing the novel I'd been struggling with. I painted my office. I spent time with family. I planned out better lessons for my music students.

Clearly, there is a balance to be had. And while I strive to find it, I've decided to take a hiatus from my blog. I've been blogging every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for the past six years, and truthfully, it's hard to let go. I may come back. But for a little while at least, I want to spend some time in the pale mist. We'll see how that goes.

The Old Poets of China
by Mary Oliver

Wherever I am, the world comes after me.
It offers me its busyness. It does not believe
that I do not want it. Now I understand
why the old poets of China went so far and high
into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.

Marilyn Singer: Mirror Mirror, A Book of Reversible Verse

How did the last day of Poetry Month sneak up so fast? Quickly, before it's over, I wanted to recommend a fun book of poetry for kids: Marilyn Singer's Mirror Mirror: A Book of Reversible Verse.

Each poem in this book looks at a fairy tale from two sides, flipping both the poem and the story upside down. Besides being fun, the reversed poems are perfect examples of how punctuation, line breaks, and rhythm are powerful tools that can change the meaning of a poem. The results are so surprising and fun, you'll immediately want to try writing one of your own.

The Doubtful Duckling

by Marilyn Singer

 

1. 

Someday

I'll turn into a swan.

No way

I'll stay

an ugly duckling,

stubby and gray.

Plain to see--

look at me.

A beauty I'll be.

 

2.

A beauty I'll be?

Look at me---

plain to see, 

stubby and gray.

An ugly duckling

I'll stay.

No way

I'll turn into a swan

Someday.

Latern Review: Poetry Month Digital Broadsides

The Lantern Review is embarking on an interesting project for National Poetry Month. This month, they've paired designers with poets to create a series of free digital broadsides. Anyone can download them, print them, post them, or use them as desktop wallpaper. The Review is also posting a series of Pocket Broadsides on Tumblr.

This month, I'll be talking to ten different 5th grade classrooms about how broadsides were used to advertise songs during the Civil War Era. I love the concept of reviving the broadside format to spread poetry in the digital world!

Digital Broadside #1: Vanitas (poem by R. A. Villanuevas, design by Debbie Yee)

Pocket Broadside #1: Vanni Taing

Edna St. Vincent Millay: Wild Swans

A couple years ago, I signed up for the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day email list. Thinking, of course, that it would introduce me to interesting new poets, remind me of old favorites, and most importantly, help me infuse each day with poetry. Instead, the emails piled up, cluttered my inbox, and made me feel like I was falling behind on one more thing. This is not how poetry should make you feel.

Kevin, as usual, was the hero in this situation. "Why don't you set up an email filter?" he asked. (And a light shone down from heaven, and the angel choir began to sing.) My filter now automatically redirects every Poem-a-Day email (as well as a few other newsletters) to a folder titled Poetry. The result? I have a (relatively) uncluttered inbox, and when I have some down time, I can open up my Poetry folder and leisurely catch up on all the poems I've missed. True, it's not the daily infusion of poetry that I imagined, but it's one of those tiny adjustments that makes life feel a bit more sane.

Which brings me to the wild swans. I've been struggling like crazy with the new novel I've been writing, and turned to my Poem-a-Day folder for solace. What I love about poetry is that it can hit you differently every time you read it. I've read "Wild Swans" by Edna St. Vincent Millay before, but this time it seemed to speak directly to the creative process. So often, I feel like what I've put on the page is "nothing to match the flight of wild birds flying." That is to say, the words seem dead and dull on the page. And so I go for a walk in the woods. When I've stepped away, let go of the tiresome heart (or mind), and simply experienced something tangible, wild, and real, then I feel I might be able to write again.

Wild Swans

Edna St. Vincent Millay

I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over.
And what did I see I had not seen before?
Only a question less or a question more;
Nothing to match the flight of wild birds flying.
Tiresome heart, forever living and dying,
House without air, I leave you and lock your door.
Wild swans, come over the town, come over
The town again, trailing your legs and crying!

Cornelius Eady: The Gardenia

I listened this weekend to Etta James' Mystery Lady: Songs of Billie Holiday and it put me in mind of Corneilius Eady's poem about Billie Holiday. I love the anguish of this poem. The wish to take back sadness and pain, to change the course of history. And the realization that, like it or not, our histories--where we come from and the things we go through--shape who we are. They shape what we bring to the world.

The Gardenia
by Cornelius Eady

The trouble is, you can never take
That flower from Billie's hair.
She is always walking too fast
and try as we might,

there's no talking her into slowing.
Don't go down into that basement,
we'd like to scream. What will it take
to bargain her blues,

To retire that term when it comes
to her? But the grain and the cigarettes,
the narcs and the fancy-dressed boys,
the sediment in her throat.

That's the soil those petals spring from,
Like a fist, if a fist could sing.

Philip Levine: Let Me Begin Again

Happy 2012! Over the past few months, I've taken some time off to get settled in my new home and finish a revision of my novel. There are still plenty of boxes to be unpacked and writerly tinkering to be done, but I'm back in the blogosphere and excited for the new year!

To kick things off, here is a poem by U.S. Poet Laureate, Philip Levine. In 2012, I hope we will all remember to "love this life because it is like no other."

Let Me Begin Again

by Philip Levine

Let me begin again as a speck
of dust caught in the night winds
sweeping out to sea. Let me begin
this time knowing the world is
salt water and dark clouds, the world
is grinding and sighing all night, and dawn
comes slowly and changes nothing. Let
me go back to land after a lifetime
of going nowhere. This time lodged
in the feathers of some scavenging gull
white above the black ship that docks
and broods upon the oily waters of
your harbor. This leaking freighter
has brought a hold full of hayforks
from Spain, great jeroboams of dark
Algerian wine, and quill pens that can't
write English. The sailors have stumbled
off toward the bars of the bright houses.
The captain closes his log and falls asleep.
1/10'28. Tonight I shall enter my life
after being at sea for ages, quietly,
in a hospital named for an automobile.
The one child of millions of children
who has flown alone by the stars
above the black wastes of moonless waters
that stretched forever, who has turned
golden in the full sun of a new day.
A tiny wise child who this time will love
his life because it is like no other.

Keeper and The Night-Blooming Cereus

Right now, I'm reading Kathi Appelt's new book, Keeper. So far, I haven't been completely sucked in like I was when reading The Underneath, but I'm only halfway through, so we'll see. One thing that stands out, though, is the way Ms. Appelt is able to capture a palpable sense of waiting. I put the in italics because it is not just your ho-hum pass-the-time kind of waiting. The whole book is infused with heavy anticipation, a quiet but persistent feeling that any moment now, some small, magical shift is going to change everything.

The perfect symbol of this waiting is the night-blooming cereus. Keeper's neighbor, Mr. Beauchamp, has a night-blooming cereus. This is a plant that blooms rarely, and only at night. In Kathi Appelt's novel, Mr. Beauchamp is waiting, waiting, for the plant to flower on the night of the blue moon.

So here's the truth. This is all a rambling excuse to write once again about how much I love Robert Hayden. Everytime I pick up Keeper, I want to pull his Collected Poems off the shelf and thumb through to "The Night-Blooming Cereus," a beautiful example of waiting for something magical to happen in the everyday. 

It's long, so I can't post the whole thing here, but check out these first few stanzas and then you'll have to go grab the book from your library (because the last stanza is one of my favorite stanzas of all time). Or better yet, buy the book...you'll want to have it handy for times like these. You may also be able to read the whole poem online at Google Books.

(Also, apologies to Mr. Hayden for the incorrect formatting. Blogger can't handle poetic indentations.)

The Night-Blooming Cereus (excerpt)
by Robert Hayden

And so for nights
we waited, hoping to see
the heavy bud
break into flower.

On its neck-like tube
hooking down from the edge
of the leaf-branch
nearly to the floor,

the bud packed
tight with its miracle swayed
stiffly on breaths
of air, moved

as though impelled
by stirrings within itself.
It repelled as much
as it fascinated me...

Marianne Moore: Poetry

How in the world have I gotten all the way to the end of Poetry Month without posting one single poem? Well, this must be remedied! Quick, fetch some Marianne Moore!

Poetry

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
      all this fiddle.
   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
      discovers in
   it after all, a place for the genuine.
      Hands that can grasp, eyes
      that can dilate, hair that can rise
         if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
      they are
   useful. When they become so derivative as to become
      unintelligible,
   the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
      do not admire what
      we cannot understand: the bat
         holding on upside down or in quest of something to 

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
      wolf under
   a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
      that feels a flea, the base-
   ball fan, the statistician--
      nor is it valid
         to discriminate against "business documents and

school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make
      a distinction
   however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
      result is not poetry,
   nor till the poets among us can be
     "literalists of
      the imagination"--above
         insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them,"
      shall we have
   it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
   the raw material of poetry in
      all its rawness and
      that which is on the other hand
         genuine, you are interested in poetry.

William Carlos Williams: Winter Trees

One last, lovely winter poem before everything turns to slush...

Winter Trees
by William Carlos Williams

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

 Photo by looseends

Erika Meitner: Untitled [and the moon once it stopped was sleeping]

It was good to hibernate and have some facebook/twitter/blog time off, but I'm glad to be back so I can catch you up on all the great books, music, and miscellanea I've been immersed in.

This poem by Erika Meitner showed up in my inbox back in January as part of the excellent (and free!) Poem-A-Day email subscription. There are certain poems that are so unexpected and lovely, I find myself holding my breath while I read them. There are poems that have such interesting movement and pacing, I accidentally mouth the words as I go along so I can feel the sound of the poem on my tongue. I haven't been able to delete this one from my inbox yet, so I decided I'd better share it here.

Untitled [and the moon once it stopped was sleeping]
by Erika Meitner

and the moon         once it stopped         was sleeping

in the cold blue light          and the moon          while the wind snapped

vinyl siding apart          slipped around corners          whipped the neighbors'

carefully patterned bunchgrass          our snow-filled vegetable boxes

the house unjoining              the moon       our yard strips          covered with

hollow shells          of hard remnants               ice      and my son's breath

contiguous               static          a shard of green light          on the monitor

wavers with coughs                     the Baptist church                     in Catawba

the only place lit up          down the mountain          past midnight, someone

waving their hands             at something          so quiet              you can hear

the wind tear          at the houses          you can hear          the neighbor

coming home          though he's .18 acres          away          it's too late

for that feeling          (possibility)          the night       always   held

the wind                   is at it                    again            cracking

paint            on the walls              one day          it will            unroot us

one day        the wind        will tally        our losses

but        not yet             the moon        not yet

Emily Dickinson for Halloween: I Heard a Fly Buzz

I hope you all had a fun Halloween! We live in a very Halloween-happy neighborhood and had hundreds of trick or treaters. The strangest costume was probably the ten year old boy dressed as "a kissing booth." Hey, whatever works.

Too bad I didn't see these cool poet costume ideas *before* the holiday. I especially like the "extra credit" add-ons. For instance, as part of the Emily Dickinson costume, they suggest you hand out plastic flies in honor of her poem #465. Or for William Carlos Williams, hand out candy from a red wheelbarrow. Nice.

I heard a fly buzz (465)
by Emily Dickinson

I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaves of Storm –

The Eyes around – had wrung them dry –
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset – when the King
Be witnessed – in the Room –

I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away
What portions of me be
Assignable – and then it was
There interposed a Fly –

With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz –
Between the light – and me –
And then the Windows failed – and then
I could not see to see –

James Wright: Autumn Begins In Martins Ferry, Ohio

Happy Labor Day, all!

Football season has officially arrived and Kevin will likely spend Labor Day morning watching yesterday's Tivo'd Notre Dame game (no spoilers, please). Football season means weekends change drastically in our house, and believe me, this used to be a big point of contention. I've never been a football fan or understood the desire to sit in front of the TV for hours on end on what is often a beautiful weekend day.

Until, with true Midwestern lemons-into-lemonade determination, I decided to train myself to write on football Sundays.

I've never been the kind of writer who can work with noise of any sort. No music, no movement, nothing. But for the last couple seasons, I've forced myself to write during football. Now, when the game starts, I type away with the roar of the crowd in the background and tasty football snacks within reach. Kevin can occasionally yell out "watch this play!" and I can ask "what do you think of this line?" He gets his game, I get some pages done, and all in all it's a lovely Sunday (or Saturday) afternoon. Go team!

In honor of the season, here is a James Wright poem I adore:

Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio
by James Wright

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

Blackberry Picking by Seamus Heaney

Photo by respres

Kevin and I spent yesterday afternoon picking blackberries. The berries were perfect. So ripe that sometimes you barely touched the branch and two or three berries would go tumbling to the ground. I got bramble scratches up my arms and a ping-pong-sized welt of a bug bite on my ankle, but it was SO worth it. Especially after I made the most delicious warm blackberry crisp ever (more on that on Friday).


In Poetry Writing for Kids this year, my students (third through fifth grade) were going to study Seamus Heaney's poem "Blackberry Picking," but I am always a bit overly ambitious. Instead of studying 25 poems in 5 afternoons, we only had time for about 20 (they did, after all, have their own writing to do). This one, sadly, is one of the ones I cut from the roster:


Blackberry Picking
by Seamus Heaney

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickening wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermetted, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

Pablo Neruda: Book of Questions

I'm working on curriculum this week for my summer songwriting, fiction, and poetry workshops, so I've been thinking a lot about words and how we use them. The sounds of words, the definitions of words, the emotion of words. It's amazing that we can jumble letters together and convey so much.

I wrote a couple weeks back about The Dreamer, a middle-grade novel based on the life of Pablo Neruda, so here is an excerpt from Neruda's Book of Questions that plays with the concept of words and how we use them.

LXVI.
Do the o's of the locomotive
cast smoke, fire and steam?

In which language does rain fall
over tormented cities?

At dawn, which smooth syllables
does the ocean air repeat?

Is there a star more wide open
the the word poppy?

Are there two fangs sharper
than the syllables of jackal?

Summer Reruns: Marianne Moore What Are Years?

Over the summer, I'll be posting some blog reruns to save a few extra minutes of summertime. Since Kevin and I will be celebrating our TEN YEAR anniversary in a month or so, I thought this one was appropriate...

Marianne Moore: What Are Years? originally posted November 17, 2008

Ten years ago when my husband and I first met, before we were even dating, he made me a birthday card with a Marianne Moore poem handwritten on the back. With my birthday coming around this week, I've been thinking about this poem again.

Moore asserts that courage lies in accepting our mortality, and within those confines, managing to find (if not satisfaction) joy. At the time, I thought Kevin's card was sweet and thoughtful (he knew how much I admired Moore's poetry). But now, ten years later--I woke up this morning, we went through the confines of our daily routine (teeth, face, hair, coffee, work), and laughed about some little thing or another. On our drive to work, I watched the sun glancing off the last surviving leaves dangling from the trees and thought: How pure a thing is joy.

What Are Years?
by Marianne Moore

What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt, --
dumbly calling, deafly listening--that
in misfortune, even death,
encourages others
and in its defeat, stirs

the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.

So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity.

Mark Kraushaar: Recent Cosmological Observations

Because I'm always a few months behind, I'm just catching up to The Missouri Review's Poem of the Week for January 27th.

I love it when a poem catches me completely by surprise, and this piece by Mark Kraushaar made me grin and read it again three times in a row. Partially because I love his off-kilter, mundane take on the concept of a parallel universe, but mostly because of that sweet turn at the end.


Recent Cosmological Observations
by Mark Kraushaar

One of the many implications of recent cosmological observations is that the concept of parallel universes is no mere metaphor. Space appears to be infinite in size.

-Scientific American

So, there's a sun like ours and a moon like ours
and a duplicate Earth with a town like this
and a street like this on a day like this
and there's a man exactly like me--
same wire glasses, same scratched thumb
and dumb job, different shirt--
a man just like me who walks
past a Frank's Corner Deli, u-turns,
walks in and orders a corned beef
on rye, double the mustard, no mayonnaise.
Outside, an equivalent Checker Cab
pulls up and a similar lady in a backward
cap gets out at a similar curb:
squashed Mars Bar, discarded sock, strutting pigeon
and all this under a wide, white sky with a glittering jet
and a crow below.
Of course, likewise, there's a smudged
glass counter and, in her crisp paper cap,
there's a girl whose tiny, terrible teeth also seem
tossed into her mouth like so many dice,
and just as I'm wishing this world's version
better, straighter teeth and love and long life too,
as I'm thinking how God on the Earth we know
seems absent or careless or cruel,
as an almost equivalent, nearly
identical God some place lolls dozing
in His giant cloud lounger, here, today,
three flies resettle on a split plastic spoon,
and as this Earth's girl scoops the last of the tuna
from a stainless tray she looks up and winks once
like we're perfectly grand.

William Carlos Williams: The Rewaking

In the spirit of belated Valentine's Day and spring around the corner (please?), here's a William Carlos Williams poem Kevin and I included on our wedding invitation just about ten years ago.

The Rewaking
William Carlos Williams 

Sooner or later
we must come to the end
of striving

to re-establish
the image the image of
the rose

but not yet
you say extending the
time indefinitely

by
your love until a whole
spring

rekindle
the violet to the very
lady's-slipper

and so by
your love the very sun
itself is revived

(Photo by americanvirus)

Henri Cole: To Sleep

This weekend my sister, some friends, and I discussed what a shame it is that we didn't appreciate naps when we had them. Isn't that just the way it goes? As Joni would say: you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone. Just think what you would give now for an hour a day when you're not allowed to do anything but rest, recharge, and maybe sneak a book under the covers.

Then I came across this poem by Henri Cole. What a lovely description of those moments just before sleep.

To Sleep
by Henri Cole

Then out of the darkness leapt a bare hand
that stroked my brow, "Come along, child;
stretch out your feet under the blanket.
Darkness will give you back, unremembering.
Do not be afraid." So I put down my book
and pushed like a finger through sheer silk,
the autobiographical part of me, the am,
snatched up to a different place, where I was
no longer my body but something more—
the compulsive, disorderly parts of me
in a state of equalization, everything sliding off:
war, love, suicide, poverty—as the rebellious,
mortal, I, I, I lay, like a beetle irrigating a rose,
my red thoughts in a red shade all I was.


Photo by Joi.

John Keats: Ode to Autumn

(Photo note: This is the view from the fire tower near my childhood home. Not so bad, huh?)

Fall is my favorite time of year. The leaves here in Maine have turned to fiery reds and yellows and they've begun to fall just enough so you can kick through them with a nice shush-shush-shush as you walk. The sun is still warm enough to bask in, but there's a nice crisp to the air. I've been baking crisps from the apples we picked last week, and savoring cups of hot chai.

In honor of the season, my friend Susan (via Leah) reminded me of this lovely Keats poem, written in 1819:

Ode to Autumn
by John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease;
For Summer has o'erbrimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river-sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Walt Whitman: A noiseless patient spider

This weekend, the spiders were busy in our backyard. I watched one build a gigantic web around my sunflowers, and another bind an entire caterpillar in a womb of silky thread.

Spiderwebs always make me think of two things: Wilbur and poetry. Well, here's a little poetry for your soul this morning. (And speaking of poetry, if you're in Maine, there are a number of poetry events coming up to celebrate the new From the Fishouse Anthology.)

(Photo by manu gomi)

A noiseless patient spider
by Walt Whitman

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.