Monthly Archives: June 2017

7 posts

The Hands of the Dying

poetry poetry books

pinsky

Typically, I’m not a fan of the “Best of…” series, but last week at the library I picked up a copy of The Best of the Best American Poetry edited by Robert Pinsky and released in 2013. Surprisingly, I enjoyed many poems by many familiar faces in this collection, and what I liked best was how the back of the book included not just a brief bio on the poet, but a brief commentary on the selected poem as well.

Most moving was the Jane Kenyon poem “Reading Aloud to My Father.” Kenyon describes the final days sitting beside her dying father, but in this case, poignancy is added to the poem not by Kenyon’s commentary in the back (for she herself would succumb to leukemia 14 years after her father’s death), but by commentary added by her husband, the poet Donald Hall. First, though, the poem:

Reading Aloud to My Father by Jane Kenyon

I chose the book haphazard
from the shelf, but with Nabokov’s first
sentence I knew it wasn’t the thing
to read to a dying man:
The cradle rocks above an abyss, it began,
and common sense tells us that our existence
is but a brief crack of light
between two eternities of darkness.

The words disturbed both of us immediately,
and I stopped. With music it was the same–-
Chopin’s piano concerto–-he asked me
top turn it off. He ceased eating, and drank
little, while the tumors briskly appropriated
what was left of him.

But to return to the cradle rocking. I think
Nabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss.
That’s why babies howl at birth,
and why the dying so often reach
for something only they can apprehend.

At the end they don’t want their hands
to be under the covers, and if you should put
your hand on theirs in a tentative gesture
of solidarity, they’ll pull the hand free;
and you must honor that desire,
and let them pull it free.

The words quoted in the first stanza are from Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory. In 1996, one year after Kenyon’s death, Hall wrote this commentary, which was used for this book; it gives the poem special significance and power, I think:

“Jane wrote many poems about her father’s illness and death, of which ‘Reading Aloud to My Father’ is the latest and last. Reuel Kenyon died of cancer in Michigan in 1981; Jane and I stayed with him for much of his illness, helping Jane’s mother care for him. When Jane was dying, I thought of this poem. Music was her passion, as it was her father’s; at the end, she could not bear to hear it, because it tied her to what she had to leave. In her last twenty-four hours, her hands remained outside the bedclothes, lightly clenched. I touched them from time to time, but I did not try to hold tight.”

Thus did a husband use his wife’s words from 14 years earlier to guide his behavior at her own death. And thus were Jane Kenyon’s last hours an echo of her father’s. I lingered on the part about the hands. I reread the poem. I lifted my eyes from the book and stared in the distance, for a while seeing nothing.

*************************************************************************

Lost Sherpa of Happiness —

The Art of Bottling Nostalgia

poetry

carr

I just finished J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country and didn’t like it as much as expected. Part of the problem is the title. I could use a month in the country along about now, raising expectations.

The other problem is the publisher, New York Review Books. NYRB’s paperbacks are pretty products. Typically, the covers are candy. This one’s so-so, but the lineage is there. Thus, picking the book up, I anticipated great things.

I settled for so-so things. But I did find diamonds in this little patch of English rough. Like this poetic chipt toward the end of the book:

Ah, those days…for many years afterwards their happiness haunted me. Sometimes, listening to music, I drift back and nothing has changed. The long end of summer. Day after day of warm weather, voices callings as night came on and lighted windows pricked the darkness and, at day-break, the murmur of corn and the warm smell of fields ripe for harvest. And being young,

Sometimes a little stretch like that makes books worth your while, at least on the given day you pick them up. I especially loved this: “…night came on and lighted windows pricked the darkness….” A nice little image, that.

Then we get the day-break, the personification of the corn’s “murmur” and the lovely “warm smell of fields ripe for harvest.” Dreamy, no? And Carr scores points for trying to bottle nostalgia there. Nostalgia’s tricky stuff. It resists being poured and hermetically sealed. At the blink of an eye, it transforms into a noble gas and disappears.

“A” for effort, then. If not a month, at least a day in the country was sweet. A fleeting thing. The best kind….

Epigraphic Content

poetry

epigraph

Writing a poetry collection is work. Finding an epigraph (or two) to grace those pale pages after the Table of Contents but before the first poem? That can be fun. “So many possibilities!” as mosquitoes in June like to say.

An epigraph can serve as a compass of sorts, a thematic guide to the poems you are about to read. Or it can be a satiric joke, maybe. A tender irony.

Whichever, I always read them. And often wonder over them. Returning to them after reading the collection is instructive, too. Sometimes they take on deeper meaning (like foreshadowing after the sun sets), and sometimes they become more cryptic (or, to be less generous, more random).

I’m still contemplating an epigraph for my forthcoming collection. For my first, I chose the oft-quoted Walden stalwart, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” because I thought it spoke to the theme of indifference, a rich vein on earth I tried to tap into. I’ve always loved that quote. Heck with the book, it could serve as an epitaph on many a gravestone. Thank you, Henry, David, and Thoreau!

For fun, I thought I’d pull random poetry collections off my bookshelf and check out the epigraphs. Here’s what I found:

What do I erroneously assume that I know? (Montaigne)

— To the Left of Time by Thomas Lux

We would give anything for what we have. (Tony Hoagland) “‘Give me my leg,” she said.(Flannery O’Connor)

— Haywire by George Bilgere

One madman laughs at another,
and they each give enjoyment to one another.
If you watch closely, you will see
that the maddest gets the biggest laugh. (Erasmus)

— failure by Philip Shultz

The hours of folly are measur’d by the clock,
but of wisdom: no clock can measure. (William Blake)
Who would dare tell me that
I am a stranger here?!? (Anna Akhmatova)

— Facts About the Moon by Dorianne Laux

The landscape crossed out with a pen reappears here. (Bei Dao)

— Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuoung

Although Rama was Vishnu,
his human incarnation
made him unaware of his identity
at the moment. (The Ramayana, trans. R.K. Narayan)
Ugh! The stupidity of the beloved! (Grace Paley)

What Narcissism Means to Me by Tony Hoagland

Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun. (Romeo & Juliet, Act III, Scene II)

I thought, everything can be used in a lifetime, can’t it, and went on walking. (Joseph Cornell)

—Night Sky Frequencies by Debra Nystrom

I go up but at the same time I go down.
Present tense I am; but past tense too.
Three is one too many, one is one too few. (Old Riddle)

— Biecentennial by Dan Chiasson

You get the idea. Epigraphs may clear their throats and go all classical on us, Stentorian-like. Or they can throw quick, quiet quips like sophomores passing time in mandatory chapel. Either way, I enjoy them, and unlike prefaces and introductions, never skip them, pretentious or not.

Temptation = a Summer Book Before the Summer

humor poetry poetry books

a&e

I visited the local Barnes and his friend, Noble, this past weekend for the express purpose of visiting the periodicals section to buy copies of the July issue of Gray’s Sporting Journal, which includes my poem, “Hemingway Fishing.” It didn’t go down that way. Not quite.

“While I’m here in the shady Tree of Knowledge,” I figured, “I might as well leaf through a few books. You know, just to browse. Nothing dangerous to my budget or my library-only resolution.”

The next thing you know, a clutch of Gray’s in my hand, I’m in the poetry section–akin to a recovering alcoholic visiting the open bar “just for the ambiance.”

Now I know how Adam & Eve felt. I had no chance. None. Before I knew it, I was starting a little book stash, rationalizing to myself that it was “just” a little pile for summer reading, that I can’t really access my home library when I am away at the summer camp, anyway, that I have a teacher-discount card from both Barnes AND Noble gathering dust in my wallet, so what the Hades.

Before you knew it, I had To the Left of Time (Thomas Lux), Stag’s Leap (Sharon Olds), and Poems (Elizabeth Bishop) poetically piggy-backed on the bookstore floor. Before you knew it, my conscience had been banished, and I didn’t give a fig.

Temptation, thy name is Summer Books Before Summer (officially starts the 21st in the northern hemisphere). To compound my sin? When I got home, I put these books aside for the summer and then, two nights later, when the novel I was reading did its molasses uphill imitation, turned to the Lux and started reading it early. Before summer, that is.

As Charlie Brown would put it: Arghhh!

Fear not, however. I immediately consoled myself. I said, “Hey, it’s over 90 degrees today. Close enough!”

Now you know where the adjective “Adamic” comes from.

Dog Days for Poetry Markets

marketing poetry poetry

dog

According to The Facts on File Encyclopedia or Word and Phrase Origins (3rd Edition), the expression “dog days” comes to us compliments of the Romans (who apparently couldn’t stay in one place and were always roamin’ around). “Dog days” refer to those torrid July and August days up ahead here in the northern hemisphere and are actually related to a star:

“The expression originated in Roman times as canicularis dies, “days of the dog,” and was an astronomical expression referring tot the dog star Sirius, or possibly Procyon. The Romans linked the rising of the Dog Star, the most brilliant star in the constellation, Canis Major, with the sultry summer heat, believing that the star added to the extreme heat of the sun.”

For poets, the dog days strike early, following the arc of university schedules. As so many poetry markets come to us thanks to the support of university journals and magazines, poets clicking through markets are now discovering dog days of submittable drought. Many markets, closed in April or May, are shouting “No current calls for submissions” on their web pages, and most won’t open again until September.

Perhaps more than any other writer, poets face seasonal challenges when it comes to getting their work published. The upside? Summer is a great time to make writing part of rest and relaxation, to generate material for the fall. Poetry even takes to the sun (think “beach write” instead of “beach read”). It mixes with dogs, too, as Robert Frost proved dog-years ago:

Canis Major

The great Overdog
That heavenly beast
With a star in one eye
Gives a leap in the east.
He dances upright
All the way to the west
And never once drops
On his forefeet to rest.
I’m a poor underdog,
But to-night I will bark
With the great Overdog
That romps through the dark.

If anyone has hot leads in the way of summer opportunities for publishing poets, share them in the comments section. Meanwhile, keep writing and keep appreciating man’s best friend, be he at your side or in the skies.

Why Do We Wander? The Poetry of Our Restless Roots

poetry

lawrence

What is it about travel? The urge to move, to discover, to see, is a poem unto itself. A rich vein worth mining.

Often travel is rooted in the psyche. Moving one’s home, restlessly, is a form of travel–only what are we fleeing? What are we seeking? Do we think we will be a new person if we find ourselves among strangers in a strange land? If we do, we forget (or deny) the “setting within.” You can escape place, yes, but you can never escape the topography of yourself.

All of these questions came to mind as I hit the final stretch of Geoff Dyer’s book Out of Sheer Rage. Though it is ostensibly a book about D.H. Lawrence, it is about most anything but D.H. Lawrence, too. Still, Lawrence shadows the author (who shadows him) throughout and, at the end in Taos, New Mexico, Dyer wonders about Lawrence’s wandering soul:

“At various times Lawrence wondered why he had drifted so far from his inclination to sit tight: ‘What is it, makes one want to go away?’ ‘Why can’t one sit still?’ ‘Why does one create such discomfort for oneself!'”

In search of answers himself, Dyer purchases a discounted copy of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry at a nearby bookstore and pauses over her poem “Questions of Travel.” It is a moment all readers know well. A moment of synchronicity where we feel we were fated to open a book and read words which transect present preoccupations.

As summer draws nigh with its travel plans, I see new wisdom in Bishop’s poem myself. Dyer’s synchronicity becomes mine, yet another variation of the reader-writer transaction that ripples out to the forever-shores of reading. I especially love Bishop’s comparison of strange lands to a stage (“Is it right to be watching strangers in a play /
in this strangest of theaters?”), as if the “real” of distant places is actually the “make-believe” to our foreign eyes–if only because our eyes cannot otherwise make sense of them and feel a need to write our own narratives.

Or maybe we don’t want to make sense of them at all. Maybe travel becomes the essence of escape that way. Thus, the strangers we see in a distant land become storybook cutouts from the distant land of our nostalgic pasts–ones that never really existed and still don’t, only we will them into existence as a panacea for all that hectors us in the hellbent of our modern lives.

As you read (or reread) Bishop, consider your own restless roots. See if you can find the “why” in yourself, photograph it, maybe, and look at it later, marveling at how different it looks from the perspective of time and experience.

“Questions of Travel” by Elizabeth Bishop

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
–For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren’t waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
— Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
— A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.

— Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr’dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages
— Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds’ cages.
— And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians’ speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

‘Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one’s room?

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there… No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?’

Allen Ginsberg’s Inner China

poetry reading poetry

ginsberg

I’m not a huge fan of Allen Ginsberg or the beat poets in general, but a poem of his I came across yesterday spoke to me, proving once again that it’s bad politics to bless or condemn poets until you’ve read the body of their work (and, in Ginsberg’s case, I have far to go).

Ginsberg, it seemed to past me, was too effusive, wordy, full of his avante garde stream-of-consciousness. Like Thomas Wolfe’s novels, his poems begged for an editor in large, sandwich-board-ad letters. An editor with scissors, thank you. Sharp and well-oiled ones.

In all honesty, it’s only eight lines of the poem that I love. But that’s OK. I’m of the school that deems poetry a “success” and a wonder if only part of it wows me. Sustaining a beautiful poem, start to finish, is no small feat, after all.

Here it is in full. Can you guess the lines that sing to me? I wonder if they’ll sing to you, too?

“Returning to the Country for a Brief Visit” by Allen Ginsberg

Annotations to Amitendranath Tagore’s Sung Poetry

“In later days, remembering this I shall certainly go mad.”

Reading Sung poems, I think of my poems to Neal
dead a few years now, Jack underground
invisible – their faces rise in my mind.
Did I write truthfully of them? In later times
I saw them little, not much difference they’re dead.
They live in books and memory, strong as on earth.

“I do not know who is hoarding all this rare work.”

Old One the dog stretches stiff legged,
soon he’ll be underground. Spring’s first fat bee
buzzes yellow over the new grass and dead leaves.

What’s this little brown insect walking zigzag
across the sunny white page of Su Tung-p’o’s poem?
Fly away, tiny mite, even your life is tender –
I lift the book and blow you into the dazzling void.

“You live apart on rivers and seas…”

You live in apartments by rivers and seas
Spring comes, waters flow murky, the salt wave’s covered with oily dung.
Sun rises, smokestacks cover the roofs with black mist,
winds blow, city skies are clear blue all afternoon
but at night the full moon hesitates behind brick.
How will all these millions of people worship the Great Mother?
When all these millions of people die, will they recognize the Great Father?

If you guessed stanzas 2 and 3 (from “Old One the dog stretches stiff legged…” to “I lift the book and blow you into the dazzling void”), you are correct.

For me, those lines stand out, a poem within a poem, a lovely nod to ahimsa, the Buddhist/Hindu/Jain belief in not harming even the tiniest of life forms. Those lines capture and bottle the gentle lightning of Chinese poetry quite nicely, no? The fact that thinking of his dead friends Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac incites Ginsberg’s muse is fine, if not essential, at least to me.

I thank Allen for the marrow of the poem alone. Its sweet, soft essence. Its gentle truths about life and how much of it is brief, tender, and vulnerable.