Monthly Archives: January 2018

16 posts

The Winter of Ivan Turgenev

rooks

One winter in the finished basement of my childhood home, I went on a Turgenev tear, reading all of Ivan’s novels in those black Penguin paperback versions. I didn’t get much exercise down there, but I surely enjoyed the visit to Russia. Here’s a poem from my first collection, The Indifferent World, about those times…

Turgenev Time
by Ken Craft

As a young man, I lay in a finished
basement for years, bound
to an oatmeal carpet, sickly and citrus-skinned
in the tangerine glow of incandescent bulbs.
Outside it was winter in Connecticut; far
away it was Hell in Vietnam; but inside it was merely
hard Berber rug, a gas heater,
and my gentrified Russian novels.
The knot-paneled room offered neither hope
nor despair nor thought of escape. Warm-woozy,
I dozed, awakened, read
more as the heater exhaled
comfort.

In the books, lime trees rattled and rooks took wing.
Bough to fragrant leaf, kvas-drinking peasants
laughed and cursed. On the wind came the smells
of horse and rain and superfluous ideas.
Outside it was spring in Oryol; inside it was
black-backed Penguins, ocher-edged paper,
ink in Monotype Bembo, the chalky outline
of my sun-starved body on the floor.

I remember my mother’s art deco clock, gold spikes
gripping the dark pine wall, how it dripped
hours and minutes, weighing tick for heavy tick
with the pinging heater, submerging
me and my future pasts—all of them—
in the calm killing current of Turgenev time.

— © Ken Craft, The Indifferent World, Future Cycle Press, 2016

Poems About Sickness

my poems poetry The Indifferent World

sick

In the northeast, flu is running at a fevered-pitch with the highest rates we’ve seen in years. Luckily, I’m only dealing with the oh-so-common cold, but it’s slowed me down with its favored weapon, the sinus headache.

So instead of some deep, thoughtful, controversial, mind-provoking (all right, enough with the thesaurus) post, today I offer up a poem from my first collection, The Indifferent World.

It’s about the brothers common and cold when they stay too long, and you know what Mark Twain (or was it Ben Franklin? Or was it Confucius?) once said about guests: Like fish, they begin to stink after three days.

Head Cold
by Ken Craft

The head stands amazed,
harboring labyrinths of lead,

Minotaur of mucus
struggling to ford rivers

that forgot their flow.
Mythical horns scratch

glyphs across the sinal
Lascaux, itching,

yearning for escape
through impassable passages:

eyes branched in red
lightning, nose non-negotiable,

mouth agog and dug dry
with rhythmic rushes of air.

Whew. I am impressed with my allusions (Lascaux? Really?) and especially my vocabulary (I’m looking up “glyphs” again even as I type). But I get the idea. The head is occupied by some virus, and the virus is making itself feel at home, too, like some squatter acting with impunity (get the Oscar ready).

The question is, does writing about sickness make one feel better? It forces you to think about your malady–and all the evidence is at hand (or in the head) for material to write about, so I say yes. No, it’s not a cure, but it’s a mighty distractor, and distraction is a popular thing these days (see House comma White on the front pages).

Conclusion: If you’re feeling ill, write about it. Then sanitize the keyboard, won’t you? It’s only polite.

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

Unlike major publishing houses, small, independent publishers have no marketing budget to speak of, so they depend upon word-of-mouth enthusiasm among their readers. If you are a poetry reader, help keep the word-of-mouth buzz rolling for Lost Sherpa of Happiness by visiting Amazon for a copy today. According to Mark Twain (and Benjamin Franklin), it’s pretty damn good!

Zero at the Bone

Lost Sherpa of Happiness poetry

snake

Maybe the Bible was on to something. There’s something elemental about snakes, after all, and their reach into our psyches. Why do 97% of people fear them? And why do the 3% who don’t rub the 97%’s faces in it by picking them up, fondling them, and bringing them closer for a little cold-blooded interaction?

Without even realizing it, I wrote not one but two poems about snakes in the “animal poems only” section of The Lost Sherpa of Happiness (“Search 2”), but they’ve got some growing to do to surpass Emily Dickinson’s stop-the-presses poem about a little guy who slithered through her Amherst lawn so many years ago.

Note how she makes a long length of simple words undulate in extraordinary ways! Note how striking the poem is, how quickly it sinks its fascinating fangs into our 97% hearts:

A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096) by Emily Dickinson

A narrow Fellow in the Grass

Occasionally rides —

You may have met him? Did you not

His notice instant is —

The Grass divides as with a Comb–

A spotted Shaft is seen–

And then it closes at your Feet

And opens further on —

He likes a Boggy Acre

A Floor too cool for Corn —

But when a Boy and Barefoot–

I more than once at Noon

Have passed I thought a Whip Lash

Unbraiding in the Sun

When stooping to secure it

It wrinkled And was gone —

Several of Nature’s People

I know, and they know me–

I feel for them a transport

Of Cordiality–

But never met this Fellow

Attended, or alone

Without a tighter Breathing

And Zero at the Bone–

I didn’t have to give you the poet’s name for your to realize Emily’s work. Random capitalization and dashes, dashes, dashes give it away. Me, I like best the description of the grass via simile: “The Grass divides as with a Comb–” and the neat use of imagery: “A Floor too cool for Corn–.”

Note, too, the use of action verbs for this most active (when not lolling in the sun) of “Fellows” (sans “for he’s a jolly good…): “rides,” “divides,” “closes,” “opens,” “wrinkled.” And yes, there are the verbals, too, adjectives in verb’s clothing–swanky participles that paint pictures of movement. Words like “unbraiding” and “stooping.”

That all said, I think the poem rises its scaly head above the hundreds of others Dickinson wrote because of that most difficult maneuver for every poet: the ending. You know, when you meet this fellow, how you feel “a tighter Breathing / And Zero at the Bone.”

That last line, as I like to say, is worth the price of admission alone. Using “Zero” instead of the easier “chills you to the bone.” Clearly she thought of the cliché, then she thought one better.

See how it’s done, poets? You think. Then you think one better. Too many poets get stuck at the think part or think and then pat themselves on the back for a job well done, but the real deal–the part that separates the grass between good poets and superior poets–is the think one better part.

Seems simple, doesn’t it? Kind of like narrow fellows in the grass….

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

The Dangers in Quoting Only Parts of a Poem

poetry reading poetry

night

Two days ago I shared the first stanza only of an Edward Hirsch poem as an example of unexpected and delightful word pairings. Some readers disagreed, which got me thinking about fairness. Is it right to pull a stanza out of context, sit it like an only child and say nothing of its sibling stanzas? As a poet, I know I wouldn’t like it.

Thus, I decided to share Hirsch’s poem in full. Readers can see how the unexpected “forehead of night” in the opening stanza comes back in different form in stanza 4, for instance, giving it a more artful touch.

Of course, reading the whole poem won’t change everyone’s minds. Psychologically, once a reader has an opinion, it is difficult to change no matter how much additional data is provided. Still, I think all will agree that reading the leading stanza in the context of the whole is not only fair but right.

This poem originally appeared in The New Yorker. Yes, poetry is a matter of taste to a degree, so I always say, if I don’t care for a poem and it appears in a big-paying glossy, “That’s a good thing! As a writer, it gives me hope that the big gates can, indeed, be crashed!” How’s that for silver linings for everyone? (Rhetorical question.)

And now, enjoy. And forgive that I cannot replicate the indentation of lines in the original, which was not all line-justified left. Still, again, a whole! Consider the poem purchased at Whole Poems, aisle six, and be glad:

MEMORANDUMS by Edward Hirsch

“I feel anxious to insert these
memorandums of my affections….” — JOHN CLARE

I put down these memorandums of my affections
To stave off the absolute,
To stave off the flat palm of the wind
Pressed against the forehead of night,
To stave off the thought of stars
Swallowed by the constellations of darkness.

Winter descends in knives, in long sheets of ice
Unravelling in the sky,
In stuttering black syllables of rain.
There’s a vise grinding on my temples
And the sound of a hammer thudding
Somewhere far back in my mind. I can’t sleep,

And when I sleep I dream of murky chemicals
Washing across the faces
Of my grandparents floating face down
In a swimming pool. I dream of un-
Born children drifting overhead
And out of reach. I dream of blinding lights.

I put down these memorandums of my affections
In honor of my mother
And my mother’s mother who cooled
My forehead with a damp washcloth,
My two sisters and the aunt
Who ministered to my headaches in childhood,

My grandfather who kissed me on the upper arm
And tucked me in
At night, my father who touched
The blanket in the morning, gently.
I think of my mother-in-law
And my friend–my only brother–who died

Because cancer feasted on their ripe bodies
From the inside.
I remember the ravaged stillness
And peacefulness of their faces,
Their open lips and sealed eyes
As they were zippered in bags and carted away.

I put down these memorandums of my affections
In honor of tenderness,
In honor of all those who have been
Conscripted into the brotherhood
Of loss, who have survived
The ice and the winter descending in knives.

We will be lifted up and carried a far distance
On invisible wings
And then set down in an empty field.
We will carry our hearts in our bodies
Over shadowy tunnels and bridges.
Someday we will let them go again, like kites.

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

Memorandums Edward Hirsch

Rupi Kaur vs. Ken Craft, Round-by-Round

humor Lost Sherpa of Happiness poetry poetry books

boxing

It wasn’t too long ago that I thought “Rupi Kaur” was a semi-precious jewel or a monetary unit from a faraway, exotic island. Then, wandering lonely as a cloud through the poetry section of a bookstore, I saw end caps with little books titled The Sun and Her Flowers and Milk and Honey.

For some reason (maybe my wife who, for the eighth time, was saying, “Are you ready to go yet?”) I did not pick up either book to browse and that was that. Lately, though, the less unfamiliar name of Rupi Kaur has been popping up again. Lots.

I saw a big feature on her, for instance, in a magazine (though the magazine’s name escapes like Harry Houdini) in which the author insisted that those who criticize and/or marginalize Ms. Kaur are kidding themselves. I got the impression that said critics weren’t laughing at their own kids, however.

I took a look-see at Amazon and lo, Rupi’s Flowers were #16 overall in Books (hardly wilting), and her Milk and Honey was flying at #15 (no evidence of curdling). That’s stratospheric, as they say on the Weather Channel!

Finally, last week, it got personal. A virtual friend on Goodreads went virtually Biblical on me by marking Milk and Honey (sans Land of) as “To Read,” adding she was curious as to what the fuss was all about. (Get in line, sister!)

Half jokingly, knowing she had yet to read a single poem of her virtual friend Ken’s, I commented: “Really?” (Of course, I already knew the answer: Really!)

I knew then it was time to take off the gloves. I knew then it was time for my latest book to step in the ring with Rupi’s blockbuster from 2014, round-by-round, reader by reader, if it was to have any chance at all of breaking free and going from little-guy obscurity to big-man-on-campus notoriety (with letters and honey).

Overall, the judges weren’t kind, but judges aren’t paid to be kind. They’re paid to bang gavels, wear gowns, and take recess (a terrific perk, if you like fresh air and nostalgia for grade school).

ROUND ONE: AMAZON SALES

As of 23 January 2018, Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey, stands at #15 overall in Books. Ken Craft’s latest, Lost Sherpa of Happiness, sits at 1,816,631 (note: you would, too, without a compass).

Winner: Tie, as judges cannot figure out how to say “1,816,631” correctly.

ROUND TWO: AMAZON CUSTOMER REVIEWS

Milk and Honey ganged up on me here. Together the breakfast staples combined for 4,455 reviews averaging 4.5 out of 5 stars. Nice work if you can get it! My book? At this early juncture (hers came out four years ago, mine two months ago), only 2 reviews averaging 5 stars.

Winner: Lost Sherpa of Happiness by 1/2 star. (Happily, the judges did not take Statistics in school.)

ROUND THREE: “SPONSORED ITEMS RELATED TO THIS ITEM”

Milk and Honey is sponsored by the following related book titles: Her, Her II, Sex, Not Love, Candy, and Lachlan Immortal Highlander Book 1: The Scottish Time Travel Romance.

Lost Sherpa of Happiness is sponsored by space, the final frontier. (Hey, at least it’s in the black.)

Winner: Milk and Honey, and move Sex, Not Love to cart.

ROUND FOUR: EDITORIAL REVIEWS

Milk and Honey features nine editorial reviews, including ones from USA Today and Huffington Post.

Lost Sherpa of Happiness chose not to feature editorial reviews, having forgotten to mail review copies to USA Today and Huffington Post. (The judges, asked to reconvene this round at a later date due to extenuating circumstances, refused.)

Winner: USA Today and Huffington Post, dressed in milk’s (or maybe honey’s) clothing.

ROUND FIVE: FIRST POEM IN COLLECTION

Milk and Honey’s:

the hurting
by Rupi Kaur

how is it so easy for you
to be kind to people he asked

milk and honey dripped
from my lips as i answered

cause people have not
been kind to me

Lost Sherpa of Happiness’s:

When Babcia Caught Her Breath
by Ken Craft

The first summer we owned the camp,
we brought my grandmother,
who wore the same one-piece floral bathing suit
each day. I said no, but she took the broom
outside, swatted webs
from the clapboards, tried to reach the eaves.
“Babcia, please! Come by the water,”
but she bent near the foundation blocks and posts,
pinching and pulling weed heads between rough
peasant fingers, the strong lake breeze
blowing her white hairs, mad dance
of dandelion fluff holding on.
Unbending herself slowly, she swore
in Polish, shuffled to the wood’s edge, tossed
ripped roots on Canada Mayflower,
Indian pipe, a Pink Lady’s Slipper.
“Come, now,” I said. She finally sat in the Adirondack
beside me, her tanned, bony chest
rising and falling, the sweetness of breath.
Silent, she stared at this lake before her. And me, I inhaled
its strange newness in her name: The waves
against rip-rap. The wild mint smell. The nuthatches
scribing arcs about pine-bark.
And, on the water, whitecaps drunk with the passing.
She took this in and more,
then said, simply, “I can’t believe
it’s almost over.”

Winner: In lines, Lost Sherpa by a Himalayan landslide. By italics, Milk and Honey running away. In the category of romance, hurt, desire, and Instagram videos, it’s Rupi, Rupi, Rupi early and often.

With that, only 2:37 into the fifth, the bell rang repeatedly and the judges interceded to stop the sherpa bloodshed. Milk‘s arm was raised, then Honey‘s.

Me, I just have to train harder: write shorter lines about longing, illustrate my poems with a graphic pencil, and invest in more italics.

That and drink lots of raw eggs….

The Number One Trait of a True Poet?

poetry word choice writing writing poetry

What is the number one trait of a true poet? Good question, and one which opens with talking points about the abstract (traits like “creativity”) vs. the concrete (harder-edged stuff, like “skills”). For the sake of argument, then, let’s dig in with skills.

Some skills you’d like to find in an accomplished poet’s toolbox might include the abilities to conjure through imagery, figurative language, and symbols. How about skills with openings and closings? Deft use of sound devices? Rhyme? Rhythm? Meter? Facility with words, language, sentence structures? Mastery of forms?

The head literally spins, but me, I’m going to go out on a lonely branch and pick something in the “word” category: the ability to make unexpected word pairings that first jolt and then resonate with the reader. As a reader of poetry, there’s nothing I like better. As a writer of poetry, there’s nothing I’m more proud of.

Examples? Let’s look at the first stanza of Edward Hirsch’s poem, “Memorandums”:

Six lines, three unexpected word pairings, all novel and oh-so-pleasing to the mind’s insatiable desire for reverie. First we get the “flat palm of the wind,” then the personification of it being “Pressed against the forehead of night.” Wind with a palm? Night with a forehead? In a poem about memories of lost ones? Of course. Why didn’t I think of that? (Because I’m not Edward Hirsch.)

Then he finishes with “the thought of stars / Swallowed by the constellations of darkness.” Here we have the expected word, “stars,” but she is like an ignored former lover left at the curb as “constellations” drives off with its new beau, “darkness.” One doesn’t ordinarily think of “constellations of darkness,” especially ones that swallow the very thought of stars, but its perfectly tuned for the dark subject of loved ones who have gone before us. Our memories of them can be traced like lines between stars, but they are frustratingly swallowed by the final stubbornness of night.

When I read poetry, this is what stops me. Makes me read again. And again. Unexpected word pairings. True poets have the knack, and reading their works is why poetry readers have a strong advantage over the humdrum masses slapping each others’ backs over the latest novel.

Ho-hum. They know not what they’re missing.

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

Unlike major publishing houses, small, independent publishers have no marketing budget to speak of, so they depend upon word-of-mouth enthusiasm among their readers. I hope you can help keep the word-of-mouth buzz rolling for Lost Sherpa of Happiness by visiting Amazon for a copy.

Amazon, Again. Still.

poetry

amaz

Ah, Amazon dot all-is-never-calm. Because it’s true what they say: The more you eat, the hungrier you get. With people, eating begets eating (thus the obesity epidemic). With corporations, jonesing money begets jonesing money (thus, in Amazon’s case, the something-silly profits).

I’ve already complained about Amazon’s insatiable appetite on these pages, especially as seen through its recent acquisition of Goodreads, a place I’ve been hanging out in since shortly after its inception, but I won’t let that stop me.

This week I received an e-mail from Amazon stating that its Prime program was going up $2 a month (apparently their profits had dropped from “ridiculous” to merely “spectacular”).

This on the heels of Goodreads’ “Giveaway” program going pay-to-play, meaning authors like me would have to pony up $119 for the right to post one of my books in the “Giveaway” program.

Ah, no. No on both counts. I’m done with “Giveaways,” both in entering my books from a writer’s perspective and in entering my name to win from a reader’s perspective. I’m also done with Prime.

But enough with using up real estate HERE on the matter. I decided instead to post my argument and raison d’être (French for “raisins forever”) over at my other blog, New England States, where I haven’t posted anything since the Rutherford B. Hayes Administration, seems. Why? Because I’ve been so busy living, breathing, writing, and reading poetry over here.

Amazing, isn’t it? Dot and calm, too.

Heads up for Underfoot Poetry!

Lost Sherpa of Happiness my poems poetry The Indifferent World

pitss

Down three rivers in the village of Pittsburgh, Tim Miller runs a smart-looking blog called Underfoot Poetry. On its pages he features a mix of new poets and old. I was honored when he approached me about featuring six of my poems on his site.

As the timing of our correspondence came just as Lost Sherpa of Happiness was finding its way to publication, I decided to send him a half dozen favorites from my debut effort, The Indifferent World.

The first poem to go west, “Trigger,” is about a deer hunter whose finger is on the trigger when he decides not to fire.

“Idyll” features a dad who, in the thick of wedding preparations for his daughter, is ready to escape the madness of preparations by jumping into a Breughel painting (still a fantasy I cherish).

A little humor is featured with “Dog Religion.” The idea for this poem came from my dog’s habit of leaving one kibble of dry meal in his bowl each day. I solved the reason why and let readers in on my Holmes-like thinking.

Fourth? “Samsara,” a meditation on the ambivalence one might feel about leaving the cycle of reincarnated lives. So American. So western. But trying harder.

In homage to Frost, “Provide, Provide” features one old man in Maine preparing for winter’s worst under threatening November skies.

It all wraps up with “Insomnia,” the last two stanzas being a bald confessions to the human folly of “not me.” Sleep is my treasured but elusive friend, is all I can say. Then, now, and probably forever, until the Big Sleep do us part….

Give Tim’s blog a read and a like. Lots of good stuff over there!

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

“When in Trouble Depend Upon Imagination.”

poetry poetry books

Thanks to The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest, I’m getting to know another New York School poet (as you’ll recall, Frank O’Hara just stopped by for lunch a few weeks back). I like to read introductions to poetry collections because you usually pick up salient quotes from the poet. In this case, Peter Gizzi, author of the intro, does not disappoint, as he shares a few bon mots from Barbara.

Guest said her primary task as a poet was “to invoke the unseen, to unmask it.” This is a variation of the more familiar call for poets to observe what’s there–the visible we often choose not to view due to negligence or engagement with the rat-race (or one might say, today, “social-network”) world, which distracts us. Gizzi calls it “the poetry of revelation and of mystery,” a nice mixture if you can get it.

Guest wrote essays as well as poems, giving Gizzi additional grist for his introduction’s mill. In one essay called “Wounded Joy,” Guest writes, “The most important act of a poem is to reach further than the page so that we are aware of another aspect of the art….What we are setting out to do is to delimit the work of art, so that it appears to have no beginning and no end, so that it overruns the boundaries of the poem on the page.”

Is this just a fancy way of describing resonance–the way works of art that speak to us resemble ripples from poetic stones thrown into the pond of a reader’s brain?

Guest aligned herself with the abstract expressionists, those who believed in “letting the subject find itself.” For Guest, Gizzi writes, “the poem begins in silence” as opposed to noise. Guest says the poem “should not be programmatic, or didactic, or show-off,” rather readers should “go inside the poem itself and be in the dark at the beginning of the journey.”

This contrasts a bit with St. Billy of Collins’ proclamation that no poem should start off in the dark and be in the least bit confusing–that it should, in fact, establish itself in such a way that the reader has a footing and a compass to begin the journey. Differences of opinion make for poetic horse races, as they say.

Back to Guest: “The forces of the imagination from which strength is drawn have a disruptive and capricious power. If the imagination is indulged too freely, it may run wild and destroy or be destructive to the artists….If not used imagination may shrivel up. Baudelaire continually reminds us that the magic of art is inseparable from its risks….”

Guest, author of the words, “When in trouble depend upon imagination,” realized it for the double-edged sword it could be. Moderation in all things, we are told, and we think of alcohol and food first and foremost. Maybe, Barbara reminds us, we should be thinking of imagination, too. Like the Promethean gift of fire, it is incredibly useful until it blows outside of man’s control. Then it is Frankenstein’s monster after not eating for three days. Look out!

Jumping around this massive tome, I find many of the poem’s a challenge in that they tend to be longer works and many are all over the page using space in novel and challenging ways. Call it the conservative in me, but the poem I chose to end this entry is easier on the eyes and the gray matter.

Envoy, then: a little Guest for the rest of this post.

Barrels by Barbara Guest

Y otras pasan; y viéndome tan triste,
toman un poquito de ti
en la abrupta arruga de mi hondo dolor.
Cesar Vellejo

I won’t let anybody

take a drink

out of this barrel of tears

I’ve collected from you.

Least of all another woman.

I see her coming along.

I know the type.

I can tell you what she’ll

be wearing.

I know the type

I won’t like it.

She’ll look at that barrel

she’s had a few in her day.

Not that she’s ever filled one.

She’ll remark casually,

“Sweet water,

good to wash my hair.”

And who doesn’t know

tears are purer

than rain water

and softer on the hair.

Just as she steps toward it

and makes for the cup,

I’ll see phantom you

and what you were

brought up by the sea.

And scraps of paper

from this ditch of my brain

will float on the water

and choke her.

Random Thoughts: MLK Eve Edition

humor Lost Sherpa of Happiness poetry

There’s a certain poetry in quotidian things, like getting out of bed, for instance, when the room is cold and the bed is warm. It gets you thinking ahead: the cold of bathroom floor tiles on your soles, the gooseflesh on your exposed body as you dress, the tiny jingle of license tags as the dog lifts his head when you come down the stairs, and mostly, the vigor of outdoor air rushing in and out of your nose, sometimes smelling piney and sometimes just dry and wintery, while the crows who have been up for hours laugh overhead. All this, while you’re still in bed!
This is why mentors advise you carry a small pad of paper with pencil: those snippets of thought, that mortar that will some day hold the bricks of a mighty poetic wall. Yes, it’s tough finding pencils in bed and when you’re in the shower, but I just make a rhyme of the idea, singing it in my head, until I can get to the paper.
A 3-day weekend is a marvelous thing. I especially like the “island day,” Sunday, a piece of luxury real estate in the middle. Usually Sunday carries a pall–wherein the monkey mind thinks of Monday, but on an island day? No. Just turquoise ocean, palm trees, and coconuts on the beach.
This weekend we meditate on Martin Luther King, Jr., and his message. Especially this weekend. MLK had a dream, but he’d have a nightmare in the decidedly White House were he alive today. “We shall overcome.”
This year, the MLK federal holiday falls on his actual birthday: Jan. 15th. (King was born in 1929.)
The best vow I ever made as a reader? Diversifying. If you thought that was financial talk, think again. Last year I branched away from my steady diet of fiction (comfort food) and started putting more fiber in my reading diet with nonfiction, short story collections, YA, and especially poetry. Oddly, it’s changed the way I read everything–even my comfort food–because these genres use different techniques and thus require of the reader different skills. Poetry, for instance, slows me down, invites rereading and marveling at how words are used. Reading it makes me notice the sloppiness of many novelists (where words are a luxury often abused) and the beauty when novelists (writers’ writers) treasure words like a poet. I’m seeing that now as I read Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing.
It’s never too late for a “New Year’s resolution,” by the way. I hope you’ll try the Eclectic Reading Plan in 2018 yourself.
The more I write poetry, the more I realize the toughest part is nailing the end of a poem. True of novels, too. How many novels have horrible endings? Too many.
Which is why I so appreciate James Wright’s ending to the oddly-named “Lying in a Hammock on William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”: “I have wasted my life.” This while he is engaging in an activity most westerners would consider a “waste of time”–lying in a hammock! What’s irony to some is all-too-obvious to Buddhists.
Seems every time I experiment with my poetry, I get some reader who critiques it by advising that I change the part I experimented on. I’m beginning to think that you can’t experiment unless you go solo and just send the poem out, unvetted. I mean, of course it’s weird! It’s an experiment! Flying kites in lightning storms is weird, too!
How do you know you’ve made it or are on your way to making it in the poetry world? You publish a “Collected Poems.” (Meaning: You have enough poems to collect, so they’d better be good!)
Although society is less religious than it used to be, there’s no denying the innate appeal of church bells riding the crisp air to your ears. The sound is both sad and beautiful, a wonderful match.
I love it when writers from the past visit your poetry and make themselves at home. In my first book it was Turgenev and Tolstoy. In my latest it is James Wright, Jack Gilbert, and Ernest Hemingway. They’re good company, all of them, and make for good cameos in a poem.
Favorite good deed: Pushing Raymond Carver’s collected poems on unsuspecting readers. The man’s unjustly labeled as a short story master when, in fact, he is a short story AND poetry master, especially if you like narrative poetry and simple poetry that does not do its best imitation of a Rubik’s Cube.
Some of my poems are starting to rhyme unbidden. What’s up with that? I’m not going to question it, though. Never question something Robert Frost ran with.
Speaking of, it took England to discover what America had the chance to figure out first: Frost was one bad-ass poet! Thank you, England, and sorry about that little Tea Party thing in Boston Harbor.
My wife still isn’t sure about the title Lost Sherpa of Happiness. My daughter loves it.
Between Christmas and January birthday, I am (and will be) happily awash in new books, including new poets: Barbara Guest and Wendell Berry so far, with more on the way (like the poetic cavalry riding over the hill in stanzas to the meter of horse hooves).
Some say writing a blog distracts you from the real deal (writing poetry). Some say it’s an essential warm-up for the real deal. And some say the world will end in fire, some in ice. (Frost would say “either will suffice.”) For now, I’m sticking with the blog.
Thanks for putting up with another in this regular feature called randomness. Happy Day of Rest. I hope you make like Wright in a hammock today. Read, write, muse. Let it be. The world is much ado about nothing, after all….

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