Monthly Archives: November 2018

17 posts

“Thou Shalt Not Write About Pet Death” (and Other Commandments Moses Never Brought Down)

poetry writing writing poetry

old cat

As a high school English teacher, I can remember teaching a unit on admissions essays. We had many resources, of course, and almost all of them warned of clichés and clichéd topics. One of these verboten topics? You guessed it: pet death.

Pet death is an entry drug to bad writing, the experts warned. Admissions officers who read such essays complained of the treacly sentimentality, the sugar-coated hyperbole, and yes, clichés like blackflies in a Maine forest. Some said they even gave up reading the minute they realized they were reading “The Death of Fluffy.”

If you’ve read this blog any (and I know a few of you exist), you know I bridle at the whole idea of “Thou shalt not’s….” It bothers me when so-called experts say, “You can’t write about that topic. It’s tired.” It bothers me when the nabobs of knowledge say, “No to that word. And that one. Oh. And, of course, that one!” It bothers me even when a respected saint of the canon like St. Billy of Collins writes, apparently seriously, that he stops reading any poem the minute he comes across the word “cicada.”

But still. If you’re going to write about your pets death, proceeding with caution is advisable. Once your pet death poem is done, you and your critique pals can debate its success, given the degree of difficulty. Going where angels fear to tread takes some angelic spine, after all, and I like that in a poet.

As Exhibit A on the topic of “pet death” (insert sound of cliché alarms blaring here), I give you Robin Chapman’s “Enough,” about the death of her cat (which, by the way, opens up a whole new can of worms in the form of cat pictures on the Internet, but I’m not going there, thank you). See what you think:

“Enough”
by Robin Chapman

There is always enough.

My old cat of long years, who

stayed all the months of his dying,

though, made sick by food,

he refused to eat, till, long-stroked,

he turned again to accept

another piece of dry catfood

or spoonful of meat, a little water,

another day through which

he purred, small engine

losing heat—I made him nests

of pillow and blanket, a curve of body

where he curled against my legs,

and when the time came, he slipped out

a loose door into the cold world

whose abundance included

the death of his choosing.

 

When the World Slaps You, Poetry…

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stanleyk

One of the themes running through Gregory Orr’s book,  Poetry as Survival, is the role of trauma and adversity in the creative process. The “survival” in Orr’s title speaks to the lyric poet’s need to make sense of past difficulty, hardship, and pain.

One poet who Orr quotes is Stanley Kunitz. In the first, more famous poem—“The Portrait”—an unfortunate family dynamic, a fateful triangle, is the topic, as Kunitz recalls discovering a portrait of his father, who committed suicide, in the attic. When his mother discovers her son’s find, her reaction is unexpectedly brutal:

 

“The Portrait”
by Stanley Kunitz

My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave moustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.

 

The poem’s dramatic moment comes at the end where son, like the father, absorbs the sting of living with his mother, though certainly in less permanent fashion. How perfect that the speaker shares “In my sixty-fourth year / I can feel my cheek / still burning.” How perfect, too, that Kunitz resists the unnecessary word “still” before “feel” in the penultimate line. Good poetry is always cut to the bone.

Kunitz also wrote about the pain of anti-Semitism. In the first line of “An Old Cracked Tune,” he lifts a line used in a taunting jingle he often endured as a youth. Here we have a sting of another sort, a cheek still burning from the slap of prejudice. A cheek burning with anger, resentment, and yes, determination:

 

“An Old Cracked Tune”
by Stanley Kunitz

My name is Solomon Levi,
the desert is my home,
my mother’s breast was thorny,
and father I had none.

The sands whispered, Be separate,
the stones taught me, Be hard.
I dance, for the joy of surviving,
on the edge of the road.

 

Here is a video of Kunitz reading this brief poem. It is easy to see the Muse’s role in survival. Pounding the disorder of pain into the order of a lyric poem can be powerful medicine. Consider it, as you look to the thickets of your own past….

It’s Giving Tuesday. You Know What THAT Means!

Lost Sherpa of Happiness poetry

giving tuesday

Yes, it means you are supposed to be giving, and that explains why you are getting all of these e-mails from journals and magazines that once (or three times) rejected your poetry but now promise NOT to reject your money.

I could get jaded and do a narrative eye roll here, but I fully understand these magazines’ plights. I have signed on to two new poetry journal subscriptions in the past month. Truth be told, I didn’t know “Giving Tuesday” existed, so I jumped the gun. But no one seems put out, so it’s all good.

But really, if we’re going to talk giving, we have no choice but to talk books, because everybody (and his sister) knows that the best gifts are books. Sure, it’s more fun to receive books, but this is Giving Tuesday, not Receiving Tuesday, so let’s get over that technicality ipso fasto, ‘K?

If you give a new (to you) poet some support by buying his book, that is a major give on an otherwise ordinary-looking November Tuesday. That can be done by taking your giving mood over to Amazon’s “Lost & Found” Department, where you’ll find a shiny new copy of Lost Sherpa of Happiness. Check out these “giving” reviews:

The New York Times: “A dark horse!”

TIME Magazine: “Below the radar no more!”

The Washington Post:” I know this guy!”

Best of all? Your gift of poetry is matched. That’s right. It counts for the person you give it to (even if it’s yourself, in which case your secret’s safe with us), and it counts for the starving artist and his small, independent publisher (in this case, Kelsay Books in full Dickensian mode).

Sound tempting? God, I hope so. Waxing poetic for no reason at all would be such a drag!

Angels We Haven’t Heard on High

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angel wing

Yesterday I shared D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Song of a Man Who Who Has Come Through,” which ends with strange angels at the door (“Admit them, admit them.”). It brought to mind these ethereal beings I’ve given little thought to since childhood, when I was a bit leery about the topic of guardian angels watching every move we make.

Today I thought I’d dig around for other poets’ thoughts on these winged dreams slash nightmares. I expected the gamut, and I got it. In winged spades. Here’s three strange ones. Which do you admit through the door—one, two, or all three? And what if you had to write a poem about an angel. Would it be good, evil, or indifferent?

“Women Who Love Angels”
by Judith Ortiz Cofer

They are thin
and rarely marry, living out
their long lives
in spacious rooms, French doors
giving view to formal gardens
where aromatic flowers
grow in profusion.
They play their pianos
in the late afternoon
tilting their heads
at a gracious angle
as if listening
to notes pitched above
the human range.
Age makes them translucent;
each palpitation of their hearts
visible at temple or neck.
When they die, it’s in their sleep,
their spirits shaking gently loose
from a hostess too well bred
to protest.

 

“Angels”
by Linda Pastan
        Are you tired of angels?
–Myra Sklarew

I am tired of angels,
of how their great wings
rustle open the way a curtain opens
on a play I have no wish to see.
I am tired of their milky robes,
their star-infested sashes,
of their perfect fingernails
translucent as shells
from which the souls
of tiny creatures have already fled.

Remember Lucifer, I want to tell them,
his crumpled bat wings
nose-diving from grace.
But they would simply laugh
with the watery sound a harp makes
cascading through bars of music.
Or they would sing to me in
my mother’s lost voice,
extracting all the promises
I made to her but couldn’t keep.

 

“Angels”
by Russell Edson

They have little use. They are best as objects of torment.
No government cares what you do with them.

Like birds, and yet so human . . .
They mate by briefly looking at the other.
Their eggs are like white jellybeans.

Sometimes they have been said to inspire a man to do more with his life than he might have.
But what is there for a man to do with his life?

. . . They burn beautifully with a blue flame.

When they cry out it is like the screech of a tiny hinge; the cry of a bat. No one hears it . . .

The Dangerous But Necessary Art of Compression

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I still have my George Bilgere book out from yesterday, so why not share another poem? Although wistful, like sentimentality, is quicksand-dangerous for a poet, Bilgere seems to walk the edges with aplomb. What is creativity without risk? Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, but we’re not in this to play safe.

This poem, in three swift stanzas, tries to negotiate the mysteries of innocence and aging. The question it poses: Is youth as good as it gets? If you’re an adult, you certainly hope not. You say, “It’s not quite as simple as all that.” And yet… and yet.

Let’s dip our toe in the pool and get wet, shall we?

 

“The Wading Pool”
by George Bilgere

The toddlers in their tadpole bodies,
with their squirt guns and snorkels,
their beautiful mommies and inflatable whales,
are still too young to understand
that this is as good as it gets.

Soon they must leave the wading pool
and stand all day at the concession stand
with their hormones and snow cones,
their soul patches and tribal tattoos,
pretending not to notice how beautiful they are,

until they simply can’t stand it
and before you know it
they’re lined up on lawn chairs,
dozing in the noonday sun
with their stretch marks and beer bellies,
their Wall Street Journals and SPF 50.

 

Parallel structure is used throughout, as Bilgere uses concrete “stand-ins” to represent toddlerhood, teen and twenty-something-dom, and, finally, the maturity of our discontent.

The question in poems like this is simple: Is there enough runway for a poem to lift-off and make profounds statements (in this case about conformity and mortality)? It is, after all, the duty of poetry to compress, not just words but ideas. The duty and the challenge, I should say (and there’s the rub).

Which reminds me, I need to rub the bird with a salt and brown sugar brine so it can brood in the fridge for a day. Happy Thanksgiving to all (4.5) of my readers. Wade in bravely!

The Poets of Nonchalance

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There are some modern poets, Billy Collins in the vanguard, who write what I call the poetry of nonchalance. Extremely modern, often humorous, prone to the quotidian, they make poetry writing look easy.

I put George Bilgere’s work in the same church and pew as St. Billy of Collins’. I’m not sure he rates knighthood yet (when it happens: St. George of Bilgere), but soon, I suppose, if he keeps working the blue-collar mill.

The thing about these School of Nonchalance poets is, they write like it’s no big deal. Like the poem came out in a burst. Like it’s not “poetic” at all, yet likable by all, because it was just written off the cuff, as a whim, in a few minutes with coffee (hot, black, and no-nonsense).

You read Collins, Bilgere, et al., and promptly say to yourself, “Hey. Look how ordinary his topics are. Look how informal his writing is. Look how inviting this all seems. Who knew poetry could be so easy?”

Then you try to write like that and you realize it’s not you. It’s you channeling Collins & Bilgere, Esquires, a law firm that can lay down the law and warns you’ll get in trouble if you approach the bench by your lonesome.

Suddenly, you go all “Dante,” from lighthearted to “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”

Sheesh. Can’t light and humorous poems have a sense of humor about poets trying to be light and humorous?

Here’s a typical Bilgere outing, seemingly routine but not. See if it goes down like a mid-afternoon snack. Not tea and crumpets but Pabst and Cheez-Its, maybe:

 

“Going to Bed”
by George Bilgere

I check the locks on the front door

and the side door,

make sure the windows are closed

and the heat dialed down.

I switch off the computer,

turn off the living room lights.

 

I let in the cats.

 

Reverently, I unplug the Christmas tree,

leaving Christ and the little animals

in the dark.

 

The last thing I do

is step out to the back yard

for a quick look at the Milky Way.

 

The stars are halogen-blue.

The constellations, whose names

I have long since forgotten,

look down anonymously,

and the whole galaxy

is cartwheeling in silence through the night.

 

Everything seems to be ok.

How Abstract “Sets” into Concrete

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shoals

Abstractions are hard—to write about successfully. Especially when concretes have to do all the talking for them.

As Exhibit A, I give you the concept of “silence.” It’s basically a nothing that is something. But how do you describe it?

If you look at a long list of abstract nouns and pick one to write about, you’ll see what I mean. It’s a workout, one your doctor will approve of due to the cardiovascular benefits. You know, where you have trouble carrying on conversation with a work-out partner because you’re too busy breathing.

For inspiration, let’s look at the concrete images the late Tomas Tranströmer came up with for the word “silence.”

You might wonder, straight off, what the antecedent is for the pronoun “they” which appears in Stanza 1 and is repeated in Stanza 4. As for me, I will luxuriate in the final stanza and its image of silver shoals—no, table silver—just kidding, silver shoals, swimming the depths of the black Atlantic’s “silence.”

If it leaves you thinking about the different types of silences, all the better. That’s the thing with abstract words. They are protean in nature. Expansive. Malleable. Perfect, turns out, for a series of concrete images created by you and your rogue accomplice, the imagination.

 

“Silence”
by Tomas Tranströmer

Walk past, they are buried…
A cloud glides over the sun’s disk.

Starvation is a tall building
that moves about by night—

in the bedroom an elevator shaft opens,
a dark rod pointing toward the interior.

Flowers in the ditch. Fanfare and silence.
Walk past, they are buried…

The table silver survives in giant shoals
down deep where the Atlantic is black.

200 Candles for Ivan Turgenev!

my poems poetry The Indifferent World

turgenev

It’s hard to keep up with family birthdays, much less venerated writers’ birthdays. You stumble across them by accident on the Internet, however. How else would I know that Ivan Turgenev just turned 200 on Nov. 9th?

Like many bibliophiles, I have fond memories of my Russian phase. In fact, if my literary leanings were to be portrayed in print, they might be titled Portrait of the Russian Lit. Reader as a Young Man. As a teen, I was consuming Russkies like pizzas: Turgenev, Chekhov, Pushkin, Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Bulgakov, and especially Tolstoy.

But Turgenev was one of the first. Chiefly reading Sketches from a Hunter’s Album (which has since been published under many like-sounding names), a collection of short stories that I will forever associate with the place where I read them, a Maine farmhouse sitting on top of a hill. I was holed up in that house during a freak November nor’easter.

But what did that matter to me? I had my Turgenev, my wood-burning Franklin stove, plenty of food and drink, and friends and family who had joined me on a deer hunting trip (the least of my ambitions at the time… I was more there for atmosphere than venison).

When I returned to Connecticut days after the storm abated, I continued my Turgenev bender. I still have the black Penguin paperbacks on my bookshelf, too: Fathers and Sons, Home of the Gentry, Rudin, On the Eve.

Now it’s been decades since I read poor Ivan Turgenev’s. He waits patiently on the shelf in hopes of my return. The prodigal reader, and all that. But he’d be happy to know that he did inspire a poem. Appearing in my first collection, it’s called, appropriately enough, “Turgenev Time.”

A gift, then, for Ivan with appreciation:

 

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

“Undrinkable as a Glass of Scorpions”

poetry

Alcoholism, it would seem, is fertile ground for poetry. Only, like poetry, nothing’s as simple as a notion stating it should be simple. Alcoholism is so… abstract. Nebulous, Incendiary.

Sure, your poem could go under the influence and come up with some obvious concrete words, but what about not-so-obvious words like lamb, puddle, black cigar, romas, cream, rainclouds, piles of ash, bayonet, the Nile, bluebrown ocean, glass of scorpions, fragrant honey and the bees, and dust on a mirror? 

Can you drink that in such a way that it works?

Which brings me to a second Kaveh Akbar poem from his book Portrait of the Alcoholic. If drinking brings altered states, poetry-writing does, too—only a wild and disciplined altered state. You know. Kind of like New Jersey.

Imbibe, why don’t you:

 

“Portrait of the Alcoholic Three Weeks Sober”
by Kaveh Akbar

The first thing I ever saw die—a lamb that took ten
long minutes. Instead of rolling into the grass, her blood
pooled on the porch. My uncle stepped away
from the puddle, called it a good omen for the tomatoes
then lit a tiny black cigar. Years later I am still picking romas

out of my salads. The barbarism of eating anything
seems almost unbearable. With drinking however
I’ve always been prodigious. A garden bucket filled with cream
would disappear, and seconds later I’d emerge
patting my belly. I swear, I could conjure rainclouds

from piles of ash, guzzle down whole human bodies,
the faces like goblets I’d drain then put back in the cupboard.
So trust me now: when I say thirst, I mean defeated,
abandoned-in-faith, lonely-as-the-slow-charge-into-a-bayonet
thirst. Imagine being the sand forced to watch silt dance

in the Nile. Imagine being the oil boiling away an entire person.
Today, I’m finding problems in areas where I didn’t have areas before.
I’m grateful to be trusted with any of it: the bluebrown ocean
undrinkable as a glass of scorpions, the omnipresent fragrant
honey and the bees that guard it. It just seems such a severe sort of

miraculousness. Even the terminal dryness of bone hides inside our skin
plainly, like dust on a mirror. This can guide us forward
or not guide us at all. Maybe it’s that forward seems too chronological,
the way the future-perfect always sounds so cavalier
when someone tells me some day this will all have been worth it.

Of Little Goats and Alcoholics

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Appropriately enough, Kaveh Akbar’s collection, Portrait of the Alcoholic, is dedicated quite simply “for drunks.” It’s not surprising, then, that you get poems dealing with issues of addiction.

One has the catchy title, “Besides, Little Goat, You Can’t Just Go Asking for Mercy.” Well, he could, but it would do him little good if he was about to be sacrificed and roasted as a celebratory meal (no kidding).

It’s exactly how an alcoholic might feel. Or a drug addict. Or anyone harried by any habit they just cannot shed.

Here’s the poem:

 

“Besides, Little Goat, You Can’t Just Go Asking for Mercy”
by Kaveh Akbar

Besides, little goat, you can’t just go asking for mercy.
With a body like that, it’s easy to forget

about the spirit—the sun unfolding over your coat, your throat
too elegant for prayer. I like it fine, this daily struggle

to not die, to not drink or smoke or snort anything
that might return me to combustibility. Historical problem:

it’s harder than you’d think to burn even what’s flammable.
Once I charged into your body and invented breath. Or,

I stumbled into your mouth and found you breathing. When I left,
I left a lozenge of molten ore on your tongue. Stony grain-pounder,

sleepy pattern-locator, do this: cover your wings, trust
the earth, spread your genes. Nothing here is owned. The ladder

you’re looking for starts not on the ground but several feet below it.