Monthly Archives: April 2019

6 posts

Adult Brain + Kid Wondering = Poetry

poetry

Sometimes you just have to be kid-curious to write poetry by saying, “What if?” and “Imagine that….” Rest assured if you are a poet walking on crowded city sidewalks, you are not thinking the same things as the folks looking down at their Palm Gods (read: cellphones). No. Your mind is moving faster than you are, turning at every bend, allowing no law of physics to get in your creative way.

In a follow-up to yesterday’s Wislawa Szymborska’s poem, here’s another that has, whether she intended it or not, a distinct samsara flavor.

 

Thoughts That Visit Me on Busy Streets
Wislawa Szymborska

Faces.
Billions of faces on the earth’s surface.
Each different, so we’re told,
from those that have been and will be.
But Nature—since who really understands her?—
may grow tired of her ceaseless labors
and so repeats earlier ideas
by supplying us
with preworn faces.

Those passersby might be Archimedes in jeans,
Catherine the Great draped in resale,
some pharaoh with briefcase and glasses.

An unshod shoemaker’s widow
from a still pint-sized Warsaw,
the master from the cave at Altamira
taking his grandkids to the zoo,
a shaggy Vandal en route to the museum
to gasp at past masters.

The fallen from two hundred centuries ago,
five centuries ago,
half a century ago.

One brought here in a golden carriage,
another conveyed by extermination transport,
Montezuma, Confucius, Nebuchadnezzar,
their nannies, their laundresses, and Semiramida
who speaks only English.

Billions of faces on the earth’s surface.
My face, yours, whose—
you’ll never know.
Maybe nature has to shortchange us,
and to keep up, meet demand,
she fishes up what’s been sunk
in the mirror of oblivion.

 

I like all the cameos here by famous people—people kind enough to share their faces with contemporary Warsaw, mind you. I had to look up Altamira to see that it is an ancient cave filled with caveman (and woman) canvases (rock on!) that might hang in the Prado if cave walls could move. As for Semirada, an opera, it appears, starring a queen of same name. Maybe Szymborska was a fan of the opera. Me, I give it a wide berth, being the Vandal that I am.

Face it, you could do worse than let your mind wander to strange wonders today. Whimsy is on the same shelf as poetry, after all. Just ask Dewey Decimal.

The Poetry in Questions

poetry reading poetry

wislawa

I am not a fan of invasive photography and film. You know. People, for instance, who record a burial in a cemetery. Such images, to my mind, belong to the photography of memory, a holier place where they can shift and adjust over time according to the mood and age of the person recalling it.

Don’t get me wrong. My wife and I have albums upon albums of photography, mostly generated by our children’s upbringing. We look at them somewhere between seldom and never, and they elbow out space for books on the bookshelves. What’s more, our children, now grown, have little interest or room for such truck.

So speak, Memory, I want to say. Heck with photos and film. The past is lovely when seen through a memory darkly.

I thought of all of this while reading the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska (and how I love that name!) yesterday. I came upon her “Portrait from Memory,” and it was all questions. The poetry of questions, if you will. But the shifting images in these questions were rich with possibility—much richer than the strict limits of an actual photograph would have been.

So here’s to our suspect memories, and the (what else?) artful way Szymborska plays with them. An album of photographs would take its ball and go home right away. With its cold logic, it would have little patience for word play. More’s the pity. More’s the reason Szymborska developed images with the aperture of her poet’s eye instead.

 

Portrait from Memory
Wislawa Szymborska (translation: Clare Cavanagh & Stanislaw Baranczak)

Everything seems to agree.
The head’s shape, the features, the silhouette, the height.
But there’s no resemblance.
Maybe not in that position?
A different color scheme?
Maybe more in profile,
as if looking at something?
What about something in his hands?
His own book? Someone else’s?
A map? Binoculars? A fishing reel?
And shouldn’t he be wearing something different?
A soldier’s uniform in ’39? Camp stripes?
A windbreaker from that closet?
Or—as if passing to the other shore—
up to his ankles, his knees, his waist, his neck,
deluged? Naked?
And maybe a backdrop should be added?
For example, a meadow still uncut?
Rushes? Birches? A lovely cloudy day?
Maybe someone should be next to him?
Arguing with him? Joking?
Drinking? Playing cards?
A relative? A chum?
Several women? One?
Maybe standing in a window?
Going out the door?
With a stray dog at his feet?
In a friendly crowd?
No, no, all wrong.
He should be alone,
that suits some best.
And not so familiar, so close up?
Farther? Even farther?
In the furthermost depths of the image?
His voice couldn’t carry
even if he called?
And what in the foreground?
Oh, anything.
As long as it’s a bird
just flying by.

Writing About Writers, Reading About Books

poetry reading poetry

Readers like reading about books and the act of reading. Thus, the occasional bestseller about libraries or rare book collectors or, God save us, the randomly-chosen Top 100 Books We Must Read Before Kicking off into the Milky’s Way (where you’ll be a star, trust me).

A corollary is this: Writers like to write about writers. This provides fodder for reader-writers reading about writers whose works they have read. These truths became self-evident last night while I was reading the new issue of Poetry (May, 2019). Flipping through pages the younger, I found a poem called “Marcus Aurelius” by Bianca Stone.

What? A poem about everyone’s favorite Stoic? Catnip!

Before even diving in, I first conjured memories of rainy afternoons on Martha’s Vineyard, where I read the landlord’s leather-bound copy of The Meditations. Who could lament lost beach weather when Marc was waxing eloquent on life, bringing seeming order to all the turmoil I’d taken existence to be?

Here is Stone’s neat little nod to the student of Epictetus:

 

Marcus Aurelius
by Bianca Stone

Sometimes I wake up in the night
with a terrible headache, my mouth
blackened; a ghost looking for valuables
in the debris, I turn on a battery-powered
light, clipped to a book, I write things down
in the spirit of Marcus Aurelius
who said the finest bottle of wine
is just grape juice, passing through the liver,
no matter the beauty of a frothing glass,
or a night of big Truth-seeking, never recalled;
the importance of putting something bittersweet
into our mouths, turning it around and around
on our tongues, attaching to it, our missions,
our purpose—in the end
we are all just filters, not even
as beautiful as the plainest bird
or as zen as the meanest deer tick,
nothing is given over to, nothing new is lit.
So often it is this. I wake up, urgent, fatalistic,
with the taste of nectar on my boughs.
I replay on a loop my one stoic consistency,
my middle of the night vow,
that I will start tomorrow
the essential dismantling
of what I live.

 

We read the philosophers when we are lost and want to be found. Trouble is, reading most philosophers, you will be more lost than when you started. Not so with Marcus Aurelius, and Stone’s poem perfectly captures the mood and self-reflection necessary to savor Stoicism like a secret Epicurean.

The poem’s narrator admits to weakness, and the honesty is both disarming and inviting. Marcus Aurelius, the original self-help section of Roman bookstores? Yes, please! I’ll have some of what she’s having! And maybe look up a few more of the works of Bianca Stone while I’m at it.

If you write but haven’t written about writers, know that there is a built-in audience. I’ve written poems about James Wright, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, and Jack Gilbert, for instance. And once, when my poem “Hemingway Fishing” appeared in Gray’s Sporting Journal, I received an email from a reader who said it was no trouble tracking me down.

His purpose? To say thanks, is all. For writing about a writer he cared about.

Why Do YOU Want to Be a Poet?

poetry reading poetry writing poetry

If you had told me fifty years ago that I would someday be a poet, I would have laughed and replied, “Right. And I’ll someday be the pope, too.”

But here I stand, sans ecclesiastical garbs and kiss-the-ring, scribbling lines in the thin hours of the morning. What’s wrong with me? And what intrinsic reasons push me to do this, line by line and stanza by stanza?

I’ve given these questions some thought and decided it is a lot like teaching. Both the teacher and the poet are stuck in jobs that can never be fully mastered. Yes, over time you can become quite accomplished at either, given the tools and the tenacity, but the thought of conquering the tasks is ludicrous. The challenge will never dissipate.

And that’s what I like about both trades. The fact that you sometimes succeed and sometimes fail and always will. The fact that there are no hard and fast rules. The fact that you have to keep experimenting with new words in new ways.

Sisyphus comes to mind, in his dogged way. The hill and the stone. The job that can never be finished in any fully satisfactory way. Yes, there will be successes, but they will be as ephemeral as May sunshine. Here this morning, gone this afternoon. You may have a poem accepted in a journal of note and say, “Finally, I have arrived,” but you will quickly be disabused of the notion with the next day’s rejections. Three of them.

As for payment, how low can you go? Compared to other trades, especially in the corporate world, the teaching profession pays poorly. And compared to writing other genres, poetry writing brings negligible monetary rewards (unless “complimentary copies” now earn interest at banks).

In her poem, “But I, Too, Want to Be a Poet,” Fanny Howe has some fun with all this. Which brings me to another point. If you’re going to write poetry, let your hair down now and then. Have some fun. Laugh at yourself. Like Cherry Garcia ice cream at midnight, it’s sometimes necessary.

 

But I, Too, Want to Be a Poet
Fanny Howe

But I, too, want to be a poet
to erase from my days
confusion & poverty
fiction & a sharp tongue

To sing again
with the tones of adolescence
demanding vengeance
against my enemies, with words
clear & austere

To end this tumultuous quest
for reasonable solutions
to situations mysterious & sore

To have the height to view
myself as I view others
with lenience & love

To be free of the need
to make a waste of money
when my passion,
first and last,
is for the ecstatic lash
of the poetic line

and no visible recompense

Continental Drift, the Friends & Family Version

poetry reading poetry

fatherdaughter

Change. It’s in your pocket, in one sense, but you’re in its pocket in another.

That is, we are all pawns on the chessboard of change. It happens. Sometimes, as our lives change, we come out unscathed. Sometimes we even find ourselves in a better place. But other times, unbeknownst to us, we are moments away from being swiped off the board by a bellicose bishop.

The poet Charles Rafferty composed a theme on a variation of change with the poem “Drift.” It connotes a more gradual change. One we don’t notice until we do. Like stars moving across the heavens on the darkest of summer nights. They look as still as ice crystals stuck to a celestial map, and yet movement here is causing drift up there.

Let’s see if we can discern the movement in Rafferty’s poem:

Drift
by Charles Rafferty

Long ago, the old friends stopped calling. I used to think they had
lost my number. Now I forgive them their children and their jobs,
their wives and their divorces, their cancer and their lawns, the fifteen
minutes they allow themselves at the piano every night. I am able to go
on without them—a kind of orphan from the life I used to live. This is
what I’m thinking as I get in the car to take my daughter to her voice
lesson. The ride is a quiet one. She is getting older and has learned to
keep things to herself. When we arrive at the lesson, she makes it clear,
without saying so, that I should wait outside. So I stay in the car—doing
the bills, doing the things I hate—as her high notes drift through the
studio door, the glass of the car window, the air that will be between us
now from here until the end.

 

In Line 2, Rafferty uses parallel structure to good effect as he forgives his former friends “their children and their jobs, / their wives and their divorces, their cancer and their lawns, the fifteen / minutes they allow themselves at the piano every night.”

In the distant unknown we once called friendship, there is drama playing out. Always, it seems. Some comedy, but often tragedy. Tolstoy’s prophetic “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” And boy, it’s rough when you see “cancer” casually paired off with “lawns” like that.

So life drifts on. In one of the strongest phrases in the poem, the narrator refers to himself as “a kind of orphan from the life I used to live.”

Then he finishes with his daughter. A ride to her voice lesson. A ride that, ironically, includes very little voice in the car because she “has learned to / keep things to herself.”

What scares me a bit is the ending. Sitting outside in the car, the narrator hears his daughter’s voice “drift” (get it?) outside to “the air that will be between us / now from here until the end.”

Ouch. A drift that crash lands into permanent change. But me, I’m going to take solace in two places—a Mark Twain quote and my own experience. First, the Twain. He once said, “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

True, some teens are susceptible to sullen years where their friends are everything and their parents are a minor (or major) inconvenience, but I’m happy to report that, in my kids’ cases, it all came around full circle. Somehow I learned a thing or two over the years. Somehow I was worth talking to and listening to again.

Like the tide, then. Change can drift in and drift out. Still, Rafferty’s poem points to the subtleties that can sneak up on us. And when a little reflection makes you realize that they have, you get… poetry.

April Is the Cruller Month

poetry

No, wait. That can’t be right. “April is the cruellest month,” according to T.S. Eliot, with “cruelest” misspelled.

Or maybe it’s a case of Brit-spell, which we fought a war over. I still remember the peace treaty at Yorktown, where George Washington proclaimed that, heretofore, “colour” would be spelled “color.” Huzzah (and all that)! Strike up “Yankee Doodle” and let’s get some lunch.

But back to Eliot. It’s a great line about April (which debuts today). A humdinger of a line. One everyone remembers, even people who consider poetry as foreign as Neptune. To stretch it out a bit, the first four lines of “The Waste Land” go like so:

 

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

 

The line works especially well in New England, where new life can be coaxed out of the earth only to be slammed with a late-season frost or a “whoops” snowstorm. Cruel.

The bigger point here, though, is great lines. All of us write them (by “us” I mean poets not quite as well-known as old Thomas Stearns Eliot), it’s just the company they keep. That is, when we create an awesome line that makes us proud, we have trouble drumming up players to go out on the field or court with it.

Poetry, you see, is a team sport outfitted with players called words and lines and stanzas. Given that, a great line cannot stand alone. It is not an orchestra unto itself. It requires other lines to help it resonate, make sense, fill the room with music. You can put a star on a basketball team, for instance, but if the other four players are mediocre at best, good luck.

Some poetry “how-to” books advise a collection of your best lines, shoehorning them into one poem. To me, that’s a cheat sure to fail.

What? My best lines from five poems forced to play together, even if they treat on different subjects? Just imagine the egos of five superstars on that basketball court with no practice as a cohesive unit. Ball hogs. Hot doggers. Ma, look-at-me’s.

No, no, no. That will not do. That would be cruelly unkind and one mess of a poem.

Think of that next time you try to devise ways to make one of your favorite lines famous. I recommend starting from scratch. Build a team around your great line. It’s not easy, but whoever said poetry was? Not this guy. So pass the crullers, poor a coffee, and get to work.