Yearly Archives: 2019

113 posts

Chasing Today’s Hot Property

poetry

Typically, this is how it goes down: You read a review of a new poetry book (say, Chelsey Minnis’ Baby, I Don’t Care), and it intrigues you. Going on interlibrary loan, you find the book, place it on “hold,” and see you are hold number #23 on 2 books in the system.

So you get in line. If you were in England Comma Jolly Olde, you’d get in queue, but in the Very Unjolly (These Days) Estatos Disunitos, you get in line with the other 99%.

Then it dawns upon you, sun and all. This poet has written previous books (say, Poemland). So you search and find one of them on the library site’s digital catalogue and, of course, there are zero holds on it even though it is the same poet of the moment.

poemland

This is because the old book is yesterday’s news, and if there’s one thing people cannot abide, it is old news (and people).

Canaries are one thing. They read old news lining the bottom of their cages. Ditto puppies, who are traditionally trained to leak old news on the floor. Before they learn to take it outside, I mean.

Anyway, happily, the voice of the searchable poet is the same in the old book as it is in the new book’s excerpts. And if you read enough of the old books, eventually your hold on the new book will inch up the line and you will be notified that it’s ready and waiting on your beloved public library’s “reserved shelf.”

Only then you’re on to something else. Some other poet. Your interest in the old “gotta read” has waned.

Why, you wonder, is interest always waning? It’s like the interest on your savings account at the bank, which has waned to 0.86 APY.

Whatever APY means.

Pantoums: Easier Said Than Done

poetry

As most of you know, poetry, supposedly dying (see Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry for all the news unfit to print) has inched its way into The New York Times Magazine on Sundays.

This week Rita Dove selected a form I haven’t seen in a while, the pantoum. As Dove explains, it hails from Malaysian oral tradition and seems easy, but isn’t. The easier part is the ABAB rhyme scheme. The more difficult part is the shifting: “Lines 2 and 4 of each quatrain become Lines 1 and 3 in the next stanza.” Hoo, boy. Like working on a 500-piece puzzle some rainy Sunday, that.

As with haiku, it is much easier to write bad pantoums than good ones. It is also a type of writing that appeals to some poets who like a challenge (example: Allison Joseph, pictured) and repels others (example: Ken Craft, seen here hiding from pantoums), who like to control their challenges, thank you.

Here’s the poem Dove offered up this week as an excellent example of the pantoum form. If you want to read Dove’s introduction as well, take a jump down this rabbit hole.

 

Flirtation
By Allison Joseph

I like my tights electric blue,
my shoes of patent leather.
This dance I dance is meant for you —
I move quick as new weather.

My shoes of patent leather
shine brighter than my skin.
I move, quick as new weather,
to shed the dress I’m in.

Shining brighter than my skin,
my eyes, they say it all.
I’ll shed the dress I’m in,
let summer fabric fall.

My eyes, they see it all.
They see what’s false, what’s true.
Let summer fabric fall.
I know what we can do.

I know what’s false, what’s true.
I dance the dance that’s meant for you.
Show me what you can do.
You like my tights, electric blue.

 

 

When the Lines Are Good Enough

poetry

It is well known that some poems enchant you so much you have to read again. And again. And again, kind of like savoring a fine wine with the tongue.

Less known, maybe, is when the same thing happens with a few lines. You read them and are willing to stop reading the poem, back up, and read the lines and the lines only again. And again. And again, kind of like savoring a tall glass of cold water on a blazing summer’s day.

I got that feeling when reading Frank O’Hara last night. These opening lines:

 

It seems far away and gentle now
the morning miseries of childhood
and its raining calms over the schools

 

The first of six stanzas, and none of the remaining five hit me like this one, so maybe it’s me, and maybe it’s personal, and maybe what puts the “fine” in my “wine” doesn’t so much in yours.

That’s poetry. Poetry that “seems far away and gentle now.”

The Trouble with Spring

marketing poetry poetry

Ah, spring, inspired by the month of May, which brings to mind May baskets, the maypole of old, and flowers encouraged by rains of recently departed April.

Spring inspires not only birds and bees, but poets. Any survey course of poetry will show you as much. Spring is icumen, cuccu (or something like that).

The spring-inspired poet lifts his pencil and smooths out a clean page in his poetry journal. Thoughts, dreams, reflections find their fertile way to paper.

Cross outs, add-ins, revisions. Cut to the bone. (OK. To the stem, then.) It’s spring and the imagination, like perennials, is sprouting full force.

Type 3-5 poems into a single Word document, PDF, or rich text format. Go to your favorite poetry journal. And another. And a third, on and on like rising dandelions, and behold the weedy words of the season:

There are presently no open calls for submissions.

There are presently no open calls for submissions.

There are presently no open calls for submissions.

In the words of the poets of old: May Day, May Day, poetry markets are sinking!

And in the words of The Happenings, “See You in September.” Your baby named “Ample Poetry Markets” has gone not only for the spring, but for the summer.

Marketing work is no summer vacation, friends. It’s about to become work.

The Poetry in Questions

poetry reading poetry

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.

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.

My Kingdom for an Audience!

humor poetry poetry readings reading poetry

audience

In this age and day, it is good to read a poem that starts with the line “How kind people are!” Not just read it, but with-an-exclamation-point read it, as if the idea needs to shout in these times where boorishness, shamelessness, and lies are king.

Connie Wanek’s poem, “Audience,” brings to mind poetry readings, where folks are, as a rule, kind. And rare. And often few and far between — but, by definition, still an “audience.”

The denotation is deliciously limber. My wife is an audience, for instance, when I unpack my troubles on her to divide them in half. It is a key part of a spouse’s job: relief through division.

My dog can serve as audience, too, tilting his head like Nipper, the old RCA Victor dog, as I go on and on, Mark Twain-like, about the damned human race (hint: no one’s in the lead).

But let’s return to Connie’s audience, shall we?

 

Audience
by Connie Wanek

How kind people are!
How few in the crowd truly hope
the tightrope will break.

Rare’s the man who’ll shoot the Pope
or throw his shoe at a liar,
though joining in—that’s natural.

An audience of St. Paul’s sparrows
is easily bored, easily frightened.
One blasphemy and off they fly.

Even a polite dog will snore
through reprimands,
though he’ll rouse to follow

the refreshments with a calculating eye.
But people, especially Minnesotans,
pull their sleeves over their watches

and want to find a way to like you.
If they can sit through winter’s sermons,
they can sit through you.

 

Sometimes poetry can send you in peculiar directions of your own making. It may be that the poet would be alarmed to hear it. Or it may be that she’d cry, “That’s exactly what I was thinking!”

Stanza one, for instance, reminds me of hockey games where fans wait out the game in hopes of a fistfight on ice. Or Nascar races where folks anticipate an exciting car crash. Stanza two, with the thrown shoe, brings images of President G. W. Bush — a.k.a. “another kettle of fish” — dodging a shoe some foreign journalist tossed at him during a press conference. Give him this. Bush had the moves if not the credentials.

Stanzas three and four bring more docile behavior to the fore. In five, the calculating eye of the dog eying refreshments cheers a reader. We love consistency and predictable behavior, after all, in our best friends.

I can’t speak to Minnesotans, having met none in my life. That they check their watches while finding “a way to like you” speaks highly of them, though. Trained by sermons, the joke goes. And sometimes a little humor is just the right touch when it comes to the tricky part of a poem (i.e. the ending). The days of saying, “And the audience lived happily ever after” are over, after all.

Applause, please.

***

Nota Bene: How kind authors are to avoid putting TIP JAR buttons on their websites. Or one of those dreaded BUY ME A COFFEE buttons.

Heck, if you like what you read on this site, I’d much rather you support the cause by buying one of my books from the BOOKS page, the monies of which go into paying the yearly cost of this site. That way, you get something out of it, too. And me, I get an “Audience” (the tie-in you were waiting for)!

😉

A Dog, Samsara, and the Sea

poetry reading poetry

Wash. Rinse. Repeat. A good mantra for samsara, seems. But the Buddhist view of samsara is negative—i.e. an endless cycle of pain, sickness, and death—while the Western view skews positive. You know. Reincarnation as better-than-nothing form of immortality. Too bad you can’t remember your former lives. Unless you’re Shirley MacLaine, that is.

Today’s poem is one part samsara and one part shaggy dog. Dogs, you see, are a form of immortality too. When life hits you with trauma and misery, invest in a puppy. Voilà, as they say in Versaille. Your worries dissolve in the day-to-day delights of puppy tail and puppy tongue.

A dog, after all, lives in the moment. It has little use for past or future. In that sense, it is not only man’s best friend, but his bodhisattva, a being that long ago reached enlightenment but is there for you anyway.

So the next time you read some rule that says, “Thou shalt not write a poem about dogs,” you can either roll your eyes and ignore it OR do as David Salner does and double down: dog plus Eastern philosophy.

 

A Dog by the Sea
by David Salner

Just after dawn, we get up,
without coffee, and let the dog lead us
through a grove of wind-stunted trees,
spiked succulents, red-berried holly,
and over the dune ridge out of the gray
of still sleeping minds. A line of pink
from the not yet risen sun
reminds me of the lilac shadows
caught in the radial grooves of shells.
I take up your hand and feel the blood
warming your fingers, as the dog bounds off
dragging her leash through wet sand.
She’s after gulls and a line of waves
that repeat themselves, she seems to think,
because they want to play.
A morning breeze
stirs the now turning tide, breathing over it,
sighing toward bayside. As the waves come in
whorls of light unfold on the sand. How I want
for us to repeat ourselves, on and on,
you holding the leash of a silly dog, me
feeling the beat, the blood in your hand.

 

In addition to imagery related to the sea, note how the waves repeat themselves, the tide turns eternal, and the narrator confesses “How I want / for us to repeat ourselves, on and on.”

If you inhale deeply while reading, you’ll catch whiffs of both salt and Buddhism, meaning we have a dog poem, yes. But an oh-so-human-in-its-wistfulness one, too.

Random Thoughts for March (i.e. Madness!)

blathering comma mine Goodreads marketing poetry poetry random thoughts

Every once in a while, I write a Random Thoughts post (copyright, patent pending). As advertised, it is random. The equivalent of blathering, often with the intent of being humorous. Think funny raft floating on a stream of serious, then don’t take it too seriously. Streams of Consciousness are on the protected conservation lands list, after all.

Or were, before some powers-that-unfortunately-be started “unprotecting” everything in the name of plutocracy, autocracy, oligarchy, et al. You know, as Lincoln never put it: “Government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations….”

  • Here in the Estados-Disunitos, we have this thing called “March Madness,” denoting a time of year when a billionaire organization (read: The National Collegiate Athletic Association) reaps fistfuls of advertising dollars while “student-athletes” play for no pay.
  • It’s called “Madness” because every American worker, student, and self-anointed “expert” jumps into a pool (despite the chilly time of year, the water’s fine!) and speaks mysteriously (e.g. “Hey, Bud. All three of my upset picks won last night,” and “Oh, man, is my West bracket busted, or what?”).
  • Nothing galls the office pool dudes more than some “mere woman” winning everything because she picked teams by color, mascot, or dartboard. Thus, the beauty of it all.
  • What? The Mueller Report is out this weekend? I lied. March Madness means the same as every other month’s madness we’ve been experiencing since January 2017 when the White House turned into the House of Orange.
  • Given the increasing time it takes to hear back from poetry markets, I’d say, as is true with the casino industry in the northeast, that the market is saturated.
  • Quick-response poetry journals, when they reject you within a week, are the poetry-journal equivalent of euthanasia. A bittersweet form of mercy, that!
  • Speaking of bittersweet, it’s always odd to enjoy a personal note from an editor (vs. a boilerplate rejection). You know the one I mean: “We particularly enjoyed your poem ‘Dover Beach’ but decided the tide wasn’t quite right for us just now. Please consult your tide charts and try us again six months from now.”
  • Such notes are found in the dictionary under paradox (n.) — “a compliment that isn’t; an endorsement that confirms and denies; a pair of mallards.”
  • Goodreads continues to skew bad. Since Amazon dot glom took over, they’ve slowly been trending more and more toward being an advertisement site, one where members get “used” for free (kind of like basketball stars in the NCAA!).
  • Exhibit A: Huge ads framing 40% of the screen when you click on a book title to learn more about that book (hint: the ad is for a completely different book). The moral of the story? Pay no attention to those blinking GIFs and videos no longer behind the curtain!
  • Exhibit B: the second entry on your activity feed, which is now an ad pretending to be an actual activity feed, saying something like (Goodreads Friend Z loves “Book Title Whose Publisher Has Paid for This Ad”).
  • Of course, Goodreads Friend Z has no clue that her innocent “like” of a book has been appropriated by the Amazons-That-Be for free advertising. It’s all in the fine print written by lawyers (a.k.a. “Terms and Conditions”).
  • Speaking of Goodreads “likes” and other fluff clicks, can you imagine if the “Wants to Read” button was a “one-click” purchase of said book? All of you writers under small, independent presses would be feeling the love (vs. the cruel tease) right now! Right in the royalties!
  • What if there were brackets for the Top 68 poets? Who would make your Sweet Sixteen? Your Elite Eight? Your Final Four?
  • Would it change, year to year?
  • I hope so. But then, I hope a lot of things. Kind of like Pandora, just before she shut the box as someone quipped, “Too late, sister. But good luck to you.”