Monthly Archives: July 2020

8 posts

First-Person Point of Dock

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dock

Here in Maine, we are in the very heart of what I call Dock Days — mornings and afternoons where you simply while away time on the smooth, sun-struck slats of a dock jutting over a lake.

After a brief heat wave, more reasonable weather has come in. The humidity went to Miami for a few days. The heat signed a cease fire, agreeing to be agreeable, to be more “Maine-like” for the time being.

Dock Days inspired a poem once. I dug it out for a reread yesterday. It’s one of those poems written last for a manuscript (which would become Lost Sherpa of Happiness). One that never had a chance to play the markets and look for a home in some poetry journal.

I often like these orphans best. Never accepted anywhere, but never rejected, either. They just “are,” which is the perfect metaphor for whiling away hours on a dock, like you did when you were a kid and time held nothing against you.

 

From a Dock on a Maine Lake
Ken Craft

Lying here, side of my head resting
on the crook of right arm and gazing
from the grotto of my right eye,
I hear the water and see the creased
dam of my left elbow, the occasional bird
flying through its wild blond grasslands.

The left eye, though. It peers over
the tanned levee, sees the high gold-shot
lake—so high it threatens
to flood and marl the east shore
where clear sky, punctured by treeline,
seeps anemic blue to airy bone.

Shifting to my back I get the sky’s
gas-flame blue scribed by pine and maple
treetops, the firmament a forgotten
language from first-person point of boy.

And my God, the wind! Needles and leaves
nodding like anxious ponies,
wagging like old ladies’ heads
at green gossip. Trees exhaling a ropey
poem of clouds. White thoughts, broken
words, startled birds put to flight. They flock,
elongate, twist and split open like smoky time
seeking its own shore to roost.

“In the Trusting Darkness”

poetry

bedtime story

Family. Talk about a feel-good word with positive connotations. But we all know that in actuality it can be complex. One fraught with both wonder and woe.

There’s one thing we as writers can agree on, however: Writing about family brings a built-in audience. As readers, we’re all in this together because we’re all experts in the sub-categories of fathers and mothers, grands and once-removed’s, siblings and cousins.

The poet Jim Daniels is especially adept at mining the concept. Down he goes, spelunking into the abstract and climbing out with the concrete. Like any miner, time and patience afford him the luxury of small finds — ones that add up, ones that flesh out a poem and speak to the secrets of family hiding in the wide open.

Here he takes a minor moment — the quiet time most any parent can identify with — and makes it wistful. True, “wistful” can be dangerous (it borders “sentimental,” after all), but done right, it can be effective. See what you think in this poem about bedtime reading to your kids:

Talking About the Day
Jim Daniels

Each night after reading three books to my two children—
we each picked one—to unwind them into dreamland,
I’d turn off the light and sit between their beds
in the wide junk shop rocker I’d reupholstered blue,
still feeling the close-reading warmth of their bodies beside me,
and ask them to talk about the day—we did this,
we did that, sometimes leading somewhere, sometimes
not, but always ending up at the happy ending of now.
Now, in still darkness, listening to their breath slow and ease
into sleep’s regular rhythm.
         They are grown, you might’ve guessed.
The past tense solid, unyielding, against the dropped bombs
of recent years. But how it calmed us then, rewinding
the gentle loop, and in the trusting darkness, pressing play.

Go Deep! Go Wild!

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Deep Wild

If you’re a FB person, I invite you to visit Deep Wild Journal’s Facebook Page, where they featured my poem “Thoreau Knows” yesterday to commemorate Henry David’s 203rd birthday.

The poem will appear in the print journal, Deep Wild: Writing from the Backcountry, the 2020 issue, which is scheduled to be released any day now. As I say of any journal that publishes my work, buy! I put my faith where faith is put!

So go ahead, FB types. Do some good for the little guy (Deep Wild Journal). Read their FB page. Endorse it. Then read it and, if you’re a writer and a lover of nature, submit to it for its next issue.

Your Future in Past’s Clothing

poetry

bee

The future is an interesting beast. It is always “out there” and yet nearby. You don’t know when it will arrive, just that it will. And when it does, it dies like the honey bee that’s delivered its one sting. No longer is it the future. Instead, too briefly to define, it’s now the present, and then the all-consuming past.

When I think of time, I think of Cronus consuming his children. The insatiable past keeps swallowing the future as it tumbles through the present’s quick portal. The regurgitation part of Cronus’s story serves metaphorically as memory.

Poetry is uniquely adept at tackling poems about time, and I collect them. Janus would be proud, whether the calendar says January (look back, look ahead) or not.

Here’s a “for example” that fits the bill. It is Mark Jarman’s poem “The Children,” which asserts that children know something we don’t — even though we were once children. Koans like that make the poetry of time interesting to read.

Go ahead. Sit by a grandfather clock and enjoy:

 
The Children
Mark Jarman

The children are hiding among the raspberry canes.
They look big to one another, the garden small.
Already in their mouths this soft fruit
That lasts so briefly in the supermarket
Tastes like the past. The gritty wall,
Behind the veil of leaves, is hollow.
There are yellow wasps inside it. The children know.
They know the wall is hard, although it hums.
They know a lot and will not forget it soon.

When did we forget? But we were never
Children, never found where they were hiding
And hid with them, never followed
The wasp down into its nest
With a fingertip that still tingles.
We lie in bed at night, thinking about
The future, always the future, always forgetting
That it will be the past, hard and hollow,
Veiled and humming, soon enough.

 

I don’t know about you, but I read this and get the feeling that the future and past are like Romulus and Remus, or Cain and Abel, maybe. Fatally bound together, sometimes in perplexing ways, but always in thought-provoking ways.

And me, I like thought-provoking. In poems that stir the pot — the one bubbling with futures simmering down to the past. Can you smell it in the air?

When Poems Move in Unexpected Directions

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Sometimes the little guy wins. Sometimes “very plain” makes its complex mark. Sometimes literal makes like Odysseus and journeys to a distant metaphor. This is the case with Ruth Bavetta’s poem, “How to Get to My House.” Let’s tackle the poem first:

 

How to Get to My House
Ruth Bavetta

From Los Angeles, where I was born,
take the San Bernardino Freeway east
past San Gabriel, Glendora, Covina,
up the hill by Forest Lawn,
down into the traffic clumped
where the 210 joins the 10.
Turn on the radio if you like,
there’s quite a way to go.

Pomona, Claremont, Ontario.
Here, if you want,
you can turn off at the airport,
catch a flight to someplace else.
Fontana, Rialto, Bloomington.
You may not have noticed it
but the road has been climbing all the way.
That’s San Bernardino on the left.

You’re in Redlands now,
the climb is a little steeper.
Exit on the Yucaipa offramp.
Just over the bridge,
turn right on Highview.
Stay there through two marriages,
a divorce, a child custody suit,
a brain tumor and a mother
with Alzheimer’s.
Soon you’ll reach where I live.

 

The pay-off, of course, comes in the final stanza. The first two read like directions your friend might give you in the pre-GPS era. You remember those: when you got lost but were too stubborn to pull over and ask for directions (I’m assuming you’re a male, in this case).

Then, wham. The last five lines of S3. You’ve arrived, all right. But the arrival brings an unexpected welcome. Not a hug, not a cold drink and warm meal, not a guest room, but a surprise. Two marriages. A divorce. A child custody suit.

It gets more alarming: A brain tumor. A mother with Alzheimer’s.

And just when you’re sure you’ve taken a wrong turn and landed at the wrong homestead, the finish: “Soon you’ll reach where I live.”

The poem lulls you with the quotidian. It all seems rather ordinary and list like. As a reader, you never suspect that you are being set up, that there is something surprising around the next curve, something as shocking as an elk standing in the middle of the road.

For an excellent tour guide as you reread this poem, check out Mark Scarbrough’s “Lyric Life” podcast,  which occasionally treats on poems famous and not-so-famous.

My hat’s off to Mark for honoring the “not-so-famous” as well as the overly-trodden famous in the world of poetry.

That’s a direction we all should take now and again.

Rubbing the Lantern of Memory

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lantern

We all have topics we are drawn to. For me, one of those topics is memory. Why? Because it’s a tricky thing, sometimes kind and sometimes cruel. Like life, then, and so, a perfect metaphor.

While poking around the book, Selected Poems & Translations : 1969-1991 by William Matthews, I came across “Housework,” a poem that hits my topical sweet spot. Let’s listen in (to the voice in your head, I mean):

 

Housework
by William Matthews

How precise it seems, like a dollhouse,
and look: the tiniest socks ever knit
are crumpled on a chair in your bedroom.
And how still, like the air inside a church
or basketball. How you could have lived
your boyhood here is hard to know,
unless the blandishing lilacs
and slant rain stippling the lamplight
sustained you, and the friendship of dogs,
and the secrecy that flourishes in vacant lots.
For who would sleep, like a cat in a drawer,
in this house memory is always dusting,

unless it be you? I’d hear you on the stairs,
an avalanche of sneakers, and then the sift
of your absence and then I’d begin to rub
the house like a lantern until you came back
and grew up to be me, wondering how to sleep
in this lie of memory unless it be made clean.

 

The first thing Matthews gets right is how everything from the past shrinks. Anyone who has “gone home again” á la Thomas Wolfe knows as much. He puts that to work in this poem by mentioning the “dollhouse” effect and the “tiniest socks.”

As a teacher of poetry, a genre most students are allergic to, I always encouraged students to simply identify cool lines that they liked. Avoiding treasure hunts for poetic devices helped young readers to relax and just go with what sounded neat. Inevitably, they were drawn to words and lines that were (wait for it) poetic devices.

I’m sure, if I assigned this in a classroom, students would jump all over “And how still, like the air inside a church / or basketball.” Ninety-nine of us could link stillness with the inside of a church, but the inside of a basketball? In a poem going back in time to the life of a young boy? Now that’s pretty cool (and oh, by the way, a simile, too).

The only other requirement I had in class is that students look up any word they didn’t know. Here it would be “blandishing” as in “blandishing lilacs.” To blandish is to coax or cajole so, metaphorically, we get the spellbinding smell of lilacs that often attracts people’s noses.

More cool lines? How about, quite simply, “and slant rain stippling the lamplight / sustained you, and the friendship of dogs, / and the secrecy that flourishes in vacant lots.” It’s kind of a sad, viewing-the-past-through-the-gauze-of-memory moment, no? Perhaps this was a lonely boy, then?

Then we get the line about “this house that memory is always dusting.” Neat. Each time you return to a particular memory, you’re dusting it, cleaning it up, changing it ever so slightly.

Finally there is the allusion to Aladdin’s lamp, wherein the house is rubbed “like a lantern” until “you” (who really is the speaker himself) returns by growing up “to be me.” Dopplegänger stuff, almost. And why I like memory poems so much, especially where the speaker is a player and all of life a stage.

In a word: Cool.

“I’m Still Falling Through Its Silence”

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nam

One reader of my Fourth of July dis wondered why I had this thing against fireworks, booze, and patriotism. Beyond the fact that they’re odd bedfellows, let me make clear that I am not a dyed-in-the-wool curmudgeon. Just a dyed one.

As proof, let me go on the record (at my age, a slow-playing 33 1/3 rpm) to say that I love Thanksgiving. See? It’s a holiday. And it’s not just the turkey (platter) and the stuffing (my stomach) I like. It’s the word THANKS front and center. GIVING isn’t bad, either. Now that’s a holiday worth celebrating (not to mention emulating).

We Americans spend too much time squawking about our rights and individual liberties. Me, me, me. Land of the Me masquerading as Land of the Free.

Perhaps it would do to give some thanks for once. To consider others. To appreciate all we have. I mean, there are worse countries to live in. Places where war and hunger are facts of life every day in every way (conceding these scourges are facts of life in certain spots within our own borders).

Is it any wonder I love Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem, “Thanks”? The speaker looks back at his service in Vietnam, how he was saved only by chance, how his one precious life was wrapped up and regifted to him till he had to live a new life — a new life of thanks.

It would seem, reading it, that there is more to the world than self, than bombast, than greed. The speaker in “Thanks” says he is “still / falling through the silence” of his new life. And while we as readers may not have experienced something as dramatic as an attempt on our lives that failed, we can certainly learn something from the speaker’s humility and love of life as well as of others.

 

Thanks
Yusef Komunyakaa

Thanks for the tree
between me & a sniper’s bullet.
I don’t know what made the grass
sway seconds before the Viet Cong
raised his soundless rifle.
Some voice always followed,
telling me which foot
to put down first.
Thanks for deflecting the ricochet
against that anarchy of dusk.
I was back in San Francisco
wrapped up in a woman’s wild colors,
causing some dark bird’s love call
to be shattered by daylight
when my hands reached up
& pulled a branch away
from my face. Thanks
for the vague white flower
that pointed to the gleaming metal
reflecting how it is to be broken
like mist over the grass,
as we played some deadly
game for blind gods.
What made me spot the monarch
writhing on a single thread
tied to a farmer’s gate,
holding the day together
like an unfingered guitar string,
is beyond me. Maybe the hills
grew weary & leaned a little in the heat.
Again, thanks for the dud
hand grenade tossed at my feet
outside Chu Lai. I’m still
falling through its silence.
I don’t know why the intrepid
sun touched the bayonet,
but I know that something
stood among those lost trees
& moved only when I moved

How Do You Like THEM Apples?

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m80

There’s nothing quite like the quiet after a storm. Thus my love for the Fifth of July, waking early, hearing only birds and wind through tree and leaf. It makes me feel so, I don’t know. Independent of noise.

Thank you, God.

Yesterday was a passing strange day for this blog. Holidays are slow days for online traffic. Notoriously. I only put my poem “It’s the Fourth of July” up because, well, it was the Fourth of July.

But a lot of people must have been home and on the web because a lot of people visited “Updates on a Free-Verse Life.” Most the site’s seen in over a month, in fact. And from all quarters of the Internet.

No one bought a book, which, ironically, was the prime reason for starting the blog so many years ago, but hey, poetry books usually sell only when they come out. Period. Two years later? It would be like Lourdes, where you’d have to separate the mirac- from the –ulous to find readers willing to take a chance on you.

Plus there are all sorts of myths (truths?) about sales and poetry books. One is that only other writers of poetry books buy poetry books, but even that has limits. As a poet, you can only extend your fiduciary kindness so far.

Two is that established poets outsell still-establishing poets (“Here, Peter Quince!”) by a country mile (“country” being Russia, east to west).

Three is that poetry books cost too much. Yes, there’s that. Though you can also argue that poetry by its nature is richer reading than prose because it holds up to rereading and, like music, offers greater pleasures through the act repetition (think “refrain” instead of “refraining from reading”).

In any event, there’s no getting around the fact that parents advise their children to grow up and become lawyers and doctors, not poets. “My son is a doctor,” women will say to their golf party at the club, never, “My son is a poet. How do you like them apples.”

Oh, would it were so. Just to see the expressions on the faces of ladies wearing lime-green skirts and visors before they tee off on the absurdity of it all.

Happy Fifth, folks. Enjoy your barbecued leftovers or, if you’re not American, enjoy the all our ironies from afar. (Assuming you’re bored with enjoying your own!)