Monthly Archives: April 2025

5 posts

The Child of Your Rainy Sundays

When you pick up a novel you read years ago, threads of narrative fabric stand out, looking somewhat familiar to you. Not so the poetry collection. If you’ve read it once, a year ago or more, chances are it will feel new to you as you read it again. A gift, then! Further testament to the mysteries of poetry.

Yesterday I pulled Simic’s That Little Something from the shelf as a tonic after watching a little too much of the evening news featuring our Leader, Pinocchio (what a dummy!). Effects were remarkable, swift, and salubrious!

Reinvigorated, I enjoyed the tranquil poem “To Boredom.” (Ah, for the good old days, when one could afford to be less vigilant about democracy being stolen from under your feet!)

To Boredom
by Charles Simic

I’m the child of your rainy Sundays.
I watched time crawl
Over the ceiling
Like a wounded fly.

A day would last forever,
Making pellets of bread,
Waiting for a branch
On a bare tree to move.

The silence would deepen,
The sky would darken,
As Grandmother knitted
With a ball of black yarn.

Heaven is like that.
In eternity’s classrooms,
The angels sit like bored children
With their heads bowed.

As former students, I’m sure we can all relate to “eternity’s classrooms,” especially in a poem called “To Boredom.” Few classrooms, after all, were capable of escaping so swift a predator as eternity. (We’ll see for ourselves some day, I assure you!)

“I Love So Many Things I Have Never Touched”

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In her collection Obit, Victoria Chang takes the journalistic standard we call an obituary and puts it through some poetic paces. For most of the book, each poem looks like a column in a newspaper, forgoing stanzas for one tall rectangular block. And while the starting point may be the stroke and death of her father followed by the death of her mother, her poems take matters a step further.

How? The Table of Contents foreshadows how: Title-less poems commemorate her father’s frontal lobe, voice mail, language, future, civility, privacy, and her mother’s lungs, teeth, friendships, gait, optimism, ambition, memory, tears, etc. Some of the poems are repeat-obits, including ones for Victoria Chang, the author herself, who feels beleaguered and fundamentally transformed by grief and its effects.

To give the reader occasional breathers, Chang includes a series of tankas throughout. Then there is Section II: “I Am a Miner. The Light Burns Blue,” where she forsakes the middle tower spaces of the page used for obits and writes poems that expand to the entire page, using white spaces between single words or small clumps of words, forcing the reader to slow down and carefully pick through the wreckage death scatters like so much flotsam and jetsam.

For this to work (and it does), the poet has to be both confident (check) and accomplished (check) with personification. Let’s look, for instance, at Chang’s obituary for Approval:

Approval – died on August 3, 2015
at the age of 44. It died at 7:07 a.m.
How much money will you get was my
mother’s response to everything. She
used to wrap muffins in a napkin at
the buffet and put them in her purse.
I never saw the muffins again. What I
would do to see those muffins again,
the thin moist thread as she pulled the
muffin apart. A photo shows my mother
holding my hand. I was nine. I never
touched her hand again. Until the day
before she died. I love so many things I
have never touched: the moon, a shiver,
my mother’s heart. Her fingers felt like
rough branches covered with plastic. I
trimmed her nails one by one while the
morphine kept her asleep. Her nails
weren’t small moons or golden doors
to somewhere, but ten last words I was
cutting off.

As Chang writes obituaries for abstract things like approval, it gives her time to explore all the feelings that overwhelm her, first while her parents are ill and then while they die, not to mention her grief in the days and months after they die. In that sense, this collection is one long obituary for both her parents and the familiar way of life she had grown accustomed to.

The form suits Chang’s talents well. It also challenges the reader to consider all the little “deaths” we experience each day, how they change us in big and small ways, and what we notice about them if we take a moment to think. People change, that’s well understood. But seen through this lens, we come to realize that change in life is nothing but a series of little deaths, some planned or expected, many more spontaneous and surprising. Like this book!

Mean Poems

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mean

Poetry, often something we uphold for its beauty and its dalliances with love and nature, sometimes has a reputation to downhold as well. In poetry, Tony Hoagland tells us, meanness can work. That’s right, vinegar instead of honey for your readers. As any misbehaving child will tell you, negative attention can be as good as positive.

Hoagland serves up some examples in the final chapter of his book of essays, Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft (but not Ken Craft). It shouldn’t surprise us. Have we not learned that the pen is mightier than the sword? Have we not realized the power of words as weapons?

Certainly as kids we quickly learn the lie in the little ditty, “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” What bull. Words will always hurt us! If they didn’t, we wouldn’t feel the need to protect ourselves with silly little chants in hopes of magically feeling better.

For starters, Hoagland gives us the plain simple plain of William Carlos Williams–a poem that will red wheelbarrow right over your heart, if you love grandmas.

The Last Words of My English Grandmother

There were some dirty plates
and a glass of milk
beside her on a small table
near the rank, disheveled bed—

Wrinkled and nearly blind
she lay and snored
rousing with anger in her tones
to cry for food,

Gimme something to eat—
They’re starving me—
I’m all right I won’t go
to the hospital. No, no, no

Give me something to eat
Let me take you
to the hospital, I said
and after you are well

you can do as you please.
She smiled, Yes
you do what you please first
then I can do what I please—

Oh, oh, oh! she cried
as the ambulance men lifted
her to the stretcher—
Is this what you call

making me comfortable?
By now her mind was clear—
Oh you think you’re smart
you young people,

she said, but I’ll tell you
you don’t know anything.
Then we started.
On the way

we passed a long row
of elms. She looked at them
awhile out of
the ambulance window and said,

What are all those
fuzzy-looking things out there?
Trees? Well, I’m tired
of them and rolled her head away.

Ouch. But it hits you in the not-so-sweet spot. Grandparents aren’t always paid to behave like the sweet old grandparents of yore. Sometimes they grow gruffer with time. Sometimes our final memories of them are best overlooked and forgotten. And sometimes that becomes an impossibility. Instead, it becomes a poem.

Or what about Louise Gluck’s “Circe’s Power,” wherein she pulls a Jonathan Swift and looks at the whole damn human race as pig-like. Thus does Circe’s act become more metaphor than magic:

Circe’s Power

I never turned anyone into a pig.
Some people are pigs; I make them
Look like pigs.

I’m sick of your world
That lets the outside disguise the inside. Your men weren’t bad men;
Undisciplined life
Did that to them. As pigs,

Under the care of
Me and my ladies, they
Sweetened right up.

Then I reversed the spell, showing you my goodness
As well as my power. I saw

We could be happy here,
As men and women are
When their needs are simple. In the same breath,

I foresaw your departure,
Your men with my help braving
The crying and pounding sea. You think

A few tears upset me? My friend,
Every sorceress is
A pragmatist at heart; nobody sees essence who can’t
Face limitation. If I wanted only to hold you

I could hold you prisoner.

And one more from Tony H., this one to the tune of “Mommy Dearest.” It’s Stephanie Brown’s poem, “Mommy Is a Scary Narcissist,” which includes the scary word, blepharoplasty (plastic surgery of the eyelids, thank you).

Mommy Is a Scary Narcissist

C’mon, I shouldn’t need to mention blepharoplasty.
Her mauled face is a part of the shared horizon.
I don’t need to mention the lift, the tuck, the lipo.
(A Trinity.)

The smile-ever-smiling is a part of the position.
This is Mommy’s supposition:
Sexy. Sexy. Sexy. Everlasting and in high-tonus stance
Decisions
Belong to dads, men, boyfriends, bartenders, chance.

Mommy looks good when she prays in the chapel.
(ferns, lush foliage, candles, rose petals, and flattering paints)
Harder than the other mommies. No one stays.
(She looks into the baptismal font deeply, passionately, and
long.)

Mommy tries to love, Mommy tries to get a job.
Not very hard, the outside world knows that, but Mommy
doesn’t.

Enough already? Ready to cry, “Uncle?” If the world is driving you nuts, you have two creative choices: one, you can write escapist poems for people who want to escape to Pollyanna poesy, or two, you can write with vim and vitriol. Let it all out. Get even. Poetically, of course.

Some readers out there just might appreciate it and thank you from the hidden dark and sinister of their hearts.

We Hold These Truths To Be Self-Evident…Once You Read Them

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One of the most famous lines in Thomas Jefferson’s start-the-presses Declaration of Independence is “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

OK, let’s not get political and note any ironies about what follows (“…that all men are created equal”) because you know and I know that inequality is as big in this Age of American Oligarchs as it was in the Age of TJ (a slaveowner himself).

Instead, let’s consider the role of truth in poetry. Truths are as important to good poets as they are to enlightened philosophers. If a reader reads your poem and has an aha moment that goes something like this: “Yes! I recognize that truth, and I loved the new way you uncovered it!” then you are onto something. Something we call the essence of good poetry (like gold cobbled from mongrel minerals, a rarity that will delight more than alchemists).

Ellen Bass’s collection, Like a Beggar, includes a batch of Pablo Neruda-like odes, which are a lot more fun than Ancient Greek-like odes. Here’s an example of a “little truth” that Bass uncovers in her own creative way. It’s called “Ode to Invisibility,” and it touches on the way older people become more and more “invisible” in a youth-worshiping world because… because what do wrinkles and oversized sunglasses matter, anyway?

If you’re older, you can read it and say, “Aha, I recognize this feeling!” and if you’re younger, you can read it and say, “Oh, yeah. Old people? I think I noticed one last year….”

Ode to Invisibility
by Ellen Bass

O loveliness. O lucky beauty.
I wanted it and I couldn’t bear it.
When I was a girl, before self-serve gas,
as the attendant leaned over my windshield,
I didn’t know where to look.
I could feel his damp rag rubbing the glass
between us. Or walking from the subway,
even in my work boots and woolen babushka,
all those slouched men plastered to the brick walls
around the South End of Boston—
I could feel them quicken, their mouths
opening like baby birds. I was too beautiful.
and never beautiful enough.
Ironing my frizzy hair on the kitchen table.
All the dark and bright creams to sculpt my cheekbones,
musk dotted on my hot pulses,
and that pink angora bikini that itched like desire
as I laid myself down under the gold of a key we didn’t yet fear.
Hello, my pretty. Your ankles were elegant,
your breasts such splendor
men were blinded by their solar flare.
These days, I’m more like my dog,
who doesn’t peruse himself in the mirror,
doesn’t notice the gray at his temples, though I think
it makes him look a little like Cary Grant in Charade.
I can trot along the shallow surf of Delray Beach
in my mother-in-law’s oversize swimsuit,
metallic bronze and stretched-out so it bulges like ginger root.
On one side, that raucous ocean surging and plunging,
on the other, the bathers gleaming with lotions and oils.
I can be a friend to them all, even the magnificent young,
their bodies fluid as the curl of a wave.
I can wander up to any gilded boy, touch
his gaudy biceps, lean in confidentially. I’m invisible
as a star at noon, a grain of clear sand.
It’s a grand time of life: not so close to the end
that I can’t walk for miles along the pulpy shore,
and not so far away that I can’t bear
the splendid ugliness of this disguise.

The poem turns nicely on the line “These days, I’m more like my dog” and really gets down to the self-evident (but hard to express) truth with the line “I’m invisible / as a star at noon, a grain of clear sand.”

The good news? For women who once had to endure wolf whistles from men on city streets, invisibility is a blessing. But also a harbinger.

Just thank god that you can still walk miles along the pulpy shore, Ellen tells us. It’s a consolation, and consolation, they say, was the penultimate thing out of Pandora’s box.

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.