Ken Craft

720 posts

How Voice Escorts Us into the “Interior of the World”

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It seems fitting that Tony Hoagland’s farewell book to the world would tackle the concept of voice. If any poet knew of what he spoke, Hoagland was the man. Whether you read his poems or his sage essays about poems or writing poetry, you “heard” Hoagland and felt as if you were lucky to have found an open seat in his seminar.

The last seminar you can attend is The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice. The posthumous collection of essays stands as a short, “Hey, wait a minute,” on the matter of hard and fast rules about poetry writing. Chief among them? Your poetry must be as concise as possible to succeed.

The old adages sound logical, but Strunk and White weren’t poets, either. What about voice? With due diligence, Hoagland demonstrates that voice often requires colloquialisms, idioms, asides, etc. — the stuff that leavens our daily speech.

If executed with purpose, voice quickly bonds writer with reader, who is more than willing to forgive linguistic excess in exchange for a temporary soul mate capable of providing an insight or two on the world.

Hoagland provides many examples of poems, some complete and others frustratingly not, to back up his words. Here’s an excerpt he uses from Lisa Lewis’s poem, “While I’m Walking”:

 

Once I saw a man get mad because two people asked him
The same question. The second didn’t even know of the
first;
Anyone would’ve called the man unfair, unreasonable,
He stormed at the person who approached him
That unfortunate second time, and it was nothing,
Where’s the restroom? or Where could I find a telephone?
He was a clerk, and the second person, a shopper,
suggested
He “change his attitude”…

But though it ruined their day it improved mine, I could rest
Less alone in anger and wounded spirits. That was long ago,…

 

Hoagland comments, “Lewis’s plain linguistic style might be described as ‘prosaic,’ that is, verbose and unpoetic, yet it compels us because her speaker tells more truth than we usually get, and she does so with a bluntness that tests the conventions of decorum. Lewis is a narrative-discursive poet in style, not a poet of lyrical language, but there is a rhythmic, businesslike terseness in her storytelling and thinking that is riveting in is purposeful informality. Her speaker captivates us for the duration of whatever she wants to say. That’s what a voice poet wants to do: hook us and then escort us deep into the interior of the poem, which is also the interior of the poet, which is also the interior of the world.

“In a world where, socially, we often feel stranded on the surface of appearances, people go to poems for the fierce, uncensored candor they provide, the complex, unflattering, often ambivalent way they stare into the middle of things. In a world where, as one poet says, ‘people speak to each other mostly for profit,’ it is exhilarating to listen to a voice that is practicing disclosure without seeking advantage. That is intimate.”

And so the book leaves practitioners with an oxymoron of sorts. For voice, the poet must practice her intimacy, plan her informality, execute her natural voice for a casually-preconceived cause.

There are some writing exercises at the back of the book, if you wish. And some reader-writers will dive in. But others, like me, will find the book’s encouragement enough. Rereading a 168-page book is an exercise of sorts, too.

Either way, you’ll leave the book realizing that there are more angles than you thought to “voice,” and more “types” of voice, too, such as “speech registers” and “imported voices” and “voices borrowed from the environment.”

Bottom line? Strunk and White were fine for your college freshmen writing course, but maybe not for your poems. Perhaps it’s time to make like Pygmalion and give voice to your art.

“The Silent Passion, the Deep Nobility and Childlike Loveliness”

poetry reading poetry

Photographic memories are  unnecessary. A small pad of paper will do, thank you. I mean for those times when you feel overwhelmed by the moment and can’t put it into words — yet.

For the time being, just make a note of the camping site: the rock walls and mountain ridges and forests. The stars. The camp-fire. The kids asleep in their sleeping bags.

After that, you can sing the lovely rock’s praises in the Key of Ode Major. When all is said and done, it might be good enough to make your readers think they experienced it, too.

 

Oh, Lovely Rock
Robinson Jeffers

We stayed the night in the pathless gorge of Ventana Creek, up the east fork.
The rock walls and the mountain ridges hung forest on forest above our heads, maple and redwood,
Laurel, oak, madrone, up to the high and slender Santa Lucian firs that stare up the cataracts
Of slide-rock to the star-color precipices.

We lay on gravel and kept a little campfire for warmth.
Past midnight only two or three coals glowed red in the cooling darkness; I laid a clutch of dead bay-leaves
On the ember ends and felted dry sticks across them and lay down again. The revived flame
Lighted my sleeping son’s face and his companion’s, and the vertical face of the great gorge-wall
Across the stream. Light leaves overhead danced in the fire’s breath, tree-trunks were seen: it was the rock wall
That fascinated my eyes and mind. Nothing strange: light-gray diorite with two or three slanting seams in it,
Smooth-polished by the endless attrition of slides and floods; no fern nor lichen, pure naked rock… as if I were
Seeing rock for the first time. As if I were seeing through the flame-lit surface into the real and bodily
And living rock. Nothing strange… I cannot
Tell you how strange: the silent passion, the deep nobility and childlike loveliness: this fate going on
Outside our fates. It is here in the mountain like a grave smiling child. I shall die, and my boys
Will live and die, our world will go on through its rapid agonies of change and discovery; this age will die,
And wolves have howled in the snow around a new Bethlehem: this rock will be here, grave, earnest, not passive: the energies
That are its atoms will still be bearing the whole mountain above: and I, many packed centuries ago,
Felt its intense reality with love and wonder, this lonely rock.

Diane Seuss & the Sonnet Renaissance

poetry poetry books

Diane Seuss, whose element is poetry, has found a more refined element still. Sonnets. Or at least something sonnet-like. In her book, frank: sonnets, she delivers a generous serving of poetry stretching 130 pages long. Not something Petrarch or Shakespeare would recognize, but sonnets nonetheless, at least by modern standards, where poetic licenses can be had with a quick visit to town hall (bring your passport as proof of identity).

What makes a Seussian sonnet? Fourteen lines, mostly. In an interview, Seuss says she holds somewhat to the meter and rhythm clause, too, which is visually evident on each page, what with the line breaks staying close like sled dogs under the command, “Mush!” Voltas can be found, too. It’s Italian for “turn,” and signals a change in the poem’s direction.

Beyond that, though, the sonnets show little resemblance to what we were force-marched through in school. But boy, do they go down easy. Voice in spades. An easy style. A way with words. Each sonnet is double-spaced. Each shows a special knack for naming things – choosing the right specific nouns to help readers visualize just so. Sound devices, too, like alliteration, assonance, consonance. And yes, everyone’s favorite: metaphor in abundance, like roadside daisies.

The design is memoir-like. Seuss mines her past, her childhood, the death of her father. It moves on to her own coming of age, a relationship with a man named Kev, the birth of a child named Dylan. And the man on the book’s cover – Mikel Lindzy – a friend of Seuss’s who would be lost to AIDS during the 80s, plays a role in some poems, as does a man named Frank who makes cameos, too.

If you must know what it’s about, I’d say “life,” which translates to “pretty much everything.” To quote Traci Brimhall’s blurbed list: “poverty, death, parenthood, addiction, AIDS, and the ‘dangerous business’ of literature.”

Raw? At times. Bittersweet? That, too. Wry and funny? Yes. In short, the narratives and the voice in these sonnets win readers over and make of the them a willing confidant(e). What’s more, as is true with all good poetry books, once you finish you need not feel lonely (another theme, by the way). You can dive right back in. There are a lot of pearls on the ocean floor, after all, and sometimes you see new and better ones the more you dive.

You don’t have to be from the Show Me state to crave examples, so I’ll offer two (they’re untitled) no matter what your state of mind. They will give you the gist, I think, and if you’re like me, you’ll like what you see. For that matter, if you’re like me, you’ll say this is one of the stronger poetry collections you’ve read.

 

 

All things now remind me of what love used to be. Swollen cattails in lonely

places. Gluey conditioner in my hair. Firm books. Their variegated spines.

Swirl of words like a stirred cocktail, whirled umbilicus, pulsing asterisk.

The past is this: to have been young and desirous and to be those things

no more. In the future the cattails will explode without me. I pray they will

not go unseen. Who will ride the cemetery horse? Incorrigible blond forelocks

blowing in their eyes. The present tense: to take a loveless path is to court

a purple-blue emptiness, like a disco or a grotto. Or the cave where dead bodies

are stored in the winter, when a shovel can’t break through frozen ground.

I have seen such spaces. I have been alone in them. Sound of water lapping.

Animals calling to each other. Echo of my own breath. Smoke pouring

from my mouth in the cold. Memory, interloper in the corner who means to kill,

heavy rock in its hand. And poetry. This poem right now. This one-night stand.

 

 

 

I fell in love with death, he isn’t mean, his kisses wet and sweet.

Broken pocket watch, strange chain, like an extra in a Western

who appears at the edge of the screen perched atop a lame horse.

Thinness at the hips, the incubator of is breath. Mother tongue

in his mouth. Kinky, but in the most earnest, heartfelt way: he

sucked my fingers while I read him Peter Pan, itself a children’s book

about dead children. His only perversion is innocence, doesn’t try

to ruin Christmas but ruins it anyway, young uncle in the disturbing

T-shirt who just can’t get into the spirit of the holiday. Try, some

female relative whispers in his ear through her lipstick, just try.

He wipes away her kisses, disingenuousness not in his repertoire.

Can’t fake it. If his eyes are hollow it’s because he’s feeling hollow.

If he’s in the mood he calls me at twilight from some meadow,

Describes how the sun digs its own grave, the copper afterglow.

Yes, You Can Judge a Town by Its Public Library

opinion poetry

Most people judge a town by its school system. I judge it by its library.

How big is it? How versatile is its stock of books? How convenient are its hours, seven days a week?

Some towns I visit have beautiful fields for baseball, football, soccer. Some even have hockey arenas and sprawling golf courses. Lots of green that costs lots of green, but me, I like to see the green buying books, providing computers, hosting community events and readings. All at the town library.

A great library sends a signal: We care about the intellectual and artistic health of our citizens. Sports are great and have their place, but we open many, many doors to far away lands and new frontiers. We are the antidote to fake cries of fake news. We are, in fact, the enemy of fascism and anti-intellectualism.

Granted, no matter how vast and lovely, no library can cater to every taste. Thus, the inter-library loan system. Yes, I buy books and try to support writer royalties, but I’d quickly go under financially if I purchased every book I wanted to read.

Enter inter-library loan. Almost 90% of the books I seek can be found via this system. Place a hold, wait, and soon enough, the book arrives in port. Your home library.

Downsides? Not many. Some books get written in, and depending on the scribe, that can be an annoyance (though I have, on occasion, become as fascinated by the annotator as I have by the author).

Other books are marred with food and drink stains. What on earth causes people to eat chocolate, sticky buns, or cake and frosting while reading a book? Sugary fingerprints are not cool. Nor are dog-ears, the ghost of bookmarks past.

But these are minor inconveniences. Overall, there is no greater institution than a public library. It is deserving not only of your patronage, but your charity. Give a donation each year. Give everyone free access to the wonders of fiction, essays, plays, poetry, and every Dewey Decimal-ed piece of nonfiction out there. Doing so makes you a soldier of democracy, knowledge, light. There is no better way to fight the dark forces around us.

It’s a dangerous world, after all. Always has been and always will be. And the Fifth Rider of the Apocalypse? It’s Ignorance. Public libraries are the best ways to combat it—the swords to smote it down. An informed public is the enemy of authoritarian weeds, wherever they may sprout.

Patronize and support your town’s library, and if it’s suffering from want and neglect and lack of taxpayer dollars, create a committee to turn that intolerable situation around.

Sooner rather than too-later.

Larkin in the Dark

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By definition, an aubade is “a dawn song expressing the regret of parting lovers at daybreak” (Edward Hirsch, A Poet’s Glossary). In his aubade, Philip Larkin had little use for lovers. Maybe it was his state of mind, though. After reading it, I learned this was his final poem. Fitting, that, because in 50 lines, the chill of reckoning with our own demise gets about as raw as you will ever read it. Larkin speaks of “the total emptiness for ever / The sure extinction that we travel to / And shall be lost in always.”

Looking for the emergency exits between stanzas? Larkin has blocked them off. Religion and the afterlife, you say? “That vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die.” Logic, you cry?

 

And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

 

Ok, then. Larkin is clearly trapped himself here. With a lover called Death-in-Waiting,  yet, and apparently he’s beginning to see the light “through a glass darkly.” Dawn brings no succor, in other words. Simply a cold, unrelenting realization:

 

Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

 

Man. It’s enough to make you wish you were never born, just so you don’t have to die. It’s that good. In the spirit of November, not known for renewal and new life, let’s take it all in, then:

 

Aubade
by Philip Larkin

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

The No-No of Playing Favorites

poetry The Indifferent World

tolstoy

Je regrette, but it’s true. I play favorites among my children. No, not those children. My poetry children.

What’s weird is, often a published author’s favorite poems are not ones that ever saw the light of poetry-published day in a journal or magazine. You will not find them on the book’s acknowledgment page, in other words. Like good soldiers, these poems enlisted, went out over the transoms to the publish-me wars, but fell in battle, struck by blind editorial eyes.

It could be coincidence, in my case. Not all of the poems in my freshman effort, The Indifferent World, were treated to equal doses of marketing. Some were written closer to deadline, and therefore did not become staples at Submittable. Others may have just gone to the wrong editors at the wrong time.

“Wrong editor” can be defined a few ways. He or she could be a.) the editor of a journal whose style and subject tastes are not an exact fit with your work, b.) the editor of a journal who never even saw your work because a front-line reader slap-dashed it into the rejection pile through a hasty reading or none at all, or c.) the editor of a “reach” journal like The New Yorker or Poetry, where the air is fine and thin and fully invested in the safe, the established, and the well-known. If you send to the latter, especially those with reading fees, you’re suffering trickle-down financial losses over time. (Note, however, that the two magazines I just cited do not charge reading fees, bless them.)

Or maybe, just maybe, playing favorites means you like a poem that speaks to your own unique sensibilities more than others’. Is that a bad thing? Does that violate the writer-reader contract, wherein the two parties are invested with equal powers? I like to think not. I like to think that a poem that resonates in a special way with its author will always appeal equally to a certain reading demographic of poetry lovers out there, too.

Here, for instance, is one of my favorites from TIW. It’s about Tolstoy, for one, and I’m the number one fan of the man not from Tennessee (try Yasnaya Polyana). It was a late entry, too, so I’m not sure how much marketing it got, but it was one of a set of narrative poems in the book that I was partial to.

In case you’re one of the three dozen or so people in the world who do NOT own a copy of my book, here it is: the death of Tolstoy reimagined:

 

Astapova Station by Ken Craft

I think of Tolstoy, November of his life,
steel wool beard caught
on the sheepskin of his collar. He’s stealing into night,
steam from the engine of his lungs
twisting gaunt and ghostly
through the air, rising, dwindling, clinging
to sky: the breaths of a lifetime.

The old writer still shows an instinct
for drama, abandoning wife, estate, every past chapter
for a train, an iron deus ex machina
that sways his body til dizziness forces him to the refuge
of Astapova. Here he can restore order, touch paper schedules,
see the starch of a station master’s uniform.
But first, he lies down—a moment
like all others, he thinks—on an oak bench burnished
smooth by passengers.

Tonight their spirits
mingle, restless, eyeing the great
clock like suspicious policemen. Tolstoy lifts his feet, hears the clunk
of his self-made shoes echo from the rafters. There’s dried mud on his soles,
caked pieces of Russia falling
on guttered slats of wood. The weight of fever
begins to climbs his chest. It stretches its claws to his temples,
rests on him, rapid heartbeat blanketing heartbeats
through the night.

He starts, thinks he hears Sofya’s voice. Did he sleep? To board
the train! Is it still here, then? Is that it—black and abandoned,
frozen to cold tracks? Is it this—oblong, silver
car blinking in snow, readying to open its doors?

Tolstoy’s mouth opens, breaking
mucus, a milky thread between the lips. His tongue is a fullness,
but he must know: arrival or departure?
The window! The red and black sign reading “Astapova”!
The stationmaster’s warm hand closing his eyelids.

 

Man + Machine = Poetry

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Joyce Sutphen likes to write about country life, specifically farm life, and I like to read poems about country life, farm life included. This poem, “H,” is about man’s best friend, the machine. Surely to a farmer, the old tractor wins out over the old dog. (Hey, life can be ruff sometimes.) Let’s see how it’s done:

 

“H”
by Joyce Sutphen

Of all the tractors, I love the “H” the best:
first for its proportions, the ratio of body to machine,
arm to wheel, leg to clutch, hand to throttle,

and for the way it does not drown the voice,
but forces it to rise above the engine,
and for the smoke signaling from the silver pipe,

for the rip-rap of tread on the big tires, driver
perched between them, as on a throne in kingdoms of oats
and corn, scrolling along the meadow’s edge,

then sometimes standing still, engine turning the belt
that turned the wheels in the hammer mill
or whirling the gears that divided the oats from the straw.

And “H” for the ache to see my father plowing fields again—
the silhouette of a red tractor and a man, one hand
on the wheel, the other waving free.

 

Notice how the first four tercets are all one sentence, a breathless homage to, of all things, a tractor. Notice how, like many good poems, this poem has a “turn,” specifically in the last stanza, a new sentence, where Sutphen shifts to the gist of things: namely, the man on the machine, who counts as much as the machine itself.

An homage to a machine, yes; but an elegy to a man as well—her father, who seemed a part of the machine given how often he sat “on a throne in kingdoms of oats / and corn, scrolling along the meadow’s edge.”

That ache mentioned in the last stanza was the raison d’être for this poem, no doubt—something every good poem has. A catalyst. An emotional spark. The fire that makes readers warm to it.

When “Anti-Poems” Are the Solution

poetry

Having trouble writing a poem? Try writing an “anti-poem.”

For inspiration, you might delve into The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. My copy features an introduction written by fellow poet John Ashbery (pictured). In it, Ashbery details O’Hara’s penchant for writing whatever, whenever. Frank also had a habit of losing his poems. They were that slapdash.

By way of evidence, Ashbery quotes a few lines from various O’Hara poems. Given the body of evidence (read: a lot), it was easy to do. We see O’Hara writing stream of consciousness. O’Hara having fun. O’Hara not O’Caring.

This is the New York School of Poets, strongly influenced by French poets like Rimbaud and Surrealists like never sat around King Art’s Round Table (“Get real, Sir Real!”). Ashbery himself was a card-carrying member (or should I say, “non-card-carrying” member, as rules were made to be broken and schools were made to be skipped).

Which brings me to this piece of advice. If you’re feeling blocked as a poet and overwhelmed by the self-imposed pressure of writing something meaningful and artsy, go New York (“New York” = “rogue”). Write an anti-poem.

Anti-poems, by my definition (which is all that counts, because I am now in “anti-” mode, a.k.a. some sweet kind of superpower), are poems that just hatch out of your head like Athena’s breech birth from the dome of Daddy Zeus (heads or tails, m’lord?).

What does that look like? Think of your composition book or computer monitor after you’ve done a free write, then take a minute or three to gussy it up. The result might look like this 2005 poem from Ashbery:

 

“Composition”
by John Ashbery

We used to call it the boob tube,
but I guess they don’t use tubes anymore.
Whatever, it serves a small purpose after waking
and before falling asleep. Today’s news—
but is there such a thing as news,
or even oral history? Yes, when you want to go back
after a while and appraise the accumulation
of leaves, say in a sandbox.
The rest is rented depression,
available only in season
and the season is always next month,
a pure but troubled time.

That’s why I don’t go out much, though
staying at home never seemed much of an option.
And speaking of nutty concepts, surely “home”
is way up there on the list. I feel more certain about “now”
and “then,” because they are close to me,
like lovers, though apparently not in love with me,
as I am with them. I like to call to them,
and sometimes they reply, out of the deep business of some dream.

 

Quite conversational, wouldn’t you agree? As for form? It is to laugh. Philosophical? In its way. Talky? Some might call it “prattle poetry.”

All that said, the New York Poets weren’t writing garbage and their work certainly appeals to broad swaths of readers, even those who are not poetry sorts. And you must admit, “rented depression” is rather nice, as are the final lines of the poem, which grows dreamy with deep business.

Still, I find easy-looking poems, whether they were easy to compose or not, to be great sources of inspiration, especially when you are trying too hard, because the fact is, trying too hard can wreck a poem before it puts its shoes on. And winging it by taking a walk barefoot can sometimes gift you with the oxygen of ideas. Something to feel good about. Something to mine and refine.

Then you can call it poetry from the (fill in your state or country here) School. For me, that’d be the “Maine School of Poetry.”

See how easy? Take ownership and pride. Then make like Ashbery and O’Hara: Write like you don’t O’Cara.

One Man’s Loss Is Another Man’s Win

poetry

readersblock

Every once in a while, you stumble across a book that proves an unexpected charmer. David Markson’s Reader’s Block, a book I keep near to dip into, is one of those rare treats.

Ostensibly, it’s about an old reader who sits down to write a novel. Trouble is, he suffers not so much from writer’s block as reader’s block. He is so well-read and knows so many facts about artists and the arts that he would put Ken Jennings to shame. His head is literally swimming with obstructions of knowledge.

The book, then, is not laid out in paragraph form so much as stream-of-consciousness form, where the stream is a roiling with trivia about poets, artists, composers, painters, philosophers, etc.

To give you a taste, I’ll share a few notable ones about poets and other famous sorts below. Some I knew already, but most I did not. I wonder how many will lodge into my long-term memory vs. here today, gone tomorrow? Probably more than I think. I’m pretty good when it comes to the “Useless Facts for $500” category on Jeopardy!

 

  • There is no mention of Ockham’s Razor in anything Ockham ever wrote.
  • Not one of Thomas Hardy’s first three novels sold more than twenty copies.
  • Wallace Stevens told Robert Frost his poems were too often about things. Frost told Stevens his were about bric-a-brac.
  • Tolstoy and Gandhi corresponded.
  • Berryman’s name was originally John Smith. He adopted his stepfather’s name when his mother remarried.
  • Walt Whitman more than once wrote anonymous favorable reviews of his own work.
  • Thomas Hobbes was born prematurely when his mother became hysterical at the approach of the Spanish Armada.
  • The tyranny of the ignoramuses is insurmountable and assured for all time. Said Einstein.
  • Balzac called Ann Radcliffe a better novelist than Stendhal.
  • Pouring out liquor is like burning books. Said Faulkner.
  • Robert Frost had exactly five poems accepted in the first seventeen years in which he was submitting.
  • Baudelaire spent two hours a day getting dressed.
  • Being a successful reader of poetry on stage, said Akhmatova, is not necessarily the same as being a writer of successful poetry.
  • Twenty American publishers rejected Elie Wiesel’s Night.
  • Johnny Keats piss-a-bed poetry, Byron called it.
  • Aesop was executed for embezzlement.
  • Philip Larkin: I wouldn’t mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.
  • Edna St. Vincent Millay died at the first light of morning after having sat up all night reading a new translation of the Aeneid.
  • Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. Said Eliot.
  • Housman published a volume entitled Last Poems in 1922. And lived until 1936.
  • Captured by Moorish pirates at sea, Cervantes spent five years as a slave before being ransomed.
  • Stalin was one of Maxim Gorky’s pall bearers.
  • An enormous dungheap, Voltaire dismissed the sum of Shakespeare as.

You get the idea. One man’s block is another man’s page-turner. Or, if you’ve already read it and vaulted the blocks with pleasure, another man’s page-dipper, a constellation most any reader would admire.

 

So Much for Red Wheelbarrows

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Perhaps one of the most famous little poems out there is William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Of course, one of the hazards of fame is that it attracts the twin scourges, satire and parody. This came to mind when I was thumbing through old copies of Poetry and found some fun in a 2020 issue, compliments of a poet almost as well-known as red wheelbarrows and white chickens, Mary Ruefle.

Her “homage” to WCW goes like this:

 

Red
Mary Ruefle

I fucking depended on you and
you left the fucking wheelbarrow
out and it’s fucking raining
and now the white chickens
are fucking filthy

 

I don’t know about you, but when I read poems like this my mind ricochets all over the place.

First, I wonder if Mary Ruefle is a huge fan of WCW’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” poem or if she can’t stand it. I could see either being true. I could see either inspiring her to see red and filthy white.

If she loves Williams’ poem, this is ha-ha laughing with him, and if she loathes Williams’ poem, this is ha-ha laughing at him (and at people who consider it a good poem). That’s the nature of parody, after all.

But what made me more envious still is that I could never write this same poem, send it to Poetry, and expect to see it published. If I could, though, it would be so cool.

Alas, this is another clear example of a “Haves vs. Have Nots” poem. Joe Nobody (of Have Not, Georgia) sends it over the transom and it might not even get past the first reader. Joe Somebody (of Have, Ohio) sends it and, wham!, it’s accepted with a check written in J.S.’s name pronto (and make no mistake — Poetry pays well not only for wheelbarrows but for rain and chickens, too).

So, yeah. Brief poem but extensive brain meandering. But I did use a wheelbarrow this weekend for fall cleaning. Gray as a cloud, my wheelbarrow. No rain. No chickens. And, oh. No f-bombs, either. (This is a family blog, after all.)

But synchronicity! Me and Mary! An f-ing team in that we both gave some not-so-serious thought to one-wheeled wonders. Thanks for the fun, M. And thanks for your fame, WCW.

Wheeling over and out, KC.