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When Bitter Meets Sweet

bittersweet

In poetry writing we see many dancing pairs. Sometimes they are pulled tight into a slow dance, and other times one spins off from the other for a bit of solo work before magnetically returning home to her partner.

This came to mind as I read Stephen Dunn’s poem “Sweetness.” It starts with generalities and philosophical abstractions about life, then settles in to some specifics by finding its way to a concrete example. The camera slowly pans across life, then zooms in on a specific life.

In this case, the poem is tracing life’s bittersweet roots. How can something so bad be so beautiful? Watch for the poem’s “turn” in the sixth tercet:

Sweetness
by Stephen Dunn

Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world

except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving

someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn’t leave a stain,
no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet.

Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving. His voice was low

and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief

until we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough

to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don’t care

where it’s been, or what bitter road
it’s traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.

Most interesting here is how sweetness arrives, staying “just long enough / to make sense of what it means to be alive, / then returns to its dark / source.” It seems passing strange to see sweetness described this way, but that is one of the functions of poetry, to explain the passing strange, or at least to make it a possibility for startled readers.

When sweetness travels a “bitter road,” Dunn seems to imply, it is most like life. It has come far for this epiphany, this understanding that blending and contrasts most often bring out the true nature of life.

Dance on, paradox.

Hot Cha!

poetry reading poetry

When you think William Carlos Williams, you think memorable name. You think Paterson, New Jersey. You think poetry slash doctor who wrote the compelling short story, “The Use of Force.”

And assuredly you think of the little-poem-that-could, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” where white chickens are forever pecking around a red wheelbarrow glinting with rain. Or maybe the sweetness of the simple but satisfying “This Is Just to Say,” where plums remain “so sweet / and so cold” in the timeless ice box of memory.

But such notoriety is no reason to skip reading deeper into a famous poet’s work. There are surprises. There are lesser-known and lesser-regarded works that may resonate with you, a poetry reader with your own discerning tastes.

“No ideas but in things,” WCW famously reminded us when he was in teacher mode. If you keep it simple and if you keep a sharp focus on “things” that have names, you can imply ideas that hide behind them.

By way of example, “Late for Summer Weather” is a thing de force (French for “great example”) with its objects (mostly clothes) and its colors (but no wheelbarrows in the rain).

It also features a most unusual, for the often dour-looking Williams, ending line. Shall we, then?

Late for Summer Weather
by William Carlos Williams

He has on
an old light grey Fedora
She a black beret

He a dirty sweater
She an old blue coat
that fits her tight

Grey flapping pants
Red skirt and
broken down black pumps

Fat Lost Ambling
nowhere through
the upper town they kick

their way through
heaps of
fallen maple leaves

still green-and
crisp as dollar bills
Nothing to do. Hot cha!

Ah. The beauty of working hard at doing nothing! The beauty of a straight neck looking around at nature as opposed to down at a cellphone like some bent Neanderthal training for a future Humpback Olympics. And mostly the beauty of a town called Fat Lost Ambling, New Jersey (Exit 157 on the Jersey Turnpike).

Hot cha!

Painting Your Own Private Malibu

poetry

malibu

In my last post, I talked about the magic of trains, how they can serve as metaphors for not only romance and adventure, but escape and renewal. In this post, I give you the poor man’s train: his brain.

Who needs an engine when the tireless brain can get you there? It has a habit, doesn’t it, of imagining a place called “Better” and sometimes the town one over, “Better Yet.”

As individuals, we all know places that are more than happy to play the role of Paradise on Earth. Sometimes it is a place we have actually visited. Other times it is a place we’ve read about or seen on television. Does the brain care? It is to laugh! Daydreaming brains specialize in not caring.

Here’s a concrete example. For the poet Mary K. Stillwell, the answer to her troubles is found on the California coast. It is a town called Malibu, one we’ve all heard of and one that seems particularly well-suited to serve as an engine of desire. Exempli gratia:

Moving to Malibu
by Mary K. Stillwell

Some nights I think of it,
moving to Malibu, just as I stretch,
like a cat stretches, to my full length,
as though I am easing into cool waters.
I imagine the blue of the sea;
the bright green leaves of the geranium
on the patio, the bright pink blooms,
the yellow sun and white sand,
in the distance, white triangles,
from the deck, wind chimes.
I will be as content and as happy
as Balboa. I will have breakfast
at my wicker table and in my wicker chair,
with the cats watching. I will taste
salt on my lips after coffee.
My door will be open. When you come,
you will carry a loaf of bread,
a bunch of flowers. The sunset
is brilliant; we might as well be anywhere.

If you’re going to write about a dream destination that will change your life to storybook, bring your palette of colors (notice here the “blue of the sea,” the “bright green leaves of the geranium / on the patio, the bright pink blooms, the yellow sun and white sand” and, “in the distance, white triangles.”

Sensory details, too, please (“from the deck, wind chimes”). A simile never hurts, and here Stillwell is “as happy / as Balboa,” the guy who trekked across Panama, climbed a tree, and cried, “Ocean, ho!” (Pacific, that is. Supposedly calmer than its wicked sister of the east, the Atlantic.)

Reveries are personal, as you can see. Here the speaker’s is populated with wicker and cats, two things I’d give a wide berth to while negotiating a dream existence. But she does not fail to remember the other. The welcome visitor. The love interest. The one how will “carry a loaf of bread, / a bunch of flowers” to enhance the happiness by sharing it.

Once you pencil in “the one” (whether you already have one or not—this is your poem, after all), the picture is complete, for we are nothing if not social animals, and no paradise is worth its chlorophyll in fig leafs if you do not have a lover to walk it with.

Just ask Adam and Eve. They might have taken a wrecking ball to their Garden of Malibu, but at least they had each other.

And one last sunset, too. I hear it was brilliant.

When Primitive Means Enduring

poetry

robin

In some ways we are as advanced and as sophisticated as we think we are, but in many ways we remain, as Jane Kenyon puts it, “primitives.” That is, we are as the human race always has been and always will be.

In literature, the definition of “classic” is debatable, but one point seems to meet with agreement: time is not of the essence. Because, if a written work is a classic, it will read as new 500 years from now as it does today.

Shakespeare may not have been aware of this, but readers since his death are. His work traded in basic human emotions, and with that “primitive” stroke, gave many of his plays the gift of immortality.

In her poem “The Blue Bowl,” Jane Kenyon keeps it simple. She buries her cat the old-fashioned way—no coffin, no insurance policy, no service with words of any sort. Just sand and gravel. And a blue bowl, like a sword or talisman buried beside a Viking warrior.

The Blue Bowl
by Jane Kenyon

Like primitives we buried the cat
with his bowl. Bare-handed
we scraped sand and gravel
back into the hole.
They fell with a hiss
and thud on his side,
on his long red fur, the white feathers
between his toes, and his
long, not to say aquiline, nose.

We stood and brushed each other off.
There are sorrows keener than these.

Silent the rest of the day, we worked,
ate, stared, and slept. It stormed
all night; now it clears, and a robin
burbles from a dripping bush
like the neighbor who means well
but always says the wrong thing.

The death of a pet will not haunt you like the death of a family member or spouse, no. But it will stay with you for a few days, making that final simile spot-on.

But robins are brown-vested Buddhists living in the present, not sentimentalists paying homage. Not to cats and blue bowls.

The poem is written. Life goes on.

Defining Poetry? Good Luck.

poetry poetry criticism

In his essay, “Notes on Poetry and Philosophy,” Charles Simic takes a shot at defining poetry. It is a moving target, to say the least. One that zig-zags. But that hasn’t stopped the poets and the philosophers from trying. Let’s listen in on an excerpt from Simic’s essay:

“Poetry is not just ‘a verbal universe that looks inwardly on itself,’ as someone said. Neither is poetry merely a recreation of experience. ‘It was and it was not,’ is how the old storytellers used to begin their tales. It lies to tell the truth.

“Mallarmé thought there were two kinds of language: parole brute, which names things, and parole essentielle, which distances us from things. One serves representation and the other the allusive, fictive world of poetry. He’s wrong. It’s not that clear-cut. If anything, it’s both. Poetry is impure. I don’t think Heidegger understands this either.

“The poem is an attempt at self-recovery, self-recognition, self-remembering, the marvel of being again. That this happens at times, happens in poems in many different and contradictory ways, is as great a mystery as the mystery of being itself and cause for serious thought.”

So, there. Some homework for you. Define poetry by giving it some serious thought. And good luck to you, because you’re going to need it.

As the prophet Peggy Lee once put it: Ain’t we got fun?

General Stores, Specific Poems

poetry reading poetry

store

In this Big Brother day of hidden cameras and mics, social networks designed to data-mine and influence, and cautionary tales in a Key of Orwell, it seems quaint to talk about voices around us. You know, the type you hear with with your own ears. When in close proximity. The old-fashioned way.

Those voices are often a song, a precept those who listen more than they talk have appreciated since time immemorial. Sometimes you hear them in a small diner. Sometimes at the movies while waiting for coming attractions to attract. And sometimes at the general store, an institution still found in small New England towns.

If voices be songs then poetry is not far behind. In that sense, the quiet poet, going about his or her business by placing a bunch of bananas and a head of broccoli in a basket, serves as conductor who must later pull these musical strands together. Here’s how Jane Kenyon did it up in New Hampshire:

At the Store
by Jane Kenyon

Clumps of daffodils along the storefront
bend low this morning, late snow
pushing their bright heads down.
The flag snaps and tugs at the pole
beside the door.

The old freezer, full of Maine blueberries
and breaded scallops, mumbles along.
A box of fresh bananas on the floor,
luminous and exotic…
I take what I need from the narrow aisles.

Cousins arrive like themes and variations.
Ansel leans on the counter,
remembering other late spring snows,
the blue snow of ‘32:
Yes, it was, it was blue.
Forrest comes and goes quickly
with a length of stovepipe, telling
about the neighbors’ chimney fire.

The store is a bandstand. All our voices
sound from it, making the same motley
American music Ives heard;
this piece starting quietly,
with the repeated clink of a flagpole
pulley in the doorway of a country store.

Depending on the listener, this poem may sound antiquated or passing familiar. What’s sure is this: It in no way resembles pushing a cart through Target or, God save us, any big-box store with piped-in music (especially cloying in the Christmas season, which starts the day after Halloween).

No, you need the same type “bandstand” as could have been gathered round a generation or three ago. Small-town America. Mom & Pop stores. Small and independent businesses where the mega-stores won’t bother because, the zip-code Gods say, the money isn’t there.

So, if you’re collecting voices and cobbling together poetry, let that be a start. Go where the money isn’t and where the people are. Then listen. And write.

"At the Store" Jane Kenyon

The Canonization of Mr. Moose

poetry reading poetry

When it comes to God, there are a lot of “what if’s.”

Across the ages, people have wondered, “What if God is female?” and “What if God’s skin is black or brown?” and “What if God looks nothing like a human at all?”

In his poem “Adirondack Moosehead,” Jeffrey Harrison takes it to another level. After many a summer in an Adirondack cabin, he begins to wonder about the moosehead hanging over the great stone fireplace. In what ways could a moosehead, of all things, remind one of God?

Poetry-Writing Basic #1: Stare at anything — anything — long enough, and strange thoughts will begin to browse at the edge of your field. Let’s look at this particular narrator’s logic:

Adirondack Moosehead
by Jeffrey Harrison

The moose that once presided over games
of Monopoly and crazy eights,
that loomed above us, goofy and majestic,
into whose antlers we threw paper planes,
still hangs over the great stone fireplace
like the figurehead of a ship.

All these years he hasn’t flicked an eyelash
in response to anything we’ve done,
and in that way resembles God,
whom, as children, we imagined looking down
but didn’t know how to visualize. A moose
over the altar would have been

as good as anything—better than a cross—
staring down on us with kind dark eyes
that would have seemed, at least, to understand,
his antlers like gigantic upturned hands
ready to lift us off the ground—
or like enormous wings outspread for flight.

In stanza two, we see that the moosehead’s indifference to “anything we’ve done” first inspires the narrator’s comparison. Then he shifts to childhood, to a kid’s struggle to picture something so abstractly awe-inspiring as God looking down. The moosehead, then, provides a ready image riding (without legs) to the rescue: “staring down on us with kind dark eyes / that would have seemed, at least, to understand.”

And why not? The antlers look “like gigantic upturned hands / ready to lift us off the ground— / or like enormous wings outspread for flight.”

Look at something long enough—even a flea-infested moosehead—and certain Christian images (hands, wings) will begin to elbow their ways in. Like antlers. Like a glowing halo over his long-deceased head.

Bullwinkle would be proud.

"Adirondack Moosehead" Jeffrey Harrison

What Groundhog Day Means to Poets

blathering comma mine poetry

phil connors

When the movie Groundhog Day was released in 1993, it received mixed reviews. Since then, however, the film has been embraced by many as a dark-horse (woodchuck?) comedy with serious undertones.

It’s even been embraced by Buddhists, who see TV weatherman Phil Connors’s repeating day as a metaphor for reincarnation and striving to try, try, try again until you reach enlightenment.

But I come not to praise born again (and again, and again) weathermen, I come to show how Phil’s inability to escape February 2nd echoes the life of a poet.

How shall I compare thee to a winter’s day, then, one that starts with Sonny & Cher on a clock radio singing, “I’ve Got You, Babe” at 6 a.m.? Like so:

a poet writes every day
a poet wakes to see the same poems every day, and the more he tries to change them, the more stubborn they become against transformation
a poet calls on pick-a-Muse-any-Muse and gets Sonny & Cher (the 10th and 11th Muses) instead
a poet knows the drill because he’s been there before (note the hard hat)
a poet sends “finished” poems into the world
the world sends “unfinished” poems back to the poet
a poet recognizes each day as yet another “No Reply At All Day” from markets
a poet reads good poetry
a poet says of good poetry, “Looks easy. I can do that!”
a poet writes good “finished” poetry, sends it into the world, waits through months of “No Reply At All Days,” and receives “unfinished” poetry back from the world
without comment
a poet writes a line he considers brilliant only to stumble upon the same idea in a poem he’s never read before
until he reads it
and thinks, “Great minds think alike, you lousy thief!”
a poet builds “I Got You, Babe” habits:
like black coffee
like riffs upon riffs of background Bach
like byzantine marketing systems
a poet, realizing reader-fee markets won’t go away unless you boycott them, only sends work to non-fee markets (if he can still find them)
a poet, realizing poetry markets will dry up without resources, ponies up reading fees until he realizes he is a poetry market, too, drying up slowly
a poet rationalizes
every day
again
and again
and again
else he’s no poet
finally, and most importantly, a poet believes, with persistence, that his day will come
it’s called February 3rd
and when it comes, he will seize the day
as his own.

Poetry as News Story

poetry reading poetry

Just the facts, Jack. That’s what detectives deal in when there’s a mystery, and that’s what newspapers deal in when there’s not.

Reporters are more about the 5 Ws and the H: who, what, why, when, where, and how. Or as many of the above as you can find, all presented in the classical inverted-pyramid style, facts first, because we can’t count on the reader to go any further than the first paragraph or two before becoming distracted by another headline.

Question is, can a straight-news, “this-happened-to-me” style work for poetry? My vote is yes, and the title of the following poem by Robert Wrigley, is a good, “just the facts” start. Exempli gratia:

Highway 12, Just East of Paradise, Idaho
by Robert Wrigley

The doe, at a dead run, was dead
the instant the truck hit her:
In the headlights I saw her tongue
extend and her eyes go shocked and vacant,
Launched at a sudden right angle—say
from twenty miles per hour south to fifty
miles per hour east—she skated
many yards on the slightest toe-edge tips
of her dainty deer hooves, then fell
slowly, inside the speed of her new trajectory,
not pole-axed but stunned, away
from me and the truck’s decelerating pitch.
She skidded along the right lane’s
fog line true as a cue ball,
until her neck caught a sign post
that spun her across both lanes and out of sight
beyond the edge. For which, I admit, I was grateful,
the road there being dark, narrow, and shoulderless,
and home, with its lights, not far away.

The poem reminds me a bit of William Stafford’s more famous deer-accident poem, “Traveling through the Dark.” Still, it’s no cinch to just relay facts like a reporter and call it poetry. It has to be rich with the muscle and bones of good writing — specific nouns and action verbs.

And yes, it wouldn’t be poetry if there wasn’t some kind of reflection at the end. Gratefulness despite the brush with another creature’s death foreshadowing one’s own, in this case, with human hungering, as always, for “home, with its lights, not far away.”

Time Passes, So Have a Drink!

poetry

Time passes. A theme for the ages. Put into poetry, however, one sees the poignant, or sad maybe, or pitiful maybe, or endearingly universal maybe truth of it all.

This is what one thinks upon reading Gavin Ewart’s tribute to the common man, who just wants more time to show up every day where everybody knows their name. A pub. A tavern. A bar. To drink away what they do not want to lose. Time.

In “Yorkshiremen in Pub Gardens,” Ewart uses end rhyme to measure time: ABABCC. There’s something about rhyme that brings us back to when we were kids “screaming for a teddy or a tinkling / musical box.” Mother Goose, you see. The Golden Age of Me. When time was not of the essence because, happily, we were immortal and had no need to forget with a draught that all is for naught:

Yorkshiremen in Pub Gardens
by Gavin Ewart

As they sit there, happily drinking,
their strokes, cancers and so forth are not in their minds.
Indeed, what earthly good would thinking
about the future (which is Death) do? Each summer finds
beer in their hands in big pint glasses.
And so their leisure passes.

Perhaps the older ones allow some inkling
into their thoughts. Being hauled, as a kid, upstairs to bed
screaming for a teddy or a tinkling
musical box, against their will. Each Joe or Fred
wants longer with the life and lasses
And so their time passes.

Second childhood: and ‘Come in, number eighty!’
shouts inexorably the man in charge of the boating pool.
When you’re called you must go, matey,
so don’t complain, keep it all calm and cool,
there’s masses of time yet, masses, masses…
And so their life passes.

Second childhood. A Shakespeare theme shaken in a snowglobe and settled into a new landscape of poetry. All the world’s a stage but also a pub populated with men glad for the entrances and ignoring the exits.

At least until they’ve downed another ale or three.

end rhyme "Yorkshiremen in Pub Gardens" Gavin Ewart