Tag: poems

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Poems I’ve Loved: May 2019

“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.”
—Faulkner, Light in August

Isnt there something jean valentine.PNG
“Isn’t there something” by Jean Valentine, from her collection Shirt in Heaven, published by Copper Canyon Press.

“Isn’t there something” by Jean Valentine

Jean Valentine is a poet whose work I came to (and who I had the good fortune of meeting) in grad school; but I was younger then, and silence outside my own bothered me more. As I age, I’m finding I’m more comfortable with less said, and though I sometimes lean toward (or on) her more traditional (narrative, explicable, punctuated) poems, I’ve come to love her work. It’s an earned love, entered into with mutual respect and trust over time; to leave so much to the imagination, so much possibility, for the reader, so much space for our subconsciouses to fill in and potentially drown her sharp-quiet thoughts on the page, is certainly an act of respect and trust.

But this isn’t to say these poems are without a dramatic pulse. To the contrary. In a world of jeering, a whisper can be twice as terrifying as a scream, and there is much more in less but an honest-less than in confident hyperbole.

This poem is a little bit more “accessible” than the typical Valentine, even in Shirt in Heaven, a book about memory and grief, and how we never really leave either, but maybe it’s because there’s a comfort in the company.

This elegy doesn’t reveal itself as an elegy until the last stanza. Before, it’s about mis-belonging, about trying to figure out or locate the parts of the self (the parts “like dogs,” “like trains leaving,” “like a gun”). What is a self, a person, made of? And if we’re made of all these parts that only appear at night, or that leave, or that threaten or protect (or both), all these parts that change, how do we keep a hold on ourselves? How do we keep it together?

This poem begins with questions, maybe rhetorical, maybe wanting affirmation from this person who, we later learn, has died. “Am I this? Am I that? Aren’t I like this and this and part that?” The speaker using “Isn’t” instead of “Is” makes for leading questions; a belief that there is indeed something in her like a gun. (It’s the difference between someone asking you “Do you think it’s rude to …?” and “Don’t you think it’s rude to … ?” The “not” implies that the person asking expects you to agree.)

At any rate, the speaker’s sure what kind of person she wants to be but isn’t: the loud squirrel that begs at the porch. And I wonder, what is it about that squirrel’s existence that’s desirable? That its desire is so out-in-the-open?

And here, where she might lose me (and also maybe because I tire of repeated words joined by an ampersand, which seems a little Literary for me), she does the oddest, most beautiful thing. It’s not just us creatures (the speaker, the dogs, the squirrel, bees) who want something (wanting having a double meaning of desiring and lacking); even the inanimate objects might: “wooden planks, / wanting something.” But what could wooden planks want? “To go back into / a tree?”

These two lines contain all the magical thinking of a great grief or great children’s book–a depth and humor and achy longing that have kept me renewing this book to re-read this poem. Here is where the speaker reveals herself and the poem turns: It’s about wanting to return to a place and time that are gone, about being without a path back.

Except in art, where we can hold on, keep the dead living. In this way, the poem is an ars poetica (a poem about poetry), which I usually despise, because they’re often highfalutin and either don’t make much sense to me or, conversely, they oversimplistically overstate how poetry changes the world. Yet, I like Valentine’s message here because it isn’t so hopeful as resurrection. It’s sad, like being the last customer to leave the bar is sad, like waiting for a phone call is sad; an unwillingness to say goodbye. But every miracle is part sad. And yes, this is miraculous, too, that there’s a place available to meet our dead, to grow our planks back into trees that the hungry dogs of us can look to or lie under.

“Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats^

This one’s also a poem about memory saves us or about how the false stories we tell ourselves about future possibility save us from the “pavements grey.” I’ve been reading it often to my belly button/kiddo in utero, in hopes they’ll like it when they move out (of my uterus). It feels good to read out loud, especially the part about “the bee-loud glade.”

It reminds me of one of my favorite songs, “Tall Pines,” a bluegrass tune about the memory of home, leaving it, and returning to die, which also is bucolic and recalls the sound of bees, almost as though written from the perspective of Yeats’ speaker if he did return as an older man: “I’ll never forget the morning I left / The hum of the bees in the hay: / The farther I walked, the louder they talked— / How silent it seems here today.” The bee sounds aren’t there; the trees are taller; there’s a gravestone meant for the singer.

Valentine and Yeats don’t attempt what the bluegrass musicians do, or not quite as fully. They aren’t ready for death themselves, despite what they might imply; or ready or not, they go on living. They don’t return to their Lake Isles; they can’t return to their person yet except for in poetry, the writing of which is an embrace of life. (In something as musical as “Lake Isle of Innisfree,” the repetition of the poem aloud does this, underscores its vivacity.)

Yeats doesn’t attempt to force the plank into tree; rather, he remains on the pavement, the musicality what allows the memory to dwell so that he can “hear it in the deep heart’s core.” Still, the poet behind the speaker hints to us that this place isn’t real, or isn’t real in the way memory or hope presents it: at noon, the sky is purple, for instance.

Valentine is more outwardly self-aware, she knows she’s clinging, but in her acknowledgement of clinging of distance, isn’t she closer to obtaining the object of her affection, this lost person, through that person’s own words?

Yeats’ speaker embraces memory (and its sister nostalgia) without questioning its illogic; Valentine’s embraces memory despite its illogic, as a means to an end.

And what is it about loss and bees?* Isn’t there something?

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^Hear Yeats read it himself here. (And you can listen to scholars talk about the poem, and “kill it” to understand it, which, sigh, scholarship.)

*Coincidental: Plath wanted her bee poems to be the last in Ariel, though they’re realer (less bucolic) than the bees of the others here; her hives having swarms and stings, unlike Yeats’.

 

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Poems I’ve Loved: December 2017

It’s the end of a year and fittingly and by happenstance, I loved (short,) end-stopped poems this month.

“[Remarkable the litter of birds]” by Emily Skaja

From the start I was told I was a powerful speaker I was told when & how I should speak
It’s true I made a feast of my own misery after all I was 29
I’d had a narrow escape from becoming Julian of Norwich

This poem transmutes again and again, but bookending in flight—the deathly flight of the city birds at the beginning, the bees stopped mid-pollination to be consumed—and disappearing acts—the “special crew” of people who sweep away evidence of violence, of failure, the beautification. I’ve been thinking a lot about disappearing acts over the last year, mainly women’s (which is touched on in this poem—the speaker asking “Is it antifeminist to starve myself over a boy?”); but this erasure of violence, male or natural or bureaucratic—the assistance in disappearing, the poem dawned that on me. Yes, dawned with a direct object.

The constant in the poem is the form, its stability and confidence, even with the punctuation erased. The lack of punctuation and longer lines is in tension with how the entire poem is end-stopped, which adds authority; it allows the pace to build, release, build, release, each line break a gasp for breath between punches. I love a poem about uncertainty and anxiety written with authority.

Meanwhile, the poet is doing something spectacular with tone: the outlook is bleak, it’s pretty much Handmaid’s Tale, yet, she inserts flowers, she has perspective and humor: understanding the reality of falling apart around 30 and how young 30 is and therefore how hilarious, in retrospect. (It makes me think of a conversation I had with a friend about someone so young he didn’t even realize he was young. That.) She does this swiftly–in the three lines above, saving her former self from the threat of Julian of Norwichdom (a state of being a highly literate writer nun). The poem confesses how writers “feast” on their miseries.

The speaker offers a sort-of epithalamium to marriages who watch her with bees in her mouth. The violence still happens, the hurt still happens, but it’s pretty. I wonder about this in a poem about the coexistence of love and violence; I wonder if maybe the only way people who are brutalized can control violence is through beautification or acknowledgement, sweeping the streets or opening a mouth full of a bees. Can one read a contemporary poem with bees in it and not think of Plath? Inserting that ghost into a poem and the poem still standing on its own is a miracle and a testament to the work its writer has done. Praise be for this one.

Read it in its entirety (it’s short) here, and start the New Year wondering whether you’d live your life over.

“Spell Against Gods” by Patrick Phillips

Let them be vain.
Let them be jealous.

Let them, on their own earth,
await their own heaven.

…
And when they call out
in prayers, in the terrible dark,

let us be present, and watching,
and silent as stars.

If you read my last post, you know how I came to Phillips’ poetry. But it’s not the poem that was most affecting that was my favorite this month. Instead, it’s another, more lyric poem from his same collection Elegy for a Broken Machine.

This near-litany shows the power of anaphora when used sparingly, when inverted. “Let them” repeats itself throughout the poem, syntax shifts to enhance its musicality, so the rhythm exists but isn’t tiresome. Like a bass guitar, it always comes in on time, heavy, but sparingly. “Let them” puts the stank on this poem. (Apologies to this poem.) I’m trying to learn to love anaphora again because I learned over the last decade of my life not to trust it: Its musicality can hide nonsense, unoriginal conceits, all number of ills. Just because it sounds good doesn’t mean its good. But in poetry, in my opinion, if it doesn’t sound good, it ain’t good either. “Spell Against Gods” meets the mark.

The conceit isn’t totally original: “What if gods had to deal with being human and we got to play god?” The gods in this poem are watching us passively like a TV, and so maybe they deserve our cruelty. The word “let” is a passive one, but of course, sometimes it’s the thoughtlessness, the casual cruelties, that cause the most pain.

I love what this poem does to stars, too. Often an image used as a sentimental symbol, “Spell Against Gods” is disgusted with them, how they stare down at us, with their heavens hunkered there, not helping. The description given is not what the stars are but an absence of what they could be, a profound disappointment: they don’t speak. A human might want to disappoint as the stars do, glinting like the tips of faraway knives.

Read the whole poem here.

“Too Anxious for Rivers” by Robert Frost

The truth is the river flows into the canyon
Of Ceasing-to-Question-What-Doesn’t-Concern-Us,
As sooner or later we have to cease to be somewhere.
No place to get lost like too far in the distance.
It may be a mercy the dark closes round us
So broodingly soon in every direction.

Grateful to Mario Chard for sharing this poem on Facebook. To be honest, I have not thought about why I love this poem at all. I just do, and plan on memorizing it in the New Year. Hope you’re 2017 “’twas the effort, the essay of love.”

Read it here.

Let’s ring in 2018 together. If you enjoyed this post, sign up for my monthly newsletter, and get my editing tips, thoughts on the creative process, favorite poems, and updates on my book, Rodeo in Reverse. Pre-order it here.

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Elegy for 2017: Right Poem, Right Time

My view during this instance of right poem, right time, and elegy

On my last day off, I was doing one of my favorite things: reflecting on the past year and planning for the coming one — essentially, writing. (In the third grade I created homework for myself. This is who I am.) The radio was on — some background music, the tea was hot, a chance of snow that never came; it was a woo-woo person’s cozy dream. I sat with my head tilted like a confused dog and stared; wrote and wrote. The radio program changed to Fresh Air, and I turned the sound down so I could remain focused. Yet.

I didn’t recognize the name of the guest, Patrick Phillips, immediately, but I did recognize the book he’d written, Blood at the Root. Terry Gross and Phillips talked about Forsyth County, Georgia, its history of racist violence, and Phillips’ upbringing there. I drifted in and out of the conversation, in and out of my writing. Specifically, I was reflecting on my father’s heart attack and open heart surgery.

Gross typically lands transitions (I take notes as someone who’s not), but in a bit of a stretch, in what felt like out of nowhere, she asked Phillips about his father’s open heart surgery. My head shot up. What?

She asked him to read the poem he wrote about it.

I hadn’t made the connection he was the poet Patrick Phillips. I had never heard this poem. This episode was a re-run, and what an odd coincidence it aired on the same day, at the same moment, I had been writing about my own father.

Writing is powerful in that it makes us pay attention: Phillips’ poem changed me, if only for an afternoon; my own writing put me in the place (literally) to hear his poem.

I sat at the dining room table, staring into the radio’s yellow fog — ON — and the feelings came.

This is the first sentence from the poem he read, “Elegy outside the ICU,” as it appears in his collection Elegy for a Broken Machine:

They came into
this cold white room
and shaved his chest

then made a little
purple line of dashes
down his sternum,

which the surgeon,
when she came in,
cut along, as students

took turns cranking
a tiny metal jig
that split his ribs

just enough for them
to fish the heart out —
lungs inflating

and the dark blood
circulating through
these hulking beige machines

as for the second time
since dawn they skirted
the ruined arteries

with a long blue length
of vein that someone
had unlaced from his leg.

To me, this poem shows strength in its willingness to observe, its looking at and saying what is. Like most courageous acts, this poem is evidence of vulnerability. (What he does with syntax is worth another post for another day.)

I did not witness any of this in my family’s experience. I saw my dad the night before his surgery and hours after — waiting, not watching, being my chief role.

*

In my family, someone cracking her knuckles who must be stopped is an emergency. Someone crying who must be stopped is an emergency. Someone missing an earring is an emergency. Painting a room only hours before guests arrive is an emergency. An actual emergency, however, is anything but.

Shortly after I found out my dad was having a “heart event” (his words), I learned from my sister that he had talked with her to make sure she could stop by and feed the dog dinner. In the same way in which he might if he were working late. It wasn’t until they told him he would need a procedure that he decided to alert us.

Certain members of my family would tell you this sort of stoicism is a show of strength; they loathe criers and huggers and direct conversation, and after three years of art school, I can’t blame them. But often stoicism isn’t stoic — a radical acceptance of reality — at all; instead, it feels like denial, the opposite of strength. Our weaknesses may be what allow us to weather a crisis. Weakness (if unconfessed) may be one sort of salvation.

Once doctors determined my dad would need open heart surgery, my sister leveled with me that it would not be overreacting to come home.

There, the situation was far from humorless: For instance, the night before the surgery, my dad had a second “heart event” much more painful than the first. (Not the funny part, I’m getting there.) As the nurse rushed to her computer coordinating with a doctor, checking whatever nurses check in these situations, my dad’s roommate kept calling for the nurse — not his nurse, using the call button, the nurse trying to stop my dad’s “heart event.” She told him time again to use his call button. Finally, peeved, she said, “What do you want?”

“Could you, uh, get me a Heath bar and some apple juice?”

*

After my dad’s surgery, it took me a while before I wanted to walk into the ICU to see him. My mom had warned us: He won’t look like himself. You don’t have to go in if you don’t want to. (He was unable to speak, and for the most part, he was asleep anyway.) When I walked into the ICU, I was nervous. He would be in Room 1. Room 1 was just inside the automatic doors. I looked to my right. There, my father, hair shocked gray, face gray-brown, swaddled in a bud of blue blankets. My eyes opened wide and welled with tears, made hopeless eye contact with the nurse, who whispered, “Your dad’s in Room 7.”

Oh.

The sight of my dad was still humbling — intubated, like a submarine full of portholes, swimming through what? the man who had carried me until I was too big to carry lying drugged on a bed, waiting to make certain small gestures as a sign of maturation, of health. But after Room 1, what a relief. He was the basic peach of many white people — not his colors, tanned leather and red, but a color of the living.

*

By the time my dad was moved out of ICU, my immediate family was exhausted and on each other’s nerves. One edgy, irritable, unable to stifle any comment or let any errant noise go; one traditional and a bit of a martyr; one cruel because she is the most fragile of us all. At one point I used pantomimes for eating cheeseburgers when my dad tried to blame my mom for his dietary habits. We are not people whose great strength reveals itself in times of trouble. But we are people who show up for one another. We sit in waiting rooms and endure rude doctors and frantically demand nurses switching shifts give showers pre-op and work our ways through mazes to find bathrooms and then attempt to relay directions. We drink and eat like gluttons because we are gluttons and know we will not eat like this again for a long time. Food has been there for us. For me, so has poetry. My dad’s life restored to us, given, gifted, like this poem was to me, except I would have never known the difference if the poem hadn’t arrived in my little house. This revelation, a paper dressing gown, leaves much to be desired, some embarrassment, more questions than answers — EKG, meter, heart, syntax, morphine, mystery. Enjambment for now instead of end-stop.

Phillips’ elegy for a father still living is really an elegy for a moment, a certain understanding of self and relation to mortality and parents. An elegy more like a notch nicked into a tree trunk or a glance at a watch — realization at the time it is: incredible and brutal and here already. It’s usually our understanding of time, our marking of it, that adds meaning and heartache. But an elegy isn’t just mourning loss, it’s freeing space for what is and what is to come. One year passes and another, like a lizard tail ripped off and growing back, comes to take its place. One view of the self passes and another, like skin over a scab, grows over. I love my family newly now; I love writing newly, too; love a never-ending autotomy; the elegy for what once was opens, like a cavity in a chest, like ribs, “just enough … to fish the heart out.”

You can listen to the full episode of Fresh Air with Patrick Phillips here.

If you enjoyed this post, sign up for my monthly newsletter, and get my editing tips, thoughts on the creative process, favorite poems, and updates on my book, Rodeo in Reverse. Pre-order it here.

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Poems I’ve Loved This Month: October 2017

Blue Monochrome by Yves Klein, which is a canvas filled with an exact shade of ultramarine blue, 1961. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

“Indigo” by Ellen Bass.

This poem immediately struck me with the whoosh of needing to re-read—not because it’s overly complex or difficult to understand, but because of the simplicity of its narrative, the longing so many of us have for some other life, granted “it’s a miracle to have a life. Any life at all.” Desire for a tattooed dad turns into desire of a totally different sort (or maybe not a different sort at all, but the desire behind the desire, behind the cobweb and the window and its screen, the thing itself, outside and wild, but also suburban, typical, banal aching. I especially love the way she describes what sets this man apart—what his tattoos, which include the indigo of a title, represent to her:

“I want to have married a man who wanted
to be in a body, who wanted to live in it so much
that he marked it up like a book, underlining,
highlighting, writing in the margins, I was here.”

Then there’s the title, kind of an Yves Klein monochrome print thing happening, “a kind of obsession,” as Bass might put it. I listened to an episode Abbi Jacobson’s podcast all about Klein’s work with ultramarine blue, how he was fascinated by it and wanted to exactly replicate it on canvas; he found it irresistible and mentioned wanting to “impregnate” viewers with the color. (Oh men.) Klein also composed “The Monotone Symphony,” which is about 20 minutes of an orchestra playing one note followed by about 20 minutes of silence. (Jacobson reveals this after a conversation with QuestLove about the B-flat quality he attributes to Klein’s Blue Monochrome.)

One great thing about language is how its user, like a musician, chooses to wield silence. What’s not in a poem often feels as present as what is. In “Indigo,” there’s a great transition, a turn toward the end, between the speaker/mother and her daughter:

“And now there’s everything that we can’t talk about.
We love—but cannot take
too much of each other.”

What the silence holds for this speaker can’t be kept silent.

I think of Bass and her indigo; despite the many things happening in this poem, doesn’t she offer a compelling monochrome print here, one moment washed in one color that transfixes? Within this indigo, there’s humor, dress shopping, jealousy, “radiance,” BBQ, “carnelian,” even the reds tinged blue. And oddly, like Klein’s ultramarine wish, the poem has much to do with pregnancy—literal and figurative, the speaker’s birth and her daughter’s birth and what comes to fruition in life.

I read recently that a beech tree puts out 1.8 million* beechnuts over the course of its lifetime and only one of those will grow to maturation. In one color, so many ways to strike the same note; what returns to us (repeat desires, images, conversations) returns tired and fresh, old and new, something borrowed, something blue.

*I originally had the incorrect number here.

“Sunshower” by Natalie Shapero.*

This poem contends with the devil we know.

In the midst of a barrage of sexual harassment and assault news, this poem is a beacon. Playing on the old wives’ tale explaining a sunshower (“Some people say the devil is beating / his wife”), the poem morphs the devil again and again into something less and less easy to distance ourselves from, making him both more familiar and more sinister.

This is a great example of a poem that deploys anaphora to build a poem’s complexity. It adds a sing-song musicality that lifts the folktale aspect up and undercuts the rhetoric we’ve all heard before while enhancing it and adding humor.

The anaphora may also point to the culprit; ultimately, the poem doesn’t end with the devil we call devil but with “some people … having a fair.”

“… Some people
say calm down; this is commonplace.
Some people say calm down;
this is very rare. Some people say
the sun is washing her face. Some
people say in Hell, they’re having a fair.”

“Nashville” by Tiana Clark.

At a concert I was at, the singer began with “This is a song about gentrification.” I could hardly keep my eyes from rolling out of my head; in my experience when a writer (of songs or of anything) has to tell you what something is about, it’s no bueno. But then that person wound up being Courtney Marie Andrews, and I’ve listened to her album Honest Life almost every day since.

“Nashville” begins as a poem about gentrification: what changes and what doesn’t. I’d say which history is lost, but this poem keeps history alive, refuses to bury it. It begins with Hot Chicken, which may seem trivial to non-Tennesseeans; but at a time when the South is conversely being identified with a stereotyped white Southerner and appropriated in culture (from dress to cuisine to music), Hot Chicken’s popularity is on the rise, and in this “farm-to-table” migration, it’s been whitewashed, not recalling:

“the history of Jefferson Street or Hell’s
Half Acre, north of downtown. Where freed slaves lived

on the fringe of Union camps, built their own new country.
Where its golden age brought the Silver Streak, a ballroom
bringing Basie, Ellington, and Fitzgerald.”

In the city’s recent boom, Clark razes the past, a brief racial history of Nashville, and the speaker’s more personal history, her great-grandmother Freelove, her grandmother Toy, and her husband being called an epithet in present day. This poem talks about what “bisects” the city, the speaker, and ultimately America: I-40, I-65, “the boomerang shape of the Niger River,” the white faces in a photo of a  black person being lynched. It explores the violence and violations of making lines and of redrawing and crossing them. Maybe the most amazing part of the poem is when the speaker imagines (or sees) the crossing of an uncrossable line—the past entering its future, the present, backwards through the lens:

“…black-and-white lynching photographs,
mute faces, red finger pointing up at my dead, some smiling,

some with hats and ties—all business, as one needlelike lady
is looking at the camera, as if looking through the camera, at me,
in the way I am looking at my lover now—halcyon and constant.”

The speaker “search[es] the OED for soot-covered roots” and yet the epithet hurled at her family from a passerby, a part of the Nashville scene, leaves her hunting, “the breath / of Apollo panting at the back of Daphne’s hair, chasing words”, rootless, “kissing all the trees,” what to ground her but history, her knowledge, maybe love, repeating “Who said it?”

I’m grateful for this poem for a number of reasons, but particularly as a person relatively new to Tennessee (though I’ve been in “herds of squealing pink bachelorette parties” and had “sour to balance prismatic, flame-colored spice / for white people”) who knows little of its history and is learning how and where to look for it. Her work consistently teaches me this and so much else.

“Guerilla Theory” by Kien Lam.

“The largest primate in the world
is the white man’s ego.”

Simply put, I love this poem. It’s hard for me to talk about because it moves so quickly, deftly, shapeshifting imperceptibly until one recognizes a new name must enter in, more like clouds that look like monkeys than a gorilla. It’s form, the skinny single stanza, adds to this rush; its effect is a feeling of unstoppability. Once the first line is read, it’s as though something heavy’s been dropped down a chute.

As in Clark’s poem, Babel makes an appearance. “Guerilla Theory” deals in naming and how to name an identity, how to shape an identity when names have been stripped by “letters … dropped / out of bombers”, and maybe what remains of a person who has lost part of himself.

“… I saw
a monkey’s face when I looked
at a cloud, but my mother couldn’t
even make out the head. Someone
looked at a tree and called it a tree.
Someone else looked at a tree
and called it whatever the word
for tree is in Vietnamese,
which I don’t remember anymore.
And the word for that loss
is too big to fit into a single
word.”

Colonialism kills the ability to name, steals language, makes for a speaker “full / of holes and dormant landmines.” And despite the violence, despite the quicksilver movement of the mind at work in this poem, the quiet is what most moves me. It feels right that in a poem about absence quiet works so well; the ending the kind that makes me pay attention in the way a friend who doesn’t often interject catches my attention when he mumbles something; what sticks to the speaker at the end of this poem has stuck with me. I guess I’m Lavar Burton-ing you: Read it.

“The Moon and the Yew Tree” by Sylvia Plath.

This month I was able to spend a day at the Lilly Library at Indiana University where some of Plath’s manuscripts and artwork are archived. (More on this later.) One thing I especially enjoyed and made me think “Drats!” was that the stunner at the opening of this poem was always there and always the opener, at least in the drafts at Lilly: “This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.”

Though favorites change, this has often been my favorite of her poems.

Originally written in a huge monolith of a stanza, she drew brackets to create separate stanzas on the first draft (or maybe lacking paper she did this as she went). She reworked the final stanza the most; lots of abstraction (and Socrates) fell away. Eventually she cut a penultimate stanza. What I wrote in my notebook while there: “It seems she (like me & [I] imagine many others) best revises in a fury—not gradually over time, but more like triage.”

October 27th is her birthday. She would have been 85 this year. This month also saw the release of Volume 1 of her collected letters. I think of her as one of the best Scorpios, best being best of its kind: physical, sensual, sharp (as in smart and as in all elbows, unsparing), grudge-holding, and talented. I’m in the midst of an essay about her and Flannery O’Connor, so I’ll spare you my love letter for Plath and leave you instead with a Plath fact: she loved avocados and red lipstick.

“The Country of Marriage (Part V)” by Wendell Berry.

Yes, more Wendell Berry. This poem is the title poem of a most beautiful chapbook that I advise purchasing posthaste, unless I know you and you’re planning on getting married in the near future because then you will have spoiled my wedding gift to you.

I’ve just reprinted my favorite section (Part V) here:

V.

Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange
of my love and work for yours, so much for so much
of an expendable fund. We don’t know what its limits are—
that puts it in the dark. We are more together
than we know, how else could we keep on discovering
we are more together than we thought?
You are the known way leading always to the unknown,
and you are the known place to which the unknown is always
leading me back. More blessed in you than I know,
I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing
not belittled by my saying that I possess it.
Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing
a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only
accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light
enough to live, and then accepts the dark,
passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I
have fallen time and again from the great strength
of my desire, helpless, into your arms.

“We are more together / than we know, how else could we keep on discovering / we are more together than we thought?” Low whistle.

I also highly recommend watching Look & See, about Wendell Berry’s work off the page on Netflix.

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Poems I’ve Loved This Month: September 2017

Photo of the back of a cream-colored brick building with a gray door. The diagonal wrought-iron (cream, rusting) of the fire escape and balcony extend as diagonal shadows on the wall.

After working on my own manuscript in what seemed like in total solitude the past several years, I realize I need to get back to reading more poems. Now that my book’s getting published, the whir of excitement was quickly followed by the clunk of recognition: It’s time to return to reading new poetry. I miss it. I don’t recognize it (in a nice way). I’m starting this monthly post in an effort to read more and think more deeply about new poems, and also to share ones that I find especially resonant.

Selection from Rosalie Moffett’s Nervous System

I’ve enjoyed collecting the bits and pieces of this longer work as I’ve seen it spin out and out over the past year or so (more?) in journals. This piece features a spider dream that the speaker interprets to being about her mother and her mother’s health. As the mother’s health deteriorates, doesn’t some part of the speaker?

         … the idea of a spider the brain holds

like a lit match, a little request
for venom, a little
like my mother: her blue arm, her self

which held my self, an idea
of me, until I was real.

Facticity holds this poem (and its speaker) together: spider facts, Google-able dream interpretation facts, dog agility facts. It moves between a tender honesty, a searching frankness, a speaker who wants to be told how it really is while maybe avoiding how it really is if how it really is is too bad. I love this poem, in all its pieces, especially this one. (Also, I cannot get the lineation right on this (Coding!), so please do read the whole poem as it’s written.)

Read the rest here at Beloit Poetry Journal.

If you like it, buy her collection June in Eden.

*Rosi is a friend, but isn’t it great when you can admire a friend’s work?

Allison C. Rollins’ “Word of Mouth”

This floored me. I read it in the print issue on a Friday night after seeing someone on Twitter hyping it. (See? Twitter is not a total waste.) It tells the history of America and a life through teeth, beginning with George Washington’s (the facts about his false teeth are incredible), and takes us (where else?) but to memory and to the library, where the speaker tracks changes and thinks of faces as abacuses, of her mother and grandmother, of the future through the past. This poem sews together beauty and ugliness or rather, just refuses to separate them, which is one of the best (truest) things maybe an artist can do. “The darkening of fractures is rather curious,” the speaker says, and I’m still thinking about the fractures in my understanding of history and the fractures in this poem—the two places where it stops to begin a new section.

… The forgetting makes the
present tense possible. Memory is the gravity
of the mind. All the icebergs have started to
melt, milky objects left hanging by a
string, the doorknobs means to an end.

Read the rest at Poetry.

Erika Sanchez’s “Saudade”

For my own learning purposes, I’m especially interested (though haven’t yet parsed out) how this poem builds and moves. This sensual stunner begins in ordinary (if synesthetic) moments in “the republic of flowers”—rain sounds, hanging clothes—and ends with this marvel of language and texture and image:

… sealed honey never spoils
won’t crystallize I saw myself snapping
a swan’s neck I needed to air out
my eyes the droplets on a spiderweb
and the grace they held who gave me
permission to be this person to drag
my misfortune on this leash made of gold

I first read the word saudade, a Portuguese word without a direct translation into English, in a note almost 10 years ago. (It actually appears a few times in my forthcoming book.) Since, I’ve been drawn to it wherever I hear or see it.

Read the rest at Poets.org.

Lessons on Expulsion is headed to my mailbox stat. Take my money.

Katie Condon’s “On the Seventh Day God Says: What You’ve Got Is Virgin Charm & a Knife in Your Pocket.”

When I read this poem I laughed, gasped, and sighed. It was a really weird noise. Appropriate, as this is a poem of great weirdness. The speaker has the kind of intimacy with God that allows for irreverence, but still, at the end of the day, if only half-heartedly, haphazardly, but maybe with a little wishing, still telling God what you want—maybe just in case. Haphazardly because, well, God never gets it right. Or God does but a little too. This poem, maybe also like “Saudade,” and maybe not, is about the nostalgia for something that never was or at least that won’t be again. How nostalgia (both looking forward and back, as Rollins’ poem reminds me “Memory is about the future, not the past“) is inherently sensual, corporeal, and a little lonely.

God says, Thou shalt not kill.
& I’m like, But what about with my eyes.

I never asked for the capacity to love
ugly things, but here I am.
…
I say, I like my men smooth & far away, reticent
as a bookshelf.

& God butts in: I can do that for you.

Read all of this poem at BOAAT.

*Katie is also a friend. Here, too, grateful to be in the position of admiring a friend’s work.

Selection from Wendell Berry’s “Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer”

Here’s one of my great-aunt’s favorite poems and now one of mine. The last year has been a bit rough, and this is one that I might as well get tattooed on the back of my eyelids, except it’s small enough to learn by heart quickly and big enough to fill it.

When I rise up
let me rise up joyful
like a bird.

When I fall
let me fall without regret
like a leaf.

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Good Me, Bad Me, and Interview with The Mondegreen

Mondegreen literary journal logo

One of my favorite online magazines is The Mondegreen, named for “a kind of misunderstanding: you mishear a word or phrase in a way that gives it a different meaning.” Their content is lively, fun, weird. Yes!

It’s nice to have the chance to have some of my favorite writing–a series of poems about the adventures of Good Me and Bad Me–up at one of my favorite sites. They also interviewed* me.

In this same issue the featured fictioneer, W. Todd Kaneko, writes about Rockgod and Metalhead, who form a kind of rad Midwestern Good Me–Bad Me duo.

*If one is interviewed on record, one most certainly confesses her dying love of the Louisville Cardinals. That information will surely be disseminated weeks later during the height of the team’s prostitution-ring imbroglio. Who can tell when one will earn the designation super fan?