In Cathryn Shea's Backpack Full of Leaves the poet is not sure about the location of her voice in relation to others, but it doesn't matter, she still hears "the rendering voice of the storm." And even though she inhabits a world of powerful sensate experience, she is given only clues as to its nature.
A Poet I Read at Night
I'm in there somewhere, not lost
but no map and no cell,
exact location not important
because I'm in a different century
anyway, and there's a blizzard
cloaking Arizona before Advent
was invented. The sky in its azure
vestment hides from the whiteout,
a choir of mute dromedaries
beds down away from Siberian
hunters drunk on potato vodka.
(One is the ancestor of a czar.)
Venison turns on a spit
in a hirsute shrine,
the rendering voice of the storm
all hallowed in the interstice
between whiskers.
Sifting through Shea's backpack of leaves--I love the reference to Whitman and Larry Levis--the reader is struck with the inventiveness with which the poet creates an explanation for her world. Illusions and reflections of reality are given poetic priority over "plain clouds" and "still trees." Instead of a representation of the world, Shea's art creates a narrative, not of understanding, but of a blessing on what is pieced together, the "seeds of thought, / ...from bird feeders" by the mind. She does not attempt to transform "the deceit" or "the illusion of a perch / look[ing] safe at twilight," but in order to "know the self," she "look[s] to the oak" to construct an explanation that may, or may not, be accurate. The reader infers again, that it doesn't matter, it's the inventiveness of constructing that explanation, and its consistency that makes it a valid world, parallel to the reality from which it grows.
Hush
How plain the clouds
this evening. How still
the trees.
The mind pecks
at seeds of thought,
scattered
from bird feeders
clipped to the clothesline.
Let the deceit
of the kitchen window's
shiny glass
continue its reflection
of branches.
The illusion of a perch
looks safe at twilight.
When I want to know
the self, I look to the oak,
study its bark,
toothed leaves, and galls.
I pretend to understand
growth rings.
In her title poem, the poet perhaps gives her readers the most insight into what she has collected on her quest, a language pilfered from innumerable sources, as disparate as the literary canon she identifies elsewhere and the oft referred to magazines and newspapers, used to call out the pervasive falseness in the world. As in all of Shea's poems, the poet's lens assists the reader's peripheral vision to brighten the dim light on the edges, "like the 4:00 o'clock splash / in the backyard bird bath," or the "button noes and lilliputian nails / just born to a distant cousin,"--important because "something there seems real," more real than a center that may not hold.
Here's My Backpack Full of Leaves
I steal words from magazines and newspapers
like a magpie falsely accused
by the BBC of stealing shiny baubles.
I stole the word "backpack"
and then packed it full
of pilfered "leaves"
instead of troubles.
Nothing that happens in California is real.
I stole "California" so I could feel
something's real in this state. Loving
sneaks into my limbic monkey plumage
and makes me wonder more.
Like the 4:00 o'clock splash
in the backyard bird bath.
Something there seems real.
And something good that would
cheer up anyone: a baby girl
just born to a distant cousin.
Her button nose and lilliputian nails.
And my cat
is why I have a cat.
That final stanza is emblematic of what is found in Shea's backpack: details from a world "that would / cheer up anyone," rendered in a musical language that causes readers to "feel something[ ] real." And we are better readers and better poets for having sifted through the "leaves" of her book.
Cathryn Shea resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and is the author of the chapbooks "The Secrets Hidden in a Pear Tree" and "It's Raining Lullabies," both from dancing girl press. [Thank you, Kristy Bowen!] Cathryn's poetry has appeared in Poet Lore, New Orleans Review, Gargoyle, Tar River Review, Tinderbox, Permafrost, Rust + Moth, and other journals. Her poetry has been nominated for Sundress Publication's Best of the Net. Cathryn served as editor for Marin Poetry Center Anthology and volunteers there. See www.cathrynshea.com and @cathy_shea on Twitter.
Thursday, April 18, 2019
Cathryn Shea: Backpack Full of Leaves
was born in the Midwest, grew up in New Mexico, and has lived in the San Francisco bay area for two decades. Terry's work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets 2012, Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Great River Review, New Millennium Writings, and The Comstock Review. His work has garnered seven Pushcart Prize nominations. He is the winner of the 2014 Crab Orchard Review Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. His chapbook, Altar Call, was a winner in the the 2013 San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival, and appears in the Anthology, Diesel. His chapbook, If They Have Ears to Hear, won the 2012 Copperdome Poetry Chapbook Contest, and is available from Southeast Missouri State University Press. His full-length poetry collections are In This Room (CW Books, 2016) and Dharma Rain (Saint Julian Press, 2017). Terry is a 2008 poetry MFA graduate of New England College. When he is not writing he is teaching as a regular speaker in the Dominican University Low-Residency MFA Program and as a free-lance writing coach. For more information about Terry and his work see www.terrylucas.com.
Thursday, April 11, 2019
David Watts: Having and Keeping
In Having and Keeping (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2017), David Watts writes lyrical narrative poems about people and events that, undoubtedly, matter to him most, piercing not only memory's smoke, but also reality's skin with keen-edged words that probe a "father...made / of dust and intelligence," a "mother...made from music and culture," a soldier brother, "...so deep in camouflage / even his blue eyes // are like cinders." Less hazy with time are his poignant poems that give us one son's epithets like, "I remember things behind things," and his other son's answers to father's calls. A lover is "beautiful / in the manner in which there is so much beauty / it almost cancels itself." But above all, or inside or both--who knows?--is the observer, the universe become conscious, the poet, the "Man at the Window:"
He stands at the window baffled
by pleasure and how brief it is.
Pleasure followed by the memory
of pleasure. Light
then dark with a splinter
left in. Something like that.
The woman in the chair is reading,
drinking tea in the ground glass
haze of evening.
The sudden swell he feels
watching her
illuminates the past she spent
getting to this place:
a lover who left, perhaps. Time
setting her kitchen in order, or maybe
gathering artichokes from the field.
The moment opens in a diorama
of impermanence, seeping away
at the edges even as it is breathed
into vision the first time. He holds out
his arms. He wants this moment
in the body, to feel there
the pleasure it holds, and then
whatever it is that pleasure
leaves behind,
which is all he can keep.
The strange quality of light
dissolving like smoke in air,
slipping away
in the sun's diminishing gaze.
Life's simple pleasures--the music of "the forest hum[ming]. / Even the Johnson grass sque[eking] / as it grows," the work of "driving nails / with the same muscles / that lost baseballs over West Texas outfields," and a hundred more--are contrasted with memory's "imperfect forgetting." Here are two passages that are true sample of the poet's musings on memory and its role in life and art. The first are closing lines from "Broken Jar."
...I'd like to think
what memory wants us
to think, sitting securely
on its fence post
lifting particles of light
from the broken jar.
But the world is beyond us
even as we live inside it--
The sun comes and goes.
The moon breathes and circles us
with reflected light,
while the soul holds the body
carefully in its arms
as we walk through the perforated dark.
I Tie Knots in the Strings of Memory
and tighten them against forgetting.
They cannot imitate her hungry look,
eyes glazed, lips parted, but they prevent
imperfect forgetting. With my fingers
I choose what I own of the past,
arranging flashes of light
the way a movie wants to be told,
part accuracy, part fiction,
part what the body wants to keep
of its bumblings in this world,
late at night when it pans the past
for gold, the lines tangling and un-
tangling in the swift undertow
of the strong passing current.
Many poems in this collection can be seen as ars poetica. Indeed, Watts is masterful "with [his] fingers, choos[ing what] to keep / of its bumblings in this world, / late at night when it pans the past / for gold, the lines tangling and un- / tangling in the swift undertow / of the strong passing current." Panning the past for gold, would be a spot-on subtitle for this collection.
Many poems in this collection can be seen as Staffordesque. Deceptively simple lines belie deep truths. The final poem informs us "How to Survive the Cold." "Shovel a path," the poet says, "to the storm cellar." And while you're there, absorb "the lava red glow / of raspberries." "Gather wood from the shed," we are told, because "Winter is only waiting for you / to build a fire." After you "Prop your feet to [it],"
Then settle for the long evening.
Read a poem. Sing a hymn.
How many years has spring listened
for your distant song?
Pick any poem from this masterful collection, and you may inhabit this poem. We have waited forever for David Watts's songs. And we are so happy they have arrived, heralding a spring beyond any winter our world is capable of delivering.
David Watts grew up in Texas, thus the scattered references throughout [Having and Keeping] to the characteristics of the terrain and subtle tonalities that capture the personalities of the people there. The "can do" attitude that characterized his family helped him to move forward into many fields, medicine, classical music, scientific invention, radio, and television hosting and production, and finally, after mid-life, to become a poet and a writer.
His literary credits include seven books of poetry, two collections of short stories, a mystery novel, a best-selling western and several essays. He has received awards in academics, medical excellence, television production and for the quality of his writing. He is a Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco and Professor of Poetry at the Fromm Institute at the University of San Francisco. He lives in California with his wife and two sons.
Reproduced from the "About the Author" page in Having and Keeping.
He stands at the window baffled
by pleasure and how brief it is.
Pleasure followed by the memory
of pleasure. Light
then dark with a splinter
left in. Something like that.
The woman in the chair is reading,
drinking tea in the ground glass
haze of evening.
The sudden swell he feels
watching her
illuminates the past she spent
getting to this place:
a lover who left, perhaps. Time
setting her kitchen in order, or maybe
gathering artichokes from the field.
The moment opens in a diorama
of impermanence, seeping away
at the edges even as it is breathed
into vision the first time. He holds out
his arms. He wants this moment
in the body, to feel there
the pleasure it holds, and then
whatever it is that pleasure
leaves behind,
which is all he can keep.
The strange quality of light
dissolving like smoke in air,
slipping away
in the sun's diminishing gaze.
Life's simple pleasures--the music of "the forest hum[ming]. / Even the Johnson grass sque[eking] / as it grows," the work of "driving nails / with the same muscles / that lost baseballs over West Texas outfields," and a hundred more--are contrasted with memory's "imperfect forgetting." Here are two passages that are true sample of the poet's musings on memory and its role in life and art. The first are closing lines from "Broken Jar."
...I'd like to think
what memory wants us
to think, sitting securely
on its fence post
lifting particles of light
from the broken jar.
But the world is beyond us
even as we live inside it--
The sun comes and goes.
The moon breathes and circles us
with reflected light,
while the soul holds the body
carefully in its arms
as we walk through the perforated dark.
I Tie Knots in the Strings of Memory
and tighten them against forgetting.
They cannot imitate her hungry look,
eyes glazed, lips parted, but they prevent
imperfect forgetting. With my fingers
I choose what I own of the past,
arranging flashes of light
the way a movie wants to be told,
part accuracy, part fiction,
part what the body wants to keep
of its bumblings in this world,
late at night when it pans the past
for gold, the lines tangling and un-
tangling in the swift undertow
of the strong passing current.
Many poems in this collection can be seen as ars poetica. Indeed, Watts is masterful "with [his] fingers, choos[ing what] to keep / of its bumblings in this world, / late at night when it pans the past / for gold, the lines tangling and un- / tangling in the swift undertow / of the strong passing current." Panning the past for gold, would be a spot-on subtitle for this collection.
Many poems in this collection can be seen as Staffordesque. Deceptively simple lines belie deep truths. The final poem informs us "How to Survive the Cold." "Shovel a path," the poet says, "to the storm cellar." And while you're there, absorb "the lava red glow / of raspberries." "Gather wood from the shed," we are told, because "Winter is only waiting for you / to build a fire." After you "Prop your feet to [it],"
Then settle for the long evening.
Read a poem. Sing a hymn.
How many years has spring listened
for your distant song?
Pick any poem from this masterful collection, and you may inhabit this poem. We have waited forever for David Watts's songs. And we are so happy they have arrived, heralding a spring beyond any winter our world is capable of delivering.
David Watts grew up in Texas, thus the scattered references throughout [Having and Keeping] to the characteristics of the terrain and subtle tonalities that capture the personalities of the people there. The "can do" attitude that characterized his family helped him to move forward into many fields, medicine, classical music, scientific invention, radio, and television hosting and production, and finally, after mid-life, to become a poet and a writer.
His literary credits include seven books of poetry, two collections of short stories, a mystery novel, a best-selling western and several essays. He has received awards in academics, medical excellence, television production and for the quality of his writing. He is a Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco and Professor of Poetry at the Fromm Institute at the University of San Francisco. He lives in California with his wife and two sons.
Reproduced from the "About the Author" page in Having and Keeping.
was born in the Midwest, grew up in New Mexico, and has lived in the San Francisco bay area for two decades. Terry's work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets 2012, Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Great River Review, New Millennium Writings, and The Comstock Review. His work has garnered seven Pushcart Prize nominations. He is the winner of the 2014 Crab Orchard Review Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. His chapbook, Altar Call, was a winner in the the 2013 San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival, and appears in the Anthology, Diesel. His chapbook, If They Have Ears to Hear, won the 2012 Copperdome Poetry Chapbook Contest, and is available from Southeast Missouri State University Press. His full-length poetry collections are In This Room (CW Books, 2016) and Dharma Rain (Saint Julian Press, 2017). Terry is a 2008 poetry MFA graduate of New England College. When he is not writing he is teaching as a regular speaker in the Dominican University Low-Residency MFA Program and as a free-lance writing coach. For more information about Terry and his work see www.terrylucas.com.
Friday, April 5, 2019
Joan Baranow: In The Next Life
Editor's Note: As of this month, I am the new (sixth) Poet Laureate of Marin County, California. My project for the next two years will be "Poetry as Connection." I intend to serve the poets of Marin by helping them connect with other poets, and with a wider audience and readership. One way of accomplishing that will be to publish reviews of as many books published 2019-2021 by Marin poets, as I possibly can. This is the first in the series--a review of In The Next Life (Poetic Matrix Press, 2019), by Joan Baranow. (See Joan's bio below.)
Like Baranow, many poets take their readers on journeys to other worlds. Melana Morling, for example, in her opening poem to Astoria (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006) begins: "If there is another world, / I think you can take a cab there, / or ride your old bicycle / down Junction Blvd." I love Morling's proximity of transcendence, and how, throughout her collection, she journeys there via the ordinary.
However, in Baranow's new collection, In The Next Life (Poetic Matrix Press, 2019), the poet assures us that we need not even leave our rooms to experience the totality of existence, because all worlds are available through poetry. And the worlds she selects to show us with her poems possess delightful divergencies that are rigorously probed with both the precise language of science and the ineffable language of poetry. In her poem, "Ars Poetica," after exploring the relationship between poetry, prosody, and people ("Why do words, when chimed, make you weep?"), she states:
And so...
(a deft ellipsis brings me back)
to gravity, my theme.
Or beauty? Both, like train cars
coupling, pinky finger-linked for miles.
Pain and joy--
even atoms want their mates.
Though also unpredictable:
nerves, like lightning, have their own agendas.
When there's much to say you close the door.
You type it up then write back into it.
What you're looking for--
a canteen flung in road dust,
a neighbor with a crowbar
splintering the door--
you can't help but swear
somewhere, between the lines, it's there.
Baranow knows about negative capability--Keats's ability to hold two diametrically opposed positions simultaneously--and her poems never forget this capacity either, illustrated above with those wonderful "train cars...pinky finger-linked," and that "Pain and [italics mine] joy--"
In her opening poem, "Believing," the poet makes it clear that she lines up with modernism, the idea that the solution to humanity's problems lies within humanity's inherent capabilities:
I believe in wrapping the baby in the blanket.
I believe in the father jingling his keys.
I believe in forgiving the one who dented the car,
the daughter who lost her new shoes.
I believe in recess at school, reasonable roads,
neighbors who sleep late on Saturdays,
who lend you eggs for the cake.
I believe in sharing the cake.
I believe in symphonies and rock concerts.
Otherwise, small groups will do--
poetry readings and the like.
I believe in nature's wallop, floodwaters,
wild lilies, the slipperiness of minutes,
the usual moon and tides.
But the poet also makes it clear that she stands in the shadow of Whitman's "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself."
I believe, too, in the mania of the many--
countries counting munitions,
subtracting soldiers from the list.
I believe nothing will change this.
Not prayer, nor uniformed officers.
Peace and terror forever,
like the heart's swell and cramp,
like our wish to rescue the vanishing wolves.
The joy of reading Baranow's poems is found, in part, by experiencing poetry that is connected to the canon, but that also has its own unique metaphorical sensibility, the same kind of sensibility I wrote about in my previous post about Alicia Ostriker and Peter Campion. (See "Poet Pairings: Alicia Ostriker and Peter Campion," 2-10-19.) Her poems are not simply rife with gorgeous metaphors, connecting disparate elements, representing all things in this world in a new light, but Baranow has also created an entirely new world--hinting throughout her book of a "next life" that holds worlds both mimetic and anti-mimetic, where art mimics life, and life mimics art--"a world without edges, reflective, // like looking into a spoon / at your own / estranged features."
At Eye Level
Gnats like being eye to eye,
unlike bees and flies and,
well, most creatures.
On a bench you'll be surprised
by a passing squirrel's
dropped seeds, half an acorn
gnawed through the middle.
A fly might light on
an open book,
but he's otherwise occupied.
Those frogs along the water's rim,
one looking that way,
one another, rest there
like old men
(minus arthritis).
And fish! What do they see
of trees and sky
but a world without edges, reflective,
like looking into a spoon
at your own
estranged features?
Baranow ups the emotional stakes as her poems progress from these tantalizing hints to more direct statements, culminating in the title poem and its neighbors in section three. Witness her investigation into the relationship between the realities of nature and art in "From This Distance:"
An ant clambers onto my sandal,
strikes out across my toe,
is joined by others like water
sucked through a straw.
Is it awe I want to feel?
Am I supposed to know
about these furry-edged leaves
whose berries are bluing?
To my left an aspen snapped
at the waist. Several here
have avalanched
as if with sappy brains
they've judged their own heft
and heaved over. We can't be everywhere
though to touch a particle
alone in space
jars another. Even an eight-year-old
can see the empty swing
sway. But this is simple.
Explain instead the moth's physics,
its unsteady flight
dipping and doubling
back with blind, frenetic tack
though it sees
with fifty more eyes
than ours. What am I asking?
The sun grows the shadows,
I'm tired of the strict music in my head,
"the wind's entreaties,"
which are not the wind's
but my own grief
gasping its speech, poetry's
hypnosis.
Distrust. Distrust.
Pick the bee's legs of their pollen.
Thrust your hand down
a snake's throat. Wheel yourself
into the operating room.
Watch how lovingly they scrape
the bodies out. Cough up
something sick. Is this it?
What? Have we finished
gnawing our bones?
Have I?
An ant is dragging
a dead larva
three times its size towards me.
I know that you know that
but I won't stop the words.
They are beating out the --O--
briefest pilot light. Inferno.
In the final two stanzas, the poet's logic is inescapable. Even though she "know[s] that you know that [an ant can drag a dead larva three times its size], [she] won't stop the words." Poetry, and by extension, art, has as much ontological priority, and as much vulnerability to extinction, as the physical world--the "briefest pilot light. Inferno."
But the purpose of these poems is not didactic. Although much can be learned from them, they are not primarily instructive in nature. They celebrate this life--all that it contains--and whatever comes next. Here then is the title poem, "In the Next Life." Read it aloud to experience all of its gorgeous, musical language, allow it to connect previously unconnected synapses, and to reinforce those neural pathways that bring delight and hope!
In the Next Life
You'll slip into the ocean's
inky dungeons, reborn
as a two-ton squid,
or reappear as that same
mosquito you squashed
while hiking through
New Jersey's pine barrens.
You'll feel your should squeeze
into Rush Limbaugh's manic
descendant, a baseball cap
distributor for the northeast coast,
a man who fled home
only to find himself pawning
the slim sliver necklace
his grandmother had given him.
You might be snow packed
into a girl's acrylic mitten
or a taste bud
as she licks the snow.
You may wince while clipped
from the dictator's mustache
or shine in the small
jar of polish his wife likes.
If asked, I'd choose something
simple, more mute
than my present incarnation,
to return as a wild strip
of loosestrife I glimpsed once
while riding up front in a truck,
or else a June bug
stuck to a screen, mating.
I'd like to try being
a breeze that touches the hot
cheeks of a bawling infant,
to enter her lungs
and cool the cramped
muscle of her heart.
Think of it--someday
your flesh will feed
stinkbug and jewel weed.
may your spirit tumble
in the moist tower
of a troublesome
thundershower.
Joan Baranow is the author of Living Apart and two poetry chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Gettysburg Review, Spillway, and elsewhere. A VCCA fellow and member of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, she founded and directs the Low-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Dominican University of CA. With her husband, David Watts, she produced the PBS documentary HealingWords: Poetry & Medicine. Her feature-length documentary, The Time We Have, presents an intimate portrait of a young woman facing terminal illness.
Like Baranow, many poets take their readers on journeys to other worlds. Melana Morling, for example, in her opening poem to Astoria (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006) begins: "If there is another world, / I think you can take a cab there, / or ride your old bicycle / down Junction Blvd." I love Morling's proximity of transcendence, and how, throughout her collection, she journeys there via the ordinary.
However, in Baranow's new collection, In The Next Life (Poetic Matrix Press, 2019), the poet assures us that we need not even leave our rooms to experience the totality of existence, because all worlds are available through poetry. And the worlds she selects to show us with her poems possess delightful divergencies that are rigorously probed with both the precise language of science and the ineffable language of poetry. In her poem, "Ars Poetica," after exploring the relationship between poetry, prosody, and people ("Why do words, when chimed, make you weep?"), she states:
And so...
(a deft ellipsis brings me back)
to gravity, my theme.
Or beauty? Both, like train cars
coupling, pinky finger-linked for miles.
Pain and joy--
even atoms want their mates.
Though also unpredictable:
nerves, like lightning, have their own agendas.
When there's much to say you close the door.
You type it up then write back into it.
What you're looking for--
a canteen flung in road dust,
a neighbor with a crowbar
splintering the door--
you can't help but swear
somewhere, between the lines, it's there.
Baranow knows about negative capability--Keats's ability to hold two diametrically opposed positions simultaneously--and her poems never forget this capacity either, illustrated above with those wonderful "train cars...pinky finger-linked," and that "Pain and [italics mine] joy--"
In her opening poem, "Believing," the poet makes it clear that she lines up with modernism, the idea that the solution to humanity's problems lies within humanity's inherent capabilities:
I believe in wrapping the baby in the blanket.
I believe in the father jingling his keys.
I believe in forgiving the one who dented the car,
the daughter who lost her new shoes.
I believe in recess at school, reasonable roads,
neighbors who sleep late on Saturdays,
who lend you eggs for the cake.
I believe in sharing the cake.
I believe in symphonies and rock concerts.
Otherwise, small groups will do--
poetry readings and the like.
I believe in nature's wallop, floodwaters,
wild lilies, the slipperiness of minutes,
the usual moon and tides.
But the poet also makes it clear that she stands in the shadow of Whitman's "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself."
I believe, too, in the mania of the many--
countries counting munitions,
subtracting soldiers from the list.
I believe nothing will change this.
Not prayer, nor uniformed officers.
Peace and terror forever,
like the heart's swell and cramp,
like our wish to rescue the vanishing wolves.
The joy of reading Baranow's poems is found, in part, by experiencing poetry that is connected to the canon, but that also has its own unique metaphorical sensibility, the same kind of sensibility I wrote about in my previous post about Alicia Ostriker and Peter Campion. (See "Poet Pairings: Alicia Ostriker and Peter Campion," 2-10-19.) Her poems are not simply rife with gorgeous metaphors, connecting disparate elements, representing all things in this world in a new light, but Baranow has also created an entirely new world--hinting throughout her book of a "next life" that holds worlds both mimetic and anti-mimetic, where art mimics life, and life mimics art--"a world without edges, reflective, // like looking into a spoon / at your own / estranged features."
At Eye Level
Gnats like being eye to eye,
unlike bees and flies and,
well, most creatures.
On a bench you'll be surprised
by a passing squirrel's
dropped seeds, half an acorn
gnawed through the middle.
A fly might light on
an open book,
but he's otherwise occupied.
Those frogs along the water's rim,
one looking that way,
one another, rest there
like old men
(minus arthritis).
And fish! What do they see
of trees and sky
but a world without edges, reflective,
like looking into a spoon
at your own
estranged features?
Baranow ups the emotional stakes as her poems progress from these tantalizing hints to more direct statements, culminating in the title poem and its neighbors in section three. Witness her investigation into the relationship between the realities of nature and art in "From This Distance:"
An ant clambers onto my sandal,
strikes out across my toe,
is joined by others like water
sucked through a straw.
Is it awe I want to feel?
Am I supposed to know
about these furry-edged leaves
whose berries are bluing?
To my left an aspen snapped
at the waist. Several here
have avalanched
as if with sappy brains
they've judged their own heft
and heaved over. We can't be everywhere
though to touch a particle
alone in space
jars another. Even an eight-year-old
can see the empty swing
sway. But this is simple.
Explain instead the moth's physics,
its unsteady flight
dipping and doubling
back with blind, frenetic tack
though it sees
with fifty more eyes
than ours. What am I asking?
The sun grows the shadows,
I'm tired of the strict music in my head,
"the wind's entreaties,"
which are not the wind's
but my own grief
gasping its speech, poetry's
hypnosis.
Distrust. Distrust.
Pick the bee's legs of their pollen.
Thrust your hand down
a snake's throat. Wheel yourself
into the operating room.
Watch how lovingly they scrape
the bodies out. Cough up
something sick. Is this it?
What? Have we finished
gnawing our bones?
Have I?
An ant is dragging
a dead larva
three times its size towards me.
I know that you know that
but I won't stop the words.
They are beating out the --O--
briefest pilot light. Inferno.
In the final two stanzas, the poet's logic is inescapable. Even though she "know[s] that you know that [an ant can drag a dead larva three times its size], [she] won't stop the words." Poetry, and by extension, art, has as much ontological priority, and as much vulnerability to extinction, as the physical world--the "briefest pilot light. Inferno."
But the purpose of these poems is not didactic. Although much can be learned from them, they are not primarily instructive in nature. They celebrate this life--all that it contains--and whatever comes next. Here then is the title poem, "In the Next Life." Read it aloud to experience all of its gorgeous, musical language, allow it to connect previously unconnected synapses, and to reinforce those neural pathways that bring delight and hope!
In the Next Life
You'll slip into the ocean's
inky dungeons, reborn
as a two-ton squid,
or reappear as that same
mosquito you squashed
while hiking through
New Jersey's pine barrens.
You'll feel your should squeeze
into Rush Limbaugh's manic
descendant, a baseball cap
distributor for the northeast coast,
a man who fled home
only to find himself pawning
the slim sliver necklace
his grandmother had given him.
You might be snow packed
into a girl's acrylic mitten
or a taste bud
as she licks the snow.
You may wince while clipped
from the dictator's mustache
or shine in the small
jar of polish his wife likes.
If asked, I'd choose something
simple, more mute
than my present incarnation,
to return as a wild strip
of loosestrife I glimpsed once
while riding up front in a truck,
or else a June bug
stuck to a screen, mating.
I'd like to try being
a breeze that touches the hot
cheeks of a bawling infant,
to enter her lungs
and cool the cramped
muscle of her heart.
Think of it--someday
your flesh will feed
stinkbug and jewel weed.
may your spirit tumble
in the moist tower
of a troublesome
thundershower.
Joan Baranow is the author of Living Apart and two poetry chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Gettysburg Review, Spillway, and elsewhere. A VCCA fellow and member of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, she founded and directs the Low-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Dominican University of CA. With her husband, David Watts, she produced the PBS documentary HealingWords: Poetry & Medicine. Her feature-length documentary, The Time We Have, presents an intimate portrait of a young woman facing terminal illness.
was born in the Midwest, grew up in New Mexico, and has lived in the San Francisco bay area for two decades. Terry's work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets 2012, Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Great River Review, New Millennium Writings, and The Comstock Review. His work has garnered seven Pushcart Prize nominations. He is the winner of the 2014 Crab Orchard Review Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. His chapbook, Altar Call, was a winner in the the 2013 San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival, and appears in the Anthology, Diesel. His chapbook, If They Have Ears to Hear, won the 2012 Copperdome Poetry Chapbook Contest, and is available from Southeast Missouri State University Press. His full-length poetry collections are In This Room (CW Books, 2016) and Dharma Rain (Saint Julian Press, 2017). Terry is a 2008 poetry MFA graduate of New England College. When he is not writing he is teaching as a regular speaker in the Dominican University Low-Residency MFA Program and as a free-lance writing coach. For more information about Terry and his work see www.terrylucas.com.
Sunday, February 10, 2019
Poet Pairings: Alicia Ostriker and Peter Campion
For the past week, I have been making final edits on my essay, "Metaphor and Love in the Poetry of Alicia Ostriker," that will be published soon on the companion website to the University of Michigan's recent collection of essays, reflections, and interviews about Alicia Ostriker's capacious and virtuosic body of work, Everywoman Her Own Theology: On the Poetry of Alicia Suskin Ostriker. [Editor's note: the essay is now published and can be accessed HERE]. In it I cite an excerpt from a letter to the editor of Poetry, published in the December 2009 issue, wherein Campion states what he means by "metaphorical sense." Upon re-reading the letter, I immediately knew that my next blog post would pair Ostriker with Campion. Here is the quote:
By "metaphorical sense" I mean a type of inventiveness that can appear even when metaphor seems absent. It's not merely a knack for crafting comparisons without "like" or "as," but the ability to establish far-reaching connections, as well as disjunctions, in consciousness...to examine and re-examine motifs [that] begin to constellate a whole climate of thought and feeling as amplitudinous as any symbol system. Metaphorical sense always implies the vision of a larger shape of being (228-229).
The work of many poets "implies the vision of a larger shape of being." But no two poets have "metaphorical sensibilities" that are more acute, more overlapping, and more comprehensive than Ostriker and Campion. Even though Ostriker's body of work spans more than six decades, and Campion has only been alive for barely four, these two poets seem to be speaking to one another, particularly when they write about metaphor. (Ostriker says in her "Eros and Metaphor" that metaphor "is what language uses to show that the world is full on connections.") Let's "listen in" to the conversation that takes place between two of their poems.
Magnolias
Ambition. Jealousy. Adrenaline.
The fear that loneliness is punishment
and that corrosive feeling draining down
the chest the natural and just result
of failures. . . . What delicious leisure not
to feel it. What sweet reprieve to linger
here with these ovals of purple and flamingo
plumed from the tree or splayed on pavement.
If only for these seconds before returning
to the open air those flowers keep
pushing out of themselves to die inside.
Peter Campion, from The Lions (The University of Chicago Press, 2009)
Middle-Aged Woman at a Pond
The first of June, grasses already tall
In which I lie with a book. All afternoon a cardinal
Has thrown the darts of his song.
One lozenge of sun remains on the pond,
The high crowns of the beeches have been transformed
By a stinging honey. Tell me, I think.
Frogspawn floats in its translucent sacs.
Tadpoles rehearse their crawls.
Here come the black flies now,
And now the peepers. This is the nectar
In the bottom of the cup,
This blissfulness in which I strip and dive.
Let my questions stand unsolved
Like trees around a pond. Waters's cold lick
Is a response. I swim across the ring of it.
Alicia Ostriker, from The Crack in Everything (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996)
By "metaphorical sense" I mean a type of inventiveness that can appear even when metaphor seems absent. It's not merely a knack for crafting comparisons without "like" or "as," but the ability to establish far-reaching connections, as well as disjunctions, in consciousness...to examine and re-examine motifs [that] begin to constellate a whole climate of thought and feeling as amplitudinous as any symbol system. Metaphorical sense always implies the vision of a larger shape of being (228-229).
The work of many poets "implies the vision of a larger shape of being." But no two poets have "metaphorical sensibilities" that are more acute, more overlapping, and more comprehensive than Ostriker and Campion. Even though Ostriker's body of work spans more than six decades, and Campion has only been alive for barely four, these two poets seem to be speaking to one another, particularly when they write about metaphor. (Ostriker says in her "Eros and Metaphor" that metaphor "is what language uses to show that the world is full on connections.") Let's "listen in" to the conversation that takes place between two of their poems.
Magnolias
Ambition. Jealousy. Adrenaline.
The fear that loneliness is punishment
and that corrosive feeling draining down
the chest the natural and just result
of failures. . . . What delicious leisure not
to feel it. What sweet reprieve to linger
here with these ovals of purple and flamingo
plumed from the tree or splayed on pavement.
If only for these seconds before returning
to the open air those flowers keep
pushing out of themselves to die inside.
Peter Campion, from The Lions (The University of Chicago Press, 2009)
Middle-Aged Woman at a Pond
The first of June, grasses already tall
In which I lie with a book. All afternoon a cardinal
Has thrown the darts of his song.
One lozenge of sun remains on the pond,
The high crowns of the beeches have been transformed
By a stinging honey. Tell me, I think.
Frogspawn floats in its translucent sacs.
Tadpoles rehearse their crawls.
Here come the black flies now,
And now the peepers. This is the nectar
In the bottom of the cup,
This blissfulness in which I strip and dive.
Let my questions stand unsolved
Like trees around a pond. Waters's cold lick
Is a response. I swim across the ring of it.
Alicia Ostriker, from The Crack in Everything (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996)
was born in the Midwest, grew up in New Mexico, and has lived in the San Francisco bay area for two decades. Terry's work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets 2012, Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Great River Review, New Millennium Writings, and The Comstock Review. His work has garnered seven Pushcart Prize nominations. He is the winner of the 2014 Crab Orchard Review Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. His chapbook, Altar Call, was a winner in the the 2013 San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival, and appears in the Anthology, Diesel. His chapbook, If They Have Ears to Hear, won the 2012 Copperdome Poetry Chapbook Contest, and is available from Southeast Missouri State University Press. His full-length poetry collections are In This Room (CW Books, 2016) and Dharma Rain (Saint Julian Press, 2017). Terry is a 2008 poetry MFA graduate of New England College. When he is not writing he is teaching as a regular speaker in the Dominican University Low-Residency MFA Program and as a free-lance writing coach. For more information about Terry and his work see www.terrylucas.com.
Tuesday, February 5, 2019
Poet Pairings: Melissa Stein & Maw Shein Win
Last September I had the pleasure of hearing Melissa Stein and Maw Shein Win read poetry together at Rebound Bookstore in San Rafael, California. Toni and Joel Eis always are the consummate hosts at their poetry readings. They provide the quality refreshments--really good wine and cheese and, according to the season, other goodies. They give all of the proceeds from books sales to the authors. And they will rent their bookstore anytime for a modest price, if you want to schedule a reading outside of their ongoing series. In addition, they will take local authors' books on consignment. Rebound Bookstore is worthy of support.
I had heard Melissa Stein read before, and so I was excited to attend this reading. I hadn't heard Maw Shein Win. I was very pleasantly surprised. Usually when two poets read, one is far superior to the other. Melissa and Maw complemented one another beautifully. And they did something that I want to expand on in this post: they spent part of their reading time alternating poems from their latest books--Stein's Terrible Blooms (Copper Canyon, 2018), and Win's Invisible Gifts (Manic D Press, 2018). The result was an answer and call performance that was superb. I don't remember what poems they paired together, but I liked the idea so much that I wanted to introduce the idea to you, as a regular feature of this blog. And I can't think of two more appropriate poets for my first such post than Melissa Stein and Maw Stein Win.
Before I share a poem from each of their two books that I think pair nicely, I want to apologize to them both for such a brief treatment of their work. Due to deadlines with other writing projects, I am writing a short post this week. Be assured that in the near future I will post complete reviews of each of these books. For now, enjoy a teaser--a tasting of their books, if you will, with a poem from each.
The opening poem to Stein's Terrible Blooms:
Harder
If you're going to storm,
I said, do it harder.
Pummel nests from limbs
and drown the furred things
in their dens. Swell creek
to flood, unhome the fish.
Everything's gone too cozy.
Winnow, flush. Let's see
what's got the will.
Let's watch what's tender
choke or breathe. Try
to make a mark on me.
And then a poem midway into Win's Invisible Gifts:
The Indexing of Sensation
Jean comes into the library and passes wildflowers into my hands.
Put these in water, darling, and have a brilliant day.
I push the cart down the carpeted aisle.
The repetition of movement is a meditation.
The Art of Benin, Paula Ben-Amos N7397N5C5
Anno's Counting Book, Mitsumasa Anno PZ7A5875
The Forgotten Ones, Milton Rogovin TP820.5R64
The Balloon--A Bicentennial Exhibition TL615B34
Maps of countries that don't exist anymore.
The archiving of fantasies.
The referencing of systems.
The indexing of sensation.
Melissa Stein is the author of the poetry collections Terrible Blooms (Copper Canyon Press, 2018) and Rough Honey, winner of the 2010 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, selected by Mark Doty. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Tin House, The Southern Review, New England Review, Best New Poets, Beloit Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and North American Review, among others.
Maw Stein Win is a Burmese American poet, editor, and educator. In addition to the full-length poetry collection, Invisible Gifts, she is the author of two chapbooks, Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. Her writing has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including Cimarron Review, Poetry International, and Fanzine, among others. She frequently collaborates with artists, musicians, and other writers.
I had heard Melissa Stein read before, and so I was excited to attend this reading. I hadn't heard Maw Shein Win. I was very pleasantly surprised. Usually when two poets read, one is far superior to the other. Melissa and Maw complemented one another beautifully. And they did something that I want to expand on in this post: they spent part of their reading time alternating poems from their latest books--Stein's Terrible Blooms (Copper Canyon, 2018), and Win's Invisible Gifts (Manic D Press, 2018). The result was an answer and call performance that was superb. I don't remember what poems they paired together, but I liked the idea so much that I wanted to introduce the idea to you, as a regular feature of this blog. And I can't think of two more appropriate poets for my first such post than Melissa Stein and Maw Stein Win.
Before I share a poem from each of their two books that I think pair nicely, I want to apologize to them both for such a brief treatment of their work. Due to deadlines with other writing projects, I am writing a short post this week. Be assured that in the near future I will post complete reviews of each of these books. For now, enjoy a teaser--a tasting of their books, if you will, with a poem from each.
The opening poem to Stein's Terrible Blooms:
Harder
If you're going to storm,
I said, do it harder.
Pummel nests from limbs
and drown the furred things
in their dens. Swell creek
to flood, unhome the fish.
Everything's gone too cozy.
Winnow, flush. Let's see
what's got the will.
Let's watch what's tender
choke or breathe. Try
to make a mark on me.
And then a poem midway into Win's Invisible Gifts:
The Indexing of Sensation
Jean comes into the library and passes wildflowers into my hands.
Put these in water, darling, and have a brilliant day.
I push the cart down the carpeted aisle.
The repetition of movement is a meditation.
The Art of Benin, Paula Ben-Amos N7397N5C5
Anno's Counting Book, Mitsumasa Anno PZ7A5875
The Forgotten Ones, Milton Rogovin TP820.5R64
The Balloon--A Bicentennial Exhibition TL615B34
Maps of countries that don't exist anymore.
The archiving of fantasies.
The referencing of systems.
The indexing of sensation.
Melissa Stein is the author of the poetry collections Terrible Blooms (Copper Canyon Press, 2018) and Rough Honey, winner of the 2010 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, selected by Mark Doty. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Tin House, The Southern Review, New England Review, Best New Poets, Beloit Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and North American Review, among others.
Maw Stein Win is a Burmese American poet, editor, and educator. In addition to the full-length poetry collection, Invisible Gifts, she is the author of two chapbooks, Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. Her writing has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including Cimarron Review, Poetry International, and Fanzine, among others. She frequently collaborates with artists, musicians, and other writers.
was born in the Midwest, grew up in New Mexico, and has lived in the San Francisco bay area for two decades. Terry's work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets 2012, Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Great River Review, New Millennium Writings, and The Comstock Review. His work has garnered seven Pushcart Prize nominations. He is the winner of the 2014 Crab Orchard Review Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. His chapbook, Altar Call, was a winner in the the 2013 San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival, and appears in the Anthology, Diesel. His chapbook, If They Have Ears to Hear, won the 2012 Copperdome Poetry Chapbook Contest, and is available from Southeast Missouri State University Press. His full-length poetry collections are In This Room (CW Books, 2016) and Dharma Rain (Saint Julian Press, 2017). Terry is a 2008 poetry MFA graduate of New England College. When he is not writing he is teaching as a regular speaker in the Dominican University Low-Residency MFA Program and as a free-lance writing coach. For more information about Terry and his work see www.terrylucas.com.
Saturday, January 26, 2019
The Best of The Best American Poetry 2017
No, that "2017" in the title is not a typo. I just got around to reading my copy of last year's BAP, guest edited by Natasha Trethewey. When I finish reading all of the books I own, I'll read (perhaps even purchase) BAP 2018. Of course by then the 2019 issue will probably be out...mercy, a lot of reading to do.
But I like reading poetry. I always learn a lot. In the case of BAP, I find new poets to include in my canon, poets to research and read more of their work. But you know that. What you don't know is what poems in BAP 2017 I thought were interesting enough to read a second time (or even more times). And, if you read this blog, you know that's my new definition of what a good poem is--one you want to read again and again and again.
So here's my list of poems I want to re-read. They were written mostly by poets whose work I already know and like. And there were several poems by poets I normally like, whose work in BAP 2017 I didn't care for enough to read again. Probably different from the poems you would select. But, hey, no poem of mine was in the anthology. And probably not one of yours either. That's why John Ashbery, when invited to be the guest editor a few years ago, asked David Lehman if the title could be changed from "The Best..." to "Pretty Good American Poetry." Best is hard to measure. So I guess I should change my title to "Pretty Good Poems from The Best American Poetry 2017." Here they are in the same order (alphabetical) as they appear in the anthology, with a comment or two as to why I will re-read them.
Mary Jo Bang, "Admission"
This poem's first enjambed line was interesting: "My mother was glamorous in a way I knew I never / would be..." But by the time I got to the fourth line, I was hooked:
...Her / bow mouth was forever being twinned to a tissue.
And the remainder of the poem lives up to that terrific verb form of "being twinned to a tissue."
David Barber, "On a Shaker Admonition"
I will re-read this poem countless times in order to allow Barber's list of objects related to locking things up that would be "needless" if everyone followed the admonition of the epigraph:
All should be so trustworthy, that locks and keys shall be needless.
The poem is a two-page delight of articles added to the needless "locks and keys" in such a world. The first two stanzas and the last two will give you the idea of why this list poem made my list:
Needless, useless, pointless, moot: stripped of every honest purpose,
nothing so haplessly worthless now, so meaningless.
Needless, needless: the deadbolt, the strongbox, the padlock
lolling from the tall spiked gate, the little metal teeth
all jingle-jangling mindlessly on their rusting ring, the all too obtuse
fitfulness of pin and tumbler, every chain known to man.
...[and then the last two stanzas]
No senseless wishfulness, no useless ruthlessness, no goods to get on us
to bust or traduce us, no clauses to bind us, no cause
for redness, no one on the loose, on the make, on the case, nothing for us
to jimmy or pick, nothing gone missing, not a thing amiss,
no No Tell Motel, no Big House, no Pale beyond us, no tragic chorus in a rumpus
over the worst in us getting the best of us in spite of us,
just all of us lapsing less and less regardless how rootless, witless, gutless, pissed,
all that thankless cussed nonsense now behind us: just us, just us.
Vievee Francis, "Given to These Proclivities, By God"
Here is the epigraph and the first few lines to give you idea of this poem...
...bound by sin's galling fetters
--hymn
And like every sinner, I prayed,
"Take this sin from me" but
the sin was mine, and how to take it
and not call it stealing? And why
place my sin upon another? So
I ate my sin. Like any good sinner
I have an appetite. I could eat as much
as I drink. And you know how much
I like a neat Mark. I don't think twice.
I swallow it down.
Two fingers, no water.
Once, then once more. So it burns?
What won't?
Amy Gerstler, "Dead Butterfly"
In addition to the luscious language that Gerstler's poems typically posses, this one has poignant lines that also strike home with universal meaning. The final line of this excerpt contains my favorite in this poem:
dead empress of winged things
weightless flake of flight
you rest in state on my desk
more delicate and flatter than
this scrap of foolscap you lie on
flatter even than my dad's voice
when he was mad like death
anger drained him of color
but his temper was gentle
flare-ups were rare
and of course nonexistent now
since he was found
lifeless in bed a cut on his head
how did he make it down the hall
after he fell do you think? homing instinct?
Terrance Tales, "Ars Poetica with Bacon"
In addition to its quirky title, I love how quickly things move in this poem. From a family's anxiety "about its diminishing food supply" in the first two lines, to "the paddle my mother used to beat me with," in line 7, we get to a homily in line 11: "...jealousy / [does] not, in fact, begin as jealousy, but as desperation." The narrative moves as quickly, with even more interest, as the poem develops...
Tony Hoagland, "Cause of Death: Fox News"
I don't think I need to say anything else about this poem in order to have everyone's appetite whetted.
Yusef Komunyakaa, "from The Last Bohemian of Avenue A"
For me, there are multiple poems within this poem, and I love them all. Komunyakaa always seems to have jazz licks, if not in the entire poem, at least in a few lines. If all this poem had was its third stanza, I would still read it for the rest of my life, if only for its atmospheric rhythms and tones.
But there is so much more...
Even if loneliness arrives
around 3 a.m., it isn't easy
to touch myself because
it's a sin. But now & then
I must hold on to something
to keep me here on Earth,
in the middle of an old tune
& a new one--I touch myself
as a face blooms in my head
& somehow worlds collide
gently. What did she step
from, or was it on my last gig
at Smoke? Or, maybe she was
wearing a garden of orchids
when we passed, or the face
of a waitress among changes
in a Trane solo as I almost
walked in front of a taxicab.
When I touch myself I am
reaching for some blue note
on the other side of an abyss.
Mary Travers stands before me
in Washington Square Park
in a silvery dress, whispering
"Where Have All the Flowers Gone?"
as I lean against Garibaldi
reaching for his sword,
& blow riffs of luster,
ready to die; go to hell.
Danish Lameris, "The Watch"
A tight poem whose conceit remains consistently good throughout!
Dorianne Laux, "Lapse"
Since it is a short one (an American sonnet, or almost one, depending on your definition), I will include the entire poem:
Poem beginning with a line from Gwendolyn Brooks
I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer. I
see the leaves turning on their stems. I am
not oblivious to the sun as it lowers on its stem, not
fooled by the clock holding off, not deceived
by the weight of its tired hands holding forth. I
do not think my dead will return. They will not do
what I ask of them. Even if I plead on my knees. Not
even if I kiss their photographs or think
of them as I touch the things they left me. It
isn't possible to raise them from their beds, is
it? Even if I push the dirt away with my bare hands? Still-
ness, unearth their faces. Bring me the last dahlias of summer.
Philip Levine, "Rain in Winter"
And oh, how I love this serendipitous placement of Levine's sonnet beside Laux's poem!
Outside the window drops caught
on the branches of the quince, the sky
distant and quiet, a few patches of light
breaking through. The day is fresh, barely
begun yet feeling used. Soon the phone
will ring for someone, and no one
will pick it up, and the ringing will go on
until the icebox answers with a groan.
The lost dog who sleeps on a bed of rags
behind the garage won't appear
to beg for anything. Nothing will explain
where the birds have gone, why a wind rages
through the ash trees, why the world
goes on accepting more and more rain.
Judgon Mitcham, "White"
A few lines from the end of section 1 of 4 sections will suffice to give you the flavor of this one:
...and this is a poem
of dumb, sputtering astonishment
at the ignorance of our lives--we who went
to our churches and our homes
and our history classes, where no one said a word,
we who lived each day like blank pages,
mistake after mistake after mistake
in the history book.
John Murillo, "Upon Reading That Eric Dolphin Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds,"
The first eight and a half couplets of a forty-nine couplet, gripping narrative poem (once again demonstrating how well couplets convey narrative), that I couldn't stop reading, and want to read again and again...
I think first of two sparrows I met when walking home,
late night years ago, in another city, not unlike this--the one
bird frantic, attacking I thought, the way she swooped
down, circled my head, and flailed her wings in my face;
how she seemed to scream each time I swung; how she
dashed back and forth between me and a blood-red Corolla
parked near the opposite curb; how, finally, I understood:
I spied another bird, also calling, his foot inexplicably
caught in the car's closed door, beating his whole bird
body against it. Trying, it appeared, to bang himself free.
And who knows how long he'd been there, flailing. Who
knows--he and the other I mistook, at first, for a bat.
They called to me--something between squawk and chirp,
something between song and prayer--to do something,
anything. And like any good god, I disappeared. Not
indifferent, exactly. But with things to do. And, most likely,
on my way home from another heartbreak...
Joyce Carol Oates, "To Marlon Brando in Hell"
A five-page anaphoric poem that delightfully names the reasons Brando should be in hell ("Because you suffocated your beauty in fat. / Because you made of our adoration, mockery. / Because you were the predator male, without remorse..."), ending with the lines "Because you have left us. And we are lonely. / And we would join you in Hell, if you would have us."
Sharon Olds, "Ode to the Glans"
Need I say more?
Gregory Orr, "Three Dark Proverb Sonnets"
There is no way to give you any part of these 42 lines without giving you all of them.
Carl Phillips, "Rockabye"
Great first lines:
Weeping, he seemed more naked
than when he'd been naked--more, even, than when
we'd both been...
There you have it--my "Best of the Best [of the best]" as Will Smith said mockingly in Men in Black--with apologies to Dan Albergotti, Dan Beachy-Quick, Cyrus Cassell, Billy Collins, Carolyn Forche, Robert Pinsky, Michael Ryan, David St. John, Charles Simic, A.E. Stallings, Christian Wiman, Dean Young, Kevin Young, and Matthew Zapruder--all poets whose work I admire, but whose poems in BAP 2017, although they were good, did not motivate me (at the time) to read them again.
So, just as Will Smith was leery of his fellow candidates for recruitment into the elite band of Men in Black, who were pronounced "The best of the best of the best," readers should be suspicious of this particular selection of mine from BAP 2017. I might pick different poems on a different day. But if the volume is setting on your shelf unread, I suggest you pick it up and try a poem or two from my list, and move on from there. Read a few poems from it each day, until you either finish it, or decide it's not worth finishing, in which case you can get rid of it and make room for something that brings you more joy. Because, after all, if a book doesn't bring you joy, why should you keep it?
But I like reading poetry. I always learn a lot. In the case of BAP, I find new poets to include in my canon, poets to research and read more of their work. But you know that. What you don't know is what poems in BAP 2017 I thought were interesting enough to read a second time (or even more times). And, if you read this blog, you know that's my new definition of what a good poem is--one you want to read again and again and again.
So here's my list of poems I want to re-read. They were written mostly by poets whose work I already know and like. And there were several poems by poets I normally like, whose work in BAP 2017 I didn't care for enough to read again. Probably different from the poems you would select. But, hey, no poem of mine was in the anthology. And probably not one of yours either. That's why John Ashbery, when invited to be the guest editor a few years ago, asked David Lehman if the title could be changed from "The Best..." to "Pretty Good American Poetry." Best is hard to measure. So I guess I should change my title to "Pretty Good Poems from The Best American Poetry 2017." Here they are in the same order (alphabetical) as they appear in the anthology, with a comment or two as to why I will re-read them.
Mary Jo Bang, "Admission"
This poem's first enjambed line was interesting: "My mother was glamorous in a way I knew I never / would be..." But by the time I got to the fourth line, I was hooked:
...Her / bow mouth was forever being twinned to a tissue.
And the remainder of the poem lives up to that terrific verb form of "being twinned to a tissue."
David Barber, "On a Shaker Admonition"
I will re-read this poem countless times in order to allow Barber's list of objects related to locking things up that would be "needless" if everyone followed the admonition of the epigraph:
All should be so trustworthy, that locks and keys shall be needless.
The poem is a two-page delight of articles added to the needless "locks and keys" in such a world. The first two stanzas and the last two will give you the idea of why this list poem made my list:
Needless, useless, pointless, moot: stripped of every honest purpose,
nothing so haplessly worthless now, so meaningless.
Needless, needless: the deadbolt, the strongbox, the padlock
lolling from the tall spiked gate, the little metal teeth
all jingle-jangling mindlessly on their rusting ring, the all too obtuse
fitfulness of pin and tumbler, every chain known to man.
...[and then the last two stanzas]
No senseless wishfulness, no useless ruthlessness, no goods to get on us
to bust or traduce us, no clauses to bind us, no cause
for redness, no one on the loose, on the make, on the case, nothing for us
to jimmy or pick, nothing gone missing, not a thing amiss,
no No Tell Motel, no Big House, no Pale beyond us, no tragic chorus in a rumpus
over the worst in us getting the best of us in spite of us,
just all of us lapsing less and less regardless how rootless, witless, gutless, pissed,
all that thankless cussed nonsense now behind us: just us, just us.
Vievee Francis, "Given to These Proclivities, By God"
Here is the epigraph and the first few lines to give you idea of this poem...
...bound by sin's galling fetters
--hymn
And like every sinner, I prayed,
"Take this sin from me" but
the sin was mine, and how to take it
and not call it stealing? And why
place my sin upon another? So
I ate my sin. Like any good sinner
I have an appetite. I could eat as much
as I drink. And you know how much
I like a neat Mark. I don't think twice.
I swallow it down.
Two fingers, no water.
Once, then once more. So it burns?
What won't?
Amy Gerstler, "Dead Butterfly"
In addition to the luscious language that Gerstler's poems typically posses, this one has poignant lines that also strike home with universal meaning. The final line of this excerpt contains my favorite in this poem:
dead empress of winged things
weightless flake of flight
you rest in state on my desk
more delicate and flatter than
this scrap of foolscap you lie on
flatter even than my dad's voice
when he was mad like death
anger drained him of color
but his temper was gentle
flare-ups were rare
and of course nonexistent now
since he was found
lifeless in bed a cut on his head
how did he make it down the hall
after he fell do you think? homing instinct?
Terrance Tales, "Ars Poetica with Bacon"
In addition to its quirky title, I love how quickly things move in this poem. From a family's anxiety "about its diminishing food supply" in the first two lines, to "the paddle my mother used to beat me with," in line 7, we get to a homily in line 11: "...jealousy / [does] not, in fact, begin as jealousy, but as desperation." The narrative moves as quickly, with even more interest, as the poem develops...
Tony Hoagland, "Cause of Death: Fox News"
I don't think I need to say anything else about this poem in order to have everyone's appetite whetted.
Yusef Komunyakaa, "from The Last Bohemian of Avenue A"
For me, there are multiple poems within this poem, and I love them all. Komunyakaa always seems to have jazz licks, if not in the entire poem, at least in a few lines. If all this poem had was its third stanza, I would still read it for the rest of my life, if only for its atmospheric rhythms and tones.
But there is so much more...
Even if loneliness arrives
around 3 a.m., it isn't easy
to touch myself because
it's a sin. But now & then
I must hold on to something
to keep me here on Earth,
in the middle of an old tune
& a new one--I touch myself
as a face blooms in my head
& somehow worlds collide
gently. What did she step
from, or was it on my last gig
at Smoke? Or, maybe she was
wearing a garden of orchids
when we passed, or the face
of a waitress among changes
in a Trane solo as I almost
walked in front of a taxicab.
When I touch myself I am
reaching for some blue note
on the other side of an abyss.
Mary Travers stands before me
in Washington Square Park
in a silvery dress, whispering
"Where Have All the Flowers Gone?"
as I lean against Garibaldi
reaching for his sword,
& blow riffs of luster,
ready to die; go to hell.
Danish Lameris, "The Watch"
A tight poem whose conceit remains consistently good throughout!
Dorianne Laux, "Lapse"
Since it is a short one (an American sonnet, or almost one, depending on your definition), I will include the entire poem:
Poem beginning with a line from Gwendolyn Brooks
I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer. I
see the leaves turning on their stems. I am
not oblivious to the sun as it lowers on its stem, not
fooled by the clock holding off, not deceived
by the weight of its tired hands holding forth. I
do not think my dead will return. They will not do
what I ask of them. Even if I plead on my knees. Not
even if I kiss their photographs or think
of them as I touch the things they left me. It
isn't possible to raise them from their beds, is
it? Even if I push the dirt away with my bare hands? Still-
ness, unearth their faces. Bring me the last dahlias of summer.
Philip Levine, "Rain in Winter"
And oh, how I love this serendipitous placement of Levine's sonnet beside Laux's poem!
Outside the window drops caught
on the branches of the quince, the sky
distant and quiet, a few patches of light
breaking through. The day is fresh, barely
begun yet feeling used. Soon the phone
will ring for someone, and no one
will pick it up, and the ringing will go on
until the icebox answers with a groan.
The lost dog who sleeps on a bed of rags
behind the garage won't appear
to beg for anything. Nothing will explain
where the birds have gone, why a wind rages
through the ash trees, why the world
goes on accepting more and more rain.
Judgon Mitcham, "White"
A few lines from the end of section 1 of 4 sections will suffice to give you the flavor of this one:
...and this is a poem
of dumb, sputtering astonishment
at the ignorance of our lives--we who went
to our churches and our homes
and our history classes, where no one said a word,
we who lived each day like blank pages,
mistake after mistake after mistake
in the history book.
John Murillo, "Upon Reading That Eric Dolphin Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds,"
The first eight and a half couplets of a forty-nine couplet, gripping narrative poem (once again demonstrating how well couplets convey narrative), that I couldn't stop reading, and want to read again and again...
I think first of two sparrows I met when walking home,
late night years ago, in another city, not unlike this--the one
bird frantic, attacking I thought, the way she swooped
down, circled my head, and flailed her wings in my face;
how she seemed to scream each time I swung; how she
dashed back and forth between me and a blood-red Corolla
parked near the opposite curb; how, finally, I understood:
I spied another bird, also calling, his foot inexplicably
caught in the car's closed door, beating his whole bird
body against it. Trying, it appeared, to bang himself free.
And who knows how long he'd been there, flailing. Who
knows--he and the other I mistook, at first, for a bat.
They called to me--something between squawk and chirp,
something between song and prayer--to do something,
anything. And like any good god, I disappeared. Not
indifferent, exactly. But with things to do. And, most likely,
on my way home from another heartbreak...
Joyce Carol Oates, "To Marlon Brando in Hell"
A five-page anaphoric poem that delightfully names the reasons Brando should be in hell ("Because you suffocated your beauty in fat. / Because you made of our adoration, mockery. / Because you were the predator male, without remorse..."), ending with the lines "Because you have left us. And we are lonely. / And we would join you in Hell, if you would have us."
Sharon Olds, "Ode to the Glans"
Need I say more?
Gregory Orr, "Three Dark Proverb Sonnets"
There is no way to give you any part of these 42 lines without giving you all of them.
Carl Phillips, "Rockabye"
Great first lines:
Weeping, he seemed more naked
than when he'd been naked--more, even, than when
we'd both been...
There you have it--my "Best of the Best [of the best]" as Will Smith said mockingly in Men in Black--with apologies to Dan Albergotti, Dan Beachy-Quick, Cyrus Cassell, Billy Collins, Carolyn Forche, Robert Pinsky, Michael Ryan, David St. John, Charles Simic, A.E. Stallings, Christian Wiman, Dean Young, Kevin Young, and Matthew Zapruder--all poets whose work I admire, but whose poems in BAP 2017, although they were good, did not motivate me (at the time) to read them again.
So, just as Will Smith was leery of his fellow candidates for recruitment into the elite band of Men in Black, who were pronounced "The best of the best of the best," readers should be suspicious of this particular selection of mine from BAP 2017. I might pick different poems on a different day. But if the volume is setting on your shelf unread, I suggest you pick it up and try a poem or two from my list, and move on from there. Read a few poems from it each day, until you either finish it, or decide it's not worth finishing, in which case you can get rid of it and make room for something that brings you more joy. Because, after all, if a book doesn't bring you joy, why should you keep it?
was born in the Midwest, grew up in New Mexico, and has lived in the San Francisco bay area for two decades. Terry's work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets 2012, Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Great River Review, New Millennium Writings, and The Comstock Review. His work has garnered seven Pushcart Prize nominations. He is the winner of the 2014 Crab Orchard Review Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. His chapbook, Altar Call, was a winner in the the 2013 San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival, and appears in the Anthology, Diesel. His chapbook, If They Have Ears to Hear, won the 2012 Copperdome Poetry Chapbook Contest, and is available from Southeast Missouri State University Press. His full-length poetry collections are In This Room (CW Books, 2016) and Dharma Rain (Saint Julian Press, 2017). Terry is a 2008 poetry MFA graduate of New England College. When he is not writing he is teaching as a regular speaker in the Dominican University Low-Residency MFA Program and as a free-lance writing coach. For more information about Terry and his work see www.terrylucas.com.
Wednesday, January 23, 2019
Writing Sentences: The Long and the Short of It
Earlier this month I led a generative writing workshop for a new writing group. I knew there would be both prose writers and poets in attendance. I decided to utilize Nina Schuyler's terrific new book, How to Write Stunning Sentences (Fiction Advocate, 2018), in a way I had not previously utilized any book in a workshop setting. I thought readers of this blog might be interested in what I did, since it seemed successful. And, of course, I think all of my readers should be interested in Schuyler's book, which sets a high bar for a collection of essays about numerous ways to write memorable sentences, including examples and comments from authors about their favorite sentences. Finally, in order to provide generative material for the poets other than prompts about writing sentences, I utilized a poem by Gerald Stern that is written in one sentence.
Here is the lesson plan for how I ran the workshop, followed by the handout, and a poem of mine that illustrates the final prompt.
WHAT I DID BEFORE THE SESSION:
1) From among the twenty-five chapters, I selected two: "Sunil Yapa: The Long Sentence" (Chapter Two), and "Melinda Moustakis: Ellipses (Chapter Fourteen).
2) I typed two or three example sentences from each chapter and came up with a title for each example sentence. For example, for the chapter on long sentences, the first example appeared in this way:
Chapter 2
Sunil Yapa: The Long Sentence
Example 1: Using modifiers to add precision to an experience...
There were people hollering from every corner, marching people of all shapes and sizes, all body types and hairdos, an assortment of clothing choices and fashion accessories to express their personalities...
3) At the bottom of the examples from each chapter, I copied Nina Schuyler's writing prompts for that chapter.
4) I re-typed "Winter Thirst" by Gerald Stern from American Sonnets (W.W Norton, 2002).
5) Below the poem, I typed a writing prompt about writing a one-page poem as one sentence.
6) I printed out enough copies so that each writer had his own handout.
WHAT I DID IN THE SESSION:
1) Prior to writers arriving I distributed handouts.
2) I opened with an introduction to what we were going to do that day: learn about and write stunning sentences that are long and short, both for the prose writer and the poet.
3) I read the few short paragraphs from Schuyler's book that introduced the chapter.
4) When we got to the first example sentence, I had a volunteer read the sentence aloud.
5) I resumed reading the brief explanatory material from Schuyler's book until we reached the next example sentence.
6) I asked for another volunteer to read the next example sentence.
7) I repeated this process until we arrived at the end of the chapter.
8) I instructed the writers to read the prompts that followed on their handout, to select one, and to do the prompt.
9) After 5-10 minutes, I had volunteers read what they had written and share how it went for them.
10) I repeated this process with the material that I had prepared from Schuyler's book.
11) We took a break (after about an hour).
12) When we returned, I read the Gerald Stern poem and we all did the writing prompt.
13) I asked for volunteers to read their poems.
14) We talked about strategies for varying lengths of sentences in both prose and verse.
15) The entire writing workshop took just under two hours.
Here is the entire handout that I prepared, along with a poem that I wrote several years ago using Gerald Stern's poem as a prompt.
Here is the lesson plan for how I ran the workshop, followed by the handout, and a poem of mine that illustrates the final prompt.
WHAT I DID BEFORE THE SESSION:
1) From among the twenty-five chapters, I selected two: "Sunil Yapa: The Long Sentence" (Chapter Two), and "Melinda Moustakis: Ellipses (Chapter Fourteen).
2) I typed two or three example sentences from each chapter and came up with a title for each example sentence. For example, for the chapter on long sentences, the first example appeared in this way:
Chapter 2
Sunil Yapa: The Long Sentence
Example 1: Using modifiers to add precision to an experience...
There were people hollering from every corner, marching people of all shapes and sizes, all body types and hairdos, an assortment of clothing choices and fashion accessories to express their personalities...
3) At the bottom of the examples from each chapter, I copied Nina Schuyler's writing prompts for that chapter.
4) I re-typed "Winter Thirst" by Gerald Stern from American Sonnets (W.W Norton, 2002).
5) Below the poem, I typed a writing prompt about writing a one-page poem as one sentence.
6) I printed out enough copies so that each writer had his own handout.
WHAT I DID IN THE SESSION:
1) Prior to writers arriving I distributed handouts.
2) I opened with an introduction to what we were going to do that day: learn about and write stunning sentences that are long and short, both for the prose writer and the poet.
3) I read the few short paragraphs from Schuyler's book that introduced the chapter.
4) When we got to the first example sentence, I had a volunteer read the sentence aloud.
5) I resumed reading the brief explanatory material from Schuyler's book until we reached the next example sentence.
6) I asked for another volunteer to read the next example sentence.
7) I repeated this process until we arrived at the end of the chapter.
8) I instructed the writers to read the prompts that followed on their handout, to select one, and to do the prompt.
9) After 5-10 minutes, I had volunteers read what they had written and share how it went for them.
10) I repeated this process with the material that I had prepared from Schuyler's book.
11) We took a break (after about an hour).
12) When we returned, I read the Gerald Stern poem and we all did the writing prompt.
13) I asked for volunteers to read their poems.
14) We talked about strategies for varying lengths of sentences in both prose and verse.
15) The entire writing workshop took just under two hours.
Here is the entire handout that I prepared, along with a poem that I wrote several years ago using Gerald Stern's poem as a prompt.
WRITING STUNNING SENTENCES: THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT
Examples from How to Write Stunning Sentences by Nina Schuyler ed.
Chapter 2
Sunil Yapa: The Long Sentence
Example 1: Using modifiers to add precision to an experience…
There were people hollering from every corner, marching people of all shapes and sizes, all body types and hairdos, an assortment of clothing choices and fashion accessories to express their personalities…
Example 2: Using modifiers to define a character…
This woman with ambiguously light brown skin, with green eyes as bright as any sea, who at one time ran a sort of illegal animal shelter behind her off-the-grid house on an unnamed island beyond the city, who journeyed here with four friends in an Econoline van, the four of them eating sandwiches of sprouts and beans, this pretty girl in laced black boots who wore black jeans and a loose white shirt, the sleeves rolled to the shoulder like some kind of back-alley tough—she had the kindest of smiles, a smile which creased her mouth and lit those green eyes and which you could see were she not currently wearing a full-face black gas mask.
Example 3: Using parentheticals and repetition to carry more information…
He had scheduled nine hundred on-duty officers. Now they were looking at upward of fifty thousand protesters in the street and four hundred delegates—four hundred delegates from one hundred and thirty five countries who may or may not speak English—to safely shepherd from the Sheraton Hotel to their meeting at the convention center.
WRITING PROMPTS
1. Start with an expletive construction—“There is,” “There are,” “It is,” ‘It was.” Note: you don’t want to use too many of these types of sentences because they are relatively passive. Whatever follows after your opening expletive is your subject. Now start modifying the subject, adding precision, details, images, as Yapa does with this sentence “There were people hollering from every corner, marching people of all shapes and sizes, all body types and hairdos, an assortment of clothing choices…”
2. Pick one of your characters. Begin your sentence with this character, as Yapa does with “This woman.” Now begin to modify it, describing your character physically. In this same sentence, add the word “who” and include some of your character’s past history, as Yapa did with the clause “who at one time ran a sort of illegal animal shelter behind her off-the-grid house on an unnamed island beyond the city.”
3. Is there something you want to emphasize in your sentence? Use repetition, as Yapa does in the sentence with the parenthetical that repeats “four hundred delegates.” By doing this, you focus the reader’s attention on this detail, and if you’ve picked the right detail, you’ve probably raised the stakes.
4. Do you need to slow your sentence down, so the reader has time to absorb it? To vary your syntax? Try a parenthetical, as Yapa does with the sentence, “Now they were looking at upward of fifty thousand protesters in the street and four hundred delegates—four hundred delegates from one hundred and thirty five countries who may or may not speak English…”
Chapter 14
Melinda Moustakis: Ellipses
Example 1: Images without the verb…
The silver of cleaned knives and metal tables, the silver of slabs of fish, of fish heads, eyes still with shock, mouths cocked open.
Example 2: The powerful partial…
Nerves and muscles twitch. Stand, they twitch, when she rests. Rest, they twitch, when she stands. Sleeping is more work than working. To sleep is to unlearn. Uncut every cut. Unknife every knife. Unline every line. Unmouth every mouth. But not everything can be undone.
WRITING PROMPTS
1.Write a sentence with 3, 4, 5 nouns—but no verb, as Moustaskis does in this sentence, “The silver of cleaned knives and metal tables, the silver of slabs of fish, of fish heads, eyes still with shock, mouths cocked open.”
2. Take a look at the list you wrote in prompt #1. Can you repeat words for emphasis, as Moustaskis does with “silver” and “fish?” Can you add alliteration, emphasizing a particularly sound? Do you want to create a harsh feeling? If so, add plosives, b/d/k/g/t/p. A soft, comforting feeling? Try the sibilants, such as “s” or “sh.”
3. Try writing a series of short sentences that begin with the same word or prefix, as Moustakis does with the series, “Uncut every cut. Unknife every knife, unline every line. Unmouth every mouth.” You’ve created a great build to your final sentence, which should break the rhythm as Moustakis does with her final sentence, “But not everything can be undone, with her final word, “undone,” echoing the other words in the pattern.
WRITING ONE-SENTENCE POEMS
Example by Gerald Stern:
Winter Thirst
I grew up with bituminous in my mouth
and sulfur smelling like rotten eggs and I
first started to cough because my lungs were like cardboard,
and what we called snow was gray with black flecks
that were like glue when it came to snowballs and made
them hard and crusty, though we still ate the snow
anyhow, and as for filth, well, start with
smoke, I carried it with me I know everywhere
and someone sitting beside me in New York or Paris
would know where I came from, we would go in for dinner—
red meat loaf or brown choucroute—and he would
guess my hill, and we would talk about soot
and what a dirty neck was like and how
the white collar made a fine line;
and I told him how we pulled heavy wagons
and loaded boxcars every day from five
to one A.M. and how good it was walking
empty-handed to the no. 69 streetcar
and how I dreamed of my bath and how the water
was black and soapy then and what the void
was like and how a candle instructed me.
From American Sonnets (W.W. Norton, 2002)
WRITING PROMPT
Write a one-page poem as one sentence, using parentheticals, adding modifiers and repetition, beginning the first line with “I grew up with…” or “There were people…” or “This woman…” or “This man…”
Example of poem written by Terry Lucas, beginning with the line:
"I grew up with __________in my mouth..."
Addicted
I grew up with diesel in my mouth,
aroma of hobo coffee boiling on the stove,
poured into my father's Stanley thermos--
I was addicted by age six, stealing
slurpy sips, testing the temp
before passing the chrome cup
across the doghouse, riding shotgun
in a Freightliner cab-over--my father's eyes
always tending to the road, left
hand on the wheel, the right flicking
twin stick shifts, as he ran
the 250 Cummins through the gears,
before taking a swallow of the steaming brew,
then passing it back and resting his palm on the knob
ticking to the rhythm of the toothed transmission--all one song
that lifted like a carnival ride, then decelerated
with mechanical whine, entering town
after facade town, fiction after fiction.
By Terry Lucas
By Terry Lucas
From In This Room (CW Books, 2016).
was born in the Midwest, grew up in New Mexico, and has lived in the San Francisco bay area for two decades. Terry's work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets 2012, Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Great River Review, New Millennium Writings, and The Comstock Review. His work has garnered seven Pushcart Prize nominations. He is the winner of the 2014 Crab Orchard Review Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. His chapbook, Altar Call, was a winner in the the 2013 San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival, and appears in the Anthology, Diesel. His chapbook, If They Have Ears to Hear, won the 2012 Copperdome Poetry Chapbook Contest, and is available from Southeast Missouri State University Press. His full-length poetry collections are In This Room (CW Books, 2016) and Dharma Rain (Saint Julian Press, 2017). Terry is a 2008 poetry MFA graduate of New England College. When he is not writing he is teaching as a regular speaker in the Dominican University Low-Residency MFA Program and as a free-lance writing coach. For more information about Terry and his work see www.terrylucas.com.
Monday, January 14, 2019
Prartho Sereno: Indian Rope Trick
In the opening poem of Indian Rope Trick, “We Can Stop Asking,” Sereno lays out what’s at stake in this collection. These poems grapple with the pull of time on everything in the flow of existence, inevitably carrying us all toward death and beyond, like the Ganges sweeping along “…miniature boats / from her banks, heaped with marigolds / making the river sob purple and orange.” But, the poet reminds us, our journey is not as straightforward as getting sick and old and dying at river’s end: “…time passes like smoke—a pungent furl / of nearly nothing, more delicate than silk.” Even so, we desire to turn the mystery into something more palpable, more useful:
We would like to sew a dress from it
and wear it to the wedding. We would like
to make a tent of it to carry on our backs.
Then in the final stanza, Sereno transposes her metaphors into similes, and shifts her nouns to verbs, underscoring our inability to capture time’s essence, and emphasizing its action on us, rather than contemplating its characteristics:
But time is not a river or smoke.
It’s more like the billow and sway
the smoke and river do. More like
the surge and swell of morning light—
a sneaker wave aimed for the shore,
a hunger in the water that wants us,
every last one of us, back at sea.
This is an appropriate ending to an apt opening poem. The “hunger in the water” provides a backdrop of longing for the specificity Sereno’s images provide in poems that follow. In “The First Rule” we encounter “the hairs on your head,” “the snow flakes filling the pines,” “a river, riotous with alligators, / a migratory cloud of monarchs,” and a “lone whale lost at sea.” In “My Daughter Falls in Love,” we find “the rustle of wingbeats in the air,” and “ a raindrop on the head of a pin, / …almost too much for us to bear.” This haunting and gorgeous language works toward the climax of section I, the title poem:
Indian Rope Trick
Steps have to be followed, but sometimes
they can wonder away from you.
--from a student essay
Steps have to be followed, but sometimes
they can wonder away from you.
--from a student essay
It’s the mystery’s favorite trick: weaving
the intricate rope of someone’s life, then
lifting it for them to climb and somewhere
near the top…disappear.
Two weeks ago my brother told me
he’d shot nine holes. Pain was lousy, he said,
but went on to try out punchlines he’d been
practicing for his meeting with the Maker.
I’m not afraid to die, he said
with that curious wonder he had
since the diagnosis. But this time
he added he had no regrets.
None worth counting, anyway.
I’d taken my phone on my walk and was talking
to him from the mountain, at the level of ravens
and hawks. He’d had a wonderful life, he said,
which caused the rope of it to rise and grow taut
so we could see it in all its color: There in his yellow
cowboy pajamas with his champion Alaskan yoyo.
There in the glow of his cherry-bomb days.
There at the helm of the stolen tractor on a joyride
over the gold club greens. And look: now he’s doing
figure eights on his forklift in the basement of Kodak.
Now he’s blasting off, bottle-rocket-style, to
international VP. See him there in Paris and Philly?
See him adrift on South Carolina’s inlet seas?
Here come the whole buzzing swarm
of friends drawn in by the honey of his ease.
Ah…we seem to have followed that rope
right up through the clouds.
I couldn’t have asked for more, he said.
And his exhale filled the valley
So the hawks lifted up on the rising air.
And we said goodbye.
I hate to point out my only quibble with Sereno’s mostly masterful book with an example from the title poem, but I must. As in the actual Indian rope trick, where a stand of rope is suspended in the air without visible support, while a person pulls herself up and out of sight, the trick in making a good poem is in using just enough language for clarity, without sacrificing mystery. For this reader, the final line is not only unnecessary, but actually detracts from that mystery by stating something better left unsaid. If the poem were to end on “so the hawks lifted up on the rising air,” I would have been both satisfied, and left aching for more. Better too little than too much, in my opinion.
The few places where Sereno’s poems stray, it’s not for lack of gorgeous language, fresh imagery, or interesting narrative, it’s for including just one image, one line or, in the case of “Piano,” one stanza too much. “Piano” is one of my favorite poems in the collection. It has a dark narrative arc about a boy who played the piano next door until he died. The story flows perfectly across its tight stanzas that eventually rip apart in stanza three to enact what must be a sibling practicing scales, showing the same “hesitation” and “plunge” of notes from a beginner by spacing the words seemingly at random on the page. All the while the poet is
…eating [her] lunch in the garden—
soup and lettuce, last night’s fish.
The book whose plot can’t hold me
lies open in my lap, when, after a gap
that seems to signal the recital’s end,
the instrument somehow
catches its breath and through
its hundred vocal chords sets loose
a winged thing—a music deep and holy,
as if every c-minor, b-flat, g-sharp—
every chord—has been summoned
to sound again.
A beautiful poem that ends on the high point of emotional intensity, allowing the space below it to echo the disappearing act of the Indian rope trick, and all emptiness and loss. But, no. The poem continues:
As if the grief-knot has come
undone and love has been freed
to pour down again
over us and our parched gardens
like summer rain.
There is nothing wrong with these lines in themselves. It is just, in the opinion of this reviewer, that the stanza is a kind of denouement. It is explaining to us—poetsplaining?—what it is we have just read and experienced in the previous stanza. And I prefer my poetry straight, undiluted, without a net to break my fall.
I am aware, however, that many readers do like their poems to end in a neatly tied bow, rather than to have loose strings, or in the case of Sereno, loose strands of rope, hanging about. And so I applaud the poet for not ending each poem in Indian Rope Trick in the same manner, managing to subvert readers’ expectations as to what will transpire in its final lines. And there are plenty of poems whose endings sound a note of mystery. “Notes from the Field” is emblematic of such a poem, albeit one whose ending is foreshadowed in the epigraph--necessary I think, in order to make sure that final "wonder" is not mistaken for a typo. In this poem, and in many others in Indian Rope Trick, Sereno achieves the balance that most poets and writers strive to achieve: mystery without opacity, and accessibility without blatant derivation or cliche. Thus, it can be read as an ars poetica, and an apt ending to this review.
Notes from the Field
And so we begin. Well, not exactly we, more like me
all by myself, taking my first step onto the field.
Blindfolded. If you listen to Science Friday, you know
where this is leading. It’s the same for everybody,
the researcher proclaimed this morning, giddy
with a certainty yet unknown to science: Blindfold
any person and aim her into an expanse of grass.
Soon enough she’ll be walking in circles. Yes!
the researcher says with relish: Everyone.
In decades of trials on the vast and motley they’ve yet
to find an exception. He’s dizzy with it: our profound
inability to walk a line. And I’m so there with him
in that dizzy. Well, not exactly there, of course,
but here where we started. And not exactly we
(I remind myself) but me in my little quorum of one.
But I’m procrastinating. Steps have to be followed.
Blindfolded. Without you. One foot at a time, though
I’m pretty sure they’ve already started to wonder away.
Indian Rope Trick by Prartho Sereno, Blue Light Press, 2018, $15.95 paper
Prartho Sereno is author of four poetry collections, including Elephant Raga, Call from Paris, and Causing a Stir: The Secret Lives & Loves of Kitchen Utensils (illustrated by the author). She is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Marin County, California and lives a little north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Indian Rope Trick is the winner of the 2018 Blue Light Book Award.
Prartho Sereno is author of four poetry collections, including Elephant Raga, Call from Paris, and Causing a Stir: The Secret Lives & Loves of Kitchen Utensils (illustrated by the author). She is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Marin County, California and lives a little north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Indian Rope Trick is the winner of the 2018 Blue Light Book Award.
was born in the Midwest, grew up in New Mexico, and has lived in the San Francisco bay area for two decades. Terry's work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets 2012, Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Great River Review, New Millennium Writings, and The Comstock Review. His work has garnered seven Pushcart Prize nominations. He is the winner of the 2014 Crab Orchard Review Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. His chapbook, Altar Call, was a winner in the the 2013 San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival, and appears in the Anthology, Diesel. His chapbook, If They Have Ears to Hear, won the 2012 Copperdome Poetry Chapbook Contest, and is available from Southeast Missouri State University Press. His full-length poetry collections are In This Room (CW Books, 2016) and Dharma Rain (Saint Julian Press, 2017). Terry is a 2008 poetry MFA graduate of New England College. When he is not writing he is teaching as a regular speaker in the Dominican University Low-Residency MFA Program and as a free-lance writing coach. For more information about Terry and his work see www.terrylucas.com.
Sunday, January 6, 2019
Michael Waters: The Dean of Discipline
The Dean of Discipline is an appropriate name for Waters’s twelfth poetry collection. Not only does the title character make its appearance in “Detention” as an administrator at “Christ the King HS,” where the narrator “…coaxed the Dean of Discipline / To make bad boys read books” instead of “stand[ing] face-to-wall hands clasped behind back[s],” it is also an appropriate description of the poet. This Dean of Poetic Discipline, like the former, holds to principle while allowing for evolving tactics of control. Emblematic of this collection’s negotiation between loose and tight properties, each of the fourteen decasyllabic, precisely-crafted lines is allowed to breathe, with extra spaces between words serving the function of commas, but providing a more relaxed meter and visual rendering of pauses. And instead of depending upon end rhyme to top off a lock-step melody, Waters mostly deploys his camouflaged, slant rhymes inside the lines’ interior, where they do their work of creating music undercover.
In a 1998 interview with John Hoppenthaler, Michael Waters traced his evolution as a poet from the early belief “that it was the power of the poet that made the poems, and it was the poet’s idea that informed the poem,” coming to believe “more in the power of language rather than in the power of the poet... that the poem might suggest where it wanted to go, and it would do so through language, through word choice, rather than through idea.” In multiple books since his early poems of the ’70s, Waters has written poems that embody that belief with a muscular, musical diction that is at the forefront of his lyrical narrative poems. There are none better being written today.
The Dean of Discipline, while in places departing from the syllabic and “written by ear” prosodies hovering around ten syllables per line that readers have grown to expect from this poet at the height of his powers, never swerves from looking to language to explore universal longings through the particularities of human existence. In “Cannibal,” for example, a poem that begins “Among the survivors of the Donner / Party—idiom’s black sense of humor—,” with images of “…flesh / Flaked between the fluted bones of a wrist,” and “charcoaled tongue or poached heart,” quickly moves to … “Jeffrey Dahmer ladl[ing] a young man’s head into a pot, / The water simmering, lightly salted, / New potatoes, leeks, and scrawny carrot / Floating past eyes uplifted toward Heaven.” Two-thirds into the poem, Waters shifts hunger’s attention away from body as food, to body as lover:
How my mouth covets your body,
Teeth grazing buttocks, shoulders, each nipple.
How I want to cradle you inside me
As you clasp me within, to celebrate
Our secular, primeval communion.
The first twenty-two lines are uniformly decasyllabic. In the twenty-third, final line, the poem reaches for something beyond with an eleventh syllable. It is noteworthy that the only word containing more than one syllable—the word that makes the line more than ten—is “poems.” And yet when reading it aloud, “poems” can be voiced quickly enough to sound as one syllable. Thus it is a pivotal word, living in two worlds at once, pushing the syllable count over ten, but not upsetting the baseline rhythm of the poem. This one word becomes the hinge that allows the poem to extend beyond itself, while remaining true to itself.
This enactment of the idea by the form is not coincidental. It is primary to the way Waters writes, and one secret to how his poems throb so palpably with desire, both particular and universal. The dedication “for Mihaela” “…inscribe[s] this desire / Bite mark by bite mark” into particularity. The poem itself, the very ink scripted on the page, and the language read into the air, joins itself to a different “you”—all who would bring the same hunger to its reading. Understood in this way, the poem can be seen as an ars poetica: “What can I do but write these poems for you?” It is as if we are listening in on a private conversation, only to discover that the conversation is about us too.
Waters crafts his placement of poems as carefully as he does each line. Across the page from “Cannibal” is a poem titled “lesire —>.” With a decasyllabic first baseline, around which the remaining lines pulse above and below—and often return to—ten syllables, the poem begins with a reflection on the previous poem, echoing the poet’s other poems that begin with longing and plunge inevitably into darker places: “I keep thinking the meaning of the word / Must be desire, so want to follow its arrow / To wherever it’s pointing….” Then halfway through the poem we encounter “But the meaning of the word is Exit, / Meaning, therefore, death, that space I’d rather / Avoid….” The remainder of the poem is a sample of Waters’s sparsely used, but always-effective combination—a visual cue bordering on concrete poetry, followed with an onomatopoetic diction that makes for a knockout punch.
Avoid,
an absence, abyss, an abscess
Raw as a screech chalking a blackboard
Or, louder and rippling outward,
Zero’s ceaseless, starless, staticky buzz,
Unlike the seizure-inducing strobe
I keep pretending desire is.
Reading this stanza aloud, one experiences the poem with multiple senses. The eye sees the void—that absence of words in the blank line—slightly before the throat feels the gap in the flow of air with each of the sibilant sounds in “ab-sence,” “aby-ss,” and “ab-scess,” carrying into the next line with the necessary break in the voice between “screech” and “chalking.” The ear is introduced to the beginning sound work that is sustained throughout the stanza—so much so that if it were not read aloud, one might miss some of the Zs in “Zero’s…buzz,” and “the seizure-inducing strobe” that “desire is.” Waters leaves no detail unattended. I cannot conceive it an accident that the only line with ten syllables in this stanza is the antepenultimate line, “Zero’s ceaseless, starless, staticky buzz.” After eight lines of at least ten syllables, in the final lines, the poet varies syllabic count, much as a concert pianist employs different dynamic levels for contrast and emphasis—in this instance with a decrescendo to mezzo forte, a crescendo back to forte, and finally another decrescendo in the ultimate line.
In addition to the pleasure I always get from reading Waters’s lyrical narrative poems that sing, revealing under closer examination a precision of craft and depth of feeling that is not achieved by many, the joy for this reviewer is that Waters is not content to write book after book utilizing only his signature moves. In The Dean of Discipline, the poet broadens his repertoire with poems that expand prosodic devices previously dabbled in, introducing nonce forms that remain true to his poetic sensibilities.
Although he has used the drop-down line effectively in many poems, I have not seen Waters begin a collection with a zipper poem—two columns of offset lines that work three ways. Each line can not only be read across the page, but each column can be read down the page as well. Even here, Waters gives language free reign, not compromising word choice in favor of formal rigor, each column moving down the page with a stumbling kind of sense, as if the vodka tonics were taking hold. Even within, or perhaps because of this form, word choice and language seem to be primary. Rather than an experimental exercise in form, the poem’s structure seems to emanate from its diction and narrative thrust. The opening lines are sufficient to make this point:
Kim, Kathleen, & I
stumbled toward the hammock,
Careful not to spill
our communal vodka tonic.
We flopped onto our backs
& let the netting sway,
Three fiery tongues
below two venerable oaks.
Two foxes yawped
two fields away.
Uncoupled,
we traded sorrows, mild jokes,
Lists of lovers—
three bodies swapping intimacies
In a hammock
wide enough for two.
The obvious step down before the threesome “stumbled toward the hammock;” the “Three fiery tongues” as cognates for the three separate poems within the poem; the swaying back and forth between the lines of the poem as enactment of the hammock; the coupling and uncoupling of the lines in the same way the three bodies do “In a hammock // wide enough for two,”—all are perfect examples of the delightful enactment of content with form.
If this first poem of the book, titled “Novae” (can the dedication, “for K,” refer to Kim, Kathlene, or both?), is a new kind of ars poetica for Waters, the final one is more typical. “Poetry” is a reiteration of the poet’s commitment to the line, to the genre, and to writing it as a full-time, perhaps I should say as an all-the-time, endeavor—not merely “ris[ing] in the night to pencil words,” but keeping watch, “hunched on narrow ledges / Sighing bird sounds…this is where poetry originates.” And we readers are so lucky that Waters remains vigilant and hungry on that ledge, always ready to scavenge some “flash below” and translate it into poetry.
Poetry
—filches dreams from birds,
Pigeons with twisted grins or crooked feet,
Their thumb-thick heads tucked under wings
On cornices overlooking traffic
That throbs and sparks along the avenue
And shivers vibrations up building walls.
These birds drowse despite fumes and noise—
Never vexed by money, or sex,
Or how thoughts wane in lazy minds.
They don’t rise in the night to pencil words,
But remain hunched on narrow ledges
Sighing bird sounds—coos and trills—
Which are translated without knowledge
Of avian language by insomniacs
Whose brains hiss with fire as they scrawl
Gnomic verse in the blunt circle of light
Thrown down on the desk near the window.
A flash below…a flax seed beckoning…
This is where poetry originates
Some nights, swiping the reveries of birds
Who quit their perch as morning commences
To scavenge the bus stop for croissant flakes
Fallen from plump lips of dazed commuters.
One finds a button. Another plucks up
A keychain bead—nothing to be eaten,
But how chic it speaks in the busted beak.
The Dean of Discipline by Michael Waters, The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018, $15.95 paper
was born in the Midwest, grew up in New Mexico, and has lived in the San Francisco bay area for two decades. Terry's work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets 2012, Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Great River Review, New Millennium Writings, and The Comstock Review. His work has garnered seven Pushcart Prize nominations. He is the winner of the 2014 Crab Orchard Review Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. His chapbook, Altar Call, was a winner in the the 2013 San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival, and appears in the Anthology, Diesel. His chapbook, If They Have Ears to Hear, won the 2012 Copperdome Poetry Chapbook Contest, and is available from Southeast Missouri State University Press. His full-length poetry collections are In This Room (CW Books, 2016) and Dharma Rain (Saint Julian Press, 2017). Terry is a 2008 poetry MFA graduate of New England College. When he is not writing he is teaching as a regular speaker in the Dominican University Low-Residency MFA Program and as a free-lance writing coach. For more information about Terry and his work see www.terrylucas.com.
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