National (USA) Poetry Month

[Tzara]

Today's poem is another favorite (and certainly my favorite poem by Ezra Pound). It originally appeared in Pound's Cathay (1915), a collection of "translations" (probably better described as adaptations) of classic Chinese poems:

The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
Ezra Pound

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chōkan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever, and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed
You went into far Ku-tō-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me.
I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
....As far as Chō-fū-Sa.

.................................By Rihaku

Source: Selected Poems (1957)​

The "Rihaku" who Pound credits as the author of the original poem is better known in the USA as Li Po or, sometimes, Li Bai, who lived from 701 to 762 and is recognized as one of the greatest of classical Chinese poets. The name "Rihaku" comes from Japanese—my understanding being that Japanese kanji, one of the three main writing systems in Japanese, uses Chinese characters and the name difference is due to how the characters of the poet's name are pronounced in Japanese as opposed to Chinese. The Chinese-American poet and novelist Ha Jin gives this explanation about the various names of the original poet and how Pound ended up using a Japanese version of the name: "In English, in addition to 'Li Po,' he once had another pair of names, Li T'ai Po and Rihaku. The first is a phonetic transcription of his original Chinese name, Li Taibai, the name his parents gave him. And Ezra Pound, in his Cathay—his collected translations of classical Chinese poetry—called Li Bai 'Rihaku' because Pound had translated those poems from the notes left by the American scholar Ernest Fenollosa, who had originally studied Li Bai’s poetry in Japanese when he was in Japan" (see "The Poet with Many Names—and Many Deaths").

As mentioned above, the poem is more of an adaptation than a "true" translation and is usually attributed in print to being "by" Pound. Wikipedia comments of Cathay that "the volume's 15 poems are seen less as strict translations and more as new pieces in their own right; and, in his bold translations of works from a language he was unfamiliar with, Pound set the stage for modernist translations."

In any case, it is in my opinion a superlative poem.

Tomorrow I'll post a more direct translation of the poem for comparison.

 

[Levitating_Bed]

I liked this one a lot Tzara. It's beautiful, and by the time I finshed it I could picture the girl I had a crush on in fourth grade. There's so much perfect ache here - not to mention that it might be the most emo thing ever to be so fragile that you could be hurt by paired butterflies.

It made me smile to think of someone posting this to a Craiglist missed connections board.

I'm with Tod and Calli in thanking you for doing these. My offer to gladly take your poetry class, should you ever be so inclined, still stands.

And I know I'm late to it, but Angie will be glad to hear that Ted Berrigan's Complete Poems is on it's way to my lap/nightstand. That one hit me just as hard as it did the rest of you. It's nice to have been reading for (slightly more than) four decades and then still be able to find something that makes the whole world new.

 

[Angeline]

I liked this one a lot Tzara. It's beautiful, and by the time I finshed it I could picture the girl I had a crush on in fourth grade. There's so much perfect ache here - not to mention that it might be the most emo thing ever to be so fragile that you could be hurt by paired butterflies.

It made me smile to think of someone posting this to a Craiglist missed connections board.

I'm with Tod and Calli in thanking you for doing these. My offer to gladly take your poetry class, should you ever be so inclined, still stands.

And I know I'm late to it, but Angie will be glad to hear that Ted Berrigan's Complete Poems is on it's way to my lap/nightstand. That one hit me just as hard as it did the rest of you. It's nice to have been reading for (slightly more than) four decades and then still be able to find something that makes the whole world new.

Ted Berrigan is awesome. I first read him in college and have been a fan ever since. You'll have to let us know what you think of the sonnets. I find them wildly innovative, surreal, touching, sometimes hilarious.

Here he is reading Sonnet 36.

https://youtu.be/uVGsxE7hErU

 

[Tzara]

Here is a translation (or, if one treats Pound's version as a translation, a different translation) of "The River-Merchant's Wife" that I posted yesterday. Notice that here there are two parts to the poem, though there is some controversy about the second part which I will discuss below:

The Ballad of Ch'ang-kan
(The Sailor's Wife)
Li Po

1

I with my hair fringed on my forehead,
Breaking blossom, was romping outside:

And you rode up on your bamboo steed,
Round garden beds we juggled green plums;
Living alike in Ch'ang-kan village
We were both small, without doubts or guile. . .

When at fourteen I became your bride
I was bashful and could only hide
My face and frown against a dark wall:
A thousand calls, not once did I turn;

I was fifteen before I could smile,
Long to be one, like dust with ashes:
You'd ever stand by pillar faithful,
I'd never climb the Watcher's Mountain!

I am sixteen but you went away
Through Ch'ü-t'ang Gorge, passing Yen-yü Rock
And when in June when it should not be passed,
Where the gibbons cried high above you.

Here by the door out farewell footprints,
They one by one are growing green moss,
The moss so thick I cannot sweep it,
And fallen leaves: Autumn winds came soon!

September now: yellow butterflies
Flying in pairs in the west garden;
And what I feel hurts me in my heart,
Sadness to make a pretty face old. . .

Late or early coming from San-pa,
Before you come, write me a letter:
To welcome you, don't talk of distance,
I'll go as far as the Long Wind Sands!

2

I remember, in my maiden days
I did not know the world and its ways;
Until I wed a man of Ch'ang-kan:
Now, on the sands, I want for the winds. . .

And when in June the south winds are fair,
I think: Pa-ling, it's soon you'll be there;
September now, and west winds risen,
I wish you'll leave the Yangtze Haven;

But, go or come, it's ever sorrow
For when we meet, you part tomorrow:
You'll make Hsiang-tan in how many days?
I dreamt I crossed the winds and the waves

Only last night, when the wind went mad
And tore down trees on the waterside
And waters raced where the dark wind ran
(Oh, where was then my travelling man?)

That we both rode dappled cloudy steeds
Eastward to bliss in the Isle of Orchids:
A drake and duck among the green reeds,
Just as you've seen on a painted screen. . .

Pity me now, when I was fifteen
My face was pink as a peach's skin:
Why did I wed a travelling man?
Waters my grief. . . my grief in the wind!

Source: Li Po and Tu Fu, translated by Arthus Cooper (1973)​

The most obvious difference between the versions is that Pound only presents the first section. This could be because the second section was long considered to not be the work of Li Po, but rather that of another poet. Cooper, in his notes accompanying his translation notes that "modern critics are increasingly inclined to accept it as his [Li Po's] work" and to consider the two sections together as a single, longer poem.

I, though not qualified to make a judgment on the matter, prefer to think of the second section as not by Li Po, but that's because it seems to me inferior poetry (though that may in part be due to this translation, which seems sing-songy at times, almost like a weepy Country & Western ballad).

The two versions are largely similar in detail, though what images are emphasized are different, and Pound seems to have perhaps invented some details (for example, the bit in line 2 of "River-Merchant" where the narrator speaks about "play[ing] about the front gate," though again that may simply have been omitted by Cooper in his translation. Pound's version is, I think, a vastly superior poem, but I'm not able to compare his English version with Li Po's Chinese original, so that's also at best a culturally biased judgment.

Cooper does make an interesting comment about the form of the poem, that it is a persona poem, where the author adopts the voice of someone else: "The River Merchant or River Captain of the poem is, I think without a doubt, Li Po himself; so that the poem is a love-poem to his wife but written as if from her to him, which was a common Chinese practice at the time."

Tomorrow, a poem that is a kind of sequel to this poem, at least in spirit.

 

[Tzara]

I think of today's poem as a kind of sequel or follow-up to the two previous poems (or two different versions of the same poem), though it is by a contemporary American poet:

Wan Chu's Wife in Bed
Richard Jones

Wan Chu, my adoring husband,
has returned from another trip
selling trinkets in the provinces.
He pulls off his lavender shirt
as I lay naked in our bed,
waiting for him. He tells me
I am the only woman he’ll ever love.
He may wander from one side of China
to the other, but his heart
will always stay with me.
His face glows in the lamplight
with the sincerity of a boy
when I lower the satin sheet
to let him see my breasts.
Outside, it begins to rain
on the cherry trees
he planted with our son,
and when he enters me with a sigh,
the storm begins in earnest,
shaking our little house.
Afterward, I stroke his back
until he falls asleep.
I’d love to stay awake all night
listening to the rain,
but I should sleep, too.
Tomorrow Wan Chu will be
a hundred miles away
and I will be awake all night
in the arms of Wang Chen,
the tailor from Ming Pao,
the tiny village downriver.

Source: The Blessing: New and Selected Poems (2000)​

While I haven't found any reference that indicates Jones had the Li Po poem specifically in mind when he wrote this, it certainly seems to me to be intended as an ironic response to, particularly, Pound's version. Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, in their poetry writing guide The Poet's Companion, describe the poem as "in the style of early Chinese poetry, at least as it sounds rendered in English" and provocatively suggest that the "surprising and amusing revelation of the wife's betrayal makes [Addonizio and Laux] question Wan Chu's declarations of love as well."

Kind of a fun poem, I think, and an especially well-written one.



Just five more days (counting today) in NaPoWriMo! I know my fingers are ready to drop, not to mention my ingenuity severely flagging in coming up with something to write. But we're close. . .

 

[Tzara]

I had intended to post a different poem today, but I happened to be in a bookshop yesterday (I spent a lot of time noodling around bookshops) and picked up Dialogues with Rising Tides by Kelli Russell Agodon, which had just been published. (According to Amazon, the lay-down date—the date on which bookstores are first supposed to place the book out for sale—for the book is actually today, so I guess I picked up my copy a day early.)

Anyway, this poem was on the back cover of the book and pretty well knocked me out:

Magpies Recognize Themselves in the Mirror
Kelli Russell Agodon

The evening sounds like a murder
of magpies and we're replacing our cabinet knobs
because we can't change the world, but we can
change our hardware. America breaks my heart
some days, and some days it breaks itself in two.
I watched a woman having a breakdown
in the mall today and when the security guard
tried to help her, what I felt was all of us
peeking from her purse as she threw it
across the floor into Forever 21. And yes,
the walls felt like another way to hold us
and when she finally stopped crying,
I heard her say to the fluorescent lighting,
Some days the sky is too bright. And like that
we were her flock in our black coats
and white sweaters, some of us reaching
our wings to her and some of us flying away.

Dialogues with Rising Tides (2021)​

The title comes from an article Agodon had been reading, about how magpies have demonstrated the ability to recognize their reflected image as being themselves—something that it was previously thought only mammals could do. It seems to me to be about how some of us look toward others and identify (or at least empathize) with them while others of us simply want to move away from behavior we find unpleasant or trying. That we are sometimes part of the first group and sometimes part of the second is simply human, and complicated.

For commentary on the poem I originally was going to post, I was going to talk about revision in poetry, as it had been published in at least four quite different versions. This poem has also appeared in an alternate (and earlier) version and it's interesting to look at the changes Agodon made to the original text (which you can view at the Academy of American Poets site here). The changes aren't that extensive—a few words are changed (e.g. "evening" for "night"), a tense switched ("have" to "having"), the lineation has been fussed with some—and it doesn't appear to me to have altered the sense of the poem much, if at all. But it's useful to look at the changes the poet made and ask yourself why she might have made them. It helps to think about your own poetry and what kinds of effects you might achieve by tweaking the text.

You can, by the way, hear Agodon read the earlier version of the poem on the Academy of American Poets Page referenced above.



Three more days!

 

[Tzara]

As you all probably know, I am fond of form poetry—particularly of forms considered the more difficult ones. When talking about difficult forms, the sestina is usually one of the forms mentioned, though I personally don't think they are all that difficult, especially if one doesn't try to write in a fixed meter. The sestina and its derivatives have appeared frequently in this year's NaPoWriMo thread, with tritinas by several people (Remec wrote some good ones), an excellent pentina by Angie, and the full-blown form done really well by Champers.

So here's a sestina, albeit one critical of sestinas:

My Confessional Sestina
Dana Gioia

Let me confess. I'm sick of these sestinas
written by youngsters in poetry workshops
for the delectation of their fellow students,
and then published in little magazines
that no one reads, not even the contributors
who at least in this omission show some taste.

Is this merely a matter of personal taste?
I don't think so. Most sestinas
are such dull affairs. Just ask the contributors
the last time they finished one outside of a workshop,
even the poignant one on herpes in that new little magazine
edited by their most brilliant fellow student.

Let's be honest. It has become a form for students,
an exercise to build technique rather than taste
and the official entry blank into the little magazines—
because despite its reputation, a passable sestina
isn't very hard to write, even for kids in workshops
who care less about being poets than contributors.

Granted nowadays everyone is a contributor.
My barber is currently a student
in a rigorous correspondence school workshop.
At lesson six he can already taste
success having just placed his own sestina
in a national tonsorial magazine.

Who really cares about most little magazines?
Eventually not even their own contributors
who having published a few preliminary sestinas
send their work East to prove they're no longer students.
They need to be recognized as the new arbiters of taste
so they can teach their own graduate workshops.

Where will it end? This grim cycle of workshops
churning out poems for little magazines
no one honestly finds to their taste?
This ever-lengthening column of contributors
scavenging the land for more students
teaching them to write their boot camp sestinas?

Perhaps there is an afterlife where all contributors
have two workshops, a tasteful little magazine, and sexy students
who worshipfully memorize their every sestina.

Source: 99 Poems: New and Selected (2016)​

While Gioia's poem is obviously meant ironically, I think he does hit on some truths about the form, and about what you might call the "poetry industry" of MFA programs and low-circulation magazines. (The line "kids in workshops / who care less about being poets than contibutors" seems pretty dead on accurate to me.) But his example is flawless—it reads very smoothly and naturally, it doesn't draw undue attention to the end words, and it avoids the trick of substituting synonyms or homonyms for the end words (e.g. meet/meat/mete).

Now maybe some of you will get inspired and write a double sestina or even a triple sestina, if you really want to wow us.

 

[Tzara]

Another type of poetry that I have long had a fascination for is ekphrastic poetry, or poems about works of art. (Ekphrasis is "the use of detailed description of a work of visual art as a literary device.")

Today I'm posting two different ekphrastic poems by two of the greatest English language poets of the twentieth century. Both poems are based on the same painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus:

http://english.emory.edu/classes/paintings&poems/icarus.jpg

This painting was long attributed to Pieter Brueghel the Elder, though the general opinion now is that it is a copy of a lost work of Brueghel's, in part because the painting is in oil on canvas, whereas Brueghel's other paintings on canvas are executed in tempura. The painting hangs in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, in Brussels.

The first poem is by W. H. Auden, originally published in 1939:

Musée des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Source: Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957 (1966)​

The second, by William Carlos Williams, appeared in his final volume of poetry, Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems, in 1962:

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
William Carlos Williams

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

Source: Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962)​

I think both are outstanding poems, though I think the Auden poem is one of the greatest poems of the last century, and it has long been an especial favorite of mine. The styles are, of course, very different, but I think it's interesting that both emphasize the nonchalance of the various figures in the painting to Icarus falling out of the sky (which the painting does as well, making his figure quite small and placed well off to the side).

One day to go.

 

[Angeline]

Another type of poetry that I have long had a fascination for is ekphrastic poetry, or poems about works of art. (Ekphrasis is "the use of detailed description of a work of visual art as a literary device.")
....

Excellent juxtaposition and, like our same title challenges here, excellent examples of different eyes looking at the same thing. I'm with you btw: the Auden poem is swoon worthy.

 

[Tzara]

I like to end these National Poetry Month posts with a poem I think is an especially fine one. I was originally thinking about posting the Auden poem from yesterday, but decided to post this one by Richard Hugo instead:

Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg
Richard Hugo

You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he’s done.

The principal supporting business now
is rage. Hatred of the various grays
the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,
The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls
who leave each year for Butte. One good
restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out.
The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,
a dance floor built on springs—
all memory resolves itself in gaze,
in panoramic green you know the cattle eat
or two stacks high above the town,
two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse
for fifty years that won’t fall finally down.

Isn’t this your life? That ancient kiss
still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat
so accurate, the church bell simply seems
a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?
Don’t empty houses ring? Are magnesium
and scorn sufficient to support a town,
not just Philipsburg, but towns
of towering blondes, good jazz and booze
the world will never let you have
until the town you came from dies inside?

Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty
when the jail was built, still laughs
although his lips collapse. Someday soon,
he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.
You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself.
The car that brought you here still runs.
The money you buy lunch with,
no matter where it’s mined, is silver
and the girl who serves your food
is slender and her red hair lights the wall.

Source: Making Certain It Goes On: The Collected Poems of Richard Hugo (1984)​

Hugo was born in White Center, Washington, which is a small neighborhood just outside the city limits south and west of Seattle. He studied until Theodore Roethke at the University of Washington and worked as a technical writer at Boeing for a number of years before publishing his first book of poems in 1961. He then began teaching in the MFA program at the University of Montana, Missoula, which developed a reputation for being one of the stronger writing programs for poets during his tenure. His small book of writing lectures, The Triggering Town, is something of a standard text for student poets.

Missoula became a kind of haven for writers, especially mystery writers, while Hugo lived there. Hugo himself published one mystery novel and he persuaded James Crumley to take up detective fiction. Crumley's novel The Last Good Kiss (the title derived from "Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg") is considered by many to be the finest private detective novel written in the latter part of the twentieth century.

This poem is particularly meaningful to me, as my mother grew up in a mining town very similar to Philipsburg, though in the Idaho mountains rather than Montana. Visiting the area when I was younger, I was always impressed by how run-down and used up everything looked—you could tell that prosperity was well in the past and that the area and the people living there simply looked tired. For quite a long time, the one stoplight on Interstate 90 was found in the next town over, along with brothels that were legally tolerated until the early 1990s.

Anyway, thank you all for letting me indulge my fondness for talking about poems. I apologize for not responding to most of the comments people made, but trying to write this everyday and compose a poem each day for Calli's NaPoWriMo thread put kind of a strain on my time. I did read and appreciate the comments that were made.

I'm off to try and write one more poem, then soak my exhausted fingers in warm water or something.

Be well.

 

[Angeline]

Thank you Tzara. Not to embarrass you but you're pretty darn wonderful.

 

[Lyricalli]

I'm about four days behind in this thread, with every intention of catching up in a day or two, but I wanted to add my thank you, too. You've introduced me to new poetry and authors I'd like to read more from. And, you wrote a whole lot of good poetry, too!

 

[Piscator]

Thanks again for this wonderful thread - I'll keep coming back to it for the next 11 months.

 

[Angeline]

I know poetry month is over, but I came across an interesting article on sestinas and the role translation can play in them. Of course I had to share it here. There are some wonderful poems linked in it, too.

On Sestinas and Literary Translation

 

[Tzara]

Since 2019, I've celebrated National Poetry Month in the USA each year by posting a poem each day during April with some brief comments about why I liked it, or why I wanted to post it, or just some irrelevant comments that made me look like the poetic idiot that I am.

I'm not sure I'll be able to do a poem a day for this year's edition as I am recovering from outpatient surgery (which, yes, can hurt) and occupied with a class in philosophy of science (are quarks real or merely empirically helpful pseudocreations?).

Well, nevermind. Here's the poem I want to post today:

​

The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve​

Yi-Fen Chou​

​

Huh! That bumblebee looks ridiculous staggering its way​

​

across those blue flowers, the ones I can never​

remember the name of. Do you know the old engineer’s​

​

joke: that, theoretically, bees can’t fly? But they look so​

​

perfect together, like Absolute Purpose incarnate: one bee​

plus one blue flower equals about a billion​

​

years of symbiosis. Which leads me to wonder what it is​

​

I’m doing here, peering through a lens at the thigh-pouches​

stuffed with pollen and the baffling intricacies​

​

of stamen and pistil. Am I supposed to say something, add​

a soundtrack and voiceover? My life’s spent​

​

running an inept tour for my own sad swindle of a vacation​

​

until every goddamned thing’s reduced to botched captions​

and dabs of misinformation in fractured,​

​

not-quite-right English: Here sir, that’s the very place Jesus​

​

wept. The Colosseum sprouts and blooms with leftover seeds​

pooped by ancient tigers. Poseidon diddled​

​

Philomel in the warm slap of this ankle-deep surf to the dying​

stings of a thousand jellyfish. There, probably,​

​

atop yonder scraggly hillock, Adam should’ve said no to Eve.​

​

The Best American Poetry (2015)​

​

The publication of this poem in the prestigious annual anthology The Best American Poetry set off a shitstorm of controversy, because the "poet," Yi-Fen Chou, was not (as implied by the author's name) a Chinese (or Chinese-American) female poet, but a white guy from Indiana named Michael Derrick Hudson who used the pseudonym as a "strategy for 'placing' poems [that] has been quite successful for [him]."

Even worse than the accusations of "yellowface" and cultural appropriation that followed on the publication of the poem is the fact that the particular pseudonym chosen by Hudson was the name of one of his high school classmates. Imagine her dismay at being dragged into a literary brouhaha to which her only involvement is that some creepy guy from high school swiped her name because he felt being perceived as a person of color was to his advantage.

There is, of course, a lot more about this story, especially as it involves Sherman Alexie, the Spokane-Coeur d'Alene-Native American who was editor of that volume of the Best American Poetry series. It is easy enough to google if you're interested.

And to those of you doing the 30/30 poems for NaPoWriMo, my envy and congratulations.

See y'all tomorrow, probably.

 

[Piscator]

Thanks for sharing - just goes to show that colour envy isn't restricted to male genitalia

 

[Tzara]

If you have followed my comments at all over the last several years, you would know I am interested in "formal" poetry, i.e. poetry that is both rhymed and metrical. Light verse is typically rhymed and metrical and, as the Encyclopedia Britannica defines it is, "poetry on trivial or playful themes that is written primarily to amuse and entertain and that often involves the use of nonsense and wordplay".

Well.

I happen to like light verse, whatever its less-than-serious basis, and today point y'all at a poem by a master of the (sub)genre, X. J. Kennedy:

To Dorothy on Her Exclusion​

from The Guinness Book of World Records​

X. J. Kennedy​

​

Not being Breedlove, whose immortal skid​

Bore him for six charmed miles on screeching brakes;​

Not having whacked from Mieres to Madrid​

The longest-running hoop; at ducks and drakes​

The type whose stone drowns in a couple of skips​

Even if pitty-pats be counted plinkers;​

Smashing of face, but having launched no ships;​

Not of a kidney with beer’s foremost drinkers;​

​

Fewer the namesakes that display your brand​

Than Prout has little protons—yet you win​

The world with just a peerless laugh.​

I stand Stricken amazed: you merely settle chin​

Into a casual fixture of your hand​

And a uniqueness is, that hasn’t been.​

​

Source: In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems 1955-2007 (2007)​

OK. It's a "sort of" standard sonnet, rhymed abab cdcd efgfe(f?). Probably, "brand" is meant to rhyme with "laugh" and "hand," so the close is efefef.

Not that it matters.

The poem is a love poem, I think, to the author's wife Dorothy, talking about how she, while not being world-famous like Craig Breedlove, who lost a drogue chute while piloting his jet car to a world land speed record, and who suffered through an agonizingly long deceleration ending in a crash, or other people who have found their way into the Guiness Book of World Records, remains for the author "a uniqueness is, that hasn't been."

Prout, by the way, is the guy whose name became the basis of the name of the proton, apparently because of Ernest Rutherford.

It's a clever and amusing poem that ends up being a very sweet poem for his spouse.

Why I like it.

 

[Tzara]

Rhymed metrical poems are relatively rare in contemporary poetry; free verse is by far the dominant technique, to the point that young poets are sometimes discouraged from writing formal verse (light verse is the exception to this quasi-rule). One of the most accomplished poets ever to frequent the PF&D, TheRainMan, used to counsel Lit poets to stick to free verse.

There are good reasons for such advice. It is difficult enough to write a halfway decent poem without having to worry about rhymes or whether one has gotten one's meter right. And, as TRM used to say, formal verse put limitations on word choice that free verse did not.

That being said, I've always been interested in form poetry, perhaps partly because it is especially challenging to write (especially without sounding sing-song or nursery rhymish).

The poem I want to feature today is, I think, rather remarkable in that it is in a straightforward meter--iambic tetrameter, to be specific--and uses only true rhymes, which usually gives a poem an amateurish sound, but I think works well here:

​

Joanna, Wading​

Timothy Steele​

​

Too frail to swim, she nonetheless​

Gingerly lifts her cotton dress​

Clear of the lake, so she can wade​

Where the descending sun has laid​

A net of rippling, molten bands​

Across the underwater sands.​

​

Her toes dig, curling, in the cool​

And fine-grained bottom; minnows school​

before her, tautly unified​

in their suspended flash-and-glide;​

Blue-brilliantly, a dragonfly​

Encounters and skims round her thigh.​

​

Despite age, all this still occurs.​

The sun's companionably hers,​

Its warmth suffusing blood and flesh,​

While its light casts the mobile mesh​

Whose glowing cords she swam among​

In summertime when she was young.​

​

Source: Toward the Winter Solstice (2006)​

​

The poem is in sestets (or sexains, if one wants to be precise), rhymed aabbcc, which seems (at least to me) a little unusual--Steele obviously felt the grouping of lines to be important, so instead of simply writing the whole thing in couplets, the grouping organizes the imagery into three more detailed presentations.

The purity of the rhyme is softened by the slight variations in meter and rhythm, for example in the first stanza where the second, third, and fourth lines use an inversion in the first foot to alter the basic iambic rhythm before returning to the iambic standard in lines five and six:

​

Too frail / to swim, / she none / the·less​

Gin·ger / ly lifts / her cot / ton dress​

Clear of / the lake, / so she / can wade​

Where the / des·cend / ing sun / has laid​

A net / of rip / pling, mol / ten bands​

A·cross / the un / der·wa / ter sands.​

In the second stanza, Steele makes use of caesurae (a pause near the middle of the line) with three commas and a semicolon that shift some of the end-line emphasis to a more flowing reading, so the stanza doesn't have so much of that sing-song sound that rhymed verse often has.

I also like how he salts the poem with a few multisyllabic words (e.g. nonetheless, underwater, companionably) that help keep the tetrameter from sounding quite so motoric.

Anyway. Steele was an English professor (he's now retired) who wrote two excellent books on prosody (the patterns of rhythm and sound used in poetry): Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter and All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing, the latter being a comprehensive explanation of meter and versification. Great stuff, both of them, if that topic's your thing.

Also: NCAA Men's Basketball final is tonight, if that's your thing.

 

[Piscator]

Blue-brilliantly, a dragonfly - brilliant image

 

[Tzara]

OK, I'm going to be dogmatic here: Most poetry is local; or, most poetry one can personally encounter is local.

What I mean by that is that any community, all communities, your community, has a bunch of people writing poetry. It could be slams, or open mics, or just something like a mailbox where someone can leave a handwritten poem as if it was a letter to noone in particular.

The thing is, people are writing poetry, oftentimes quite good poetry.

So I want to recognize a local (to me, anyway) poet who has written what I think of as a very good poem:

​

​

Remains​

Dennis Caswell​

​

"Good morning, my beautiful children, god damn​

but your mother was dynamite in the ol' sack last night!"​

​

numbers among things my father never said,​

along with "Crank up the Hendrix!" and "I've been thinking it over,​

​

and that Martin King might just have a point." In fact,​

there weren't many things he did say as he buried himself​

​

in his easy chair beneath a glacier of nicotine​

and muscatel on the rocks. Yet somehow,​

​

while he was under there, he put me through college,​

handing out checks from under the layers of ice​

​

so I could learn whole libraries full​

of things he would never say, embrace ideas​

​

he despised, appreciate art a dog could have made,​

acquire respect for the kinds of people who ought to be​

​

lined up and shot, though he never said that either.​

That's my reconstruction, like when a paleontologist​

​

looks at a handful of blunted teeth and imagines​

a weed-grinding lizard who never saw the asteroid coming,​

​

or when an archeologist digs up a shard of clay​

and envisions a civilization that once believed it had​

​

a future, or when an astronaut finds a hole in space​

and reckons back to an aging sun, out of fuel, imploding.​

​

Source: Phlogiston (2012)​

​

Dennis Caswell apparently is best known as a video game architect in the dawn of computer gaming, having written something called Impossible Mission for the Commodore 64 platform.

I would guess that not many poets have also written successful video games.

One of the things I like about this poem, and the kind of thing I often like about poems by "outsider" poets is the quirkiness of the imagery. These kinds of poems don't have that filtered and refined professionalism that so often denotes that the poet has been through this or that MFA program so that they are well-prepared to write impeccably stylish and well-wrought poems that often seem to have been produced by a computer program.

This isn't to say that Caswell hasn't had professional training--one of the people he thanks in his book is the late David Wagoner, who was an extremely influential creative writing instructor in the University of Washington MFA program--but he's managed to keep some attitude. And I happen to like that.

 

[Piscator]

Thanks for sharing, it brought back some memories.

 

[Tzara]

Here's another poet most closely associated with the Seattle area, Crysta Casey. She was born in Pasadena, graduated from SUNY Stony Brook, joined the Marines, and eventually moved to Seattle where she also, like Dennis Caswell, studied with David Wagoner, among others. She also suffered from schizophrenia and cancer, and died from the latter in her middle fifties.

While Casey is not well known, probably even in the Seattle area, she made a remarkable impression on those who knew her--if you google her name you'll get a significant number of comments on her and her poetry from people whose lives she touched.

As one might expect from her life history, her poems were often very personal observances of what to most of us would be extreme situations--being a female Marine recruit in boot camp, dealing with life as an inpatient for both cancer and for mental health issues, portraits of people she met in some of these situations.

Here's a poem from her posthumous chapbook, Green Cammie:

The Sane and the Insane
Crysta Casey

My thoughts are more exciting
when I'm not on meds.
On medication, I think
of vacuuming the carpet
to get rid of any bugs
Bonnie may have left
when she curled into a fetal position
on the rug last Sunday.
At three a.m. she lit
three cigarettes at the same time,
put them in the ashtray
and watched them burn,
said, "Kaw, globble,"
so I called 911. The medics were nice
when they took her to the hospital.
She put on her boots
without socks, did not lace them--
I had to give a poetry reading
the next night. "Don't rock,"
I reminded myself, "that's a dead giveaway."
I think it was Robert Graves who wrote
in The White Goddess, "The difference
between the insane and poets
is that poets write it down."

Source: Green Cammie (2010)​

One of the things that poems and other forms of creative writing can do is to give a reader a sense of what life is like, what experience is like for people different from oneself. Poetry, because of its immediacy and its particular focus on imagery, is especially good at this, and we are all the richer for that.

 

[Tzara]

Here's a sonnet for today by Edna St. Vincent Millay, who became famous as quite a young woman for her poetry (she won the Pulitzer Prize while still in her twenties). Her poems, particularly for their time, are often focused on feminist themes, including women's sexuality, though as one would expect given when they were written, they are more suggestive than explicit:

"I, being born a woman and distressed"
Edna St. Vincent Millay

I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body’s weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity,—let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.

Source: Selected Poems (1992)​

One thing I particularly like about this poem is how Millay acknowledges her sexual attraction to the "you" of the poem (notably, neither identified as male or female--she had affairs with both sexes), but in the end essentially states that the (presumed) liaison was merely a sexual thing and that "you" should not expect Millay to be further interested in a relationship. This from a poem published in her 1923 collection!

Millay's own life was rather racy and bohemian (again, for the time) and she attracted quite a number of (now) rather famous admirers. She also lived in "the narrowest house in New York," recently put up for sale.

 

[Tzara]

I had mentioned a couple of posts back something about "outsider poets," by which I meant poets who were outside of the prestige periodicals, be they the New Yorker or The Atlantic or the various university associated journals like Prairie Schooner or the Georgia Review. Poets, who if published in book form at all, are published by organizations named things like Dying Starfish Press rather than publishing heavyweights like Knopf or W. W. Norton.

But mainly what I meant by "outsider" was writers who don't have a place in the academic poetry community--the kinds of writers who don't get taught in MFA programs or who aren't invited to writing retreats.

Charles Bukowski is something of the patron saint of outsider poets, though he published tons of books and ended up (eventually) fairly well off, due to his being championed by John Martin of Black Sparrow Press and, ultimately, his popularity with a wider range of readers than most poets find. His work has obvious debts to the Beats, both stylistically and thematically, and some critics don't think of his poems as being "poems" at all.

I happened to read one of his posthumous volumes the past few days and rather enjoyed it. Here's a selection from that collection:

notes on some poetry
Charles Bukowski

to feign real emotion, yours or the world's,
is, of coourse, unforgivable
yet many poets
past and present
are adept at
this.
these are poets
who write what I call the
"comfortable, clever poem."
these poems are sometimes written by professors
of literature who have been on the job too
long,
by the overly ambitious,
by young students of the game
or the like.
but I too am guilty:
last night I wrote 5 comfortable, clever
poems.
and if you aren't a professor of literature,
overly ambitious,
a young student of the game
or the like,
this can also be caused by too much
success with your writing,
or even be the result of a life gone
soft.

to make matters worse, I mailed out
those 5 comfortable, clever poems
and I wouldn't be surprised if
3 or 4 of them were accepted for
publication.
none of this has anything to do with
real emotion and guts,
it's just word-slinging for the sake of
it
and it's done almost everywhere by
almost
everybody.

we forget what we are really about
and the more we forget this
the less we are able to write a
poem that
stands and screams and laughs on
the page.
we just become like the many writers who make
poetry magazines so dull and
unreadable and
pretentious.
we might just as well not write at all
because we've become
fakes, cheaters, poem-hustlers.

so look for us in the next issue of
Poetry: A Magazine of Verse,
look for us in the table of contents,
turn to any of our precious poems
and yawn your life
away.

Source: The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain (2005)​

Bukowski is interesting because he doesn't give a rip about niceties like end word choice or techniques like alliteration, consonance, metrical balance, or damn near anything else normally associated with poetry--he seems to only be interested in dumping his feelings, opinions, and experience onto the page as directly as possible, which I think is a large factor in his success with readers. You don't need to know anything to appreciate a Bukowski poem. And speaking as someone who has read a lot of overly academic claptrap, there's a lot of value in that.

Angie posted one of his poems last year in this thread, also on the subject of writing. Check that one out too.

 

[Tzara]

What do poets do for a living? With few exceptions (Bukowski in his old age, maybe Billy Collins now) poets cannot live on their earnings as poets. Mostly, they teach poetry at universities, if they can get a job.

Ted Kooser solved that problem by working in the insurance industry, rather like his predecessor Wallace Stevens. He retired as a vice-president of Lincoln Benefit Life at the age of 60.

He then, predictably, taught poetry at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

This poem is from his Pulitzer-winning collection Delights & Shadows:

A Box of Pastels
Ted Kooser

I once held on my knees a simple wooden box
in which a rainbow lay dusty and broken.
It was a set of pastels that had years before
belonged to the painter Mary Cassatt,
and all of the colors she'd used in her work
lay open before me. Those hues she’d most used,
the peaches and pinks, were worn down to stubs,
while the cool colors—violet, ultramarine—
had been set, scarcely touched, to one side.
She’d had little patience with darkness, and her heart
held only a measure of shadow. I touched
the warm dust of those colors, her tools,
and left there with light on the tip of my fingers.

Source: Delights & Shadows (2004)​

What I love about this poem is the feeling of reverence about touching an object once owned by someone whom one admired. I for years held onto a ticket stub for a concert of the music of one of my idols, the experimental composer John Cage, where he left the stage mid-concert to sit quite close to me in the audience.

This is why, I think, we have museums where we display objects that either famous people or people living many years ago might have touched, used, or depended upon. It somehow connects us to them, helps us understand them.

Here's an informative page about Mary Cassatt's pastels, if you're interested.