December 2009
118 posts
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a note
Going off-line for a while. Be back in January.
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a poem by Shinkichi Takahashi
Sparrow in Withered Field
Feet pulled in, sparrow dead
under a pall of snow.
“Sparrow’s a red-black bird,”
someone says, then—
“sun’s a white-winged bird.”
If the bird sleeps, so will man:
things melt in air, there’s only breathing.
You’re visible, nose to feet,
and while an ant guard rams a two-by-four
genitals saunter down the road.
...
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a poem by Nazim Hikmet
Optimistic Man
as a child he never plucked the wings off flies
he didn’t tie tin cans to cats’ tails
or lock beetles in matchboxes
or stomp anthills
he grew up
and all those things were done to him
I was at his bedside when he died
he said read me a poem
about the sun and the sea
about nuclear reactors and satellites
about the greatness of humanity
from Poems of Nazim...
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a poem by David Keller
The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry
I still think I remember some old mechanic
or a farmer using Coca Cola
to clean the rust off metal parts.
Teachers would hand out that stuff
as a warning to convince the kids
to take up a life of reading the classics.
Like the rest, I, too, have let things slide,
so that summer, for example, is no more
than an ad in the smoking car,...
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a poem by D.H. Lawrence
I Am Like a Rose
I am myself at last; now I achieve
My very self. I, with the wonder mellow,
Full of fine warmth, I issue forth in clear
And single me, perfected from my fellow.
Here I am all myself. No rose-bush heaving
Its limpid sap to culmination has brought
Itself more sheer and naked out of the green
In stark-clear roses, than I to myself am brought.
from The Complete Poems of...
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a question
For future reference, at what point does it become creepy that a 39-year-old guy’s blog about teaching, writing, and poetry is “followed” by a cadre of women in their late teens and twenties?
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a poem by Charles Bukowski
never interrupt a writer at work
most simply don’t understand that writing is
done
at a certain time and in a certain
place.
we work just like other professional
people
like
dentists
doctors
butchers
lawyers
fry
cooks
policemen
actors
trapeze
artists
waiters
taxi drivers, airline pilots, insurance salesmen,
bond bailsmen, auto
mechanics and sundry
others.
we need our quiet...
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a poem by Marilyn Hacker
From Orient Point
The art of living isn’t hard to muster:
Enjoy the hour, not what it might portend.
When someone makes you promises, don’t trust her.
unless they’re in the here and now, and just her
willing largesse free-handed to a friend.
The art of living isn’t hard to muster:
groom the old dog, her coat gets back its luster;
take brisk walks so you’re...
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a poem by Elizabeth Bishop
One Art
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these...
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a poem by Maurya Simon
A Moment in Time, while Cynthia Awaits Labor
It’s always the same story, you yearn
for a transparent dream, for an unwinding
passion that lives on the inside of the skin,
for a prayer that changes from water
into blood, from nerves into quicksilver.
You crave a hymn for your drowning.
Now you must learn another way to walk,
a new way of pulling things out of yourself,
you must...
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a poem by Howard Schwartz
Lilith
One day
All of your unborn children
Will gather around you
Lilith will bring them back
She will leave them in your care
She will ask for nothing more
Than a place for them
By your bed
She will warn you
If you turn to go
You will take what you are leaving
Your pockets will fill with ashes
Your children will all scream
Quietly.
from Gathering the Sparks (Singing Wind Press,...
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a poem by James Merrill
Nightgown
A cold so keen,
My speech unfurls tonight
As from the chattering teeth
Of a sewing machine.
Whom words appear to warm,
Dear heart, wear mine. Come forth
Wound in their flimsy white
And give it form.
from From the First Nine: Poems 1946–1976 (Atheneum, 1982)
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“All the smart people are on Tumblr. So are all the pervs interested in naked...”
– from a student turning in an essay who noticed my Tumblr dashboard open to post.
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“Thanks for this semester. It was fun. Like getting mauled by sharks, but...”
– student leaving final exam session
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a note
I’m sitting in an exam session right now, watching twelve students sweat over a two-hour in-class essay exam worth 100 points. Some students’ fate in the class will be decided on this essay. Some students are golden even if they out-and-out flunk the exam. I feel evil. And not in a good way.
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poetic advice redux
Back at my main site, Poetry Midwest, I’ve gotten into the habit of occasionally posting snarky poetic advice. Several folks have emailed me and asked for the full list. Here is that list to date (the gaps in numbers are intentional), including a brief epilogue:
1. Make it concrete. Poetry is in things, not concepts.
2. Nouns and verbs are your friends.
3. No one cares how you feel....
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a poem by Margaret Atwood
You Are Happy
The water turns
a long way down over the raw stone,
ice crusts around it
We walk separately
along the hill to the open
beach, unused
picnic tables, wind
shoving the brown waves, erosion, gravel
rasping on gravel.
In the ditch a deer
carcass, no head. Bird
running across the glaring
road against the low pink sun.
When you are this
cold you can think about
nothing...
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a poem by Howard Nemerov
Burning the Leaves
This was the first day that the leaves
Came down in hordes, in hosts, a great wealth
Gambled away over the green lawn
Belonging to the house, old fry and spawn
Of the rich year converted into filth
In the beds by the walls, the gutters under the eaves.
We thought of all the generations gone
Like that, flyers, migrants, fugitives.
We come like croupiers with rakes,
To...
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a poem by Archibald MacLeish
Poem in Prose
This poem is for my wife.
I have made it plainly and honestly:
The mark is on it
Like the burl on the knife.
I have not made it for praise.
She has no more need for praise
Than summer has
Or the bright days.
In all that becomes a woman
Her words and her ways are beautiful:
Love’s lovely duty,
The well-swept room.
Wherever she is there is sun
And time and a...
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from the Department of Unfortunate Analogies,...
“Treating a fine glass of scotch correctly is like making love to a beautiful woman. As it sits in the glass as you roll it around, the warm honey gold liquid shakes the ice inside of it like the ocean does to a boat at sea during a storm. Letting the glass come to rest, it’s apparent that the legs of flavor have attempted to crawl up the sides of the glass, giving you an unmistakable...
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“It’s not that I like you; it’s that I don’t not like you.”
– overheard in a hallway on my way to give a final exam
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From the Department Of Good Questions
poetbabble:
How do all the bad dreams get into my head?
-Sadie Burch, 3 years old
In the middle of the night, your parents pour the stuff that’s in Pixy Stix in your ears, followed by two drops of rainwater gathered at midnight from a hollow tree stump.
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From The Department Of Good Questions
poetbabble:
What do you call a boy ladybug?
-Zoe Gehrke, 4 years old
Frank.
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a poem by Billy Corgan, improved with strikethrus...
The Poetry of my Heart
Revealing now The poetry of my heart Think Birds in flight and you will start to comes close
As faces come from the darkness familiar
To greet you hello again.
They pluck those strings and sing those refrains I know so well, and hold so close Now follow these birds faithfully, keeping Those faces in mind
Over rivers and dales and soft greens until we come to the edge...
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a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa
Believing in Iron
The hills my brothers & I created
Never balanced, & it took years
To discover how the world worked.
We could look at a tree of blackbirds
& tell you how many were there,
But with the scrap dealer
Our math was always off.
Weeks of lifting & grunting
Never added up to much,
But we couldn’t stop
Believing in iron.
Abandoned trucks & cars...
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a poem by Stanley Kunitz
The Portrait
My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave...
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another poem by James Wright
Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio
In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.
All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.
Therefore,
Their sons grow...
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a poem by Jeff Friedman
Reflexive
He is not himself. He is not us either.
While others enter the subway for their desires he remains here,
the sum total of our wishes for his departure.
We center ourselves according to planets that hum.
What are these question marks, these humps in the snow
as soundless as rooms emptied of all that is essential to rooms?
At the center of our center is a knot of light
that...
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a poem by Jayne Cortez
Don’t Ask/1980
Don’t ask me
who I’m speaking for
who I’m talking to
why I’m doing what I do in
light of my existence
You rise you spit you brush you drink you
pee you shit you walk you run you work
you eat you belch you sleep you dream &
that’s the way it is
In the morning
tap water taste fishy
coffee sits in its
decaffeinated cup
ca ca...
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a poem by Alan Williamson
Paris, the Shortening Days
What is it asking? The blooming of ironwork roses,
of observatories at the ends of the avenues;
the body still shot through with triangles, trapeze swung
forward, in the medical bookstores:
or winter come with the underwater heaviness
of its distances, a blue shift in the spectrum …
No church is endurable in that light but those
too late for the full...
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a poem by Norman Williams
The World is on Fire
Railing by night through the prairie heat
I hear the bones of Kansas towns crack.
In a Grand Hotel a rafter gives way;
A wall collapses in a Bijou Marquee …
Nebraska cafes and Burlington shacks
Bleach like cattle skulls the next day.
From the tracks behind ghosts swelter up:
I remember father at night in the dome car
Pointing out stars to me and my mother;
I...
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a poem by Ezra Pound
Ancient Music
Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Damn you, sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, ’tis why I am, Goddamm,
So ’gainst the winter’s balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm,
Sing...
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a poem by Sara Teasdale
A Winter Bluejay
Crisply the bright snow whispered,
Crunching beneath our feet;
Behind us as we walked along the parkway,
Our shadows danced,
Fantastic shapes in vivid blue.
Across the lake the skaters
Flew to and fro,
With sharp turns weaving
A frail invisible net.
In ecstasy the earth
Drank the silver sunlight;
In ecstasy the skaters
Drank the wine of speed;
In ecstasy we laughed...
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a poem by Robinson Jeffers
Juan Higera Creek
Neither your face, Higera, nor your deeds
Are known to me; and death these many years
Retains you, under grass or forest-mould.
Only a rivulet bears your name: it runs
Deep-hidden in undeciduous redwood shade
And trunks by age made holy, streaming down
A valley of the Santa Lucian hills.
There have I stopped, and though the unclouded sun
Flew in loftiest heaven, no...
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a poem by Steven Schreiner
Hypnotist
In the white garage, with a dirt floor,
a boy kneels down. The older boy
dangles a locket in front of him, advises
that he keep looking and say nothing.
Soon his eyes, which are awake and hot,
close voluntarily. Good, the boy says
speaking to him like a friend
who can keep a secret. There is a test
and he passes, before something
like velvet brushes his cheek. Then
because he...
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a poem by Philip Levine
Facts
The bus station in Princeton, New Jersey,
has no men’s room. I had to use one like mad,
but the guy behind the counter said, “Sorry,
but you know what goes on in bus station men’s rooms.”
If you take a ‘37 Packard grill and split it down
the center and reduce the angle by 18° and reweld it,
you’ll have a perfect grill for a Rolls Royce
just in...
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a poem by Jewel, improved with strikethrus
As A Child
As a child I walked with noisy fingers
along the hemline of so many meadows of back home.
Green fabric stretched out, shy earth, shock of sky.
I’d sit on logs like pulpets,
listen to the sermon of sparrows
and find god in simplicity there amongst the dandelion and thorn.
Now I frequent hotel lobbies, like a chain smoker having a bad day., A nasty habit that breathes...