The Concise Guidebook Contains Everything

The Concise Guidebook Contains Everything

I feel, dear November, a thinness beginning.

Your sky today insists on the color of rooming house sheets.

Enough of polls—no one polls the sparrows on who should rule the world.

The white roses still in bloom on Summerdale Avenue, do they clarify the nature of November morning light?

The concise guidebook contains everything you need to identify seventeen varieties of cloud.

I was dwelling past midnight in the house of your silence.

Why wear the color of blood at all, unless you want to attract the attentions of every hungry wolf?

Sometimes the empty bus arrives just in time.

All my ducks are in a row, they just need to be nudged until they waddle.

We live every moment in the grand perhaps.

The wolves might howl but they cannot get in.

I’d like to state for the record that all the birds of the world at last belong to me.

Enough of elections—the trees did not vote on the closing of the day.

The Dark Snakes Coiled on the Cover

It's been a startlingly long time since I've posted anything here. I plead work, (Oh those very long days, and loss of the self  and goals as I fret over job stuff) I plead a new house and all the attendant duties and tasks involved.  But here I am back.  With several enthusiasms to share:

1.  Mary Ruefle's new book, Madness, Rack, and Honey.  I already posted once about this book. If it does not get you excited by the art and craft of poetry, then  I give up. Here are two snippets from her essay "On Secrets" that I love:

"The words secret and sacred are siblings."

_______________________________________


"Colette calls a poem, 'that secret, that scar, that sin.' James Tate uses as an epigraph for one of his books a line by James Salter: 'Here, then, faintly discolored and liable to come apart if you touch it, is the corsage that I kept from the dance.'"

See?  Just write for five minutes about the word corsage and all it conjures for you, and then get back to me.

2. Dobby Gibson's forthcoming book It Becomes You from Graywolf Press.  I got a sneak peak at this thanks to the fine folks at Graywolf when I hit them up for new books at a recent bookselling conference.  I may not get a lot of financial reward as a bookseller, but I sure get a lot of free books.  Dobby Gibson is Billy Collins if Mr. Collins were a generation younger, a tad more adventurous, and stopped writing poems about writing poems. (Note to Billy Collins: you have used up your allotment of poems about writing poems.) One of the many delights of Gibson's book is the poem "40 Fortunes," which will make you want to run away and become a fortune cookie writer.  But what's the use, Dobby is already in that room, his lips pursed in concentration as pens your future on that wee rectangle:

"Only fools ride the rain facing backwards."

"No matter who walks with you into the woods, you walk into the woods alone."

"Do not aspire to be the tiger. Aspire to be the sparrow who sits upon the tiger's back."

3.  Karen Finneyfrock's forthcoming YA novel, The Sweet Revenge of Celia Door.  For my job as a buyer for an independent bookstore, I read a LOT of YA novels, and I am allergic to books about teens who want to be poets, or think they are poets, and let's also throw in there YA novels-in-verse, which are so hard to do well that the writing of them should be rationed.  Finneyfrock's (and isn't that about the best last name ever) book is thankfully NOT in verse.  It's told in the voice of Celia, a girl who, due to the general (and specific) shittness and mean-spiritedness of her high school peers, has decided to be "dark." To dress darkly, to remain apart, and be a poet.  Like many high school girls suddenly befriended by a hot cool boy of her dreams, Celia finds that instead of the boyfriend she wanted, she has a gay best friend. Unlike many novels of this sort--the whole oh-my-god-he's-gay-and-why-didn't-I-know part is quick and easy. Celia has a friend, suddenly, something that's been lacking in her life.  She's been bullied, and hurt, she wants (very understandably) revenge, and her voice, and the poems in her voice, will win you over.


4. Slow Lightning, by Eduardo C. Corrall.

The dark snakes coiled on the cover gave me a good feeling about this book--Corral is inventive, he is not shy about changing form and pattern, and the only poet I can think of to compare him to is Lorca, for his passion, commitment, and dedication to the song of the work.  (And I jut now looked at his blog, which says, "Eduardo Corral is the love child of Robert Hayden and Federico García Lorca." So I guess he won't mind the Lorca comparison." This is a book of complexity--with layers of discomfort and arousal built into poems of sex, gender, shame, and homosexual love that are astonishing in their power.  I am going to return to this book again and again.  I can't imagine quoting from a poem without either giving you the whole thing or giving you the poems around it for reference.  So how about if I just share a few of his great titles:

"In Colorado My Father Scoured and Stacked Dishes"

"Self-Portrait With Tumbling and Lasso"

"All the Trees of the Field Shall Clap Their Hands"

All the time I have been away I have been grabbing snippets of time, mostly on the train on my way to work, to write poetry.  Today I had to stay home in case the house painters needed anything, so I have been at the keyboard al day, typing rough drafts from yellow legal pads into the form of rough drafts on a laptop, and it felt industrious and pleasurable.  I hope some of these (short for me) poems will be out in the world on webpages and paper pages before too long.

"And what were they anyway, sprigs of grass, things of blue?"

I have been interested in whatever poet Mary Ruefle might have to say ever since I discovered her book A Little White Shadow,  a poetry collection that was the facsimile of a small novel that she herself found in a thrift store and with the aid of white-out, used to reveal small, beautiful, and disquieting poems. Now from Wave Books we have her collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, a book I've dropped everything else for.  You can find more of her erasure works on her website, and I bet you'll want to rush out and find the perfect book that you can use to simultaneously obscure and uncover.  It is in the corner of the junk shop, it lives at the bottom of a box at the next garage sale you see.

Here she speaks in the lecture "Someone Reading a Book is a Sign of Order in the World."

There is a world that poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everybody else lives in. And the only thing poets seem to have in common is their yearning to enter this world.

Her lecture "I Remember, I Remember" is the best homage and
riff on Joe Brainard's I Remember that I can remember:

I remember reading Rilke's Duine Elegies again and again and again, until I "got" them, until something burst over me like a flood, and I remember, once again, weeping and weeping with a book in my hands.

Presently the Teacup Stirred

I am missing out on a reading/discussion on James Merrill and his masterpiece, The Changing Light at Sandover next week.  But that does not mean you have to.  Here's some information on the event, and a bit of what I had to say on Merrill, thanks to the queries of Kathleen Kirk.

http://www.escapeintolife.com/uncategorized/familiar-spirits/

And here's Richard Fox saying things more cogently than I:

http://www.escapeintolife.com/blog/changing-light/

Finally, here's the man Merrill himself, reading a poem about using the Ouija board for the first time.

(As an aside, did you know that "Ouija" was just the French yes and ther German yes put together, because someone at Milton Bradley thought it made a foreign and mystical-sounding word?  it's better, at any rate, than communicating with the spirits on your yes-yes board.)

If that bird muttered with an old man’s throat.

Hooray for the approach of fall.  I sat outside today at my local cafe, feeling urban and writerly as I drank a cappuccino and a glass of red wine and wrote in my notebook.  It turned out that I filled up the notebook, writing the last three pages, which feels like an ending, but also a beginning, which is the way fall feels to me. It was nearly 90 today in Chicago, and as I wrote I heard the whap whap whop of people walking by in their flip-flops. But the elm tree in my front yard knows what's coming, it is already shedding some brown saw-edged leaves.  Tonight I am fiddling with a manuscript.  Here's a poem from it that feels (to me) like a fall poem:

Postcard for the Soul That at Last Became a Bird

Consider

a warm afternoon:

a crow

stalks the shade beneath

a sycamore tree,

picking

at some kind of meat

in the grass.  If

your soul

became a bird.

If that bird muttered

with an old man’s

throat.  If there’s a soul.

If the crow

found a treasure,

a beakful, a bone.

The soul’s search,

the crow’s

hunger.  The luck

of the scrap. The force

of the stab.

The pluck and rasp

of those black

scissors. Crows,

their voices. Crows

in the branches

like a wicked boys choir.

What About the Moon?

I looked up and saw the full moon tonight and remembered this poem from the archives:

Postcard Written at Montrose Harbor

If God exists then God loves the crows; they gather like soldiers

around the flooded portions of the municipal golf course; and if

there’s a God, then God loves the black water

and the worms therein; and God might love the sweet

high notes on the violin, and the man, his violin case

a mouth and hungry on the sidewalk—although

I only allow for a God who loves what I love,

God loves the night because I love night, and the crows,

and the glint of dark water, my God loves broken voices,

an old woman sings a childhood hymn while she fishes for carp

in Montrose Harbor—rats in the garbage, I can imagine

a God who loves rats, for their tunneling, their stewardship:

sticks, refuse, crusts, a fierce attachment to the scraps

of the world—One might love an ash tree’s yellow leaves,

how they pave the sidewalk just after a storm, one might love

birds, or blood, screams, or explosions. God

loves the darkness, because

what about the moon?

Notes from The Book of Light

Exciting news!  The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton is coming out this fall. Ever since I discovered her work in the early 1990s, Clifton has been a major deity in my poetry pantheon. Denise Levertov said of Clifton's work:

"Poems after poem exhilarates and inspires awe at the manifestation of such artistic and spiritual power."

Even more than Levertov, Clifton could be so compact and succinct.  I don't know of another American poet who uses five and dime words--the vocabulary of the everyday--to build such palaces of language.

thel

          was my first landscape

          red brown as the clay

          of her georgia.

          sweet attic of a woman,

          repository of old songs.

          there was such music in her;

          she would sit, shy as a wren

          humming alone and lonely

          amid broken promises,

          amid the sweet broken bodies

          of birds.


You can see Lucille Clifton read her work here.