And Now, a Word from Louise Gluck

This struck me from an interview with Gluck. (Apparently she rarely gives interviews) in this month's Poets and Writers magazine:

"For me it's tone--the way the mind moves as it performs its acts of meditation. That's what you're following. It guides you but also mystifies you because you can't turn it into conscious principles or say precisely what its attributes are. The minute you turn tone into conscious principle it goes dead. It has to remain mysterious to you. You have to be surprised by what it is capable of unveiling."

That's what I love about writing poetry. The work itself unveiling to you, the work itself letting you know what it needs to say.

I Love the Part in Aaron's Smith's New Book of Poetry

I love the part in Aaron Smith's new book Appetites called "I Love the Part," a long list poem indebted to Joe Brainard and David Trinidad, and the spirit of Frank O'Hara. It's an homage to movies, popular culture, to the gods and goddesses of cinema and how much we desire them. I can imagine, years in the future,  creative writing instructors all over the country assigning their students to write "I love the part" poems about the movies they love, just as we now assign "I remember" poems based on Joe Brainard's book of that name.

For the record, I just rented "Looper," and I love the part where Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis sit across from each other in an otherwise empty diner.  They are each playing the same man--30 years apart. Willis has been sent back to the past to be killed by an assassin, who is in the case himself, the younger version played by Gordon-Levitt. I wanted them to hug or something, but each despises the other, as we often despise our younger or older selves.

Click on this link for another poem from Appetites.  And click here for a brief but stirring defense and cheer for the power of personal narrative in poetry from Mr. Smith.

Someone in the Room of Writers Walks You Over to Another Guest

I only went outside once yesterday, just up the block to the small organic grocery store, where I paid 10 dollars for some additions to my planned turkey chili--a red pepper, a jalapeno pepper, a can of kidney beans, a can of garbanzo beans.  I couldn't walk any farther than that because of the ice, glittery in the trees, a half inch thick and crackling on the sidewalk. I slept a lot, fighting off a cold, and when I wasn't sleeping or cooking chili I was reading.  Natalie Goldberg's forthcoming book is called The True Secret of Writing. Her book Writing Down the Bones has been hugely influential in my writing and teaching life and habits, and in all of her books about writing since that one she delivers essentially the same message: write as a practice. Keep your hand moving. Write it down first, write more.  Judge/edit/cut later. Walk into the room of writers and make yourself at home there.

The new book doesn't break new ground, but Goldberg, as always, approaches writing from a Zen perspective.  New is not the point.  Sometimes the message, repeated in a slightly different way, will fall on the ears or in the mind in a new way, the way the ocean is always the ocean but at some point the sight of it is imbued with more meaning by the viewer. I have some new writing prompts to take from the new book, and some writers to explore further--another part of Goldberg's practice, and her writing advice books, is the study, admiration, and kudos to other writers.  It's one of the really cool things I get from blogs, from books, from conversations--someone in the room of writers walking you over to another guest and saying here, you two should know each other. Here is one poet she passed on to me:

Ikkyu

suddenly nothing but grief
so I put on my father's old ripped raincoat



The other book I was reading is Sharon Old's Stag's Leap, a book of poems she wrote as her husband of 30 years was leaving their marriage.  I started it a few days before, and finished it this morning over breakfast at a cafe called Taste of Heaven. It's an astonishing, complex and powerful work. As I was finishing reading the poem "Years Later" I gasped at the end, one of those beautiful and deadly silver arrows that poetry can shoot into the heart, and as I looked up to the window, I met the eyes of a bearded young man walking up Clark Street. Because of the poem, my stunned reaction to it, I held his gaze, surge of electric blue, and I'll remember that moment, and how his winter cap matched his eyes, and we saw each other, and maybe I'll write a zen poem about it when I am very old.

a sideways gravity in him, toward some
vanishing point. And no, he does not
want to meet again, in a year--when we 
part it is with a dry bow
and Good-bye. And then there is the spring park,
damp as if freshly peeled, sweet
greenhouse, green cemetery with no
dead in it-except, in some shaded
woods, under some years of leaves and 
rotted cones, the body of a warbler
like a whole note fallen from the sky--my old
love for him, like a songbirds rib cage picked clean.

 --from "Years Later" by Sharon Olds


Late at night, I wanted to take a photo of the jeweled ice on the window, because it was all due to melt away by morning:

Hey Jack Gilbert, Where Are You Going With That Empty Tin Bucket?

I work retail, and this season of buying and lists, demands and the wrapping of the many many gifts, (I could giftwrap a book in my sleep) and waiting on people, and trying to be friendly and upbeat, well. It's taken its toll.  Which is to say that I keep wanting to post things here but end up at night drained of the energy to focus. But here's a good thing: I write a first draft of a poem almost every day on my train ride to work. And another: I do still read a lot.  Although on the train on the way home, after a long day of retail hell, playing Angry Birds on my I-phone is the only thing to soothe an over-the-whole thing savage breast.

But I did want to take the time to tell you that one of the very best books of poetry published this year is Jack Gilbert's Collected Poems. Stark, without self pity, and beautiful in the way a well-made bowl or a wooden chair is beautiful: they do the work they were designed to do.  As always happens when I fall in love with a poet's work, my own poems start trying to sound like the work I love.  And that's okay.  Maybe, like Gilbert, I will be unabashed and unashamed to use words like love and heart and yearn. Like silence and music and rivers and God. And the moon, of course, that old dinner plate left on the table after the dinner party's long over.

Here is one of the many elegies Gilbert, who just died, wrote for his wife:

MICHIKO NONGAMI (1946 - 1982)

Is she any more apparent because she is not
anymore forever? Is her whiteness more white
because she was the color of pale honey?
A smokestack making the sky more visible.
A dead woman filling the whole world. Michiko
said, "The roses you gave me kept me awake
with the sound of their petals falling."

Here's a diving board to begin learning more about Jack Gilbert.

He lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri

I try, every summer, to take a break from all the reading of contemporary fiction I do.  As a bookseller, part of my job is to keep up on what's new, or what will be new soon.  Perhaps 80% of my reading is advance reading copies ("ARCS" in pub-speak) that publishers send out to booksellers in the hopes that we will fall in love with a book and promote it and hand-sell it when it is actually published.  I reached a point about a decade ago where I realized that other than a few poetry collections, all I ever, ever read (at my usual pace of 3-6 books a week) were books that were still three months away from being published.  Among other things, this makes it difficult to talk about books with friends, even book-loving friends:

"What are you reading these days?"
"Oh, this book called Emerald Snake in the Tall Dry Grass--It's a great novel about ghosts, and sisters, and how small town America is both a haven and  a trap...really great stuff, like Faulkner and J.D. Salinger had a baby."
"Sounds great, I bet I'd like it."
"You probably would.  But it doesn't come out until next March, and I already loaned my copy to a co-worker."   (Conversation ends here.)

To help combat ARC-only reading, and to help fill in some of the many gaps in my education and reading history, I decided to use the summer (later shortened to August) to read  works by an author I didn't know very well.  I've had summer romances with Dickens, with Edith Wharton, with Willa Cather, and with the entire New York Review Classics series--all sorts of excellent titles that had been out of print, until someone stood up and said, "Hey. This needs to be back in the world and on book shelves."  Well-known writers nominate books to be re-published and write introductions for them.    When I started at a new bookstore I got out of my summer classics habit. This summer I decided to not let the time slot slip by, and reluctantly, and with a great deal of hemming, delay, and trepidation, started to read Moby-Dick.  (It was either that or
cracking open my still wrapped-in-plastic editions of Proust.)

And I am loving it.  Somehow I had the impression it was a "difficult" work, dense, verbose, and, well, boring.  I didn't expect the short prose-poemy chapters, or humor, or a rolling and rollicking sea of delightful language.  Here, I am going to describe the town, Melville says, and he takes a chapter and does just that. Here's a church, here's a pastor, here's his sermon--each gets a chapter.

Maybe things will get muddier as Ahab and Company get further from land and as the Great White Whale himself first surfaces. Maybe I should not yet be proclaiming a very public love for Melville's masterpiece. It's only page 188, for Pete Squeaks.  But hear ye oh my friends and Fellow Sailors, my deckhands and lordlings and ladies of Ocean the Mighty--this so far is a delightful voyage out.  Maybe I was supposed to wait to read Melville until I myself had been out on the ocean and saw whales, glorious city buses, rising up, sleek and monstrous and beautiful, out of deep water mere feet from the (suddenly small) boat that carried me. Two summers ago off Provincetown I got to do that.

And while I heard it before, I never knew for sure what the word confabulations meant until today when I read it and had Mr. Google help me look it up. Thanks Herman, for that and so many other fine soundings:

"Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!"

Fling Yourself Into the World: Smart Things Other People Said

"And for god’s sakes, don’t write every day. That’s the worst advice I’ve been given. What a terrible thing to advise a poet. To write every day is to pry apart, on a daily basis, the mind’s most terrible crevices. You can trick yourself into believing it is a herculean act, nearly crusade-like. But one can only burn at both ends for so long. Save the poems, let them grow inside you, like a pregnancy, and when the water breaks, nothing can stop it.  Also, there’s no such thing as writer’s block—don’t sell yourself short with such an excuse. If you have nothing to say, put down the pen, go outside, and fling yourself into the world. It’s waiting for you." -- Ocean Voung, in Pank.

"Negative capability, Keats called it—to dwell with uncertainty without grasping after an easy solution. A poem often asks us to dwell there, and it’s unbearable, especially if you have no practice, if you don’t read or if you don’t go off by yourself and sit alone for a while. Even those of us who write, we’re often rushing around. So this dwelling, not fully comprehending something instantly, is very difficult. Anything that pushes us into the depths of our being is very hard to bear. I find it hard to bear. Sometimes I open a book that’s so beautiful I have to shut it because it hurts me. I can’t stand it. It’s like, Oh no! Oh no! Oh no! This is going to drive me into my own heart. A day or two days later I’m saying, All right, and I just surrender to it: Do it to me. Go ahead. I want it. I don’t want it. I want it. I don’t want it." -- Marie Howe, in AGNI online.

"The New York School poets made collaboration look fun, and it is.  It’s stimulating, too, opens me up, keeps me spontaneous, responsive.  Maybe in the way letter writing used to?  Only you’re creating something together.  I find it very exciting.  My collaborative projects stem from my friendships with other poets—they’re an extension of those friendships.  By Myself, which I wrote with D.A. Powell, came out of a late night telephone conversation.  It was Doug’s idea, to piece together an autobiography out of sentences from a myriad of celebrity autobiographies.  He called it a 'Trinidad-esque' idea.  So I suggested we write it together.  And we did.  He provided one sentence, I provided the next, and off we went, alternating sentences—an exhilarating tug-of-war.  I often laughed out loud when I received his sentences via email." --David Trinidad, in Sonora Review.

Write a poem called "Walla Walla, Washington"

Or Climax, Michigan.  Or Burnt Ridge, Idaho.  Hooker, OK. Embarrass, MN. The fine folks at Right Hand Pointing have put out a call for poems that use city names as their titles.  This comes after their successful two-part issue made up of poems with titles that are also the names of states. I think I'll try to take this as an assignment.  Maybe using my hometown, Mt. Clemens, Michigan. See what y'all can do with this.

Here are 15 unfortunate city names, for your potential amusement.

One Can Always Fall in Love Online

With poems, at least.  And falling in love with a poem or a poet online is safer than, say, falling in love with a profile on a dating website, or a grainy video of a stranger. Herewith some poems I have come across online that made my heart leap in my chest like a fish being chased by a larger fish.

First up, Heather Abner, in the journal Shot Glass.  Note to self: send some short poems there soon. Note to others: do likewise.

Next I turn my attentions to the realm of Ocean Voung's blog.  This young man is an extremely talented poet.  You can read some of his work here.  But he also, on his blog, posts poems that have had a profound influence on his spirit and his writing.  All of his choices thus far have been stellar, but this is the one I personally have found the most memorable.

I think my friend Richard Fox is brilliant.

"The sky holds the rain
like a sigh in a bag."

(See?  I think I might give up a tooth to have written those lines. But if I followed that logic and Richard with any frequency, I'd be a toothless man.)

Here are some recent poems of Richard's, featured in Escape Into Life.


While I was forced offline by the lack of home internet service, I read A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos.  I need to write more about Tim's work--I call him "Tim" like he's a friend, but he died at the age of 40 of AIDS, and I never met him.  Nonetheless, much like my first experience reading Frank O'Hara, I felt, reading Tim's work, like I had discovered a new friend, complicated, funny, arch, dry, broken and broken-hearted as well as golden with light...ah--I am nattering on. Just read his masterpiece, here, and you will want to read the complete big, generous volume and get to know him too.


One can always fall in love with a voice on the page.

The Smells of the City

It occurred to me as I walked toward the lake yesterday that the sense of smell needs to enter into my poems more.  Here in the city, in the near-summer: lilacs, honey locust, newly cut lawns. (An entire thesis might be created on the evocations of a newly-mown lawn in June--childhood, fatherhood, chores and green stains) Damp maple seeds on the sidewalk, most of them rotting. Puddles with worms and puddles with motor oil. A whiff of sewer, a blast of perfume from a woman a quarter block ahead. And when I reach the lake itself, the smell of fish and iron. Is there a contemporary poet who delves into scent? An ode to odor?

Another Five Word Challenge

Another one, using the required words: windowpane, destination, seeker, circle, reading.  I've been writing these on the train during my morning commute.

Who knows the intended destination
of the housefly born
or reborn
in the warming northwoods cabin,
pinballing against the windowpane, above
a circle of dry predecessors, a fly
mortuary
on the floorboards.
Is it reading the frost
still melting on the glass? Poor
seeker
of neverwhen, June day,
heaven.

Five Word Challenges

Somehow on this here internet-thingy I came across a blog devoted to a bowl of random words. You are given five words, they come from slips of paper placed inside a quite pleasant ceramic bowl and pulled forth at random.  The challenge is to then write a poem using all five words.  (In the same order as they've been pulled from the bowl?--not clear on this part.) I like this more than many other write-a-poem prompts lurking here and there these days.


The words in this case: hide, forgive, grasshopper, slip, smoke.


Forgive me,
I told the grasshopper,
who had been an old man,
but I feel I must hide here
with you in the grass, as I
have been an old man,
once upon a time, my strong teeth
yellow
and stained with smoke.

If, as I believe, the end times
are near, let's slip
quietly into the hemlock forest.

A Post Recycled from an Old Myspace (remember them?) Blog

Joseph Ceravolo--check out the little-known New York School poet


Hey, if you have not yet read this guy, check him out: Joseph Ceravolo--so far, it seems,  known mostly to other poets--he studied with Kenneth Koch and has some of that guy's humor, but he's a lot more nature-oriented than most of the New York School folk, and his wordplay and syntax disruptions recall Tender Buttons by Big Mama Stein. Here's one sample from the posthumous collection The Green Lake is Awake.

SPRING

All I will amount to: knowing
your sound, small bees,
the winter wind
is green


See? simple, odd, beautiful and way cool!

Japanese Poetry on the Evening Train

The poems in the Japanese poetry anthology (see previous post) made me remember the late poems from Denise Levertov in Evening Train. The shorter poems here often have the succinct nature imagery and the "aha!" moments  (no, not the swedish band A-Ha) that the Japanese poetry favors.  Here, for example is "Idyll."

The neighbor's Black Labrador, his owners
out at work, unconscious anyone
is watching him, rises again and again
on hind legs to bend with his paws
the figtree's curving branches
and reach the sweet figs with his black lips.

What I Don't Know about Japanese Poetry Could Fill a Book

For instance, there's this work of classic Japanese literature that everyone who knows about these things knows, the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, a compilation a Japanese poems from the seventh through twelth centuries. I was given a contemporary translation (One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each, translated by Peter McMillian) from the very nice gent at the Columbia University Press booth at the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers conference last weekend.  (one thing that is so pleasant about the book business is all the free books.) Since then I have opened the book time and again, just letting the page pick itself at random:


How the night deepens.
As lovers part
a white ribbon of frost
is stretched along
the Bridge of Magpie Wings
                                                  --Otomo No Yakamochi

and


I can only pluck at random
for I cannot tell apart
in all this whiteness--
white chrysantemums
from the first frost
                                                        --Minamoto No Muneyuki


Both the forward and afterward are valuable in giving the ignorant reader like myself some context and history. This book makes me want to write nothing but short and sad nature poems, containing the moon, and frost, and fallen leaves. I want to walk along the Bridge of Magpie Wings.

Pants

I wear them, mostly, I always have. Although I still remember my foray into a skirt. I was four years old, and more than anything in the world, I wanted to be a witch for Halloween. My parents, bless their hearts, did not try to stop me; my mother paid for my costume from Kresges Five and Dime. My Aunt Dorothy, who took care of me during the day, did tell me, mildly, “witches are girls,” but I was adamant in my conviction, witches were witches. If I’d had the vocabulary to articulate what I meant, I would have said that witches were beyond gender, perhaps pre-gender, a witch was not a girl, a witch was not a boy, the witch mask was so frightening I could barely stay in the same room with it, and at night I had to put it in my closet and close the door. I knew it gathered the shadows of winter coats unto itself and became something more, a thing of rustle, of teeth, and bony hands talking to themselves in the dark.

It’s a wonder I ever slept. The mask, wart-nosed, green. When I wore it, the elasticized string cut into the tender skin behind my ears. The accompanying skirt was snappy, short, and lemon yellow; I liked the way the waistband grabbed my waist and left blue indentations in my skin. I felt secure: my mask in place, I could look out from inside the witch, I could be the witch myself, and not have to see it. I inhaled the scent of plastic, and paste, my breath heavy and loud, wet around the mouth hole. And I was wearing a short yellow skirt, my cape patterned with crescent moons, and stars. I remember a wand, or was it a miniature broom? With my mask, and my wand, and my lemon yellow skirt, I had the power to summon every piece of candy in town.

I never had any interest in becoming a fairy princess, all pink and crepe, with sparkles. I wanted to be old, as old as tree roots, as old as stories. As old as the dark. In my little yellow skirt I was bright as the sun, my thin legs scabby with mosquito bites—I loved to test myself, to see how long I could be still, on the back porch in the evening, I’d watch a mosquito settle and prospect her spot. She’d inject me, and then, thrillingly, she swallowed, ingested. If I could stand the itch she’d become a red balloon. On wings the size of an eyelash she rose, and with no pause, no goodbyes, my blood in her belly, she took me away and she left me behind. Witchcraft.

The Book Reports are Overdue

Books on the stack, waiting:

Selected Poems, by Mary Ruefle

Nox. by Anne Carson

Tuned Droves, by Eric Baus

Other Flowers, by James Schuyler

10 Mississippi, by Steve Healy

Oneiromance (an epithalamion) by Kathleen Rooney

Undersleep, by Julie Doxsee

I have looked at all of these except Nox. I am avoiding Nox because I suspect a book about a troubled and missing sibling will consume and obsess me, and I am not in the mood to be consumed and obsessed. Maybe not brave enough, just yet. But I will be.

Boxcar Poetry Review

It was a Facebook surprise--I found out today via that online institution that Neil Aitken, the hard-working poet and editor of Boxcar Poetry Review, included me in the 2nd anthology, a sort of "best of."  I was very pleased to have work in two issues of Boxcar, I think Neil does an excellent job of selecting work and designing the site, so I am really happy to be included in the print anthology.  The most excellent poet and blogger Sarah J. Sloat has work in it, too.  You could get a copy here if you wanted.

Exciting news if you are a fan of dogs, and diamonds, and myth.

Cover: tintype by Robert Turney

Diane Wakoski has a new book out from Anhinga Press.  You can read about it, and read some poems here. I'll report back in more detail after I get my copy.  I studied with Diane in the late 1980s, and she has a huge and wonderfully varied imagery collections in her bag of tricks. With some poets you say, "Oh, he's a nature poet---trees again," or "Oh, I get it, she does the gritty urban punk kid thing."  Or, "Ah, yes, those stately images of Iowa farms, that must be the work of Gerhardt Dipthong."  With Wakoski, you might encounter mythic beasts, or kitchen implements, or birds, or flowers, all in one poem.  I will be interested to read this new collection, her first comprised of all new work in over ten years. 

a flame is kindling in the robin’s throat.

I have been following the work of poet Sarah Sloat for a while now.  Actually, I have been aware of her work ever since I was idly googling myself one afternoon and found she'd added one of my poems to a list of some of the best things she'd read online recently.  So she is a woman of taste and sensitivity.  But also a interesting poet herself, writing work in a voice that is quirky, adroit, charming, with a dash of earned bitterness, and heaps of smarts. She has a chapbook, In The Voice of a Minor Saint.  You can get it here.  My favorite work of hers I've read this year is a collection of prose pieces called "Attending the Tasting."  And I am not alone in my admiration, it won a Best of the Web 2010 Award. The title of this blog post is a quote from "Attending." Attend, friends.

Lately I keep noticing wrought iron benches

Oh you black iron
park bench empty
and waiting
for something beautiful as snow,

oh you black park bench
occupied
by sunlight
and the invisible

buttocks
of one hundred
grumbling
urban ghosts,

black
iron bench I
will scratch my name
on your arm

before the bus arrives
and takes me in
chains to
the castle of the day