Poetry Month

It is April and that means warmer weather (I hope!) and that the flood of poetry in honor of National Poetry Month is beginning. Here's a fine poem by one of our best poets, Yusef Komunyakaa: Daytime Begins with a Line by Anna Akhmatova.

Closer to home, I am delighted to report that my poem "Poem beginning with a found line," recently published in Broadkill Review, will be on display outside the New Deal Café in Greenbelt, MD, as part of their Poetry Moment Project. In connection with this, I will be reading during a National Poetry Month reading and reception on Sunday April 6 at the Café from 2-4 p.m. If you are in the DC area, please attend. The link has information about the Café, including address, phone number, and directions.

Add some poetry to your day every day in April...and always!

Poetic Tourism

The editor of Little Patuxent Review (where I have now had the honor of being published twice), Laura Shovan, recently invited me to be one of her guest bloggers for National Poetry Month. Her theme this year is the Technoverse, so my experience with a podcast poetry tour was a perfect fit. Read it and a supplemental poem and enjoy Laura's wonderful illustrations, in today's edition of Author Amok.

As it happens, today is also Poem in Your Pocket Day, sponsored by The Academy of American Poets. Mine is "The Rain" by Robert Creeley. What's yours?

Old Fires

Happy to report that a recent poem has found a home online with a very fine journal called Cactus Heart. It's entitled "Gerhard and Fern," and was inspired by a brief encounter with a charming couple I met at my Iota reading in January.

I am also delighted to have just received the acceptance of two poems for the journal The Rusty Nail. I will post details and link when the time comes. I hope everyone had a happy and poetry-filled National Poetry Month!

Ending the Month

This April has been too busy for much posting, so I have been unable to post excerpts from favorite poems as I have done in the past. However, I am happily able to close out National Poetry Month 2009 with a new poem of my own. Once again, a few minutes at One Word has produced pay dirt.

Glossy

the sky yesterday
where it edged
the roofs of buildings
and lay on the surface
of the water in the
fountain basin in the park
and how the sun poured
down and gave
a sheen to the feathers
of the grackle bathing
in the fountain and to
all of us just
and unjust alike
out under the sky

The poem evokes a lunchtime walk I took on Tuesday to Lafayette Park (last four pictures).

Happy May!

Listen

The Smoking Book has posted a sound file of my reading my poem, "Mescal." They continue to receive and post some excellent work, both poems and prose, so visit often.

Until Everything Goes Dark

Drinking Weather

Sky perfect dull gray
intermittent spits of rain
not cold or warm
and just enough wind
to get inside a jacket
and I have nothing to do
and all the time in the world
to do it. A good day
to go home early
turn out all the lights
open the bottle
and look through the window
at the sky until everything
goes dark.

Just about a week ago, the weather was as described in the poem and and it made me feel as described in the poem. Instead of getting drunk, I wrote the poem.

Gray

It's a gray and cool early Spring day in Washington and I've been in a mood to match. This weather is excellent for poetry, however, so in honor of National Poetry Month, here's an older one of mine from an unpublished manuscript called The Sunflower Notebook. Though the season it depicts is different, the mood and color are the same:

Cold Day in June

Gray thoughts on a gray day.
Gray wind drives gray rain
into gray faces. Tires hiss
on gray pavement. And yet
on a cold day in June
the work of a year
is finished after all,
and reading Rilke,
“feeling yourself among stones
that listen,” you feel something
stir: a gray happiness.

I seem to be busier this year, so my poetry month postings may be fewer than in previous years. Don't let that stop you from going out and trying some new poetry or revisiting old favorites this month!

The Great Figure

We'll close National Poetry Month with William Carlos Williams, one of America's greatest and most important poets. He influenced many poets across a wide and diverse range, from Robert Lowell, to Robert Creeley to Allen Ginsberg. My own work owes a great debt to his.

The Great Figure

Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.

April may be over, but keep poetry part of your life every day!

Don't Love Your Life Too Much

Continuing our National Poetry Monthly selections, an excerpt from Mary Oliver, one of our finest poets and one of the few who can actually sell out a reading:

For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then

the butterfly
rose, weightless in the wind.
"Don't love your life
too much," it said,

and vanished
into the world.
from "One or Two Things"

And something new from me:

Lightning in a Bottle

Dozens of interlaced
nerves branch out
like ant pathways
in all directions
crackling like a hundred
tiny electrical fires if
I could find the switch
I could sleep.

Check These Out

To hold my readers until I can post another poem (Mary Oliver is up next), here's a link to a very entertaining article about the value of poetry up against, e.g., mathematics. Also, I am not alone in thinking
George Oppen deserves a wider audience.

Out of a Cloud

Continuing our Poetry Month postings, here's another first-rate poet who happens to have been a woman (I'm not falling into that "woman poet" locution ever again...no one calls T.S. Eliot or Whitman "America's greatest man poet"!):

Several Voices Out of a Cloud

Come, drunks and drug-takers; come, perverts unnerved!
Receive the laurel, given, though late, on merit, to whom
and wherever deserved.

Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,
Get the hell out of the way of the laurel. It is deathless
And it isn't for you.
—Louise Bogan

Swifts

I noticed I have yet to post any poems by women poets, so to correct this oversight, a selection from a very fine British writer, Anne Stevenson. I was aware she had written a biography of Sylvia Plath, but not until I received a poem of hers in my daily Poetry Month e-mail from Poetry Daily did I discover what an incredible poet she is.

The next day, a fleet of high crosses cruises in ether.
These are the air pilgrims, pilots of air rivers;
a shift of wing, and they’re earth-skimmers, daggers,
skilful in guiding the throw of themselves away from themselves.

Quick flutter, a scimitar upsweep, out of danger of touch, for
earth is forbidden to them, water’s forbidden to them,
all air and fire, little owlish ascetics, they outfly storms,
they rush to the pillars of altitude, the thermal fountains.
—from "Swifts"

My own modest attempt to depict swifts:

a flight of
swifts just at
dusk their strange
high thin music
a thin reed
to grasp a hope
for next day's
dusk and again
music

Prize Poetry

Congratulations to Robert Hass and Philip Schultz, co-winners of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry!

The rest of us have to act like we believe
The dead women in the rubble of Baghdad
Who did not cast a vote for their deaths
Or the raw white of the exposed bones
In the bodies of their men or their children
Are being given the gift of freedom
Which is the virtue of the injured us.
It's hard to say which is worse, the moral
Sloth of it or the intellectual disgrace.
—Robert Hass, from "Bush's War," in Time and Materials

The deep forlorn smell of moss and pine
behind your stone house, you strumming
and singing Lorca, Vallejo, De Andrade,
as if each syllable tasted of blood,
as if you had all the time in the world. . .

You knew your angels loved you
but you also knew they would leave
someone they could not save.
—Philip Schultz, from "The Failure"

I've had two poems of my own accepted for the May issue of The Scrambler. In addition to the texts, you will be able to listen to audio files of me reading the poems. I'll repost the link when that issue is online.

"Still the sea is salt"

In my continuing series of poems for National Poetry Month, here is a lovely lyric by A.E. Housman. While his poems may not have the grandeur of Tennyson or the philosophical heft of Matthew Arnold, his ear is matchless and his handling of meters and his musicality make him worthy of a wider readership.

Stars, I have seen them fall,
But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.
The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault;
It rains into the sea,
And still the sea is salt.

And in the spirit of NaPoWriMo, here's a fragment of my own. Perhaps it will grow into a fulll poem, but in any case, it's all I have that's new to offer at the moment.

Fled

Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?
And was it the bass or the keening
vocal that kept me awake for two hours
in the first place? And did I ever
actually fall asleep?

This piece was inspired by a writing "assignment" from the editors of Red Morning press, a small poetry press, sent to their e-mail list. The challenge was to use the last line of a favorite poem as a starting point for a poem of one's own. Your assigment: Identify the poem and author of my first line.

NPM & NaPoWriMo

It's April and that means both National Poetry Month and NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), during which many poets will try to write a poem a day for the duration of the month. While I don't expect to have the time or energy to write a poem every day, I do intend consciously to make time and space for regular writing. To get the month started, here's my most recent poem.

Hands
(for B)

Dark stones shine
at your throat
and your eyes
are dark and shine
like your black hair
that cascades down
the sides of your pale face.
I should be listening
to what others are saying
but my eyes dart back
to you. I wonder
what you are thinking
as I turn away again.
I try to think about
what I will say when
it’s my turn but my eyes
are caught again and
again by your slender
nervous hands.

Thanks as always to Naomi for her keen eye and ear in helping me revise. I'll be posting poems throughout the month, so look back in when you can.

Battle-Flags

We come back to Whitman for the final offering for this year's National Poetry Month with an excerpt from "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryards Bloom'd," his great elegy for Abraham Lincoln and the dead of the Civil War. With 100 American soldiers and countless Iraqis killed just in the last month, we should ponder Whitman's words carefully:

And I saw askant the armies,
I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,
Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierced with missiles I saw them,
And carried hither and yon through the smoke and torn and bloody,
And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (all in silence,)
And the staffs all splinter'd and broken.

I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,
I saw the debris and debris of all the dead soldiers of the war,
But I saw they were not as was thought,
They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer'd not,
The living remain'd and suffer'd, the mother suffer'd,
And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer'd,
And the armies that remain'd suffer'd.

Somehow for the Best

Edwin Arlington Robinson is a supreme poet of alienation and a keen commentator on the necessary delusions by which people give their lives meaning. This poem, however, is uncharacteristically somewhat more hopeful than many of his best.

The Altar

Alone, remote, nor witting where I went,
I found an altar builded in a dream --
A fiery place, whereof there was a gleam
So swift, so searching, and so eloquent
Of upward promise, that love's murmur, blent
With sorrow's warning, gave but a supreme
Unending impulse to that human stream
Whose flood was all for the flame's fury bent.

Alas! I said,—the world is in the wrong.
But the same quenchless fever of unrest
That thrilled the foremost of that martyred throng
Thrilled me, and I awoke . . . and was the same
Bewildered insect plunging for the flame
That burns, and must burn somehow for the best.

For more poems, biography, and critical writings on Robinson visit Edwin Arlington Robinson—American Poet.

I Am the Wings

Today's poem is from Ralph Waldo Emerson, a true American original and an important influence on and encourager of Walt Whitman.

Brahma

If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

Brahma is the creator-god in the Hindu trinity Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva.

Some Blessed Hope

I was intending to restrict these National Poetry Month offerings to American poets, but I can't resist presenting Thomas Hardy, whose poems I love deeply.

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

Two other Hardy links:
The Thomas Hardy Association (N. America)
The Thomas Hardy Society (UK)

Plath & Vonnegut

One should read Sylvia Plath, not out of curiosity about her famously troubled private life or the controversies around her marriage to Ted Hughes and his handling of her literary remains or for any other extra-literary concerns, but simply for the great power and beauty of her best work. Here's a favorite of mine, quiet yet intense and lovely:

Sheep in Fog

The hills step off into whiteness.
People or stars
Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

The train leaves a line of breath.
O slow
Horse the colour of rust,

Hooves, dolorous bells -
All morning the
Morning has been blackening,

A flower left out.
My bones hold a stillness, the far
Fields melt my heart.

They threaten
To let me through to a heaven
Starless and fatherless, a dark water.

R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut. There's an excellent tribute, with songs, at Straight, No Chaser.