things i saw at paul hunter's house

I'd say Paul Hunter is probably best known for his farmer's poetry, detailing and honoring the everyday tasks and stories of rural life. I also haven't seen a single poem of his that uses punctuation. This style of writing irks me to read at first, but a second look lets me see line after line of beautiful fragments or phrases.

I had the privilege last winter to meet Paul Hunter and visit his house with my poetry class. It's a cozy one, his house, built on a steep hill of the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle. His home is lived-in, full of things collected over time. Taking the creaky steps down to his basement and carefully edging around stacks of boxes, brimming shelves, instruments and tools, we crowded around his workspace where he does his wood carving and runs his own printing press (Wood Works Press).

Hunter is just as welcoming as his home. Friendly, full of advice, a great reading voice, and an endearing graying mustache.

Things I saw at Paul Hunter's house, a list:
large paintings of men walking down the street
stacked cans of ink sorted by color
a variety of wooden chairs in the living room
oriental rugs on a hardwood floor
a cartoon of a bull shitting, with an X drawn over it (think about it)
a sketch of something that looked like a hand
printing presses, at least three, each about 100 years old
a wall of framed poems (by other poets)
a record collection collecting dust
an unfinished wood carving clamped beneath a light

To listen to Paul Hunter talk about and read his poetry and to see some of his house (specifically his porch and his basement), watch the Online NewsHour's interview.

kooser's valentines

Friday afternoon I had a full schedule, but everything fell through. Disappointment led to opportunity, and I picked up a book to read at the library. I ended up with Valentines, poems by Ted Kooser. (I do realize that it's in the middle of August, not Valentine's Day. Deal with it.)

In 1986, Kooser started a project in which he started sending Valentines to his female friends and fans. He'd write a poem, print it on postcards, send them to Valentine, NE to be postmarked from there, and have them mailed out to his list of ladies. He started writing to 50 women, and by 2007 he was sending his Valentine poems to around 2600. Kooser decided that last year was his last year to do this, but now all of his Valentine poems are collected in this book. They're not mushy or sexual, but thoughtful or playful.

His first Valentine poem was "Pocket Poem", which is my favorite of the entire collection. You can hear him read it at the NPR link "Ted Kooser shares the poetry of Valentine's Day".

Poem of the Day

I Googled "Poem of the Day," and sure enough such a site exists. Here's today's feature, by Pierre Martory.

a little out of my range

We've been studying Louise Glück (pronounced "glick") all week in CAP. I must admit, she is a hard poet for me to engage. She uses nature imagery as symbolic for her own life, and after 40 poems it gets a little old. Nonetheless, here is one that I can stand more than the others, mainly because the last three lines are fascinating to me:

Spring Snow

Love at the night sky:
I have two selves, two kinds of power.

I am here with you, at the window,
watching you react. Yesterday
the moon rose over moist earth in the lower garden.
Now the earth glitters like the moon,
like dead matter crusted with light.

You can close your eyes now.
I have heard your cries, and cries before yours,
and the demand behind them.
I have shown you what you want:
not belief, but capitulation
to authority, which depends on violence.

breathtaking, or at least a little slice of delightful

Little Blues

There is no pain. A cracked
teacup rose says hover
in this fracture, your lips
like bees that love

the too ripe pear
nearby. Mist's in the air. Jerry
is filling his pipe again.
There's that song.

-Christopher Howell (a professor at Eastern Washington University, in fact).

My note: If you don't read this one aloud, you just don't get it. Seriously.

i like this one

THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

--Robert Hayden

I might as well share the wealth

My comprehensive paper on Elizabeth Bishop is due Monday at 5 p.m. As I have learned from the dear Mrs. Stairet's class, I can pretty much write a 10-page paper of b.s. in less than 4 hours. Granted there are still some holes and I need to find some more secondary support, but overall I'm rather pleased with myself. Here is one of the poems I included in my in-depth analysis, from her collection Questions of Travel:


On the unbreathing sides of hills
they play, a specklike girl and boy,
alone, but near a specklike house.
The sun's suspended eye
blinks casually, and then they wade
gigantic waves of light and shade.
A dancing yellow spot, a pup,
attends them. Clouds are piling up;

a storm piles up behind the house.
The children play at digging holes.
The ground is hard; they try to use
one of their father's tools,
a mattock with a broken half
the two of them can scarcely lift.
It drops and clangs. Their laughter spreads
effulgence in the thunderheads,

weak flashes of inquiry
direct as is the puppy's bark.
But to their little, soluble,
unwarrantable ark,
apparantly the rain's reply
consists of echloalia,
and Mother's voice, ugly as sin,
keeps calling to them to come in.

Children, the threshold of the storm
has slid beneath your muddy shoes;
wet and beguiled, you stand among
the mansions you may choose
out of a bigger house than yours,
whose lawfulness endures.
Its soggy documents retain
your rights in rooms of falling rain.

The dew is in your beard

Found this on my iTunes playlist while I was looking for something new to listen to. Jack Kerouac reading his poem "Abraham," with some piano in the background.

Wires, Philip Larkin

Wires

The widest prairies have electric fences,
For though old cattle know they must not stray
Young steers are always scenting purer water
Not here but anywhere. Beyond the wires

Leads them to blunder up against the wires
Whose muscle-shredding violence gives no quarter.
Young steers become old cattle from that day,
Electric limits to their widest senses.

-Philip Larkin


Writing a paper on Larkin, and this one may not make the cut for my topic, but I love it, so I had to share it.

i think this could be applicable

I AM NOT FLATTERED

I am not flattered that a bell
About the neck of a peaceful cow
Should be more damning to my ear
Than all the bombing planes of hell
Merely because the bell is near,
Merely because the bell is now,
The bombs too far away to hear.

--Robert Francis

more Stevie

Once again, piggy-backing on Alyssa. Hope she has a strong back.

Edinburgh Festival recording, 1965.

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.


Also, the BBC interview with Derek Hart.

Stevie Smith's "Bag-snatching in Dublin"

It had Dublin in the title, so I thought I'd share it with you.


BAG-SNATCHING IN DUBLIN

Sisely
Walked so nicely
With footsteps so discreet
To see her pass
You'd never guess
She walked upon the street.

Down where the Liffey waters' turgid flood
Churns up to greet the ocean-driven mud,
A bruiser fix
Murdered her for 6/6.

--Stevie Smith

More Ezra, Walt; reference "you're supposed to be excited to be living, or something"

This was originally a comment, but once I threw in a poem I was afraid the comment field would ruin the line spacing. Sorry folks.

I'm not really sure how I feel about that. I mean, as a poem. I always get uncomfortable when I feel like a poet is talking so directly. More Ezra Pound than Walt Whitman, I suppose. Your man Jack London did have his hand on beat poetry long before it was mainstream, though, that's for sure.

Which reminds me:

A Pact

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman--
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root--
Let there be commerce between us.

-Ezra Pound

I love it--this is Pound at his most self-reflective: there is no "persona" to be reckoned with. There is no Hugh Selwyn Mobeley, no Prufrock, just himself. But it comes across as sincere, not condescending to Whitman. The line "Now is a time for carving," is so Whitman (mostly just because of the word "Now") but instantly made me think of "Petals on a wet, black bough." from In a Station of the Metro. Maybe it's just the sound, even. Both of these have the same goal of immediacy, of something temporary made permanent. Bringing this to a whole new level, Pound would perform his poetry with a hand drum. He did not (to my knowledge) live in Greenwich Village and wear turtlenecks, but he was a beat none the less (albeit a fascist beat--what's more counter-culture than treason?).

So, I'm an advocate for studying Whitman as a "literary text" (and London, sorry, this got off-topic) but I'm also an advocate for shouting good ol' Ezra while standing in a forest, or maybe at the top of some cliff somewhere.

you're supposed to be excited to be living, or something

Jack London shares my birthday, although he was born in 1876. Quite a long time ago. He has written a semi-autobiographical novel called Martin Eden, which tells the story of a young man consumed with the desire to become an artist. It's a sad story, I'm told. Here is a more upbeat poem of his ("credo" = "what I believe"):

CREDO

I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark
should burn out in a brilliant blaze
than it should be stifled by dry-rot.

I would rather be a superb meteor
every atom of me in magnificent glow
than a sleepy and permanent planet.

The function of man is to live
not to exist.
I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time.

i'm all about diversity

Last night I dreamed that Andrew told me that we're already failing the revival of this blog, so I flew to Dublin with the intention of punching him in the face for being a liar.

Anyway, I thought I'd share a fun poem with you. It's by Paul Laurence Dunbar, who was a popular African American poet back in his day. The poem is written in dialect, and therefore Herbert Martin reads it way better than I ever could. (You can listen to this and a wide selection of Dunbar's poems at dunbarsite.org.)

"A Negro Love Song"

a little advice

I'm so stoked we're back in action, my friends. I'm currently taking a Contemporary American Poetry course, and I love the fact that I can sit and drink tea for hours while reading Adrienne Rich and Robert Lowell, and say I'm doing something academically productive.

However, I'm in a bit of a pickle. I have to pick one poet to do a major research project on (15 page paper) and I was looking for suggestions. My current leaning is either Adrienne Rich or Elizabeth Bishop. However, as part of the project, we have to read every single thing our poet has ever written, multiple times. I welcome your thoughts.

...oder ich werde melancholisch

That's right, another Wozzeck quote, from Alban Berg's opera. I just thought it was applicable to this article. The book has been reviewed constantly for the last month in various papers, but this is the author's column in the LA Times. "The miracle of melancholy," is the article, based on the book Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy. The section on Keats (fittingly, one of the longest sections) is the reason I felt it needed to be shared. The perfect gift for the tortured artist in your life.

The Captain (Herr Hauptmann), in the first scene, says some things to Wozzeck that I don't understand, then threatens "...or I will be melancholy," which I do understand.

das Messer einsinken

That's right, we are blogging machines. Enough of this third-party nonsense about poetry and inevitability and slamming. Not that I don't appreciate these things. I'm just trying to find something to fight about. It's not a joint-blog unless there's fighting. We're the Oasis of poetry blogs.

Two poems: first, Louis MacNeice's "Snow," then, no interval, "History" by Paul Muldoon. Both are Irish; Muldoon seems to draw on the poetic mantra of MacNeice, drawing it out into the self, the two parts of the self, instead of the customary post-war-divided-Ireland interpretation of much mid-century Irish poetry.

Snow

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

-Louis MacNeice (from an anthology, I don't have a date)

History

Where and when exactly did we first have sex?
Do you remember?  Was it Fitzrow Avenue,
Or Cromwell Road, or Notting Hill?
Your place or mine?  Mareilles or Aix?
Or as long ago as that Thursday evening
When you and I climbed through the bay window
On the ground floor of Aquinas Hall
And into the room where MacNeice wrote 'Snow',
Or the room where they say he wrote 'Snow'.

-Paul Muldoon, Why Brownlee Left (1980)

quotes (about poetry). you know, to inspire you.

True eloquence consists in saying all that is necessary, and nothing but what is necessary.
-German poet Heinrich Heine

A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-French poet Rene Char

I don't want to write good poems. I want to write inevitable poems--given who I am, they are what I will write.
-American poet William Stafford

(A theme? Yes, there is one.)

because we have no excuse to learn

And we're back. I'd like to begin with some video--ease us back into the game.

My classmate Lauren, who interns for the PI, goes to a lot of local events to report on the new blog aimed at our age group. (I wish them luck.) Her latest post covers the Youth Speaks preliminaries. I love listening to slam poetry. You should too.

Who speaks? Youth Speaks