slaughter and laughter

spelling, by Margaret Atwood

2009-07-16T13:14:00.000-07:00

My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,red, blue & hard yellow,
learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells.

I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.

A child is not a poem,
a poem is not a child.
there is no either/or.
However.

I return to the story
of the woman caught in the war
& in labour, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.

Ancestress: the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.

A word after a word
after a word is power.

At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow & the word
splits & doubles & speaks
the truth & the body
itself becomes a mouth.

This is a metaphor.

How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.

Writer's Almanac - Mary Oliver

2009-05-02T23:01:00.000-07:00

In Blackwater Woods
Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

It's the poem of the day for the Writer's Almanac (from Garrison Keillor). Got to dig into Mary Oliver now.

it knocked me off my feet

2009-03-03T00:27:00.000-08:00

A Story About the Body

The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had
watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and
he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work
was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him
directly when she made amused or considered answers to his questions.
One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she
turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like
that too, but I must tell you I have had a double mastectomy," and when
he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." the radiance that he
had carried around in his belly and chest cavity--like music--withered,
very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I
don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines,
and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his
door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it
up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl--she must have
swept them from the corners of her studio--was full of dead bees.

-Robert Haas

at least there was a poet at inauguration day, right?

2009-01-24T20:42:00.000-08:00

Sam Green, Washington state's first poet laureate and one of my favorite past professors, is back at SU, teaching his Writing Poetry class. Since I'm no longer one of his students (unfortunately), the only time I get to chat with him is when he stops by the bookstore. He came in the other day, in order to buy a card for his wife (because he is such a sweet man), and we got onto the subject of the poet at Obama's inauguration. He didn't outright say it, but you could tell he was not too impressed with the choice. "Obama's favorite poet is [some man whose name escapes me]," he said. "I don't know why he chose her to read." He added that I could have written a much better poem, but I don't know if that's saying much.

I do know that I can't stand the way she reads aloud.

Elizabeth Alexander at the Inauguration
(You can read the text here.)

things i saw at paul hunter's house

2008-09-21T23:09:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-25T21:50:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-07T13:49:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-25T09:15:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-09T15:23:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-07T18:30:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-30T18:17:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-23T17:03:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-19T17:10:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-09T20:05:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-07T16:51:00.000-08:00

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"

2008-03-07T15:36:00.000-08:00

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"

2008-03-01T06:22:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-29T18:24:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-26T11:39:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-23T14:24:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-22T04:35:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-20T14:58:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-02-19T21:56:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-18T11:00:00.000-08:00

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

If anyone happens to stumble upon this; also, Dylan Thomas

2007-08-04T12:27:00.001-07:00

If anyone who isn't me, Alyssa, or Joy happens to come across this and wants to help share poets and poems and short stories, then e-mail me (acsmith@willamette.edu) and I'll include you. Seriously, three's company, four's a party.

Also, read "A Visit to Grandpa's" by Dylan Thomas. If I edited a book called "Greatest Short Stories Written, Ever," this would be one of them.

http://www.undermilkwood.net/prose_avisit.html

Yeah, more Jorie Graham ALL RIGHT!

2007-08-04T11:48:00.001-07:00

Opened up my New Yorker today, and Jorie Graham had a poem in it. I don't even have to tell you that I was excited. It's a good one.

Later in Life

the neglected girlfriend

2007-06-09T21:56:00.000-07:00

Finishing third place
after good beer and Halo:
story of my life.

"Poets don't have to work."

2007-05-26T21:55:00.001-07:00

I love hearing writers read their own work. Maxine Hong Kingston (author of The Woman Warrior and Tripmaster Monkey) is a fun one to listen to. Her reading at U.C. Berkeley's Lunch Poems makes me laugh out loud. She talks about her process of becoming and being a poet and reads from her more recent books, To Be The Poet. The video is almost an hour long--it's high quality but if you can't sit for too long, at least listen to her poem about elephant seals. Start at 10 minutes if you want somewhat of an intro to the poem. But if you just want to skip straight to the poem, forward to about 13:30 minutes.

For Sarah and Joy

2007-05-22T23:31:00.001-07:00

When the river is

still, to stand beside the shore

is to see the sky.

Dublin

2007-04-26T21:59:00.000-07:00

I got into Trinity College, Dublin, for the whole year. I know, this isn't the expressed purpose of this blog. But seeing as how only two other people check it and those two have asked me repeatedly, I thought I'd share.

Snedding and all that it entails

2007-04-22T00:37:00.000-07:00

This poem should have been here a long time ago. One of my favorite from the summer.

The Turnip-Snedder by Seamus Heaney

For Hughie O'Donoghue

In an age of bare hands
and cast iron,

the clamp-on meat-mincer,
the double flywheeled water-pump,

it dug its heels in among wooden tubs
and troughs of slops,

hotter than body heat
in summertime, cold in winter

as winter's body armour,
a barrel-chested breast-plate

standing guard
on four braced greaves.

"This is the way that God sees life,"
it said, "from seedling-braird to snedder,"

as the handle turned
and turnip-heads were let fall and fed

to the juiced-up inner blades,
"This is the turnip-cycle,"

as it dropped its raw sliced mess,
bucketful by glistering bucketful.

The first poem from Seamus Heaney's new (2006) collection "District and Circle." Read it aloud. With an Irish accent, preferably. Especially "from seedling-braird to snedder."

not a poem, but one of the shortest short stories in the world:

2007-04-16T23:06:00.000-07:00

"El Dinosaurio" por Augusto Monterroso (1921-2003)
Cuando despertó el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí.

the translation
"El Dinosaurio" by Augusto Monterroso
When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.

Um, I'm a little irked by the fact that people can get away with writing one-sentence stories. Am I allowed to do that? That aside, I suppose the point of this story is to get the reader to imagine. That's what my Spanish prof says, anyway. What immediately comes to my mind: A purple (a majestic purple, not a Barney purple) dinosaur resembling a dragon, which sleeps protectively next to the narrator.... I guess I'm not in one of my cynical moods right now.

I heart coffeehouses

2007-03-22T20:50:00.000-07:00

I read this poem, along with T.S. Eliot's "Preludes," at our dorm Fair Trade coffee house last night. I don't think there will ever be a day when I read something by Margaret Atwood and say, "Hmm, she could have done better." This poem is no exception:

IN THE SECULAR NIGHT

In the secular night you wander around
alone in your house.
It's two-thirty.
Everyone has deserted you,
or this is your story;
you remember it from being sixteen,
when the others were out somewhere, having a good time,
or so you suspected,
and you had to baby-sit.
You took a large scoop of vanilla ice-cream
and filled up the glass with grapejuice
and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller
with his big-band sound,
and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up the chimney,
and cried for a while because you were not dancing,
and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple.

Now, forty years later, things have changed,
and it's baby lima beans.
It's necessary to reserve a secret vice.
This is what comes from forgetting to eat
at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully,
drain, add cream and pepper,and amble up and down the stairs,
scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl,
talking to yourself out loud.
You'd be surprised if you got an answer,
but that part will come later.

There is so much silence between the words,
you say. You say, The sensed absence
of God and the sensed presence
amount to much the same thing,
only in reverse.
You say, I have too much white clothing.
You start to hum.
Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn't now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone's been run over.
The century grinds on.

In a Station of the Metro

2007-02-18T22:12:00.000-08:00

Once I realized that there are a lot of long poems here, I thought maybe a short one would be fun.

In a Station of the Metro
Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

So, the first line just runs, skipping and iambic. The second just drops, stagnant. One is motion, the other is stagnation. Of all the times I've looked at this poem, this last time is the first time I saw that. Just a reminder to read everything twice. Or, like, three hundred times.

On Rain and Nothingness

2007-02-16T00:36:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the absence, no excuses will be made. Just to let you all know that I value your participation highly, read everything you post at least three times, but that all I read right now is Jorie Graham and her corresponding philosophers, and I've decided to spare you that part of my life.

Anyway, it rained here today and so I was infinitely productive. I thought how I really am content to just sit and live in my mind without really taking care of my body (aside from now-sustained vegetarianism) and then I got to thinking about this Wallace Stevens poem, The Snow Man. I also saw some ducks poking at the ground with their faces looking for worms in the rain and thought it was a nice metaphor how they were grasping at things unseen and uncertain; yet, their instincts told them that if they could not penetrate the earth in its moment of weakness they would starve. See how I slipped that in there? Been reading too much theology lately.

Wallace Stevens:
The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

We talked about this one in class, as it pertains to a state of the mind. It really praises nothingness, as in, one must fully enter into a mind of winter in order to appreciate what others may find misery in.

It's still cold here, though. I won't go so far as to condone the cold. Just saying, as a coping mechanism, it's nice to sit inside the library and read poems.

And now, for another

2007-02-06T12:58:00.000-08:00

Living In Sin

She had thought the studio would keep itself;
No dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,
The panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears,
A piano with a Persian shawl, a cat
Stalking the picturesque amusing mouse
Had been her vision when he pleaded "Come."
Not that at five each separate stair would writhe
Under the milkman's tramp; that morning light
So coldly would delineate the scraps
Of the last night's cheese and blank sepulchral bottles;
The on the kitchen shelf among the saucers
A pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own--
Envoy from some black village in the mouldings...
Meanwhile her night's companion, with a yawn
Sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard,
Declared it out of tune, inspected whistling
A twelve hours' beard, went out for cigarettes;
While she, contending with a woman's demons,
Pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found
A fallen towel to dust the table-top,
And wondered how it was a man could wake
From night to day and take the day for granted.
By evening she was back in love again,
Though not so wholly but throughout the night
She woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming
Like a relentless milkman up the stairs

-Adrienne Rich

This poem is from my American Lit class last spring, and re-reading it made me love it even more than I remember. Even though I have to read it pretty carefully, I like that it's not broken up at all, except for the plethera of punctuation. I also loved the opposing night and day imagery, and how this woman's ideal is so well contrasted to the reality of the situation. The title is also interesting to me, and sets up the religious language throughout the poem.

Zbigniew Herbert's "A Life"

2007-02-03T19:17:00.000-08:00

"A Life"

I was a quiet boy a little sleepy and--amazingly--
unlike my peers--who were fond of adventures--
I didn't expect much--didn't look out the window
At school more diligent than able--docile stable

Then a normal life at the level of a regular clerk
up early street tram office again tram home sleep

I truly don't know why I'm tired uneasy in torment
perpetually even now--when I have a right to rest

I know I never rose high--I have no achievements
I collected stamps medicinal herbs was O.K. at chess

I went abroad once--on a holiday to the Black Sea
in the photo a straw hat tanned face--almost happy

I read what came to hand: about scientific socialism
about flights into space and machines that can think
and the thing I liked most: books on the life of bees

Like others I wanted to know what I'd be after death
whether I'd get a new apartment if life had meaning

And above all how to tell the good from what's evil
to know for sure what is white and what's all black

Someone recommended a classic work--as he said
it changed his life and the lives of millions of others
I read it--I didn't change--and I'm ashamed to admit
for the life of me I don't remember the classic's name

Maybe I didn't live but endured--cast against my will
into something hard to govern and impossible to grasp
a shadow on a wall
so it was not a life
a life up to the hilt

How could I explain to my wife or to anyone else
that I summoned all my strength
so as not to commit stupidities cede to insinuation
not to fraternize with the strongest

It's true--I was always pale. Average. At school
in the Army in the office at home and at parties

Now I'm in the hospital dying of old age.
Here is the same uneasiness and torment.
Born a second time perhaps I'd be better.

I wake at night in a sweat. Stare at the ceiling. Silence.
And again--one more time--with a bone-weary arm
I chase off the bad spirits and summon the good ones.

--Zbigniew Herbert (translated, from the Polish, by Alissa Valles)

Honestly, although I may be an English/Creative Writing major, I'm not very proficient at understanding poems, thus hindering my ability to talk about them. But practice apparently makes perfect.

This poem was featured in the Jan. 22, 2007 issue of the New Yorker (p. 68-69), where I get my dose of poetry these days. "A Life" is just one of those things that I like without really knowing why. I suppose I'm intrigued by Herbert's reflective tone and purposeful (mis)use of punctuation; it seems to follow the speaker's stream of consciousness--if you think about your own, it's often fluid and choppy at the same time, repetitive, has tangents, and doesn't follow a logical order--and by the end of the poem, when they are finally used, the periods seem to tack on a sense of finality of his life and a sense of certainty that his life was indeed nothing special.

Alyssa

P.S. All of the lines in second to last stanza are supposed to be indented, but I can't figure out how to make that happen--

A little lighter

2007-01-30T10:24:00.000-08:00

First of all, I'm glad I'm not the only one that was dissapointed in our poetry-lacking summer. However, I will say that I tend to gravitate towards more concrete poetry, rather than abstract. I enjoy thinking about a theme or image, but at the same time I like being able to sit down at the end of the day and say, yeah, I get that.

"And always an audience / for all this slaughter and laughter--"

2007-01-28T14:57:00.000-08:00

Since I signed up for a class on the poet Jorie Graham, I've gotten pretty much obsessed. She says she comes from Wallace Stevens, yet her images have more of a solid foundation in reality. She studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and absorbed Derrida's postmodern philosophy into almost all of her poetry. Given that, even a cursory glance at Omaha will reveal double meanings and oppositions that are not too opposed--"...always an audience / for all this slaughter and laughter," for one. So, I've got a couple of opinions about Omaha, but I hope it just gets the ball rolling. Not that everything here has to be war poetry.

The constant play on the theater of war is the most politically potent message. Even in the title, Omaha, there is the sense of being far removed. Omaha, in the center of the United States, was also the name of the center of the bloodiest scene in World War II--Omaha Beach, the site of the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day. At once, it is so far removed and yet inextricable from the violence. The phrase "balconied gods" evokes the indifference of those higher up, and she pulls us into the current time with "As I tell you this / the stage grows very dark." The next lines reverse the balcony/stage metaphor, putting the violence at the upper floor of an American city. The powerlessness of those below suddenly becomes the powerlessness of those above, and there are then her true feelings--that even the "balconied gods" cannot get the killing to end.

Share poetry

2007-01-28T14:46:00.000-08:00

Last summer, there was this great idea that we--not sure exactly who, but at least Joy, Alyssa, and I--had where we get together and have dinner and read some poetry. But, as we quickly realized, no one, ourselves included, wants to learn when the sun is out. So, now that we're back in Salem/Spokane/Seattle, I think that we can do better. Mainly because we're avoiding homework. Post your thoughts about poems, or post a poem that you want us to read. Hey, even post a short story. I have a lot of homework to avoid doing.

Omaha - Jorie Graham

2007-01-28T14:39:00.000-08:00

OMAHA

(Lowest Tide, Coefficient 105, Full Moon)

You can enlarge your soul but it is to receive what?
Did you say the thing they were expecting you to say?
Well then, see, how easy it is to be somebody else.
Like someone you see who looks like yourself in a dream,
for instance. What is it you look like. Your face,
is it there in your hands now, or down in the water?
If in the water, can you still pick it up, put it back on,
or is that trick lost? Reflect. Quick. Have you that vacancy 
         in you
which can be forced to collaborate?
Have you that vacancy which can be occupied,
and by what, and for how long, and at what
cost, pray, tell. Oh speak. Say TAKE YOUR MEDICINE.
Or PRETEND YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT IT'S ALL
ABOUT. Or whatever else it is you would have us
know. MY HOW YOU'VE GROWN would be ok,
but I'm not sure how you'd mean us to take that.
TAKE THAT. WHO ARE THOSE THERE.
Everything looks suddenly frighteningly reassuring.
As if the gods were rummaging through their drawers for this brief
spell, which feels like rain to us, so one can imagine
humming a little song, nothing, for just this tiny interval,
behind one's back. But look, even as we feel free
to live as if in their absence, for just this little while,
look how our mania continues to strut, oblivious. Ours,
in spite of us. What is this we are?
Even the balconied-ones have their limits.
Tolerance. Boredom. One comes out to the edge now with a blue
            wand,
I look up. Don't draw too close.
Do you think she has a different power. She waves
the thing. Others scamper away as she reaches the rail
and leans out over us. Waves and waves of blue
seem to scatter from the tip of her wand. "You
are fools" is said by the waves, but in another tongue.
"Anaesthesized by greed" is also let loose.
Some among us think they rise triumphant by just
drawing the next breath. As I tell you this
the stage grows very dark, I can hardly make her out.
The perspective is that of an American city, where one
is peering from street level to an unfindable upper floor.
A noisy place where it seems all of this
should have been long obvious to us from the start.
When "good" and "evil" had fresh paint on them,
performing for us on their various pedestals,
and you, you could look into any store window
and see the offspring of the two
right there, dead center, from any sidewalk,
a certain resemblance to some actor--waves now, waves rolling
            eternally,
of men, some dead, some still alive, being swept in, being rammed in--
Agency! What is that? The drowned wash in to receive
their bullets, the living wash in to receive
theirs. They cannot really be told
apart. Not from up there where the firing originates.
Not from up there where it's a scene in a movie.
There never was an alternative.
No one after a point could have stood up and walked
         away
in fear. No. No fear. Not anymore. These are the givens:
       poverty, greed, un-
expectedness. The bubble of the now being emitted from the
        blossoming
then. That's all. Maybe disappearance--as of the moon
to the horror of the men already in dark.
And always the one, far away, sitting charred and absent-
minded, on his throne. And always an audience
for all this slaughter and laughter--
"later on." The last few decades at any given moment
a leaf that drops. Some twig left
bare. The change upon us. But the fall--the falling
         of it
even after it is done--the fall: continues.
Because there is no way to get the killing to end.