spelling, by Margaret Atwood

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

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

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?

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

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.