Sunday Reading: Earthly

The volume is called Earthly, but it deals as much with nostalgia as it does with gardens and fruit. In her poems, Erica Funkhouser eulogizes the changing New England landscape, and yearns for the past represented by the poetry of Robert Frost, poetry which she self-conciously recalls in this volume. The imagery of the second section of the volume, about the apple crop, recall's Frost's time and even his language. "Into the Blue Core", and the rest of the sequence can't help but remind a reader of "After Apple Picking", with the images of the ladder and the apples heaping into crates during the apple harvest. When Funkhouser writes, "I will wait with one foot pressed against the lower rung," one is reminded of the Frost line "my instep arch keeps the pressure of a ladder round." Throughout the volume there are echoes of Frost and his landscape, the fields of hay waiting to be mown, the apples and the people who harvest them.

In "Chebacco: Perspective with Views" Funkhouser reminds us that while this rural landscape still exists, it exists as a commodity, it's been commercialized. The antiques, or an apple crate, symbolize the nostalgiac uses to which the past is put in modern life, kept around for decoration or as a quaint reminder of an idealized history. The poem is a portrait of a town where "one angry citizen advertises his grievance/ on a hand-painted sign in his yard:/ If you'd listened to me your tax bill would be $400 lower this year.", where the past becomes commodity in the poem's final lines:

Town where you might in the twenty-first century still purchase
at the White Elephant or Red Dragon
an old apple crate
if it hasn't already been auctioned on eBay.

This symbol of the apple crate also opens the long section called "Pome"--15 separate poems about the apple harvest. The poem begins with a description of the commercialized old-fashioned-ness of rural life:

An empty box--
all that remains
is the sweat-on-wood scent
of collectible New England
and a single plural

APPLES

stamped in stocky letters,
their original bloom
long ago receded.

Funkhouser's collection is about such nostalgia, but also loneliness, wandering, searching. But the poems don't have a despairing tone; it's more hopeful and optimistic, like the figure of Johnny Appleseed who is sprinkled like seeds throughout this volume, with his messianic rural optimisim and practicality.


A great example of the mood of this volume is the poem "Waiting to Cut the Hay". Again it reminds a reader of Frost (Mowing). But the poem revels in its loneliness, a warm and sweet appreciation of the beauty of rural life. The movement of the poem is masterful. As the speaker drives the tractor out of the toolshed and throughout the farm, drives it past fields and the river, a procession of images, but more remarkably, the rhythm of the poem imitates the movement of the tractor itself over farm terrain. For urbanites, think of an SUV on a bumpy road, or in grass: the jerky movements side to side, the unpredictable jostling of your body--all this comes to life in the harsh rythm of the lines, with regular strings of stressed syllables like "heart-shaped seat":

In the toolshed the best thing
is the heart-shaped seat of the tractor.
You don't have to know anything to sit in it.
You don't have to squeeze out the choke
and pump the gas pedal before you can go anywhere.
You dont have to steer the front wheel around
like the neck of a stubborn horse
in order to get out to the fields.
You don't have to look through the rusted floorboards
to see that the timothy is ripe
and that all the hayfields tilt toward the toolshed.
Even the stones beneath the fields lean this way.
And here comes the far pasture,
with its sumac and cow parsley and the sway-backed fence,
and here's the road to the river, and now the river itself,
the shy wood duck flapping up from the reeds,
the bullfrogs frog-kicking into black water,
and the yellow perch swirling like our own galaxy
until they're right here above the clutch
where you can lower yoru toes in among them.

There's much to enjoy in this volume. But I thought I'd finish with a somewhat political poem, her fantastic concluding poem "The Pianist Upstairs."

The world's at war and he breaks into Brahms
tonight--an intermezzo one might him
to lull a child or coax to life numb
nerves after a round of deafening bombs.

The stairwell's dark and cold, and still I sit
and listen as the music circulates.
I don't know what to do; the day's debates
don't change a thing. We hit. They hit. We hit.

My country's ruined choir resounds with lies,
and still my song will only come from words.
Upstairs, a man devotes a tender hour
to teasing out sweet hidden harmonies
that populate the hallway with white birds.
How wasted here, their pure expressive power.

The sonnet, as a medium for this expression, is perfect, the neat and tidy artistic form whose loveliness contrasts with the brutality and anarchy of war. Art gives form to life and gives us hope with order and beauty. But what strikes me is the odd final line: how wasted here? The peace symbolized by the white birds in the 13th line aren't wasted in the home. And neither are the "words" of the 10th. Peace needed at home as well as on the battlefield.

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A Literary Thanksgiving

Getting back to primary sources is always the best way to study history. So here, from Google books, is a cool new feature they allow, which is to highlight and embed a section of text from a book directly into your site.

William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation is a fascinating document, describing the voyage of the Mayflower in all its horrific detail, including the death of Bradford's own wife and about half of the original group of Pilgrims who first came to Plymouth.

The brief passage which describes the first 'thanksgiving' is below, page 121, located on Google Books (sorry, not sure how to size it properly...if anyone knows, give me a tip in the comments).

EDITED....Removed the google Books embed due to format problems.

Another history of the Wampanoag's first contact with Europeans is here (not everyone knows that Squanto had already been kidnapped and taken to England):

The earliest contacts between the Wampanoag and Europeans occurred during the 1500s as fishing and trading vessels roamed the New England coast. Judging from the Wampanoag's later attitude towards the Pilgrims, most of these encounters were friendly. Some, however, were not. European captains were known to increase profits by capturing natives to sell as slaves. Such was the case when Thomas Hunt kidnapped several Wampanoag in 1614 and later sold them in Spain. One of his victims - a Patuxet named Squanto (Tisquantum) - was purchased by Spanish monks who attempted to "civilize" him. Eventually gaining his freedom, Squanto was able to work his way to England (apparently undeterred by his recent experience with Captain Hunt) and signed on as an interpreter for a British expedition to Newfoundland. From there Squanto went back to Massachusetts, only to discover that, in his absence, epidemics had killed everyone in his village. As the last Patuxet, he remained with the other Wampanoag as a kind of ghost.

To Squanto's tragic story must be added a second series of unlikely events. Living in Holland at the time was a small group of English religious dissenters who, because of persecution, had been forced to leave England. Concerned their children were becoming too Dutch and the possibility of a war between Holland and Spain, but still unwelcome in England, these gentle people decided to immigrate to the New World. The Virginia Company agreed to transport them to the mouth of the Hudson River, took their money, and loaded them on two ships (Speedwell and Mayflower) with other English immigrants not of their faith. The little fleet set sail in July only to have the Speedwell spring a leak 300 miles out to sea. Accompanied by the Mayflower, it barely made it back to Plymouth without sinking. Repairs failed to fix the problem, so in September everyone was crammed aboard the Mayflower, and the whole mess sent merrily on its seasick way to the New World.

Landfall occurred near Cape Cod after 65 days and a very rough passage, but strangely enough, the Mayflower's captain, who had managed to cross the Atlantic during hurricane season, suddenly was unable to sail around some shoals and take them farther south. This forced the Pilgrims to find a place to settle in Massachusetts and try to survive a New England winter with few supplies. For the Virginia Company, there was no problem, since in 1620, Great Britain claimed the boundary of Virginia reached as far north as the present border between Maine and New Brunswick. So the Pilgrims were still in Virginia (although perhaps a little farther north than originally promised), but remembering Britain's concern at the time about French settlement in Nova Scotia, the misplacement of the Pilgrims to New England may not have been entirely an accident.

Skipping past the signing of the Mayflower Compact, the first concerns of the new arrivals were finding something to eat and a place to settle. After anchoring off Cape Cod on November 11, 1620, a small party was sent ashore to explore. Pilgrims in every sense of the word, they promptly stumbled into a Nauset graveyard where they found baskets of corn which had been left as gifts for the deceased. The gathering of this unexpected bounty was interrupted by the angry Nauset warriors, and the hapless Pilgrims beat a hasty retreat back to their boat with little to show for their efforts. Shaken but undaunted by their welcome to the New World, the Pilgrims continued across Cape Cod Bay and decided to settle, of all places, at the site of the now-deserted Wampanoag village of Patuxet. There they sat for the next few months in crude shelters - cold, sick and slowly starving to death. Half did not survive that terrible first winter. The Wampanoag were aware of the English but chose to avoid contact them for the time being.

In keeping with the strange sequence of unlikely events, Samoset, a Pemaquid (Abenaki) sachem from Maine hunting in Massachusetts, came across the growing disaster at Plymouth. Having acquired some English from contact with English fishermen and the short-lived colony at the mouth of the Kennebec River in 1607, he walked into Plymouth in March and startled the Pilgrims with "Hello Englishmen." Samoset stayed the night surveying the situation and left the next morning. He soon returned with Squanto. Until he succumbed to sickness and joined his people in 1622, Squanto devoted himself to helping the Pilgrims who were now living at the site of his old village. Whatever his motivations, with great kindness and patience, he taught the English the skills they needed to survive, and in so doing, assured the destruction of his own people.



Another Thanksgiving read, from the patron saint of this site, Robert Frost:

"Gathering Leaves"

Spades take up leaves
No better than spoons,
And bags full of leaves
Are light as balloons.

I make a great noise
Of rustling all day
Like rabbit and deer
Running away.

But the mountains I raise
Elude my embrace,
Flowing over my arms
And into my face.

I may load and unload
Again and again
Till I fill the whole shed,
And what have I then?

Next to nothing for weight,
And since they grew duller
From contact with earth,
Next to nothing for color.

Next to nothing for use.
But a crop is a crop,
And who's to say where
The harvest shall stop?

Finally, a Native American view of Thanksgiving is found at Alternet.

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Sunday Reading: Ooga-Booga

Ooga Booga is the title of the 2007 volume by the American poet Frederick Seidel. If the title makes you think of the playful mock fright of children at Halloween, you're only part right. The playfulness is only a cheap mask for the seriousness of his subject matter. The poems are about violence, death, the threats we face in the modern world which we desperately attempt to cover with a veneer of civility, routine, and occasional humor.

Here he is in "Eurostar", juxtaposing the innocence of youth with its vulnerability, a vulnerability extended to all of us, and mentioned with a matter of factness that is even more frightening:

Japanese schoolgirls in their school uniforms with their school chaperones
Ride underwater on a train
Every terrorist in the world would love to bomb
For the publicity and to drown everybody.

Ooga Booga indeed.

Elsewhere Seidel mentions the reality of war against the backdrop of the banality of western life, especially the lives of the wealthy elite. The fascinating opening poem "Kill Poem" makes a parallel between the fox hunts of the priveleged classes and the wars that maintain their positions of priveleged power.

Winter Spring Baghdad fall
Venery is weritten all
Over me like a rash,
Hair and the gash,
But also the Lehrer News Hour and a wood fire and Bach.
A short erect tail
Winks across the killing field.
All will be revealed.
I am in a killing field.

The poem ominously concludes with a comparison between the "antlered heads" and the murdered civil rights figures of the 60's:

John F. Kennedy is mounted weeping on the wall.
His weeping brother Robert weeps nearby.
Martin Luther King, at bay in Memphis, exhausted, starts to cry.
His antlered head is mounted weeping on the wall.

Throughout it all Siedel's tone is not mock-serious, but actually mock-light. He has moments of humor, or self mockery ("The owl you heard wasn't an owl. It was me.")Like a culture that plays while Baghdad burns, Seidel's tone suggests nothing's wrong. The rhyme, for example, is occasionally sing song with brief couplets that belie the seriousness of the meaning. He describes the Shah of Iran in his brief, chirpy lines: "I call him Nancy/ He is so fancy/ It is alarming/ He is so charming." But then is a burst of pained realization, the tone reverts back to the awful seriousness of the moement at hand.

So many interesting poems in this volume, but "To Die For" illustrates Seidel's movement within a poem from the mundane to the epic and terrible.

The ants on the kitchen counter stampede toward ecstasy.
The finger chases them down while the herd runs this way and that way.
They are alive while they are alive in their little way.
They burst through their little ant outfits, which tear apart rather easily.

The little black specks were shipped to Brazil in ships.
The Portuguese whipped the little black specks to bits.
The sugar plantatiosn on the horrible tropical coast where the soil was rich
Were a most product ant Auschwitz.

The sugar bowl on the counter is a D-cup, containing one large white breast.
The breast in the bowl is covered by excited specks
That are so beyond and running around, they are wrecks.
They like things that are sweet. That's what they like to eat.

The day outside is blue and good.
God is in the neighborhood.
The nearby ocean puts liquid lure in each trap in the set of six,
Paving the way to the new world with salt and sweet.

They sell them at the hardware store on Main Street.
Inside each trap is a tray that givens them a little ot eat
And sends them back.
There is light in Africa, and it is black.

I was looking for something to try for.
I was looking for someone to cry for.
I was looking for something to die for.
There isn't.

More on Frederick Seidel:

Hear the poems

From Ron Slate:

The best thing ever written about Seidel may be Adam Phillips' "Frederick Seidel's New Poetry," collected in his book of essays Promises, Promises. He noted "the relationship between sophisticated complicity and stark outrage ... Seidel is not writing about anything as consoling as moral muddles; he is writing about how life collapses the moral distinctions we make in order to live it." In other words, Seidel's purpose is serious. Funny how American critics often miss both the cultural significance and formal sophistications of Seidel, and focus instead on his most extreme singularities and personality as if they're writing for People magazine.

Benjamin Kunkel in Harper's (not available on line): Ooga Booga with its playfully scary title and truly frightening contents, is Frederick Seidel's ninght and best book. It is also a sort of culmination, bringing to a pitch of sckill and outrageousness traits present in his work from the beginning. Seidel has always cast a cold but enchangted eye o the rich, including himself; shown a horrified fascination with politics, and been attended by a sense of decline....The early work remains impressive but too obviously indebted to Robert Lowell. The long enjambed lines, mostly unrhymed, crammed like parlors with historical and social data, create an effect of impacted prose, and their emotional violence and lurid imagery ("The cars zombied on, through the synchronized lights...") likewise put you in the mind of Lowell.

The Griffin Prize (shortlisted) Judge's Citation:
“Frederick Seidel’s work reminds us that it is not poetry’s job to reassure, to confirm expectations and habits of thought. Its beauty is often difficult and its pleasures complicated and unnerving. Violent, scary, uncomfortably funny and ferociously sad, angry, mourning, or in love, the poems’ brutal honesty of intellect and instinct is written with wicked, magnificent control. And always, they are utterly human. Morality is never excused from the mess of politics and culture. ‘Civilized is about having stuff,’ writes Seidel. ‘Too much is almost enough.’ Addressing privilege and complicity in the first person, the poems know that for all that is acquired, somebody, or something, pays. ‘The American trophies covered in tears that deck the American halls’ dog the boutique hotels, shadowing corners of those poems in which ‘We lived like hummingbirds on nectar and oxygen.’ Ooga-Booga places in uneasy proximity images and statements that, in the discomfort of the other’s glare, reveal their underpinnings and implications. Its poems refuse complacency and the inertia of despair, whether from trajectories of loss, war, movies, hunting, cocktails at the Carlyle or superbike racing. It bids us take a look at our own affairs. Seidel has written a startling, haunting book. Its risks are both its challenge and reward.”

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John Donne on Torture (Updated)

UPDATE: Horton with more Aug. 17 on Donne and torture. Worth a read.

And then there's this.

Scott Horton in Harper's blog "No Comment":

Recently I asked a clerical friend whether, considering the persistence of torture as a moral issue, he had thought of giving a sermon on the subject? He looked very uncomfortable and responded saying that his congregation was bipartisan and that he would be loathe to introduce a political issue as a sermon topic. It would fragment the congregation, he thought. Really?

I reject the notion that torture is a political issue of any sort. It is a great moral issue. And when those who have a clerical vocation fail to understand it and address it in those terms, they do their flock and themselves a great disservice.

Horton goes on to describe a sermon given by John Donne in 1625, in which Donne challenges the use of torture. Horton explains that when Donne gave this sermon, it was certainly a loaded political question, but he did it anyway, seeing it as a moral issue rather than a political one.

Brilliant, but why doesn't Mr. Horton quote the sermon at all? His post forced me to look up the sermon in question, which opens with language similar to the poetic conceits Donne is famous for:

As the sun works diversly according to the diverse isposition of the subject, (for the sun melts wax, and it hardens clay) so do the good actions of good men: upon good men they work a vertuous emulation, a noble and a holy desire to imitate, upon bad men they work a vicious and impotent envy, a desire to disgrace, and calumniate.

Donne later argues that God made the human body holy by choosing to present himself in human form, and therefore those who "tear the body of man with violence" have opposed God "in his purpose of dignifying the body of man":

They therefore oppose God in his purpose of dignifying the body of man, first who violate, and mangle this body, which is the organ in which God breathes, and they also which pollute and defile this body, in which Christ Jesus is apparelled; and they likewise who prophane this body, which is the Holy Ghost, and the high Priest, inhabits, and consecrates.

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Site Review: Ramble Underground

Wanted to take a moment and recommend a good site dedicated to fiction and poetry. Kind of an on-line literary magazine.

The site is called Ramble Underground and I've included a few readings below.

Ramble Underground publishes quarterly; when you visit the site you'll see a series of tabs and you'll see the quarterly "winners", those writers that the editors have chosen to publish that quarter.

The current 1st Prize winner is Bob Thurber--great Ohio literary name, eh? I thought this was a good choice. Thurber's story is edgy and reminded me a little bit of Jim Harrison in its rambling monologue style. Here's an excerpt:

You a big drinker, Carl, Fred said.

I told him I hadn't had a drop in four years, honest to God, and that I would consider it a personal favor if this one time he could please cut me some slack, which is a stale joke around a shoelace factory.

How long you been sober? For real.

One hundred and twenty one days, I said.

That's still a lot of days, said Fred.

It's my new world record, I said.

He put his hand on my shoulder and steered me over to one of the coffee machines. He said he was terribly sorry about my loss. Then he fed the machine a few coins. He bought me a coffee.

Listen, he said. Tell you what. Coming in tomorrow is pretty much up to you, okay? What ever you want to do.

He smiled and I shook his hand. I thanked him. I told Fred he was a swell guy.

Then I emptied six sugar packets into my coffee and stirred it with a pencil. On the walk back to the line he asked if my mother's death had been sudden.

She died this morning, I said.

He nodded. Then he said what he had meant to ask was had she been ill for a long time.

I shrugged. You're asking the wrong person, Fred. I haven't seen the woman in a dog's age.

How old?

Not very, I said. She had me at fifteen. I was born on this side, about 800 feet over the border, which makes me one hundred percent legal, and would have made her a citizen too if she'd stayed. Mostly my aunts raised me. They did a good job.

A poetry sample, "Three Weeks and One Day" by Sarah Fruchtnicht:

Who will come to get me

In this bed?

If knowing me was

Knowing enough and

Delivery was at the

Push of a button

I’m only good for

Sleep tonight

That isn’t unusual

If I promise to be

Nimble in the morning,

Who will help me sleep

And not ask about my dreams

That I hardly remember,

Avoid being slovenly,

Abrasive or nervous,

But sleep as if teaching

The bed what it should

Look like

Until they let us

Go home again

And pretend not a

Body ever floated down

Our driveways and

Past the grocery store,

That our teacher didn’t

Die in her attic with

Her newborn,

All the stores weren’t

Plundered and schools

Weren’t full of mold,

1,000 didn’t die because

We can still

Sleep like people in

Iowa, Oregon, Brazil,

France and Paraguay

Share a bed and never

Think of the same thing

Because what would

Be the point or prize

Need my breath to

Fall in sync with another’s

Someone who knows what

We really lost

And needs the rest

Just as much as I.

I really like Ramble Underground... I'll keep a link in the Arts sidebar on the right, and for a while under my Sunday Reading tab also. I'd like to see the editors clean up some of the navigation, and get that blog going (there's enough art and lit news out there to keep a blog filled up) and give readers a reason to come back more than once a quarter when the new material comes up. And it looks like there hasn't been any new poetry for a while, which is too bad, because poets are always looking for a place to put their work. Also, it shouldn't be too hard to put a comment feature up so readers can comment on the pieces they read. I'd love that. Haloscan is pretty easy to get, even though it's unreliable and doesn't work a third of the time. Still, it's an easy way to get comment functionality.

How about some reviews? What, you guys have jobs? And you let that get in the way of your blogging? What's the matter with you?!

But overall I love what these guys are doing, and I recommend it. Stop by and take a look.

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More poetry in the news

I saw this article on Yahoo referring to an online archive of recorded poetry at the University of Pennsylvania. This is a great resource and a really great idea; how cool that Penn put this together.

The site has some great finds on it, and below the fold I've linked a few gems, which should play after you click on them; or you can go here and pick your own to hear.

Amiri Baraka, "Poem for Speculative Hipsters," recorded in 1964.

Allen Ginsberg, "In Back of Real"

In French: the haunting voice of Guillaume Appolinaire, "Le Pont Mirabeau"

William Carlos Williams: Reading for a Columbia Records 78 rpm disc in the Series "Pleasure Dome: an audible anthology of modern poetry read by its creators," ed. by Lloyd Frankenberg, May 20, 1949: "The Young Housewife," "The Bull," "Poem ('As the cat')," "Lear," "The Dance ('In Brueghel's great picture')," "El Hombre".

Kenneth Koch, "They Say Prince Hamlet"

Four Horsemen

Robert Creeley "I is the Grandson"

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Poem for April 30

I'm concluding National Poetry Month with an original work. I hope you like it, and if you don't, forgive me, and read one of the other great poems new and old that I've posted this month, which you can access on one page by clicking on the "National Poetry Month" tab at the bottom of this post. Thanks to everyone who took the time to read, post, and correspond this month, especially the fine poets Stephen Kuusisto, Ron Slate, Jay Hopler, and Maggie Dietz. And go buy their books (or, like I did, ask your library to buy them!).


ICU

In that hospital corridor
with its shadowless light
white and crisp as linen,

behind the plastic curtain
the tubes sprouting from you
like a crazy geyser,

I pause at the sight of you
and turn away from my
embarrassed revulsion,

only to pass the young mother
from last night's news:
the backlit pulverized chaos,

her daughter and sisters
un-cocooned in the car that
someone didn't see.

She passes me
expressionless
when she should be howling like Lear.

Up close, I recognize her
from a previous life
but don't dare speak.

What right have I
to disturb the tragedy
cascading around her

like a waterfall?
The waiting room tv whispers
21 dead in Algeria--Al Quaeda?

The healthy sip smoldering coffee
gripped in folded prayerlike hands.
It isn't them this time.

Suddenly the knife
they knitted you with
seems flimsy by comparison

with a deeper shade
of grief waiting
outside the door.

Your eyelids flutter at my step--
who's there?
you seem to say.

Don't wake up
this world is drowning
in violent misery

broadcast at
the speed of night.

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Beowulf

One of the remarkable poetic achievements in the latter part of the 20th century is Seamus Heaney's great translation of Beowulf. Every serious reader should own it. Heaney has made the work thrilling and accessible to modern readers, and his introduction to the book is a fascinating lecture in the history of English.

It also brings back good memories of my teaching days. I used to teach Beowulf, The Odyssey (read over the summer), and Paradise Lost (Book IX) as a unit. Sound fun?!

If you've never read Beowulf, other than the boring translation you read a few pages of in your high school lit book, consider picking up Heaney's translation. And be sure to read his remarks at the beginning.

Below are the opening lines of Heaney's Beowulf.


So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns.

There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes,
a wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes.
This terror of the hall-troops had come far.
A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on
as his powers waxed and his worth was proved,
In the end each clan on the outlying coasts
beyond the whale-road had to yield to him
and begin to pay tribute. That was one good king.


Afterwards a boy-child was born to Shield,
a cub in the yard, a comfort sent
by God to that nation. He knew what they had tholed,
the long times and troubles they'd come through
without a leader; so the Lord of Life,
the glorious Almighty, made this man renowned.
Shield had fathered a famous son:
Beow's name was known through the north.
And a young prince must be prudent like that,
giving freely while his father lives
so that afterwards in age when fighting starts
steadfast companions will stand by him
and hold the line. Behaviour that's admired
is the path to power among people everywhere.


Shield was still thriving when his time came
and he crossed over into the Lord's keeping.
His warrior band did what he bade them
when he laid down the law among the Danes:
they shouldered him out to the sea's flood,
the chief they revered who had long ruled them.
A ring-whorled prow rode in the harbour,
ice-clad, outbound, a craft for a prince.
They stretched their beloved lord in his boat,
laid out by the mast, amidships,
the great ring-giver. Far-fetched treasures
were piled upon him, and precious gear.
I never heard before of a ship so well furbished
with battle tackle, bladed weapons
and coats of mail. The massed treasure
was loaded on top of him: it would travel far
on out into the ocean's sway.
They decked his body no less bountifully
with offerings than those first ones did
who cast him away when he was a child
and launched him alone out over the waves.
And they set a gold standard up
high above his head and let him drift
to wind and tide, bewailing him
and mourning their loss. No man can tell,
no wise man in hall or weathered veteran
knows for certain who salvaged that load.


Then it fell to Beow to keep the forts.
He was well regarded and ruled the Danes
for a long time after his father took leave
of his life on earth. And then his heir,
the great Halfdane, held sway
for as long as he lived, their elder and warlord.
He was four times a father, this fighter prince:
one by one they entered the world,
Heorogar, Hrothgar, the good Halga
and a daughter, I have heard, who was Onela's queen,
a balm in bed to the battle-scarred Swede.

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Poem of the Day

Just a few days of National Poetry Month left. Trying to work in some more of my favorites. Robert Lowell below.

For the Union Dead

"Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam."

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gently tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die--
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year--
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

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Poem: Sir Thomas Wyatt

A sonnet by Sir Thomas Wyatt. The poem is reputed to be about Anne Boleyn, whom Wyatt desired but couldn't have. For those who may not be familiar with Renaissance English, "list" means wants or desires, "hind" is a deer, and "noli me tangere" means, "don't touch me". Otherwise the poem's central metaphor is plain enough to anyone who's wanted a woman he couldn't have. A fun, clever, pre-Shakespearean sonnet.


WHOSO list to hunt ? I know where is an
hind !
But as for me, alas ! I may no more,
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore ;
I am of them that furthest come behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer ; but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow ; I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt
As well as I, may spend his time in vain !
And graven with diamonds in letters plain,
There is written her fair neck round about ;
' Noli me tangere ; for Cæsar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.'

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Poem of the Day: Paul Lawrence Dunbar on Frederick Douglass

Certainly everyone who's lived in or around Dayton very long is familiar with Paul Dunbar, probably more so than those who live in other parts of the U. S. We in Dayton take a great deal of pride in Dunbar, being along with the Wright Brothers our favorite son.

I haven't studied Dunbar's poetry extensively, but I read quite a bit of it in my teaching days when I was looking for poems to use in class. Like many critics, I have always found the dialect poems much truer--in terms of tone and feeling. His more traditional poems tend to also have more traditional (which here I mean sentimental) feeling. The dialect poems too have a bit of quaintness and nostalgia, and a sort of Norman Rockwell folk sentimentality, but at the same time they seem more real and human. The poem below is touching in its own way, not just as a tribute to Frederick Douglass, but as a light poem about growing old, focusing on not the struggles of Douglass' life but the exuberance and joy of his incredible life. While Douglass has grown old, the poem says subtly, he has accomplished a great deal, and brought about a "fairer day".

You can see here why Dunbar continues to have appeal today. His inventiveness with verse in dialect makes him significant as an American poet, but also highly accessible and enjoyable to read. He was a poet of the people in the way that Whitman or Sandburg was, writing poems of and for the common man. The poem is below the jump, and you can visit Wright State's digital collection of Dunbar poems here.

Frederick Douglass

Hello, ole man, you 're a-gittin' gray,
An' it beats ole Ned to see the way
'At the crow's feet 's a-getherin' aroun' yore eyes;
Tho' it ought n't to cause me no su'prise,
Fur there 's many a sun 'at you 've seen rise
An' many a one you 've seen go down
Sence yore step was light an' yore hair was
brown,
An' storms an' snows have had their way--
Hello, ole man, you 're a-gittin' gray.

Hello, ole man, you 're a-gittin' gray,
An' the youthful pranks 'at you used to play
Are dreams of a far past long ago
That lie in a heart where the fires burn low--
That has lost the flame though it kept the glow,
An' spite of drivin' snow an' storm,
Beats bravely on forever warm.
December holds the place of May--
Hello, ole man, you 're a-gittin' gray.

Hello, ole man, you 're a-gittin' gray--
Who cares what the carpin' youngsters say?
For, after all, when the tale is told,
Love proves if a man is young or old!
Old age can't make the heart grow cold
When it does the will of an honest mind;
When it beats with love fur all mankind;
Then the night but leads to a fairer day--
Hello, ole man, you 're a-gittin' gray!

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Happy Birthday, Willie

April 23 is generally recognized as the birthday of William Shakespeare. The reason for this is that his christening document states April 26, and generally that took place three days after the child's birth. So we don't know for certain that today is Shakespeare's birthday, it's simply a deduction based on the known facts. To celebrate, here's one of my favorite bits from Hamlet, when Hamlet has seen the ghost and vows to keep his memory close.

.--Remember thee!
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there;
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix'd with baser matter: yes, by heaven!--

Shakespeare is always current, always in the news. Here are a couple of recent pieces on Shakespeare.

First, from the amazing Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare and the Uses of Power, published recently in the New York Review of Books. Begins with an interesting exchange with President Clinton, described below:

In 1998, a friend of mine, Robert Pinsky, who at the time was serving as the poet laureate of the United States, invited me to a poetry evening at the Clinton White House, one of a series of black-tie events organized to mark the coming millennium. On this occasion the President gave an amusing introductory speech in which he recalled that his first encounter with poetry came in junior high school when his teacher made him memorize certain passages from Macbeth. This was, Clinton remarked wryly, not the most auspicious beginning for a life in politics.

After the speeches, I joined the line of people waiting to shake the President's hand. When my turn came, a strange impulse came over me. This was a moment when rumors of the Lewinsky affair were circulating, but before the whole thing had blown up into the grotesque national circus that it soon became. "Mr. President," I said, sticking out my hand, "don't you think that Macbeth is a great play about an immensely ambitious man who feels compelled to do things that he knows are politically and morally disastrous?" Clinton looked at me for a moment, still holding my hand, and said, "I think Macbeth is a great play about someone whose immense ambition has an ethically inadequate object."

Then there's this piece by Robert Fisk, Shakespeare and the War.

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Ohio Poet: George Starbuck

Poem today by George Starbuck, born in Columbus. I don't know much else about his life. I was hooked on Starbuck from the moment I read "Cargo Cult of the Summer Solstice at Hadrian's Wall," a poem I've tried desperately to find on line but can't. If someone out there has a subscription to Harper's, do me a favor: look for it in the archive and send it to me.

Meanwhile, here's a poem that shows his inventiveness, play with form, humor, and general craziness. And while you're at it, here is an interesting letter I found on "the Google" from Vonnegut to Starbuck--kindred souls if ever there were.

Sonnet With a Different Letter at the End of Every Line

O for a muse of fire, a sack of dough,
Or both! O promissory notes of woe!
One time in Santa Fe N.M.
Ol' Winfield Townley Scott and I ... But whoa.

One can exert oneself, ff ,
Or architect a heaven like Rimbaud,
Or if that seems, how shall I say, de trop ,
One can at least write sonnets, a propos
Of nothing save the do-re-mi-fa-sol
Of poetry itself. Is not the row
Of perfect rhymes, the terminal bon mot,
Obeisance enough to the Great O?

"Observe," said Chairman Mao to Premier Chou,
"On voyage à Parnasse pour prendre les eaux.
On voyage comme poisson, incog."

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And I have something to expiate... a pettiness.

Poem of the day: "Snake," (1923) by D. H. Lawrence.

I loved teaching this poem, one of my favorites from my tattered old copy of the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. God bless D. H. Lawrence. The poem below, long but enjoyable, beautiful imagery, reminds us of the dangers of our silly and destructive prejudices, leading us to the trough of violence, but also preventing us from missing out on the "lords of life," and the great moments in life where we meet up with the divine, if we are not too frightened and too ignorant to notice them.

Read, savor, and enjoy this, one of the magnificent works of 20th century verse.

Snake

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before
me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of
the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that
horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

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Today's poem

Today's poem is by Donald Hall.

White Apples

when my father had been dead a week
I woke
with his voice in my ear
I sat up in bed
and held my breath
and stared at the pale closed door

white apples and the taste of stone

if he called again
I would put on my coat and galoshes

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Elegies for Today: In Memoriam

A propos of the the tragedy yesterday. A few elegies and fragments, on the deaths of students and others.

To start here is again a fragment from Maggie Dietz, whom I reviewed a couple of days ago:

All night the faucet drives hard tears
down into the silent house.
They say it is beyond repair.

Wherever you are, cry for us.

Roethke, Gray, Thomas, Milton, and Auden below.

The heavily anthologized "Elegy for Jane" by Theodore Roethke, written, appropriately, for a student who had died:

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,

A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw,
Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.
The opening 14 lines of Milton's great elegy "Lycidas" on the death of his fellow student at Cambridge:

Yet once more, O ye Laurels, and once more
Ye Myrtles brown, with Ivy never-sear,
I com to pluck your Berries harsh and crude,
And with forc'd fingers rude,
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.
Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear,
Compels me to disturb your season due:
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer:
Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew
Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.
He must not flote upon his watry bear
Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,
Without the meed of som melodious tear.

Dylan Thomas' magnificent elegy for his father:

Too proud to die; broken and blind he died
The darkest way, and did not turn away,
A cold kind man brave in his narrow pride

On that darkest day, Oh, forever may
He lie lightly, at last, on the last, crossed
Hill, under the grass, in love, and there grow

Young among the long flocks, and never lie lost
Or still all the numberless days of his death, though
Above all he longed for his mother's breast

Which was rest and dust, and in the kind ground
The darkest justice of death, blind and unblessed.
Let him find no rest but be fathered and found,

I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed,
In the muted house, one minute before
Noon, and night, and light. the rivers of the dead

Veined his poor hand I held, and I saw
Through his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea.
(An old tormented man three-quarters blind,

I am not too proud to cry that He and he
Will never never go out of my mind.
All his bones crying, and poor in all but pain,

Being innocent, he dreaded that he died
Hating his God, but what he was was plain:
An old kind man brave in his burning pride.

The sticks of the house were his; his books he owned.
Even as a baby he had never cried;
Nor did he now, save to his secret wound.

Out of his eyes I saw the last light glide.
Here among the liught of the lording sky
An old man is with me where I go

Walking in the meadows of his son's eye
On whom a world of ills came down like snow.
He cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres'

Last sound, the world going out without a breath:
Too proud to cry, too frail to check the tears,
And caught between two nights, blindness and death.

O deepest wound of all that he should die
On that darkest day. oh, he could hide
The tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.

Until I die he will not leave my side.)

The epitaph which concludes Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard":

Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.
Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,
And Melacholy marked him for her own.

Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,
Heaven did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Misery all he had, a tear,
He gained from Heaven ('twas all he wish'd) a friend.

No farther seek his merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode
(There they alike in trembling hope repose),
The bosom of his Father and his God.

Auden:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

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Sunday Reading: Maggie Dietz

(Note: This is the fifth in a series of essays on contemporary American poets. The previous entries are: Jay Hopler, Billy Collins, Ron Slate, and the memoir of Stephen Kuusisto, along with five original poems by Kuusisto, located here.)

I wish I could print all of Maggie Dietz's poems for you here. I'm afraid, you'll have to buy the book. You won't regret the purchase.

But I can tell you that they are by turns moving, suprising, compelling, at turns heartbreaking, with powerful language and wit, gorgeous imagery. Perennial Fall is Dietz's first volume but I suspect we will be reading her work for years to come. The second poem is called "North of Boston" (more about that in a moment) in reverence to Frost, and I see a few similarities. Frost once said that as a teacher he was in the class of poets who wanted to be understood: certainly Dietz as a partner in the Favorite Poem Project has worked to bring poetry to the masses as Frost did in his own way. Her conversation with nature is reminiscent of Frost as well, as "North of Boston" makes self-conciously clear. That said, let's forget about influence and just look at her work on its own.

I can only give you a few poems. But take the stunning and moving "Prayer to a Suicide":

Brother when they laid you down
I touched the break in lashes
where the chicken pox had blown

the lid up long ago, small brushes
that stroked out your seeing hours.
I wish the clouds would wash us

down with unrepepentant power,
that pounding rain would soak in
to your newly opened grave. Our

mother's breath is broken,
her C scar tingles after many years.
Our father has not spoken.

All night the faucet drives hard tears
down into the silent house.
They say it is beyond repair.

Wherever you are, cry for us.



This poem, so compact and powerful like a bullet, certainly turns expectation on its head. The title might call upon us to anticipate a prayer for a victim, a call to soothe the tortured soul that has been lost. Instead, in the stunning closing line, she asks the deceased to cry for the living. Throughout the book, Dietz challenges us to think backwards and forwards about transitions, between worlds, between states of being, about past and future. This poem is no different: the direction of the tears is turned totally around, from the dead to the living. And the imagery in the poem magnificently upholds this direction of thought, from the "lashes" at the beginning of the poem to the faucet which "drives hard tears into the silent house." Water, the symbol of birth, again turned around into a symbol of death, while the "C scar tingles". What a sad and fantastic poem.

The best explanation--illustration, rather--of this idea Dietz has about comings and goings comes from the poem "Perpetual Between": "A book a hinge, the page a hinge. / The mind, this way and that, a hinge." A book, a mind is a passage between imagination and reality, past and future turning on the hinge of the present, the real and the unreal. These images and ideas are recurrent in the collection. (The book's cover is a photograph of a brass hinge.)

"North of Boston" is a satisfying, lighter poem, fun and challenging. It's a bit too long to type out here (with apologies for my laziness), but here's the money part, following two sections describing the woods in fall:

But something strange
is going on: the trees are tired
of meaning, sick of providing
mystery, parallels, consolation.
"Leave us alone," they seem to cry,
with barely energy for a pun.

David Kirby of the Times (see the links section below) really misses the boat on this poem. It's not all about environmentalism, and global warming and so on. This is classic projection: it's not nature that is tired of us imposing our meanings on it when we should be saving it, it is the speaker that's tired of it, as if to say, let's find a new poetic vocabulary rather than talking about nature all the time. In this sense she is conciously distancing herself from Frost, making the title cleverly ironic. At the end she turns the whole thing into laughing mockery:

...Come on, Night,
with your twinkly stars and big
dumb moon. Tell me don't
show me, and wipe that grin off your face.

Now that is audacious, not only calling attention to Frost but saying, in effect, let's leave that tired stuff behind.

It's not that Dietz doesn't write about nature, but she tends to write more about nature animated, not the slow decaying woodpile of Frost but the horses, dogs, cats and birds. Another of my favorites from the collection is "Circle of Horses", in which the horses circling the ring seem a symbol of life's labors, until they have worn down the circle and created a burial mound. And then there's "Bird Bath," with its imagery of apples and the frozen water like glass leads invitably to another comparison to Frost (think "After Apple Picking"):

How could it have been otherwise
the year he died? The ice hastened
its surprise, one day descended.

Apples froze in clusters on
the branches, glass apples on glass trees.
Any false move would end them.

Our mother's heart fell down around
her knees, knocked between her ankles,
tripping her up. We held her

like a doll, a rag doll--her eyes
glass buttons, shining but not seeing.
Mute eyes dreaming a sense

of heaven, of what is next. But
everywhere the bald world and cold.
The snow, the clouds, the frozen ground.

Our fatherless mother not like our
mother, the one with the father.
From the piano, chords of her anger

roamed the house. Tears fell from her
clean, wet hair. The coffee grinder
screamed, and went silent.

The day she laughed ice cracked
the bird bath. Its halves lay in the snow.
One was the past, and one the future.

Once again we see the pairing of halves at the end; the hinge between the past and the future where the pain and the beauty of life dwells.

Another narrative poem, "When She Asked I Said No You Cannot Play With It," deals with the preservation of childhood and of memory, the conflict between experiencing the moment and preserving it for posterity. The poem tells the story of a dollhouse the speaker had as a child and her painstaking attempts to preserve the dollhouse and by extension the memory of something beautiful and precious from her childhood. When her niece asks to play with it, the speaker says no:

...I told her softly no, and no I said
to the thumb-sized toilet and frosted sink, the pewter

apples and silverware, the wooden plates,
the blank-paged books, the brass roses
greening on the mantle over an endless fire.

No to the gingham bunkbeds, to the false-doored china hutch
and no to the yellow haired delicate doll, though I know
she would gladly be broken again to be touched.

Here the speaker is infused with the things around her; the items carefully catalogued in the dollhouse are as much about the speaker as the dollhouse, and the experience is as much about the speaker's reach into her own childhood as about preserving an antique toy. It's not just the dollhouse she wants to protect, as much as her own image of herself and her past.

Perennial Fall is an intriguing collection that asks to be read again and again. Like all great poetry, Dietz's work takes on new meanings with successive readings. This is a poet worth watching.




Links, etc.

NY Times review focuses on "North of Boston" with little other insight. This book deserves fuller praise but this is a good start:

North of Boston” was Robert Frost’s first book of poems to be published in the United States (“A Boy’s Will” had appeared in England two years earlier) and contains “The Death of the Hired Man,” “After Apple-Picking” and “Mending Wall,” poems now inscribed permanently in the American canon. So for Maggie Dietz to call a poem in her first book “North of Boston” is like an unknown jumping into the ring with the heavyweight champ; you worry not about who’s going to win but whether the newcomer will end up on the canvas or in the cheap seats.

A really interesting poem appearing in Ploughshares; here's the beginning:

How anyone is happy in this country
I don’t know. Any way you turn
there is an edge, and everyone
cocks a wind-burned hand over
the brow to look out under it.


The Chicago Blog (the blog of Ms. Dietz's publisher) with a brief sample of the kind of pretentious review writing that I can't stand:

At the heart of this unusually accomplished and affecting first book of poetry is the idea of the hinge—the point of connection, of openings and closings. Maggie Dietz situates herself in the liminal present, bringing together past and future, dream and waking, death and life. Formally exact, rigorous, and tough, these poems accept no easy answers or equations.

Okay, sure.

Favorite Poem Project: Dietz and Robert Pinsky have edited 3 books together gathering readers' favorite poems. You can sumbit your own favorite poem. (I submitted mine--Into My Own--although I don't think I could choose a single poem, so that's a pretty good choice.)

Here is another poem, a sonnet, from Perennial Fall:

Why I Don’t Piss in the Ocean

Once my sister told me that from her summit at the city
pool she could see the yellow billows spread like gas
or dreams between kids’ legs. In something the size of the sea,
you can’t be sure who’s watching from above. Let’s say
it’s the Almighty, twirling His whistle, ready to blow it
at any moment and let loose the bottomless Apocalypse?
The ocean would make bone of a body, coral of bone.
Piss, and a tiger-fish darts through a skull-hole, a weed
weaves itself through ribs. You, too, have seen
the bulbs flash from the sea. You, too, have felt
it breathing down your neck. You eat fish. You’ve heard
that mermaids sing. My dreams are as beleaguered as the next
Joe’s, my happiness as absurd, but I’m not going to go
piss in the ocean about it. No, not in the ocean.

The Yellow House, 1978

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