Three days worth of poems May 31, 2010

Saturday’s poem: Thomas Lux, “Debate Regarding the Permissibility of Eating Mermaids” from The Cradle Place (p. 7). (Not a fan of the formatting here, but at least you can read the poem). Curiously, a search for this poem also came up with some articles about a fatwah against eating mermaids. Satirical, I assume, but I didn’t have the time to investigate. Anyhow, as regards the poem itself: I wonder whether there’s more to it than meets the eye, but for the time being, I just enjoyed it for what met my eye.

Sunday’s poem: Nancy Pagh, “Titles of Twenty-Nine Poems I Did Not Write” from No Sweeter Fat (p. 44). This poem moves quickly from whimsical to sobering. I can’t find it online for you, but here is “Blackberries”, my favorite poem by Pagh, a Pacific Northwest poet. Note that the formatting is atrocious — the gaps between stanzas have been erased — but maybe you’ll be inspired to seek out No Sweeter Fat, where you can read it properly.

Today’s poem: Tony Curtis (the Irish poet; not the American actor), “When Sometimes all I Can Imagine are Hands” from The Well in the Rain: New and Selected Poems (p. 53). Tony Curtis is a lovely man. I saw him read a few weeks ago and two years ago (Nancy Pagh, too, for that matter) at the Skagit River Poetry Festival. When I read this poem I had to look up Akhmatova. She’s a poet, natch. I still have so much to learn. Anyhow, I enjoyed the quiet, interior contemplation of this poem.

Three by Mary Oliver May 28, 2010

I feel a little anxious when picking from titles. What if I don’t like the poem, and then I have to write down for you to read that I didn’t like the poem? And then what if everyone else recognized what a fantastic poem it is, and I have revealed my ignorance. This is some trouble that comes when I write in public.

Anyhow, tonight the poems — because there is more than one, again — come from Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems: Volume One. I started with a poem near the end of the book, “The House” (p. 244; and you can find it here). When I started reading the poem, a feeling of foreboding came over me, and I thought, in particular, of romantic relationships, partnerships, and how things can shift and fall apart almost without one’s noticing.

We did not hear, beneath our lives,
The old walls falling out of true,
Foundations shifting in the dark.

And then a little later in the relatively short poem…

We made our minor, brief repairs,
And sang upon the crumbling stairs
And danced upon the sodden floors.

Until…

For years we lived at peace, until
The rooms themselves began to blend
With time, and empty one by one,
At which we knew, with muted hearts,
That nothing further could be done

I see, by the end of the poem, aging and death as its themes. And not the slow, quiet falling apart of relationships. But one of my own fears is that in my own romantic partnership, we would drift apart so slowly that by the time we realized we had lost our foundation, it would be too late to recover. So there’s where the chill in the reading comes from for me. And I’m left feeling slightly hollow.

Mary Oliver just seems to be like that for me, though. Beautiful poems that leave me a little hollow with sadness or fear or apprehension.

The next poem I skipped to, just flipping through the book, was “A Visitor” (p. 116; it is the second poem here). I assumed on first read that the father was dead and coming to the author in her dreams. That she turned him away, unready to face him or to reconcile or to even accept the part of herself that loves him. And that she then experiences some internal shift and was able to come to terms with him, with her past, with that part of herself. Reading it again I realized that the father could just be old, and in need, and not dead and in dreams. She writes:

But finally there came the night
when I rose out of my sheets
and stumbled down the hall.
The door fell open

and I knew I was saved
and could bear him

I hope someday I can be at that place with my own father. But not yet.

Hm, still feeling kind of hollow after that one, I kept flipping through the book and came to “Dogfish” (p. 103; it can be read here, among many other places). It’s a longer poem, and I still need to think about it longer before I have something really distilled to say about it. But I will end this post with the end of the poem, in which the dogfish is preying upon three smaller fish. (Please go read the whole poem, though. And if you have something to say about it, comment).

And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.

*

And probably,
if they don’t waste time
looking for an easier world,

they can do it.

Two more by Charles Simic May 28, 2010

Still from Walking the Black Cat.

“On the Sagging Porch” (p. 26)

“Dogs Hear It” (p. 27)

I continue to like Simic.

Two by Charles Simic May 26, 2010

Tonight I had a delightful poetry surprise. I picked up Charles Simic’s Walking the Black Cat, which I bought in the same Toronto used bookstore I mentioned a few posts ago. I had never read a single poem from it until tonight.

I usually look at the table of contents, like I said, and choose a poem when a title jumps out at me. Last night’s book (Milosz) had poems with titles that didn’t inspire, and I wasn’t as taken with the poem either. But tonight I couldn’t decide which poem to pick because so many of the titles intrigued. At the end, I chose “Free the Goldfish” (p. 45). Are you surprised? If you are, you don’t know me too well.

I liked “Free the Goldfish” well enough, though its joy lay mostly in the juxtaposition of the title with the poem. But it was short, and I was hungry for more, so I read, on the opposing page (p. 44) “Don’t Wake the Cards.” I read it twice. It was fantastic. (If you really want to read it, the evil Amazon.com itself offers the diabolical suggestion that you can use its ‘Search Inside’ feature).

I want my life to feel like that poem every day.

Sentences May 26, 2010

Last night’s poem was “Sentences” by Czeslaw Milosz, from Selected Poems 1931-2004 (p.76).

My favorite bit from the poem is:

Perhaps we should have represented him otherwise
Than in the form of dove. As fire, yes, but that is beyond us.
For even when it consumes logs on a hearth
We search in it for eyes and hands.

I also like the last stanza:

Still it’s just too great a responsibility to lure the souls
From where they lived attentive to the idea of the hummingbird, the chair, and the star.
To imprison them within either-or: male sex, female sex,
So that they wake up in the blood of childbirth, crying.

I find interesting that this poem was written over two years, 1963-1965.

And now I’m off to work.

Pattiann Rogers and a skinny grandfather riding a bicycle May 24, 2010

Actually the poem for tonight is called “In Union: Skinny Grandfather Riding a Bicycle.” I am secretly glad that poem isn’t to be found online, because I was going to have to say “The internet knows everything, people!” But the internet doesn’t know everything after all, though what it does know is that the poem is from Pattiann Rogers’ book Generations (p. 17, to be precise).

I picked the poem because the title reminded me of my partner’s father. It tells a story of a skinny old man riding a bicycle, coming a hair away from falling, but regaining balance. In the last movement of the poem, the bicycle leans against the tree; the grandfather sleeps. And it is about the union of not only grandfather and bicycle but the weeds on the side of the road, the road dust, insects, birds, the road, the stars, all in one another.

A theory of marriage (poems) May 23, 2010

Tonight I read two poems, because I couldn’t resist, and they were delicious. Both were by Mark Doty. I’ve had his book, Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, for a year or two. I bought it in Toronto in a beautiful used bookstore that I couldn’t find again this last visit. It had an enormous poetry section, and I walked out with several books, including this one which had been long-listed or short-listed for some award, and even better, it had a cover with chunky drawings of what I think of as birds flying, but looking again, actually it’s books on a chair and maybe some sorts of abstract flowers. Anyhow, Mark Doty has been sitting on my poetry shelf since probably late 2008 but I really hadn’t read any of the poems yet.

As a side note, the trouble with reading one poem a night (or two, as the case may be), is that I will not get the grasp of a collection of poems. They aren’t only children haphazardly bundled together, right? They have been carefully ordered in a manuscript; there’s a reason one comes before another. But by plucking them one at a time, either at random or by a shape on the page catching my eye or because the title makes me curious, I am missing the place the poem fits into a whole. So it’s lucky for me that quite a few of the books I have are collections, like Lorna Crozier’s or P.K. Page’s or this one, Mark Doty’s. It makes me feel less sorry that I’m just pulling out one poem alone.

OK, so tonight’s poem(s). The first is called “Theory of Marriage” (p. 30) and the second is “Theory of Marriage (The Hug)” (p. 33). Initially it was the hug that made me curious as I skimmed the table of contents, but then I felt that it would really be wrong to not read “Theory of Marriage” first. I’m so glad I did. (And then I googled it. I wish I hadn’t. I wanted to find it for your reading pleasure but instead I got sucked into reading someone’s litcrit).

Since I can’t offer you a link to “Theory of Marriage,” I will have to quote for you my favorite little bit. In this little poem-story, the narrator (I assume it is a personal narrative but that’s just my assumption) and his life-partner go to a massage parlour. Each keeps extending his massage time because he thinks the other is not yet ready, to the point where the partner is in pain and the narrator is exhausted from being blissed out, so they have endured for each other each beyond his own point of comfort. My favorite bit, about in the middle of the poem, where the narrator is talking about the experience of the massage:

Is that the cure, for subjectivity
to diminish to a singular point of attention,
everything but this floated away?

I read that bit (aloud) a few times, playing with how to read the first line and how the meaning changed if I pretended to ignore that comma after “cure.”

I’m happy to say that I can offer you “Theory of Marriage (The Hug).” How could I not like this poem, given that the main characters are dogs? I chose to read the poem and think about love. You could also read it thinking about sex and monogamy (or not). Or about anything, I suppose. About dogs. Enjoy.

A year later, poetry May 22, 2010

It’s been almost a whole year since I’ve blogged. What brings me back: a poetry festival. An intention: to read a poem a day. A desire: to keep a list somewhere. This seems like as good a place as any.

Tonight, the first poem. I picked a book from my poetry shelf. I have about 15 books of poetry, and I haven’t read most of the poems in most of the books. There are even a few from which I have read no poems at all, but my goal: to change that. Anyhow, tonight I picked Poems New and Collected by Wislawa Szymborska. Then I flipped through the book until one poem caught my attention. ‘In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself’ (p.168). You can read it here (and if that link doesn’t last forever, just google the title).

I’m not going to do literary analysis here, not because it’ll bore you, but because it’ll bore me. But I did like this poem — the combination of wry irony, neat rhyming scheme and animals. I don’t necessarily agree with the premise, though — it sets humans farther apart from other animals than I really imagine us to be. Who’s to say that animals have no conscience? There’s so much we don’t know. But I love Szymborska for it anyway.