Category Archives: poetry

You Are Not Here

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cover art: "Rooms by the Sea" by Edward Hopper

David Jauss is my adviser this semester at Vermont College. During the residency, each student creates a reading list, which the adviser must approve. The books on the list may change as writing issues come up, but it’s a place to start.

Both semesters I’ve included books by my adviser on my list. This seems like an opportunity not to be missed–to read a writer’s work and have a dialogue about it.

Before I arrived at Vermont College, I knew of David Jauss mostly from his craft essays in the AWP Chronicle. I had also read a story of his. For my first packet due on Saturday, August 7th, I read some more of his work.

I started with his poetry and loved almost every one of his poems in the collection, You Are Not Here.

From “Requiem”:

“…how many times

have I paused at the crossroads, then turned right

toward home, instead of left,

toward the darkening highway that leads to that nowhere

called everywhere…”

And from “You Are Not Here”:

“each morning I ask myself

where I won’t be today

or ever.”

some saturday morning fun

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A one-year subscription to Quick Fiction is $13.50.

with new pages!

#1: What’s in it for me?

#2: What’s happening?

#3: What’s in a cover?

A one-year subscription to Conjunctions is $18.00.

I’ve subscribed to One Story since 2004. Plus, I try to subscribe to 3-4 other literary journals. And I mix it up from year to year.

If we don’t subscribe to the journals where we want to see our writing, who will?

For lunch today or tomorrow, make a pb&j and spend your $ on a subscription to the journal of your choice.

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day dreams

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Several years ago in a used bookstore in Columbus, Georgia, called “Beetlebinders” that now no longer exists, I found a very old book called Day Dreams.
It took me a minute to figure out that the formless white shape on the cover was a genie being released from a lamp. Reading is a lot like rubbing the lamp.
Day Dreams is an anthology of poems selected by Daphne Dale. One of my favorites (by an anonymous author) is titled “The Things in the Bottom Drawer.”

It was published in 1892. For Christmas that same year, Ralph Davis’ mother gave this book to him as a present.

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the old swing set

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I was in my study on the phone wishing my father a happy day when I glanced out the window to see what my father thought, from my description, was a hawk on the roof of the old swing set, and I called to my son, home from college, who came in and took these two pictures.

“The day grew light, then dark again–
In all its rich hours, what happened?”
Jane Hirshfield, “Apple”

four poems

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I have a folder where I put poems I’ve printed or been given or copied out of books. Maybe someday I’ll put them in a notebook so I’ll think to look in it more often. Three poems were mentioned in connection with the manuscripts we discussed in my March Sirenland workshop. I was not familiar with any of them. A fourth one I discovered on the same page as the third one. Here are a few lines from each:

1) “After great pain a formal feeling comes” by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

This is the hour of lead
Remembered if outlived,
As freezing persons recollect the snow–
First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.


2) “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone” by W. H. Auden (1907-1973)

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.


3) “A Third Body” by Robert Bly (1926-)

A man and a woman sit near each other, and they do not long
at this moment to be older, or younger, nor born
in any other nation, time, or place.
They are content to be where they are, talking or not-talking.


4) “A Story About the Body” by Robert Haas (1941-)

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


When I was working on my novel, I would start by reading a poem or two. I think I’m going to go back to that for a while–light a candle, read a poem, get to work….

Do any of you read poetry before writing? Do you have a favorite poem you read over and over?

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from their flat, yellowed pages

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A Literary Tour

In her first album in 7 years, Natalie Merchant brings 26 poems to life…

“I pulled these obscure and eccentric poems off their flat, yellowed pages…”

With her young daughter in mind and often on her lap, Merchant was inspired to show her that “speech could be the most delightful toy in her possession.” I love her description of childhood with its nod to the underside of life:

“that time when we wake up to the great wonders and small terrors of this beautiful-horrible world of ours.”

An 80-page book comes with this 2-CD collection of 26 songs (so don’t download). It’s beautiful on the outside and the inside–with copies of the poems, pictures of the poets, and odd little details Merchant discovered as she delved deeper into the worlds of these artists.

One of my all-time favorite poems, “maggie and milly and molly and may,” by E. E. Cummings is included in the collection. “Estlin, as he was called,” she writes. And then,

“In just scratching the surface of his life I found this one lost and unrequited daughter.”

A new favorite, “The Land of Nod,” by Robert Louis Stevenson, put to music with a full orchestra and on top, Merchant’s voice light as frosting, gave me goose bumps. She writes of his gift of a piano to a leper colony he visited on route to Somoa and of his “trance-inducing doomed and luminous eyes.”

“I used music to enter these poems, and once inside I was able to understand how they were constructed with layers of feeling and meaning.”

I will leave you with this March 9, 2010 interview–Natalie speaking with Granta Magazine’s deputy editor Ellah Allfrey about Leave Your Sleep:

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evidence

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In honor of National Poetry Month, I finished Mary Oliver‘s Evidence, which I’ve been reading in bits and pieces since October. I enjoyed it, but I have to admit I’m not really a nature woman. Still, I loved the ending of “Swans”…

What we love, shapely and pure,
is not to be held,
but to be believed in.
And then they vanished, into the unreachable distance.

.
…and the title of this short poem…

“The Poet Always Carries a Notebook”

.…and every once in a while, I will love one of her poems. There is one of those in this book: “I Want to Write Something So Simply.” Here’s the beginning:

I want to write something
so simply
about love
or about pain
that even
as you are reading
you feel it…

.
Are you reading any poetry this month?

lines connect in thin ways

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On October 28, 2002, a rainy night in Georgia, I drove from Columbus to Atlanta to hear the poet Lucille Clifton read at Georgia Tech. If I remember correctly, she opened by reciting the short poem, “Why Some People be Mad at Me Sometimes.”

Lucille Clifton died on Saturday. She was only the second woman, and the first African American, to be poet laureate of Maryland.

She told the audience that rainy night that she wanted to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted. Toward the end of the reading, she recited “Hommage to My Hips,” and then said, “In some cultures I am what’s happening.”

Our eyes met when she spoke to me and signed my book, A Good Woman: poems and a memoir 1969-1980. One of my favorite lines in this book, for its power:

Things don’t fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept.

Here’s the end of a poem of hers I love about a fox:

Child, i tell you now it was not
the animal blood i was hiding from,
it was the poet in her, the poet and
the terrible stories she could tell.
from “Telling Our Stories“

Thelma Lucille Sayles, who became Lucille Clifton, was born in 1936 and lived 73 years.

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a brief history of time

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In most books of poetry, I put a little check in the Table of Contents by the poems I really like. In Shaindel Beers‘ first collection of poetry, A Brief History of Time, I liked so many poems that I switched to marking the poems I didn’t love with a tiny x (only 9 out of 47).

Here are a few of my favorite lines from the collection:

From Elegy for a Past Life for its honesty: “Back then at sixteen/I thought we’d make it out together,/and become writers, the only job we could imagine/where we wouldn’t smell like shit or hay or cows”

From Why Gold-digging Fails for its detail: “and I decided to leave my marriage/with enough money to fix a timing belt/just in case my engine decided to go.”

From For Stephen Funk, in Prison for Protesting the Iraq War for its reaching: “Lately things have made me question the stuff/I’m made of. What is it that makes me me?”

From Taking Back the Bra Drawer for its imagery: “I don’t want him to be another man–…another man whose jewelry rests in a hidden/drawer, worn only as an accessory to/regret.”

My two favorite poems in the collection are “Flashback” and “Rewind.” Two very different poems, but inherent in the titles alone, a preoccupation with the past.

REWIND

Fridays Mrs. Wampler would give in
and leave the projector light on
as the film wound from one reel to the other.

At six, the world moving backward amazed us
more than the world moving forward,
though that amazed us, too.

Full blooms squeezed back into buds;
seedlings hid themselves underground,
but our favorite was our claymation version

of Beauty and the Beast. We would cheer as each
petal affixed itself to the thorny stem
and the beast grew stronger, clap as Beauty

no longer wept at his deathbed. And soon,
he was a prince again, too polite to ever
insult a crone. This taught us that beginnings

are always best, despite all they say about
Happily Ever After. If we could invent
the automatic rewind, bodies would expel

bullets that would rest eternally in chambers,
130,000 people would materialize
as the Enola Gay swallowed the bomb,

landmines would give legs and fingers
back to broken children.
Right now, teeming cancer cells

would be rebuilding blood and bone.

“Rewind” is reprinted here with Shaindel’s permission. It won the 2007 Bob Dylan Award for Poetry for the poem most in the spirit of Bob Dylan at the Dylan Days Festival in Hibbing, MN. You can read more of Shaindel’s poems through links on her website. You can also listen to a wonderful interview with Shaindel on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Think Out Loud.

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waiting for me

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DSC00191This leaf, propped up like it is here on its stem and all by itself, was waiting for me when I opened the front door yesterday morning. Do you think it thought I wasn’t noticing?

I moved it for a moment over by the pumpkinDSC00189…

Then I brought it inside where I showed it to everyone.

“The Lesson of the Falling Leaves” by Lucille Clifton