Category: Today’s Pillar of Poetry (Page 7 of 8)

Years ago, I came across some poetry of Miroslav Holub in The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry. I bought a used copy of his book Poems, Before & After which has been sitting on my shelves for a year or two.

This book was another surprise for me this year. I started to make a list of the poems I liked in this anthology and I was checking off every single poem so I gave up the list.

Holub was a Czechoslovakian poet and well-established microbiologist. His poems are a lovely melding of science and humanity. The book is divided into poems before 1968 and poems after 1968, the year the democratic revival was crushed by the Russians.

He has great commentary about poetry. The prose piece "Although" talks about how "a poem arises when there's nothing else to be done" and "art doesn't solve problems but only wears them out." From "The root of the matter"

There is poetry in everything. That
is the biggest argument
against poetry…

…the root of the matter
is not the matter itself.

From "Wisdom"

…poetry should never be a thicket,
no mater how delightful, where
the frightened fawn of sense could hide.

These poems in their surreal escapades reminded me of my favorite short story writer, Donald Barthelme, and are elemental weavings of the scientific, the haunting, the human and the moral. The poem "Evening idyll with a protoplasm" is a good example:

Over the house spreads
the eczema of twilight,
the evening news bulletin
creeps accross the facades,
the beefburger is singing.

A protoplasm called

well-that's-life
bulges from all the windows,
tentacles with sharp-eyed old hags' heads,
it engulfs a pedestrian,
penetrates into beds across the road,
swallowing  tears and fragments of quarrels,
pregnancies and miscarriages,
splashing used cars and television sets,
playing havoc with the price of eggs,
simply puffing itself with adultries,
crossing off plotting spores of
things-were-different-in-our-day.

And even after dark it prosphoresces
like a dead sea drying up

between featherbed, plum jam and stratosphere.

All the poems expertly mesh contemplations on biology with the horrors of humanity. Some of my very favorites are "Heart Failure," "The end of the world," and "Reality." The After poems are darker, more cynical, and incorporate more storytelling. I loved the Brief Reflections On series, "Brief reflection on test-tubes" being my favorite. He delves even more deliriously into language in this section.

From "Whaling"

Metaphors face extinction
in a situation which itself a metaphor.
And the whales are facing extinction
in a situation which itself is a killer whale.

The book ends with some poems laid out in theatrical script that read almost like avant-garde short films. Of those "The Angel of Death" and "Crucifix" are my favorites.

Ever since I did the post about poets who have read poems at presidential inaugurations and discovered singer-songwriter Lucinda William's Dad, Arkansas poet Miller Williams spoke at Bill Clinton's second inauguration, I've wanted to do a post on Lucinda Williams here.

I was fortunate to have seen both Lucinda and Miller Williams at a concert/reading they did together at Royce Hall at UCLA years ago. I've also read Miller William's book Making a Poem. But before I even knew about him, I was a fan of Lucinda.

My dad is a huge fan of Lucinda Williams and one day he sent me five CDs from her long oeuvre. Coincidentally, I had just broken up with a Northern Irish boyfriend I had in Los Angeles. I was ripe for the kind of tragic break-up lyrics she had to offer.

My two favorite albums of hers are Essence and World Without Tears. Lucinda did a run of shows in LA where she performed a different album every night with special guests. I chose to go to the show where she played Essence. My boyfriend's favorite alt-country singer, Mike Stinson, was there that night to play with her. He was on the arm of famous groupie-tell-all-author Pamela Des Barres and they stood right behind us when Stinson wasn't playing on stage.

Lucinda has an element of gritty southern gothic in her music and  lyrics. In fact, I feel her songs are driven more by their poetry than by her melodies or arrangements. From Essence, the song "Lonely Girls" really lingers over the words in a kind of mesmerizing plodding dirge:

Lonely girls
Heavy blankets
Cover lonely girls
Sad songs
Sung by lonely girls
Pretty hairdos
Worn by lonely girls
Sparkly rhinestones
Shine on lonely girls
I oughta know
About lonely girls

On this album I also love "Steal Your Love" and "I Envy the Wind"

I envy the wind
That whispers in your ear
That freezes your fingers
That moves through your hair
And cracks your lips
That chills you to the bone

In the creepy song "Get Right With God," she sings

I would sleep on a bed of nails
Till my back was torn and bloody
In the deep darkness of Hell
The Damascus of my meeting

On the album World Without Tears, my favorite song is "Worlds Fell," which is all-in-one a tribute to a love affair, an homage to the words that helped to bring it out, and commentary on the uselessness of words in emotional moments:

Words Fell
Like roses at our feet
When you let me see you cry
You silent lips against my cheek.

Lucinda Williams songs have a starkness compared to other rock and pop songs because she doesn't always use rhyme, even off-rhymes. Her stories are rough-shod and her lyrics are filled with hard-edged descriptive nouns. Her songs alternate between bar-soaked heartbroken ballads and righteous alt-country rockers.

Interestingly one of my favorite poets is Kim Addonizio and this year I found a quote on her website that said "Kim Addonizio writes like Lucinda Williams sings." Andre Dubus III

In other ways Lucinda has influenced the events of my life. I met Mr. Bang Bang eight years ago on Match.com. He said he responded
to my profile because I had listed Lucinda Williams as one of my current
favorite artists. I had just been to see her open for Willie Nelson at the Santa Barbara Bowl with my dad. That show also made me a lifetime Willie Nelson fan. For a while I fantasized about starting an all-girls tribute to Willie called Nellie Wilson. Ah, the dreams of youth.

So the poet of the hour is Richard Blanco, the man who made a hit of himself during Monday's inauguration of President Obama.

When he came on to read "One Today," Mr. Bang Bang asked if that was Ben Stiller or Paul Ryan.

Poems for public occasions, especially big ceremonials like this, are tricky. You can't lay out an arty opus that will fly over the heads of folks in TVLand. You have to invoke the big ponds and rocks of America. You have to highlight Americans, like Blanco did with his repititions of faces and hands. You have to invoke plebeian things like cabs and groceries. The editor in me would have dispensed with the 7th stanza. There is much awkwardness in the mishmash of:

weaving steel into bridges, finishing one more report
for the boss on time, stitching another wound
or uniform

But there are plenty of good lines in there:

on our way to clean tables, read ledgers, or save lives–
to teach geometry, or ring-up groceries as my mother did
for twenty years, so I could write this poem.

…the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won't explain
the empty desks of twenty children marked absent
today, and forever.

[a somber nod to the Newtown, Connecticut, shooting]

…hands gleaning coal or planting windmills
to deserts

[that would be invoking both of my particular great-grandfathers]

...the plum brush of dusk

Read the full poem.
Watch a video of Blanco reading the poem.

The Daily Beast called the poem "Whitman-esque…a grand tour of the continent." William Wright of Southern Poetry Anthology called it "incantatory, an optimistic, careful piece meant to encourage, a balm."

Blanco's charge was probably to write about unity…in a multi-cultured way. I don't know how far he'll get bringing opposing sides of the Washington D.C. together however.  After all, only five poets have contributed to presidential inaugurations. And those five have all been invited by Democrats. Do Republicans even believe in global poetry-ing?

Blanco read his poem in that overly-serious poet cadence, as you do. After he finished, the massive crowd gave him some polite clappings (not the roaring ovation of Obama or even Beyonce) and Chuck Schumer (who I voted for by the way, years ago when he was first running and I was living in New York City) gave a slight indication of discomfort in the transition, as to say "Ok, now we did that. Moving on." I thought maybe Blanco didn't go over. But he did! People were talking about him on MSNBC and the next morning on The Stephanie Miller radio show and even my co-worker remarked about it. Turns out Blanco broke some records Monday and people were proud of him. Not only was he the youngest to have read a poem at an inauguration, he was the first immigrant, the first Hispanic and the first openly-gay poet to do so. Wow! The poet is office-cooler worthy conversation this week! What a great thing Richard Blanco did for us!

Blanco's poetry website is also very good. I'm excited when poet even has one! The site is very simple and the left-hand menu is full of action items to draw you in: Meet (interviews), Read (books), Listen (recordings), Look (press kit), Contact (all the major social media icons are represented). Blanco if anything might be just a little too slick. He's got a publicist, a speakers agency (Blue Flower Arts no less), and a manager! Blanco's website proved its own importance this week as various news stories culled quotes from it.

His Wikipedia page also peaked my interest to read his 2012 book Looking for the Gulf Motel, specifically the poem "Queer Theory: According to My Grandmother" with lines like:

Don't stare at The Six Million-Dollar Man
I've seen you.

The history of poets at presidential inaugurations

Robert Frost read "The Gift Outright" at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. It was not the poem he intended to read. "Dedication" was.

Maya Angelou read "On the Pulse of the Morning" at Bill Clinton's first inauguration in 1993. Poets spent much time hating on that poem although the event made her famous. Watch her read it at the inauguration; she's introduced as Maya Angelow.

Miller Williams read "Of History and Hope" at Bill Clinton's second inauguration in 1997. Bill Clinton makes the "listening carefully" pose.

Miller Williams is the father of acclaimed alt-country singer Lucinda Williams.

Elizabeth Alexander read "Praise Song for the Day" for Obama's first inauguration in 2009. Watch her performance on video.

Look at that…this old picture of Joan Didion has a picture of that Georgia O'Keeffe cloud painting in the background. Huh.

My husband and I just spent Thanksgiving in New York City. I hadn't been there for years (ever since I moved to LA in the spring 2002 after deciding not to move back to NYC after 9/11). I missed the Christmas-ness of the city, the bagels, the pizza, a knish from a food truck…and good Chinese food. So we had Thanksgiving dinner at Hop Kee restaurant in Chinatown. We also saw The Book of Mormon (hilarious and thought-provoking) on Broadway, the Katharine Hepburn costome show (loved it!) at the NYC Public Library of Performing Arts and the African Burial Ground National Momument (somber and important monument; usually when you talk about proper regard for a culture's human remains you think of Native Americans, but this moment shows how African Americans struggle with similar treatment and how they make maybe different choices on how their cultural remains should be treated).

For the trip I borrowed the book Blue Nights by Joan Didion from my local library for airplane reading. I first heard of Joan Didion when I was at Sarah Lawrence. Fellow students loved her writing and how she handled "place" when talking about New York City and Los Angeles. I had never been to Los Angeles and it all sounded too high-brow for me so I avoided her. Then I moved to Los Angeles and had the opportunity to read her book Where I Was From and then I understood what everyone was so gaga about. I read everything Didion I could get my hands on, the ultimate book being The Year of Magical Thinking about the illness of her daughter and sudden death of her husband, fellow LA/NYC writer John Gregory Dunne.

Blue Nights picks up where Year of Magical Thinking leaves off, with the eventual death of her only child. In fact, the books should probably be read together. In Blue Nights, Didion is left alone and ailing and she recounts more of her memories from Los Angeles and NYC as they pertain to motherhood in the 1960s and 70s. This is a short book…maybe 168 pages so I never could bring myself to pay the near $30 price when the book first came out.

But Didion does an amazing thing in those 168 pages. She essentially writes a very long poem stringing together her mourning over the death of her family with her fear of dying. Lines are repeated over and over like a kind of obsessed villanelle, but one that is drawn out almost to transparency. You keep asking yourself, what do these two things have in common, dying and mourning (are they slapped together arbitrarily?). In the last half-page of the book, Didion tells you why, quite amazingly and beautifully, laying down the hammer in the very final line. It's masterful. And if it aint poetry…nothing else is.

I don't know whose idea it was to go see Jim Carroll read in Manhattan in the last 1990s. My friends Julie and Christopher from Sarah Lawrence were usually on top of the trendy readings in the city and I would tag along, very much a newbie about famous and trendy writers.

I do remember we were near St. Marks and we also saw Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson read that night. I was hooked by Jim Carroll's poems right off. I bought his selected anthology, Fear of Dreaming, and later the book Void of Course.

Jim was already famous for The Basketball Diaries, probably this is what tempted my friends to want to see him read if Lou Reed wasn't a big enough draw. I didn't like Lou Reed's work at all. Maybe Carroll benefited in comparison. However, I still feel Carroll is the best poet at describing Manhattan, the tone of the city as I experienced in the late 1990s.

From "Heroin"

so beside me
a light bulb is revolving
wall to wall,
a reminder of the great sun
which had otherwise completely collapsed
down to the sore toe of the white universe.

From "Poem"

We are very much a part of the boredom
of early Spring of planning the days shopping
of riding down Fifth on a bus terrified by easter.

From "Chelsea May"

I conceal so much
moving in and out poetry
I could have simply left a note

There are many prose poems from The Book of Nods that I loved, including "Trained Monkey," "Homage to Gerald Manly Hopkins," "Zero's Final Paradox," "Silent Monkey" and "The Buddha Reveals Himself." And I love this poem, "Post-Modernism"

I gather up the giant holes.
Why should I bother with the rock
and sand which fills them?

Why should I bother with distracting weights.
Without elegance, or allow myself to be taken
hostage, leaving only through back doors,
a gun raised to the pulse of my lucid shadow?

Read his obituary in the New York Times.

I missed blog posts this week due to adopting our second dog  Saturday morning. Our fur-kid Franz Alanzo now has a sister-mate, Bianca Jean, a shelter dog who had been seriously neglected, the result of which she has had two litters of puppies (one litter a few months ago) and a severe shoulder injury.

Meanwhile, our lives have been close to chaos since the weekend while we've all been sorting out the new arrangements. Like my husband's classmate warned him, with two dogs the house gets very doggie.

But I want to talk about one of my favorite poems ever, one by Pasadena poet Ron Koertge. Getting a degree from Sarah Lawrence College, most of my exposure to living poets were to East Coast writers popular in the 1990s like Mark Doty, Stanley Kunitz and Molly Peacock. 

Moving to Los Angeles in 2002, I was pleased to encounter West Coast voices.  Now I have Koertge's selected works, Making Love to Roget's Wife. With similarities and connections to Billy Collins, the titles are always meandering, compelling and his poems are humorous, irreverent, and often about pop culture subjects like "On the Anniversary of His Death, the Men of the Village Meet to Talk about Frankenstein;" and yet he can be just as ecstatic and reverent with "What a Varied Place the World Is So Trusting and Strange So Deserving of Praise" or a poem called "Lazarus" that ends, "God's name in vain on his cracked and loamy lips."

He has wonderful short poems like this one, "Diary Cows" (and you know I love me some poems about cows!)

Got up early, waited for the farmer.
Hooked us all up to the machines as usual.
Typical trip to the pasture, typical
afternoon grazing and ruminating.
About 5:00 back to the barn. What
a relief! Listened to the radio during
dinner. Lights out at 7:00.
More tomorrow.

I found the favorite poem one day while working at The Prostate Cancer
Foundation, Mike Milken's cancer charity in a Santa Monica building I used to dub The Castle. I was sitting at my desk hating my boss at the time (an incompetent blowhard who issued insults office-wide to hide his mistakes) and I was depressed about the situation when I found this poem online, "A Guide to Refreshing Sleep"

 It is best to remember those nights

when grown-ups were singing and breaking

glass and someone who smelled good

carried you up hushed stairs toward strange

cold bedrooms to be launched on a dark

lake of coats.

If Memory does not suffice, you may

summon the obvious mascots of sleep,

but forego counting. It is miserly. They

will come and stand by your bed, nodding

their graceful Egyptian heads, inviting you

across the crooked stile to one of those

hamlets nestled between blue hills

where the curious are curious about sleep,

the enthralled are enthralled with sleep,

and the great conclusion is always,

Its time for bed.

Look–a cottage door stands open. On the night

table is a single candle, yellow sheets are turned

back, and in the garden are marshaled

the best dreams in the world. Lie down.

The horrible opera of the day is over.

Close your eyes, so the world which loves you

can go to sleep, too.

More about Ron Koertge

Who?

Yes, Marylu Terral Jeans published two books of poetry in her lifetime, Statue in the Stone  (1966) and Moonset (1971) and she's my only related (out-of-the-closet) poet.  Terral is the name of my great-great-grandfather, a circuit Methodist preacher who moved around Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico founding Methodist churches back in the mid-to-late 1800s. He founded the town of Terral, Oklahoma, and the Methodist church in Roy, New Mexico, my family seat. He is buried all by his lonesome in the old cemetery in Las Vegas, New Mexico.

Marylu was my grandmother's first cousin. My Aunt Jane recently explained to me Marylu's place on the family tree. Aunt Jane said when she first married and moved to Walnut Creek, California, in 1944, Marylu's father, Ernest Terral, invited her to come visit them nearby. 

Personally, I always pictured Marylu to look like a dotty old lady because that's what I think of when I imagine women poets who are related to me from somewhere back in time. However, Aunt Jane tells me Marylu lived in a trailer park and made herself up like Zsa Zsa Gabor every day and wrote poetry "sitting amidst the dirtiest house I had ever been in."   

But remarkably, her poems were published in Better Homes and Gardens, California Farmer, Ladies' Home Journal, McCall's, New York Herald Tribune and Saturday Evening Post reminding us of a day when poems were actually published in these magazines. Aunt Jane gave her copy of Statue in the Stone  to my mother
who a few years ago gave it to me. It was published by The Golden Quill
Press and her book jacket oozes over the power of her sonnet-making. The book is divided into somewhat staid but funny sections like Death of a Dream, Mute Testament, Valley of Stars, Love Match and Love-Armored. She uses words like "threnody."

I expected to hate the book's old-style rhyming verses but I didn't. I was intrigued by lines like this from her poem "Ghost:"

So love's sweet ghost, with undiminished art,
Remains to haunt each hall-way of my heart.

In fact, there's a melodramatic 18th-century novel reader in me who loves stanzas like this from "Dark Fire:"

Not that I love you in a smaller measure,
Not that I seek to hide my love from view,
But I no longer have a dream to treasure,
And lacking dreams, what could I offer you?

Although most of the poems have the rhythm and musicality of Dr. Seuss, some transcend the singsong, as in this little gem, "Hepzibah Higby:"

Hepzibah Higby fought the devil,
Fought his image, fought his ways;
Railed at sin, denounced all evil,
Had no time for words of praise.

Hepzibah saw a world in darkness,
Lost to light from up above;
Wept about the foolish sinners,
Never spoke a word of love.

Hepzibah Higby died, bemoaning
Man, the weakling and the dunce;
Gave her life to fight the devil,
Never saw an angel once.

I read Aunt Jane's story and some of her poems to my husband tonight.

He says he accepts living with a lazy poet.
He could even accept my dressing like Zsa Zsa Gabor.
But he refuses to live in a low-rent dirty trailer,
No matter how good my sonnets are.

When I was at Sarah Lawrence in the mid-90s, Mark Doty came to teach for one semester. All the second-year graduate students fought tooth and nail to get in his class. First-years had to sell off their first born to get a shot. At the time, I was probably heard to ask, "Who is Mark Doty?"

That's because before Sarah Lawrence, the only living published poets I knew where Howard Schwartz and Steve Schreiner (my teachers from the University of Missouri), Tom Lux and Alice Fulton  (because Steve Schreiner introduced me to them) and Philip Levine (and I don't know how I heard about him).

When Philip Levine finally came to read at Sarah Lawrence, he walked right by me, I felt like I had just experienced a celebrity sighting. What a silly thought: a celebrity poet.

Anyway, after moving to LA and diligently attending each Los Angeles Times Festival of Books every spring, (literally, the Cochella of books….if you want to see a million people in one place buying books, this is the biggest book festival in the universe), I got to know Mark Doty who was there year after year reading in the poetry nook. I grew to be quite a fan of his very funny, comforting and touching reading-style. On the Festival of Books panels, (real head-food, those free panels), his comments were also embracing and brilliant. I loved him! I could then see why the poetry students at Sarah Lawrence drew blood over the chance to get into his class. I wish I had been more savvy and aggressive back then too.

And then I read Dog Years. What can I say about Dog Years. It is indescribable. If you have a dog and love literary memoirs…walk, don't run to this book.

I have his book of poems Atlantis, much of which is about his lover's death from AIDS. I think what I love about Doty's poems are the way his brain gravitates toward particularity. From "Grosse Fuge" talking about his dying lover:

Mostly he looks away, mouth open,
as if studying something slightly above
and to the right of the world.

…or the end of the poem "Breakwater," his ability to be obliquely specific:

now that we have come to rest,
as mysteriously as ever,
as nearly perfect a shape
as ever we'll discern.

or from "Atlantis," his heartbreaking and arresting similes:

and I swear sometimes
when I put my head to his chest
I can hear the virus humming
like a refrigerator.

If I could be the Dead-head-esque groupie of a poet, I would drive from town to town to be the obsessed fan of Mark Doty. But I have no time for this because I am committed to tracking the never-ending farewell tours of Cher.

Further reading:

• New York Times artile on Philip Levine when he ws to become the U.S. Poet Laureate
• A New Yorker piece on Alice Fulton
• Interview with Thomas Lux
• Mark Doty reading at the Dodge Poetry Festival in 2008