Continuing in 2017 to work through the Poet’s Corner card deck.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies? And even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

“The First Elegy” from The Duino Elegies (1923), Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell

The elegies are named for Duino Castle on the Adriatic Sea. The card didn’t have much else about Rilke. Sad face.

Yes, I went to the city,
And there I did bitterly cry,
Men out of touch with the earth,
And with never a glance at the sky.
Oh, can’t hold the han’ of my love!
Can’t hold her pure little han’!

From “I Went to the City” by Kenneth Patchen.

Patchen was a poet and a painter. His idol was William Blake. He created many painted poems which he called “anticalligraphy” which were sometimes accompanied by jazz musicians.

And through the tremble of a sigh
May tremble through the story.
For “happy summer days” gone by,
And vanish’d summer glory—
It shall not touch, with breath of bale,
The pleasance of our fairy-tale.

From Lewis Caroll’s “Through the Looking Glass” preamble.

Carroll "wrote children’s literature that adults liked," much of it was poetry and puzzles. He was fond of “clever young girls” in the vein of Alice in Wonderland.

Week eight stats:

1 white American colonialist female
1 black American female
2 white American females
3 white American males
1 white Andalusian male
1 white Austrian male
1 Chilean male
3 white English males
1 white French male
1 white Italian male
1 white Scottish male
1 white Welsh male

1 1300s poet
1 1600s poet
1 1700s poet
6 1800s poets
8 1900s poets

One should always honor one's teachers, preferably before they pass away. You don't always make it.

I was fortunate to begin my undergraduate and graduate poetry workshops with two very strong poetry teachers in St. Louis, Missouri. Howard Schwartz was a master at teaching mechanics. In class we often debated poems word by word, even down to the advantages of using 'and' or 'the.' Steve Shreiner taught about feeling and persuasiveness and encouraged us to read other poets. I also had a big crush on him, which I vowed never to let happen again. And Steve Schreiner introduced me to the poet Tom Lux at a local reading Lux was giving. I never would have ended up at Sarah Lawrence College had I not heard those Tom Lux poems back then. They were funny and I wanted a teacher who was funny. Although I had some good classes with Jean Valentine, David Rivard and Joan Larkin, Tom Lux was the professor who sent me to Sarah Lawrence.

Thomas Lux passed away last week from cancer and many of his students have been posting tributes and commentary about what an important mentor he was to them, what an inspiring teacher and friend. In the mid 1990s, Lux was my "don" (or dedicated advisor) at Sarah Lawrence and I took two of his classes, a craft class and a workshop class. Lux had a larger-than-life presence. He was charismatic. His voice boomed during readings. He seemed comfortable in his own skin. He was the celebrity of the writing program. My friend and I called him poetry’s Daryl Hall. We loved to hear him recite the Refrigerator poem and we'd imitate lines of it to each other the way Tom read it: "because you do not eat / that which rips your heart with joy!"

And herein lies the rub for me because I've always had a hard time with celebrities. They walk around with such an impenetrable veneer, it makes one feel smaller. Tom's office at Sarah Lawrence was set up that way, too. It was a beautiful office, especially by the looks of the dives my other professors inhabited (basements were common). It was large and multi-textured, intellectual and full of stuff like Lux had lived a pirate's life. I scanned the New York Times photograph to the top left from a photocopy just to illustrate the scene: Tom in a large chair, his imposing shoulders and head towering over you as you sat uncomfortably in the lower chair. To be uncomfortable is a choice to be sure. But there it was.

I had a big blow up with Lux in that office. The fight wasn't even over poetry. It was over standards of behavior. He called me petty and another word which I can’t remember and can't believe now that I can’t remember as it was so upsetting to me at the time and I've carried that phrase around, ("petty and something"), like a big memorial gravestone all these years since. My eyes opened wide and I stood up to leave his office dramatically. He stopped me and we dialed the whole thing back into civility. He walked me from his office to Slonim Hall.  After that I knew I would never be one of his favorites.

But he told me my poems were brilliant, (whether they were or not), and he took the time to tell my family at graduation that I was a good poet, (I don't think they believed him), and the first time I ever had greens was as a party for the students up in his NYC apartment. He was like my difficult relative or the antagonistic mentor, the best kind of mentor probably, something you must push up against until it's gone. Despite the fact that I don't have the same connection to Tom Lux that other students had, despite all the drama at Sarah Lawrence, I've always been proud to have been one of his many doe-eyed students.

The obits

Thomas Lux, esteemed Georgia Tech teacher and poet (The Atlanta0-Journal Constitution)

Campus, Atlanta communities mourn the loss of Thomas Lux, director of Poetry@TECH (Georgia Tech)

Rest in Peace, Thomas Lux (1946–2017) (Poetry Foundation)

Sarah Lawrence College Mourns the Loss of Longtime Writing Faculty Member Tom Lux (Sarah Lawrence College)

Thomas Lux, 70, poet known for his generosity as a writer, teacher (The Boston Globe)

Renowned poet Thomas Lux, an Easthampton native, dies at 70 (MASS Live)

Remembering Thomas Lux (Technique)

Remembering a One-of-a-Kind Poet (The Atlantic)

The Old New York Times piece from which the photo above came: If Poetry Is Puzzling Who is to Blame?

So I'm still working through a deck of poetry cards I found in my parents house last year. This week randomness dealt out some good stuff:

It could not be dangerous to be living
   in a town like this, of simple people,
who have a steeple-jack placing danger
   signs by the church
while he is gliding the solid-
   pointed star, which on the steeple
stands for hope.

“The Steeple-Jack” by Marianne Moore

Moore was born in the outskirts of St. Louis, in Kirkwood, MO. She went to Bryn Mawr College and was a teacher and a librarian. She was also editor of The Dial and considered one of the modernist poets.

Great God! I’d rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

“The World is Too Much With Us” by William Wordsworth

Wordsworth was a leader of English Romanticism movement, primarily a lyrical writer who believed specific experience served up universal meaning. He celebrated humanity, real language and this poem was his “recipe for  poetry as a ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" and "emotion recollected in tranquility.’”

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will end the human war?

Allen Ginsberg from “America” 

Wow! So great to read this right now. The card calls Ginsberg’s “Howl” a “literary gauntlet hurled down” and calls this poem “a brutally funny indictment of the mechanized torture that awaits any sensitive soul caught like a rat in the consumer maze.” Hear Ginsberg read the poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Orar-V3y5Sk.

Week seven stats:

1 white American colonialist female
1 black American female
2 white American females
3 white American males
1 white Andalusian male
1 Chilean male
2 white English males
1 white French male
1 white Italian male
1 white Scottish male
1 white Welsh male

1 1300s poet
1 1600s poet
1 1700s poet
5 1800s poets
7 1900s poets

These are the cards I pulled this week:

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Requiem” (1950-1984)

According to the card, he lived a short life, beset with illnesses. However, he's known for his adventure tales and he did travel to the South Sea Islands and Samoa. This short poem "Requiem" was written as his own epitaph.

Toiling, rejoicing, sorrowing,
Onward through life he goes;
Each morning sees some task begin,
Each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night’s repose.

Whoa. Semi-colon overload, dude. This is from “The Village Blacksmith” by Henry Wadsworth Longellow (1807-1882)

The card states that Longfellow is “America’s first true man of letters.” He was a linguist, professor, translator, and critic, and “the most popular poet writing in the English language” during his 19th Century. Some of his greatest hits include: “The Song of Hiawatha,” “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “The Courtship of Miles Standish.” I own the book “Tales of a Wayside Inn” because for years while I was in college and our family spent Christmases in Boston, we would eat dinner at the Wayside Inn. I loved it. Which is obvious because I bought the book! Once I took my friends to visit his house but it was closed. There was a dispenser with buttons out front which appeased our disappointment.  The button had his picture on it and said, "I'm a poet too!"

Week six stats:

1 white American colonialist female
1 black American female
1 white American female
2 white American males
1 white Andalusian male
1 Chilean male
1 white English male
1 white French male
1 white Italian male
1 white Scottish male
1 white Welsh male

1 1300s poet
1 1600s poet
2 1700s poets
3 1800s poets
5 1900s poets

We’re still doing poem cards from the deck I found in my parents’ basement. Because they're easy like Sunday morning.

Time has an end, they say
sea-walls are worn away
by wind and the sea-spray.
   not the herb,
            rosemary.

This was from “Time Has an End” by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886-1961)

H.D. liked Greece and Egyptian mythology and hey, she was a Moravian from Pennsylvania! My parents are about to move from Lititz, Pennsylvania, where they’ve lived in retirement for many years and Lititz was founded as an exclusive Moravian community so I know a little somethin-somethin about Moravians. As does anyone else who owns that multi-pointed Christmas decoration, the Moravian star. H.D. moved to Europe in 1911, however, and folded in with Ezra Pound’s Imagists. She was “briefly engaged” to Ezra and it was his idea for her to sign her poems as “H.D. Imagiste.” (I’m not fact checking these cards, btw.) The card calls her a “poet’s poet” and I like this as a description of experimental poets, like pure vs. practical science. She was also in psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud. She also translated Sappo's poems.

I see only a summer’s
transparency, I sing nothing but wind,
while history creaks on its carnival floats
hoarding medals and shrouds
and passes me by, and I stand by myself
in the spring, knowing nothing but rivers.

This is from “Pastoral” by Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), translated by Ben Belitt. Neruda is much loved for his “immense, heroic, prophetic, romantic and moving universe of words” as the card says and he was also controversial due to his “radical socialist politics,” (is this card bias or actually how we refer to his political stance?). He was exiled from Chile between 1936-1952. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971.

The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over the harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

From “Fog” by Carl Sandburg (1878-1967). That’s the poem in its entirety! It's a very popular and anthologized poem, according to my card, even though, like Walt Whitman, Sandburg went on to be know for his longer, more effusive lines.

Week Five Stats:

1 white American colonialist female
1 black American female
1 white American female
1 white American male
1 white Andalusian male
1 Chilean male
1 white English male
1 white French male
1 white Italian male
1 white Welsh male

1 1300s poet
1 1600s poet
1 1700-1800s poet
2 1800s poets
5 1900s poets