So, tell me.

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
— Mary Oliver (New and Selected Poems)

Filed under: Uncategorized, Mary Oliver, poetry

i must change my life.

But how? Where do you start?

Whom do you ask? Do I see anything?

Do I see the people around me?

Do I know if I will hurt them in

the process of change? Or, it they have not

noticed my not changing my life and know

I must, do they count? Today is over. I

through it made it again, made it, weak and not strong,

limping and not running, no fervor, no

sentiment, just numbness, dull and trudging

with a hawthorne where a heart would be.

I must change my life.

Larkin suits my mood, so often suits my mood.

Talking In Bed

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,
And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

(picture from Google Images, poem copied from poem-hunter)

Filed under: Uncategorized, "Talking in Bed", Philip Larkin, poetry

brevity

I don’t write with brevity. My writing is more a trial and error mush of everything I (think I) know at the time, which then gets edited down to (usually, at least right now) fourteen lines of everything I did not know when I sat down to write. That is why writing is an act. An act of discovery. If you sit down to write specifically about a subject, I’ve heard, it won’t be good. It just won’t. If you know what you are going to say and relentlessly persevere in that, then what have you learned? And more likely, what have you learned about yourself or the process? No, writing helps you find yourself, your self lost in relationship, your self lost in overwork, your self lost in the hours.

I bet Amy Lowell didn’t know where this poem was headed when it began.

Vernal Equinox
by Amy Lowell

The scent of hyacinths, like a pale mist, lies
between me and my book;
And the South Wind, washing through the room,
Makes the candles quiver.
My nerves sting at a spatter of rain on the shutter,
And I am uneasy with the thrusting of green shoots
Outside, in the night.

Why are you not here to overpower me with your
tense and urgent love.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/22831

Filed under: Uncategorized, "Vernal Equinox", Amy Lowell, poetry

Today is a good day . . .

Momentary
By A.E. Stallings
I never glimpse her but she goes
Who had been basking in the sun,
Her links of chain mail one by one
Aglint with pewter, bronze and rose.

I never see her lying coiled
Atop the garden step, or under
A dark leaf, unless I blunder
And by some motion she is foiled.

Too late I notice as she passes
Zither of chromatic scale—
I only ever see her tail
Quicksilver into tall grasses.

I know her only by her flowing,
By her glamour disappearing
Into shadow as I’m nearing—
I only recognize her going.

Isn’t this a lovely poem? A.E. Stallings will be at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference this summer for the first time.
It may take a couple of reads to discern sho actually the “she” is. Probably from the mind of my adult life being steeped in Biblical history, I tend always to think of the snake as male, even the snake as metaphor. And, so, today is a good day for a poem about a snake, I think. mm-hmm.

Filed under: Uncategorized, "Momentary", A.E. Stallings, poetry, untruth

feeling a little cynical

after this week of love? I am. This poem by William Logan,

author of eight books of poetry and five books of criticism. I

recently had the opportunity to introduce him at a reading and

I said that to enumerate all his accomplishments, I would have

to get butcher paper to list them all. I suggested having him

run through it like a football player. somehow, I have my doubts

that he ever played football. He has been called the most

hated man in all of poetry, but in my opinion, he is one of

the nicest men in all of poetry, with a great soft spot for

hurting hearts.

A Valentine For Matthew Arnold

 William Logan (1977)

The Seas of Faith are full again with vain
Philosophies, empty orders of gods,
Demons of the mind and heart supplanting
The slow angers of love with hollow stares
And rhetoric. These are not days to love,
When the rare expectations of morning
Will be blackened by the shoddy evening.
Let us be faithless to one another.
The monarch butterflies now copulate
In the kitchen, bats bare their teeth against
The screens, and throatless songbirds rasp all night.
At dawn, armies of toads and frogs litter
The walks. All animals act cruelly
Toward each other. We are no different.

 

I am reading this poem over and over and listening to the Doors

Grateful Dead. Wonder what that says about me. Am I

different than an animal? Is the survival of the fittest my rule

for love? I don’t know, maybe. Maybe that is what marriage

is really all about, who can bear it the longest?

oh, and happy birthday good boy bryan. Sorry i forgot.

 

Filed under: Uncategorized, A Valentine for Matthew Arnold, William Logan

be still a moment

Psalm to Be Read with Closed Eyes

By D. Nurkse

Ignorance will carry me through the last days,

the blistering cities, over briny rivers

swarming with jellyfish, as once my father

carried me from the car up the tacked carpet

to the white bed, and if I woke, I never knew it.

Be still and listen to the moment in this poem.

That moment the author recalls for us all, I think.

Either, you have carried a sleeping child to bed

or some of you, the lucky ones, may have been carried.

Or maybe both carried and been carried. But, this

poem is, feels a bit like the way I am living my life now.

Sleeping, being carried—unwaking somewhere.

Only, this time I don’t know where.

copied from www.poetry.org

Filed under: Uncategorized, "Psalm To Be Read with Closed Eyes", D. Nurkse, Poetry.Org

no light, no light

Buchenwald

Listening to a podcast while I do online banking, which caused me pause,

hearing Anthony Hecht’s poem, “More Light, More Light.”

Two deaths in two different centuries—one in Renaissance England

and one outside Buchenwald. Christoper Hicks, professor of

Humanities at Boston University, mentions so rightly

that the rhyme is hard for the first several stanzas and breaks

up in the last stanzas, disintegrating, if you will. I feel haunted by the

line, “and every day mute /  Ghosts come drifting from the ovens . . .”

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/poetry-off-the-shelf/id138752347

For Heinrich Blucher and Hannah Arendt
Composed in the Tower before his execution
These moving verses, and being brought at that time
Painfully to the stake, submitted, declaring thus:
"I implore my God to witness that I have made no crime."

Nor was he forsaken of courage, but the death was horrible,
The sack of gunpowder failing to ignite.
His legs were blistered sticks on which the black sap
Bubbled and burst as he howled for the Kindly Light.

And that was but one, and by no means one of he worst;
Permitted at least his pitiful dignity;
And such as were by made prayers in the name of Christ,
That shall judge all men, for his soul's tranquility.

We move now to outside a German wood.
Three men are there commanded to dig a hole
In which the two Jews are ordered to lie down
And be buried alive by the third, who is a Pole.

Not light from the shrine at Weimar beyond the hill
Nor light from heaven appeared. But he did refuse.
A Luger settled back deeply in its glove.
He was ordered to change places with the Jews.

Much casual death had drained away their souls.
The thick dirt mounted toward the quivering chin.
When only the head was exposed the order came
To dig him out again and to get back in.

No light, no light in the blue Polish eye.
When he finished a riding boot packed down the earth.
The Luger hovered lightly in its glove.
He was shot in the belly and in three hours bled to death.

No prayers or incense rose up in those hours
Which grew to be years, and every day came mute
Ghosts from the ovens, sifting through crisp air,
And settled upon his eyes in a black soot.

Filed under: Uncategorized, "More LIght, Anthony Hecht, Christopher Hicks, poetry, Poetry Off the Shelf

Let us remember . . .

that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.

Christian Wiman, Editor of Poetry Magazine

Good exhausted tonight. I picked William Logan up from school, (was it just yesterday?), took him to tea (the Anglophile), dropped him at his hotel, wrote for two hours , cobbling together an introduction for his reading, printed it at like 5 minutes and ocunting, introduced him, heard his reading, went with a big group to take him to a French bistro, woke up, went to Body Pump, picked him back up, coffee and croissants at a French bakery, to the airport, all of this time spent with one of the most important men in poetry today, all of this only to realize that I am woefully ignorant of the current poetry scene in America, Britain, anywhere. It’s hard starting late, playing catch-up, trying to learn all that I’ve missed, much less what is being written now, today, yesterday. LIfe is short, I’m reminded once again. “Life is short,” is a cliche for good reason. It’s because it’s true. And life is full of choices. Choose wisely. What you read, what you care about, who you care about.

Filed under: Uncategorized

So, what is the novel?

I started my last class for this degree last night (besides my thesis hours). I know. It’s about time. I think I have dragged this degree out so much because I love school so much. I mean I think I know that. I love, love, love learning. And last night was a high for me. The Modern British novel. So guess how many we are reading? NINE. They call it the Book of the Week club. My teacher is brilliant. He is a Joycean expert. He has written many articles in his field. So. You will never guess what “they” consider the first Modern novel. Not the first novel, but the first modern novel. MADAME BOVARY. Book it. I was so gratified that I had read it during all those child-bearing, nursing, child-dragging around, picking up for a living years. Not that I didn’t enjoy them. Not that I don’t have regrets for how driven I’ve been. Not that I’m any less driven now. It’s a tool in my toolbox. It numbs pain. And it really, really works. SO. Heart of Darkness, Sons and Lovers, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A Clockwork Orange, Mrs. Dalloway, Saturday Morning, Saturday Evening, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Good Soldier. Is that nine? It better be. I finished Conrad today, read Joyce’s short story “Araby,” am about to study British Imperialism and the reasons for mass Irish immigration to America in the Twentieth Century. I can’t stop. But back to Bovary. I have so much to say about that. This woman, I can relate to. Her pain. But, the real thing that makes it a “Modern” novel is that it makes no overt judgments. That, and the fact that Flaubert wrote painfully, rather than painlessly—as we believe Dickens and Scott did. He chose “le mot juste,” the right word—which of course makes perfect sense in poetry and should be always the rule of writing. The right word makes the right sentence makes the right novel. Ad infinitum. Ad glorious infinitum.

See for yourself. Read Heart of Darkness. What is the heart of darkness? Is it found only in the hearts of British Imperialists or do we all have this heart of darkness. Why didn’t Conrad write an easy adventure novel like Sir Walter Scott might have done? Why did Kurtz go mad? Why was it “Horrible, horrible,” and most of all, why can I not forget those two words. I hear them now, “Horrible, horrible.”

Filed under: Uncategorized, Gustave Flaubert, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, Madame Bovary, short story araby, the Modern novel

Today I am full of thoughts

“To-day I am full of thoughts and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world; but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will not be strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803–1882, U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. “Circles,” Essays, First Series 1841, repr. 1847.

via Today I am full of thoughts, Ralph Waldo Emerson | Dictionary.com.

Well, a little pantheism never hurt anyone.

Did it?

Filed under: Uncategorized, Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing