Life Chant

cacophony of small birds at dawn

may it continue

sticky monkey flowers on bare brown hills

may it continue

bitter taste of early miner's lettuce

may it continue

music on city streets in the summer nights

may it continue

kids laughing on roofs on stoops on the beach in the snow

may it continue

triumphal shout of the newborn

may it continue

deep silence of great rainforests

may it continue

fine austerity of jungle peoples

may it continue

rolling fuck of great whales in turquoise ocean

may it continue

clumsy splash of pelican in smooth bays

may it continue

astonished human eyeball squinting thru aeons at astonished nebulae who squint back

may it continue

clean snow on the mountain

may it continue

fierce eyes, clear of light of the aged

may it continue

rite of birth and of naming

may it continue

rite of instruction

may it continue

rite of passage

may it continue

love in the morning, love in the noon sun

love in the evening among crickets

may it continue

long tales by fire, by window, in fog, in dusk on the mesa

may it continue

the night music

may it continue

grunt of mating hippo, giraffe, foreplay for snow leapord

screeching of cats on the backyard fence

may it continue

without police

may it continue

without prisons

may it continue

without hospitals, death medicine: flu and flu vaccine

may it continue

without madhouses, marriage, highschools that are prisons

may it continue

without empire

may it continue

in sisterhood

may it continue

thru the wars to come

may it continue

in brotherhood

may it continue

tho the earth seem lost

may it continue

thru exile and silence

may it continue

with cunning and love

may it continue

as woman continues

may it continue

as breath continues

may it continue

as stars continue

may it continue

may the wind deal kindly with us

may the fire remember our names

may springs flow, rain fall again

may the land grow green, may it swallow our mistakes

we begin the work

may it continue

the great transmutation

may it continue

a new heaven and a new earth

may it continue

may it continue

Diane DiPrima

"Life Chant"

The Gift of Form

I picked up this book by happenstance at the library's used book store and am thoroughly glad I did.

David Yezzi's poems in Birds of the Air provide a lovely example of the modern use of classic poetic forms such as the sonnet. One hardly notices the regularity of the rhymes embedded within contemporary subjects and what sounds like well-educated and perceptive, but not stilted, speech -- until the sound overcomes the sense and reveals the words' formal arrangement.

It's the best kind of poetry: thoughtful, sensitive, worthy of repeated return.

Excerpt:

Orts

Tough to say from this tableful of scraps
what couples feasted here -- gnawed olive stones
among the burnt ends of cold meat, the laps
of cantaloupes splayed open, spindly bones
of game birds, unloaved crusts, a waxy rind.
Did late-harvest wine unloose their wild talk?
Whose restless eyes, at once far-off and kind,
looked skyward on an after-dinner walk?
The clues are hard to tease out: were they fair
or compromised, temperate or gluttonous;
did some not give a fig and others care?
Both, perhaps, and in both just like us,
who, swept up in the whirl of tonight's laughter,
pay no special mind to what comes after.

Note: I counted this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge.  

Goldilocks Reviews

In a rush to finish my run up Mont Blanc for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge, I stayed up late-ish on New Year's Eve and savored three slim poetry books that had been on my TBR list for quite a while.

It worked out nicely to read them in such close proximity to each other because it made compare-and-contrast so very easy. At the end I felt a bit like Goldilocks, intent on finding the just-right poetry fix to conclude my reading for 2019.

Stag's Leap chronicles Sharon Olds' ambiguous experience as her long marriage ends, and the push and pull of the complex emotions involved. It's a crushing event that offers opportunities and a new freedom that's filled with sorrow. Olds' poems follow a seasonal arc as well as the zigzagging stages of grief, coming finally to the realization that her husband left her for another woman "because I/didn't suit him anymore -- /nor him, me, although I could not see it." The ultra-personal specifics sometimes get in the way, but Olds' honesty, perception, and wry humor make these poems strong and ultimately healing medicine.

Ted Kooser has a marvelous eye for detail and the matching of unusual likenesses. In some ways this is my favorite sort of poetry, the kind that can stop your eye as it flows over the page, recognizing the perfect match of image with image . . . but it's also -- especially when compared so closely with these other two works -- a little bit cold.  For example, I love the virtuosity with which Kooser turns a hand-washing moment into an arresting vignette: "She turned on the tap and a silver braid/unraveled over her fingers." At the same time, I found myself yearning for the detail that would tell me more about the emotional connections within these poems. Despite Kooser's masterful blending of engaging image and exceptional technique, that sense of cerebral distance left me unsatisfied.           

Eleanor Lerman, in contrast, seems always to be scanning the edges of sight for signs of what lies beyond the dailiness of experience. Her poems assemble images that are somehow more than the sum of their parts and I'm struck by the appropriateness of the book's title poem, "The Sensual World Re-Emerges," in which an ordinary commute home is transformed into something much more and Lerman leaves the reader to figure out (if possible) precisely what that is. 

. . . Just before
your reach the lighted street that leads
to home, from within a stand of trees

the sensual world re-emerges, in all its
naked, jackal-headed beauty, holding
the moon in its outstretched hand
But you aren't afraid: the sensual world
is an old friend. Or is it? . . .

Call me. I have left my number
everywhere. I want to know
how this story turns out

I love this level of detail, with Lerman suggesting emotional connection but allowing the reader to supply it: walking through darkness, before reaching the streetlights, imagine for yourself how the moon looks and what that feels like. This volume is, as Goldilocks might say, just right.

Another Look

Friends of mine often quote a line from Denise Levertov's poetry and although I'd never heard of her before, that piqued my curiosity. Challenge reading gave me an additional nudge to read With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads, which was published in the year I was born.

As I grow older, time seems more and more amazing to me. Imagine that when I was just a baby, when American society was so diferent, this woman was already a mature poet, writing with a modern sensibility about the beauty and intricacy of the natural world! And meanwhile perhaps she was wearing a hat and white gloves for every social occasion, like my mother did -- or willfully discarding them as a representation of her true self. It's really quite extraordinary.

Levertov's poetry requires a pause, a certain level of attention, and the resulting stillness in the reader allows the natural rhythms to come through. Reading aloud is the best way I've found to attune to the pulse of her words and understand her meaning. Her clear voice leaves adjectives behind for the most part, reflecting the way that Nature simply is but our awareness can lead us into spiritual places. Although it's often difficult to know Levertov's subject on first glance, the reader who slows and pays attention will be rewarded with a glimpse of another dimension.

Excerpt:

Obsessions

Maybe it is true we have to return
to the black air of ashcan city
because it is there the most life was burned,

as ghosts or criminals return?
But no, the city has no monopoly
of intense life. The dust burned

golden or violet in the wide land
to which we ran away, images
of passion sprang out of the land

as whirlwinds or red flowers, your hands
opened in anguish or clenched in violence
under that sun, and clasped my hands

in that place to which we will not return
where so much happened that no one else noticed,
where the city's ashes that we brought with us
flew into the intense sky still burning.

Note: I read this book for the Birth Year Reading Challenge, and it also counts toward the Mount TBR Reading Challenge. 

Thanks

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is

W.S. Merwin
"Thanks"

Wishing you all a happy Thanksgiving!

Love in Words

Let me just say that I love Pablo Neruda. When I think of what it takes to be a poet, his work provides the standard: a certain freshness that's drawn from the stuff of everyday life, the ability to juxtapose words and concepts in a way that illuminates both, a talent for expressing the inexpressible.

The poems in 100 Love Sonnets are dedicated to his wife Matilde Urrutia de Neruda, printed in translation with the original Spanish on the left page and English on the right, and 14 lines each, though without rhymes.

To say they are love sonnets is to say that water is damp. Adoration is more like it. A deluge of devotion. And yet, again: fresh, vibrant, never cloying in the moon/June/ love/dove poetic tradition.

He will always be part of my library. Yours, too, if you're wise.

Excerpt: (two, because Neruda is so wonderful)

XVII

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.   


LVIII

Among the broadswords of literary iron
I wander like a foreign sailor, who does not know
the streets, or their angles, and who sings because
that's how it is, because if not for that what else is there?

From the stormy archipelagoes I brought
my windy accordion, waves of crazy rain,
the habitual slowness of natural things:
they made up my wild heart.

And so when the sharp little teeth of Literature
snapped at my honest heels, I passed along
unsuspectingly, singing with the wind,

toward the rainy dockyards of my childhood,
toward the cool forests of the indefinable South,
toward where my heart was filled with your fragrance.

Note: I've had this book in my library for a very long time, but I read it cover to cover for the Birth Year Reading Challenge. I'm also counting it in the Mount TBR Reading Challenge.

Light? Not So Much

Robert Bly is perhaps best known as the author of Iron John: A Book About Men, an important and still timely book about modern masculinity. These poems have a robust voice -- distinctively masculine, if there is such a thing -- as they deal in dark images invoking death, disasters both national and personal, and the Viet Nam War. I read them with trepidation, still feeling tender and skittish from my recent post-apocalyptic reading.

Bly deftly combines disparate words and images, creating meanings that bounce off each other like ripples confined in a narrow pool, leaving the reader to make sense of the overlaps. His subjects are often political and always distinctly American, flavored with despair and resistance. They reflected a segment of the national mood when they were written, and they have aged well.

Excerpt:

At a March against the Vietnam War

Washington, November 27, 1965

Newspapers rise high in the air over Maryland

We walk about, bundled in coats
     and sweaters in the late November sun

Looking down, I see feet moving
Calmly, gaily,
Almost as if separated from their bodies

But there is something moving in the dark somewhere
Just beyond
The edge of our eyes: a boat
Covered with machine guns
Moving along under trees

It is black,
The hand reaches out
And cannot touch it--
It is that darkness among pine boughs
That the Puritans brushed
As they went out to kill turkeys

At the edge of the jungle clearing
It explodes
On the ground
 
We long to abase ourselves

We have carried around this cup of darkness
We have longed to pour it over our heads

We make war
Like a man anointing himself

Note: This book completes my reading for the Color Coded Reading Challenge (light). Hooray! But I still have a few reviews to write before I'm officially finished.  

A Modern Mixed Bag

My reaction to Robert Lowell's Life Studies and For the Union Dead is decidedly mixed, which seems appropriate for a book that's assembled from very disparate works, one of which -- Life Studies -- won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1960.

Parts 1 and 2 of Life Studies contain autobiographical essays, largely focused on family circumstances and business associates of Lowell's father, providing a child's perspective filtered through an adult sensibility. The essays are imbued with early 1900's Boston propriety and status-consciousness, at times reminiscent of Edith Wharton, and they are also quite amusing. Artful details such as his father's monogrammed garbage cans lend flashes of insight to Lowell's stories of his oh-so-proper-but-not-quite-top-drawer childhood.

I thoroughly enjoyed the essays, which read as you would expect essays by a poet to read, with precise and sometimes lyrical word choices. Perhaps that makes their contrast with the poems in the latter two sections and in For the Union Dead all the more notable. The essays are witty but restrained, whereas the poems are thoroughly modern, right down to impressionistic imagery that requires the reader to tease out the meaning.

Sometimes Lowell's choices are obscure enough to be jarring, as when he describes a seal swimming "like a poodle" in the ocean (a poodle? I had to read that line twice to be sure). Lowell clearly knows how to marshal the language, however; even his strange juxtapositions have a certain power, even when it's difficult to tell exactly what he's talking about. He walks the line between formal poetry and free verse, and writes revealingly about his struggles with mental illness.

Considering the social structures in place then, being modern in 1959 is quite a feat!

Excerpt:

After the heat and push of Commander Billy, it was pleasant to sit in the shade of the Atkinsons. Cousin Ledyard wasn't exactly an admiral: he had been promoted to this rank during the World War and had soon reverted back to his old rank of captain. In 1926 he was approaching retirement age and was still a captain. He was in charge of a big, stately, comfortable, but anomalous warship, which seldom sailed further than hailing distance from its Charlestown drydock. He was himself stately and anomalous.

Note: The book counts toward the Birth Year Reading Challenge, the 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge, and is the B (Boston) book in the Where Are You Reading? challenge. It also adds another read book to my National Book Award for Poetry winners list. I'm so efficient!  

Old Roses

White roses, tiny and old, flare among thorns
by the barn door.
                                 For a hundred years
under the June elm, under the gaze
of seven generations,
                                        they lived briefly
like this, in the month of roses,
                                                         by the fields
stout with corn, or with clover and timothy
making thick hay,
                                  grown over, now,
with milkweed, sumac, paintbrush.
                                                                  Old
roses survive
winter drifts, the melt in April, August
parch,
              and men and women
who sniffed roses in spring and called them pretty
as we call them now,
                                       walking beside the barn
on a day that perishes.

Donald Hall
"Old Roses"
White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006 

(photo credit)

National Book Award for Poetry

I'm always on the lookout for new poets, but at the same time I'm always trying to broaden my appreciation and knowledge by reading the "best" of the past. Hence this list.

The National Book Award books are a little too "out there" for me -- they seem to reward the most avant-garde literary works in a given year  -- but I figure a stretch in the poetry department is good for the soul. More about the prize here, if you're interested: National Book Award Winners, by category.

It also gives me something else to run down in bookstores, which is a good thing. Not that I need an excuse to spend more time browsing the shelves!

Green means I'm still seeking it. Blue means it's on the TBR shelf, perhaps even languishing there -- in a good way, of course. Poetry and leisure go together, don't they?

1950: Paterson: Book III and Selected Poems - William Carlos Williams
1951: The Auroras of Autumn - Wallace Stevens
1952: Collected Poems - Marianne Moore
1953: Collected Poems, 1917-1952 - Archibald MacLeish
1954: Collected Poems - Conrad Aiken
1955: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens - Wallace Stevens
1956: The Shield of Achilles - W.H. Auden
1957: Things of the World - Richard Wilbur
1958: Promises: Poems, 1954-1956 - Robert Penn Warren
1959: Words for the Wind - Theodore Roethke
1960: Life Studies - Robert Lowell
1961: The Woman at the Washington Zoo - Randall Jarrell
1962: Poems - Alan Dugan
1963: Traveling Through the Dark - William Stafford
1964: Selected Poems - John Crowe Ransom
1965: The Far Field - Theodore Roethke
1966: Buckdancer's Choice: Poems - James Dickey
1967: Nights and Days - James Merrill
1968: The Light Around the Body - Robert Bly
1969: His Toy, His Dream, His Rest - John Berryman
1970: The Complete Poems - Elizabeth Bishop
1971: To See, To Take - Mona Van Duyn
1972: Selected Poems - Howard Moss; Frank O'Hara
1973: Collected Poems, 1951-1971 - A. R. Ammons
1974: The Fall of America: Poems of these States, 1965-1971 - Allen Ginsberg and Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 - Adrienne Rich
1975: Presentation Piece - Marilyn Hacker
1976: Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror - John Ashbery
1977: Collected Poems, 1930-1976 - Richard Eberhart
1978: The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov - Howard Nemerov
1979: Mirabell: Books of Number - James Merrill
1980: Ashes - Philip Levine
1981: The Need to Hold Still - Lisel Mueller
1982: Life Supports: New and Collected Poems - William Bronk
1983: Selected Poems - Galway Kinnell and Country Music: Selected Early Poems - Charles Wright
(not awarded 1984-1990)
1991: What Work Is - Philip Levine
1992: New & Selected Poems - Mary Oliver
1993: Garbage - A.R. Ammons
1994: A Worshipful Company of Fletchers - James Tate
1995: Passing Through: The Later Poems - Stanley Kunitz
1996: Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey, Poems 1991-1995 - Hayden Carruth
1997: Effort at Speech: New & Selected Poems - William Meredith
1998: This Time: New and Selected Poems - Gerald Stern
1999: Vice: New & Selected Poems - Ai
2000: Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 - Lucille Clifton
2001: Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry - Alan Dugan
2002: In the Next Galaxy - Ruth Stone
2003: The Singing - C.K. Williams
2004: Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003 - Jean Valentine
2005: Migration: New and Selected Poems - W.S. Merwin
2006: Splay Anthem - Nathaniel Mackey
2007: Time and Materials - Robert Hass
2008: Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems - Mark Doty
2009: Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy - Keith Waldrop
2010: Lighthead - Terrance Hayes
2011: Head Off & Split - Nikky Finney
2012: Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations - David Ferry
2013: Incarnadine - Mary Szybist
2014: Faithful and Virtuous Night - Louise Glück
2015: Voyage of the Sable Venus - Robin Coste Lewis
2016: The Performance of Becoming Human - Daniel Borzutzky
2017: Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 - Frank Bidart
2018: Indecency - Justin Phillip Reed
2019: Sight Lines - Arthur Sze

2020: DMZ Colony - Don Mee Choi

2021: Floaters - Martin Espada

2022: Punks: New & Selected Poems - John Keene

2023: from unincorporated territory [amot] - Craig Santos Perez

2024: Something about Living - Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

2025: The Intentions of Thunder - Patricia Smith

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (TBR and DR)

In keeping with my efforts to keep exploring new poets, here's a list that -- thanks to the passage of time -- contains a whole bunch of venerable poets, a few I've never heard of, several of my favorites, and plenty of relative newcomers I've never read before.

I got a head start on this list when it was a whole lot shorter. How that happened without becoming a formal goal, I'm not quite sure. But my printed-out copy from 2001, sourced from the Harvard Book Store website, no less, goes only back to 1986. Hmmmm. Was Harvard cutting corners? Or did they figure no one wanted to read poetry from, say, 1947? There is some kind of a floating heading on the page that says "Latest Awards," so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. That will make us all feel better.

(Yeesh! The meaning of the words "my printed-out copy from 2001" has just sunk in. How can that be 15 years ago???)

As usual, green means I'm still in search of a copy. Blue means waiting patiently on the TBR shelves.

It's nice to make this official! We all need goals. Even if they take decades to accomplish.

The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (website)

2025: New and Selected Poems - Marie Howe
2024: Tripas: Poems - Brandon Som

2023: Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020 - Carl Phillips
2022: frank: sonnets - Diane Seuss

2021: Postcolonial Love Poem - Natalie Diaz

2020: The Tradition - Jericho Brown
2019: Be With - Forrest Gander
2018: Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 - Frank Bidart
2017: Olio - Tyehimba Jess 
2016: Ozone Journal - Peter Balakian 
2015: Digest - Gregory Pardlo 
2014: 3 Sections - Vijay Seshadri 
2013: Stag's Leap - Sharon Olds
2012: Life on Mars - Tracy K. Smith 
2011: The Best of It: New and Selected Poems - Kay Ryan 
2010: Versed - Rae Armantrout 
2009: The Shadow of Sirius - W.S. Merwin 
2008: Failure - Philip Schultz and Time and Materials - Robert Hass 
2007: Native Guard - Natasha Trethewey 
2006: Late Wife - Claudia Emerson 
2005: Delights & Shadows - Ted Kooser
2004: Walking to Martha's Vineyard - Franz Wright 
2003: Moy Sand and Gravel - Paul Muldoon
2002: Practical Gods - Carl Dennis
2001: Different Hours - Stephen Dunn
2000: Repair - C.K. Williams
1999: Blizzard of One - Mark Strand
1998: Black Zodiac - Charles Wright 
1997: Alive Together: New and Selected Poems - Lisel Mueller
1996: The Dream of the Unified Field - Jorie Graham
1995: The Simple Truth - Philip Levine
1994: Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems - Yusef Komunyakaa
1993: The Wild Iris - Louise Gluck
1992: Selected Poems - James Tate
1991: Near Changes - Mona Van Duyn 
1990: The World Doesn't End - Charles Simic 
1989: New and Collected Poems - Richard Wilbur
1988: Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems - William Meredith
1987: Thomas and Beulah - Rita Dove
1986: The Flying Change - Henry Taylor
1985: Yin - Carolyn Kizer
1984: American Primitive - Mary Oliver
1983: Selected Poems - Galway Kinnell 
1982: The Collected Poems - Sylvia Plath
1981: The Morning of the Poem - James Schuyler 
1980: Selected Poems - Donald Justice 
1979: Now and Then - Robert Penn Warren 
1978: Collected Poems - Howard Nemerov 
1977: Divine Comedies - James Merrill
1976: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror - John Ashbery
1975: Turtle Island - Gary Snyder 
1974: The Dolphin - Robert Lowell 
1973: Up Country - Maxine Kumin 
1972: Collected Poems - James Wright 
1971: The Carrier of Ladders - William S. Merwin 
1970: Untitled Subjects - Richard Howard 
1969: Of Being Numerous - George Oppen 
1968: The Hard Hours - Anthony Hecht 
1967: Live or Die - Anne Sexton
1966: Selected Poems - Richard Eberhart 
1965: 77 Dream Songs - John Berryman 
1964: At The End Of The Open Road - Louis Simpson
1963: Pictures from Brueghel - William Carlos Williams 
1962: Poems - Alan Dugan 
1961: Times Three: Selected Verse From Three Decades - Phyllis McGinley 
1960: Heart's Needle - W. D. Snodgrass 
1959: Selected Poems 1928-1958 - Stanley Kunitz 
1958: Promises: Poems 1954-1956 - Robert Penn Warren 
1957: Things of This World - by Richard Wilbur 
1956: Poems: North & South--A Cold Spring - Elizabeth Bishop
1955: Collected Poems - Wallace Stevens
1954: The Waking - Theodore Roethke 
1953: Collected Poems 1917-1952 - Archibald MacLeish 
1952: Collected Poems - Marianne Moore 
1951: Complete Poems - Carl Sandburg 
1950: Annie Allen - Gwendolyn Brooks
1949: Terror and Decorum - Peter Viereck 
1948: The Age of Anxiety - W. H. Auden 
1947: Lord Weary's Castle - Robert Lowell 
1946: no award
1945: V-Letter and Other Poems - Karl Shapiro 
1944: Western Star - Stephen Vincent Benet
1943: A Witness Tree - Robert Frost
1942: The Dust Which Is God - William Rose Benet 
1941: Sunderland Capture - Leonard Bacon 
1940: Collected Poems - Mark Van Doren 
1939: Selected Poems - John Gould Fletcher 
1938: Cold Morning Sky - Marya Zaturenska
1937: A Further Range - Robert Frost
1936: Strange Holiness - Robert P. Tristram Coffin 
1935: Bright Ambush - Audrey Wurdemann 
1934: Collected Verse - Robert Hillyer 
1933: Conquistador - Archibald Macleish
1932: The Flowering Stone - George Dillon 
1931: Collected Poems - Robert Frost
1930: Selected Poems - Conrad Aiken
1929: John Brown's Body - Stephen Vincent Benet 
1928: Tristram - Edwin Arlington Robinson 
1927: Fiddler's Farewell - Leonora Speyer
1926: What's O'Clock - Amy Lowell 
1925: The Man Who Died Twice - Edwin Arlington Robinson
1924: New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes - Robert Frost
1923: The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver: A Few Figs from Thistles: Eight Sonnets in American Poetry, 1922. A Miscellany - Edna St. Vincent Millay 
1922: Collected Poems - Edwin Arlington Robinson
1920 and 1921: no award
1919: Corn Huskers - Carl Sandburg and Old Road to Paradise - Margaret Widdemer
1918: Love Songs - Sara Teasdale

This "Nobody" is Somebody

This afternoon I was fortunate enough to see a one-man show of the Odyssey, which just might be my all-time favorite book. It was performed by the same actor, Charlie Bethel, who did Beowulf here a few years back. I loved that show, so when I heard he was going to do the Odyssey, I jumped at the chance to see it: it sounded like the perfect storm of actor and subject.

There's not any costuming to speak of, and although there's plenty of set, it's not clearly representational. (This is the "after" version of the stage, which started out much neater, before all the monsters and shipwrecks and the big fight scene.)

Mostly the show is the man and the words. And what words they are!  He delivers an accessible, modern version of Homer's adventurous tale, complete with all the humor, surprise, action, pathos and impact of the original.

Among my takeaways:

Never taunt anyone whose father is a god.

Yearning for home is a lot less painful when you're shacked up with a goddess.

A spouse who is your equal is worth waiting for.

Don't let the fear of making a mess get in the way of a good story.

A New Favorite Poet

It's always such fun to discover a new poet, and particularly to discover one who works the kind of poetic alchemy I like best: one who dazzles with the ideas behind the words, not so much with the words themselves.

I sometimes grow mildly irritated by poets who reach too ardently for the showy, scintillating phrase that shouts, "Look at me! Watch this!" I suspect a lack of authenticity whenever I see that kind of display. Give me an intellectual backflip, please, and you can keep your sleight-of-hand vocabulary.

Carl Dennis is one such authentic poet. He's a careful observer and a conscientious thinker who sifts layer upon layer of meaning from a seemingly ordinary event and moves back and forth through time, getting the most from every vignette. Conversationally, with references to art and mythology and the occasional striking, meticulously selected phrase -- as if you were musing about life with a wry, erudite friend over a few glasses of wine -- Dennis opens up the commonplace to best display its inner light.

And so a poem that begins in a Chinese restaurant ends up being about love and memory, and a poem that begins with a map ends up being about the magic of education that transforms immigrant children into Americans while the parents are left behind by language. And a poem that begins with shopping for a sweater ends up being about the difficult mystery of family unhappiness.

All of which leave me not so much wishing I'd said that as wishing I'd thought of that, when -- thanks to this poet -- now I have.

Sample:

from In the Short Term

There's no denying insight to Epictetus
When he argues the story of Troy is about illusion,
That Paris was crazy to endanger his town for the sheen
Of a woman's body, Helen crazy to love a playboy,
Menelaus to think that a wife as light as his
Worth regaining. As for Achilles, whatever possessed him
To squabble with Agamemnon over a war prize?

All dust now, Troy as much as the flesh of Helen
Though Homer never assumes they're immortal,
Just that you won't be likely to forget them quickly
Once their story is told in the leisurely way
It should be told, over many evenings.

Time enough to make clear that fault-ridden Paris
Is loved by a goddess, that Helen's a gift
Only a goddess could have provided.
And who is he to deny a goddess
Even if her gift only lasts a day?

Between the Holidays

Let us make merry while we may, and think upon joy,
for one may seize sorrow whenever one likes.

~Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Five Owls

I have heard owls calling lately. One spoke outside my open bedroom window in the middle of the night. One was calling during dinner in the garden. And one was calling across the forest on my recent dusk hike.

The last one reminded me of this lush, hushed poem. This is just how wild and weightless his voice made me feel.

If the Owl Calls Again
by John Haines

at dusk
from the island in the river,
and it's not too cold,

I'll wait for the moon
to rise,
then take wing and glide
to meet him.

We will not speak,
but hooded against the frost
soar above
the alder flats, searching
with tawny eyes.

And then we'll sit
in the shadowy spruce
and pick the bones
of careless mice,

while the long moon drifts
toward Asia
and the river mutters
in its icy bed.

And when the morning climbs
the limbs
we'll part without a sound,

fulfilled, floating
homeward as
the cold world awakens.

Wishing you all a Christmas weekend of wonder and comfort and delight.

Opening Day, Squared

I imagine that everyone has one good poem in them, kind of like everyone (maybe) has the ability to write one good novel.

In honor of the baseball season's Opening Day and the beginning of National Poetry Month, both of which occurred on April Fool's Day this year, here's mine. I wrote it for a Whitman class, in which we were charged to follow Whitman's lead and do something creative; when I read it aloud, it was very well received. Go figure.

BASEBALL

I saw you at the ballpark last Sunday, Walt Whitman.
I couldn't wave because I had a hot dog in one hand and a beer in the other.
You wouldn't have noticed me anyway
because you were concentrating on the millionaires in tight pants playing a kid's game,
the sunburned necks of the boys on the bench,
the one kneeling in the on-deck circle,
the one crouched behind the plate,
the batter waiting for the ball to stay up a little in the strike zone
so he can send it high against the blue blue blue March sky
into deep right field for a hit or an E or an out and maybe a long singing throw into second.
The sound of the crowd is the voice of America.
I've heard you said you see great things in baseball, that it's America's game,
our game,
as important as the Constitution,
and I could have looked it up if I'd gone to the library on Sunday.
But I went to the ballgame instead.
I saw you there, Walt Whitman.
You were wearing a Dodgers cap.

Birth Year Reading Challenge: Selected Poems - Stanley Kunitz

Sigh. I hate to say I was disappointed in a book of poems, but there it is. Perhaps I am just too stupid or lazy to appreciate what Kunitz offers. A lot of the time I couldn't even tell what he was talking about.

Having written that, I feel guilty and inadequate. One of the blessings, for me, in reading prize-winners is the encouragement to persist, knowing that others have found merit in the work and perhaps I can, too. And so, I soldier on.

After a second sampling (randomly, just now), perhaps I have been too hasty. I suspect I rushed through my first reading, and paid the price in lack of understanding. These are poems to be read carefully, in small doses, perhaps one per day, and pondered.

Kunitz conveys a sense of mystery, often constructed with careful observations from the natural world. His rhymes are delicately applied, coherent without being obvious. Each poem is a kind of riddle, to be decoded with time, not grasped on first impression.

So don't be discouraged, as I nearly was. Keep trying, if you care to. I certainly will.

Sample:

Last Words

Listen: from sleep's long pillow I arise
To go away. One moment let me lean
On falling air before I lock my eyes.
Are the leaves red now? No matter. Trees are green.

The colors of the world are permanent
Despite the bleach of change. Pure stain on stain,
The bow of light's eternal forms is bent
Across steep heaven in the general brain.

Who cries, The beautiful, the proud, are fallen!
(Oh silly child, it was myself that cried.)
Death, eater of the heads of flowers, spills pollen:
Our little strength, our beauty, and our pride.

Are for the race to keep; we can discover
Secrets with our broken skills; our dead feet run
Under the lid of earth that closes over
The generations marching to the sun.

Ask for Nothing

Ask for Nothing
Instead walk alone in the evening
heading out of town toward the fields
asleep under a darkening sky;
the dust risen from your steps transforms
itself into a golden rain fallen
earthward as a gift from no known god.
The plane trees along the canal bank,
the few valley poplars, hold their breath
as you cross the wooden bridge that leads
nowhere you haven't been, for this walk
repeats itself once or more a day.
That is why in the distance you see
beyond the first ridge of low hills
where nothing ever grows, men and women
astride mules, on horseback, some even
on foot, all the lost family you
never prayed to see, praying to see you,
chanting and singing to bring the moon
down into the last of the sunlight.
Behind you the windows of the town
blink on and off, the houses close down;
ahead the voices fade like music
over deep water, and then are gone;
even the sudden, tumbling finches
have fled into smoke, and the one road
whitened in moonlight leads everywhere.

Philip Levine
"Ask for Nothing"
from The Simple Truth

(photo credit)

My Day on the Slippery Slope

I should have known better than to venture into a bookstore at Christmastime, with a coupon in hand.

No, I didn't get a Nook. (Never! In my world, it's paper all the way.)

I did get:

This will be a great hostess gift for a friend who said she wanted to read it.

And then I thought, what the heck, while I'm here I might as well pick up . . .

For myself. From there it was only a brief slide to . . .

Also for myself. Then I also grabbed onto . . .

Also for myself. Can I help it if one of my very favorite poets has a new book out? I definitely believe in voting with my wallet when I get the chance.

And then, since I was already entangled in a full-fledged book binge . . .

Why not include a cheery calendar?

Or two? For the desk at work . . .

Because nothing cheers me up in the morning like a cute cat photo, when I've stayed up way too late, reading.

Starfish

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

Eleanor Lerman

"Starfish"

(photo credit)

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!