Enchant the land with amethyst

Photo from La Pouyette

October

Robert Frost

O hushed October morning mild,

Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;

To-morrow's wind, if it be wild,

Should waste them all.

The crows above the forest call;
To-morrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow,

Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know;
Release one leaf at break of day;

At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away;
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.

Slow, slow!
For the grapes' sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost -
For the grapes' sake along the wall.

I was led to this poem by a friend who posted it on Facebook, and very glad I am that she did.

Today was such a perfect October day. I was fortunate enough to be working from home today, and able to take three long walks with Bean (morning, noon, and evening), not averse to having my heart beguiled by the lovely weather.

When I watch the living meet

When I watch the living meet,
And the moving pageant file
Warm and breathing through the street
Where I lodge a little while,

If the heats of hate and lust
In the house of flesh are strong,
Let me mind the house of dust
Where my sojourn shall be long.

In the nation that is not
Nothing stands that stood before;
There revenges are forgot,
And the hater hates no more;

Lovers lying two and two
Ask not whom they sleep beside,
And the bridegroom all night through
Never turns him to the bride.

A. E. Housman


Read A Shropshire Lad again recently, and was struck by this poem that I had never noticed before. No poet is more constantly aware of death than Housman, which of course makes him acutely aware of life.

I love "In the nation that is not."

Testimony

The Lord woke me in the middle of the night,
and there stood Jesus with a huge tray,
and the tray was heaped with cookies,
and he said, Stephen, have a cookie,

and that's when I knew for sure the Lord
is the real deal, the Man of all men,
because at that very moment
I was thinking of cookies, Vanilla Wafers,

to be exact, and there were two
Vanilla Wafers in among the chocolate
chips and the lemon ices, and one
had a big S on it, and I knew it was for me.

and Jesus took it off the tray and put it
in my mouth, as if He were giving me
communication, or whatever they call it.
Then He said, Have another,

and I tell you I thought a long time before I
refused, because I knew it was a test
to see if I was a Christian, which means
a man like Christ, not a big old ole hog.

Stephen Dunn

Show & Tell

This poem is for you, Miss Birnbaum, my once-upon-
a-time 4th-grade teacher, whom I shall never
never forget. Back in the fall of '49,
while the invincible Yankees, golden as ever,

were beating the worthy (but vincible) Red Sox
on the greendsward enclosure which the late Bart
Giamatti used to call our New World paradise,
back when the Russians had just ended the short-

lived U.S. hegemony created by those twin
phoenixes rising sublimely over Hiroshima
& Nagasaki, ending our invincibility by detonating
their own version of an H-bomb, and that a monster,

at that very moment, Levittown, Long Island
(that ex-potato-farm & homemade muddy eden
for all those GIs like my father as well as other
huddled masses living in  New York's superheated

flats and tenements) was still so new, it didn't
even have a school which at that particular instant
it could call its own. Those one-storied brick
& plastic wonders still lay in the "not-too-distant

& foreseeable future," like our wonder malls.
The answer was to bus us kids across the tracks,
over to your four-storied ancient redbrick school
in picturesque Old Bethpage, replete with its oaks

& maples out of Norman Rockwell. The leaves
then were in their autumn beauty, flame red
& flame gold. My imitation leather shoes squeaked
with every step I took across your sun-bled

dusty wooden floor. And when my sad pants
at last split up the back, you gathered three other
teachers, ladies like yourself, and made me
bend over in the courtyard, amid a smother

of giggles, to pick up stones for you,
my backside showing through the tear, much ah!
much to your delight, Miss B, until one woman
had the decency to call the torture

to a halt. And now that I am twice the age
you were back then, Miss B, now before the bell
dismisses both of us for good, I want to thank you,
especially for the morning ritual of Show & Tell.

Everyone did Show & Tell, you reassured me.
Everyone. Tomorrow it would be my turn, you said,
to do my Show & Tell. I worked hard that night,
sweating cold sweat to try & make a card.

Scissors, ribbon, old crayons, a piece of pretty paper,
Except at home we had no tape or glue & I knew
we had no money, then, for sure, for either
tape or glue. I even tried to make a home brew

of flour mixed with water, but the batter
wouldn't stick. Nothing stuck. Finally, I sewed
the goddamn thing together & made my card for you:
a red heart rampant on a piece of yellowed board

which, Miss B, I remember you holding at arm's length
between your thumb and forefinger, away from you,
and, before that class of strangers, asking why,
instead of sewing it, I hadn't simply glued

the thing together, the way any of the other
children would have done. I said nothing then,
or when I had to take the others' jeers
down on the playing field that noon, or even when

I got back home and hid, or at anytime since then,
except, Miss Birnbaum, the kid grew up the way
kids do. Eventually, the boy from the other side
of town even learned to read & write & say

things properlike, and make a proper bow.
And now, Miss B, though you may already be in hell
& I left speaking to a ghost, I have come back to try
and get it right this time. This is my Show & Tell.


Paul Mariani

Nothing but pure onionhood fills this devout onionist.

One of the best contemporary poets has just died - Wislawa Szymborska (and I am very glad for the article at the link mentioning, among many other things, how to pronounce her name).

I think this is her most famous poem, or perhaps it's just the one I see most often. Deservedly famous.

In Praise of Feeling Bad about Yourself

The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn't know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they'd claim their hands were clean.

A jackal doesn't understand remorse.
Lions and lice don't waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they're right?

Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,
in every other way they're light.

On this third planet of the sun
among the signs of bestiality
a clear conscience is Number One.


And this one gives you an idea of how excellently Szymborska played with language:

The Onion

The onion, now that's something else.
Its innards don't exist.
Nothing but pure onionhood
fills this devout onionist.
Oniony on the inside,
onionesque it appears.
It follows its own daimonion
without our human tears.

Our skin is just a cover-up
for the land where none dare go,
an internal inferno,
the anathema of anatomy.
In an onion there's only onion
from its top to its toe,
onionymous monomania,
unanimous omninudity.

At peace, of a piece,
internally at rest.
Inside it, there's a smaller one
of undiminished worth.
The second holds a third one,
the third contains a fourth.
A centripetal fugue.
Polyphony compressed.

Nature's rotundest tummy,
its greatest success story,
the onion drapes itself in its
own aureoles of glory.
We hold veins, nerves, and fat,
secretions' secret sections.
Not for us such idiotic
onionoid perfections.

There are not too many poets of whom you automatically think whenever you behold a particular object, or hear a particular sound. I would imagine that if I ever heard a nightingale, though, I would always think of Keats. And whenever I cut an onion I think of Szymborska.

Her translators, Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, are amazing. There must be some way of getting a similar sort of wordplay in both languages, but it would require a lot of talent in the translation as well as the original writing.

Finally, isn't it nice to find a Nobel prize winner who is so accessible?

Whenas in silks my Julia goes

I came across a great new word.

scroop


n. the rustle of silk



Reminds me of a great poem.


Whenas in silks my Julia goes
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free;
Oh how that glittering taketh me!


Robert Herrick
 
 

 
Photo courtesy of Ingermaaike2, Flickr Creative Commons.

Silence

There is the sudden silence of the crowd
above a player not moving on the field,
and the silence of the orchid.

The silence of the falling vase
before it strikes the floor,
the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.

The stillness of the cup and the water in it,
the silence of the moon
and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun.

The silence when I hold you to my chest,
the silence of the window above us,
and the silence when you rise and turn away.

And there is the silence of this morning
which I have broken with my pen,
a silence that had piled up all night

like snow falling in the darkness of the house—
the silence before I wrote a word
and the poorer silence now.


Billy Collins

The Painted Chair

When the season changes

(that first snow, that first really hot day),

my earlier selves come crowding back, jostling for attention.



Again I walk on bright leaves, savoring the air's tiniest chill,

my twelve-year-old body springy and yearning,

envisioning some cloudy fabulous event still to come.



I wasn't sure what it would look like, but it was something so good

that when it arrived I would be stunned with my good fortune,

able at first to think only, "Oh! Oh! Oh!"



And for some moments I feel that again, the feeling shadowed this time

by the knowledge that the immensely good fortune never came,

and never would, unless - could it be? - this is it. Oh.



Or, I wake up in a room not mine,

and I know my own room again, by its absence.

Not just the smell and look of it, but also the feeling

you get from knowing that walls and furniture are located here

rather than there.

And suddenly I know my self

in my accustomed room,

and the difference between it and my self

in this room.


For a moment I know the house I lived in as a child, and the bed I slept in -

they are back again, brighter and more solid than they were then,

and more lovely - the lilac leaves through the window,

the painted chair,

the door through which I will walk.




Photo by Horia Varlan

Waking with my ears ringing

Sometimes I wake up in the night.
I squint at the green-eyed clock
and it tells me two fourteen. Outside
rain sidles down. Why does my head
ring with shouting? Words, loud words
have been thrown tumbling like empty
boxes down the steps of my spine.

Who argues in my head at night
after I have crawled into the wet
cave of my own belly to sleep?
My cats snooze in a multicolored heap,
one snoring, one whimpering. My
love is chewing the cud of his day
grinding his teeth and mumbling.

But my brain bears the scuff marks of boots.
Somebody has been pacing there ranting --
the dogmatist I was at thirty-two?
Noisy ghosts have been making speeches.
Are these sins of omission screeching?
Unworn alternate selves in chartreuse?
Scorned opinions demanding equal air time?

I am like the beds in rooming houses
of Word War II Detroit in the housing crisis
of my childhood, slept on in turns,
one guy getting into bed from the graveyard
shift when another crawled out to shower,
my head is in continuous use, rented out
to ghosts whenever I shut off the lights.

Marge Piercy

Fishing Around

Keeping his feet, a feeling in his gut,
Heart in his mouth, a slow bee in his bonnet,
Silently groaning under God knows what,
He wants to see if he can write a sonnet:
Nothing spectacular, just some decent verse,
Each phoneme brooded on, each syllable weighed,
The diction plain, the sentence fairly terse
(To please you, lovely reader, meter-made.)


And now he feels he’s in his element,
Baiting a hook and casting forth the line,
And through clear water sees a heaven-sent
Swift flash of silver rise into the air and shine.
Ah, let it go – go, dart back to the deep.
A lovely thing, but much too small to keep.



Robert Mezey

The Student Theme

The adjectives all ganged up on the nouns,
insistent, loud, demanding, inexact,
their Latinate constructions flashing. The pronouns
lost their referents: They were dangling, lacked
the stamina to follow the prepositions' lead
in, on, into, to, toward, for, or from.
They were beset by passive voices and dead
metaphors, conjunctions shouting But! or And!

The active verbs were all routinely modified
by adverbs, that endlessly and colorlessly ran
into trouble with the participles sitting
on the margins knitting their brows like gerunds
(dangling was their problem, too). The author
was nowhere to be seen; was off somewhere.

Ronald Wallace

(Note: interesting to me partly because I might begin teaching English comp again, part time. But mostly because it's a very clever, astute poem.)

The Genie of Childhood

The first messenger suggested
"Let childhood be good - so good, in fact,
that they sorrow ever after, sighing for
the strong embrace, the safe room, the approving look.
Let its absence flavor the rest of life with gall.
That is my plan."

The second messenger suggested
"Let childhood be bad - so bad, in fact,
that they sorrow ever after, seeking to escape
the strong grip, the locked door, the contemptuous glance.
Let its existence favor the rest of life with gall.
That is my plan."

And the Genie of Childhood
smiled, looking from one to the other,
as tears began to roll down
his plump pink cheeks; as he laughed,
"So be it. So be it."

Ab Ovo

Ultimately, there should be a language
in which the word "egg" is reduced to O
entirely. The Italian comes closest,
naturally, with its uova. That's why Alighieri thought
it the healthiest food, sharing the predilection
with sopranos and tneors, whose pear-like torsos
in the final analysis embody "opera."
The same pertains to the truly Romantic, that is,
German poets, with practically every line
starting the way they'd begin a breakfast,
or to the equally cocky mathematicians
brooding over their regualrly laid infinity,
whose immaculate zeros won't ever hatch.

Joseph Brodsky

The Quiet

Best of any song
is bird song
in the quiet, but first
you must have the quiet.

Wendell Berry
Sabbath Poems, 1997, I

Small Comfort

Coffee and cigarettes in a clean cafe,
forsythia lit like a damp match against
a thundery sky drunk on its own ozone,

the laundry cool and crisp and folded away
again in the lavender closet -- too late to find
comfort enough in such small daily moments

of beauty, renewal, calm, too late to imagine
people would rather be happy than suffering
and inflicting suffering. We're near the end,

but O before the end, as the sparrows wing
each night to their secret nests in the elm's green dome
O let the last bus bring

love to lover, let the starveling
dog turn the corner and lope suddenly
miraculously, down its own street, home.

Katha Pollitt

Heel should not be an insult

The true humility of heels:
pale, battered, wrinkled, swollen.
We may paint our toes, but naked
heels are dumb as cows' behinds.

Patient, stubborn, vulnerable
they follow us looking back
like children in cars making faces
through the rear view window.

In undressing a lover, even
foot fetishists must blink;
the sock, the stocking peeled,
the unappetizing bony fruit.

We are always landing on them
slamming them into pavement,
jumping out of trucks, forcing
them into stirrups and pedals.

Cats walk on their toes like ballerinas
but we, ape cousin, go shuffling
and what we leave in the sand
is the imprint of our heels coming home.

They are the periods under the leaping
exclamation point, gravity's mooning,
our anchor to earth, the callused
blind familiar of soil, rock, root.

Let me rub your angular barnacled
hull with unguents and massage you
tenderly, my little flatiron shaped
heroes, my hard laboring heels.

Marge Piercy

A Girl Named Zippy

This book, by Haven Kimmel, is so great. I just finished reading it for the second time, and I feel like I could immediately start all over again on page one. A truly original and wonderful memoir.

Here's Zippy encountering poetry for the first time:

Mrs. Denver made us memorize and recite poetry, another thing I'd never experienced. The first poem I chose was Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," and when I stood up to recite it I got through it marvelously, right up until the last line, "and miles to go before I sleep," repeats itself, and then I got intensely moved and just had to stand there with my throat aching while thirty-seven unsympathetic eyes stared at me. Finally I just ran over to my desk and put my head down, and Mrs. Denver walked over behind my desk and put her hand on my shoulder. The rest of the room stayed blisteringly silent.
"Why does he do that?" I asked in a tight, mad voice, meaning why does he repeat the last line in that devilish way?

Here's Zippy encountering chopped liver for the first time:

One crystal bowl held a gray paste that Rose swore to me was made of goose liver; she would not deny it even after I hit her for lying. For the rest of the evening I walked around giving myself the hookey-spooks by repeating the phrase "goose liver, goose liver, goose liver."

I want to go back in time and live in Mooreland, Indiana, and live on the same block as Zippy.

My hidden set of struts and joists

Memento

Bad rap for the bones. More permanent
than muscle, hair or blood, they lie alone,
memento mori always. We praise heart,
cuticle and spleen, but say it, bone,
and there's the slightest knell, word you intone
rather than pronounce, and in our art
the skull however rendered is a stone
to swallow, stern reminder to be smart,
waste not a moment, taste each grape, repent,
smell the coffee and the roses, telephone
your loved ones, think of how your light is spent,
Be in the Now. The skeleton's a drone
and best ignored. Meanwhile, my hidden set
of struts and joists, stroll on. Forget. Forget.

April Lindner


I recently read this poem that I like a lot, and then looked up some information about April Lindner. Apparently she is local - teaches in Philadelphia. And has just published a Young Adult novel. I'm going to read more of her stuff. The Internet is wonderful.

My newsworthy daughter

Had her picture in the local paper when her seventh-grade class was taught by poet-in-residence Daniel Lusk (in 1987).

I am pleased to find that he is doing well today, teaching at the University of Vermont - and still looks pretty much the same as he did 20+ years ago!

Attention

"It needs good management to enjoy life. I enjoy it twice as much as others, for the measure of enjoyment depends on the greater or less attention that we give to it....The shorter my possession of life the deeper and fuller I must make it."
Michel de Montaigne

This quotation from Montaigne reminds me of two things:
1.       Montaigne had a very good opinion of himself ("I enjoy it twice as much as others")
2.       He's right - the more attention you pay to something, the more you enjoy it.

Point two is the point I always tried to make on the first day of class when I taught Introduction to Poetry. My first-day lecture began something like this.

Introduction to Poetry. Let's begin by talking about football.

I have never enjoyed football. Of course, I've only watched one game; this happened when I was invited to a Rose Bowl party about 12 years ago. I thought this would be a normal party, except with a TV playing in the background for people who wanted to watch. To my surprise, it turned out to be a small group of rapt football fans, seated around a very large television set, each person furnished with a TV tray to hold food and drink. We got up every so often to replenish our plates and glasses from the buffet table. Except for the sounds of chewing and drinking, there was nothing but the Game and talk about the Game.

I tried to watch the Game, but it was meaningless. Just a bunch of colorfully costumed fellows running around a field, and sometimes piling up in what looked like dangerous, haphazard stunts. I understood that one group was trying to get the football past the goal lines on one end of the field, and the other group trying to get the ball in the opposite direction, but that was about it. The scoring seemed Byzantine. There were frequent dead spots in the program, where everyone just stood around. It was excruciatingly tedious. I ate way too many nachos, just to have something to do.

Therefore, it seems pretty obvious that the game of football is boring, pointless, stupid, and dull. Does anyone disagree? 

Well, of course people disagreed. I asked them why I had not enjoyed that one game of football. And everyone observed that I didn't enjoy it because I knew nothing about it. If you don't understand the rules, and the history, and the strategy, and the ongoing story line of the teams, you won't like the game.

Okay, agreed. And it's the same way with poetry. If you haven't read very much poetry, and you don't understand the history of it, and the "rules," and the strategies, and the story lines of movements and poets and literary traditions, it will likely be just as boring to you as football is to me.

I am more than willing to acknowledge that my lack of interest in football is a result of my ignorance and inattention. It is extremely likely that if I spent ten or twenty hours studying the game, I would start to enjoy watching it. (After all, I'm not opposed to sports; I'm crazy about baseball.)

Now, I'm not willing to put that amount of time into learning to appreciate football. My lack of appreciation for football is just something that I can live with happily. And you might feel the same way about poetry: frankly, I can live without it.

That's a perfectly reasonable conclusion. You might feel that way now, and you might feel the same way at the end of the semester (although I hope very much that by the end of the semester you won't say that you positively hate poetry; that would be an unfortunate outcome). However, sometimes it happens that people who put 20-40 hours into studying poetry end up liking it very much indeed, often to their surprise.

What happens to them is what Montaigne (and many others) have noticed: the measure of your enjoyment of something depends on the greater or less attention that you give it. For every person who finds gardening dull, there is someone else for whom it is delightful. For everyone who finds video games dumb and inexplicable, there is someone who finds them fascinating and even addictive. For everyone who hates opera, there is someone else who loves it, and can't live without it.

The difference is partly innate predisposition, but mostly attention. In this class you will learn how to pay attention to poetry, which basically means paying attention to language - more attention than you might have thought possible, down to the level of syllable and letter and placement on the page, and sound and breath and stress. Some of you already like poetry a lot, and in that case my hope is that a semester of paying close attention to several poems will increase your enjoyment. But for everyone, I hope this class will make your life fuller and deeper --  even if the end result is to make you appreciate football more than you did before, because you can think whenever you watch a game, "Well, at least I'm not sitting in that poetry class."

Let's begin by paying close attention to one line.


And off we went. I really liked teaching poetry classes.