Tag Archives: Poetry A-Z

Poetry, G

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Poetry Month is officially over (it’s now Short Story Month, apparently), but that’s no reason to abandon our arbitrary and occasional Poetry A-Z series…

G is for Glück, Louise

GluckAmerican poet Louise Glück isn’t the cheeriest duck in the pond—loneliness, divorce, and rejection are her favored themes—but she can shoulder the weight of myth like no one else, and her spare, intimate, unflinching voice is utterly compelling. If you’re new to Glück, her Pulitzer-Prize-winning collection, The Wild Iris (1993), is a great place to dive in, and the more recent Averno (2007) is also wonderful. Here’s a poem from Averno to get your weekend off to a hellishly good start:

A Myth of Devotion

When Hades decided he loved this girl
he built for her a duplicate of earth,
everything the same, down to the meadow,
but with a bed added.

Everything the same, including sunlight,
because it would be hard on a young girl
to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness

Gradually, he thought, he’d introduce the night,
first as the shadows of fluttering leaves.
Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars.
Let Persephone get used to it slowly.
In the end, he thought, she’d find it comforting.

A replica of earth
except there was love here.
Doesn’t everyone want love?

He waited many years,
building a world, watching
Persephone in the meadow.
Persephone, a smeller, a taster.
If you have one appetite, he thought,
you have them all.

Doesn’t everyone want to feel in the night
the beloved body, compass, polestar,
to hear the quiet breathing that says
I am alive, that means also
you are alive, because you hear me,
you are here with me. And when one turns,
the other turns—

That’s what he felt, the lord of darkness,
looking at the world he had
constructed for Persephone. It never crossed his mind
that there’d be no more smelling here,
certainly no more eating.

Guilt? Terror? The fear of love?
These things he couldn’t imagine;
no lover ever imagines them.

He dreams, he wonders what to call this place.
First he thinks: The New Hell. Then: The Garden.
In the end, he decides to name it
Persephone’s Girlhood.

A soft light rising above the level meadow,
behind the bed. He takes her in his arms.
He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you

but he thinks
this is a lie, so he says in the end
you’re dead, nothing can hurt you
which seems to him
a more promising beginning, more true.

Poetry, F

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And now for the fourth installment in Malvern Books’ arbitrary and occasional Poetry Month A-Z series…

F is for Frame, Janet

Janet FrameJanet Frame (1924-2004) is New Zealand’s most acclaimed author. She wrote eleven novels and four short story collections (I recommend her novels Owls Do Cry and Living in the Maniototo, and also Prizes: The Selected Stories of Janet Frame), and was a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. And she’s also pretty well known for being the big ol’ ginger weirdo in Jane Campion’s film, An Angel at My Table, an adaptation of Frame’s autobiographical trilogy of the same name. (Frame’s personal history makes for harrowing reading/viewing: she was wrongly diagnosed with schizophrenia, received over two-hundred electroshock treatments, and was days away from a scheduled lobotomy when news came through that her first published short story collection had won a major literary prize.)

But Frame-the-poet gets less attention, though poetry was very dear to her. She referred to it as “the highest form of literature,” and in a 1979 interview she said, “Poetry is my first love.” However, Frame’s belief that a poem must be perfect—“you can have no dead wood in a poem”—made it difficult for her to ever declare a verse finished, and she published just one poetry collection in her lifetime (The Pocket Mirror, 1967). After her death, her niece, Pamela Gordon, and two fellow poets, Denis Harold and Bill Manhire, released The Goose Bath, a selection of over a hundred of Frame’s unpublished poems (the title comes from the old garden fountain in which she kept her not-quite-finished work). Frame might not have considered her poetry entirely “real” or “successful,” but the work in The Goose Bath is beautiful nonetheless, full of rich imagery, a sense of mischief, a novelist’s inventiveness (we are addressed by a brain tumor, the Guggenheim, a piano), and a profound love of the natural world (birds and cats abound).

I Take Into My Arms More Than I Can Bear To Hold

I take into my arms more than I can bear to hold
I am toppled by the world
a creation of ladders, pianos, stairs cut into the rock
a devouring world of teeth where even the common snail
eats the heart out of a forest
as you and I do, who are human, at night

yet still I take into my arms more than I can bear to hold

* * *

from “Tenant”

No, he didn’t bath. He never turned the radio up loud.
He came from somewhere the back of beyond
where they sit under lemon trees, and ask
riddles of giant vermilion cattle with white faces.

One thing in his life—there was a tortoise.
Like a crude brooch worn across his heart, it sat
brown and flat and quiet—except
it sparkled when he spoke to it.

Poetry, E

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And now for the third installment in Malvern Books’ arbitrary and occasional Poetry Month A-Z series…

E is for Eady, Cornelius

Remember Susan Smith, the shitty mom from Union, South Carolina? On October 25th, 1994, she told police she’d been carjacked by a stranger, who forced her out of her Mazda Protegé and drove away with her two young sons still in the back. She appeared on television, pale and twitchy, begging for their safe return: “I would like to say to whoever has my children, that they please, I mean please, bring them home.” But she failed repeated polygraphs—that little blue line always stuttered when they asked, “Do you know where your children are?”—and nine days after she reported the crime, she was arrested: Susan Smith had rolled the car into a lake with her kids inside, and left them to drown.

Susan Smith

So Susan Smith was a Very Bad Mom, and the media loves a bad mom—the story was front page news for weeks. The case prompted a few peculiar strangers to make YouTube tribute videos in honor of her dead children, and the videos all come with a string of comments that pretty much blur into one: “She needs to rot in hell for what she did to those sweet innocent boys.” But keep scrolling down and you find: “A curse to these devils, always placing blame on other races for their own shit… they need to worry about their own race, devils devils devils.” Yes, Susan Smith had been very clear: her imaginary carjacker was an African American, a dark man dressed in a dark shirt and wearing a knit cap. “A black man did it”: the racial hoax. In 70% of cases where someone commits a crime and blames it on a fabricated transgressor of another race, the real criminal is white, and their invented assailant is black.

Brutal ImaginationIn his 2001 collection, Brutal Imagination, poet Cornelius Eady addresses the role of the black man in white America. In the collection’s second cycle, “Running Man,” Eady’s poems draw on the libretto for his 1999 music-drama of the same name (and for which he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize). But it’s the first, eponymous cycle of the collection that directly addresses the Susan Smith case and the concept of the racial hoax, with Eady adopting the persona of Smith’s imaginary black attacker.

How I Got Born

Though it’s common belief
That Susan Smith willed me alive
At the moment
Her babies sank into the lake

When called, I come.
My job is to get things done.
I am piecemeal.
I make my living by taking things.

So now a mother needs me clothed
In hand-me-downs
And a knit cap.

Whatever.
We arrive, bereaved
On a stranger’s step.
Baby, they weep.
Poor child.

This character, referred to as Mr. Zero, acts as a kind of guide, leading us through this all-too-familiar scenario, where “everything they say about me is true.” The narrator also recalls being summoned by Charles Stuart, the Boston man who shot and killed his wife, then told the police the murderer was a young, black male:

I sat with Charles the way I sit
With Susan; like anyone, and no one,
Changing clothes,
Putting on and taking off ski caps,
Curling and relaxing my hair,
Trying hard to become sense.

In the cycle’s final poem, “Birthing,” words from Susan Smith’s handwritten confession (in italics) are interwoven with the narrator’s voice:

When I left my home on Tuesday, October 25, I
was very emotionally distraught

I have yet
to breathe.

I am in the back of her mind,
Not even a notion.

A scrap of cloth, the way
A man lopes down the street.

Later, a black woman will say:
“We knew exactly who she was describing.”

* * *

I felt I couldn’t be a good mom anymore, but I didn’t want
my children to grow up without a mom.

I am not me, yet.
At the bridge,
One of Susan’s kids cries,
So she drives to the lake,
To the boat dock.

I am not yet opportunity.

* * *

I had never felt so lonely
and so sad.

Who shall be a witness?
Bullfrogs, water fowl.

The poems were written to be performed; this first cycle was adapted for an award-winning off-Broadway play. The language in Brutal Imagination is plain and straightforward, almost disarmingly serene. It’s a powerful collection, unabashedly political, but never preachy: the narrator, this conjured scapegoat, delivers his message in a voice so calm, so quiet, so resigned—it’s utterly chilling.

If you decide to wash your car,
If you decide to mail a letter,

I might tumbleweed onto a pant leg.
You can stare, and stare, but I can’t be found.
Susan has loosed me on the neighbors,
A cold representative.
The scariest face you could think of.

In an interview, Eady says of Brutal Imagination:

It’s an examination of what the stereotypes are made of, the elements that we’ve used to make those characters what they are, our belief system. One thing that fascinated me about the story was how easy it was for Susan Smith to tap into that. She just pulled it out of the ether. I know when it happened. Between the time she sees the car’s taillights go under the lake and when she’s walking from the lake across the highway toward the first house she finds. In that little space of time, she’s thinking, Who did this? Someone’s got to have done this. Someone’s got to be blamed for this. It’s a black guy, and he’s wearing a cap, and he pushed me out of the car. She’s thinking this as she’s walking toward the house. It’s just so easy because it’s plausible. That was the scariest part, how easy it was for her.

Poetry, C & D

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And now for the second installment in Malvern Books’ arbitrary and occasional Poetry Month A-Z series…

C is for Coleridge, and also constipation

The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!

At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God’s name.

ColeridgeWere you forced to memorize lengthy bits of the dead albatross saga in school? Has this experience left you with less-than-fluffy feelings toward Samuel Taylor Coleridge? Let me offer you a little fecal schadenfreude (a phrase with exactly zero google results—until now!) by sharing with you poor Mr. Coleridge’s bowel tribulations.

Coleridge’s addiction to opium inspired some of his most famous poetry (like Kubla Khan, another poem you may have learned by rote), but it also caused terrible constipation. Here’s Coleridge’s diary account of a particularly gruesome bout, which occurred on a sea voyage from Gibraltar to Malta aboard the Speedwell:

Tuesday Night, a dreadful Labour, & fruitless throes, of costiveness—individual faeces, and constricted orifices. Went to bed & dozed & started in great distress.

The following day, “a day of horror,” the captain of the Speedwell had to flag down a passing ship and request that the ship’s surgeon come on board to tend to Coleridge:

The Surgeon instantly came, went back for Pipe & Syringe & returned & with extreme difficulty & the exertion of his utmost strength injected the latter. Good God!—What a sensation when the obstruction suddenly shot up!… At length went: O what a time!—equal in pain to any before. Anguish took away all disgust, & I picked out the hardened matter & after a while was completely relieved. The poor mate who stood by me all this while had the tears running down his face.

Lawks-a-lawdy! Alas, the enema—and its attendant humiliation—was to become a regular occurrence in Coleridge’s life. He knew the constipation was a side effect of his opium use, but he couldn’t kick the habit, and thus he came to see his rectal misfortunes as a punishment for his addiction.

To weep & sweat & moan & scream for parturience of an excrement with such pangs & such convulsions as a woman with an Infant heir of Immortality: for Sleep a pandemonium of all the shames and miseries of the past Life from earliest childhood all huddled together, and bronzed with one stormy Light of Terror & Self-torture. O this is hard, hard, hard.

D is for Davis, Olena Kalytiak

From the ridiculous to the sublime: I can’t say enough good things about the poetry of Olena Kalytiak Davis, and in particular her first collection, And Her Soul Out of Nothing, which won the 1997 Birmingham Prize in Poetry. Her poems are funny, brutal, and brilliant, and she manages that trick of conjuring universal meaning from something deeply idiosyncratic.

In Defense of Marriage

Marry the black horse stuck
Dumb in her humble corral.

Marry the white fences; marry the fenceless
Moon and the defenceless sky.

Marry the feedlot and the threshing
Floor. Like the northern heaven to the southern

Stars, marry the kitchen table, its three strong
Legs. Marry the gate and the small intricate

Cuts on the key and the view spreading
Outback. The streetlamp

Weds the morning light, like that, take the
Nomad. Promise to forsake. Give in

To the cistern full of asters.
To the way the beloved

Story goes: her body from a bone.
And her soul out of nothing.

In a slowly spoiling month find out
You have married the house worn

Blue on the yellowing hill: each of its
Slow budding bedrooms. Marry one or two

Or three varieties of light, in three or four
Different lifetimes. I meant, windows.

Mate, be forsaken.

I married the way moths marry.
I married hard.

Poetry, A & B

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It’s April, which means it’s National Poetry Month. It’s also National Anxiety Month and National BLT Sandwich Month (“the second most popular sandwich in the United States”), and this trinity of nationwide awareness can be no coincidence—so let’s fix ourselves a bacon sarnie, crack open the Xanax, and settle in for the first installment in Malvern Books’ arbitrary and occasional Poetry A-Z series.

A is for Aubade

troubadourIf a serenade is an evening love song, an aubade is its early bird equivalent. Aubades often recount tales of adulterous lovers who must part company as the sun comes up, and they were quite the thing in the freaky Middles Ages, when troubadours roamed the world, playing their annoying fiddles and reciting aubades to anyone who would listen. The aubade then passed out of fashion for a while—sixteenth-century poets preferred to bang on about unrequited love, which meant very little romping at dawn—but the form enjoyed a brief revival in the seventeenth century, with John Donne’s “The Sun Rising,” in which the poet chastises the “busy old fool, unruly Sun” for disturbing two lovers in bed. Now that reciting poetry under someone’s window at 5am is likely to get you arrested, the aubade has lost much of its appeal. Still, the marvellous Mr. Larkin gave it a go; here’s an excerpt from his “Aubade”:

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

A is also for Auden, W. H.

Creative writing teachers love the “poem about a painting” exercise, in which you take your class to an art museum, dump ’em in front of a Jackson Pollock, and then chortle to yourself as they spend the next twenty minutes trying to come up with synonyms for drip. In “Musée des Beaux Arts,” Auden stares hard at Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and shows us how ekphrasis should be done:

IcarusAbout suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window
or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

B is for Bly, Robert

I know, I know. Robert Bly. Mr. Iron John. He’s just so… embarrassing. Whenever I hear his name, I picture a gaggle of chubby accountants standing in a circle in a moonlit forest, howling pointlessly at the moon. After a while they grow tired, these lardy, booming babies, so they lie down in the mud and share tales of man-sadness. Now that I no longer kill wildebeests with my bare hands, my life has lost all meaning! Now that my wife has been promoted to Head of Marketing at Zappos, my penis has stopped working! They are sheepish at first, ashamed, but after a while they grow bold. They are men, damn it! They paint their faces with mud and admire one another’s terrifying pubic hair. DUMB. Still, men’s movement nonsense aside, Robert Bly writes some lovely poems. He’s very good at birds and seals and weather. Here’s an excerpt from “August Rain”:

The older we get the more we fail, but the more we fail the more we feel a part of the dead straw of the universe, the corners of barns with cow dung twenty years old, the belt left hanging over the chair back after the bachelor has died in the ambulance on the way to the city. These objects ride us as the child who holds on to the dog’s fur; these objects appear in our dreams; they are more and more near us, coming in slowly from the wainscoting; they make our trunks heavy, accumulating between trips; they lie against the ship’s side, and will nudge the hole open that lets the water in at last.

I recommend Eating the Honey of Words, a collection spanning fifty years of his work. Just ignore the icky title, and skip all poems featuring spirit horses.