Falling in Love with Fellow Prisoners—Gwendolyn Zepeda

I am ashamed to admit that this book has been waiting nine months for me to review it. I feel as if I should apologize to it directly—not to the author or publisher, but to the book. It has been patient.

Gwendolyn Zepeda, poet laureate of Houston, has a complicated relationship with her job. Many of her poems are poems of the air-conditioned cubicle, the reception desk and the morning commute. What makes them interesting is the simmering discontent just below the surface, the uncomfortable gender politics, the quiet desperation. Though it may not be the high tragedy of Tristan and Isolde, Zepeda adds great poignancy to the grinding, dispiriting nine-to-five.

“A Man Needs a Woman” gets this theme started. After detailing all of the things a man “needs” in a woman (a list that grows more unequal and demeaning line-by-line), it concludes, “and if you can type fast, that’s even better.” We realize this list wasn’t for a lover, but for a secretary (and Zepeda took the job).

Zepeda has more than this one side to her, though. She discusses her position straddling two cultures—Mexican and white American—in many of her poems.  That duality informs some poems, but others capture the duality of being a worker and a mother, or of a mother and a lover. The poem “Self-Acceptance”, in which Zepeda accepts that she is more Hera than Aphrodite, not only contrasts those two archetypes, but also the images of classical mythology with “throw pillows that smell like the shoes of little boys.”

The poem “These People” is fascinating because of its ambiguity. The poem gives examples of parents and grandparents neglecting or abusing their kids with the excuse of toughening them up, then ends:

The lady on the news says there’s a teacher who won an award. She’s a teacher at your daughter’s school. She seeks to undo all the lessons you teach her.

Who is the “you” in this case? Hypothesis 1: “you” is a neglectful, abusive parent. Fortunately for your daughter, there are caring people in her life that work to “undo” the “toughening up” that you have subjected her to. Hypothesis 2 (slightly more ominous): this teacher is yet another of those who toughen children. She is there, in ironic contrast to her award, to toughen up your daughter, just as the people previously mentioned in the poem would do. And you can’t stop her.

The balance of this collection lies in observations on daily life, but from time to time bold truths stand out. My favorite poem of the book is “Hush Now”, which begins, “You called it ‘unspeakable horror’, the things this girl went through,” alluding to a rape. Zepeda asserts, “You won’t be able to speak when you hear” the story of this girl, but “that doesn’t make it unspeakable.” Her conclusion: “It’s just not spoken by you. It’s not your tale to tell.” Those ending lines resonate with me, and are a good example of Zepeda’s strongest talent—condensing a single moment or thought in to a simple yet well-crafted line.

Vari-Colored Songs -- Leyla McCalla

This is a review I recently published on KithFolk, a quarterly online roots music magazine put out my Hearth Music, which you can find here.

With Leyla McCalla’s Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes, another artist examines the possibilities presented in setting famous poetry to music. McCalla is not the first to do this—favorites of mine in recent past have included Kyle Alden’s Songs from Yeats' Bee-loud Glade and Martha Redbone’s The Garden of Love—Songs of William Blake. It might seem that such a plan makes life easy on the musician: “Look, free lyrics! Just make up a tune!”, but it is much harder than that, as other musicians have found to their dismay. You see, a successful song is more than good words and good melody. First of all, the two have to fit, as far as style, mood and structure, but more than that, there are some things that we love about good songs that not all poems naturally have; on the other hand, some poems feel like lyrics from the beginning, and this is one reason why McCalla’s choice works so well.

The poetry of Langston Hughes is imbued with music. Music was an important aspect of his the times and settings of his life, in America, Europe and the Caribbean, and of the movement he is famously linked to: the Harlem Renaissance. McCalla calls him “the Duke Ellington of words—painting the most incredible portraits with simple musical ideas that just come together in amazing ways.” Consider the use of jazz in such poems as “Dream Boogie” or “Lennox Avenue: Midnight”:

The rhythm of life

Is a jazz rhythm,

Honey.

The gods are laughing at us.

The broken heart of love,

The weary, weary heart of pain,—

   Overtones,

   Undertones,

To the rumble of street cars,

To the swish of rain.

Lenox Avenue,

Honey.

Midnight,

And the gods are laughing at us.

Or the undertone of the blues in “Song for a Dark Girl”:

Way Down South in Dixie

(Break the heart of me)

They hung my black young lover

To a cross roads tree.

Way Down South in Dixie

(Bruised body high in air)

I asked the white Lord Jesus

What was the use of prayer.

Way Down South in Dixie

(Break the heart of me)

Love is a naked shadow

On a gnarled and naked tree.

If I had read those lyrics without knowing they were written by Hughes, I would have guessed Leadbelly or Son House. So McCalla makes the natural step of setting Hughes’s poems to jazz and blues, and the effect is perfect. They are as they were always meant to be.

McCalla shows Hughes’s versatility—and her own—through the variety of music she uses. The upbeat raggy setting of “Too Blue” works perfectly for the wry, morbid humor:

I wonder if

One bullet would do?

Hard as my head is,

It would probably take two.

But I ain’t got

Neither bullet nor gun—

And I’m too blue

To look for one.

The song is perfectly backed up with a tenor banjo and Hawaiian guitar that make the arrangement sound as if it came straight from a smoke-filled 1930s speakeasy.

McCalla feels a deep connection to Langston Hughes; in fact, she called him a focal point in her life, and credited him with inspiring her to pursue a creative path. But this album throws in quite a twist that you might not have seen coming: much of the album is incorporates Haitian folk music. In fact, Vari-Colored Songs is essentially Langston Hughes set to music plus Haitian music, with some overlap between the two. But that twist makes perfect sense not just in McCalla’s life, but for Hughes himself. McCalla’s parents are Haitian, and so the music is of more than academic interest to her, and Hughes himself also felt a deep connection to Haiti. He began one of his books in Haiti, and wrote a play and an opera about Haitian Revolution, and he translated a work by Haitian novelist Jacques Roumain. Hughes was very interested in pan-Africanism, the idea of a world-wide Black culture. You can imagine that he would nod approvingly at the idea of his poems sitting side-by-side with such songs as “Kamèn sa w fè” and “Latibonit”.

McCalla keeps the instrumentation intentionally spare, so we don’t get the sound of big bands. There are no drums or horn section on these tracks. Guitar, banjo and cello are of primary importance. She is very creative with the use of these instruments, though. The opening track, “Heart of Gold”, is built around a strummed cello, shifting back and forth from an A minor to a C ninth, but nevertheless the effect is clearly jazz, aided by McCalla’s excellent vocal ability. She uses this fascinating technique on other tracks as well.

I wouldn’t call Vari-Colored Songs “foot-tapping”; it’s not meant to be party music, as some jazz is. I absolutely would call it “engaging” and “ingenious”, and even “fun”, in the music-and-history nerd sense of the word. Fortunately the CD comes with extensive liner notes, and I recommend listening with the words close at hand at least once. Because the lyrics are poetry first, there is never a wasted word, and Langston Hughes’s wry and insightful wit comes through. The combination of prying questions, political consciousness, and biting wit is one thing that makes the poetry of Langston Hughes so great, as can be seen in such poems as “Cross”, “The Ballad of the Landlord”, and the poem “Vari-Colored Song” itself:

If I had a heart of gold

As have some folks I know

I’d up and sell my heart of gold

And head north with the dough.

But I don't have a heart of gold

My heart's not even lead.

It's made of plain old Georgia clay.

That's why my heart is red.

I wonder why red clay’s so red

And Georgia skies so blue.

I wonder why it's yes to me

And yes, sir, sir to you.

I wonder why the sky’s so blue

And why the clay’s so red;

Why down South is always down

And never up instead.

It’s a perfect combination.

You might also like to check out Kyle Alden's rendition of W. B. Yeats's poems:



And Martha Redbone's take on William Blake, which I reviewed earlier for No Depression.

Everything Must Go – Rosie Garland

Rosie Garland takes on an interesting and potentially rich topic in Everything Must Go, which follows her battle with cancer.  I expected some touching moments or profound truths, but ultimately I was left feeling cold.  Garland’s focus throughout the thirty-three poems in the book is on process and her body.  These, I assume, were the most interesting or moving parts of the ordeal for her, and I have no right to tell her what she should be interested in or moved by, but as the poems ticked past I found myself uninvolved.  It was like reading a medical chart expressed in simile and personification.  I recently had a friend die of cancer (Garland did not die, by the way), and the most significant parts of his last days were based in connection: other people, memories, what he was leaving behind, my own children coming to understand what was happening, the struggle to finish what he had started before he succumbed.  All these were strangely absent from Garland’s work.  Thirty-three poems later I have no idea who Rosie Garland is, what she loves, what her story is.  I know only the indignity of her medical processes and the color of the waiting room carpet.

Her poetry itself is skillful, but again rarely has that magic effect of a profound truth, perfectly expressed, the way great poetry does.  I rarely felt surprised.  Exceptions were occasional turns of phrase and image: when she describes “the man who watched his wife led away: her birdlike, crumpled steps, his face distorted, his eyes punched red.”  Another memorable poem is a letter to her hair, and how her expectation of losing it suddenly is belied by the fact of it lingering to the point of annoyance.

It is not that the words are poorly assembled, though the poetry is entirely prose, and lacks any sound devices or rhythm.  I find myself reminded of a favorite author of mine, Jeanette Winterson, and her novel Written on the Body, which also concerns cancer.  Garland’s poetry is similar to Winterson’s prose, but this highlights what Garland’s work lacks—character, relationships, and a greater emotional depth than the constant lingering on physical change and medical detail.

Shakespeare Bats Cleanup – Ron Koertge

Here’s an interesting book of poetry that, while not recent, certainly qualifies under the label “contemporary”: it was published in 2003.  Shakespeare Bats Cleanup is an epistolary short novel that takes the form of a diary/notebook belonging to a fourteen-year-old boy who is laid up for the spring with mono.

Kevin begins writing down just his thoughts, about how he misses baseball and how he and his father are dealing with the death of his mother.  His father is an English teacher, and so a handbook of poetry is fortunately kept on a bookshelf, and as Kevin continues to chronicle his recovery he experiments with putting things into verse.

It is pretty clear that Koertge is hoping to pitch poetry to young teens like Kevin.  Poetry is instrumental in Kevin’s emotional healing and his getting a girlfriend.  Kevin’s reluctant admission that he actually likes poetry is difficult at first (but it’s easier when the girl you like likes it too, right?).  His discovery of sonnets goes hand-in-hand with the improvement of his health and his character.  Koertge works a little technical instruction into the book as Kevin considers his use of metaphor, or discovers blank verse, but it’s not heavy handed.  I have to say, I appreciate Kortege including metered verse along with other styles in this introduction to poetry.

This is one of those fascinating situations where I am unable to tell whether or not this book succeeds because I’m not really the target audience.  If I assume correctly that Koertge’s primary objective was a book that would be enjoyed by teens, and to convince teen boys to consider the merits of poetry, one would really have to ask them, not me.  I think the book is a great little story, but then, what does a fourteen-year-old care what I think?  Part of my concern is that the target audience would simply interpret it as propaganda.  Of course, it is, but it’s not ­bad propaganda.  I support the effort.  I now need to find a fourteen-year-old smart-but-non-literary athlete and hand him this book, and follow up later.

Hey, it turns out there’s a sequel!  If anyone has read it, let me know what you think.

    

The Bitter Oleander v. 18 n. 1

The new Bitter Oleander magazine is out, filled with great international poetry and short fiction.  I love The Bitter Oleander for the focus on international writing and the side-by-side translations of poetry.  My favorite from this issue is "One's Own Sea" by Yi Lu.

In addition to poems in Portuguese, Faroese, Georgian and Urdu, there are plenty of poems and stories in English, and in interview with Estonian poet Kristiina Ehin.

You can also check out The Bitter Oleander Press website.

You Exist. Details Follow. -- Stuart Ross

The ground had a hunch.
Furniture made no sense.
Oh luminous blur of body destiny!
You huff and puff. You stand
on magnificent corners,
wander into a cage of sunset.
The ground explained
the meaning of sunset.

Whoa. *mind blown*

I think I have met Stuart Ross before, and I think he was that slightly ragged man with the intense stare outside the grocery store who cornered me and wanted to tell me a million important things that made no sense at all. These lines, from “You Exist. Details Follow.”, are typical of his style in his new book of the same name.

Every poem is absurdist in some way. In some instances this is charming and engaging—I think particularly of the line “When we met, poodles sported four legs, just as they had before, and just as they do now — four legs for every poodle.” Some poems wallow in the absurdity to the point of being incomprehensible, but others evoke a strong narrative or relationship though a series of images. I liked the poem “Fathers Shave”:

Father shaves. Details follow.
The blade rips the bristles
from his cheeks, his chin,
from beneath the thunderous
nose. It rips the carpet
and the curtains, rips
Sylvester the Cat
right off the TV screen.
We children cry.
The blade rips the welcome
mat off our porch, the
grass off our lawn,
the trees off our block,
oh weeping willows.
Father goes to the office.
His boss caresses
his smooth face. The
clients ooh and ahh.
The streets are bare
of cars. One planet
hurtles into another.
There are no prizes
in a bag of Cheezies,
but in Pink Elephant
Popcorn you get a
little sticker or maybe
a tiny soldier with a parachute
you can drop out your second-
floor window. Look!
He drifts down.
He drifts in the breeze.
The jays and sparrows
gaze on in wonder.

I like the view through the eyes of children, the sense of the father as this larger-than-life, intimidating force. He is dangerous, barbarous and awesome in the true sense of the word, yet outside the house no one sees this side of him. After he is gone, the children are free to relax and immerse themselves in the minutiae of things that amuse them. Nevertheless, there is always the knowledge that father will return.

Conversely, there are poems such as “Time”:

It’s about time.
It’s about time.
It’s about two astronauts.
Starring ______________ as Blugga.
A brave crew? A strange place?
Prehistoric gals? Sue me.
Tell me where all past years are.
It’s about dinosaurs vs. astronauts.
It’s about their fate.

I feel in this case like putting on my best Simon Cowell voice and asking, “OK, Stuart—how do you think it went?”

American Copia: an Immigrant Epic – Javier O. Huerta

The inspiration for American Copia comes (according to Javier Huerta’s preface, at least) from Huerta’s citizenship interview.  As part of the “English test”, he was asked to write the sentence “Today, I’m going to the grocery store.”  At the time, Huerta was an English major in college, and so to add a flourish to the interview, he marked the scansion of the line, and pointed out that it is in iambic pentameter.  This tension between the immigrant Spanish speaker and the English Lit buff pervades Huerta’s work, and it is not unusual for him to reference Keats while describing the aisles of the Fiesta supermarket.

According to the preface, Huerta promised the aforementioned immigration official that he would write an epic starting with the line “Today, I’m going to the grocery store,” and this book sets out to do that.  Grocery shopping is a major theme, and through it Huerta explores issues of class, culture, family and literature.  The book as a whole cuts back and forth between “American Copia” episodes, in which he collects short prose anecdotes based on grocery shopping, giving brief asynchronous flashes of his life and relationships, jumping between time and place.  Huerta sees shopping and food as windows into all sorts of experiences and issues—family and relationships weave throughout the scattered narrative.  One episode describes how Marisol, a pregnant Yale student, steals a shopping cart to keep next to her apartment, just in case it is the only way to get to the hospital when she goes into labor.  This observation, both humorous and serious, highlights the juxtaposition seen throughout much of the work—privilege and poverty, the lyrical and the mundane.

Other short works fill out the book: a short drama, many poems, pieces of short fiction.  Huerta switches fluidly between English, Spanish, and Spanglish.  Especially in dialogue, English and Spanish sit comfortably side-by-side in what I imagine (though I am no expert) is an accurate rendition of dialogue in a bilingual culture.  Therefore, reader, you will find much of this work difficult to access if your Spanish is rusty, but that’s part of the point—this work is not for everyone.  This is emphasized early on in an episode that concludes

I remember also one time when Saul and his friends were watching music videos and “Fiesta” by R. Kelley came on.  In the video R. Kelley is at a party, and he and all of his entourage chant, “Fiesta, fiesta.”  Then one of my brother’s friends said, “Hey, fu, sería más tight if they sing, ‘la michoacana, la michoacana.’”  And we laughed.  We started dancing and chanting “la michoacana.”  We could not stop laughing.  It was a joke not meant for you.

In all, I found the book very interesting, but I didn’t feel much emotional connection.  Great poetry stands out for me when I feel an emotion sting acutely while reading, or come across a line which stays with me all day because it is so true.  Nevertheless, I can’t judge Huerta’s work by these standards—it is clear that though I may appreciate it, this book is not for me, nor does it have an obligation to be.  And I do, certainly, appreciate Huerta’s wit, style, and insight.

Misconceptions about Haiku

I had the chance to sit in on a middle school English class one day while substitute teaching. Another teacher was using the classroom after I was done. Instead of going to the staff room, I stayed and observed a lesson on haiku.

Someone in the classroom—maybe this particular teacher—clearly loved haiku: there were books of “cat haiku” and other collections, and a poster with a haiku by Jack Prelutsky on the classroom door. Yet this teacher gave the same definition of haiku that I remembered from when I was in school: it is a poem of five, seven and five syllables, usually about nature. In fact, this is exactly how most Americans would define a haiku.

A friend of mine, Dejah Leger, is deeply into haiku, and through her I have learned how inadequate and even inaccurate this definition is. Traditional Japanese haiku are indeed three lines of five, seven and five syllables, and are technically always about nature (a poem identical in format that instead considers the human condition is a “senryu”). But Japanese not only counts syllables differently than English does, but the words tend to have different numbers of syllables. A poem in English that adheres the five-seven-five syllable might well be too crowded.

Adherence to syllable count, though, is not the central issue. Haiku is about an image—it is not a vehicle for explicit opinion, musing, rhetoric or emotion. All those things must be implicit, and be accessed only through the image.

an ancient pond
a frog jumps in
the splash of water
–Basho

Often, the beauty of a haiku is the tension between two images in the poem. Two of the lines of a haiku (often) form a phrase, and the remaining line a fragment. It is this juxtaposition that gives a haiku its significance. Senryu, too, though focused instead on human concerns, are essentially imagist.

A fantastic book for further study on this is Jane Reichhold’s Writing and Enjoying Haiku.



Reichhold argues that the essence of a haiku lies in the connection between two parts of a haiku, the fragment and the phrase, which may come in either order. The significance of a haiku comes from the juxtaposition of these images. Senryu, too, though focused instead on human concerns, follow this same imagist fragment-phrase pattern. As for length, Reichhold recommends about two “beats” in the first and third lines, and three “beats” in the middle, as a rough equivalent to five, seven, and five “on”.

I remember two haiku lessons from my youth, and one by a teacher when I was doing my student teaching, and all missed the mark. In the latter example, the teacher even shared his own “haiku” with the class, which were essentially seventeen syllables of stream-of-consciousness free-association.

The result of classes such as these is that haiku are misunderstood by most Americans. But why would teachers teach haiku this way? Of course, many teachers simply teach what they were taught, often neglecting any research on the assumption that their teachers were correct. But more than that, haiku, taught the way it is taught, fits the requirements of a freshman English class perfectly—it’s easy to read, easy to write, and it teaches about syllables.

It is hard to get students to pay close attention to language, and because the current concept of poetry is so influenced by the modernists, there is very little sense of form in any contemporary poetry that students are exposed to. After reading only free verse, there is little sense among students that a poet crafts and forms a poem rather than simply writing down the first words that come to mind. Haiku of the classroom variety provides the teacher with a simple, accessible way to get students to write a poem in a form (which also aids the student somewhat—imposing limits can dispel the indecision that results from too much freedom). Moreover, it teaches about syllables, which must be taught, but which would be boring and pointless to teach outside of a poetry lesson. Haiku (classroom variety) is the simplest form of syllabic poetry, and it doesn’t require the discussion of meter or prosody. The result is that haiku provides an entry-level exercise in paying attention to language (a noble goal, to be sure).
To alter classroom haiku to more accurately reflect the original tradition would make it more difficult for students because they would have to follow much subtler conventions. The requirements of the poem would be harder to define, and the quality harder to judge. From personal experience, I can tell you that no English teacher wants to call a student’s poem incorrect or inadequate. The bar for haiku is therefore lowered to the point that any student can jump over it, so teachers can say, “Yes, that’s a haiku,” without complicated questions of image, connotation and juxtaposition.

The result is a massive cultural misunderstanding of this form of poetry. Examples include the following. The second of these, through the use of enjambment, escapes the strictures of natural line breaks, and so the 5-7-5 structure morphs into simply a requirement for seventeen syllables. The third of these abandons syllable count altogether; lacking any kind of concrete imagery, it is truly no more than a platitude arranged into three lines.

Underground magic.
Peel brown bundle, mash, pile high.
Salt and pepper clouds.
     Pat Mora, from Yum! ¡MmMm! ¡Qué rico!

Oh good, you’re home. I
Celebrate joyously with
A rousing ear-twitch.
     Deborah Coates, from Cat Haiku

Teach children
Not the limitation of ego
But the omnipresence of life.
     Lily Wang, from Garden Haiku

Consider also the use of haiku in this comic strip (Get Fuzzy, Darby Conley).

The internet is full of “haiku” on all subjects by many enthusiasts, all of which share the same misunderstanding. The popularity of this form in mass culture is likely the same as for teachers. It is quick and easy, and allows the author to compose a poem on a subject with ease. The author can then access some of the cultural cachet that comes with having written a poem, and the observations therein are validated more than if they were rendered in prose. This last comic strip pokes fun at the resulting pretension and vapidity of haiku, but that is only applicable, of course, by the current popular definition.

Elinor Wylie

I can never tell, when I discover a poet new to me but many years gone, whether I should feel like I have found a beautiful though dusty artifact in an antique store, or like I have simply come late to the party. I had never heard of Elinor Wylie before, but I’m glad I found her. I’m self-conscious, though, at the thought that I was supposed to have known about her all along. I found this sonnet of hers in an old textbook, sandwiched between Robert Frost and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones
There’s something in this richness that I hate.
I love the look, austere, immaculate,
Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones.
There’s something in my very blood that owns
Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate,
A thread of water, churned to milky spate
Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones.

I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray,
Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meager sheaves;
That spring, briefer than apple-blossom’s breath,
Summer, so much too beautiful to stay;
Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves,
And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death.

I love this. This era—with Frost, Millay, and E. A. Robinson in the States (and Kipling and others in the UK) were writing—this is when English poetry hit its peak: a modern sensibility paired with a classic form. It surpasses the ornate decoration of earlier times while employing a technical skill that at the time was being busily abandoned by everyone else.

There’s a stanza from another of Wylie’s poems that has been buzzing around in my head since I read it—from her poem “Let No Charitable Hope”:

In masks outrageous and austere
The years go by in single file;
But none has merited my fear
And none has quite escaped my smile.

It somehow brings to mind William Ernest Henley (“Invictus”) and Dorothy Parker at the same time. As if those two could collaborate. I wonder if they would have gotten along.

More reviews to come!

Come, Thief – Jane Hirshfield

This blog is good practice for me; I often react to poetry quickly, and either like it or don’t like it, and it’s good for me to be patient, finish the book, and figure out why I like it (or not). Jane Hirshfield presents an interesting example because I like her poetry—I really do—although it is a style of lyric free-verse meditations I don’t usually like. Maybe that shows the power of her words: she even won over the formalist. Her verse reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop’s, Jacqueline Berger’s or of Wendy Cope’s when she writes free verse—I admire her skillful use of words to make an observation in a surprising and beautiful way. This manifests itself best in the first poem of Hirshfield’s that I read, which remains my favorite.

These Also Once under Moonlight

A snake
with two small hind-limbs
and a pelvic girdle.

Large-headed dinosaurs
hunting in packs like dogs.
Others whose scaly plates
thistle to feathers.

Mammals sleekening, ottering,
simplified,
back towards the waters.

Ours, too, a transitional species,
chimerical, passing
what is later, always, called monstrous—
no longer one thing, not yet another.

Fossils greeting fossils,
fearful, hopeful.
Walking, sleeping, waking, wanting to live.

Nuzzling our young wildly, as they did.

Part of what I love about that is it takes on time and mortality—common poetic themes—at new, larger level: the rise and fall of species, including our own. That last line, far from debasing humanity, links us to part of something even greater. It is not that humans are doomed: we are transitory; being an animal, one of many, is suddenly reassuring. We are tiny, yet connected. After that, I was predisposed to like all of Hirshfield’s poems. Sometimes she is more straightforward:

The Promise

Stay, I said
to the cut flowers.
They bowed
their heads lower.

Stay, I said to the spider
who fled.
Stay, leaf.
It reddened,
embarrassed for me and itself.

Stay, I said to my body.
It sat like a dog does,
obedient for a moment,
soon starting to tremble.

Stay, to the earth
of riverine valley meadows,
of fossilized escarpments,
of limestone and sandstone.
It looked back
with a changing expression, in silence.

Stay, I said to my loves.
Each answered,
Always.

But poems like this—patterned, forthright, allegorical—are not typical Hirshfield; she is usually more guarded and complex. Take instead:

“Distance Makes Clean”

Best when gods changed
into rag and sandal,
thinness, wrinkle,
knocked, asked entrance.

Such test is simple, can be passed or failed.
The softest bed,
The meat unstinting.

But when from far and mountain
they would ask
and for amusement, “What are mortals?”

even the flocking creatures came to tremble, cattle, sheep.

Scentless      silent
             then
the distant slaughters, like toy armies in the hands of boys.

It so happens that my daughter, noticing me reading, asked me to read a poem, and I was on this one. I read it, and tried to explain it (it shouldn’t be too far off for her—she likes the Odyssey); I found it easy to understand and difficult to explain, which is a quality often found in a good poem.

Things I like about this poem:

1) It had focus; much lyric poetry can lose its focus.
2) Elision—how she leaves out unnecessary words even if they have a grammatical function (too much of this, by an unskilled author, would drive me crazy).
3) Phrases that make no sense syntactically yet perfect sense intuitively: “But when from far and mountain…”

One more tonight, because I’m a sucker for cool traditional forms: a haibun (discussed in an earlier post)…

Haibun: a Mountain Rowboat

Go for a walk on the mountain. The trail, up many wooden stairs, passes some houses. In front of one, an old man is building a boat. All summer I have watched this mountain rowboat. Like a horse in its stall, patiently waiting for its evening hay, it rests on its wooden cradle. Finally, today, it is being painted: a clear Baltic blue. Horses dream. You can see this move through their ears. But the hopes of an old man spill, as waking life does, through the hands.

amid summer trees
blue boat high on a mountain
its paint scent drying

By the way, Jane Hirshfield is coming here to Portland this Tuesday, September 13, to Powell’s Books.

Afterglow—Alberto Blanco (trans. Jennifer Rathburn)

Bitter Oleander Press, as I learned when I read the most recent issue of their journal, has an interest in international poetry and side-by-side translations. This is seen once again in their publication of a side-by-side translation of the work of Mexican poet Alberto Blanco, Afterglow, translated by Jennifer Rathburn.

I find it fun to read the original of a poem next to its translation whenever I know even a little of the language. In this case I got to see some of the interesting choices that Rathburn made. A good example is “Psalm of Transfiguration”. 

En las amapolas de cobre
Cantan los pájaros ultramarinos;
En la espuela de caballero
despunta la fiebre que no cesa.
El fuego se aviva y el humo crece
como las ramas de un árbol planetario.

In copper poppies
chant ultramarine birds;
In the knight’s spur
spikes the endless fever.
Fire arouses and smoke grows
like the branches of a planetary tree.

Rathburn translates “cantan” as “chant” instead of “sing”, which fits the poem well. The original Spanish original has a sense of both possibilities, but an English translation must pick only one.

She translates “la fiebre que no cesa” as “endless fever”, but think of all the possibilities: it could have been “fever that never ends” or “fever that never ceases” or “neverending fever” or “fever without end”. It’s always a challenge to balance truth to a translation and poetic necessity; I think Rathburn does a great job in this volume.

Another interesting think to note in this poem is how sound devices, which are usually destroyed in a translation, can be spontaneously (or intentionally?) created. “Amapules de cobre” ends up as “copper poppies”, and the line “el fuego se aviva y el humo crece” results in the wonderfully alliterative/assonant sentence “fire arouses and smoke grows”. Whether by serendipity or design, it is fun, and somewhat reassuring, that the sound elements of poetry aren’t doomed upon translation.

As for the poetry? It is something like the wild hallucinatory prophetic visions of the Old Testament prophets or the Book of Revelations. The entire book is written in the present tense, and there is no sense of specific everyday life. There is nothing that happened, only things that happen, always, universally, even in cases like

The failing calf
in the corral dies.
A dazzling bull
contemplates the field.

The images spill forth as from a dream—disconnected, intense, packed with significance but without meaning. Any references to “you” or “I” are disembodied and universal as well. Either one might refer equally to the poet, the reader, or anyone else, real or imaginary. We never get to see into Alberto Blanco’s life—only into his mind, and the visions that live there.

body English – Peter Cornwall

I really enjoyed reading this collection, and what I loved is that Cornwall is not afraid to play with words and form, to experiment, and to focus on sound. Poetry today seems full of caution and self-consciousness: sure you can express the depths of your soul, but don’t let your words do anything interesting. But not Cornwall. He writes

The exigencies! You put in a word of hope against
the exigencies. You put in a word of hope against
our clasped hands, pressed to your lips.
Our clasped hands, pressed to your lips:
your lips pressed to put the exigencies in a word
of hope against your clasped hands. […]

Peter Cornwall knows that poetry began as sound, and must concern itself with sound. Even when not writing verse, he often weaves rhyme and other sound devices throughout his poems: The rhythm in his poem “Gavotte” builds to a fantastic energy, like a waterfall or a rock slide. 

September remember the ochre the red and
the golden beholden to shadow, burnt umber
penumbra, the chill wrapping warm in the mist;
the time that our kiss took the form of a beam
unlocking October’s first dream, the days not as
long as they’d been just before, still peace and
still war, rotation dilation translation mutation
beneath a bough soon to come bare. It were there […]

Playing with words includes puns—not the heavy-handed groaners that we all dread, but the occasional winking drive-by witticism, such as 

[…] She love a man
who know a code she do not know but do.
He write it on her wall her grace.
She love a man in cuneiform.

My favorite poem was the last in the collection. There is something distinctively English about it, it seems to me. It reminds me in ways of Philip Larkin’s poetry, and Rudyard Kipling’s, too, maybe in the quite dignity and remembrance of the past, maybe in the mixing of childhood and military honor. Though not formal verse, the poem is clearly aware of itself as verse, which captures the mood precisely.

Standing on my grave

Children, do be careful!
Stay with me, stay with me.
Look now, a pretty falling leaf:
who will bring their colours here
who will take a rubbing?

I grabbed my crayons resolute
and newsprint in my hand, I
climbed the hill halfway and then—
A leader of our finest men!
A credit to our land:

Rest sweetly on the sand.
I meant to go up further still and
catch the leaf atop the hill.
I did not mean to misbehave

But stood beside the admiral’s grave.
I’d found the rubbing that I wanted
Modest life and yet much vaunted:
sea and surf and love, and haunted
stood there with my crayon blue

that I might get a bit on you
to take back down with me, Sir John
(who lead as I meant to go on) and
did not mean to be a knave but
leant across your fulsome grave

that I might get a rubbing,
that I might get a rubbing.
Miss Brown I thought might be upset
but even still she seemed to let
me tarry, let me get you still

Sir John; in one tremendous act of will
your name upon my newspage rested:
Always calm and never bested
And now it’s 1939
and behind a glass of wine

a second thanks I give,
a second thanks I give
and make my way across the brine.

Theodore Roethke

A review is on its way, but I wanted to take a moment to post a poem I came across on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac.  If I time it right, I can catch this brief show on the radio on my way home from teaching my night class.  One night last week I caught this poem by Theodore Roethke, whose work I love, even though I never made a thorough examination of it.  In fact, I could only name “My Papa’s Waltz” and “I Wake To Sleep” as poems of his I know (the latter of which I parodied as “I Wake To Eat”, and published in The Formalist a while back).  So I was happy to stumble across another one of his.

I Knew a Woman

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,

When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;

Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:

The shapes a bright container can contain!

Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,

Or English poets who grew up on Greek

(I'd have them sing in a chorus, cheek to cheek).

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,

She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand;

She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin;

I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;

She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,

Coming behind her for her pretty sake

(But what prodigious mowing we did make).

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:

Her full lips pursed, the errant notes to seize;

She played it quick, she played it light and loose;

My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;

Her several parts could keep a pure repose,

Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose

(She moved in circles, and those circles moved).

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:

I'm martyr to a motion not my own;

What's freedom for? To know eternity.

I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.

But who would count eternity in days?

These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:

(I measure time by how a body sways).

from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. © Anchor, 1974.

It feels like this poem would be at home in the court of Henry VIII alongside Thomas Wyatt, or the Cavalier Poets like Robert Herrick.  It’s a shame we seemed to lose poets like this in the 20^th century except for a few like Roethke.

You can always see the current Writer’s Almanac at http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/, and search the archive as well.

Here Lies Lalo—Abelardo Delgado

I must admit that I was skeptical about this collection when I received it. The poet Lalo—Abelardo Delgado (1930 – 2004)—was an activist for social justice and a central figure in Chicano literature. I am ashamed to confess that I expected ranting and moaning. Instead I found a vibrant, engaging consideration of life, the universe and everything...with a Chicano twist. Though many of his poems take a uniquely Chicano perspective, Lalo ought never be pigeonholed.


Though many poems concern politics, Lalo makes political poetry beautiful because he focuses on emotion, not policy.

stupid america, hear that chicano
shouting curses on the street
he is a poet
without paper and pencil
and since he cannot write, he will explode

Political poetry is hard. The two parts of the term hardly understand each other. A poet fails when he or she tries to debate, analyze or support an argument. Elizabeth Alexander got it right at Barack Obama's inauguration:

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

But all too often political poems try to argue in verse, or more frequently, argue in prose, and are soon reduced to an editorial. Not Lalo: the fact that his poems have political implications is secondary to the fact that it captures emotion with skillful language:

stupid america, remember the chicanito
flunking math and english
he is the picasso
of your western states
but he will die
with one thousand masterpieces
hanging only from his mind

Lalo's style is a wild ride of sound and image, often mixing languages and voices. He uses rhyme in different ways in different poems, even occasionally writing in metric verse.  (In case it's not clear, the second stanza is not a translation of the first; Lalo switches languages back and forth throughout this poem.)

que te alcancen mi beso y mi abrazo
felicitando el hecho que hoy es tu día,
que en la palabra mi corazón pierda un pedazo
al dicirte, feliz cumpleanos, esposa mía.

after all these years together we have learned
to assume, without too much trouble, each other's identity
and in all these years how often i've yearned
not to take for granted the fact that you are an entity.

But even in his free verse, sound and rhyme play an important role. Lalo often likes rhyming couplets at the beginning and end of poems; sometimes he combines English and Spanish to do this. Occasionally a rhyme requires some awkward syntax, but usually the rhymes leap naturally, spontaneously, from the page. Alliteration, too—just the beauty and fun of language—are sometimes an element:

to scunner and not to hate,
to scupper and keep the taste,
to hide under the thick scurf
of scurrile life that yearning
to scurry itself leaps out
and is able to see its own scut,
obsolete as old scutage.

Here Lies Lalo is a great collection and tribute. Much of the publicity surrounding Lalo and this book focuses on his activism for social justice. I want to emphasize that his poetry is more than that. “Preguntas Pesadas”, for instance, sets aside ethnicity, nationality and discontent to peer deep into human questions. Here, the motifs of sleep, questions and definitions, and the tender concern for another, remind me of Jorge Luis Borges.

for some strange reason i cannot explain
i woke from my usual unperturbed sleep...again,
trying to define you...
          a bottle...that's it, one with no bottom
so that many can pour themselves into
but none can be contained within.
[…]
that glass
          from which the bottle is made
is very sensitive
          very sensuous
and desirable
and it can accommodate
all
   and all can rub themselves
into the sides
               and the sides are warm
but nonetheless
made of glass.

Poetry News in Review

I wanted to let you know about a great website I found: Poetry News in Review.

If you will allow me to lift some text straight from the website, "Poetry News in Review is a weekly curated and aggregated newsletter intended for anyone with an abiding interest in poetry of all kinds and all languages.  The encapsulated stories are linked to the original sites without commentary. While much of it is current, there is, from time to time, a story or review that refers to earlier publications."

You can see the current issue here, and sign up for a weekly e-mail.

Up next: Here Lies Lalo: the collected poems of Abelardo Delgado.

Wild Horses, Wild Dreams – Lindy Hough

Wild Horses, Wild Dreams collects the poetry of Lindy Hough, founder of the magazine Io and North Atlantic Books.  The poems range from 1971 to 2010, so we get the opportunity to look at an entire writing career.  In her preface, Hough mentions Ezra Pound, H.D. and William Carlos Williams as influences.  I do see the similarities, to H.D. in her early work and Williams in the later.  Here I think Hough comes up short for the same reason that Williams does.  Her poetry is often simply the stuff of everyday observation.  I am reminded of someone—not necessarily a poet—chatting to me about what she has been up to since I last saw her.  Her poetry is better than Williams’s, and we are spared notes left on refrigerators and “Dude, that wheelbarrow is so cool,” but I often found myself waiting for the poetry to start. Her titular piece, for instance, begins

     Jacqueline moved onto land

     where a heard of horses already lived

     It became obvious they were no one’s,

     had drifted up and down this coast

     for years, a bother to many.

     They were not a bother to her.

     […]

She continues for pages with the same MO: chatting about the horses.

     […]

     They stick around near the water’s edge.

     J’s gotten good fences so they don’t straggle

     down onto the highway, get themselves killed,

     her sued.

     They big eyes are serious.  They look at you with no

     guile.  That’s why she loves them.

     […]

A few poems degenerates into polemics, which again I can best imagine a friend delivering over coffee:

     […]

     Because the gun lobby is unopposed

     Because Charlton Heston played Moses,

     standing on the mountain with the flowing beard,

     arms uplifted, holding the Ten Commandments

     People see him as The God of Guns

     like his tough western persona which

     gives authority to the concept of a citizen’s

     “right to bear arms”, an idea left over from 1776.

     They contribute to the NRA

     thinking only of defending themselves.

     […]

     We’re the only industrialized nation

     in the world with such a lack of

     gun control.  Most European countries

     don’t allow guns in their borders.

     […]

That last stanza particularly seems to escape any definition as “poetry”.

Nevertheless, Hough gets much more lyrical when she gets less political.  Her earlier poems have a kind of eerie dreaminess at times:

     What she already knows

     is a rich tangle

     of possibility.

     Threading through

     the lover’s hair,

     knot by knot,

     living with him to unravel

     the sequel to the mermaids.

     Not always searching.
     [...]

One poem I particularly enjoyed was “Seeing: To the Mailmen”, which I’ll put here in its entirety.  I felt from this poem a sense of structure, image, complex metaphor and focus.

     I would wish, growing up

     in a round dance

     that if I made a picture

     you would not dilute, ex-

     tend, wash further

     the colors beyond the border.

     You would stop the eye there

     and he sense given to the eye

     by the eye; the colors therein

     and not extend.

     Even so, it would not be enough.

     The picture would have to sing, not only

     be seen; as an ocean or a far off

     coyote is heard, the eye seeing

     and the ear listening, breath & pulse

     of the joy of living pushing out

     though the chest and throat

     to the world.  Keep coyote

     particularly in mind: full white chest,

     head thrown back to the moon, his howl

     a statement to all and the heavens—

     outlasting Geronimo, the lion, the red wolf—

     I am here.  Know that I still exist.

     A decent wish.  Hoping for

     a decent pleasure,

     for the seer, whether watching

     or hearing or reading,

     loving or unloving.

As I was reading this collection, thinking about Hough’s style and topics, I came across one poem I found fascinating because it considers exactly this.  In “The Poet’s Métier” Hough asks what her style might be called.  She responds, “I am a cat on a fence…  There’s a skittering between my eyelids, a sort of imbalance only righted walking very carefully along a fence, & then down another, and another.”  In the poem she wonders how to classify her style, and whether her uncertainty indicates that “it engages me but no one else.”  Her conclusion: “I’d rather be a cat, walking successive winding fences, silent and moonstruck.”

I find this an apt metaphor, and salute her for her candor.  Her poems do wander like a cat on a fence, and like a cat, no plan or purpose is necessary other than to be a cat.  If you feel compelled to follow a cat on its perambulations, this collection may well be for you.

Blood Honey – Chana Bloch

Chana Bloch’s strength lies in image and metaphor.  Her style of free verse is simple and fairly typical of poetry today.  Her subject matter, too—themes of life and death, family and culture—are not unexpected.  It is the sudden and surprising image or metaphor that begs to be read again and again--not from confusion, but from the sense that such a line needs to be savored--that makes her poetry engaging.

Wild Honey

A puddle of sun on the wooden floor.

The infant crawls to it, licks it,

dips a hand in and out,

letting the wild honey

trickle through his fingers.

Then a voice from on high—

Look at the pretty color!—

Wipes up the glory with a rag of language

A Life on Earth

[…]

An adult heart is the size of a fist, he said.

And what does the heart do?

Hoists itself up each morning into the weather.

A fist is not just a sign of defiance:

four fingers and a thumb can grasp.  And hold.

And what does the heart hold in that tight little fist?

The string of its life on earth,

taking the tug of it, letting it fly,

not letting it fly away.

[…]

Sometimes the surprise is more deliberate, and Bloch reveals a deft control over her words and an admirable wit.  One of my favorite stanzas, discussing her mother, reads:

Things are easier between us lately.

She’s not so carping. Is even willing to listen.

One would almost think death

had mellowed her. 

The Bitter Oleander v. 17, n. 1

I just read The Bitter Oleander v. 17, n. 1. Great stuff. I liked the side-by-side translations of poems in Chinese, French, Spanish and Estonian. I also liked the inclusion of short fiction. Here’s my favorite poem:

“Fragmentation” – Philip Todd

     For a long while now it’s only been a man and his garden rock.
     The garden’s not much—just a patch of yard with scattered thistle, clover, dandelions, crabgrass.
     Before this the man had his one wife. When she left there was no wife. Only the rock in the garden was left.
     Years ago the rock was almost buried. The man dug it out when he built the house. He built the house when he had the one wife.
     The rock was large, really too large to roll, and colorless, caked with grime and grit. Rain washed the exposed rock. Soon streaks of color surfaced, baked by the bright sun, highlighted by the moon.
     So, long after the one wife had left, they sat in a scruffy garden—a man, his one rock. No words exchanged, just the sound of wind between them, ruffling the man’s beard, passing smoothly over the rock’s surface.
     The man was prone to smile at his rock, its colors now bleached. He would raise it with both hands, fingering its grainy texture, probing its crevices.
     Rock solid, he whispered to himself on more than one occasion.
     One day the sight of the rock in the middle of the garden stopped him cold. The rock, weathered by the elements, had split apart along a deep crevice.
     The man fell to his knees before the fragmented rock and stared. One rock plus one rock equals… two… Again, two precious things belonged in his life.
     Oh, but which one should he touch first? His outstretched, trembling hands paused before each rock fragment as tears moistened the sides of his beard.



http://www.bitteroleander.com/

Poems Seven -- Alan Dugan

Here is Robert Pinsky's review of Alan Dugan's Poems Seven.  A good review, though I found it curious that the poem (Dugan's "best known" poem, apparently) was edited for length in the radio broadcast, though that was never mentioned.  I understand the need for brevity with radio broadcasts, but leaving out select "non-essential" parts of a poem (as opposed to using only an otherwise unaltered excerpt) and never mentioning it seems like dangerous ground.  I wonder if Dugan was consulted.  If not, Pinsky was taking quite an editorial liberty.  I think of poems of my own and shudder to think what a self-appointed editor might do with them to cut them down to a desired length.

Click here for the review on NPR.

Farang – Peter Blair

I thoroughly enjoyed this new collection—it was a delight to read, though in saying that I don’t mean that most of the poems were meant to be amusing. It is simply that they worked, and they worked together as a collection, too. In style, subject and attitude, Farang reminds me of Patrick Hicks's This London.


“Farang” is the Thai word for “foreigner”, and the focus of the collection is Blair’s experiences in Thailand. The sense of foreignness is woven throughout the collection, and applies not only to Americans in Thailand. An ex-monk just out of the monastery feels foreign; a Chinese son fled to Thailand sends letters home, to the amusement of the government censors; Blair feels foreign among his friends back in the states. The effect is a sense of unreality even within the activities of everyday life:

He’s naked except for flip-flops
and frayed jeans cut-off
above mid-thigh and tight
around his bulging belly.

Look at that farang strutting
down the sidewalk, I think,
sweaty, hairy-chest and shock
of frizzed, blond hair bright
in sunlight. Ragged pants,
no shirt, that beard.

I’m about to cross the street
to warn him that we Thais
find big white bodies unsettling
as ghosts, until I glimpse
my pale reflection in a store
window, my round farang eyes
staring back at me in wonder.

One thing I liked about Farang was the way that the poems connected and supported each other. Since Blair writes essentially in prose, unconcerned with any syntactic devices, the collection reads like snippets from a travel diary. As you continue to read, you get to know the personalities of recurring characters: Blair, his Thai girlfriend, his American associates, Thai friends and students. They interact in various situations and small threads of narrative develop. Other poems are not connected to this, but all are somehow concerned with exploring a strange new country that the poet clearly loves. 

Making Sticky Rice on Edgerton Place

I pour the dry white grains into water.
Golden chaff rises to the surface.
Remembering the rice’s bready smell,
the roots of my teeth stir, anticipating
its sticky sweetness. I ate it plain,
or wrapped in banana leaves and roasted
over coals, crunchy outside, a raisin hidden
in the center. I ate it with Sirpan,
at Professor Kwaam’s party.
In the cool season wind, I drove her home
on my bicycle. He came running
with a basket of sticky rice:
For later tonight. Now I stir the pan.
In the water, a curled brown thing wakes,
moves tiny antennae, legs hugging
a swelling rice grain. After 12,000 miles,
years in dry sacks, months on a shelf
at Kim Do Store, this creature revives
in the ricey water like a seed
opening, a memory: Sirpan’s smile
as she lifted her dress around her thighs
wading in the Mekong’s moonlight waves.