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.