Apropos of the new year, a poem by Polish poet, Wislawa Szymborska.
THE CENTURY'S DECLINE
Our twentieth century was going to improve on the others.
It will never prove it now,
now that its years are numbered,
its gait is shaky,
its breath is short.
Too many things have happened
that weren't supposed to happen,
and what was supposed to come about
has not.
Happiness and spring, among other things,
were supposed to be getting closer.
Fear was expected to leave the mountains and the valleys.
Truth was supposed to hit home
before a lie.
A couple of problems weren't going
to come up anymore:
hunger, for example,
and war, and so forth.
There was going to be respect
for helpless people's helplessness,
trust, that kind of stuff.
Anyone who planned to enjoy the world
is now faced
with a hopeless task.
Stupidity isn't funny.
Wisdom isn't gay.
Hope
isn't that young girl anymore,
et cetera, alas.
God was finally going to believe
in a man both good and strong,
but good and strong
are still two different men.
"How should we live?" someone asked me in a letter.
I had meant to ask him
the same question.
Again, and as ever,
as may be seen above,
the most pressing questions
are naive ones.
Friday, January 4, 2008
Szymborska: The Century's Decline
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
New Year's haiku
Thanks to Sharon Brogan for the nudge - see a string of New Year's haiku at her blog, and add your own.
The tradition continues here with a few haiku to usher in 2008.
This chameleon day -
born in the pitch of midnight
turns yellow at dawn.
Twelve seedless grapes,
El Bochero in a glass -
Taste 2008!
Morning breezes sweep
tallow leaves from limbs-
housekeeping is done.
No more monsters here -
this house eats a bowl of sun,
and burps with content.
Feel free to add your own New Year's haiku.
Friday, November 23, 2007
NaPoWriMo Week Three
BLACK FRIDAY
ten Mourning Doves flurry across
the flagstones, dust-speckled wings,
something god-like in their descent.
A grey squirrel scratches the top crust
of a potted plant, pecan in mouth;
its body nimble as electricity.
Oyster white tiles and the waft of lint,
familiar Tide in the air, the clutter
and warmth of the laundry room.
A forgotten can of cranberry sauce,
a single lemon, the remains of French
Cut Green Bean Casserole.
Skin bright Clementines shine
an invitation from their rustic box;
orange silence at hearthside.
4AM clamor at Kohls -
imagined wealth, mock war,
elbows and adrenalin.
That second cup of coffee,
sweet as syrup while red-bulbed
shrimp plants burst like fiery pokers.
In a quiet alcove, a woman
is haunted by the deadly thing
stirring under her arms.
She surveys the ads, subtracts
the ordinary from the onslaught:
lymphoma, MD Anderson, memory.
She questions the day, the dip
in temperature, the possibility
that teases, stirring like a vine.
An oak tree splits asunder,
reeds attached to its hide.
Symbiosis fights suffocation.
An oceanic hush now as light
wind tilts the browning leaves.
One Blue Jay sings through silence.
Monday, November 5, 2007
NaPoWriMo Week Two
Nov. 5, 2007
Natural Surrounding
The shrimp plant outside my window is a forest
to the ants circling below, driven
by innate regimen to survive.
A noose circumscribes the neck
of a neighboring oak,
sticky vines in their relentless march:
symbiosis or suffocation.
This warm animal glances
from behind a viscuous wall,
believes she can rake in the scent
of Fall as it singes the blood
of gentle tallow, breaks the neck
of the fern and empties
the husk of the wasp, reverting
to its former life as bamboo chime.
She claims some bond - green in the veins
or bayonet hands, perhaps a lack of warmth,
the inclination to thrive on borrowed seed,
sipping from a flower pot, black
with fungus, no matter, it's wet.
She tightens her grip on the elements,
weaves a dry nest of shallow breath,
thinks she can endure.
Friday, November 2, 2007
NaPoWriMo Starts
Starting the month with a haiku:
Nov.2, 2007
Restless needle -
thought winding in and out,
a bee without honey.
Uniform Days
When we went Downtown, officious
trips to the busied structures
fronting Laura and Bay streets,
Mom held me by the wrist at each
street crossing, her face pained
and straight, her posture perfect.
Bills with deadlines brought us there
but once, we entered the glittered
realm of May Cohens, entering a side
door, hand in hand, her grip
inescapable, while amazed eyes
captured the width of column,
marbled ballustrade, ornate
elevators with bronzed frontispiece.
She held my wrist as we approached
an opening, a gulf in the floor,
stone steps and shiny railings
led down to the Basement,
where the Sales were hidden.
It was late August, outside,
the sun was steep and mosquitos
visited nightly, a blitzkrieg among
sweet grass and fireflies.
The basement held racks of white
blouses, short-sleeved and plain,
pocket-ready for the parochial
school badge. There were navy blue
beenies and navy blue jumpers,
a clean panoply of uniforms.
This was the beginning of my
uniform days, Mom's exact gaze
searching and finding necessary
items, my hand in hers, silent,
while all around, the world
opened in color and curiosity
unveiled itself, like a sticky web.
Sleep Walk
The needle of nightmare pricks
and guides like a wand of dense symphony
luring eyes open, relief from the staccato
of stuck tongue, dark glue of immobility.
For two nights now, it's brought
me to the quick release, feet fumbling
for the carpeted floor, the soft
groove of solid ground, the golden grass
of artificial turf to settle me.
Then the Buddhists sing their "Oms"
amid a background of synthetic
waterfall and moog music,
my morning coffee with U-Tube.
In three hours these eyes, ears
mouth, back will adhere to another
pastiche - the hum of bleak work song,
computer screen and red blinks,
false logic and prayers surrounding me.
This is no nightmare but a premonition.
Grasping at the edge of a hole,
swinging my hips upward, making good grasp
of tumbling weeds and dirt, while
below me, the emptiness of free fall.
In the distance, a lullabye,
its faint echo like Circe, calls
me back to sleep another day.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Being Southern
Thanks to Julie R. Enszer who posted these two poems by Jane Cooper. Cooper was born in Jacksonville, FL, my hometown.
Being Southern
1
It's like being German.
Either you remember that yours was the defeated country
(The South breeds the finest soldiers, my uncle said,
himself a general in one of his incarnations)
or you acknowledge the guilt, not even your own guilt, but
Can any white person write this, whose ancestors once kept slaves?
2
Of course there were "good" Germans.
My father was still under 30, a passionate Wilsonian, when he was named a delegate to the 1916 Democratic Convention. By the end of the first evening he had discovered that eleven of the other Florida delegates were members of the Klan, he couldn't answer for the twelfth, he was number 13.
Only a few years later he argued for, and won, token black representation on the Jacksonville school board.
And my aunt as a girl went into the sweatshops to interview Cuban cigar workers, all women. She found the first Girl Scout troop in the South for, as she put it, colored children. True, it was segregated. But it was the first.
Take your guilt to school. Read your guilt in your diplomas or the lines of the marriage ceremony. Face your guilt head-on in the eyes of lover, neighbor, child. Ask to be buried in your guilt.
Of course they were paternalistic. I honor their accomplishments. What more have I ever done?
When is memory transforming? when, a form of real estate?
3
Transplanted "north" in 1934 I never questioned
a town that received its distinguished refugees
with a mix of pride and condescension: the specialist in Christian iconography
in her man-tailored suits, Einstein like a disembodied spirit
pacing our leafy sidewalks. Only because my best friend lived next door
would I glimpse him, sometimes at twilight, tuning his violin
as his back yard filled up with tents
But why can't I remember the actual men and women who slept in those tents, among patches of ragged tigerlilies? the children with skinny arms, who would soon be passed along. . . ?
All he could vouch for. Not famous. At their backs
the six million.
Hotel de Dream
Justice-keepers! justice-keepers!
for Muriel Rukeyser and James Wright
Suppose we could telephone the dead.
Muriel, I'd say, can you hear me?
Jim, can you talk again?
And I'd begin to tell them the stories they loved to hear:
how my father, as a young boy, watched Cora Crane
parade through the streets of Jacksonville with her girls
in an open barouche with silver fittings;
how the bay haunches gleamed as they twitched off flies,
polished hooves fetched down smartly into the dust,
ostrich feathers tickled the palates of passers-by.
Muriel, I'd say, shall we swing along Hudson Street
underneath the highway and walk out together on the docks?
.the river would be glittering, my grandmother
would be bargaining
with a black man on a dock in Jacksonville;
grapefruit and oranges would be piled up like cannonballs
at the fort in Old St. Augustine. . . .
I'll never put you in a nursing home, you said early that year,
I promise, Jane, I'll never put you in a nursing home.
Later Cora Crane showed her dogs right next to my aunt's.
They had a good conversation about bloodlines
amidst the clean smells of kennel shavings and well-brushed dog
but never, of course, met socially
although she had dined with Henry James.
Jim, I'd say, remember that old poem "The Faithful"
you helped me by caring for? How what we owe to the dead
is to go on living? More than ever
I want to go on living.
But now you have become part of it, friends of my choosing years,
friends who magnificent voices
will reverberate always, if only through machines,
tell me how to redress the past,
how to relish yet redress
my sensuous, precious, upper-class,
unjust white child's past.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Jane M. Cooper, Poet, 1924-2007
Obituary
Jane M. Cooper, Poet, 1924-2007
Jane Marvel Cooper, poet, Professor and Poet-in-Residence Emerita at
Sarah Lawrence College, died peacefully at Pennswood Village, Newtown,
PA, on October 26th from complications due to Parkinson's Disease.
Family were with her at the end.
She was the daughter of the late John C. Cooper Jr. and Martha Marvel
Cooper, and sister of the late Rachel C. Baker, all formerly of Armour
Road, Princeton. Jane Cooper was born in Atlantic City, N.J. in 1924.
She spent her early childhood in Jacksonville, Florida and then moved
with her family to Princeton in the mid-1930s. There she went to Miss
Fine's School where, in her senior year, she won the Leslie Shear Poetry
Prize for two works: "We are the Generation of War" and "I have Sung
Solitary Various Worlds", early signs of future acclaim.
She attended Vassar College 1942 to 1944 and earned a B.A. from the
University of Wisconsin in 1946. She joined the faculty of Sarah
Lawrence College in 1950, where she remained as a teacher and poet in
residence until her retirement in 1987. Over that period, together with
Grace Paley, Jean Valentine, Muriel Rukeyser and others, she helped
develop and enhance a writing program that became one of the most
distinguished in the country.
In 1953-54 she took a year off to get a M.A. at the University of Iowa,
where she studied with Robert Lowell and John Berryman. She received
much recognition in her lifetime including awards from the Guggenheim
Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for
the Arts, the Bunting Institute and the American Academy of Arts and
Letters.
Jane Cooper maintained her links with Princeton over the years, but she
lived most of her adult life in New York City. She also spent several
summers at Yaddo and the McDowell Colony, working on her own poetry. Her
first book, The Weather of Six Mornings, appeared in 1969 and was
followed at intervals by four others: Maps and Windows (1974),
Scaffolding: Selected Poems (1984), Green Notebook, Winter Road (1994)
and The Flashboat: Poems Collected and Reclaimed (2000). She was named
State Poet of New York for 1995-97.
She is survived by her brother, John C. Cooper III, of Tucson, AZ, five
nephews, two nieces and three grandnieces. There will be a service at
All Saints Church, Princeton on Saturday, November 3, at 1:00 p.m. All
are welcome. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to the Immune
Deficiency Foundation, 40 W. Chesapeake Avenue, Suite 308, Towson, MD 21204.
(Prepared by the family of Jane M. Cooper, October 2007)
Monday, October 1, 2007
Great American Poetry Anthology
Speaking of anthologies, Larry Ziman sent an invite to my email the other day, promoting the Great American Poetry Anthology.
What's this?
Who is Larry Ziman?
Monday, September 10, 2007
Anthology redux
Thanks to Denise at the New Pages blog for bringing up the question of anthology merit. Although I couldn't find the responses, she did post a follow-up which included a comment that covered at least one of the major issues with the glut of narrowly-focused subject matter anthologies:
From Dinty W. Moore, editor of Brevity :“I honestly don't know the answer, but thanks for asking all of the right questions. If an anthology ‘packager’ doesn't at least have a plan to find distribution, it seems unlikely anyone will read the book other than the authors and the authors' friends. Which begs the question: if a book falls into the forest of books, and no one hears it fall ...”
Of even more significance to me is the screening process (anyone who submits is printed versus a merit based filtering), which is inescapably linked to more issues - will the anthology weather time? are the contributions representative of the highest creative voices or simply representative? is the anthology intended for its contributors or a wider base of readers (the distribution question fits here)? is the anthology simply a revenue generating effort for the editor/publisher (something Denise brings up) or more cynically, a route to false kudos in the land of special interest publishing?
I'm leaning toward a weaning of the anthology glut. Accomplishing this in the era of electric messages is the first challenge.
Friday, September 7, 2007
Praying
Praying
from Mary Oliver, Spiritus 6 (2006).
It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but a doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
###
haiku tries:
Mexican poppies
lean against a bamboo fence,
pink mouths swallow rain.
While the feral cat
eats from my dish, I can gaze
at its wildness.
Snow in the summer -
Cottonycushion Scale
floating on sun rays.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Healy, The Islands Project
Healy, Eloise Klein. The Islands Project. First. Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2007.
What are these islands in the vastness of open ocean and what is their origin? Think: fragments surfacing as separate entities; volcanic eruptions, fractured parts of a whole. Imagine islands as independent chips off the block of the earth table, coalescing into forms with self-sustaining ecostructure and infrastructure; islands as individuals apart from the concentrated countries with their clumps of citizens, cultures, languages, taboos. Healy’s islands evolve separate but equal to their collective counterparts, similar in shape, texture, needs but obstinately, essentially apart, different. And yet, there is origin, the mother, the durable inevitable connection.
The islands of Healy’s newest book of poems are echoes and convolutions of the original islander, Sappho: these are women thriving in self-sufficiency. They are islanders of time and continent, akin in their independence. These islanders include the poet herself, who recognizes a door and whose own “complicated embodiment” contains glimpses, scraps and fragments of adjoining lives. Whose own life of sight, memories, auric echoes, anger, metaphor and physicality embodies and recalls other “isolates aswirl with life.”
And what is this “project,” a term signifying a concerted effort, a mission, goals, specificity? It’s an effort to get at the geography of these landscapes, the origins of these islanders, to rediscover the door, recognize the entranceway.A random rescued piece
becomes a better bit
when joined, when each bit
meets its neighbor and the isolate
is shown to be a rich piece
of an unfolding archipelago
Healy’s mission is to take “the lonely isolate / or broken note,” those scraps of papyrus that remain of Sappho, combine her song with the songs of other islanders, and show “the fragment is not a scrap, not a bitter lover, alone and disconsolate” but part of a greater made whole by the joining.
The mission is to recoup the “lost notes” of Sappho and join them with her twins, to turn echoes from statue to flesh, retune the lyre, let it echo anew into ”the clang of things.” Different music for a different twin who hankers for “hard things,” whose own music led her with a “chrome handle to a different and difficult world.”
To reclaim that echo, Healy arrives “to see for herself,” the silent, empty island that was Sappho’s, a physical quest, the catalyst and a first door toward this recognition. “Nothing is as real as place,” and the beach at Skala Eressou is that “hardscape” origin.
“I am living in a lineage of desire / defined by others before me.” The desire defined in the pages of The Islands Project are living fragments of the poet’s mother, whose thoughts roamed like scattered winds. “She is my other / blasted heritage, beautiful in disarray.” That island of fragmented beauty is twinned with a procession of other women: “The Singing School,” enumerated by their uniqueness and their commonality: “all of them,” the poet says, “have passed down Sappho’s street.”
The map of that lineage extends from the beach at Skala Erresou to Echo Park, where two isolates touch within the hardscape of a car, the heat of their fission fogging its windows, the fog replicating the shape of the unknown, not yet visible form emerging. Here the map turns from the four-year marriage, the solid coding and broad lines of the heterosexual country, takes a plunge into the waters of women-loving, swims out into that vast sea as another islander.
As Healy makes her way toward Sappho, she offers homage to recent and long-gone islanders. Here are the ex-pats of Paris: Barney and Stein, Barnes, Brooks, Colette and De Pougy and Rosa Bonheur with her livescapes of horses, portraits of dogs. And here is the Flower Shop where the blight of AIDS fed on the sap and sweetness of its proprietors. Here is Artemis, not Aphrodite (what heresy to bloom fullgrown out of the brain of a god) and old Walt. And in the back and forth marathon swim toward Sappho, there are those others who protest, who frustrate, who proclaim otherwise, who doubt, who get in the way, who deny.
Isolates have their origins, and Healy searches backward a generation, moves forward a lifetime. She uncovers origins. She affirms the future:Whatever emerges, a poem
written by a lesbian poet
has a heritage of flame,
and no matter what Sappho was,
any woman who “comes out”
springs from a burned life
as a poem.
With The Islands Project, Healy achieves something more than poetry, something more than narrative. Though the story is cohesive, satisfying and encompassing. And many poems stir with gracefulness and strength, honesty and robustness; their tonal quality and diction rising out of the ordinary.
These lyrics are more aligned to ritual, and yet there is a vital freedom coursing through them that denies the stricture of form. The Island Project sings of release. It has the feel of a compilation long-stirring, biding its time and finally emerging.
BUY THE BOOK HERE
Monday, August 20, 2007
Mary Oliver: master as pupil
Oliver, Mary. Why I Wake Early. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.
I have yet to tire of Mary Oliver. In book after book, her words flow by like leaves in a spring, simple, uncluttered, a flash of elegance. Why I Wake Early slowed my enchantment.
Oliver covers the same ground: snapshots of the land outside the writer’s doorstep (and within). The diction keeps its clarity. No excessive modifiers. But there’s a bothersome element in a few of these poems - a fancifulness that I’d not before noticed, as in “The Arrowhead,” where the spirit of its possessor intrudes with too clever, too pat, too predictable dialogue.
“I would rather drink the wind,” he said
I would rather eat mud and die
than steal as you steal,
than lie as you still lie.”
The chastisement is unremarkable, more fitting for middle school reading consciousness. Or Oliver leans too heavily on the easy abstraction, stealing conclusion from her readers. For example, “Beans,” a severely hyphenated prose poem, concludes with this question: But, what about virtue? as if filling in the blank for the dull witted reader.
But Oliver redeems herself with the perfectly clean, evocative glimpse of “The Snow Cricket,” where her lines row across the page in spontaneous rhythm, with the reader as passenger, eyes open to her scene. There is the cricket, its “little mouth-cave,“ and the swell of loneliness as it sits “pale and humped” all evening in its “leafy hut in the honeysuckle.” Oliver entrances again. She pours out the stream of her vision uncluttered by concepts. She visits Blackwater Pond, the font of her visions, to introduce gentleman snake with his “lazy wake” and “narrow mouth,” using just enough verbiage, a modest modifier or two, just enough to open and point the lens of the readers’ sight. We follow her in the path of a beetle as it makes our narrow, busy, glum lives more destitute with its “sighing,” its “humming,” its existence nestled against the soft undersides of a fragrant flower. This is irresistible Oliver.
Is she a pantheist or a Romantic with her glorification of the simplest living being? More than anything, she is a storyteller. Her lyrical apologues show us the live lore. And if at times, her pen is a hammer or her words are bulbs of explanation or if she invokes a machinating “He” of biblical standard, then this is just the writer seeping in, a blunt aside. I can live with it - the master as occasional pupil is far more reassuring than alienating.
Saturday, August 4, 2007
Blue Pastures: Oliver's finest, again
Oliver, Mary. Blue Pastures. First. San Diego: A Harvest Original, Harcourt, Inc., 1995.
Just as I’d thought that I’d imbibed the sweetness and the crust of Mary Oliver, traced her thoughts on the craft of writing, believed I had an inkling of what moved her, along comes Blue Pastures, a gift dropped into my hands.
Here is another Oliver: the truant school kid in Ohio, hauling Walt Whitman in her backpack, the high school grad who was privy to the “secrets” of Edna St. Vincent Millay. In Blue Pastures, there is also the familiar naturalist, trekking for miles in search of an owl’s nest, and the poet of the ponds and coves, of Provincetown beaches, cataloguing the detritus of Herring Cove, the “bright trash of the past,” and giving us her “Sand Dabs,” entry moments that may or may not lead to a finished poem.
This collection of vignettes is about recollection and revelation. In “Staying Alive,” the poet I’d thought so private says:Children are powerless, and in difficult situations they are the victims of every sorrow and mischance and rage around them, for children feel all of these things but without any of the ability that adults have to change them. Whatever can take a child beyond such circumstances, therefore, is an alleviation and a blessing.
I quickly found for myself two such blessings - the natural world, and the world of writing: literature. These were the gates through which I vanished from a difficult place.
But this is not a story about victim or anger or the sludge of grievance. Far from it. This is Oliver’s remedy: “… having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.” So much for the critics who want to contain her in the realm of “nature poet” or “romantic poet.” So much for the harpies who call her asocial, who clamor for human messiness in her lines. Oliver found her cure in the wellspring of adjacent worlds: writing and nature.
Blue Pastures teems like a school of brilliant fish; it has the luster of an eggplant, supple and smooth and dark. Her language mimics the lyricism of her verse: elegant and simple. She observes and absorbs and shines back to us what she sees. She is the Magician that channels, using the wand of the pen. This collection is testament to her urge to not just write but to witness, and not just witness but to become participant in what’s out there. As Oliver says: “It is the instant I try to catch, … not the comment, not the thought.”
Evaluating this book, in the scheme of other Mary Oliver books I have read, I want to call it the finest. But this unreserved enthusiasm comes each time I get a taste of Mary Oliver. It’s immediate and it endures. So that this response illustrates what Oliver calls the service of poems: “I look for them to be ongoing presences within my life, not interludes-not places apart.”
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Beauty and Brutality: Facts About the Moon
Dorianne Laux. Facts About the Moon. First Edition. NY, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.
The title poem appears midway in Laux's newest collection, a deliberate placement to emphasize not so much the tone but the archetypal drive of this work.
The poem begins in a plain-spoken literal way: "The moon is backing away from us / an inch and a half a year," then drifts toward a personification in which the speaker tells the reader:I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling
Laux personalizes the equation of a grieving mother into the image of such a being, "romanticizing" her culprit of a son. A mother who has "forgotten the bruises and booze," is coupled with a cold-eyed observer who wants to "slap her back to sanity" until the observer recognizes the futility. There's no logic in the room for "you know love when you see it, / you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull."
around alone in space without
her milky planet, her only love, a mother
who's lost a child, a bad child,
a greedy child or maybe a grown boy
who's murdered and raped
Facts About the Moon follows a similar structure: poems of literal image and personification ("The Trees"); poems of anchored abstracts and allegory ("Democracy," "The Ravens of Denali"). Again and again, she portrays the "brutal pull" of love, whether in her lyric to a fallen hummingbird or the narrative journey leading to a brother's grave.
The "lunar strength" emerges in poems such as "Moon in the Window" or in the aching couplets, the catalog of "What's Broken." She celebrates it in odes to a lover ("Face Poem," "Kissing Again," "Vacation Sex") and in her delicate lyrics to nature ("Cello," "Mornming Song," "Starling," "Come Spring" and "The Life of Trees").
Laux makes the mundane valuable, incorporates those things that determine everyday order and rhythm: jigsaw puzzles and laundry. She juxtaposes the tedium of housework with what matters: "the bleachy,/ waxy, soapy perfume of spring."
Facts About the Moon contains the variety and brutality of what is under the sun, in motion across the earth, characterized by a babysitter suckling her eight year-old charge, a pool hall starlet and sisters bonding: "Pretending we were beautiful,/ pretending we were dead." The pedophile father, Fred the German neighbor, symbol and antithesis of the Holocaust, the shadow of Mathew Shepard, strung up and left for dead - all these citizens of earth are gathered together in this volume, anchored by the moon and undone by the moon. In the background, the soothing, patient perfection of this planet's wildness. These are the facts, brutal and common, of the moon.
