Author: taylor mardis katz

poeming & farming in the hearty hills of vermont

Poem that I have memorized (Langston Hughes).

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Harlem Sweeties

Have you dug the spill
Of Sugar Hill?
Cast your gims
On this sepia thrill:
Brown sugar lassie,
Caramel treat,
Honey-gold baby
Sweet enough to eat.
Peach-skinned girlie,
Coffee and cream,
Chocolate darling
Out of a dream.
Walnut tinted
Or cocoa brown,
Pomegranate-lipped
Pride of the town.
Rich cream-colored
To plum-tinted black,
Feminine sweetness
In Harlem’s no lack.
Glow of the quince
To blush of the rose.
Persimmon bronze
To cinnamon toes.
Blackberry cordial,
Virginia Dare wine—
All those sweet colors
Flavor Harlem of mine!
Walnut or cocoa,
Let me repeat:
Caramel, brown sugar,
A chocolate treat.
Molasses taffy,
Coffee and cream,
Licorice, clove, cinnamon
To a honey-brown dream.
Ginger, wine-gold,
Persimmon, blackberry,
All through the spectrum
Harlem girls vary—
So if you want to know beauty’s
Rainbow-sweet thrill,
Stroll down luscious,
Delicious, fine Sugar Hill.

Poem (William Matthews).

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Supper

Tuesday. An idle rain so sparse
and distracted it might be brushing its hair
by a window which nobody passes.
So much of life is spent in a vague
readiness that when we catch ourselves at it
we’re a little ashamed, and pretend
to have been thoughtful. Good thing the soup’s
been on all afternoon—the beans releasing
their starchy fetor, and the onions, limp
and nearly translucent now that the rain
has stopped and the first scents of dusk
are following soup’s good news upstairs.

True Stories (Mine).

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I attended a wedding this weekend. A beautiful wedding to be exact, complete with dancing, overmuch delicious food, mother nature’s offerings (it was in Lake Tahoe) and a lot of serious, goodtime chatting. Below are some of the responses to my issuing a statement along the lines of “I’m getting my MFA in poetry.”

* * *

Look at this setting—the type of scene you write a poem about, eh?

The last time I read a poem was in Sixth Grade. It was my own poem. I wrote it for Emily Eisenberg, and it was called “Beautiful This.” It was about all the things that are beautiful in the world and how she is one of them, and how she should notice all the other beautiful things around her. I wrote it for her so that she’d want to be my girlfriend. She didn’t want to be my girlfriend. I haven’t read or written a poem since.

So after you finish your MFA, what do you want to be?

{{45 second baffled silence accompanied by a sightless stare}}

Poetry! That’s lovely. I have a good friend that’s a poet. He’s actually not a poet; he works for the IRS. He writes poems for…for therapy, I guess.

Let me introduce you to Taylor, and since her mother’s not here, I will have to tell you myself that she was the Poet Laureate of Connecticut. And her father is an amazing athlete, a real runner and he used to be a great tennis player, too. Does he still play, Taylor?

I’m a poet, too. Did you hear my rap at the party?

I took two Creative Writing classes in college. We read each other’s poems out loud and then we talked about them and I’ve never done anything like that again.

I have a friend who got her MFA in Creative Writing! She’s in Zimbabwe now…or is it Ecuador? {Pause.} Anyway, she’s really nice.

Where are the poems?

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The poems wrote their grandmother a letter, but their stamp was out of date by a penny.
The poems let the strawberry preserves get moldy and were scolded (it was home made!).
The poems antagonized each other because they loved each other fitfully and had to keep their hearts on the defensive.
The poems performed songs in wire but they remain unrecorded.
The poems looked so much like Denzel Washington they got kidnapped for ransom (3 million).
They poems became raw food vegans; the poems lost all their friends.
The poems pushed the cobbler’s price so low that after they left he considered early retirement. (But the poems’ moccasins have thick soles again.)
The poems filled out a March Madness bracket too early and got booed off the stage.
The poems mined their lungs for hymns.
The poems read “Into the Wild” while on summer vacation and now they’re out there…somewhere.
The poems could not decide who they liked more: Andre 3000 or Big Boi. The poems don’t know how they will ever decide.
The poems got lost in a canyon tunnel. Did the rats eat the poems?
The poems asked Eoin Cahill if you have to be tortured in order to be an artist, and he said, “If you’re not suffering, you’re not paying attention.” The poems were sitting shotgun. And nodding.
The poems expelled air from their orifices and were called Quite Crude.
The poems shaved off their eyebrows and broke a friend’s bed.
The poems enjoyed themselves by sharing a Dark Chocolate Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup in the car while listening to Ray Charles.
The poems made verbs out of infrequently-used nouns.
The poems missed dead people so much they found it difficult to talk to the living.
The poems succumbed to the constancy of Facebook and updated their status.
The poems wanted to get kissed like lovers but got slapped like thieves.
The poems imagined a ship where all their trinkets would be stored tightly and well, and she arrived in their harbor.
The poems reenacted the last scene of “Grapes of Wrath,” and some ladies were scandalized.
The poems partook in crawdads, but against their will.
The poems pursed their lips and therefore missed their mothers.
The poems wore their helmets.
The poems slipped everyone a love note when leaving, but no one ever wrote back.
The poems broke it off because she wasn’t Jewish.
The poems grew like figs on trees, but were ripe too quickly, and all at once.
The poems surmised that air conditioners were a major cause of the current lack of friendly sociability.
The poems picketed against their estrangement.

The poems picketed but they forgot their signs and the poems couldn’t find any paint to make new ones and it started to rain and no one was listening anyway and all the crows gathered around the poems like the Sharks or Jets from “West Side Story” and the poems threw up their arms and showed their unshavenness and missed the stopsign graffiti of their hometown and the minor loves they never nodded to and the smell of running through a sprinkler and the poems went home to put their heads on their pillows and did not wake until it was dark, until around the hour when everyone they loved had decided they would lay their heads down, too.

Prose poem (mine).

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Charoset

 

You start with two granny smiths, or, you know, another hard, tart, apple-type. I do all the Making and your grandpa does the Chopping. So two granny smiths, walnuts, raisins, or this-year-I’m-using-cranberries. After it’s all chopped you add the honey—I have some cinnamon honey this year—and some cinnamon sugar if you have it and then you add a little sweet kosher wine. I always have a bottle of sweet kosher wine around so you just add that in. Then you mix it all together, all chopped, and you should put it away for a little while if you have time, because, you know sweetie, it gets better sitting with itself like that.

Poem.

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Piazza San Marco

Imagine for yourself what was in my heart
I was in Venice for the very first time
Piazza San Marco
With a thousand lire in my pocket
About a thousand lire
The pigeons were drunk on music
You know Venice better than I do
You know the Italians
Their music their pigeons
I was totally adrift
At nine o’clock it suddenly occurred to me
That I hadn’t eaten since the day before
The day before I had an orange for lunch
I stop a woman
She keeps on going
I’m lucky I bump into another
She laughs I laugh
But even before I have a line
ready in my mind
I remember I’m in Italy
And don’t know the language
I catch a pigeon by the wing
It claps me on my hat and flies off
Imagine for yourself
What was in my heart
I was in Venice for the very first time
With a thousand lire in my pocket

Jean-Piere Rosnay (French poet)

The News

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TaylorMardisKatz poetry updates for the week:

1. Rejected by another literary magazine. Woo-hoo.

2. I am now a reader for a San Diego poetry press called Cooper Dillon! I met the editor in Denver at a literary conference, and immediately volunteered my free poem-reading skills.  Full-length poetry submissions now clog my inbox, and I don’t hate it.

3. Favorite poem this week found here (it’s too long to insert into post, but worth the effort I promise!).

4. Below, a poem sent to me by a good, good friend.

Something I Know About Her

by Gerald W. Barrax

She touches when she talks–
must touch to smooth out syntax with her fingertips,
must lay on her hand to hear her echo,
to feel the words you don’t speak
below the ones you do.

What she means by it is warm,
if she touches you, listen:
to surprise her at it
would be like waking a sleepwalker
between two dreams–
would trap her in this tedious
world of mere words.

* * *

Budding Phenomenom

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A pattern has developed in my life where people I know very well or know only slightly request, sometimes even demand, that I recommend poetry to them. Poets, books, poems–I am milked for my knowledge of this nearly-obscure art form. I do love to respond–to introduce someone to a literary world that not enough people think they can enjoy–and one that I spend an enormous amount of time in. I hope that everyone, at some point, believes it is their time to begin reading poems. But at the same time, this is an impossible request. It’s like someone saying, “So I’ve never listened to music before–who’s good?” Recommending poems or poets is so difficult because basically I’m just handing out what I like and hoping others will like it, too. I don’t really tailor it to each person–I couldn’t. Most people have no sense what type of poems they like, so I have nothing to go off of besides for my own inclinations and a little bit of trying to match someone’s personality or current situation up with a poet (and that’s f’ing hard!).

The advice I would like to give in each person in these instances goes something like this: Go into a bookstore. Grab a book of poetry that looks enticing off the shelf. Read a poem. Do you like it? Read another from that book. Continue. If you like the first five or so that you read, buy it; you’ll likley enjoy the rest. If you don’t like any of the first couple of poems you read, reshelf that book, grab another, and repeat.

I have no idea what poems were meant for people. Since poetry is so sidelined and so few people read it, it’s treated like a genre that has more distinguishable “bests” than other genres. But poetry is just as much about personal taste as any art. In addition, certain poems or poets can be especially meaningful/helpful/interesting based on what mindset someone is in at that moment. Certain poets I’ve been enamored of don’t impress me when I look back on them–probably because at that point in time, they were providing necessary nourishment for something I’m not lacking in anymore. Or something.

The point is: poetry is not as menacing as everyone treats it. As my friend Lilah would say, Poetry has a frush on you (friend-crush).  I’m happy to continue recommending poetry entranceways to people, but I just want to put it out there that although I’m always willing to help, I’m really not necessary–who knows, I might even ruin some people who could have been great poetry lovers with my recommendations.  So go out there and tackle those p-words yourself. And then we can talk about it. And I’ll be thrilled.

(check out www.savagechickens.com for more good cartoons)