Category: poetry alive

Poet of today (John Berryman).

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The excerpt below is from a poem entitled “In Loving Memory of the Late Author of Dream Songs.” It was written by John Berryman’s good friend, William Meredith. William Meredith taught at Connecticut College for many years, and when he died our school held a memorial for him. I  picked up Richard Wilbur at his house in Connecticut in my 1998 Toyota Camry LXE so that he could read a poem at Meredith’s memorial service. His house was in the beautiful Connecticut countryside, and I was a little early so a woman who I assumed was his caretaker had me wait in the sitting room. It was late autumn. I sat on a very stiff couch and his Siamese cats entered while I waited, upright on the sofa: two of them. They stared into my soul with their four blue eyes. Richard Wilbur was much easier to be around than his cats. We talked about weather and dangerous curves of the highway, and he told me a story that took place in Key West, and he told me another story where the punch line involved some sentence which proved a poet he admired knew Latin even better than he did. His voice was very soft and I did not mention that I wrote poetry, or that I had found poetry relatively recently and now knew I had to study it and  keep writing poems. I stole a line from something he said to me during that car ride and put it in a poem, but I changed the phrase by taking out a word, and I didn’t credit him, though there’s an invisible footnote there that only I can see. I can show you to that poem, it’s in my thesis.  It’s a love poem, but that doesn’t help you much: they all are, especially the ones since the thesis.

Do we wave back now, or what do we do?
You were never reluctant to instruct.
I do what’s in character, I look for things
to praise on the riverbanks and I praise them.
We are all relicts, of some great joy, wearing black,
but this book is full of marvelous songs.
Don’t let us contract your dread recidivism
and start falling from our own iron railings.
Wave from the fat book again, make us wave back.

We are all relicts of some great joy, some of us even newer than relics–some of us perhaps just made.

Home poem (mine).

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An Almanac
after Schuyler

The yeasty closet where
the wine is kept. The
greasy iron skillet in its
allday dress of fat. The
soap that’s lengthened
by dilution. The sole
Haggadah on the shelf
above the mugs. It’s
illustrated. The empty
bourbon bottles staunch
in the last days of their
labels. The Buddha’s
mounted on a spoke.
The wok utensils, the
tipping photos on the
stained refrigerator’s
doors. Four avocadoes
in the highest hanging
basket. Four chairs of
lusty patterned velvet.
The teapot with its half
-filled silver belly. The
poppy flowers sipping
pertly in a liquor glass.
The books that wait for
us below the toaster.
The drying rag strung
through the grip of
the refrigerator. Dried
wildflowers in a tea
decanter atop the tallest
cabinets. There’s tape left
on the window from the
flier for the party. The
doubled over tablecloth
with specks of soup and
breakfast. Three pens
from which to choose
from. The pinkish salt
and labeled pepper. A
clock that’s impossible
to hook back on its
nail. It’s slow. We’re
slow to change its
battery. The tiny bowls
of seeds that could
be planted. The tapestry
of red batik: naked
woman with the stars
that mingle with her
hair (the artist is in
residence). The wire
rooster on the wall above
the table. The wooden
bowl of over twenty
oranges. The burner
knobs all turned to
OFF. The blue bread
bag hanging from a
tiny cabinet knob, full
of plastics to reuse. The
folded-open magazines
in piles by the window.
Peacock feathers fanning
from the shelves of
spices. Bananas green
as limes. Olive oil leaned
against the vinegar because
they’re standing on a
towel. And another
bottle joins them. At least
one door or drawer
remains ajar. A wooden
bowl for farm-picked
lunches drying in the
rack. And all the other
drying bowls. And forks
and used containers.
The canister of coffee,
salmon pink with its
spoon stained brown.
I can smell it when I
walk into the bathroom.
The tiny colored flags
above the kitchen door.
The blinds that loosen
but we tighten them back
up. The skinny bathroom
door. The red tin colored
like a phone booth for
change found on the
floor. Knives stiff and
at attention on their
magnet, and the print
of wood and ink and
the cloaklike steam
that coats the windows
in the winter when
there’s roasting beets
or casserole. If the
sun is coming in, it’s
early. If both the blinds
are closed then the
golden lock is locked

Books; a quote; photographs. Poetry.

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Somehow, even after 7 hours in the studio today (4 art books due very, very soon), I still love books and writing so much that it’s hard for me to express it in words. I’ll try something James Dickey said:

What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe.

And then there’s this book I was given, a tiny little thing, with tiny poems letterpressed into its pages, poems I feel I almost wrote myself (and after taking this book arts class, I actually COULD make this book myself [!!]):

I can’t seem to write anything small these days. I am long-winded, full of things to say, full of poems despite how much I must do in the realm of schoolwork every day to insure that by the time I board a plane to Nashville, on May 11th, everything will be finished. It will be gloriously bound, pressed, researched, written, edited, stapled, sent, dropped off, handed in, handed over, FINISHED!

Passover prose poem (mine).

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You know I used to play tennis with Robin Williams’ mother. She had her own way she liked to play: we would just hit the ball back and forth, no games, no sets, and sometimes it would finish and someone would get a point or they wouldn’t. She was really a very quirky woman, a real character, I think that’s where he got his sense of humor from. She used to put Band-Aids on the sides of her eyes like this to give herself “facelifts.” And she had this great story about her friend. This friend never did laundry because she was always playing tennis! And this went on for many weeks and her husband was, you can understand, getting a little annoyed with her, he said, I don’t even have any clean socks! But she loved playing tennis so much that she never had time to wash their clothes! So one day what she did was she took all of their socks, and she put them all in the dryer! She didn’t even wash them first! And then they all went back in the drawer! God knows if her husband even noticed!

On erotic power (Lorde).

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Audre Lorde, from her essay ” The Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power”:

For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.

It feels very good to read something that reverberates so strongly in my bones.

Happy poem in your pocket day (April 14)!

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Today I celebrated a holiday that no one ever seems to believe is actually real. The night before this day each year, I stay up as late as I need to writing poems on stationery emblazoned with my name in purple script (thank you, Jeannie Scheinin). Check out these pocket-sized poem PDFs, if you want one of your own.

If I saw you today, I gave you a poem. Here’s the poem I gave to Misha today.

Letter Poem #3

The night is quiet
as a kettle drum
the bullfrog basses
tuning up. After
swimming, after sup-
per, a Tarzan movie,
dishes, a smoke. One
planet and I
wish. No need
of words. Just
you, or rather,
us. The stars tonight
in pale dark space
are clover flowers
in a lawn the expanding
universe in which
we love it is
our home. So many
galaxies and you my
bright particular,
my star, my sun, my
other self, my bet-
ter half, my one

-James Schuyler