"To These Eyes," W.S. Merwin.
"If a Clown," Stephen Dunn.
"At Thomas Merton's Grave," Spencer Reece.
"I Don't Buy It," Wendy Videlock.
When the words we want to say don't come out right or when we can't find the words to describe how we feel, it's good we get more chances to say more words. Eventually, we figure, we have to find our true voices.
For Christmas, Lori gave me a subscription to the Poetry Foundation's Poetry magazine. I've read one issue so far, and that issue delivered on all of my hopes. So, I've collected my favorite moments here. Thank you to the magazine for putting all its content online! From December's issue:
Interview with Lucie Brock-Brodio: "On fragmenting: I’m in love with the idea that a poem should always try to be smaller than itself. The white space should be as detailed and passionate as that which is said aloud."
Mary Karr's "Loony Bin Basketball: For Phil Jackson." A joy to read.
Karr talking about the poem: "Our autonomic nervous system breathes for most of us, and a priest friend told me once, when I asked him how I was supposed to know God’s will for me, that I should see what is. If you’re breathing, just presume you’re supposed to be alive and start looking around for some way to make yourself useful."
Sharon Dolin: "How do you find something worth saying? / How do you find desire to find desire / to find something worth saying?"
Dana Levin's "At the End of My Hours." The ending is beautiful.
Michael Lista's "Today's Special." I liked this poem so much but wasn't sure why. Then I read the interview with him, and it turned out it was about a TV show I'd watched as a child. Sure, Lista was using the reference to help frame the atmosphere during a Canadian serial killer's spree. But still good.
(Are you finished reading this post? Have you not clicked on everything? Stop right where you are, my friend, and go back and click some more.)
The Poetry Foundation is based in Chicago, and Chicago is a cold place. So, it's always good when the Poem of the Day feed people there break from selections of frozen branches and hearts and think warm thoughts. Three recent favorites: "To the New Year," "Snowflake" and "The Love Cook."
"Dear Reader" by Rita Mae Reese. "You have forgotten it all. / You have forgotten your name, / where you lived, who you / loved, why."
"The Present" by Jim Harrison. "The cost of flight is landing."
"Prayer" by Lia Purpura. Poem is at the very bottom of that link.
"Hide and Seek" by Kay Ryan. A modicum of words goes so far in Ryan's hands. Saw her read Monday night at the Folger for a celebration of Emily Dickinson's birthday, and she offered up this line: "Greatness isn't doing it all right. It's doing it right at all." Post on that night hopefully to come.
I read the four poems in different, unlikely moments of sitting still. All four made me want to sit still more often and find deeper levels of stillness. The way time goes, the more I want to stop more time from arriving. I don't have anything against time. I am just having trouble keeping up with it.
Friend Dave in Japan was googling "donkey sauce" last week after reading the New York Times' scathing, wild, beautiful review of Fieri's new spot. On the first screen of results, he came across my blog post, quoting from the Times and linking directly to the piece. Dave turned out not to be the only one. This blog got some 400 extra hits from Google because I mentioned donkey sauce in my post's headline. On that day, I doubted the Internet.
But restoring my faith in digital worlds was the fact that The Paris Review has a poetry blog, and Lori happened to see the blog's post remembering Gilbert and emailed it to me. Tinker to Evers to Chance. One line the post quoted from Gilbert was, "If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, we should give thanks that the end had magnitude." The greatness of that line led to the full poem, "A Brief for the Defense," which made my hour. The next line is "We must admit there will be music despite everything."
"Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew." Three-plus years ago, I read Jack Gilbert's poem "Failing and Flying," and that line was how it began. Despite not keeping the poem in my bookmarks or among the cut-out collection on my refrigerator, I've never forgotten that line. When it's come to mind, I've always felt as though I'd read the poem just a month or two prior.
Gilbert died Tuesday, at 87, a day after the Los Angeles Times published a moving story about the friends keeping poetry in his life amid a dementia decline. How better to thank someone who's kept his poetry in your life?
"All you / have to lose / is one / connection / and the mind / uncouples / all the way back." -Kay Ryan, on focused lives, in "A Hundred Bolts of Satin."
Both, of course, came in my beloved Poetry Foundation "Poem of the Day" feed last week. The first was "Sleeping with the Dictionary" by Harryette Mullen, and the second was "The Lie" by Don Patterson. First lines? "I beg to dicker with my silver-tongued companion, whose lips are ready to read my shining gloss." And: "As was my custom, I’d risen a full hour before the house had woken to make sure that everything was in order with The Lie, his drip changed and his shackles all secure." I tried to get away. Couldn't.
Temperatures have been bouncing between 70 and 30 in the last week, and the first poem I've read this morning and the first song I've heard this morning fit the slow-but-indelicate switchbacks. The poem is William Butler Yeats' The Fisherman. "Before I am old / I shall have written him one / Poem maybe as cold / And passionate as the dawn." The song, from friend Casey's Crumbler, is a violin cover of Frank Ocean's Thinking About You.
Both the text and the tune are sad, but I'm generally happy. The happy is a tired happy, though. What these pieces offer me now is their search for precision. "Generally" is vague, showing the tired and not realizing so until sentences later. Being happy is okay. Appreciating the feeling is better.
How much have I enjoyed reading Dean Young's Elegy on Toy Piano poems? Very much. Who knows what the other people on the Metro must think, with a cover so strange on a paperback so thin. But the book has accompanied me on my rides the past couple weeks, and no one has said anything. Except in my head where I've been reading every poem aloud.
The collection — and Dean Young in general — fits the train. When there isn't silence, there are noises, bodies and parcels from every direction. But there is some silence, and life (and poems) are unexplainable without it.
Favorites?
Original Monkey. "I'm working on my vanishing point. / I'm practicing my zenith." Ghost Gash (not online). "You'll have maybe forty dollar, maybe a roadmap of Vermont, only an inkling of what you're escaping…." Facet. "I can’t make it any clearer than that / and stay drunk." Alarm Clock (not online). "Clank of the lightning factory, clank / of the leopard's leash."
Peach Farm. "How far we are from kissing / our damage deposit goodbye." Whirlpool Suite (not online). "Every day is crash day." Bathed in Dust and Ash. "So the shadows vanish and return / carrying their young in their jaws…." Elegy on Toy Piano. "The injured gazelle falls behind the / herd. One wild last enjambment." Last Words. "What if everyone's combined into one big poem / and I'm stuck with a preposition?" And another, Flamenco, which cannot be quoted well and instead must be danced in one's head.
