The Best American Poetry

Dear Life: Still Here! (by Jenny Factor)

Stacey Harwood's important post earlier this week put me in mind of James Wright. A poet and exemplar of endurance. A sturdy fragile voice. Perhaps I'm looking for an antidote. Perhaps I'm just looking. In any event, I was reminded this morning of his "Northern Pike". 

This is one to read slowly to oneself, twice-in-a-row. (It's an argument with the self, I think...). It works best on a kind of rhythmic repetition...

Northern Pike

All right. Try this,
Then. Every body
I know and care for,
And every body
Else is going
To die in a loneliness
I can't imagine and a pain
I don't know. We had
To go on living. We
Untangled the net, we slit
The body of this fish
Open from the hinge of the tail
To a place beneath the chin
I wish I could sing of.
I would just as soon we let
The living go on living.
An old poet whom we believe in
Said the same thing, and so
We paused among the dark cattails and prayed
For the muskrats,
For the ripples below their tails,
For the little movements that we knew the crawdads were making
under water,
For the right-hand wrist of my cousin who is a policeman.
We prayed for the game warden's blindness.
We prayed for the road home.
We ate the fish.
There must be something very beautiful in my body,
I am so happy.

       --  James Wright

Mary Oliver once wrote of those poets and other artists who commit suicide, "I forgive them/their unhappiness.../...for walking out of the world./But I don't forgive them.../for taking off their veils/and dancing for death. for hurtling/toward oblivion/on the sharp blades/of their exquisite poems, saying:/this is the way/// I was, of course, all that time/coming along/behind them, and listening/for advice. She concludes "Members of the Tribe" from her 1986 Dream Work with these lines that remind me of my own high school darkness, and how, on the day after, I'd feel so light my head and shoulders just floating up without any of the ego or striving left in me:

And the man who merely
washed Michelangelo's brushes, kneeling
on the damp bricks, staring
every day at the colors pouring out of them,

lived to be a hundred years old.

So here's a toast...To the muskrats. To the game warden's blindness. And to life. Inventive. Fragile. Liveable.

L'chayim!

A Special Post for Jenny Factor (by Laura Orem)

Maybe Dats Your Pwoblem Too
(by Jim Hall)

All my pwoblems who knows,
maybe evwybody's pwoblems is due to da fact,
due to da awful twuth dat I am
SPIDERMAN.

I know, I know.
All da dumb jokes:
No flies on you, ha ha,
and da ones about what do I do wit all doze extwa legs in bed.

Well, dat's funny yeah. But you twy being
SPIDERMAN for a month or two.
Go ahead.

You get doze cwazy calls fwom da Gubbener
askin you to twap some booglar
who's only twying to wip off color TV sets.

Now, what do I cawre about TV sets?
But I pull on da suit, da stinkin suit,
wit da sucker cups on da fingers,
and get my wopes and wittle bundle of equipment
and den I go flying like cwazy
acwoss da town fwom woof top to woof top.

Till der he is.
Some poor dumb color TV slob
and I fall on him and we westle a widdle
until I get him all woped.

So big deal. You tink when you
SPIDERMAN
der's sometin big going to happen to you.

Well, I tell you what.
It don't happen dat way.
Nuttin happens.
Gubbener calls, I go.
Bwing him to powice,
Gubbener calls again,
like dat over and over.

I tink I twy sometin diffunt.
I tink I twy sometin excitin like wacing cawrs.
Sometin to make my heart beat at a difwent wate.

But den you just can't quit being sometin like
SPIDERMAN.
You SPIDERMAN for life.
Fowever.
I can't even buin my suit.
It won't buin.
It's fwame wesistent.

So maybe dat's youwr pwoblem too, who knows.

Maybe dat's da whole pwoblem wif evwytin.
Nobody can buin der suits, dey all fwame wesistent.
Who knows?

Poets on Obama's First 100 Days (by Jenny Factor)

A Dispatch from Day 23...President's Day is right around the corner. But one President shows up every single day.

 

Check out "Starting Today: Poems for the First 100 Days", an evolving online collection of poems inspired by Barack Obama's first 100 days in office. Launched the day of the inauguration, the First 100 Days is the idea of writers Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker, who asked ninety-eight other writers to each take on a single day of these first one hundred, and write a timely poem to reflect on each day of grace. The writers involved in the project are asked not to write their poems in advance, but rather, to allow their poems to reflect the date they've been assigned. Read the poems by Major Jackson, Rachel Zucker, Leslea Newman, and Cate Marvin right now.

Which poet is up next? It's always a surprise....

John Updike at 40 (by Jenny Factor)

Four weeks from tonight, if I catapult over some few tiny remaining hurdles (two short reports, an interview, and a scary party—in fact, even if I don’t jump the hurdles), one way or the other, I will turn 40. Forty years old—neither wise nor ready—but at least, I’ve learned to laugh more of the time.

The year my father turned 40, I was 16 years old. I wrote John Updike a fan letter—not on my own behalf, but on his. 

“My father reads your books,” I told him. “My father—who incidentally is, like you, a Harvard man—reads your books and thinks about them and takes them apart and shares them with me. And what I think he’d like best of all for his fortieth birthday would be for you to send him—well, even just your signature.”

I was a high-school sophomore or junior—and my father knew his Updike: The Centaur, The Rabbits, several volumes of short-stories. At the time, I could rattle the books off in order. It was only 1985—there were still a manageable number.

I’d take them down from the locked bookshelf one-by-one with his blessing, and read them for insight…into people, into grown men, into the funny, sentimental, brilliant and complex man my father was (and is). I read them to learn the enemy, boys, and the chess board—people, adults, interactions, the tension of wanting freedom, of wanting connection, of never holding onto one’s own wants quite long enough. I read them to learn the Road.

The punchline of this story is that John Updike wrote back! 

Dorothy Parker (by Jenny Factor)

Got a New Years' Resolution? Here's what poet Dorothy Parker* might have to say...

Observation

If I don't drive around the park,
I'm pretty sure to make my mark.
If I'm in bed each night by ten,
I may get back my looks again,
If I abstain from fun and such,
I'll probably amount to much,
But I shall stay the way I am,

Because I do not give a damn.

--Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)

Wishing you all the best in 2009 and beyond!

-J.F.

*Little-Known Note: Once upon a time, famous New Yorker Parker was a west-coast poet. You can read about the Los-Angeles-based events of the Dorothy Parker Society here. Thanks to Adrienne Crew for putting Parker on the L.A. map!

Looking Back at 2008: Mahmoud Darwish (by Jenny Factor)

Before we say goodbye to 2008, I'd like to take a moment to remember poet, Mahmoud Darwish. A fellow Piscean (born March 13, 1941), Darwish died in August 2008 in the United States. He was 67 years old. As a Palestinian poet, Darwish wrote with complexity and honesty from an intersection of lived experience and politics.

Here is an original translation of one of his poems by one of my favorite American poets, Marilyn Hacker:

Now in Exile

Now, in exile – yes, at home
in the seventh decade of a brief life
they light candles for you.

Be joyful, yes, as calm as you can be
a stupid death went astray on the cluttered road
and left you a respite.

Above the ruins, an inquisitive moon
laughs like a fool.
Don't think he's coming closer to welcome you.

Like the new month of March,
as part of her endless task,
she has given the trees back their names of nostalgia
and neglected you.

Toast the breaking of the glass, then, with your friends.
In your sixties, you won't find
a leftover tomorrow
to carry on the shoulder of a song
… and let it carry you.

Say to life, as behooves an experienced poet:
Walk lightly, like those women aware
of their enchantments
and their guile.  Each one makes her secret plea:
Now I am yours ! How handsome you are !

O life, walk lightly, so that I can see
your imperfection.  I had so forgotten you
in the torment of my quest for you, for me.
And each time that I unravelled one of your secrets
you said to me, harshly : Oh, ignorant !

Say to absence : you let me diminish
and I have come --- to perfect you !

  -Mahmoud Darwish
                                tr. Marilyn Hacker

A Poetic Geometry of the Holidays (by Jenny Factor)

What is it about the circle that suggests itself as a poem form for a sacred season? 

I'm thinking here of a beautiful Christmas "garland" by Marilyn Hacker, called "A Christmas Crown." It begins, "Son of the dark solstice descends the tree/into the winter city" and ends six sonnets later with "The children sing/below our gossip. Roast and fruit and wine/and smoke mix in the air near dinnertime./The guests file foodward while the darkening/sun of the dark solstice descends the tree."

Long ago last spring, when the season was all shoots and ladders, poetry correspondent Mitch Sisskind posted a Poetic Term of the Day. He instructed us that Serpentine Verses are poems comprised of lines that begin and end with the same word. BAP leader extraordinaire, David Lehman, then demonstrated with a serpentine verse of his own in the Comments section. Such poetry circles make little loops out of each line; links in a chain disconnected from each subsequent link. Mirror poems, by contrast, are one bigger Circle: their end words repeat in reverse order, iterating themselves on the way in and the way out. 

So here in the Spirit of the Circle is a modified depiction of both these poetic shapes by long-dead genius, George Herbert. His "A Wreath" turns the serpentine line progressive, connecting each chunk of chain to the one that follows, and finally clasping it around with a complete mirror. Here it goes:

A Wreath
A wreathed garland of deserved praise,
Of praise deserved, unto thee I give,
I give to thee, who knowest all my ways,
My crooked winding ways, wherein I live,
Wherein I die, not live: for life is straight,
Straight as a line, and ever tends to thee,
To thee, who art more far above deceit
Then deceit seems above simplicity.
Give me simplicity, that I may live,
So live and like, that I may know they ways,
Know them and practice them: then shall I give
For this poor wreath, give thee a crown of praise.

So, Writers, as we shoot and ladder forward into 2009, here's my wish for you all: a season that circles as it climbs, that mirrors only the best. As the short days fade, Writers write: write and bloom.

-J.F.

Scandal and Scenery: Make your Poetry Video! (by Jenny Factor)

Last Wednesday. Overcast. A day so drippy, so bit-dreary that I didn't intend to go far from home...until the sagey smell of a sunny Mulholland Drive morning came winging right into my living-room. California poet, Kim Dower, sent me a link to Guerrilla Reads, a great new poetry e-Zine, in which writers read their work in the environment where it was created.

The submission guidelines include:

1. The video must show the author reading his or her own fiction or poetry.
2. The reading should take place in a real-world setting and should not be formally staged.
3. Videos should be no more than eight minutes long.

The creators of Guerrilla Reads are Bronwyn Mauldin (a writer, blogger, podcaster and radio host) and Cheryl Klein (director of the California office of Poets & Writers). There's a smudged, street-theater genius to this project. Check it out!

-J.F.

Frederick Douglass

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

-- Robert Hayden. The Collected Poems of Robert Hayden. Liveright, 1966.

Poet Eloise Klein Healy forwarded this to me under the subject "The Lives Grown Out of His Life". The original post came from poet David Graham who must have seen in this an echo for us all.

-J.F.

Donne No More: Some Puns (by Jenny Factor)

The recent post about John Donne's penchant for puns led me to fish out my copy of Donne's Holy Sonnets in order to transcribe Sonnet 17--the stunningly sad sonnet which was written upon Donne's wife (Anne More)'s death.

Notice both the punning of "more love" (which links the phrase to the concept of Anne More's own now-missing love) and the mention of my very fave 17th Century disease: dropsy.* * an incurable thirst; probably a symptom of diabetes.

XVII

Since she whom I loved hath paid her last debt
To nature, and to her and my good is dead,
And her soul early into heaven ravished
Wholly on heavenly things my mind is set.
Here the admiring her my mind did whet
To seek thee, God; so streams do show the head;
But though I have found thee, and thou my thirst hast fed,
A holy thirsty dropsy melts me yet.
But why should I beg more love, when as thou
Dost woo my soul for hers off'ring all thine:
And dost not only fear lest I allow
My love to saints and angels, things divine,
But in thy tender jealousy dost doubt
Lest the world, flesh, yea Devil put thee out.

Dr. Robert N. Watson of UCLA has pointed out the counter-Trinity Donne raises at the end of this sonnet: world, flesh, and Devil. But I am most in love (I resist the urge to say more in love) with the lines of this poem whose meanings wiggle like a fish (i.e., whose soul is wanted for whose in line 9?) and with how Donne slows down and speeds up the metric of the poem with stream-like eddies of sound (the th's of line 7 tarrying into the quick shoot of line 8). Read it aloud. Some critics tackle poor John for these raggedy edges of sound. But I am in love with the echoey places ("a holy thirsty dropsy" indeed!).

Donne done.

-J.F.