Author: tgifreytag

Poem-A-Day April 3: Wandering companionless

Hello Friends,

Yesterday’s poem (“So Much Happiness” by Naomi Shihab Nye) ended with the moon, so I thought I’d keep that theme going just one more day. This is an unfinished fragment by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822).

Enjoy.
Ellen

To the Moon

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth, —
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

Percy Bysshe Shelley has been previously featured for Poem-a-Day April 15, 2015 and Poem-a-Day April 22, 2011.

Poem-A-Day April 2: coffee cake and ripe peaches

So Much Happiness

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records . . .

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

■
“So Much Happiness” appears in poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s 1995 collection Words Under the Words: Selected Poems.

Naomi Shihab Nye has been previously featured in these other poem-a-days.

Happy National Poetry Month 2020!

Hello Friends, and Happy National Poetry Month 2020!

As mentioned yesterday, I won’t be able to send a poem every day this month, and they may not have my usual in-depth analysis and commentary and related anecdotes. But I am going to at least get you a few poems!

<3 Ellen

Imaginary Conversation

You tell me to live each day
as if it were my last. This is in the kitchen
where before coffee I complain
of the day ahead—that obstacle race
of minutes and hours,
grocery stores and doctors.

But why the last? I ask. Why not
live each day as if it were the first—
all raw astonishment, Eve rubbing
her eyes awake that first morning,
the sun coming up
like an ingénue in the east?

You grind the coffee
with the small roar of a mind
trying to clear itself. I set
the table, glance out the window
where dew has baptized every
living surface.

■
“Imaginary Conversation” appears in poet Linda Pastan’s 2015 collection Insomnia.

It’s almost National Poetry Month!

Hello Friends,

March Madness and a whole lot of other things may have been cancelled for this year, but one month that can never be cancelled is National Poetry Month. I happen to think the world needs poetry more than ever right now, I need poetry, and that you might poetry, too.

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.

Muriel Rukeyeser
Unfortunately, I am not in a place to bring you a poem every day this April. But I will be sharing with you when I can.

For those of you who don’t know, I have been running this poem-a-day email list for the past thirteen Aprils (I can’t believe it’s been that long, but it has!). It is usually 30 days, 30 poems, 30 poets — but again, this year will not be every day.

No prior poetry experience is required to enjoy this poem-a-day list! I’m not going to send you some obtuse obscure long ode that’s impossible to understand (hopefully). What will I send you? Well, last April we read couplets, tercets, quatrains, haiku, sonnets, ghazal, spoken word, and trochaic dimeter; poems from the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, and 2000s; poems from each of the past five decades; poems by Black poets, Latinx poets, Asian American poets, Arab American poets, Native American Poets, Mixed Race poets, and white poets; poems by people of different religions and economic backgrounds; poems by queer poets, straight poets, non-binary poets, men, women, and one six-year-old — just to name a few!

My selections do skew heavily, but not exclusively, to American poets writing in English — hence the name “Meet Me in 811,” the Dewey Decimal Code for American Poetry (and my favorite part of the library to wander around picking random books off the shelves). This poem-a-day series is strictly for personal use only; in almost all cases, I do not have poets’ nor poetry publishers’ permission to reproduce their work — this gives me a freedom other poem-a-day lists do not have to choose whichever poems I want to include, as well as the freedom to include commentary, analysis, personal stories, and other tidbits that I hope make poetry more accessible. I will also frequently refer you to the Academy of American Poets (poets.org), the actual creators and sponsors of National Poetry Month, for a more official poem-a-day email list.

Thanks, and Happy (Almost) National Poetry Month!

Love,
Ellen

POEM-A-DAY APRIL 2019

Thank you so much for joining me this month! We packed a lot into 30 days — including couplets, tercets, quatrains, haiku, sonnets, ghazal, spoken word, and trochaic dimeter; poems from the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, and 2000s; poems from each of the past five decades; poems by Black poets, Latinx poets, Asian American poets, Arab American poets, Native American Poets, Mixed Race poets, and white poets; poems by people of different religions and economic backgrounds; poems by queer poets, straight poets, non-binary poets, men, women, and one six-year-old — just to name a few!

The recap below includes links to each post, a bio for each poet, and (where applicable) the book each poem can be found in.

Poem-A-Day April 30: serving the messy deep into the dead eggplant evening

Hello Friends,

It’s the end of poetry month! I usually send you some kind of “End” or “Never Never End” or “I wished for another poem” type of poem on April 30, and today is no different: “So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye” by sam sax (excerpt below) appeared in the December 2018 issue of Poetry magazine.

Thank you so much for joining me this month! We packed a lot into 30 days — including couplets, tercets, quatrains, haiku, sonnets, ghazal, spoken word, and trochaic dimeter; poems from the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, and 2000s; poems from each of the past five decades; poems by Black poets, Latinx poets, Asian American poets, Arab American poets, Native American poets, mixed race poets, and white poets; poems by queer poets, straight poets, non-binary poets, men, women, and one six-year-old — just to name a few! Anecdotally, I would say the most loved poem-a-day this year was Poem-A-Day April 21: “Theories About the Universe” by Blythe Baird. And the least loved poem-a-day was “Heavy.” No one liked “Heavy.” Maybe too heavy.

I hope you encountered a poem or two you enjoyed, or learned something new about poetry.

Later this week I will post a re-cap of the month on meetmein811.org, including links to more information about each poet and links to a book each poem appears in (where applicable) if you’re interested in reading more.

Y’all are the best! Thank you again for listening.

In 811,
Ellen

So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye

goodbye city. goodbye stoop. goodbye rush hour traffic plume.

goodbye feminist qpoc weed delivery group. goodbye cheap noodle

spot on the corner. goodbye drag bar next door serving the messy

deep into the dead eggplant evening. goodbye drunks screaming

about literally nothing below my window. goodbye window & all

it’s seen & forgiven. goodbye urine stains talking shit between

parked cars. goodbye stars erased from the polluted heavens. goodbye

getting my steps in. goodbye highway streaked red & white with

shipments of grapefruit trucked in by the refrigerated crateful.

goodbye angels dressed in thrifted robes. goodbye locusts—

                              i’ll see you in a decade or so.

i’m beguiled by & guided by goodbyes: meaning go ye with god :

meaning ghost-flushed & godless : meaning guided by some guy away.

who cares who? some new charon who smiles big as a river. who

rivers big as i ferry with him toward death. the city you’re in now

will never be the city you live in again. the ferryman with his good

bile smiles good with his good will toward men. with his good

guiding arm. no need for goodbyes when i got this phone where

i can visit both my living and my dead.

■


This is an excerpt. You can read the full poem here.

Poem-A-Day April 29: Heavy

Heavy

The narrow clearing down to the river
I walk alone, out of breath

my body catching on each branch.
Small children maneuver around me.

Often, I want to return to my old body
a body I also hated, but hate less

given knowledge.
Sometimes my friends—my friends

who are always beautiful & heartbroken
look at me like they know

I will die before them.
I think the life I want

is the life I have, but how can I be sure?
There are days when I give up on my body

but not the world. I am alive.
I know this. Alive now

to see the world, to see the river
rupture everything with its light.

■



Hieu Minh Nguyen is a queer Vietnamese American poet and performer based in Minneapolis. Nguyen was also featured for Poem-A-Day April 18, 2018: “Ode to the Pubic Hair Stuck in My Throat.”

Poem-A-Day April 28: I love and I love!

Hello Friends,

There are a variety of poetry and prose pieces devoted to imagining what animals think and say. Something I want you to notice about today’s poem from Samuel Taylor Coleridge is that “my Love” has no gender. Coleridge could as easily be writing about a male and female dove or this trio of eagles:

A rare trio of bald eagles -- two dads, one mom -- are raising eaglets together in one nest

Eagles are not one of the birds poets have traditionally associated with love (perhaps due to their serious faces?), but they are a species that “mate for life” — behavior humans associate with love — returning to the same nest to produce and raise young with the same co-parent(s) year after year.

Not all the birds named in this poem mate for life, so whether he meant to or not, I like to think Coleridge is celebrating a variety of loves here, and not just long-term monogamous love.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Answer to a Child’s Question

Do you ask what the birds say? The Sparrow, the Dove,
The Linnet and Thrush say, “I love and I love!”
In the winter they’re silent—the wind is so strong;
What it says, I don’t know, but it sings a loud song.
But green leaves, and blossoms, and sunny warm weather,
And singing, and loving—all come back together.
But the Lark is so brimful of gladness and love,
The green fields below him, the blue sky above,
That he sings, and he sings; and for ever sings he—
“I love my Love, and my Love loves me!”

■

Poem-A-Day April 27: It is evening in the antiworld

Hello Friends,

Poetry might be most stereotypically associated with topics like Romance or Nature, but poems can also be found in genres like Comedy, Horror, or — in this case — Science Fiction.

A palindrome, as you may recall, is a word or phrase that is spelled the same both forwards and backwards — such as “kayak” or “Was it a car or a cat I saw?” Martin Gardner, the writer cited in the epigraph of today’s poem, also coined the term Semordnilap (palindromes spelled backward) to refer to a word that spells a different word in reverse — as in, stressed is the semordnilap of desserts.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Palindrome

There is less difficulty—indeed, no logical difficulty at all—in imagining two portions of the universe, say two galaxies, in which time goes one way in one galaxy and the opposite way in the other . . . Intelligent beings in each galaxy would regard their own time as “forward” and the time in the other galaxy as “backward.”
—Martin Gardner, in Scientific American


Somewhere now she takes off the dress I am
putting on. It is evening in the antiworld
where she lives. She is forty-five years away
from her death, the hole which spit her out
into pain, impossible at first, later easing,
going, gone. She has unlearned much by now.
Her skin is firming, her memory sharpens,
her hair has grown glossy. She sees without glasses,
she falls in love easily. Her husband has lost his
shuffle, they laugh together. Their money shrinks,
but their ardor increases. Soon her second child
will be young enough to fight its way into her
body and change its life to monkey to frog to
tadpole to cluster of cells to tiny island to
nothing. She is making a list:
          Things I will need in the past
               lipstick
               shampoo
               transistor radio
               Sergeant Pepper
               acne cream
               five-year diary with a lock
She is eager, having heard about adolescent love
and the freedom of children. She wants to read
Crime and Punishment and ride on a roller coaster
without getting sick. I think of her as she will
be at fifteen, awkward, too serious. In the
mirror I see she uses her left hand to write,
her other to open a jar. By now our lives should
have crossed. Somewhere sometime we must have
passed one another like going and coming trains,
with both of us looking the other way.

■



“Palindrome” can be found in Alive Together: New and Selected Poems (1996) by Lisa Mueller.

Poem-A-Day April 26: It is I you have been looking for

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

■



Hello Friends,

“Kindness” can be found in Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (1995) by Naomi Shihab Nye — a poet who has been featured several times before, including:

Poem-A-Day April 8, 2017:
“Famous” by Naomi Shihab Nye

Poem-A-Day April 29, 2016:
“Burning the Old Year” by Naomi Shihab Nye

Poem-A-Day April 17, 2015:
“Making a Fist” by Naomi Shihab Nye

Poem-A-Day April 2, 2014:
“Trying to Name What Doesn’t Change” by Naomi Shihab Nye

I won’t say this about every single poem I’ve ever featured, but these four in particular are each very powerful and absolutely worth your time to give a read.

For another take on “you must lose things,” see also Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” — which I maybe didn’t explain that well in this post from 2008 (there’s so much more that could be said about this poem!), but here it is anyway.

Enjoy.
— Ellen