Author: tgifreytag

the mundane


Hello Friends,

Poet Al Zolynas is here to reassure you that you can write a good poem about absolutely anything, no matter how ordinary — including doing the dishes. I find it incredibly reassuring to think about this poem when sitting down myself to write.

Enjoy.
Ellen

The Zen of Housework

I look over my own shoulder
down my arms
to where they disappear under water
into hands inside pink rubber gloves
moiling among dinner dishes.

My hands lift a wine glass,
holding it by the stem and under the bowl.
It breaks the surface
like a chalice
rising from a medieval lake.

Full of the grey wine
of domesticity, the glass floats
to the level of my eyes.
Behind it, through the window
above the sink, the sun, among
a ceremony of sparrows and bare branches,
is setting in Western America.

I can see thousands of droplets
of steam—each a tiny spectrum—rising
from my goblet of grey wine.
They sway, changing directions
constantly—like a school of playful fish,
or like the sheer curtain
on the window to another world.

Ah, grey sacrament of the mundane!

■

young, lucky, and sad


Hello Friends,

I have to begin with a confession today: Since I started this poetry month email list ten years ago, I have never sent out a prose poem. I didn't want to confuse you all about what a poem is — and I think prose poems can be confusing in that regard. But the problem with this approach is that it means I've never sent you Claudia Rankine.

So today is a new day for poem-a-day. Today's prose poem by Claudia Rankine looks like prose, but it uses a lot of poetic techniques like repetition, metaphor, alliteration, assonance, and more. Notice also that Rankine conveys a Black person's experience of feeling so American in a third-world country that she feels white, and then just lines later manages to claim the seemingly universal word "sad" for a specifically Black experience.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Don't Let Me Be Lonely

Excerpt pp. 105-108

At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am asked to drink from my water bottle.

          This water bottle?

          That's right. Open it and drink from it.

/

At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am asked to take off my shoes.

          Take off my shoes?

          Yes. Both Please.

/

At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am asked if I have a fever.

          A fever? Really?

          Yes. Really.

/

My grandmother is in a nursing home. It's not bad. It doesn't smell like pee. It doesn't smell like anything. When I go to see her, as I walk through the hall past the common room and the nurses' station, old person after old person puts out his or her hand to me. Steven, one says. Ann, another calls. It's like being in a third-world country, but instead of food or money you are what is wanted, your company. In third-world countries I have felt overwhelmingly American, calcium-rich, privileged, and white. Here, I feel young, lucky, and sad. Sad is one of those words that has given up its life for our country, it's been a martyr for the American dream, it's been neutralized, co-opted by our culture to suggest a tinge of discomfort that lasts the time it takes for this and then for that to happen, the time it takes to change a channel. But sadness is real because once it meant something real. It meant dignified, grave; it meant trustworthy; it meant exceptionally bad, deplorable, shameful; it meant massive, weighty, forming a compact body; it meant falling heavily; and it meant of a color: dark. It meant dark in color, to darken. It meant me. I felt sad.

death and fertility


Hello Friends,

The central character in today's poem by Rita Dove is arguably Persephone, though she is never mentioned by name. Persephone is out gathering flowers when she is abducted to the underworld and raped by Hades — who thinks that he loves her, but takes her by force. Persephone's mother is Demeter, the greek goddess of harvest and fertility, and she is so furious and distraught about her daughter that she causes all the crops to fail. Demeter regains hope and joy when Persephone returns to earth (on Zeus's order), and life springs anew and crops flourish. But before she returns, Hades tricks Persephone into eating some pomegranate seeds, and because she has tasted food in the underworld, she is required to spend a third of each year (the winter months) with Hades as his queen of the underworld. The myth of Persephone explains the cycle of seasons and crops, and embodies the close ties between death and fertility.

In today's poem, Rita Dove imagines the voice of the mother Demeter addressing her daughter's rapist and husband Hades. In some sense, in can be read as a mother's address to all males about their responsibility for the male-dominated nature of the world that she must send her daughter out into.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Demeter's Prayer to Hades

This alone is what I wish for you: knowledge.
To understand each desire and its edge,
to know we are responsible for the lives
we change. No faith comes without cost,
no one believes without dying.
Now for the first time
I see clearly the trail you planted,
what ground opened to waste,
though you dreamed a wealth
of flowers.
                    There are no curses, only mirrors
held up to the souls of gods and mortals.
And so I give up this fate, too.
Believe in yourself,
go ahead—see where it gets you.

■

forsaken city

Wife's Disaster Manual

When the forsaken city starts to burn,
after the men and children have fled,
stand still, silent as prey, and slowly turn

back. Behold the curse. Stay and mourn
the collapsing doorways, the unbroken bread
in the forsaken city starting to burn.

Don't flinch. Don't join in.
Resist the righteous scurry and instead
stand still, silent as prey. Slowly turn

your thoughts away from escape: the iron
gates unlatched, the responsibilities shed.
When the forsaken city starts to burn,

surrender to your calling, show concern
for those who remain. Come to a dead
standstill. Silent as prey, slowly turn

into something essential. Learn
the names of the fallen. Refuse to run ahead
when the forsaken city starts to burn.
Stand still and silent. Pray. Return.

■

Hello Friends,

One of the hardest poetic forms to write is the villanelle, and today's poem by Deborah Paredez is an absolute mastery of that form. Notice that the entire poem uses only two rhyme sounds, and that the first and third lines of the first stanza are refrains that repeat as the last lines of alternating stanzas throughout the poem. But a really good villanelle like Paredez's doesn't give you a hint of just how hard it is to write; it flows effortlessly.

Paredez certainly invokes the biblical character identified only as Lot's wife, who turns into a pillar of salt when she ignores an angel's command not to look back over her shoulder at the city they are leaving behind as they flee. However, what I love about this poem is that its female gaze on disaster could as easily be about a woman fleeing Aleppo in 2016 as it is about a woman fleeing Sodom in biblical times — it has that level of timeless quality about it.

"Wife's Disaster Manual" appeared in the September 2012 issue of Poetry Magazine. Villanelles have also been featured for Poem-A-Day April 14, 2016 and Poem-A-Day April 6, 2008. You can read more about the villanelle form here.

Enjoy.
Ellen

the amount of wonder


Hello Friends,

There is a special little group of poems that are about a slip between words, misreading or miswriting, and today's poem-a-day by Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello belongs to that group. See also Natasha Trethewey's "Letter" or Sherman Alexie's "Psalm Like It Hot."

Enjoy.
Ellen

Above the Thin Shell of the World

I fell in love with a North Korean

by falling asleep on his shoulder

in a South Korean subway.

Later, perhaps because of that,

I misread the Arabic word gurfa,

not as the amount of water

that can be held in one hand,

but the amount of wonder.

As if one's entire history could be

measured one handful at a time.

As if we knew another way.

■

Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello's "Above the Thin Shell of the World" can be found in The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database, maintained by the DC-based poetry organization Split This Rock.

hey nonny, nonny


Hello Friends,

Since it is the Bard's birthday, we're featuring a little ditty from Much Ado About Nothing. While there is no exact translation for "hey nonny, nonny," one interpretation is that this is Shakespeare's recruitment song for some kind of lesbian separatist utopia.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more.
          Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea, and one on shore,
          To one thing constant never.
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
          And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
          Into hey nonny, nonny.

Sing no more ditties, sing no more
          Of dumps so dull and heavy.
The fraud of men was ever so
          Since summer first was leafy.
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
          And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
          Into hey nonny, nonny.

■

Track Shoe


Hello Friends,

It's Earth Day, and I'm still in San Francisco, so it seems natural today's poem-a-day should by "Earth Day on the Bay" by Gary Soto.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Earth Day on the Bay

Curled like a genie's lamp,
A track shoe from the 1970s among seaweed,
The race long over, the blue ribbons faded,
The trophies deep in pink insulation in the rafters.
Perhaps the former distant runner sits in his recliner.

The other shoe? Along this shore,
It could have ridden the waves back to Mother Korea,
Where it was molded from plastic,
Fitted with cloth, shoelaces poked through the eyelets,
Squeezed for inspection.

I remember that style of shoe.
Never owned a pair myself.
With my skinny legs I could go side-to-side like a crab,
But never run the distance with a number on my back,
Never the winner or runner up heaving at the end.

I bag that shoe, now litter, and nearly slip on the rocks.
Gulls scream above, a single kite goes crazy,
A cargo ship in the distance carrying more
Of the same.

■

The J Church Line


Hello Friends,

I'm in San Francisco for the weekend, and feeling nostalgic for the version of the city that I called home for many years. So today we're featuring a poem named for the best Muni line in San Francisco, the J Church Line, by the poet Thom Gunn. "The J Car" appears in his 1992 collection The Man with Night Sweats — night sweats being a common symptom for men living with HIV, and especially severe in the later stages of AIDS. I do not mean to say I am nostalgic for AIDS — but I am nostalgic for the J Line and Thom Gunn, who was also my teacher just before he passed away in 2004.

Enjoy.
Ellen

The J Car

Last year I used to ride the J Church Line,
Climbing between small yards recessed with vine
— Their ordered privacy, their plots of flowers
Like blameless lives we might imagine ours.
Most trees were cut back, but some brushed the car
Before it swung round to the street once more
On which I rolled out almost to the end,
To 29th Street, calling for my friend.
       He'd be there at the door, smiling but gaunt,
To set out for the German restaurant.
There, since his sight was tattered now, I would
First read the menu out. He liked the food
In which a sourness and dark richness meet
For conflict without taste of a defeat,
As in the Sauerbraten. What he ate
I hoped would help him to put on some weight,
But though the crusted pancakes might attract
They did so more as concept than in fact,
And I'd eat his dessert before we both
Rose from the neat arrangement of the cloth,
Where the connection between life and food
Had briefly seemed so obvious if so crude.
Our conversation circumspectly cheerful,
We had sat here like children good but fearful
Who think if they behave everything might
Still against likelihood come out all right.
       But it would not, and we could not stay here:
Finishing up the Optimator beer
I walked him home through the suburban cool
By dimming shape of church and Catholic school,
Only a few white teenagers about.
After the four blocks he would be tired out.
I'd leave him to the feverish sleep ahead,
Myself to ride through darkened yards instead
Back to my health. Of course I simplify.
Of course. It tears me still that he should die
As only an apprentice to his trade,
The ultimate engagements not yet made.
His gifts had been withdrawing one by one
Even before their usefulness was done:
This optic nerve would never be relit;
The other flickered, soon to be with it.
Unready, disappointed, unachieved,
He knew he would not write the much-conceived
Much-hoped-for work now, nor yet help create
A love he might in full reciprocate.

■

"The J Car" by Thom Gunn was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 28, 2009.

‘Twas brillig


Hello Friends,

Today I am attending a Watershed Company reunion of sorts, and because of that, today's poem-a-day can only be "Jabberwocky" — which I used to make my co-workers recite once a year during poetry month.

One of the things I love about "Jabberwocky" is that Carroll forces you to acknowledge the role of the reader, and not just the writer, in constructing the meaning of a poem — any poem. Carroll draws particular attention to the reader's participation by using words for which we as readers must invent our own pronunciations and meanings — but even in other poems, where the words are not made up, we as readers are still applying our own meanings, in a sense creating our own translations, for the words on the page.

So be creative and brave today! I challenge you to read "Jabberwocky" out loud to someone you know. And if you're feeling really brave, try one of the translations of Jabberwocky — into languages ranging from Spanish and Japanese to C++ and Klingon — compiled by Keith Lim.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Jabberwocky

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought —
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One two! One two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

■

Split This Rock


Hello Friends,

Today's poem comes from Split This Rock, keepers of The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database. Lisa Suhair Majaj is a Palestinian-American poet who resides in Cyprus.

Enjoy.
Ellen

A Few Reasons to Oppose the War

because wind soughs in the branches of trees
like blood sighing through veins

because in each country there are songs
huddled like wet-feathered birds

because even though the news has nothing new to say
and keeps on saying it
NO still fights its way into the world

because for every bomb that is readied
a baby nestles into her mother
latches onto a nipple beaded with milk

because the tulips have waited all winter
in the cold dark earth

because each morning the wildflowers outside my window
raise their yellow faces to the sun

because we are all so helplessly in love
with the light

■