Author: tgifreytag

Long Finger Poem

Hello Friends,
Since finger length has come up as a topic in our current presidential race, it seemed appropriate to share with you this work by Jin Eun-Young, translated by Peter Campion.
Enjoy.
Ellen

Long Finger Poem

I’m working on my poems and working with

my fingers not my head. Because my fingers

are the farthest stretching things from me.
Look at the tree. Like its longest branch

I touch the evening’s quiet breathing. Sounds

of rain. The crackling heat from other trees.

The tree points everywhere. The branches can’t

reach to their roots though. Growing longer they

grow weaker also. Can’t make use of water.
Rain falls. But I’m working with these farthest stretching

things from me. Along my fingertips bare shoots
of days then years unfurl in the cold air.

■

hurtling towards

The Leash

After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear,
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can
you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek
bottom dry to suck the deadly water up into
your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to
say, Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish
comes back belly up, and the country plummets
into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still
something singing? The truth is: I don’t know.
But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing
like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move
my living limbs into the world without too much
pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight
toward the pickup trucks break-necking down
the road, because she thinks she loves them,
because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud
roaring things will love her back, her soft small self
alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm,
until I yank the leash back to save her because
I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say,
and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings
high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay
her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth.
Perhaps, we are always hurtling our body towards
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe
like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together
peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.

■

Hello Friends,

Today’s poem by Ada Limón was originally published as the Academy of American Poets poem-a-day on January 1, 2016. For another great dog moment in poetry, see Mark Doty’s “Golden Retrievals” (1998).

I hope you’re enjoying poetry month!
Ellen

put a food stamp on this poem and eat it.

Hello Friends,

I’m going to cheat a little bit today and send you a series of short poems (instead of just one poem) by my favorite street poet, Julia Vinograd. These excerpts are from her collection Berkeley Street Cannibals: Selected Poems, 1969-1976.

Enjoy.
Ellen

SPRING

There’s coke
in the spoon
of June.

■

GRAFFITTI

Bathrooms inspire me.
I write my best poems
with my pants down.

■

BOREDOM

We repeat ourselves
helplessly
like hiccups.

■

WIFE

She hangs his laundry
out to dry
between her thighs.

■

THE F.B.I.

Not even lovers
look so close
and see so little.

■

HITCH-HIKING

Couples don’t stop.
They have their own problems.

■

HARD TIMES

put a food stamp on this poem
and eat it.

■

STREET MORALITY

Everything is permitted,
but nothing is taken seriously.

■

WHAT NOW?

We’ve forgotten the rules
we were trying to break.

■

Poet Julia Vinograd was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 25, 2011, Poem-a-Day April 12, 2009, and Poem-a-Day April 20, 2007.

invincible

Anthem

We were all in love
but didn’t know it.
We were all in love
continually. Bless
our little hearts,
smoking and drinking
and wrecking things.
Bless our shameless shame.
We were loud, invincible.
We were tough as rails.
We stole street signs
and knocked over bins.
Ripped the boards
off boarded-up stuff.
Slept in towers
filled with pigeon shit
and fluff. We kicked
beer bottles down
cobbled lanes.
Tires and chains.
Chains and wheels
and skin. The world
was always ending
and we the inventors
of everything.

■

— Melissa Stein

Thanks

Hello Friends,

Since yesterday’s poem-a-day was about giving, today’s poem-a-day will cover saying thank you. The remarkable poet W.S. Merwin manages to convey his meaning without using punctuation, not just in today’s poem but in nearly his entire 50+ years worth of work.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Thanks

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is

■

Poems by W.S. Merwin were also featured for Poem-a-Day April 16, 2010; Poem-a-Day April 9, 2009; Poem-a-Day April 17, 2008; and Poem-a-Day April 7, 2007.

We give because

Hello Friends,

Below is my favorite fundraising-related poem. Notice that the inaugural state poet laureate of Arizona, Alberto Ríos, uses couplets throughout this piece but ends with a single line — making today’s poem-a-day similar to yesterday’s poem-a-day in terms of form.

Enjoy.
Ellen

When Giving Is All We Have

One river gives
Its journey to the next.

We give because somebody gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.

We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.

We have been better for it,
We have been wounded by it—

Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,
Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.

Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,
But we read this book, anyway, over and again:

Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,
Mine to yours, yours to mine.

You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.
Together we are simple green. You gave me

What you did not have, and I gave you
What I had to give—together, we made

Something greater from the difference.

■

Poet Alberto Ríos was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 22, 2014.

you may open a door

Hello Friends,

Today’s poem by Matthew Olzmann is composed entirely in couplets, groups of two lines, except for one stanza that is only a single line. Olzmann disrupts the structure of his poem at this moment, exactly at the same spot in the poem where he invokes the epigraph from Czesław Miłosz, to create a fulcrum on which he pivots to referring to a “you.” It’s as if the “missing” line that would have made that stanza a couplet is instead you catching your breath to realize “you” is you in the doorway. Or, the “missing” line is one of those special doorways in poetry that allows our minds to open a door to “a meadow, or a eulogy.”

This is just one small example of using form or structure to convey meaning — the words mean more because of how they are arranged on the page. The use of form is one of the key characteristics that makes poetry bett—ur, different from prose.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz

You whom I could not save,
Listen to me.

Can we agree Kevlar
backpacks shouldn’t be needed

for children walking to school?
Those same children

also shouldn’t require a suit
of armor when standing

on their front lawns, or snipers
to watch their backs

as they eat McDonalds.
They shouldn’t have to stop

to consider the speed
of a bullet or how it might

reshape their bodies. But
one winter, back in Detroit,

I had one student
who opened a door and died.

It was the front
door to his house, but

it could have been any door,
and the bullet could have written

any name. The shooter
was thirteen years old

and was aiming
at someone else. But

a bullet doesn’t care
about “aim,” it doesn’t

distinguish between
the innocent and the innocent,

and how was the bullet
supposed to know this

child would open the door
at the exact wrong moment

because his friend
was outside and screaming

for help. Did I say
I had “one” student who

opened a door and died?
That’s wrong.

There were many.
The classroom of grief

had far more seats
than the classroom for math

though every student
in the classroom for math

could count the names
of the dead.

A kid opens a door. The bullet
couldn’t possibly know,

nor could the gun, because
“guns don’t kill people,” they don’t

have minds to decide
such things, they don’t choose

or have a conscience,
and when a man doesn’t

have a conscience, we call him
a psychopath. This is how

we know what type of assault rifle
a man can be,

and how we discover
the hell that thrums inside

each of them. Today,
there’s another

shooting with dead
kids everywhere. It was a school,

a movie theater, a parking lot.
The world

is full of doors.
And you, whom I cannot save,

you may open a door

and enter a meadow, or a eulogy.
And if the latter, you will be

mourned, then buried
in rhetoric.

There will be
monuments of legislation,

little flowers made
from red tape.

What should we do? we’ll ask
again. The earth will close

like a door above you.
What should we do?

And that click you hear?
That’s just our voices,

the deadbolt of discourse
sliding into place.

■

Poetry Month is here!

Hello Friends!

Each April, I celebrate National Poetry Month by sharing with you all some of what I love about poetry — through 30 poems from 30 poets delivered to your inboxes over 30 days.

As you may recall, 811 is the Dewey Decimal System call number for American Poetry, and that’s the section of my personal library where I’ll be asking you to meet me once a day (mostly, with a few dabblings in international work).

No prior poetry experience is required to enjoy this poem-a-day list! So feel free to invite friends and family to join you in this little poetry month celebration. Just send me an email, or sign up through this blog meetmein811.org — where you can also find an archive of the past eight years of poem-a-days.

Without further ado, here is your first poem! In this translation by Robert Bly, Rilke uses the sunset to embody multiple types of transitions, in-between spaces. He also reminds us that all life, all of the matter that makes us up, all energy, can be traced back to (and may return to) suns.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Sunset

Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors
which it passes to a row of ancient trees.
You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you,
one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth,

leaving you, not really belonging to either,
not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,
not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing
that turns to a star each night and climbs—

leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)
your own life, timid and standing high and growing,
so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,
one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.

■

Poem-a-Day April 30: Air and Angels

Hello Friends,

I hope you’ve enjoyed a little bit of National Poetry Month in your inboxes this month! I didn’t make it to 30 poems and 30 poets this year, but we did manage to cover several centuries and decades and continents as well as a variety of poetic forms in our 30 days together.

Today’s final selection is by Kenneth Rexroth from his Collected Shorter Poems (1964).

Thank you again for spending some time reading poetry with me.

— Ellen

 
Air and Angels: This Night Only

          [Erik Satie: “Gymnopédie #1″]

Moonlight   now    on Malibu
The winter night    the few stars
Far away   millions    of miles
The sea   going on    and on
Forever    around   the earth
Far    and     far     as your lips    are near
Filled    with the same light     as your eyes
Darling     darling     darling
The future     is long gone by
And the past     will never happen
We have     only this
Our one forever
So small    so infinite
So brief    so vast
Immortal     as our hands that touch
Deathless     as the firelit wine we drink
Almighty      as this single kiss
That has no beginning
That will never
Never
End