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Poem-a-Day April 30: Make a lot of wishes

The Wish

Remember that time you made the wish?

I make a lot of wishes.

The time I lied to you
about the butterfly. I always wondered
what you wished for.

What do you think I wished?

I don’t know. That I’d come back,
that we’d somehow be together in the end.

I wished for what I always wish for.
I wished for another poem.

Hello Friends —

April 2014’s final poem-a-day is by Louise Glück from her collection Meadowlands (1996). A recap of the month in poems can be found here, including sources for each day’s poem — in case you’re interested in reading more from a particular poet or two whose words may have stuck with you this month.

Thank you again for partaking in my own little celebration of National Poetry Month. And if you’re ever looking for a recommendation or advice on a poem or poet during some other the month of the year, you know where to find me…

In 811,
Ellen

“The Wish” was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 30, 2007.
Poet Louise Glück was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 12, 2008.

Poem-a-Day April 29: Flip-Flop

Flounder

Here, she said, put this on your head.
She handed me a hat.
You ’bout as white as your dad,
and you gone stay like that.

Aunt Sugar rolled her nylons down
around each bony ankle,
and I rolled down my white knee socks
letting my thin legs dangle,

circling them just above water
and silver backs of minnows
flitting here then there between
the sun spots and the shadows.

This is how you hold the pole
to cast the line out straight.
Now put that worm on your hook,
throw it out and wait.

She sat spitting tobacco juice
into a coffee cup.
Hunkered down when she felt the bite,
jerked the pole straight up

reeling and tugging hard at the fish
that wriggled and tried to fight back.
A flounder, she said, and you can tell
’cause one of its sides is black.

The other side is white, she said.
It landed with a thump.
I stood there watching that fish flip-flop,
switch sides with every jump.

Hello Friends —

Today’s rhyming quatrains are brought to you by the residing Poet Laureate of the United States Natasha Trethewey, from her 2000 collection Domestic Work. For more on the experience of growing up bi-racial in Gulfport, Mississippi, pick up a copy of Trethewey’s Native Guard — one of the best poetry collections I have ever read.

And if there’s another poetry book you’ve been meaning to pick up, take advantage of Powell’s Books 15% off all poetry — that’s any selection from the five centuries and five continents we’ve touched on in poem-a-days this month, but only during National Poetry Month. Or find Trethewey and all sorts of other treasures in the American Poetry (811!) section of your local library.

I’ll meet you there,
Ellen

Poems by Natasha Trethewey were also featured for Poem-a-Day April 18, 2010 and Poem-a-Day April 16, 2009.

Poem-a-Day April 28: Lenore (I Miss You)

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem is a hip-hop interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Lenore” by the nerd rapper (and inspiring young poetry educator) MC Lars.

Click play below to listen. If desired, you can find Lars’ lyrics here, and Poe’s original poem here.

If you have time, also check out the rest of Lars’ Poe album, and this really excellent lecture Lars gave at USC. Then see how you do on this quiz from the Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Poem-a-Day April 27: Andy Warhol Speaks to His Two Filipina Maids

Hello Friends —

In today’s poem, the Filipino poet Alfred “Krip” Yuson uses humor, juxtaposition, and some brilliant line breaks to celebrate aspects of Pop aesthetics while simultaneously imagining the patronizing that Andy Warhol’s (real-life) Filipina maids endured.

Meanwhile, in Pittsburgh, a new generation of “help” continue to serve Warhol and his definitions of “art” to this day.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Andy Warhol Speaks to His Two Filipina Maids

Art, my dears, is not cleaning up
after the act. Neither is it washing off
grime with the soap of fact. In fact
and in truth, my dears, art is dead

center, between meals, amid spices
and spoilage. Fills up the whitebread
sweep of life’s obedient slices.

Art is the letters you send home
about the man you serve. Or the salad
you bring in to my parlor of elites.
While Manhattan stares down at the soup

of our affinities. And we hear talk of coup
in your islands. There they copy love
the way I do, as how I arrive over and over

again at art. Perhaps too it is the time
marked by the sand in your shoes, spilling
softly like rumor. After your hearts I lust.
In our God you trust. And it’s your day off.

Poem-a-Day April 26: Sometimes I drop my spoon.

The Little Boy and the Old Man

Said the little boy, “Sometimes I drop my spoon.”
Said the old man, “I do that too.”
The little boy whispered, “I wet my pants.”
“I do that too,” laughed the little old man.
Said the little boy, “I often cry.”
The old man nodded, “So do I.”
“But worst of all,” said the boy, “it seems
Grown-ups don’t pay attention to me.”
And he felt the warmth of a wrinkled old hand.
“I know what you mean,” said the little old man.

— Shel Silverstein, 1981

Poem-a-Day April 25: def bemoan(): print(‘Alas!’)

Hello Friends,
My hope is that by this point in the month of poetry, not all poems read to you like they were written in another language, some special code. Today’s subject, however, is “code poetry.”
Enjoy.
Ellen

Poem in CSS:
Capsized By Zak Kain


.ocean {
    color: cornflowerblue;
    pitch: high;
    overflow: visible;
}

.boat {
    color: firebrick;
    transform: rotate(94deg);
    float: none;
}

.rescue-team {
    visibility: visible;
}

.crew {
    widows: none;
}

Poem in Python:
A Pythonic Lament By Mike Widner


'''
The circumstances
'''
def bemoan():
        print('Alas!')
our_lives_must = ['end']
the_suffering = [True]        # Read as "the suff'ring"
she = 'loves you'
love = 'a string of memories'
alone = bemoan
alas = alone

'''
The lament
'''
for poetry in the_suffering:
        bemoan()
for variables in our_lives_must:
        pass
if None and 1 or 1 and None:
        alone()
if love.split() or she.replace('you', ''):
        alas()
try:
        the_suffering.escape() and love.admit()
except:
        for one_day in our_lives_must:
                quit()

Poem in Java:
ThatGirl By Ian Holmes


import java.Object.*

public class ThatGirl {
  public SomethingBetter main() {
    return whatYouFound;
  }
}

Poem-a-Day April 24: Pocket-Sized Indian

Hello Friends —

1) If you’re in the Bay Area, don’t miss the opportunity to hear today’s poet Sherman Alexie at Stanford, for FREE and open to the public, tomorrow Friday April 25 at 7:30pm.

2) Today is Poem in Your Pocket Day! #pocketpoem For more details on the meaning of this holiday and its origins, see my April 2013 ramble on why pair poems with pockets here. You can also download my own PDF of the pocket-sized poems I’ll be passing out on street corners this weekend, all ready for you to print at home for your own distribution purposes!

Heretofore the dihedral angle formed by 1) and 2) gives us a 90-degree chance that today’s selection is a pocket-sized poem by Sherman Alexie.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Aware, Unaware

Be quick now and pull to the roadside
Because bad drivers don’t know they’re bad drivers,
And the architects of genocide
Always think they’re the survivors.

Find more pocket poems by Sherman Alexie on Mudlark (“An Electronic Journal of Poetry & Poetics: never in print and never out of print…”) and on Sherman Alexie’s website fallsapart.com (where the homepage currently contains more excellent examples of the poetic device juxtaposition).

Poem-a-Day April 23: star-crossed

ROMEO speaks about JULIET:
(Excerpt from the first monologue of Act II, scene II)

Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven
Having some business, do entreat her eyes
To twingle in their spheres till they return.
What if her eyes were there, they in her head?
The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars,
As daylight doth a lamp; her eye in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright,
That bird would sing, and think it were not night.

JULIET speaks about ROMEO:
(Excerpt from the first monologue of Act III, scene II)

Give me my Romeo: and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine,
That all the world will be in love with night…

Hello Friends—

Here’s an assertion for you: No writer in English will ever be able to use the word “star-crossed” (or “star-cross’d”) without it being a reference to Shakespeare.

Now send in your examples to disprove that assertion. Or: What other writers do you feel can be invoked with just a single word, who uniquely own that particular word, like (in my opinion) Shakespeare alone owns “star-crossed” — not because they invented the word, but because they used the word that unforgettably.

Virginia Woolf mentions Shakespeare’s “word-coining power” in a journal entry:

“I read Shakespeare directly after I have ﬁnished writing, when my mind is agape and red and hot. Then it is astonishing. I never yet knew how amazing his stretch and speed and word-coining power is, until I felt it utterly outpace and outrace my own, seeming to start equal and then I see him draw ahead and do things I could not in my wildest tumult and utmost press of mind imagine.”

And, because I am very jealous of all the folks who went to see Anna Deveare Smith speak on Shakespeare’s Birthday (did I mention April 23 is his birthday yet?) at a free and open to the public event on Stanford’s campus this evening, I’ll leave you with her words on Shakespeare’s influence. What most resonates with me is Anna Deveare Smith’s articulation that the most valuable things we learn from studying Shakespeare are not definitive answers but the ability to question; we learn how to pursue inquiries about our human existence.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Poem-a-Day April 22: Touched with Fire

Rabbits and Fire

Everything’s been said
But one last thing about the desert,
And it’s awful: During brush fires in the Sonoran desert,
Brush fires that happen before the monsoon and in the great,
Deep, wide, and smothering heat of the hottest months,
The longest months,
The hypnotic, immeasurable lulls of August and July—
During these summer fires, jackrabbits—
Jackrabbits and everything else
That lives in the brush of the rolling hills,
But jackrabbits especially—
Jackrabbits can get caught in the flames,
No matter how fast and big and strong and sleek they are.
And when they’re caught,
Cornered in and against the thick
Trunks and thin spines of the cactus,
When they can’t back up any more,
When they can’t move, the flame—
It touches them,
And their fur catches fire.
Of course, they run away from the flame,
Finding movement even when there is none to be found,
Jumping big and high over the wave of fire, or backing
Even harder through the impenetrable
Tangle of hardened saguaro
And prickly pear and cholla and barrel,
But whichever way they find,
What happens is what happens: They catch fire
And then bring the fire with them when they run.
They don’t know they’re on fire at first,
Running so fast as to make the fire
Shoot like rocket engines and smoke behind them,
But then the rabbits tire
And the fire catches up,
Stuck on them like the needles of the cactus,
Which at first must be what they think they feel on their skins.
They’ve felt this before, every rabbit.
But this time the feeling keeps on.
And of course, they ignite the brush and dried weeds
All over again, making more fire, all around them.
I’m sorry for the rabbits.
And I’m sorry for us
To know this.

Hello Friends —

Today is Earth Day, and the Earth’s report-back to us this year is Not Good.

Right here in California, we’re having possibly our worst drought in more than 500 years (there’s a great little “Beyond A Reasonable Drought” quiz at www.californiaquiz.org), and yet I keep coming across people who very casually “don’t know” or “forgot” that we’re having any kind of drought at all; who actually frown and complain on the 2 out of 365 days it’s overcast in Southern California from something other than smog or massive wildfire smoke, or heaven forbid it actually rains here.

And here’s the thing: that is a 100% totally natural reaction. It’s an adaptive survival trait for the human mind to suppress thoughts that are just too massive and too depressing to comprehend — like drought. Or climate change. Or “we’re all gonna die.” Those may be true thoughts, but they’re not useful thoughts for a human just trying to get through one day and into the next day.

But if we’re going to survive not just day-to-day, but year-to-year, decade-to-decade, humans have to break through that adaptive suppression of some of those Big Dark Thoughts. And that’s where the poets (those “Touched with Fire”) come in and start hurtling rabbit-fireballs.

I would argue that the scientists have (more or less) done, and continue to do, their part — they’ve used reason and logic and numbers to try to convince the other humans of what we need to do to save ourselves. We (more or less) have the science to clean up the Pacific Garbage Patch, re-freeze glaciers, re-plant rainforests, maybe even repair the hole in the ozone and temper human population growth. We (more or less) have fiscal and governmental entities massive enough to implement that kind of global project. What we don’t have are the hearts and minds of the ever-growing masses.

I would argue it’s the poets (and I use “poets” loosely, for all those engaged in the arts of winning hearts and minds) who still have the most work to do if we are going to save ourselves from ourselves — and those poets, we poets, are running out of time.

I have a lot more to say about today’s poem by Alberto Ríos, the inaugural state poet laureate of Arizona, his choice of rabbits, and fire, the location of humans in the poem, the science behind what makes for a memorable poetic image, the fine line between depressing messages and messages that motivate action — but this is all getting quite long. So, let’s skip ahead to the single most hope-inducing, optimistic thing I have heard said about our chances, as a species, of not killing the entire planet right out from under our own feet. It comes from a prominent ecologist in the area of climate change impact on species’ survival, Chris Thomas:

“If nature can bounce back from an asteroid hit, it can probably bounce back from us.”

Happy Earth Day, and here’s to many more.

Love,
Ellen

Poem-a-Day April 21: Singing Whitman

Hello Friends,

You have all heard Walt Whitman’s poetry — but only a lucky few of you have had the opportunity to hear him like this. The extraordinary Daniel Redman has given us a new way to receive Whitman’s words, by setting the poems of Leaves of Grass to song. As the Poetry Foundation describes it, “His performances blend the tradition of ecstatic music and Jewish prayer with the lilting, loping music of America’s passionate bard, an oddly resonant combination.”

Hear for yourself. If you listen long enough, Daniel will even connect Whitman to Whitney via The Wiz. He’s that good.

Enjoy.
Ellen

To thee old cause!
Thou peerless, passionate, good cause,
Thou stern, remorseless, sweet idea,
Deathless throughout the ages, races, lands,
After a strange sad war, great war for thee,
(I think all war through time was really fought, and ever will be
really fought, for thee,)
These chants for thee, the eternal march of thee.

(A war O soldiers not for itself alone,
Far, far more stood silently waiting behind, now to advance in this book.)

Thou orb of many orbs!
Thou seething principle! thou well-kept, latent germ! thou centre!
Around the idea of thee the war revolving,
With all its angry and vehement play of causes,
(With vast results to come for thrice a thousand years,)
These recitatives for thee,—my book and the war are one,
Merged in its spirit I and mine, as the contest hinged on thee,
As a wheel on its axis turns, this book unwitting to itself,
Around the idea of thee.

Excerpted from Leaves of Grass (1871) by Walt Whitman

Click here for a little more historical context on the political slogan “good old cause.”