Author: tgifreytag

Token Loss

To the dragon
any loss is
total. His rest
is disrupted
if a single
jewel encrusted
goblet has
been stolen.
The circle
of himself
in the nest
of his gold
has been
broken. No
loss is token.

“Token Loss” by recent U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan has not yet been published in a book, but was released as part of the Academy of American Poets more official-like poem-a-day series in January 2014.

Hello Friends—

I must confess I strongly considered just sending you all This Llama Frolicking to DMX instead of a poem today. And then I thought perhaps I’d send you Denise Levertov’s “Come into Animal Presence” and secretly hyperlink to the frolicking every time the world “llama” appears in that poem. But then I worried I’d already sent a disproportionate number of animal-related poems this April, what with all the birds and the whale and such, so: that’s how we arrived back at a poem about people — specifically today: grandmothers, and the men who flirt with them. Poet Mary Moore Easter is a professor of Dance emerita who I am going to guess is enjoying her retirement to the fullest.

“Mama Said …” appeared in the April 2013 issue of Poetry magazine and was also selected for the New York Times Poetry-News Pairings series (to complement the article “Oldest Woman in New York Celebrates Birthday No. 114.”)

Enjoy.
Ellen

July, waxwings
on the berries
have dyed red

the dead

branch

Hello Friends—

There’s a bit of Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” in today’s untitled poem by Lorine Niedecker — another selection coming to you because of a gift given to me: a new friend Christie introduced me to the Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker (Thanks, Christie!). Niedecker’s biographer calls her “America’s Greatest Unknown Poet,” an impossible claim. But I can say this: Niedecker’s The Granite Pail: Selected Poems may have claim to the single greatest “blurb” I have ever encountered on the back cover of a poetry collection:

I’m not sure if you have to have read a lot of blurbs on the backs of poetry books, and/or a lot of William Carlos Williams, to appreciate this gem, or if it’ll come across even if you just have a sense of what the blurbs on the backs of books are like more generally — you’ll have to write back and let me know. I wish that Jake Adam York were alive for me to share this blurb with — he wrote a little piece for the Kenyon Review called “A Field Guide to North American Blurbs” and I just know that he would love it.

Happy National Poetry Month!
Ellen

Said the Barnacle,

You enchant me, with your carnival
of force.

Yours is a system of slow.

There is you, the pulley
and there is you, the weight.

Your eyes wide on a hymn.

Your deep song like the turn
of that first,

that earliest of wheels.

Said the Whale,

I have seen you, little encruster,
in that business of fouling the ships.

Known, little drum machine, you
to tease out food from the drink.

Little thimble of chalk and hard water.

You could be a callus of whiter skin.

You could be a knucklebone. You
who hang on me,

like a conscience.

Hello Friends,

There were so many cetacean visitors breaking the surface of my dreams last night — gray whales, great blue whales, humpbacks, orcas, a pair of Dall’s porpoises, belugas, sperm whales, right whales, wrong whales, some whales I don’t think exist, some whales I definitely know don’t exist. Perhaps something was weighing on my mind… Which weighs more, several dozen whales, all floating freely, swimming, dancing, leaping about, or one tiny nagging barnacle in a spot you can neither see nor reach?

Today’s imagined dialogue between a whale and a barnacle is the work of Cecilia Llompart, first published earlier this year as part of the Academy of American Poets‘ more official-like poem-a-day list.

For another take on whales, weight, the pulley, see poem-a-day April 2, 2007 “Weight, In Passing” by Andrea Haslanger.

Cheers,
Ellen

Imaginary Number

The mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed
is not big and is not small.
Big and small are

comparative categories, and to what
could the mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed
be compared?

Consciousness observes and is appeased.
The soul scrambles across the screes.
The soul,

like the square root of minus 1,
is an impossibility that has its uses.

Hello Friends,
Vijay Seshadri won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry today, so I figured he deserved a poem-a-day. This one is for the math nerds especially!
Enjoy.
Ellen

P.S. Blogspot informs me that my Gorgeous Nothings post yesterday was a bit of a milestone: my 200th poem-a-day!*

* That math is (7 Aprils) time (30 days in April) minus (2012 [skipped April]) plus (a scattered stray or two) plus (13 poem-a-days this April) = more or less 200 somewhere hereabouts.

1.

A hummingbird flies into a window
that looks like the sky. Everything around here

looks like the sky. The sky looks tiger striped.
They call that kind of cloud

something. I know somebody
who knows about clouds. I could find

out the name. Everything around here
has a name.

2.

The hummingbird fell to the deck. My husband picked it up.

—What did it feel like in your hand?
—Nothing. It felt like nothing.
—Where is it now?
—Gone.
—Dead?
—Not dead. It flew away. It disappeared and it disappeared again.

3.

I’ll tell you a joke. A hummingbird flew into a window…

I’ll tell you another joke. Treachery,
we were friends once.

4.

In dreams the bird
weighs more, so you can feel it

when you pick it up. So when
it dies it seems

like something actually happened.
It’s a word

bound
around your hand and a sign

at the stripped road.
A mylar star on a plastic stick

tied to the sign.
Blacktop. Post. A fat star’s

wrinkles taut. It’s stuffed.

It’s shining.
There’s going

to be a party around here somewhere.
The bird weighs nothing waits nowhere.

The sky looks like a window and it flies right through.

Hello Friends,

A hummingbird got trapped in the castle stairwell today. Dead or nearly dead, we took it to a sheltered spot outside, and Bethany covered it with flowers.

A literal hummingbird flying into a window is just one reading of Melissa Ginsburg’s 2013 poem. Ginsburg highlights the briefness of a fellow poet’s life by including the years of his birth and death in her dedication “for Erik Lemke (1979 – 2012)” — a suggestion to the reader, along with the vastness of the sky, that this poem is bigger than one bird. The hummingbird seems to represent the kind of death that is so sudden and nonsensical, it doesn’t seem entirely real — even as you grasp it, it seems to have no weight.

Readers have puzzled over Ginsburg’s choice of “Tigers” for the title of this poem — I think it’s a title that’s not entirely for us; it’s in part something meaningful to Melissa Ginsburg and Erik Lemke on a personal level. But to my ear, there is also something of “tigers in red weather” in it — a line from a famous poem by Wallace Stevens, “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock.” To me, there’s also something of Craig Arnold in this poem — a poet whose death in 2009 was also so sudden and nonsensical, it doesn’t seem entirely real: he disappeared into a volcano in Japan, leaving no body, but a great deal of weight, behind.

— Ellen

Hello Friends,

The poet, Mexican Ambassador, and Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz wrote today’s poem for a memorial service for the critic and linguist Roman Jakobson, who passed away in 1982. “Entre Lo Que Veo Y Digo . . . / Between What I See and What I Say . . .” is also included in his 1987 collection Árbol Adentro / A Tree Within. The accompanying English translation is by Paz’s longtime collaborator and translator Eliot Weinberger.

¡buen provecho!
Ellen