Category: April 2007

POEM-A-DAY APRIL 2007

Poem-a-Day, April 30: what I always wish for

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 —

Today’s poem is by Louise Glück from her collection Meadowlands (1996).

If you wish to be unsubscribed from this Poem-a-Day email list, you’re a little bit late: Today is the last day of April, and the last Poem-a-Day for 2007. Thirty days. Thirty poets. Thirty poems.

Thank you for humoring me in this celebration of National Poetry Month. Remember that you may peruse all of the month’s poem-a-days on my blog at meetmein811.blogspot.com.

If a particular poem or two from this month has really stuck with you, and you’re feeling inspired to dive into a whole book of poetry, here are some places to start.

You can still learn more about National Poetry Month, and about poetry events in your geographic region all year round, at www.poets.org.

Thank you again for partaking in my own little celebration of National Poety Month.
I hope to run into you in 811…

Ellen

Poet Louise Glück was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 12, 2008.

Poem-a-Day, April 29: Un-humm-m!

Madam and the Phone Bill

You say I O.K.ed
LONG DISTANCE?
O.K.ed it when?
My goodness, Central
That was then!

I’m mad and disgusted
With that Negro now.
I don’t pay no REVERSED
CHARGES nohow.

You say, I will pay it –
Else you’ll take out my phone?
You better let
My phone alone.

I didn’t ask him
To telephone me.
Roscoe knows darn well
LONG DISTANCE
Ain’t free.

If I ever catch him,
Lawd, have pity!
Calling me up
From Kansas City.

Just to say he loves me!
I knowed that was so.
Why didn’t he tell me some’n
I don’t know?

For instance, what can
Them other girls do
That Alberta K. Johnson
Can’t do – and more, too?

What’s that, Central?
You say you don’t care
Nothing aobut my
Private affair?

Well, even less about your
PHONE BILL, does I care!

Un-humm-m! . . . Yes!
You say I gave my O.K.?
Well, that O.K. you may keep –

But I sure ain’t gonna pay!

*

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem is from Langston Hughes‘s “Madam poems,” a series of dramatic monologues in the voice of Madam Alberta K. Johnson, published in his 1949 collection One-Way Ticket. This poem is also included in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (1995).

April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating by emailing out my own eclectic selection of one poem per day for the duration of the month. If you wish to be unsubscribed from this Poem-a-Day email list at any time, please reply to this email with a friendly unsubscribe request (preferably in heroic couplet form). You may also request to add a consenting friend to the list, or even nominate a poem.

To learn more about National Poetry Month, or to subscribe to a more official-like Poem-a-Day list, visit www.poets.org.

Enjoy.
Ellen

“Madam and the Phone Bill” by Langston Hughes was featured again for Poem-a-Day April 18, 2009.
Poet Langston Hughes was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 10, 2011.

Poem-a-Day, April 28: the smell of scissors

WHAT THE ANGELS LEFT

At first, the scissors seemed perfectly harmless.
They lay on the kitchen table in the blue light.

Then I began to notice them all over the house,
at night in the pantry, or filling up bowls in the cellar

where there should have been apples. They appeared under rugs,
lumpy places where one would usually settle before the fire,

or suddenly shining in the sink at the bottom of soupy water.
Once, I found a pair in the garden, stuck in turned dirt

among the new bulbs, and one night, under my pillow,
I felt something like a cool long tooth and pulled them out

to lie next to me in the dark. Soon after that I began
to collect them, filling boxes, old shopping bags,

every suitcase I owned. I grew slightly uncomfortable
when company came. What if someone noticed them

when looking for forks or replacing dried dishes? I longed
to throw them out, but how could I get rid of something

that felt oddly like grace? It occurred to me finally
that I was meant to use them, and I resisted a growing compulsion

to cut my hair, although, in moments of great distraction,
I thought it was my eyes they wanted, or my soft belly

-exhausted, in winter, I laid them out on the lawn.
The snow fell quite as usual, without any apparent hesitation

or discomfort. In spring, as I expected, they were gone.
In their place, a slight metallic smell, and the dear muddy earth.

*

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem is by Marie Howe, from her 1987 collection The Good Thief.

April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating by emailing out my own eclectic selection of one poem per day for the duration of the month. If you wish to be unsubscribed from this Poem-a-Day email list at any time, please reply to this email with a friendly unsubscribe request (preferably in heroic couplet form). You may also request to add a consenting friend to the list, or even nominate a poem.

To learn more about National Poetry Month, or to subscribe to a more official-like Poem-a-Day list, visit www.poets.org.

Enjoy.
Ellen

“What The Angels Left” by Marie Howe was featured again for Poem-a-Day April 14, 2009.

Poem-a-Day, April 27: some distant trembling warmth

FROM THE ADULT DRIVE-IN

The hill, no the body unbroken
By the strip mall’s lights arced
Harp of her pelvic bone a mouth

Falling upon it like corn cut down
In a field I was forbidden
To walk through. There are so many

Kinds of darkness: her arms tied
To the bed, the shadow they cast
On the sheets whose brightness

Illuminates the hushed cars lying below.
Dark mouth surrounding the root
Or pressing against an opening:

A dog furrowing into the mole’s home
Following some distant trembling warmth.

• ♦ •

Having walked here through the darkening pines
The woman finds her lover in the abandoned
House, some hunter’s cabin, feathers everywhere.

She’s been running, has been pursued, a jealous
Husband who wants her. Is she afraid? Who cares.
We want the fucking to start. The field is so full

Of hunger that when she bends over the cars
Seem to move forward without being turned on.
Two women moving inside each other.

He’s coming for them sure as raccoons in grain
Pails. Their pale skin washes the screen
So we’re almost snow-blind. They can’t see us

Or him for that matter, huge in the doorframe.
He’s beginning to unbuckle his pants.

• ♦ •

O dark barns who will move me now?
I am undone by the flickering screen
By all those girls thrown against the coal black

Night. We, all of us, go back to the field
Scene of a back that went on forever,
The closed eyes, the want that entered us

As we drove by and tried not to look.
How will I ever learn to tell the truth
After the places my hands have been?

It is darker here than other towns, leaves
Burn clear through December. After that
We light beasts of the field to keep ourselves

Warm. Everyone has weathered each other’s want,
Familiar as the feed store’s smell of grain.

• ♦ •

Familiar as the feed store’s smell of grain
This figure seen from the road where the trees
Break apart. A woman straddling the pasture,

Arms white as birches that surround the body
Of cars idling beneath her. I cannot
Tell her voice from the leaves, just watch her mouth

Move, bare as plucked birds in a hunter’s
Hands. It’s a short walk to the fairgrounds.
I want to take her there, to the palace

Of the bandstand and have it out, music
Of tailbone, tensed hamstring, unrelenting
Chord of her neck pulled back till our eyes

Fill like a screen awash in headlights
As the hushed crowd pushes into the night.

• ♦ •

Like snow, feathers, thrush in the virgin’s mouth
It appeared, white against the dark sky. How
Did he know we wanted it, that we’d come

In all weather? A drive-in of skin flicks
For farmers, machinists, salesmen who lived
For small towns like ours. So much empty

Land and the mills shut down, our lives like barns
With both doors blown open: you could see straight
Through. O life before the freeway rose, dark

Turnpike passing thin as a shiv through
The backside of town. Nobody looking
For anyone to come home, truckers in

Back, some kids out for a ride, all of us
Expectant as deer in open season.

*

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem is by Gabrielle Calvocoressi. The above version of this sonnet sequence appeared in the journal Ninth Letter. A different (more recent) version of this poem also appears in Calvocoressi’s collection The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart (2005) — but I’m sending you the older version because I like it better (possibly just because I fell in love with it first), and it’s my poem-a-day list so I get to choose. 😉 I would also like to note that I started writing this email before midnight and have at least some meek argument that I did not spoil my perfect record of having not missed a day all month.

April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating by emailing out my own eclectic selection of one poem per day for the duration of the month. If you wish to be unsubscribed from this Poem-a-Day email list at any time, please reply to this email with a friendly unsubscribe request (preferably in heroic couplet form). You may also request to add a consenting friend to the list, or even nominate a poem.

To learn more about National Poetry Month, or to subscribe to a more official-like Poem-a-Day list, visit www.poets.org.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 23, 2010.

Poem-a-Day, April 26: alone too, too alone

28
Snow Line

It was wet & white & swift and where I am
we don’t know. It was dark and then
it isn’t.
I wish the barker would come. There seems to be to eat
nothing. I am unusually tired.
I’m alone too.

If only the strange one with so few legs would come,
I’d say my prayers out of my mouth, as usual.
Where are his notes I loved?
There may be horribles; it’s hard to tell.
The barker nips me but somehow I feel
he too is on my side.

I’m too alone. I see no end. If we could all
run, even that would be better. I am hungry.
The sun is not hot.
It’s not a good position I am in.
If I had to do the whole thing over again
I wouldn’t.

*

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem is by John Berryman (1914-1972) from his masterwork The Dream Songs (1969).

April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating by emailing out my own eclectic selection of one poem per day for the duration of the month. If you wish to be unsubscribed from this Poem-a-Day email list at any time, please reply to this email with a friendly unsubscribe request (preferably in heroic couplet form). You may also request to add a consenting friend to the list, or even nominate a poem.

To learn more about National Poetry Month, or to subscribe to a more official-like Poem-a-Day list, visit www.poets.org.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Dream Song #28 “Snow Line” by John Berryman was featured again for Poem-a-Day April 26, 2009.

Poem-a-Day, April 25: Hold one bead

Object Tension

Sorry, but in the Mahler I hear approach and retreat
further out even than language. I had to think of the music
entering the cone of a hibiscus at its widest moment,
knowing the flower’s movement from most present to most gone
takes one day only, briefest resolution, like a heard note
or notes in any combination, however long. Brief, however deep,
like the buoyant silence after an applause.
In Donatello’s figure of the aged Magdalene, the raised hands
are caught, held apart just so, one coming to the other
in the gesture for prayer, not touching, held there arguing
look, the soul is sensate, look how true things feel
when they’re held.
Oh my God,
is grief more true than love? My father had a problem
with his hands, growths on the tendons drew his fingers into fists,
in years. God bless
the women passing needles to their girls, and hooks, any word
or flower can be embroidered with the x, anything
can last, sweet home sweet
home. I saw the face of a beaded evening bag,
minutest iridescent beads in rose and deeper rose,
and black. Someone stopped at the fringe,
the most decorative part of the decorative thing. She left
the threaded needle in. What grief
was it, as those hours spent readying the rare occasion stopped,
the bag not done but not undone? One bead
is a beautiful thing. We won’t all die at once. Hold one bead
in your hand and keep from thinking of the next one if you can.

*

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem is by Kathleen Peirce in her 1991 collection Mercy.

April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating by emailing out my own eclectic selection of one poem per day for the duration of the month. If you wish to be unsubscribed from this Poem-a-Day email list at any time, please reply to this email with a friendly unsubscribe request (preferably in heroic couplet form). You may also request to add a consenting friend to the list, or even nominate a poem.

To learn more about National Poetry Month, or to subscribe to a more official-like Poem-a-Day list, visit www.poets.org.

Enjoy.
Ellen

P.S. Thanks to Kate Gapinski (wherever you are) for introducing me to this poem.

Poem-a-Day, April 24: does your house have lions?

what does a liver know of peace
or spleen. kidneys. ribs. be still my soul.
how does a city broker its disease
within the confines of a borough, where control
limps tepid-like carrying a parasol
of hurts, hurting, hurted, hurtful croons
stranded in measured arenas without pulpits or spittoons.

came the summer of nineteen sixty
harlem luxuriating in Malcolm’s voice
became Big Red beautiful became a city
of magnificent Black Birds steel eyes moist
as he insinuated his words of sweet choice
while politicians complained about this racist
this alchemist. this strategist. this purist.

came the rallies sponsored by new york core
came Malcolm with speeches spilling exact and compact
became a traveling man who revived the poor
who answered with slow echoes became cataract
and fiesta became future and flashback
filling the selves with an old outrage
piercing the cold corners with a new carriage.

then i began an awakening a flowering inside
the living dead became a wanderer of air
barking at the stars became a bride
bridegroom of change timeless black with hair
moist with kinks and morning dare
then i began to think me alive with form and history
then i made my former life an accessory.

how to erect respect in a country of men
where dollars pump their veins?
how to return from exhile from swollen
tongues crisscrossing my frail domain?
how to learn to love me amid all the pain?
how to look into his eyes and be reborn
without blood and phlegm and thorn?

*

sister tell me about this cough i cough
all of my skin cradled in this cough
my body ancient as this white cough, i cough
all day and night i’m haunted by this cough,
a snake rattles in my throat this cough, i cough
a scream embalms my chest with cough
sister an echo surrounds my lungs with this cough, i cough.

*

Hello Friends —

Sonia Sanchez returns poetry to its oral and dramatic roots in Does Your House Have Lions? (1997), a book-length dialogue between sister, brother, father, mother, and ancestor voices. The excerpts above are both in the voice of the brother, who is dying of AIDS.

Sanchez succeeds in invoking a contemporary spoken word sensibility of language and applying it to a poetic form at least as old as Chaucer, the Rhyme Royal: Does Your House Have Lions? is written entirely in seven line stanzas with an a-b-a-b-b-c-c rhyme scheme.

April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating by emailing out my own eclectic selection of one poem per day for the duration of the month. If you wish to be unsubscribed from this Poem-a-Day email list at any time, please reply to this email with a friendly unsubscribe request (preferably in heroic couplet form). You may also request to add a consenting friend to the list, or even nominate a poem.

To learn more about National Poetry Month, or to subscribe to a more official-like Poem-a-Day list, visit www.poets.org.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Poem-a-Day, April 23: Since it’s his birthday…

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

*

Hello Friends —

Happy Bard Day! April 23 is celebrated as the supposed birthday of William Shakespeare. The Bard was born in 1564 and also supposedly died on the exact same day 52 years later, April 23, 1616. The monologue above is from Act V, scene 5 of Macbeth, when Macbeth learns of Lady Macbeth’s death. As with “Jabberwocky,” I strongly encourage you to read today’s selection out loud to someone else, at least once a year.

Ever wonder how Shakespeare was able to stay in perfect iambic pentameter so much of the time? Well, it certainly didn’t hurt that he made up many of the words he used — often taking a known word and twisting it into a new part of speech; noun into verb, verb into adjective, etc. — so that they just happen to fit perfectly into his syllabic structure. Here’s a fun list of words that have their earliest usage credited to Shakespeare in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Further reading: Of the dozens of literary works deriving their titles from this ironically immortal Macbeth passage, two particularly worth reading are “Out, Out —” by Robert Frost; and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (but not unless you’ve read something else by Faulkner first — As I Lay Dying is a good place to start if you’re a Faulkner virgin — otherwise, you’ll never get past the first sentence of The Sound and the Fury).

April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating by emailing out my own eclectic selection of one poem per day for the duration of the month. If you wish to be unsubscribed from this Poem-a-Day email list at any time, please reply to this email with a friendly unsubscribe request (preferably in heroic couplet form). You may also request to add a consenting friend to the list, or even nominate a poem.

To learn more about National Poetry Month, or to subscribe to a more official-like Poem-a-Day list, visit www.poets.org.

Enjoy.
Ellen

“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” by William Shakespeare was featured again for Poem-a-Day April 23, 2009.
Poems by William Shakespeare were also featured for Poem-a-Day April 23, 2008 and Poem-a-Day April 23, 2011.

Poem-a-Day, April 22: 100% cotton

The Shirt

The shirt touches his neck
and smoothes over his back.
It slides down his sides.
It even goes down below his belt—
down into his pants.
Lucky shirt.

*

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem is by Jane Kenyon from her 1978 collection From Room to Room. For a different take, also see “Shirt” by Robert Pinsky.

April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating by emailing out my own eclectic selection of one poem per day for the duration of the month. If you wish to be unsubscribed from this Poem-a-Day email list at any time, please reply to this email with a friendly unsubscribe request (preferably in heroic couplet form). You may also request to add a consenting friend to the list, or even nominate a poem.

To learn more about National Poetry Month, or to subscribe to a more official-like Poem-a-Day list, visit www.poets.org.

Enjoy.
Ellen

“The Shirt” by Jane Kenyon was featured again for Poem-a-Day April 7, 2009.