April 2008

Poem-a-day, April 11: belly-scuttling

Hutch

—by way of what they say

From back when it was Nam time I tell you what.

Them days men boys gone dark groves rose like Vietnam bamboo.

Aftergrowth something awful.

Green have mercy souls here seen camouflage everlasting.

Nary a one of the brung-homes brung home whole.

Mongst tar-pines come upon this box-thing worked from scrapwood.

Puts me much myself in mind of a rabbit-crouch.

Is it more a meat-safe.

Set there hid bedded there looking all the world like a coffin.

Somebody cares to tend to it like a spring gets tendered clears the leaves!

Whosoever built it set wire window-screen down the sides.

Long about five foot or thereabouts close kin to a dog-crate.

A human would have to hunch.

Closes over heavy this hingey-type lid on it like a casket.

Swearing to Jesus wadn’t it eye-of-pine laid down for the floor.

Remembering the Garner twins Carl and Charlie come home mute.

Cherry-bombs 4th of July them both belly-scuttling under the house.

Their crave of pent-places ditchpipes.

Mongst tar-pines come upon this box-thing worked from scrapwood.

From back when it was Nam time I tell you what.

***

Hello Friends,
Today’s poem is by Atsuro Riley, who grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, and lives in Menlo Park, California. “Hutch” was printed in the December 2007 issue of Poetry magazine.
Best,
Ellen

Poem-a-day, April 10: Angels were not

This is not a love poem, 1895

Angels were not
coursing through us.
It wasn’t as though

I couldn’t think for days.
We touched hands
quite by accident.

Quite.
Too much to do
in those missionary meetings

to let my mind
linger on
imagining the bend

of a man’s neck
as he bowed in prayer,
to wonder

if it would bend
just that way
to find my lips.

***

Hello Friends,

Today’s poem is an unpublished (yet? to my knowledge) work of Maia McAleavey, written in 2001.

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. You can always learn more about National Poetry Month or sign up for a more official-like poem-a-day list at www.poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Poem-a-day, April 9: Quoth the raven

Hello friends,

Today is a day for reading aloud! You can listen to today’s poem at the following link:
http://bit.ly/basilrathbone

Enjoy!
Ellen

Poem-a-day, April 8: the look

The Look

Strephon kissed me in the spring,
Robin in the fall,
But Colin only looked at me
And never kissed at all.

Strephon’s kiss was lost in jest,
Robin’s lost in play,
But the kiss in Colin’s eyes
Haunts me night and day.

***

Hello Friends,

Yesterday’s poem-a-day is “The Look” by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933).

Some Teasdale trivia tidbits: Her middle name was “Trevor.” She hung with the Harriet Monroe crowd (whose sizable fortune makes Poetry magazine the most financially well-off poetry organization in the U.S. to this day).

Teasdale is also among the (many) suicide sisters of our poetic heritage; for some interesting reading on the connection between mental illness, suicidality, and artistic genius, I highly recommend Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched with Fire.

Enjoy.
Ellen

P.S. You will have to wait til later today for today’s poem. I apologize for falling a bit behind.

“The Look” by Sara Teasdale was featured again for Poem-a-Day April 27, 2011.

Poem-a-day, April 7: a kind of gore

The Horses

The primary red striped onto the black, the dye
spotting the mirror and sink with
a kind of gore, a sulfur that is in the air for days:
you are twenty-two and this means

even folly has its own exacting nature. The hair
turned red, as easily as last month’s
blue; the puggish, miniature barbell pierced into
a nipple. At the club I watch you on top

of the speaker, tearing the shirt your brother gave
you, the music a murderous brightness
in the black room. Now you want it all off, down
to clear scalp. Your head in foam,

you ask me to do the places you can’t properly
reach: the neck’s mossy hairs, the back’s
escarpment, an edge of bone the razor nicks
to small blood, tasting like peppermint

and metal on my tongue. In the used-bookstore
this afternoon, in the master’s book of
drawings, pencil sketches of the heads of horses,
whose long nostrils had been slit open

as custom demanded. The Icelanders, Mongols,
and Italians finding a measurable
efficiency in what they could see: the horses, even
in their speed, as though not breathing.

***

Hi Friends,

Today’s poem is from Rick Barot‘s new collection Want (2008).

The drawing referenced in the last two stanzas is probably “The Slashed Nostrils of Horses” by the Italian artist Antonio Pisanello, part of the Louvre collection. In the Early Reniassance period, horse racing was big business, and in some cultures horse racers believed that slitting the nostrils allowed a horse to take in more air, making it faster.

A visually memorable tidbit of history. But then again, “The Horses” isn’t really about the horses. Why do you think Barot chose this title?

Best,
Ellen

Poet Rick Barot was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 19, 2007.

Poem-a-day, April 6: the art of losing

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

***

Hello Friends,

Elizabeth Bishop‘s “One Art” is an example of a villanelle, a difficult poetic form to master. You can read more about the villanelle form here. There’s also an excellent analysis of this poem in Chapter 2 of Edward Hirsch’s How To Read A Poem.

Today’s poem is dedicated to Nishat and to my grandmother.

Love,
Ellen

Poems by Elizabeth Bishop were also featured for Poem-a-Day April 3, 2007; Poem-a-Day April 5, 2009; and Poem-a-Day April 13, 2010.

Poem-a-day, April 5: shorter than haiku

Jamesian

Their relationship consisted
In discussing if it existed.

***

Dear Friends,

I had the privilege of being one of Thom Gunn‘s last students before he passed away. A couple of British journalists called from overseas when it happened, eager to ask me about what that was like.

My vision is of Thom Gunn walking into the classroom, taking the chair in the center of the room, propping his well-worn black leather boots up on the table, crossing his legs, leaning back, unbuttoning and rolling up just one of his sleeves so we could all see the black panther of tattoo roaring beneath the white hairs and loosening skin of his forearm, and waiting for the bunch of ignorant undergraduate students milling about to realize that Thom Gunn was in the room. Sadly, most of them never did.

Towards the end of the quarter, Thom told me I was by far the most “adventurous” writer in his class. Given how he lived and wrote his own life, I am fairly certain that was a compliment — one that I carry with me and aspire to some day live up to.

“Jamesian” is from Gunn’s 1992 collection The Man with Night Sweats.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Poet Thom Gunn was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 28, 2009.
Poems shorter than haiku were also featured for Poem-a-Day April 20, 2007; Poem-a-Day April 14, 2008; and Poem-a-Day April 2, 2009.

Poem-a-day, April 4: seethes like a billboard

Yellow Light

One arm hooked around the frayed strap
of a tar-black patent-leather purse,
the other cradling something for dinner:
fresh bunches of spinach from a J-Town yaoya,
side of split Spanish mackerel from Alviso’s,
maybe a loaf of Langendorf; she steps
off the hissing bus at Olympic and Fig,
begins the three-block climb up the hill,
passing gangs of schoolboys playing war,
Japs against Japs, Chicanas chalking sidewalks
with the holy double-yoked crosses of hopscotch,
and the Korean grocer’s wife out for a stroll
around this neighborhood of Hawaiian apartments
just starting to steam with cooking
and the anger of young couples coming home
from work, yelling at kids, flicking on
TV sets for the Wednesday Night Fights.

If it were May, hydrangeas and jacaranda
flowers in the streetside trees would be
blooming through the smog of late spring.
Wisteria in Masuda’s front yard would be
shaking out the long tresses of its purples hair.
Maybe mosquitoes, moths, a few orange butterflies
settling on the lattice of monkey flowers
tangled in chain-link fences by the trash.

But this is October, and Los Angeles
seethes like a billboard under twilight.

From used-car lots and the movie houses uptown,
long silver sticks of light probe the sky.
From the Miracle Mile, whole freeways away,
a brilliant fluorescence breaks out
and makes war with the dim squares
of yellow kitchen light winking on
in all the side streets of the Barrio.

She climbs up the two flights of flagstone
stairs to 201-B, the spikes of her high heels
clicking like kitchen knives on a cutting board,
props the groceries against the door,
fishes through memo pads, a compact,
empty packs of chewing gum, and finds her keys.

The moon then, cruising from behind
a screen of eucalyptus across the street,
covers everything, everything in sight,
in a heavy light like yellow onions.

***

Hello Friends,

“Yellow Light” is the first poem of Garrett Kaoru Hongo‘s first collection of poems, Yellow Light (not a bad start, eh?). The book was published in 1982. Hongo grew up on the Big Island of Hawai’i, crossing over to the mainland to attend college in Southern California. Like many poets, he makes his living as a professor of Creative Writing — currently at the University of Oregon in Eugene.

Best,
Ellen

Poem-a-day, April 3: love-plucked

monster

We can be so sensual,
and I know you were waiting for a signal.
I move closer and closer,
until I feel like a bookstore.

Also at some point I woke,
and my love had been plucked
like a guitar string
and I was just shaking.

Now I see you’re a volcano
to whom I cannot say no.
Would you believe I’m the monster
trapped in your radiator?

***

Hello friends,

Today’s poem was written by Rose Polenzani and self-published in an untitled chapbook in the late nineties.

As a reminder, you can always learn more about National Poetry Month or sign up for a more official-like poem-a-day list at www.poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets.

Best,
Ellen

Poem-a-day, April 2: what i think when i ride the train

what i think when i ride the train

maybe my father
made these couplers.
his hands were hard
and black and swollen,
the knuckles like lugs
or bolts in a rich man’s box.
he broke a bone each year
as if on schedule.
when i read about a wreck,
how the cars buckle
together or hang from the track
in a chain, but never separate,
i think; see,
there’s my father,
he was a chipper,
he made the best damn couplers
in the whole white world.

***

Hi friends,

Today’s poem comes from Lucille Clifton‘s Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000.

As you have probably inferred from the poem, a “coupler” — also called a “coupling” — is the mechanism that holds two railway cars together. One meaning of “knuckle” is the round nob-like piece of a coupler. The role of a “chipper” in a steel mill focuses on seems and joints — hammering, cutting, chipping, splitting, filing, fine-tuning angles; “chipper” is also slang for an occasional narcotics user.

Since you are reading this poem in isolation from Clifton’s larger body of work, I would also consider myself remiss if I left you thinking that she had a wonderful, perfect relationship with her father and always viewed him in a nostalgic, idealized light. Many of Clifton’s other poems explore a more complex and painful relationship with her father, who, among other things, sexually abused her as a child.

Does that biographical information change how you read this poem, in particular the description of her father’s hands? Should biographical information change how one reads a poem?

Best,
Ellen

Correction Note: The initial poem-a-day email for April 2, 2008 contained by far my most embarrassing error in Poem-a-Day history. It incorrectly stated this poem could be found in a collection “published in 2000, the year of her death.” Lucille Clifton is still alive. I am so very sorry and so very embarrassed. I don’t know what else to say at the moment. How does one apologize for mistaking someone for dead?