Category: April 2011

Hello Friends —

Kay Ryan was awarded the Pultizer Prize this week for her collected poems, spanning 45 years of published work. So we’re going to do one of her poems today.

Earlier this week, I was reminded of how so many people who are taught the Williams Carlos Williams poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” end up remembering “so much depends upon a red wheel barrow” but may forget about the “glazed with rain water” and “beside the white chickens.” Although I had not connected them before, reading Kay Ryan’s “Home to Roost” again this week after thinking about the forgotten chickens of “The Red Wheelbarrow,” I will probably always associate these two barnyard scene poems with each other in my mind from now on —

Cheers,
Ellen

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Home to Roost

The chickens
are circling and
blotting out the
day. The sun is
bright, but the
chickens are in
the way. Yes,
the sky is dark
with chickens,
dense with them.
They turn and
then they turn
again. These
are the chickens
you let loose
one at a time
and small—
various breeds.
Now they have
come home
to roost—all
the same kind
at the same speed.

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P.S. When Kay Ryan became the United States poet laureate for the 2008-2010 term, the Bay Area photographer Lisa Wiseman (who, full disclosure, is also my oldest childhood friend) took a gorgeous, very poetic potrait series that added a whole nother dimension to the Newsweek profile article “The Reluctant Poet Laureate,” which you can view here.

Hello Friends —
I ate a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast, and a peanut butter sandwich for dinner, and I didn’t eat lunch. So we’re doing a Shel Silverstein poem today.
Cheers,
Ellen

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Peanut-Butter Sandwich

I’ll sing you a poem of a silly young king
Who played with the world at the end of a string,
But he only loved one single thing—
And that was just a peanut-butter sandwich.

His scepter and his royal gowns,
His regal throne and golden crowns
Were brown and sticky from the mounds
And drippings from each peanut-butter sandwich.

His subjects all were silly fools
For he had passed a royal rule
That all that they could learn in school
Was how to make a peanut-butter sandwich.

He would not eat his sovereign steak,
He scorned his soup and kingly cake,
And told his courtly cook to bake
An extra-sticky peanut-butter sandwich.

And then one day he took a bit
And started chewing with delight,
But found his mouth was stuck quite tight
From that last bite of peanut-butter sandwich.

His brother pulled, his sister pried,
The wizard pushed, his mother cried,
“My boy’s committed suicide
From eating his last peanut-butter sandwich!”

The dentist came, and the royal doc.
The royal plumber banged and knocked,
But still those jaws stayed tightly locked.
Oh darn that sticky peanut-butter sandwich!

The carpenter, he tried with pliers,
The telephone man tried with wires,
The firemen, they tried with fire,
But couldn’t melt that peanut-butter sandwich.

With ropes and pulleys, drills and coil,
With steam and lubricating oil—
For twenty years of tears and toil—
They fought that awful peanut-butter sandwich.

Then all his royal subjects came.
They hooked his jaws with grapplin’ chains
And pulled both ways with might and main
Against that stubborn peanut-butter sandwich.

Each man and woman, girl and boy
Put down their ploughs and pots and toys
And pulled until kerack! Oh, joy—
They broke right through that peanut-butter sandwich

A puff of dust, a screech, a squeak—
The king’s jaw opened with a creak.
And then in voice so faint and weak—
The first words that they heard him speak
Were, “How about a peanut-butter sandwich?”

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Poems by Shel Silverstein were also featured for Poem-a-Day April 21, 2007 and Poem-a-Day April 30, 2009.

The Kiss

She pressed her lips to mind.
    ⎯a typo

How many years I must have yearned
for someone’s lips against mind.
Pheromones, newly born, were floating
between us. There was hardly any air.

She kissed me again, reaching that place
that sends messages to toes and fingertips,
then all the way to something like home.
Some music was playing on its own.

Nothing like a woman who knows
to kiss the right thing at the right time,
then kisses the things she’s missed.
How had I ever settled for less?

I was thinking this is intelligence,
this is the wisest tongue
since the Oracle got into a Greek’s ear,
speaking sense. It’s the Good,

defining itself. I was out of my mind.
She was in. We married as soon as we could.

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Hello Friends —

Some people I like a lot got married today. They are similarly touched in mind, and I think they’ll be happy together for a long time — which makes me happy.

For the most part, I’d say writers despise typos. But there are also very few things that delight a poetically inclined mind as much as a real-life accidental metaphor or word play — and every once and awhile, a typo comes along that belongs in that category. For a couple of my other favorite typo poems, see “Letter” by Natasha Trethewey and the spoken word piece “The Impotence of Proofreading” by Taylor Mali. You can find “This Kiss” in Stephen Dunn‘s 2007 collection Everything Else in the World.

Cheers,
Ellen

Hello Friends —
More of you probably know Audre Lorde from her essays, activism, or autobiography, but she was also a poet. In one of those essays, she writes, “Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”*

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Echoes

There is a timbre of voice
that comes from not being heard
and knowing    you are not being
heard    noticed only
by others    not heard
for the same reason.

The flavor of midnight fruit    tongue
calling your body through dark light
piercing the allure of safety
ripping the glitter of silence
around you
       dazzle me with color
       and perhaps I won’t notice
till after you’re gone
your hot grain smell tattooed
into each new poem    resonant
beyond escape    I am listening
in that fine space
between desire and always
the grave stillness
before choice.

As my tongue unravels
in what pitch
will the scream hang unsung
or shiver like lace on the borders
of never    recording
which dreams heal    which
dreams can kill
stabbing a man and burning his body
for cover    being caught
making love to a woman
I do not know.

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* Bonus Reading: The essay quoted above is “Poetry Is Not A Luxury” from Sister Outsider (1984). In a very similar substantive vein to “Poetry Is Not A Luxury” from a very different writer, see also William Faulkner’s 1949 Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

Falling: The Code

1.
Through the night
the apples
outside my window
one by one let go
their branches and
drop to the lawn.
I can’t see, but hear
the stem-snap, the plummet
through leaves, then
the final thump against the ground.

Sometimes two
at once, or one
right after another.
During long moments of silence
I wait
and wonder about the bruised bodies,
the terror of diving through air, and
think I’ll go tomorrow
to find the newly fallen, but they
all look alike lying there
dewsoaked, disappearing before me.

2.
I lie beneath my window listening
to the sound of apples dropping in

the yard, a syncopated code I long to know,
which continues even as I sleep, and dream I know

the meaning of what I hear, each dull
thud of unseen apple-

body, the earth
falling to earth

once and forever, over
and over.

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Hello Friends —

Today’s poem is from Li-Young Lee‘s first collection, Rose (1986). I love Lee’s attention to pauses, to the spaces between things in this poem, building toward that stanza break between “apple-” and “body.” What passes in that moment, in that white space, is a solidification of the apples’ transformation in this poem to more-than-apples: Lee uses “bodies” earlier in the poem, but it is not until this moment — this pause, this use of white space — that the apples become undeniably tied to human mortality, myth, knowledge, code (from the title) in the moral and religious sense. Re-reading the earlier “bodies” reference in this light makes “the bruised bodies, the terror of diving through air,” all the more terrifying — their “final thump” and “disappearing,” earth to earth and dust to dust.

It’s National Poetry Month all month! If a poem a day just isn’t enough, you can always find more at the website of the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org.

— Ellen

Poet Li-Young Lee was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 28, 2008.

Why is the Color of Snow?

Let’s ask a poet with no way of knowing.
Someone who can give us an answer,
another duplicity to help double the world.

What kind of poetry is all question, anyway?
Each question leads to an iceburn,
a snownova, a single bed spinning in space.

Poet, Decide! I am lonely with questions.
What is snow? What isn’t?
Do you see how it is for me.

Melt yourself to make yourself more clear
for the next observer.
I could barely see you anyway.

A blizzard I understand better,
the secrets of many revealed as one,
becoming another on my only head.

It’s true that snow takes on gold from sunset
and red from rearlights. But that’s occasional.
What is constant is white,

or is that only sight, a reflection of eyewhites
and light? Because snow reflects only itself,
self upon self upon self,

is a blanket used for smothering, for sleeping.
For not seeing the naked, flawed body.
Concealing it from the lover curious, ever curious!

Who won’t stop looking.
White for privacy.
Millions of privacies to bless us with snow.

Don’t we melt it?
Aren’t we human dark with sugar hot to melt it?
Anyway, the question–

if a dream is a construction then what
is not a construction? If a bank of snow
is an obstruction, then what is not a bank of snow?

A winter vault of valuable crystals
convertible for use only by a zen
sun laughing at us.

Oh Materialists! Thinking matter matters.
If we dream of snow, of banks and blankets
to keep our treasure safe forever,

what world is made, that made us that we keep
making and making to replace the dreaming at last.
To stop the terrible dreaming.

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By Brenda Shaughnessy from Human Dark with Sugar (2008)