Category: April 2011

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem comes from Elizabeth Alexander‘s 1990 collection The Venus Hottentot — and from a long lineage of poems that incorporate quotes, scraps, excerpts from other works.

The Dirt-Eaters

tra
dition
wanes
I read
from North
ern South:
D.C.

Never ate
dirt
but I lay
on Great-
grandma’s
grave
when I
was small.

“Most cultures
have passed
through
a phase
of earth-
eating
most pre
valent today
among
rural
Southern
black
women.”

Geo
phagy:
the practice
of eating
earthy matter
esp. clay
or chalk.

(Shoe-
boxed dirt
shipped North
to kin)

The gos
sips said
that my great-
grand
ma got real
pale when she
was preg
nant:

“Musta ate
chalk,
Musta ate
starch, cuz
why else
did her
babies
look
so white?”

The Ex
pert: “In ano
ther gener
ation I
sus
pect it will dis
appear al
together.”

Miss Fannie Glass
of Creuger, Miss.:
“I wish
I had
some dirt
right now.”

Her smile
famili
ar as the
smell
of
dirt.

The Crossroads

This is the place it happened. It was here.
You might not know it was unless you knew.
All day the cars blow past and disappear.
This is the place it happened. It was here.
Look at the sparkling dust, the oily smear.
Look at the highway marker, still askew.
This is the place it happened. It was here.
You might not know it was unless you knew.

---

Hello Friends —

A trigger, one most people might not notice, sparks a particular sequence of your neurons firing. Do you have a trigger like that, one that brings the same sharp memory back over and over? It could be an intersection. It could be a day of the year. It could be a word.

The poet Joshua Mehigan is so strict to form in this piece — every line exactly 10 syllables; every line end-stopped in a whole, perfect rhyme; no dashes, no italics, no indentation — you don’t have to count syllables to hear the plain rigidness; it’s like he’s just white-knuckled clinging to basic structure, to have something regular and certain to hang onto. For me, it’s how tightly you can feel Mehigan clinging — that conversational but stalted, redundant tone — that enable him to convey the common characteristic of traumas that still come back to us over and over: a sense of something amorphous unexplained or unresolved — you’ve got many sharp little details, and yet still somehow they don’t add up. That’s why it’s still following you around, still getting triggered, precisely because there is something about it you still don’t have words for. I’d argue this is a poem about not having words — about that feeling of knowing there is something that you have not named, but also still not having the name for it.

In the meantime, you do have these words, these eight lines, you can hear going round in your head every time that trigger goes off. Stalted, redundant, simple, jagged — it might not sound like the most flattering description for a poem, but for me that’s exactly what makes this little piece drop-dead gorgeous.

“Crossroads” appeared in Poetry magazine (Feb. 2010).

Cheers,
Ellen

CHECKING OUT

I turn off the Xerox machine and the fax and the other fax
and the PC tower and the fluorescents,
put the check register in the desk, lock the desk,
and take the elevator eleven floors down
to the narrow front of East 21st Street.

When I come out, the space between the buildings
is so thin it’s an upside-down skyscraper of sky,
narrower at the street. There will be no sky at all
for the next two hours of trains back to Brooklyn.
Someone once told me I should come to New York, so I did.

Two trains and three stations later—and a walk
past a housing project like a cliff made of bricks—
I am back in my windowless basement room
with the tile floor, staring at the square grate
in the middle, wondering what the drain was for.

I eat the same sandwich I eat every night.
A car alarm punctuates the seconds of the dark,
as if to say how few hours of single-malt sleep
stand between me and tomorrow’s trains.
Someone once told me I should come to New York,

so I did. Tomorrow I will try to buy food
for a different kind of sandwich and it will not go well—
I will see the word California on a bag of mandarin oranges
and start crying in the narrow aisles of the supermarket—
and a man with a cart full of cat food will ask me to move, please,

he is trying to get to the checkout. Where I come from,
I want to tell him, they make the grocery stores
big enough for someone to cry in the produce section
and someone else to move around them.
And when you get to the parking lot

you put your oranges in a car, not a backpack,
and you drive the car home, and you park the car
in a driveway above ground, never under,
and you eat the whole bag of mandarin oranges
at a kitchen table bigger than Brooklyn.

---

Hello Friends —

Alright, it’s Dara Weinberg‘s birthday. And she has her first poem in print in fancypants academic literary journal thing (you can find “Checking Out” on pages 7-8 of The Hopkins Review winter 2011 issue). So if you enjoy today’s selection, hop over to www.daraweinberg.com and leave a comment on her blog.

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.

Go Cardinal,
Ellen

love is a deep and a dark and a lonely
and you take it deep take it dark
and take it with a lonely winding
and when the winding gets too lonely
then may come the windflowers
and the breath of wind over many flowers
winding its way out of many lonely flowers
waiting in rainleaf whispers
waiting in dry stalks of noon
wanting in a music of windbreaths
so you can take love as it comes keening
as it comes with a voice and a face
and you make a talk of it
talking to yourself a talk worth keeping
and you put it away for a keen keeping
and you find it to be a hoarding
and you give it away and yet it stays hoarded

like a book read over and over again
like one book being a long row of books
like leaves of windflowers bending low
and bending to be never broken

---

Hello Friends —

“Love Is a Deep and a Dark and a Lonely” from Carl Sandburg‘s 1953 collection Honey and Salt begs to be read out loud. Here’s a little experiment for you: read this poem out loud to yourself. Then find someone else and ask them to read it out loud. Notice if the two of you made the same choices about where to put punctuation, or when to ‘wind’ and when to ‘wind.’

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.

Cheers,
Ellen

Hello Friends —

Welcome to National Poetry Month! For the past several years, I’ve enjoyed sending out one poem per day for the duration of the month and hearing your thoughts and responses to the different poems. All are welcome; no prior poetry experience is required — just send me an email if there’s someone who’d like to be added to the list.

Today’s poem comes from the 19th century Canadian poet James McIntyre:

Ode on the Mammoth Cheese

    Weighing over 7,000 pounds

We have seen thee, queen of cheese,
Lying quietly at your ease,
Gently fanned by evening breeze,
Thy fair form no flies dare seize.

All gaily dressed soon you’ll go
To the great Provincial show,
To be admired by many a beau
In the city of Toronto.

Cows numerous as a swarm of bees,
Or as leaves upon the trees,
It did require to make thee please,
And stand unrivalled, queen of cheese.

May you not receive a scar as
We have heard that Mr. Harris
Intends to send you off as far as
The great world’s show at Paris.

Of the youth beware of these,
For some of them might rudely squeeze
And bite your cheek, then songs or glees
We could not sing, oh! queen of cheese.

We’rt thou suspended from balloon,
You’d cast a shade even at noon,
Folks would think it was the moon
About to fall and crush them soon.

---

Ok, so this poem is pretty funny. But it also raises some serious questions:

I came across this poem in a collection called Very Bad Poetry (1997), which begs the question, what makes a poem bad? or Bad? or Very Bad? Try to describe bad poetry without just using other adjectives (like ‘cheesy’). If there were no such thing as bad poetry, could there still be such a thing as good poetry?

When is a poem so bad that it becomes good? What evidence tells you this poem is or is not bad on purpose? Does the author’s intent matter in the ultimate determination of Badness or Goodness? what about a century from now?

What does producing a collection of Very Bad Poetry say about the relationship between readers/audience, writers, and the publishing industry?

Also, what does a gaily dressed cheese look like? Does anyone have a picture of one?
What kind of cheese repels insect life but attracts small children?
How far back in literature has there been in a mythical connection between cheese and the moon?

These and other pressing questions we will address as Poetry Month unfolds.

As always, you can learn more about National Poetry Month at www.poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets.

Cheers,
Ellen

Dear Friends,

Today is the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City, a horrific illustration of the conditions immigrant workers endured — and continue to endure — in garment industry sweatshops.

It’s a piece of news that I first learned from a poem, many years ago. Robert Pinsky weaves this bit of history into his ode to the shirt, from his 1990 collection The Want Bone.

It’s nearly that time of year again — National Poetry Month is just around the corner — so I thought I’d send you this little appetizer, because today is the anniversary, and also so that you can let me know before next week if you’d like to be on the poem-a-day list this year. And if you have any friends or family who would like to be added (or removed), please send them my way!

I will send out one poem each day from April 1-30. No prior poetry experience is necessary to participate! Enthusiasm, ability to read (mostly English), and access to email are the main prerequisites.

So, if you have a minute, take in “Shirt.” And then take a minute to take in your own shirt, whatever you happen to be wearing right now — try to figure out how many cuts of fabric were sewed together to make it, how many buttons, how many stitches; if you don’t already know what it says, take a minute to read your shirt’s tag, the whole tag; think of words you’d use to describe its color, texture, size or fit. Put yourself in Pinsky’s sleaves for a minute, and imagine the moment you realized you were wearing a poem.

To learn more about National Poetry Month, visit www.poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets.

You can also read more about the Triangle Factory Fire here.

---

Shirt

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—

The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out

Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.

A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once

He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers—

Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.”
Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked

Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord.  Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans

Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,

Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
To wear among the dusty clattering looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,

The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:

George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit

And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
Both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone,

The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.

---

Poet Robert Pinsky was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 10, 2007 and Poem-a-Day April 3, 2009.