Category: April 2012

Hello Friends —
Sometimes a story takes roost in a writer. Its unspokeness occupies a space in you, even in your sleep. The story keeps reminding you that it can’t tell itself, like a bird can’t speak English. For me, that feeling is what today’s poem by Jim Harrison is about.
Enjoy.
Ellen

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Birds Again

A secret came a week ago though I already
knew it just beyond the bruised lips of consciousness.
The very alive souls of thirty-five hundred dead birds
are harbored in my body. It’s not uncomfortable.
I’m only temporary habitat for these not-quite-
weightless creatures. I offered a wordless invitation
and now they’re roosted within me, recalling
how I had watched them at night
in fall and spring passing across earth moons,
little clouds of black confetti, chattering and singing
on their way north or south. Now in my dreams
I see from the air the rumpled green and beige,
the watery face of earth as if they’re carrying
me rather than me carrying them. Next winter
I’ll release them near the estuary west of Alvarado
and south of Veracruz. I can see them perching
on undiscovered Olmec heads. We’ll say goodbye
and I’ll return my dreams to earth.

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A large quantity of dead birds also featured prominently in Poem-a-Day April 24, 2011.

Hello Friends —

Many of you may recall sometime in elementary or middle school writing a poem about the weather in the shape of a raindrop — your teacher probably gave you this exercise to teach you what poetry is. But think about this: humans invented rhyme and meter to make stories easier to memorize and re-tell orally, long before the written word. For an art form that originated as strictly spoken, that little elementary school raindrop poem is arguably a pretty radical departure — taking the poetic form all the way to its other extreme: an arrangement of words on the page so visual that it cannot be conveyed out loud; it requires the physical page.

You can think of today’s poem as a grown-up version of that popular visual poetic form, the concrete poem. “Manhattan” by Howard Horowitz first appeared in The New York Times on August 30, 1997. For those of you not familiar with this island covered largely in concrete, the content of Horowitz’s words corresponds to their location — so, for example, the unicorn tapestries in the Cloisters are located at the northern most tip of Manhattan Island, just as they are located at the northernmost tip of Horowitz’s page.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Poem-a-Day April 19, 2009 is another example of a concrete poem.

SPLINTER

The voice of the last cricket
across the first frost
is one kind of good-by.
It is so thin a splinter of singing.

— Carl Sandburg

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Poet Carl Sandburg was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 2, 2011.

Hello Friends —

My friend Kate’s birthday is September 11, and it is a beautiful birthday.

It’s been her birthday her whole life. One day in her teens, it became something else, to everyone else. But it’s still her birthday. It’s still a day. And days are vast — they contain so much, and so much that is beautiful.

I need an un-cursing, a de-jinxing, a filtering down to the beautiful — I need this poem today. I just couldn’t find another that would do. So with apologies to Kate, and to anyone else for whom this is a repeat, Ann Lauterbach‘s hum:

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Hum

The days are beautiful
The days are beautiful.

I know what days are.
The other is weather.

I know what weather is.
The days are beautiful.

Things are incidental.
Someone is weeping.

I weep for the incidental.
The days are beautiful.

Where is tomorrow?
Everyone will weep.

Tomorrow was yesterday.
The days are beautiful.

Tomorrow was yesterday.
Today is weather.

The sound of the weather
Is everyone weeping.

Everyone is incidental.
Everyone weeps.

The tears of today
Will put out tomorrow.

The rain is ashes.
The days are beautiful.

The rain falls down.
The sound is falling.

The sky is a cloud.
The days are beautiful.

The sky is dust.
The weather is yesterday.

The weather is yesterday.
The sound is weeping.

What is this dust?
The weather is nothing.

The days are beautiful.
The towers are yesterday.

The towers are incidental.
What are these ashes?

Here is the hate
That does not travel.

Here is the robe
That smells of the night

Here are the words
Retired to their books

Here are the stones
Loosed from their settings

Here is the bridge
Over the water

Here is the place
Where the sun came up

Here is a season
Dry in the fireplace.

Here are the ashes.
The days are beautiful.

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“Hum” by Ann Lauterbach was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 17, 2007 and Poem-a-Day April 21, 2009.

The Hour and What Is Dead

Tonight my brother, in heavy boots, is walking
through bare rooms over my head,
opening and closing doors.
What could he be looking for in an empty house?
What could he possibly need there in heaven?
Does he remember his earth, his birthplace set to torches?
His love for me feels like spilled water
running back to its vessel.

At this hour, what is dead is restless
and what is living is burning.

Someone tell him he should sleep now.

My father keeps a light on by our bed
and readies for our journey.
He mends ten holes in the knees
of five pairs of boy’s pants.
His love for me is like sewing:
various colors and too much thread,
the stitches uneven. But the needle pierces
clean through with each stroke of his hand.

At this hour, what is dead is worried
and what is living is fugitive.

Someone tell him he should sleep now.

God, that old furnace, keeps talking
with his mouth of teeth,
a beard stained at feasts, and his breath
of gasoline, airplane, human ash.
His love for me feels like fire,
feels like doves, feels like river-water.

At this hour, what is dead is helpless, kind
and helpless. While the Lord lives.

Someone tell the Lord to leave me alone.
I’ve had enough of his love
that feels like burning and flight and running away.

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By Li-Young Lee from The City In Which I Love You (1990)

Poet Li-Young Lee was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 14, 2011 and Poem-a-Day April 28, 2008.

Hello Friends —

So here’s a nice 40th birthday present: a Pulitzer Prize.

It’s official: At long last, a Pulitzer has been awarded to a poetry collection named after a David Bowie song. One of my favorite lines from Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars: Poems is, “A pair of eyes. The most remarkable lies.” — but I’m not lying to you:

Life on Mars: Poems really is named for a Bowie song.
The collection really was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
And the announcement really was made on April 16, 2012, the poet’s 40th birthday.

I find this delightfully poetic. So, in celebration, an excerpt for you from sections 2 and 3 of Smith’s “Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?” (a poem titled after a line in a much later Bowie song, “Sound and Vision”).

Happy Birthday, Tracy K. Smith!
Enjoy, everyone.
— Ellen

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DON’T YOU WONDER, SOMETIMES?

2.

He leaves no tracks. Slips past, quick as a cat. That’s Bowie
For you: the Pope of Pop, coy as Christ. Like a play
Within a play, he’s trademarked twice. The hours

Plink past like water from a window A/C. We sweat it out,
Teach ourselves to wait. Silently, lazily, collapse happens.
But not for Bowie. He cocks his head, grins that wicked grin.

Time never stops, but does it end? And how many lives
Before take-off, before we find ourselves
Beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold?

The future isn’t what it used to be. Even Bowie thirsts
For something good and cold. Jets blink across the sky
Like migratory souls.

3.

Bowie is among us. Right here
In New York City. In a baseball cap
And expensive jeans. Ducking into
A deli. Flashing all those teeth
At the doorman on his way back up.
Or he’s hailing a taxi on Lafayette
As the sky clouds over at dusk.
He’s in no rush. Doesn’t feel
The way you’d think he feels.
Doesn’t strut or gloat. Tells jokes.

I’ve lived here all these years
And never seen him. Like not knowing
A comet from a shooting star.
But I’ll bet he burns bright,
Dragging a tail of white-hot matter
The way some of us track tissue
Back from the toilet stall. He’s got
The whole world under his foot . . .

Hello Friends —
I have very vivid memories from early childhood of flying — not memories of dreaming about flying, just memories of flying, just me and sky. I also love ridge trails deep in Tennessee. So you can see why C. Dale Young’s “The Vista” speaks to me — and, I hope, to some of you.
Enjoy.
Ellen

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The Vista

Not tenderness in the eye but the brute need
to see accurately: over the ridge on a trail
deep in Tennessee, the great poet looked out and saw
the vista that confederate soldiers saw
as they rode over the edge rather than surrender.

I saw only the edge of the cliff side itself and then
estimated the distance down to the bottom
of the dirty ravine. This is what someone with wings
does when he knows he cannot fly: he measures
distance. I have spent far too much time

examining my wings in the bathroom mirror
after the shower’s steam has slowly cleared
from the medicine cabinet’s toothpaste-splattered glass:
grey, each feather just slightly bigger than a hawk’s.
The great poet said one might find a vista like this,

perhaps, once in a lifetime, but I didn’t understand
what he meant by this then. The wings, tucked
beneath a t-shirt, beneath my long-sleeve oxford,
the wings folded in along my spine, were irritated
by that humid air, itchy from the collected sweat from the hike.

I wasn’t paying attention, which is a sin I have since learned.
At 14, after the wings first erupted from my back,
I went up to the roof and tried to fly. Some lessons
can only be learned after earnest but beautiful failures.
My individual feathers are just slightly bigger than a hawk’s

feathers. But my wingspan is just about 8 feet. I’m a man,
and like men I measure everything. But vistas
make me nervous. And the great poet made me nervous.
And I knew then what I still know now, that I
was only seconds away from another beautiful failure.

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For the curious: The great poet who makes C. Dale Young nervous may be Allen Tate (“Ode to the Confederate Dead”: “We shall say only the leaves / Flying, plunge and expire”). Tate in turn may have been made nervous by Donald Davidson (“The Last Charge”: “the blue waves of hills lap all the distance”), and Davidson in turn may have been made nervous by Lord Alfred Tennyson (“The Charge of the Light Brigade”: “All in the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred”). All of which is to say, every poet walks a delicate balance between the premise that every poem he could possibly think of to write has already been written, and has never been written.

Hi Friends —

Thanks for enduring a sadder poem-a-day yesterday, and here’s a sunnier poem to balance out your poetic intake.

My lovely neighbors Kristin and Jason pointed out to me the other day that April is National Grilled Cheese Month as well as National Poetry Month — and clearly these two celebrations were meant to be brought together.

At my new favorite diner-I’ve-never-been-to, the Pop Shop neighborhood soda foundation in Collingswood, New Jersey, owners Stink Fisher and Connie Correia Fisher serve up a speciality grilled cheese sandwich for each day of National Grilled Cheese Month — that’s 30 days, 30 different kinds of grilled cheese sandwiches — and they also run an accompanying Cheesy Poetry Contest. From my quick review of past year’s winners, I’d say any one of you has a great shot at cheesy poetry gold — so consider penning your own Ode to Grilled Cheese this weekend; I’d be happy to critique a draft for you before the submission deadline of April 26, 2012.

In the grand literary tradition of parody, retired professor Walt Howat offers the following Cheesy Poetry Contest entry, celebrating some of the Pop Shop’s 30 variations on the grilled cheese sandwich.

Lastly, while the selection of “American (cheese) the Beautiful” for a poem-a-day may be considered an endorsement of National Grilled Cheese Month more generally, please note that the opinions and views of American cheese expressed are those of the poet and do not necessarily reflect the views of this poem-a-day curator.

Bon Appétit.
Ellen

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American (cheese) the Beautiful

Oh forest of flavors full of taste
I wander through your browned cliffs of bread
watching streams of cheese run without haste
through trees of tomatoes oh so red
past beautiful rocks of avocado
ridges of sweet bacon hard and lean
through the lushness of pesto meadow
and gourmet mustards that lie unseen
toward the lake of mozzarella glow
’round boulders of pickles gray and green
smelling the warm gold Jarlsberg blossoms
climbing o’er the focacia ridges
surrounded by the sharp cheddar mums
crossing juicy chicken slice bridges
past black olives parading like nuns
clouds of mayonnaise ever so dear
and amber waves of carm’lized un’yuns
tis April again grilled cheese is here
a forest of lush tastes for me to find
The Land of the Pop Shop draws me near
rich veins of flavors for me to mine.

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Cheese also featured prominently in Poem-a-Day April 1, 2011.
The grilled cheese’s close relative, the peanut-butter sandwich, was celebrated for Poem-a-Day April 18, 2011.

Hello Friends —
When the immortal goddess of the moon falls in love with a mortal man of earth (named Endymion), the forces of light and dark, life and death, hope and despair play themselves out in four thousand lines of iambic couplets. You can think of Endymion as sort of like Star Wars, 1818-style — brought to you by a 23-year-old named John Keats.
Enjoy.
Ellen

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I.

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
‘Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven’s brink.

Nor do we merely feel these essences
For one short hour; no, even as the trees
That whisper round a temple become soon
Dear as the temple’s self, so does the moon,
The passion poesy, glories infinite,
Haunt us til they become a cheering light
Unto our souls, and bound to us so fast,
That, whether there be shine, or gloom o’ercast,
They always must be with us, or we die.