Category: April 2012

The Butterfly

those things
which you so laughingly call
hands are in fact two
brown butterflies fluttering
across the pleasure
they give
my body

[21 feb 71]

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Hello Friends —

I hope you’re enjoying National Poetry Month so far! Thank you to everyone who has hit reply to a poem; I love hearing from you. For instance, you could write me back about why Nikki Giovanni gave this poem about butterflies (plural) the title “The Butterfly” (singular) in her 1972 collection My House.

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

Cheers,
Ellen

Hello Friends —
Since a poem is missing, we’re going to catch up with a found poem by Charles Jensen. This form of poetry — deriving a poem from an existing work, like a newspaper article, by crossing out or removing some of the words — has seen a recent trendy resurgence of late, including zines like the Found Poetry Review devoted solely to found poetry.
Enjoy.
Ellen

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Poem In Which Words Have Been Left Out

You have the right to remain
anything you can and will be.

An attorney you cannot afford
will be provided to you.

You have silent will.
You can be against law.
You cannot afford one.

You remain silent. Anything you say
will be provided to you.

The rights can and will be
against you. The right provided you.

Have anything you say be
right. Anything you say can be right.

Say you have the right attorney.
The right remain silent.

Be held. Court the one. Be provided.
You cannot be you.

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For another poem derived from language in a famous Supreme Court case, see Kevin McFadden’s “It’s Smut.”

Hello Friends —
In his 1963 Fundamentals of Poetry, William Leahy selects Richard Armour’s “Money” to illustrate trochaic dimeter — meaning, four syllables per line with emphasis on the first and third syllables.
Enjoy.
Ellen

MONEY

Workers earn it,
Spendthrifts burn it,
Bankers lend it,
Women spend it,
Forgers fake it,
Taxes take it,
Dying leave it,
Heirs receive it,
Misers crave it,
Robbers seize it,
Rich increase it,
Gamblers lose it . . .
I could use it.

Hello Friends —

Can you believe it? All mine for only $4.50 today: a 1985 first edition of Marilyn Hacker‘s Assumptions, yellowed at the edges just enough to earn your respect for its age, but otherwise prestine, unmarked. It’s the kind of book that makes a point of letting you know with what care it was made — the pages thick and textured, the note about the typography (Garamond) as long as the poet’s biography on the final page. To make it even more special, the “advance praise” note on the back cover is from Adrienne Rich (who you’ll be hearing from later this month).

So, in celebration of this newest addition to my poetry shelves, a poem-a-day from that book that encourages you to unbind your lips, unwind your tongue, and read aloud:

Rune of the Finland Woman

She could bind the world’s winds in a single strand.
She could find the world’s words in a singing wind.
She could lend a weird will to a mottled hand.
She could wind a willed word from a muddled mind.

She could wend the wild woods on a saddled hind.
She could sound a wellspring with a rowan wand.
She could bind the wolf’s wounds in a swaddling band.
She could bind a banned book in a silken skin.

She could spend a world war on invaded land.
She could pound the dry roots to a kind of bread.
She could feed a road gang on invented food.
She could find the spare parts of the severed dead.

She could find the stone limbs in a waste of sand.
She could stand the pit cold with a withered lung.
She could handle bad puns in the slang she learned.
She could dandle foundlings in their mother tongue.

She could plait a child’s hair with a fishbone comb.
She could tend a coal fire in the Arctic wind.
She could mend an engine with a sewing pin.
She could warm the dark feet of a dying man.

She could drink the stone soup from a doubtful well.
She could breathe the green stink of a trench latrine.
She could drink a queen’s share of important wine.
She could think a few things she would never tell.

She could learn the hand code of the deaf and blind.
She could earn the iron keys of the frozen queen.
She could wander uphill with a drunken friend.
She could bind the world’s winds in a single strand.

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“Rune of the Finland Woman” by Marilyn Hacker was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 11, 2009.

Hello Friends —

In the spring of my freshman year at Stanford, Cathy and I went to a live reading with Dorothy Allison AND Jewelle Gomez AND Alice Walker at the Women’s Community Center in San Francisco. Our seats were so front and center, we could see the beads of sweat roll down Allison’s face, the saliva gather in the caesura of Gomez’s front teeth, and the dark specs spark in Walker’s purple irises. The dynamic amongst those three writers, and between the writers and an overflowing audience, was incredible — it was by far the best reading I’ve ever been to, one of the best nights of my entire life.

That was over a decade ago, and I haven’t seen Dorothy Allison since. But I’m nonetheless convinced that tonight’s live reading by Dorothy Allison and Sister Spit in Long Beach is going to be its own kind of sweat-beading magical. Appropriately, the event is free — since experiencing Dorothy Allison live is priceless.

As communities and as individuals, we often to turn to poetry to survive traumas we have experienced. In today’s poem, Robert McDonald embodies clinging to writers and poets who have come before us, as well as clinging to the form and structure poetry provides, in order to process his trauma. I like that McDonald titles this piece “The Dorothy Allison Poem” — the phrase that his audience would use to request or refer to this piece no matter what he titled it, suggesting that added layer of his writing in turn providing something for others to cling to as he has clung.

Enjoy.
Ellen

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The Dorothy Allison Poem

For I shall praise Dorothy Allison

For Dorothy Allison is fearless and angry, the pull of that anger, the pull and the fire

For I do not like to be angry and I am most often afraid

For while Dorothy Allison’s anger could plow down a mountain, Dorothy Allison’s jokes could make the Pope laugh so hard that communion wine sprayed out of his nose

For Dorothy Allison had once had a contest with a gay male poet to see which of them could shove the most buttered baby carrots up the ass

For Dorothy Allison’s story did not tell us who won, for Dorothy Allison is modest in her triumph

For Dorothy Allison is in truth immodest but seeks to write herself beyond shame,
for Dorothy Allison, the discomfort and rage and rocking triumph of hard sex, and laughter

For my dead sister who comes to me sometimes not a ghost but a thought

And my sister big and loud, an angry dyke who shot herself in the head

For yea though I have met a lot of big angry dykes Dorothy Allison is bigger and badder, more hilarious and brave

For my sister and her upbringing, if she spoke to you on your ouija board she might tell you how it killed her

For white trash and drunken fathers, an uncle named Speedy an uncle named Buddy, an aunt named Red an aunt named Dot, baby sister it was my upbringing, too

For let us not compare our childhood to anyone else’s pot-holed road,
for buckle up your seatbelts it’s going to be a bumpy night

For the heat and howl of Dorothy Allison, for whiskey shots, the fluids of sex, the yes goddamnit yes oh mama baby daddy”’girl, nobody ever came so goddamn hard on the page

For I shall mourn my sister, she told me in the last year of her life
that she didn’t think she’d ever had an orgasm

For something broken and something sad, stupid ass world, it would not fix her

And I would tell her and tell her that yea all of us are broken

And Dorothy Allison with a limp and Dorothy Allison with a drawl rolls up her sleeves, pushes her hair up off her face, says fuck it, and commences to make herself some biscuits and gravy

For we must love one another, and oh if my sister like Dorothy Allison could live, and oh if my sister like Dorothy Allison might live, and how am I broken let me count the ways

For our father is not the villain in this story

And our childhood was not as remarkable as all that

For Dorothy Allison shakes the truth in her mouth
like a dog shakes a toy

For Dorothy Allison takes the truth out of the dog’s mouth and sets it on the ground not a toy but a rabbit and rejoice oh ye watchers as that sweet wounded bunny shakes itself sober and sweet jesus runs free

For read Bastard Out of Carolina and then sit down with me and let’s talk about childhood and what is remembered

For the fragility of our mother as she walked up the front porch to get into the car, for the sudden whiteness of her thin hair, for the sound in my throat when I saw her stooped and aged like that, we were leaving for your funeral
sister oh sister I do not forgive you

Yet still I wish and lo I wish

Yet Dorothy Allison is brave enough to brave her stories; for Dorothy Allison the laughter and the howl and the fire

For tell your little sisters do not die, for tell your little sisters: dismantle your guns

For I shall praise Dorothy Allison for the glorious rock, and the pull, the rock and pull and sweat of her language, for the force and butter and hard liquor of her words

For she lives, and she lives, and I heard the awesome growl of sex in her words

And my sister is dead, her name was Kathleen, she called herself Mick.

For how long did she drive around with the gun in her pocket

Her name was Mick and she was once a little girl, we called her Kathleen.

The crime oh my sister and my shame oh my sister and why will you not speak to me even in my dreams

And lo we fail and we fail and we fail those we love

For Dorothy, and Oz, and there is no place like home, and where is the home in Homosexual, and never oh never was there ever such a place

Oh my sister with her heart and my sister with her brains and her lion’s roar, yet my sister that final cowardly act

For I wish she’d been the baddest dyke I wish she been the bitch unconquered I wish she’d seduced one hundred loose and eager girls

For she did not know the power of an anger tinged with joy

For she did not let her muscles thrum with electric rage and then stretch and square her shoulders, and put herself to work

For I think that Dorothy Allison knows

For the daunting, for the sacred task of saying the unsaid

For saying the unsayable for this our daily bread

And mother fuck it, six tears in a bucket

For Dorothy Allison could kick my ass from here to California

Oh Dorothy Allison I will not let you go unless thou bless me

For I will tell the world and tell the world that all of us are broken

For Dorothy Allison shall make me brave

For I am alive god damn it, alive and triumphant and failing and broken

And I shall not go by my own hand, you can bet your buck-toothed Aunt Hazel on that

For I am alive and angry and failed and shaken.

And the joy, and the fire, a fire that burns under the crust of the world, and sister, believe me, the world will always find a way to break your heart

For my sister on the gurney in that terrible room

For my dead sister on the gurney in that terrible cold room

For I saw her face and I can still see her face and my sister looked angry and yes I said yes I said yes that is her

Sister, sister, the word a caress

For Dorothy Allison, I saw her read what she had written and raise the crowd to its feet

For Dorothy Allison says we have to tell our stories.

For I can’t go on. For I will go on.

For my sister is dead, her name was Kathleen, she called herself Mick.

For some stories weigh one hundred pounds

Forgive me. The world will always find a way
to break the heart. Forgive me, then

forgive yourself. I will lift up this story, I will tie it to my back.

Like a pack mule descending down in

the Grand Canyon (I have a photo of you, happy on the lip
of that break in the earth.)

I will lift up your torn story: I will carry it, carry it.

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“The Dorothy Allison Poem” by Robert McDonald appeared in the October 2010 issue of [PANK] magazine.

Traveling Light

I’m only leaving you
for a handful of days,
but it feels as though
I’ll be gone forever—
the way the door closes

behind me with such solidity,
the way my suitcase
carries everything
I’d need for an eternity
of traveling light.

I’ve left my hotel number
on your desk, instructions
about the dog
and heating dinner. But
like the weather front

they warn is on its way
with its switchblades
of wind and ice,
our lives have minds
of their own.

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Hello Friends —

Sometimes when writing a poem, you discover the words have minds of their own. For me, the title poem from Linda Pastan‘s 2011 collection Traveling Light (2011) documents one of those moments of discovery. “For an eternity” and “traveling light” are two completely ordinary, everyday phrases we use when describing travel. And yet, when the two phrases are combined, they evoke an extra layer of imagery: in the context of “eternity,” “light” can also be read as a noun, as in rays of light traveling through the eternal blackness of outerspace — giving the reader a visual equivalent for what it feels like when “it feels as though / I’ll be gone forever.” When I get to that “traveling light” image in this poem, I feel a sudden joyful leaping out of the page, like I’ve just bounced on a trampoline that zoomed me from the tiny black of inked letters all the way out to the infinite blackness at the limits of outerspace, and then quickly back again — wheeee! — that delightful sensation of words becoming more than the sum of their parts, becoming poetry.

April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating by emailing out one poem per day for the duration of the month. I love hearing when you love a poem, or hate a poem, or have a thought or a question about a poem — so please do hit reply, or leave a comment on the blog, meetmein811.blogspot.com. You are also welcome to nominate a poem or poet to be included. You can also learn more about National Poetry Month at www.poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets.

Enjoy.
Ellen