Category: April 2014

what does a liver know of peace
or spleen. kidneys. ribs. be still my soul.
how does a city broker its disease
within the confines of a borough, where control
limps tepid-like carrying a parasol
of hurts, hurting, hurted, hurtful croons
stranded in measured arenas without pulpits or spittoons.

***

sister tell me about this cough i cough
all of my skin cradled in this cough
my body ancient as this white cough, i cough
all day and night i’m haunted by this cough,
a snake rattles in my throat this cough, i cough
a scream embalms my chest with cough
sister an echo surrounds my lungs with this cough, i cough.

 

Hello Friends,

Sonia Sanchez’s Does Your House Have Lions? (1997) is a book-length dialogue between sister, brother, father, mother, and ancestor voices. The excerpts above are both in the voice of the brother, who is dying of AIDS.

Sanchez takes her ear for contemporary spoken word and applies it to a poetic form at least as old as Chaucer, the Rhyme Royal: Does Your House Have Lions? is written entirely in seven line stanzas with an A-B-A-B-B-C-C rhyme scheme.

Does Your House Have Lions? was also featured for poem-a-day way back on April 24, 2007.

— Ellen

Anxieties

It’s like ants
and more ants.

West, east
their little axes

hack and tease.
Your sins. Your back taxes.

This is your Etna,
your senate

of dread, at the axis
of reason, your taxi

to hell. You see
your past tense—

and next? A nest
of jittery ties.

You’re ill at ease,
at sea,

almost in-
sane. You’ve eaten

your saints.
You pray to your sins.

Even sex
is no exit.

Ah, you exist.

Hello Friends,

Today’s poet, Donna Masini, credits her contemporary Terrance Hayes (featured for poem-a-day April 28, 2011) with introducing her to this poetic exercise in anagrams: Every single line in Masini’s “Anxieties” ends with a word that can be spelled using only the letters A-N-X-I-E-T-I-E-S. Those “ants” and “ants” are quite literally crawling out of “Anxieties.” The result is a poem that doesn’t necessarily convey the exact formula of its form, but your ear does pick up a more general sense of remixing variations on the same sounds.

If you have an interest in anagrams (or porn, or supreme court justices), may I also highly recommend the insanely brilliant “It’s Smut” by Kevin McFadden (featured for poem-a-day April 26, 2010).

Happy National Poetry Month!

Ever anxiously yours,
Ellen

Hello Friends,

There’s something very special about holding a 114-year-old book in your hands, that visceral reminder of how long these words have lasted, and how precious these words’ surviving is.

This 1900 edition of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s (167-year-old) epic poem Evangeline that Bethany gave me has been in Long Beach at least since its previous owner inscribed it in pencil in 1926. A number of poems this month will come from books that were gifts from one of you on this poetry list, actually — the most precious books in my poetry collection.

I wish that every one of you could read today’s poem from this copy I’m holding. There’s nothing quite like it. But since the current poem-a-day budget doesn’t cover that kind of travel expense, nor purchase and shipping costs for that many 114-year-old copies, we’ll have to make do with the email equivalent.

Longfellow’s epic is a very readable page-turner: His title character, Evangeline, loses her family, her childhood home, everything she’s ever known, when the British forcibly remove the French population from Acadia (now Nova Scotia). We then get a historical tour of pre-Revolutionary America that covers territories from Louisiana to Nebraska to Michigan to Pennsylvania, as Evangeline spends her life searching towns where scattered survivors from Acadia may have settled, trying to find her long-lost love Gabriel.

Today’s poem is also an exercise in whether the printed page matters, especially for poetry. Whether font matters. Margins. Page breaks. The poem that came before a poem or after a poem when it was bound as a collection. A poet may not have personal control over all those aspects of print, but do they still impact how you read a poem? Take a look at the photos below of my 1900 copy of the famous opening lines of Evangeline, and then check out the 2014 version of Evangeline on poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets, who officially bring you National Poetry Month.

Make an argument for how these are or are not the same poem. Make an argument for whether paper books, electronic books, or some other form of the written or spoken word will survive the longest on this earth. What does a 114-year-old copy of a book written in 2014 look like?

Friends,

I picked out “Sunflower Sonnet Number Two” as a favorite of mine from an old edition of June Jordan’s Things that I Do in the Dark, only to later find that Adrienne Rich picked out the same sonnet in her introduction to Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (2005), published after Jordan’s death in 2002. That was a fun moment for me — to think Adrienne Rich and I had similar taste in June Jordan poetry. And I’m going to use that Adrienne Rich introduction to justify cheating just a little bit today and sneaking in two poems, both quoted in Rich’s introduction: I believe Jordan wrote these two poems years apart, but they share a theme of the fluctuation of distance and closeness, impermenance and certainty, in long-term relationships.

Enjoy.
Ellen

SUNFLOWER SONNET NUMBER TWO

Supposing we could just go on and on as two
voracious in the days apart as well as when
we side by side (the many ways we do
that) well! I would consider then
perfection possible, or else worthwhile
to think about. Which is to say
I guess the costs of long term tend to pile
up, block and complicate, erase away
the accidental, temporary, near
thing/pulsebeat promises one makes
because the chance, the easy new, is there
in front of you. But still, perfection takes
some sacrifice of falling stars for rare.
And there are stars, but none of you, to spare.

***

POEM NUMBER TWO ON BELL’S THEOREM,
OR THE NEW PHYSICALITY OF LONG DISTANCE LOVE

There is no chance that we will fall apart
There is no chance
There are no parts.

P.S. You don’t need a physics background to understand this poem, but for the curious: “Bell’s Theorem” refers to a debated concept in quantum physics — something about how an action on one subatomic particle can affect another subatomic particle instanteously, even if the particles are universes apart.* Language that physicists (including Einstein) use to talk about this particular theorem includes “quantum entanglement,” “non-locality,” and ”spooky actions at a distance” — just the sort of poetic phrases that would catch the attention of a romantic like Jordan in a physics article or textbook.

For me, knowing the physics reference does make a difference in how I read Jordan’s use of the phrase “There is no chance.” That brazen, very American “I have 100% control over my own (relationship’s) destiny” attitude is still there. But there’s also a more literal, physical (subatomic-particle-level physical) reading — an almost opposite feeling of giving 100% control over to the universe and trusting in its mysteries we only scratch the surface of understanding.

* Physicists on this email list: Please speak up and clarify if I’ve misrepesented Bell here!

The Secret

We have a secret, just we three,
The robin, and I, and the sweet cherry-tree;
The bird told the tree, and the tree told me,
And nobody knows it but just us three.

But of course the robin knows it best,
Because she built the—I shan’t tell the rest;
And laid the four little—something in it—
I’m afraid I shall tell it every minute.

But if the tree and the robin don’t peep,
I’ll try my best the secret to keep;
Though I know when the little birds fly about
Then the whole secret will be out.

Hello Friends—

“The Secret” is written by Anonymous (of course, who else?). You can find it in The Golden Book of Poetry (1947). This poem is one of my favorite examples of withholding an expected rhyme — that moment when your ear hears “nest” without the poet ever writing it down. You’ve encountered this technique before: Alexander Pope uses it in “An Essay on Criticism,” The Killers use it in “Mr. Brightside.” What’s special about the use of withheld rhyme here in “The Secret” is that it so perfectly mimics the subject matter — that “I’m afraid I shall tell it every minute” feeling when a secret is just bursting through all your seams.

Happy Birthday, Robin and Megan! And to anyone else whose birthday the little bird didn’t tell me about.

And of course a Happy National Poetry Month!

Cheers,
Ellen

A Blessing for One Who is Exhausted

When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic,
Time takes on the strain until it breaks;
Then all the unattended stress falls in
On the mind like an endless, increasing weight,

The light in the mind becomes dim.
Things you could take in your stride before
Now become laborsome events of will.

Weariness invades your spirit.
Gravity begins falling inside you,
Dragging down every bone.

The tide you never valued has gone out.
And you are marooned on unsure ground.
Something within you has closed down;
And you cannot push yourself back to life.

You have been forced to enter empty time.
The desire that drove you has relinquished.
There is nothing else to do now but rest
And patiently learn to receive the self
You have forsaken for the race of days.

At first your thinking will darken
And sadness take over like listless weather.
Then flow of unwept tears will frighten you.

You have traveled too fast over false ground:
Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.

Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.

Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.
Learn to linger around someone of ease
Who feels they have all the time in the world.

Gradually, you will return to yourself,
Having learned a new respect for your heart
And the joy that dwells far within slow time.

— John O’Donohue, from To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings (2008)

Hello, Friends, and Happy National Poetry Month!

Have you ever fallen in love with a word, just one word? Have you ever just been tickled that a particular word exists — maybe it’s slang in your region, maybe it’s jargon in your profession, maybe it’s a term in your native language with no precise English translation.

Jason Schneiderman’s “Vocabulary” is not about alientating other people or ranking yourself above them with something you memorized off the back of a flashcard. I love this poem because it conveys what it means to discover and share the meaning of words from a place of personal inquisitiveness — from a place of wonder and love.

The very word “vocabulary” can never be fully separated from elitism and hierarchy: there is always inclusion and exclusion in the words we choose. But that doesn’t have to get in the way of learning to love to learn.

Or so says the kid who copied pages of the dictionary just for fun.

Vocabulary

I used to love words,
but not looking them up.

Now I love both,
the knowing,

and the looking up,
the absurdity

of discovering that “boreal”
has been meaning

“northern” all this time
or that “estrus”

is a much better word
for the times when

I would most likely
have said, “in heat.”

When I was translating,
the dictionary

was my enemy,
the repository of knowledge

that I seemed incapable
of retaining. The foreign word

for “inflatable” simply
would not stay in my head,

though the English word “deictic,”
after just one encounter,

has stuck with me for a year.
I once lost “desiccated”

for a decade, first encountered
in an unkind portrayal

of Ronald Reagan, and then
finally returned to me

in an article about cheese.
I fell in love with my husband,

not when he told me
what the word “apercus” means,

but when I looked it up,
and he was right.

There’s even a word
for when you use a word

not to mean its meaning,
but as the word itself,

and I’d tell you what it was
if I could remember it.

My friend reads the dictionary
for its perspective on culture,

laughs when I say that
reference books are not really

books, but proleptic databases.
My third grade teacher

used to joke that if we were bored
we could copy pages out of the dictionary,

but when I did, also a joke,
she was horrified rather than amused.

Discovery is always tinged
with sorrow, the knowledge

that you have been living
without something,

so we try to make learning
the province of the young,

who have less time to regret
having lived in ignorance.

My students are lost
in dictionaries,

unable to figure out why
“categorize” means

“to put into categories”
or why the fifth definition

of “standard” is the one
that will make the sentence

in question make sense.
I wonder how anyone

can live without knowing
the word “wonder.”

A famous author
once said in an interview,

that he ended his novel
with an obscure word

he was sure his reader
would not know

because he liked the idea
of the reader looking it up.

He wanted the reader,
upon closing his book, to open

another, that second book
being a dictionary,

and however much I may have loved
that author, after reading

that story
(and this may surprise you)

I loved him less.

What’s your relationship to the dictionary? Post a word you fell in love with once below!

Cheers,
Ellen