Category: April 2016

last poem

Hello Friends,

Well, it’s been quite the month! You’ve read a sonnet, villanelle, pantoum, limerick, terza rima, eulogy, couplets, tercets, quatrains, pocket poems, poems in translation, and plenty of free verse. You’ve read poems from the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, and 2000s. You’ve read poems by Latina poets, Black poets, Asian poets, Native American poets, and queer poets. Not bad for thirty days!

The last word this month goes to Ken Mikolowski — I will leave you with a poem from his 1991 collection Big Enigmas.

Thank you again for joining me in a celebration of poetry this month.
Ellen

Nothing

can replace
poetry
in my life
and one day
surely
it will

■

So much of any year is flammable

Burning the Old Year

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

■

Today’s poem is by the Palestinian American poet Naomi Shihab Nye. For another take on “things I didn’t do,” see W.S. Merwin’s “Something I’ve not done.”

the sweet, sane calm

Hello Friends,
Today’s poem is a rare case of writing by a 19th-century African American woman that has survived for us to read today. Alice Dunbar-Nelson published her first poetry collection when she was only 20 years old and already a college graduate (but not yet married to her first of three husbands, the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar). Appropriately for today’s poem, Dunbar-Nelson is interred in Delaware very near Carney’s Point, and her papers are collected by the University of Delaware.
Enjoy.
— Ellen

The Lights at Carney’s Point

O white little lights at Carney’s Point,
        You shine so clear o’er the Delaware;
When the moon rides high in the silver sky,
        Then you gleam, white gems on the Delaware.
Diamond circlet on a full white throat,
        You laugh your rays on a questioning boat;
Is it peace you dream in your flashing gleam,
        O’er the quiet flow of the Delaware?

And the lights grew dim at the water’s brim,
        For the smoke of the mills shredded slow between;
And the smoke was red, as is new bloodshed,
        And the lights went lurid ‘neath the livid screen.

O red little lights at Carney’s Point,
        You glower so grim o’er the Delaware;
When the moon hides low sombrous clouds below,
        Then you glow like coals o’er the Delaware.
Blood red rubies on a throat of fire,
        You flash through the dusk of a funeral pyre;
Are there hearth fires red whom you fear and dread
        O’er the turgid flow of the Delaware?

And the lights gleamed gold o’er the river cold,
        For the murk of the furnace shed a copper veil;
And the veil was grim at the great cloud’s brim,
        And the lights went molten, now hot, now pale.

O gold little lights at Carney’s Point,
        You gleam so proud o’ver the Delaware;
When the moon grows wan in the eastering dawn,
        Then you sparkle gold points o’er the Delaware.
Aureate filagree on a Croesus’ brow,
        You hasten the dawn on a gray ship’s prow.
Light you streams of gold in the grim ship’s hold
        O’er the sullen flow of the Delaware?

And the lights went gray in the ash of day,
        For a quiet Aurora brought a halcyon balm;
And the sun laughed high in the infinite sky,
        And the lights were forgot in the sweet, sane calm.

■

Failing and Flying

Hello Friends,
More than any other poem this month, if I could just believe in this one poem by Jack Gilbert, I think I would be better off. Maybe you would be too.
— Ellen

Failing and Flying

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

■

Between Prose and Poetry

Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned to pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

■

— Howard Nemerov, Sentences (1980)

See also Emily Dickinson’s “They shut me up in Prose – “.

so approximate

Hello Friends,

Today’s poem about the distance between words and what they mean appeared in the May 2013 issue of Poetry magazine and is also included in Rick Barot’s award-winninig 2016 collection Chord.

You can listen to the poet read his poem here.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Tarp

I have seen the black sheets laid out like carpets
under the trees, catching the rain

of olives as they fell. Also the cerulean brightness
of the one covering the bad roof

of a neighbor’s shed, the color the only color
inside the winter’s weeks. Another one

took the shape of the pile of bricks underneath.
Another flew off the back of a truck,

black as a piano if a piano could rise into the air.
I have seen the ones under bridges,

the forms they make of sleep. I could go on
this way until the end of the page, even though

what I have in my mind isn’t the thing
itself, but the category of belief that sees the thing

as a shelter for what is beneath it.
There is no shelter. You cannot put a tarp over

a wave. You cannot put a tarp
over a war. You cannot put a tarp over the broken

oil well miles under the ocean.
There is no tarp for that raging figure in the mind

that sits in a corner and shreds receipts
and newspapers. There is no tarp for dread,

whose only recourse is language
so approximate it hardly means what it means:

He is not here. She is sick. She cannot remember
her name. He is old. He is ashamed.

■

Acquainted with the Night

Acquainted with the Night

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in the rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

■

Hello Friends,

It is extremely difficult to write a poem this deceiving simple! Today’s sonnet by Robert Frost is an example of terza rima — written in iambic pentameter and following an interlocking ABA BCB CDC DAD AA rhyme scheme. Much like Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Acquainted with the Night” is typically interpreted to have both literal and metaphorical layers of meaning.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Poems by Robert Frost were also featured for Poem-a-Day April 26, 2012, Poem-a-Day April 28, 2010, Poem-a-Day April 30, 2008, and Poem-a-Day April 16, 2007.

Long Finger Poem

Hello Friends,
Since finger length has come up as a topic in our current presidential race, it seemed appropriate to share with you this work by Jin Eun-Young, translated by Peter Campion.
Enjoy.
Ellen

Long Finger Poem

I’m working on my poems and working with

my fingers not my head. Because my fingers

are the farthest stretching things from me.
Look at the tree. Like its longest branch

I touch the evening’s quiet breathing. Sounds

of rain. The crackling heat from other trees.

The tree points everywhere. The branches can’t

reach to their roots though. Growing longer they

grow weaker also. Can’t make use of water.
Rain falls. But I’m working with these farthest stretching

things from me. Along my fingertips bare shoots
of days then years unfurl in the cold air.

■

hurtling towards

The Leash

After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear,
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can
you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek
bottom dry to suck the deadly water up into
your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to
say, Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish
comes back belly up, and the country plummets
into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still
something singing? The truth is: I don’t know.
But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing
like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move
my living limbs into the world without too much
pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight
toward the pickup trucks break-necking down
the road, because she thinks she loves them,
because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud
roaring things will love her back, her soft small self
alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm,
until I yank the leash back to save her because
I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say,
and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings
high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay
her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth.
Perhaps, we are always hurtling our body towards
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe
like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together
peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.

■

Hello Friends,

Today’s poem by Ada Limón was originally published as the Academy of American Poets poem-a-day on January 1, 2016. For another great dog moment in poetry, see Mark Doty’s “Golden Retrievals” (1998).

I hope you’re enjoying poetry month!
Ellen