April 2016

put a food stamp on this poem and eat it.

Hello Friends,

I’m going to cheat a little bit today and send you a series of short poems (instead of just one poem) by my favorite street poet, Julia Vinograd. These excerpts are from her collection Berkeley Street Cannibals: Selected Poems, 1969-1976.

Enjoy.
Ellen

SPRING

There’s coke
in the spoon
of June.

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GRAFFITTI

Bathrooms inspire me.
I write my best poems
with my pants down.

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BOREDOM

We repeat ourselves
helplessly
like hiccups.

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WIFE

She hangs his laundry
out to dry
between her thighs.

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THE F.B.I.

Not even lovers
look so close
and see so little.

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HITCH-HIKING

Couples don’t stop.
They have their own problems.

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HARD TIMES

put a food stamp on this poem
and eat it.

■

STREET MORALITY

Everything is permitted,
but nothing is taken seriously.

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WHAT NOW?

We’ve forgotten the rules
we were trying to break.

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Poet Julia Vinograd was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 25, 2011, Poem-a-Day April 12, 2009, and Poem-a-Day April 20, 2007.

invincible

Anthem

We were all in love
but didn’t know it.
We were all in love
continually. Bless
our little hearts,
smoking and drinking
and wrecking things.
Bless our shameless shame.
We were loud, invincible.
We were tough as rails.
We stole street signs
and knocked over bins.
Ripped the boards
off boarded-up stuff.
Slept in towers
filled with pigeon shit
and fluff. We kicked
beer bottles down
cobbled lanes.
Tires and chains.
Chains and wheels
and skin. The world
was always ending
and we the inventors
of everything.

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— Melissa Stein

Thanks

Hello Friends,

Since yesterday’s poem-a-day was about giving, today’s poem-a-day will cover saying thank you. The remarkable poet W.S. Merwin manages to convey his meaning without using punctuation, not just in today’s poem but in nearly his entire 50+ years worth of work.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Thanks

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is

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Poems by W.S. Merwin were also featured for Poem-a-Day April 16, 2010; Poem-a-Day April 9, 2009; Poem-a-Day April 17, 2008; and Poem-a-Day April 7, 2007.

We give because

Hello Friends,

Below is my favorite fundraising-related poem. Notice that the inaugural state poet laureate of Arizona, Alberto Ríos, uses couplets throughout this piece but ends with a single line — making today’s poem-a-day similar to yesterday’s poem-a-day in terms of form.

Enjoy.
Ellen

When Giving Is All We Have

One river gives
Its journey to the next.

We give because somebody gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.

We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.

We have been better for it,
We have been wounded by it—

Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,
Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.

Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,
But we read this book, anyway, over and again:

Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,
Mine to yours, yours to mine.

You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.
Together we are simple green. You gave me

What you did not have, and I gave you
What I had to give—together, we made

Something greater from the difference.

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Poet Alberto Ríos was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 22, 2014.

you may open a door

Hello Friends,

Today’s poem by Matthew Olzmann is composed entirely in couplets, groups of two lines, except for one stanza that is only a single line. Olzmann disrupts the structure of his poem at this moment, exactly at the same spot in the poem where he invokes the epigraph from Czesław Miłosz, to create a fulcrum on which he pivots to referring to a “you.” It’s as if the “missing” line that would have made that stanza a couplet is instead you catching your breath to realize “you” is you in the doorway. Or, the “missing” line is one of those special doorways in poetry that allows our minds to open a door to “a meadow, or a eulogy.”

This is just one small example of using form or structure to convey meaning — the words mean more because of how they are arranged on the page. The use of form is one of the key characteristics that makes poetry bett—ur, different from prose.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz

You whom I could not save,
Listen to me.

Can we agree Kevlar
backpacks shouldn’t be needed

for children walking to school?
Those same children

also shouldn’t require a suit
of armor when standing

on their front lawns, or snipers
to watch their backs

as they eat McDonalds.
They shouldn’t have to stop

to consider the speed
of a bullet or how it might

reshape their bodies. But
one winter, back in Detroit,

I had one student
who opened a door and died.

It was the front
door to his house, but

it could have been any door,
and the bullet could have written

any name. The shooter
was thirteen years old

and was aiming
at someone else. But

a bullet doesn’t care
about “aim,” it doesn’t

distinguish between
the innocent and the innocent,

and how was the bullet
supposed to know this

child would open the door
at the exact wrong moment

because his friend
was outside and screaming

for help. Did I say
I had “one” student who

opened a door and died?
That’s wrong.

There were many.
The classroom of grief

had far more seats
than the classroom for math

though every student
in the classroom for math

could count the names
of the dead.

A kid opens a door. The bullet
couldn’t possibly know,

nor could the gun, because
“guns don’t kill people,” they don’t

have minds to decide
such things, they don’t choose

or have a conscience,
and when a man doesn’t

have a conscience, we call him
a psychopath. This is how

we know what type of assault rifle
a man can be,

and how we discover
the hell that thrums inside

each of them. Today,
there’s another

shooting with dead
kids everywhere. It was a school,

a movie theater, a parking lot.
The world

is full of doors.
And you, whom I cannot save,

you may open a door

and enter a meadow, or a eulogy.
And if the latter, you will be

mourned, then buried
in rhetoric.

There will be
monuments of legislation,

little flowers made
from red tape.

What should we do? we’ll ask
again. The earth will close

like a door above you.
What should we do?

And that click you hear?
That’s just our voices,

the deadbolt of discourse
sliding into place.

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