Category: April 2017

The J Church Line


Hello Friends,

I'm in San Francisco for the weekend, and feeling nostalgic for the version of the city that I called home for many years. So today we're featuring a poem named for the best Muni line in San Francisco, the J Church Line, by the poet Thom Gunn. "The J Car" appears in his 1992 collection The Man with Night Sweats — night sweats being a common symptom for men living with HIV, and especially severe in the later stages of AIDS. I do not mean to say I am nostalgic for AIDS — but I am nostalgic for the J Line and Thom Gunn, who was also my teacher just before he passed away in 2004.

Enjoy.
Ellen

The J Car

Last year I used to ride the J Church Line,
Climbing between small yards recessed with vine
— Their ordered privacy, their plots of flowers
Like blameless lives we might imagine ours.
Most trees were cut back, but some brushed the car
Before it swung round to the street once more
On which I rolled out almost to the end,
To 29th Street, calling for my friend.
       He'd be there at the door, smiling but gaunt,
To set out for the German restaurant.
There, since his sight was tattered now, I would
First read the menu out. He liked the food
In which a sourness and dark richness meet
For conflict without taste of a defeat,
As in the Sauerbraten. What he ate
I hoped would help him to put on some weight,
But though the crusted pancakes might attract
They did so more as concept than in fact,
And I'd eat his dessert before we both
Rose from the neat arrangement of the cloth,
Where the connection between life and food
Had briefly seemed so obvious if so crude.
Our conversation circumspectly cheerful,
We had sat here like children good but fearful
Who think if they behave everything might
Still against likelihood come out all right.
       But it would not, and we could not stay here:
Finishing up the Optimator beer
I walked him home through the suburban cool
By dimming shape of church and Catholic school,
Only a few white teenagers about.
After the four blocks he would be tired out.
I'd leave him to the feverish sleep ahead,
Myself to ride through darkened yards instead
Back to my health. Of course I simplify.
Of course. It tears me still that he should die
As only an apprentice to his trade,
The ultimate engagements not yet made.
His gifts had been withdrawing one by one
Even before their usefulness was done:
This optic nerve would never be relit;
The other flickered, soon to be with it.
Unready, disappointed, unachieved,
He knew he would not write the much-conceived
Much-hoped-for work now, nor yet help create
A love he might in full reciprocate.

■

"The J Car" by Thom Gunn was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 28, 2009.

‘Twas brillig


Hello Friends,

Today I am attending a Watershed Company reunion of sorts, and because of that, today's poem-a-day can only be "Jabberwocky" — which I used to make my co-workers recite once a year during poetry month.

One of the things I love about "Jabberwocky" is that Carroll forces you to acknowledge the role of the reader, and not just the writer, in constructing the meaning of a poem — any poem. Carroll draws particular attention to the reader's participation by using words for which we as readers must invent our own pronunciations and meanings — but even in other poems, where the words are not made up, we as readers are still applying our own meanings, in a sense creating our own translations, for the words on the page.

So be creative and brave today! I challenge you to read "Jabberwocky" out loud to someone you know. And if you're feeling really brave, try one of the translations of Jabberwocky — into languages ranging from Spanish and Japanese to C++ and Klingon — compiled by Keith Lim.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Jabberwocky

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought —
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One two! One two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

■

Split This Rock


Hello Friends,

Today's poem comes from Split This Rock, keepers of The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database. Lisa Suhair Majaj is a Palestinian-American poet who resides in Cyprus.

Enjoy.
Ellen

A Few Reasons to Oppose the War

because wind soughs in the branches of trees
like blood sighing through veins

because in each country there are songs
huddled like wet-feathered birds

because even though the news has nothing new to say
and keeps on saying it
NO still fights its way into the world

because for every bomb that is readied
a baby nestles into her mother
latches onto a nipple beaded with milk

because the tulips have waited all winter
in the cold dark earth

because each morning the wildflowers outside my window
raise their yellow faces to the sun

because we are all so helplessly in love
with the light

■

Say Yes


Hello Friends,

It's time for another spoken word piece — Please check out Andrea Gibson's "Say Yes" here. This piece also appears in Gibson's 2008 collection Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Say Yes

excerpt

This is for the possibility that guides us
and for the possibilities still waiting to sing
and spread their wings inside us,
'cause tonight Saturn is on his knees
proposing with all of his ten thousand rings
that whatever song we've been singing we sing even more.
Pull all your strings.
Play every chord.

If you're writing letters to prisoners
start tearing down bars.
If you're handing out flashlights in the dark
start handing out stars.

This is only a brief excerpt. Watch the rest of Andrea Gibson's piece here.

Asleep You Become A Continent


Hello Friends,

I once wrote a poem that included one woman's hip fitting into another woman's side like the curve of South America returning to the crook of Africa — which I think is why I am a sucker for today's sonnet "Asleep You Become A Continent" by Queer Latino poet and San Francisco native Francisco Aragón.

Many people learning to write get taught not to mix metaphors — but then sometimes you grow up and learn to break all the rules beautifully.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Asleep You Become A Continent

asleep you become a continent—
undiscovered, mysterious, long,
your legs mountain ranges
encircling valleys, ravines

night slips past your eyelids,
your breath the swaying of the sea,
sprawled across the bed like
a dolphin washed ashore, your mouth

is the mouth of a sated volcano,
O fragrant timber, how do you burn?
you are so near, and yet so far

as you doze like a lily at my side,
I undo myself and invoke the moon—
I'm a dog watching over your sleep

■

Help me to shatter this darkness


Hello Friends,

Two things Langston Hughes loved unabashedly, and that turn up in his poems again and again, are dreams and the sun. Both make an appearance in today's poem.

Enjoy.
Ellen

As I Grew Older

My hands!
My dark hands!
Break through the wall!
Find my dream!
Help me to shatter this darkness,
To smash this night,
To break this shadow
Into a thousand lights of sun,
Into a thousand whirling dreams
Of sun!

■

Poet Langston Hughes was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 10, 2016, Poem-a-Day April 30, 2012, Poem-a-Day April 10, 2011, Poem-a-Day April 18, 2009, and Poem-a-Day April 29, 2007.

The Founding Mother


Hello Friends,

In October/November of 1987, when today's poem was published in Poetry Magazine, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was still referring to the African National Congress as a terrorist organization — the same social democratic political party that would go on to elect Nelson Mandela in 1994 and that has continued to rule post-apartheid South Africa to this day. By this time in 1987, Winnie Mandela had survived imprisonment, solitary confinement, interrogations, police raids, house arrest, surveillance, and exile. Some consider her to have endured more suffering than her husband imprisoned for 27 years because she was much more exposed. She was targeted because of her political power, serving as her husband's public face and conveying his message to her nation and the world.

Although her life is far from uncontroversial, especially in the years after this poem was written, Winnie Mandela was and is revered as the "Mother of the Nation." Gwendolyn Brooks holds Winnie's elevated position in world politics and in the Black cultural imagination in tension with her existence as just a woman with a childhood and everyday human feelings.

Notice also Brooks' unusual choice to give the poem a narrator in the very last line. Would this change how you hear the poem if you read it over again?

Enjoy.
Ellen

Winnie

Winnie Mandela, she
the non-fiction statement, the flight into resolving fiction,
vivid over the landscape, a sumptuous sun
for our warming, ointment at the gap of our wounding,
          sometimes
would like to be a little girl again.

Skipping down a country road, singing.

Or a young woman, flirting,
no cares beyond curl-braids and paint
and effecting no change, no swerve, no jangle.

But Winnie Mandela, she,
the She of our vision, the Code,
the articulate rehearsal, the founding mother, shall
direct our choir of makers and wide music.

Think of plants and beautiful weeds in the Wilderness.
They can't do a thing about it (they are told)
when trash is dumped at their roots.
Have no doubt they're indignant and daunted.
It is not what they wanted.

Winnie Mandela, she
is there to be vivid: there
to assemble, to conduct the old magic,
the frightened beauty, the trapped wild loveliness, the
crippled reach,
interrupted order, the stalled clarity.

Listen, my Sisters, Brothers, all ye
that dance on the brink of Blackness,
never falling in:
your vision your Code your Winnie is woman grown.

I Nelson the Mandela tell you so.

■

Poet Gwendolyn Brooks was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 29, 2010.

bathroom telephones


Hello Friends,

I will never be able to look at a hotel room's bathroom telephone without thinking of Sherman Alexie and this poem. As indicated in the epigraph, this piece is a nod to Richard Wilbur's "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World" — which you can read here if you like — but you do not need to read Wilbur to appreciate Alexie.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World

          The morning air is all awash with angels...
          Richard Wilbur, "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World"

The eyes open to a blue telephone
In the bathroom of this five-star hotel.

I wonder whom I should call? A plumber,
Proctologist, urologist, or priest?

Who is blessed among us and most deserves
The first call? I choose my father because

He's astounded by bathroom telephones.
I dial home. My mother answers. "Hey, Ma,"

I say, "Can I talk to Poppa?" She gasps,
And then I remember that my father

Has been dead for nearly a year. "Shit, Mom,"
I say. "I forgot he's dead. I'm sorry

How did I forget?" "It's okay," she says.
"I made him a cup of instant coffee

This morning and left it on the table
Like I have for, what, twenty-seven years

And I didn't realize my mistake
Until this afternoon." My mother laughs

At the angels who wait for us to pause
During the most ordinary of days

And sing our praise to forgetfulness
Before they slap our souls with their cold wings.

Those angels burden and unbalance us.
Those fucking angels ride us piggyback.

Those angels, forever falling, snare us
And haul us, prey and praying, into dust.

■

Poems by Sherman Alexie were also featured for Poem-a-Day April 24, 2014, Poem-a-Day April 17, 2010, Poem-a-Day April 27, 2009, and Poem-a-Day April 24, 2008.

The Unwritten


Hello Friends,

Do you have a hardest day? I don't know if there will ever come a time when April 13 isn't the hardest day of the year for me. It is a day when I am forced to face myself. I have known the greatest joys of my life on April 13ths — which I live in fear of never finding again — and April 13 has also been the worst day of my life. All these years later, there is still so much about this day I have not found the words or the courage to write about — and that is the topic of today's poem: the unwritten.

Notice that W.S. Merwin uses no punctuation. He's written entire books with no punctuation, and yet his meaning is still perfectly clear. I find that kind of craft remarkable — like the great Buddhist temples erected without using a single nail.

Enjoy.
Ellen

The Unwritten

Inside this pencil
crouch words that have never been written
never been spoken
never been taught

they're hiding

they're awake in there
dark in the dark
hearing us
but they won't come out
not for love not for time not for fire

even when the dark has worn away
they'll still be there
hiding in the air
multitudes in days to come may walk through them
breathe them
be none the wiser

what script can it be
that they won't unroll
in what language
would I recognize it
would I be able to follow it
to make out the real names
of everything

maybe there aren't
many
it could be that there's only one word
and it's all we need
it's here in this pencil
every pencil in the world
is like this

■

Poems by W.S. Merwin were also featured for Poem-a-Day April 4, 2016, 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.

under the bed


Hello Friends,

We're going to follow up yesterday's poem by Walt Whitman with a contemporary poem about Walt Whitman — written by my teacher, Rick Barot, and featured in Best American Poetry 2016. That same man who spread his arms wide to take in all the open road also cowered under a bed in fear for his life.

— Ellen

Whitman, 1841

I don't know if he did or did not touch the boy.
But that boy told a brother or a father or a friend,
who told someone in a tavern, or told someone

about it while the men hauled in the nets of fish
from the Sound. Or maybe it was told to someone
on the street, a group of men talking outside

the village schoolhouse, where he was the teacher.
What was whispered about him brought everyone
to church that Sunday, where the preacher roared

his name and the pews cleared out to find him.
He was twenty-one, thought of himself as an exile.
He was boarding with the boy and his family.

The boy was a boy in that schoolroom he hated.
Not finding him in the first house, they found him
in another and dragged him from under the bed

where he had been hiding. He was led outside.
And they took the tar they used for their boats,
and they broke some pillows for their feathers,

and the biography talks about those winter months
when there was not a trace of him, until the trail
of letters, articles, stories, and poems started

up again, showing he was back in the big city.
He was done teaching. That was one part
of himself completed, though the self would never

be final, the way his one book of poems would
never stop taking everything into itself. The look
of the streets and the buildings. The look of men

and women. The names of ferry boats and trains.
The name of the village, which was Southold.
The name of the preacher, which was Smith.

■

Poet Rick Barot was also featured for Poem-A-Day April 11, 2016, Poem-A-Day April 9, 2015, Poem-A-Day April 7, 2008, and Poem-A-Day April 19, 2007.