Category: Blogspot

why things burn

My fire-eating career came to an end
when I could no longer tell
when to spit and when

to swallow.
Last night in Amsterdam,
1,000 tulips burned to death.

I have an alibi. When I walked by
your garden, your hand
grenades were in bloom.

You caught me playing
loves me, loves me
not, metal pins between my teeth.

I forget the difference
between seduction
and arson,

ignition and cognition. I am a girl
with incendiary
vices and you have a filthy never

mind. If you say no, twice,
it’s a four-letter word.
You are so dirty, people have planted

flowers on you: heliotropes. sun-
flowers. You’ll take
anything. Loves me,

loves me not.
I want to bend you over
and whisper: “potting soil,” “fresh

cut.” When you made
the urgent fists of peonies
a proposition, I stole a pair of botanists’

hands. Green. Confident. All thumbs.
I look sharp in garden
shears and it rained spring

all night. 1,000 tulips
burned to death
in Amsterdam.

We didn’t hear the sirens.
All night, you held my alibis
so softly, like taboos

already broken.

*

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem comes from Daphne Gottlieb‘s 2001 collection Why Things Burn — because sometimes the title poem really is the one most worth reading.

April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating by emailing out my own eclectic selection of one poem per day for the duration of the month. If you wish to be unsubscribed from this Poem-a-Day email list at any time, please reply to this email with a friendly unsubscribe request (preferably in heroic couplet form). You may also request to add a consenting friend to the list, or even nominate a poem.

To learn more about National Poetry Month, or to subscribe to a more official-like Poem-a-Day list, visit www.poets.org.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Benevolence
by Tony Hoagland

When my father dies and comes back as a dog,
I already know what his favorite sound will be:
the soft, almost inaudible gasp
as the rubber lips of the refrigerator door
unstick, followed by that arctic

exhalation of cold air;
then the cracking of the ice-cube tray above the sink
and the quiet ching the cubes make
when dropped into a glass.

Unable to pronounce the name of his favorite drink, or to express
his preference for single malt,
he will utter one sharp bark
and point the wet black arrow of his nose
imperatively up
at the bottle on the shelf,

then seat himself before me,
trembling, expectant, water pouring
down the long pink dangle of his tongue
as the memory of pleasure from his former life
shakes him like a tail.

What I’ll remember as I tower over him,
holding a dripping, whiskey-flavored cube
above his open mouth,
relishing the power rushing through my veins
the way it rushed through his,

what I’ll remember as I stand there
is the hundred clever tricks
I taught myself to please him,
and for how long I mistakenly believed
that it was love he held concealed in his closed hand.

*

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem comes from the quiet fury of Tony Hoagland, in his second book, Donkey Gospel (1998).

April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating by emailing out my own eclectic selection of one poem per day for the duration of the month. If you wish to be unsubscribed from this Poem-a-Day email list at any time, please reply to this email with a friendly unsubscribe request (preferably in heroic couplet form). You may also request to add a consenting friend to the list, or even nominate a poem.

To learn more about National Poetry Month, or to subscribe to a more official-like Poem-a-Day list, visit www.poets.org.

Enjoy.
Ellen

“Benevolence” by Tony Hoagland was featured again for Poem-a-Day April 11, 2010.

The Converted

When those doves come for their evening weep
And the last sun kneels till the lawn is lit
From underneath,

When the tiny bats begin their arcs around the porch
And the older goats remember,
Running for the stable door,

The sky cracks again; the inexhaustible pours in.

Breezes swing down into fields, amulets.
Leaves chatter against the flagstone. Each house steadies
Into night like an airplane, silver propellers of light

Nosing out. The dog stands in front of the TV: Heston
Is Moses and Moses in color. Suddenly all is conspiracy.
Night dark pushes out the cold stone of moon; each lightbulb

Chooses a star to convert, to bring down.

*

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem opens Sophie Cabot Black‘s first book, The Misunderstanding of Nature (1994).

April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating by emailing out my own eclectic selection of one poem per day for the duration of the month. If you wish to be unsubscribed from this Poem-a-Day email list at any time, please reply to this email with a friendly unsubscribe request (preferably in heroic couplet form). You may also request to add a consenting friend to the list, or even nominate a poem.

To learn more about National Poetry Month, or to subscribe to a more official-like Poem-a-Day list, visit www.poets.org.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Weight, In Passing

Because it is still
early, the sky is skimmed
grey, and the three men working here

have little to say to each other.
They drive the truck closer
along the sand, ready the winch

for lifting. This is a solemn
thing, and the day is quiet
as communion.

They open
the whales
with chainsaws — the ribs

enormous crescent moons,
the blubber an awkward
afterthought.

Without mirth
they haul the soft masses
onto the flatbed. It is the hearts

they are after, large
as cars, with veins
a grown man could crawl through.

*

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem comes from the young poet Andrea Haslanger, circa 2002, and is unpublished.

April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating by emailing out my own eclectic selection of one poem per day for the duration of the month. If you wish to be unsubscribed from this Poem-a-Day email list at any time, please reply to this email with a friendly unsubscribe request (preferably in heroic couplet form). You may also request to add a consenting friend to the list, or even nominate a poem.

To learn more about National Poetry Month, or to subscribe to a more official-like Poem-a-Day list, visit www.poets.org.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Hello Friends —

April is National Poetry Month! I am celebrating by emailing out my own eclectic selection of one poem per day for the duration of the month. If you wish to be unsubscribed from this Poem-a-Day email list at any time, please reply to this email with a friendly unsubscribe request (preferably in heroic couplet form). You may also request to add a consenting friend to the list, or even nominate a poem.

For April Fool’s Day, I feel it is only fitting to send you a poem with a sense of humor: “One-Word Poem” comes from David R. Slavitt, in his 2006 book William Henry Harrison and Other Poems. Please note that I did not write the discussion questions; they are supposed to be part of the poem.

To learn more about National Poetry Month, or to subscribe to a more official-like Poem-a-Day list, visit www.poets.org.

Enjoy.
Ellen

One-Word Poem

Motherless.

Discussion questions.

1. Is this a joke? And, if so, is it a joke of the poet in which the editor of the magazine (or, later, the book publisher or the textbook writers) has conspired? Or is it a joke on the editors and publishers? Is the reader the audience of the poem?

2. It is regrettable not to have a mother. Is the purpose of the poem to convey an emotion to the reader? Does the poet suppose that this is the saddest word in the language? Do you agree or disagree? Can you suggest a sadder word?

3. The Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary gives an alternate meaning from nineteenth- and twentieth-century Australian slang as an intensifier, as in “stone motherless broke.” Can you assume that the poet knew this? Does this make for an ambiguity in the poem? Does this information change your emotional response?

4. If the assertion of the single word as a work of art is not a joke, then what could it mean? Is it a Dada-ist gesture, amusing and cheeky perhaps but with an underlying seriousness that the poet either invites or defies the reader to understand?

5. Even if the poet was merely fooling around, does that necessarily diminish the possible seriousness of the poem?

6. If we acknowledge that this is a work of art, can the author assert ownership? Is it possible to copyright a one-word poem?

7. In writing a one-word poem, the crucial decision must be which word to choose and to posit as a work of art. Do you think the poet spent a great deal of time picking this word? Or did he simply open a dictionary and let his fingers do the walking? Does that diminish the poem’s value? Or is it a kind of bibliomancy?

8. Should the word have been in quotes? Or is it quotes even without being in quotes? There is a period at the end of the poem. Would it change the meaning of the poem if there were an exclamation point? Or no punctuation at all? Would that be a different poem? Better or worse? Or would you like it more or less? (Are these different questions?)

9. You can almost certainly write — or “write” — a one-word poem. But it would be difficult for you to get it published — almost certainly more difficult now that this one has been published and staked its claim. Is the publication of a poem a part of the creative act? Had the poet written his poem and put it away in his desk drawer as Emily Dickinson used to do, would this make it a different poem?

10. Some poems we read and some that we particularly like, we memorize. You have already memorized this one. Do you like it better now? Or are the questions part of the poem, so that you have not yet memorized it? Will you, anyway? Do you need to memorize the questions verbatim, or is the idea enough?

“One-Word Poem” by David R. Slavitt was featured again for Poem-a-Day April 1, 2009.