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The poet, Mexican Ambassador, and Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz wrote today’s poem for a memorial service for the critic and linguist Roman Jakobson, who passed away in 1982. “Entre Lo Que Veo Y Digo . . . / Between What I See and What I Say . . .” is also included in his 1987 collection Árbol Adentro / A Tree Within. The accompanying English translation is by Paz’s longtime collaborator and translator Eliot Weinberger.
¡buen provecho!
Ellen
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Dear Lord
Show me
The way—
Take
My heart
And throw
It away
Lord, take
My heart
And throw
It out
Lord, throw
My heart
Way out
When you read poet Robert Glück’s “Prayer,” do you picture hands closed in prayer, or hands wide open in prayer?
There’s something of Kay Ryan in the cadence over these short choppy lines. I’m also reminded of a handful of other prayer-related poem-a-days from past Aprils: Julia Vinograd’s “Ballad,” Maia McAleavey’s “This is not a love poem, 1895,” and Kathleen Peirce’s “Object Tension.”
I hope you’re enjoying National Poetry Month! If not, don’t forget to submit your unsubscribe request in the form of a heroic couplet.
Thanks,
Ellen
***
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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?
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
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.
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!
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.
“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
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.
11.
The stillness of the night disturbed your rest.
The piteous communication of coyotes
wept drop by drop into your breast.
So you went outdoors,
were joined together with the desert night,
encircled by mysterious distances,
surrounded by nocturnal fortresses.
But overhead —
An intimate, brightly-laden sky,
A low-lying heaven, heavy with pellucid pearls
and stuffed with sparkling spangles,
is about to fall of its own weight.
It must be lifted up,
supported by a set of chuppah poles.
A wedding in the black of night!
Here comes the bride, the bride!
Make way, here comes the bride!
Yitshok Elhonon Rontsh, or Isaac E. Ronch, was born in 1899 in Poland and spent much of his later life in Los Angeles, California, where he composed poems, essays and other works in Yiddish. This excerpt from section 11 of a translation of “In the Desert” was published in 1970.
The desert was the place in Southern California where Ronch felt most viscerally connected to desert scenes and experiences recorded in the Torah. For Ronch, the desert was a landscape that collapsed centuries and continents, and his poems set in the desert frequently blur the lines between his present day reality, visions, the ancient past, and the future.
If you’re interested in the original Yiddish, the entire poetry collection In Midber (In the Desert) is available to download here. If your name is Dara Weinberg and today is your birthday, a 1970 first edition copy of this poetry collection, with dust jacket, illustrated with drawings by Marc Chagall, and signed by Ronch, awaits you the next time you make the journey from Poland to Los Angeles.
Love,
Ellen
Roselva says the only thing that doesn’t change
is train tracks. She’s sure of it.
The train changes, or the weeds that grow up spidery
by the side, but not the tracks.
I’ve watched one for three years, she says,
and it doesn’t curve, doesn’t break, doesn’t grow.
Peter isn’t sure. He saw an abandoned track
near Sabinas, Mexico, and says a track without a train
is a changed track. The metal wasn’t shiny anymore.
The wood was split and some of the ties were gone.
Every Tuesday on Morales Street
butchers crack the necks of a hundred hens.
The widow in the tilted house
spices her soup with cinnamon.
Ask her what doesn’t change.
Stars explode.
The rose curls up as if there is fire in the petals.
The cat who knew me is buried under the bush.
The train whistle still wails its ancient sound
but when it goes away, shrinking back
from the walls of the brain,
it takes something different with it every time.
It’s a nearly universal experience to read or hear the same words over again, and have them mean something different to us, isn’t it? How human of us!
Something we didn’t touch directly on with yesterday’s “Vocabulary” poem is how the meaning of even a single word changes over time and in different contexts — context in sentence, in a room, in the mouth of a particular speaker, in the walls of the brain it reverberates in. You could make an argument that a word signifies something slightly different every single time it’s used — as Humpty Dumpty* argues in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass when he says (in a rather scornful tone), “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
Today’s poem, from the Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye in her 1995 collection Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, is in part about how much of a poem’s, a word’s, a sound’s, a train’s meaning — at the very least half — belongs to the listener, the reader, the audience.
You know that saying about the tree falling in the woods, whether it makes a sound or not if nobody hears it? Is it any less mysterious when the tree falls and people do hear the sound — how much the tree determines what the sound it makes sounds like, and how much the people listening determine that sound? And how much something so much bigger.
You think about that tree, or the train whistle, and don’t ever let anyone tell you that you got the meaning of a poem “wrong,” ok? It’s entirely possible for a poem to mean something to you that the poet never intended — you could argue it’s not only possible, but inevitable. But that doesn’t make the meaning you read wrong; it just makes it yours.
For what Edna St. Vincent Millay hears in the train whistle, see “Traveling.” And for another take on what doesn’t change when stars explode, see Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Shampoo.”
April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating with my own eclectic selection of 30 poems by 30 poets, and some of what they mean to me. Thank you again for letting me share this month with you.
— Ellen