Alina's Adventures

That poetry book in the pipelines.

Gnome and the King discuss "is" and "ain't".

I haven't been blogging as much, and I miss it. I miss the soft chorus of voices and faces from around the world. The wisdom of other mothers. The creativity and ingenuity of fellow females.

One big reason for the diminished blogging involves my first poetry chapbook coming out in March. It's called Objects In Vases, and many of you will recognize not my only voice but also, I think, your own inside its pages.

I am grateful for a generous, kindhearted, and (yes yes yes) homeschooling editor, as I am grateful to the publisher, Anchor & Plume, for making this such a beautiful experience in a challenging year.

At first, I wasn't sure whether to blog this book-- partly because I fall prey to the suspicion sometimes that poetry is extraneous, a luxury, an aspect of life we don't need, a facet of leisure. That is what I think.

But it's not what I believe. I know better than my cultural conditioning which tells me poetry doesn't matter. I know the first written history began as poetry and that poetry, whether in the form of psalms or sonnets or lyric, feeds a space in us that no sitcom or self-help book or video game can oblige. A space that is aching to be spoken and engaged.

So this is my first poetry book. It comes from the "wrack" (to borrow from poet, Mary Ruefle) and glory and ruin of homeschooling my children. It comes from the giant slalom of daily married life. It comes from the negotiations between my Alabama self and my native Romanian. It comes from the ordinary and everyday menu of successes and strife. It is a story of what it means to be a female- and a question. It is about you. And me.

I would be honored if you considered sharing it with others. You can pre-order a copy for $9 right now and it will magically appear in your March mailbox, just in time for spring. I will also have a free poem study handout/activity available on this website in late April to use with one of the more lyrical poems from the book. 

Your support means more than I can say. Or write. Please consider supporting other amazing authors featured by Anchor & Plume as well. Thank you. And thank you. For being a face and a name in a world of beautiful stories, a moment on our planet's wild heart.

"Elbows", a poem by Minnie Bruce Pratt.

I've been immersed in a mind-bending book by Alabama-born author and poet, Minnie Bruce Pratt. Titled, s/he, the book explores her life as a fe/male and poet and mother and partner. It is beautiful, heart-wrenching, bone-on-bone stuff. I am so grateful to have discovered her. And for the way in which she expands my love for life and all the variants of the lives we try to lead.

Pratt has two sons from a prior marriage to poet Marvin E. Weaver II which ended in divorce in North Carolina in 1975. She lost custody of her children because the state criminalised homosexual activity at the time.

Without further ado, here is...

 

Elbows

 

Cover your arms.
Don’t let your elbows
show.

That’s what my neighbors
down in Alabama tell
their daughters
so no elbow
plump or thin
tan or pink
will entice others
to passion.

But if I thought
my scrawny, two-toned
elbows would lure you

if I thought
my skinny, sharp-boned
elbows could secure you

I’d flap my arms
like a chicken
like a pea-fowl
like a guinea hen

when next I saw you
honey
I’d roll
up my sleeves and
sin
sin
sin.

A short fiction inspired by "Light Enough To Travel", a Be-Good Tanyas tune.

 

I was listening to "Light Enough To Travel", a song on our wedding CD, when the story took shape. Remembering how important it felt to never be owned by Things.

To remain free of Objects.

To keep our love and our lives light enough to travel.

 

 

And then I imagined vows of poverty which intersected somehow with Haiti and mission work. People who were not us but romance can make us anyone. Anywhere. And so I wrote it.

 

 

Read the rest of "People We Saved" online in the latest issue of Gravel Magazine, where you will also find beautiful moments from Kathleen Brewin Lewis, Lee L. Krecklow, and Ege Al'Bege, among others. Meanwhile, here's an old Be-Good Tanyas mp3 for your downloading enjoyment. Right-click and save.

Only In the Past (mp3)

What P. and the kids did while I made a fool of myself at the Alabama State Poetry Society retreat last month.

Feeding creatures at Oak Mountain.

Gnome gets up close and personal.

Nothing like a goat.

The latest issue of Kindred on my dresser.

You can purchase a copy from Anchor & Plume.

I have two poems in it, among many other beautiful pieces.

A paean to unpretty meadows.

I don't remember where I read that our conservation ethos is biased in favor of pretty places. Maybe it was Muir. Maybe the comment was actually about wilderness. Either way, it struck me as an unethical approach to conservation. Similar, in a sense, to deciding which kids should receive life-saving treatments on the basis of their good looks. 

I've seen this ethos hard at work in the case of Hurricane Creek, where some folks say the Eastern Bypass will be a boon for development. Then, behind a cupped hand, those same people whisper that Hurricane Creek is "a working class creek"-- and obviously "it's no Cahaba River". To preserve a wild area requires the discovery of some rare lily. Some impossibly perfect beauty. Because only the pretty people are worth saving. Only the tourist dollars count.

Which leads me to a poem. The poem inspired by the desire to honor a meadow, regardless of its economic value to so-and-so apartment magnate. To honor even the un-pretty meadows. To ascribe value to even the unsexy lives.

Today, the awesome Matrix Magazine published the poem in question-- "I Don't Think We Should Use Words Like Meadow Anymore". Here's the first stanza of my paean to unpretty meadows:

 

There is a meadow across from our subdivision which does not belong to anyone. There are no lawnmowers on this meadow where a coterie of crows conduct their general assembly each morning. There is a four-way stop sign but the stop looks ashamed and some say there is a ghost that haunts the meadow and what the stop sign feels is akin to dread.

Read the rest online.

 

Like historic preservation which aims to preserve the antebellum mansion without an eye for the dogtrot cabin made from nearly-extinct longleaf pine, conservation can be driven by the desire to save what rich people believe deserves saving. Preservation can be a way of maintaining social status. Certainly, the choices made by state historic preservation commissions determine what our children are allowed to value of the past. So it's debutante balls and fainting couches and Scarlett O'Hara swaying at the top of a staircase. Most developers do very well for themselves and usually, they are the ones who have a money-making plan for the meadow or creek in question. Oh Progress, thou art a fine and wealthy god indeed. A god of brass placards and community development. A god to which our politicians appeal again and again behind closed doors and in open chambers-- the god to which some consecrate the awful tornado of 2011.

Speaking of tornados, there's this book you should read (edited by Brian Oliu) titled, simply, Tuscaloosa Runs This. I'm about to start quoting from it. I'm about to agree wholeheartedly with Andrew Beck Grace (and perhaps the whiskey-scented ghost of Walker Percy) when he writes:

"I'm the Southerner who, like an anthropologist living among the natives too long, informs outsides on their customs, their rites, their rituals, their speech."

In other words, I may live here and hike here and dream my way through life here but I'm always a foreign entity. My "ain't" lacks a certain spittle. My "cain't" never could. So I'm not trying to be one of you so much as to feel and understand you-- to savor your BBQ ribs beneath a steel-plant infused sunset. Maybe even tell a true story. 

Which brings me to the post-tornado story. A true story that's jam-packed with traffic and development. When Tuscaloosa Runs This was published in 2012, the development hadn't quite begun. But a Camus-loving prophet by the name of Erik Wennermark nailed it. Probably not because he loved Camus but let's face it, Camus called it over Sartre every time and he had the grist of a good prophet. Three years ago, Erik wrote:

"When they rebuild, they'll rebuild ugly. More cookie-cutter student condos. New look strip malls, Panera and Starbucks and Best Buy. Yes, when they finally opened the Barnes & Noble in town I went too, but with great reservation. Tuscaloosa may have been dull at times and prone to exacerbate my alcoholism, but at least it wasn't like everywhere else in this country-- when I first arrived it could have just as well been El Salvador, so different and unique it felt to me. I fear when they rebuild-- if they rebuild-- it will be just another strip mall suburb along the highway. The same shitty stores in the same shitty architecture. Clean and modern and lifeless boxes dropped to earth."

Did he say the word "life"? Because I feel like that's what we were talking about. I feel like maybe I was saying a pretty life isn't the only one worth saving. A lifeless box is not an upgrade. A massive four-lane bypass is nothing but an opportunity to expand the craven, pathetic strip mall style deeper and deeper into the woods. Then over the creek. Forget grandmother's house because that place was 1,000 square feet and we need bigger houses. Faster cars. Blah blah blah you know where I'm going. 

The fact is simply this: I don't want to go there. I don't want to imagine my hometown covered in highways and byways and neighborhoods abandoned for the latest prefab "community". I don't want to smile and pray to Progress. I don't want to call rampant, ridiculous consumerism a "blessing". I don't want to lie to you and pretend I'm a satisfied citizen of this.

Because...... there are meadows. And because there are people who care about life. And because there are children who might care about life if they grew up in a town saturated with life. Not just roll tide life and tailgating parties but trees and creeks and slippery rocks. Simple, uncomplicated, naturally-existing life. Unpretentious, unpretty, un-manicured life. Yes... WILDlife.

There. I said it. 

Before I go wash out my mouth with soap, you should know there is a beloved meadow in Northport, Alabama currently under siege. You can sign a petition to preserve it here. And I can thank Amy LeePard for caring about life. And I can thank Roxanna Bennett for her sailor's mouth and the wide-open heart beneath. Thank you to all who work to save meadows-- and to all who publish poems about meadows to conserve or preserve the unpretty-perfects of the world. 

"Visitation", a prose poem by David Shumate.

Fall is hammocks by the fire.

I'm slightly in love with David Shumate's book of prose poems, High Water Mark. Apart from admiring his craft, my affections tend towards the particular.

I am grateful for his "Prescription For Insomniacs". Because a poem is the best prescription of all once you accept the words which keep you awake. The price of a good night's sleep being so many unrendered stories.

Riveted by "What Hemingway Learned From Cezanne", which reads like a gallery visit, the conversations we create between artists and writers who inspire us. It's a sharp poem. Clear and edgeless.

Astonished by "The Blue Period". Muddling slowly through the thick muds of "Lifesaving"- the question at which point two people wish to lose the cares of loving another, return to the place where "she could just drive by".

Curious about "The Psychic Geography of Atlantis", and the Romanian reference.

Pacing the room with "The American Dream" in hand. Thrilled by his insight into immigration and assimilation. The phantom limbs that keep me up at night.

He tends the fire in the pit he
created for the Eldest's birthday.

And then there is "Visitation", the poem that hits me in all the right places. The poem that speaks outside spoken sense. Straight into smoke and fire.

 

Visitation

 

This morning I sit down with the spirit of my father. At first he is reluctant to join me. Perhaps he fears what we might say. Or something in the code of the dead warns to leave the living alone. I pour him some coffee. Offer him his favorite pipe. We start with small talk. How the others are. The time when we did this or that. He has lost that nervous edge. That tremor in his voice. As if we grow younger with each year of death. He senses something unsettled in me. That gnawing the dead know so well. He blows a smoke ring in the air and points his pipe in my direction. Take up gardening, he says. Become a shepherd. Or follow your way with words. He reaches over and places his hand on my shoulder. Like the foot of a bird, it weighs nothing. But it is more than enough.

 

Oh if I could only tell you about the bird, that stubborn phoebe that keeps returning to sit on my notebooks as I write. She is not enough, though. Not yet.

More poems from High Water Mark

"Passing Through A Small Town" (The Writer's Almanac)
"High Water Mark" (The Writer's Almanac)
"Teaching A Child the Art of Confession" (Reader's Connection)
"Mornings With Freud" (Indianapolis Public Library)
"Afternoon Nap" (Arabesques Review)
"Reading to the Blind Man" (The Writer's Almanac)
"Shooting the Horse" (The Writer's Almanac)
"Custer" (The Writer's Almanac)

"I set out into a poem imagining I am Kafka let loose in this modern world just to see how that feels, and I end up with the image of a lover straightening his tie, giving him a renewed sense of purpose."

Paul Holler talks to David about prose poetry craft (Eclectica)

Other poems by David Shumate

"Plum" (Agni)
"Amish" (The Writer's Almanac)
"Trains" (The Writer's Almanac)
"Chinese Restaurant" (The Writer's Almanac)
"The Department of Love" (Karen Kovacik)
"An American In Paris" (Karen Kovacik)
"Lincoln" (The Writer's Almanac)
"The Long Road" (AGNI)
"Mangos" (Plume)
"Bringing Things Back From the Woods" (Plume)
"Talking Animals" (Plume)
"If You Hire A Poet To Draw A Map" (Verse Daily)
"A Hundred Years From Now" (The Writer's Almanac)
"Welcome Home Children" (The Writer's Almanac)
"The Bible Belt" (The Writer's Almanac)
"Mannequins" (NEA)

A few recent things.

Just because you call this home doesn’t mean home is not a form of self-defense. A band-aid heals but remains a barricade. The flag waves but has no hands. Mexican-Americans pour over lower borders like beetles from a moist log but they still die parched.

[from "The Ring in the Rain" published in Lingerpost]

 

Things I’ll never say again.
Settle, instead, for dictators and awful.
Treasures are stored inside
stories passed on as pickled
cauliflower recipes or mountains
rising mid-nose or a taste for sun
with teeth. Emotions are held back,
stockpiled into traditional forms.
Agony: a folk song old as wind.

[from "Holy Bread" published at Eunoia Review] 

 

It was Mabel’s idea. Everything from the temple to the mattress was Mabel’s idea. She read about the mattresses in a book about woodland Indians and the way she told it I was sure she could teach a class on the subject. So we sat in the temple and tore out hundreds of pages and wadded them up in our fists then unwadded only to wad them again until the paper was soft and smooth enough to feel the cotton inside. Soon only the covers were left. 

[from "Doppelganger" published in *82Review]

 

Whatever footprints persist
none of this is separate as it seems.

It was, after all, the Frank O’Hara poem,
that went through several hands

before it left me warmer
within your arms’ parentheses

the punctuation marked a girl
and how she lied to a perfectly

good poem. Whatever she quoted
you or him, the poem is the part

she can’t recover with our regret.

[from "Incident Concerning A Poem By Frank O'Hara" published at Logophile]

 

You call it unknown but what of me have you known and what more supple mystery than the nights of a creature who bleeds by the magnetic force of the moon.

[from "53/New Forms", a series of letters to Arthur Rimbaud
published in Lockjaw]

"Goodbye Tuscaloosa", a poem by Bruce Smith.

I read the poem in a 2014 issue of Five Points and I spent all morning being struck-- and restruck-- by it. It's a beautiful paean to the time from 1998 to 2002 which Bruce spent in Tuscaloosa, "equidistant from William Faulkner, Otis Redding, and W.E.B. DuBois.... the axis of bourgeois ante-bellumism among the legacies of blood and blues."

Italics are mine, things that spoke to me, people I've known or imagined, places I've tasted, plants I've touched. The familiar re-envisioned in the wave goodbye.

Lee Bains playing at Druid City Brewery last month.

GOODBYE TUSCALOOSA 

Goodbye Rufus and Ditzy, Goodbye Don Dove, Goodbye Tim Early,
     Goodbye Bebe Barefoot.
Goodbye to the Brooklyn Jew-boos and the boys from Des Moines
     who wandered in their trail of tears to Tuscaloosa.
Goodbye to the Ur ovens of Woodrow's. I loved the slaughtered hog,
     the gloried grease, the human nature standing around,
     standing around the fire.
Goodbye to the state flower, the shredded layer of rubber
     the truckers call alligators.
Goodbye to my face in the window at night.
Goodbye to the songs I sang to you beginning in bright vocals
     continuing through licking to the dark lies
     ending in parlando where our burdens are put down.
Goodbye to those I could not understand and could not understand me.
     When you said, "Troy" I heard, "Charlie."
Goodbye All-American Storage and my birthright exchanged for a mess of
     postage.
Goodbye rained-on cardboard box. Goodbye corrugation--chart of my          heart.
Goodbye roach, you were my ontology.
Goodbye wind twisted in the Gulf and bitch slapped
     and spun through Tupelo
     and sent like the Po-lice to the homes of the poor.
Goodbye Druid City Car Wash whose spray was scrupulous to me at two
     ayem,
     whose mist was an exercise by St. Ignatius.
Goodbye to my face in the window at night.
Goodbye Blondel. Goodbye Aquanetta.
Goodbye, too, to the West Alabama Veterinary Clinic where I waited
     with the sick furred thing with the owners of Wabbles,
     L'l G'l, Dollbaby, Mrs. Pinkerton and Honey Bun
     for yours is the pure devotion.
Goodbye to the Crimson Tide fans who worshipped the hypermasculine
      for yours is the pure devotion.
Goodbye Mr. Vaughn of the 103rd bomber squadron, blind, kind, for no
      white reason.
Goodbye to the machinery of the horizon and the fried foods of Ezel's
     Catfish Shack,
     where I could taste my mud and slumber.
Goodbye crepe myrtle and the vertigo of the last hundred years
     when I lived here (there) George Wallace died
     the coach was fired and you were my alibi.
Goodbye three hours drive to M'fs. Goodbye elsewhere.
Goodbye red Camaro in a black bra. Goodbye hairdo as the Kabuki
     of the South. Goodbye blues.
          If there's a labial among y'all, let it be heard now.
Goodbye Alfonso. Goodbye Tyrone. Goodbye Stella. Goodbye student
     who prayed for me in my sin and affliction.
Goodbye freight train for yours was the pure devotion.
Goodbye nights of the fragrance I never named and days of noon,            tongue,
     and handgun.
Goodbye manners as tongue and handgun.
Goodbye unknown woman with a drink in her hand who burst through the        tea olive
         without spilling, walking in the back and out the front door.
     I kiss your Jack and coke goodbye.
Goodbye to the bird saying Preacher, Preacher.
Goodbye to the three legged-dog who suckled the twins, Tusk and Lou,
     who founded the town on snarl and hunger.
Goodbye to the dirty silence clarified. Here's my reparation.
     Here's my face in the window at night.
Goodbye to the 4X4's on lawns and the Pain Care Center.
     I became an orphan like you here (there).
     There was no shade for me under pin oak or magnolia.
Goodbye to the Black Orchid and your transvestites. Goodbye Miss
Mystery.
     I kiss your post-op lips goodbye.
Goodbye and thanks for the Jesus.
Goodbye Time as a pure form of sensuous intuition. Goodbye Immanuel Kant
     of Queen City Boulevard.
Goodbye Bible verse on the cash register receipt.
Goodbye pool hall, cabstand, pawnshop, and storm door company.
Goodbye He's as Rude as a Yankee.
Goodbye red velvet cake and ersatz rue.
Goodbye Little Zion Tabernacle Church with your brush arbor
          built from wood milled in the hollow
      and your darker than blue.
Goodbye bathtub covered with a mattress during the tornado.
     You took my form.
Goodbye tetchy, goodbye triflin', goodbye mama love and moonpie.
Goodbye my little scuppernong.
Goodbye interlocutor with the lost. I kiss you reluctantly
     as one kisses the forehead of the child
     whose fever will kill.
Goodbye to the Enola Gay of race, and to Mr. Vaughan, who flew in you,
     blind, kind for no white reason.
          Thank you for the two-dollar bill.
Let me lie down between Rama Lama's and Vinyl Solutions one last time.
Let me lie down between the porch and the battle reenactment,
     the bombers and the lambs,
     the bonfires and the birthplace of Sun Ra.

Wisteria growing through the tin shed cannot find me.
From now on the law against kudzu is lifted.
From now on I will be translated into this.
You were my Dollywood. I was your Judas.
     Maybe some Tara will save me.
I will look back.
I will become cold and salted.
I will go up into the morning, sometimes.
I will be measured. I will be shattered.

My Partner's Matchbook Collection.

Mark your calendars for the First Annual East Alabama Book Festival.

 

On Sunday, October 18th from 1:00 to 6:00 pm, The Gnu's Room is hosting the First Annual East Alabama Book Festival at Town Creek Park in Auburn, Alabama.

The Festival will feature authors, publishers, local original music, vendors and more! Co-hosts for the event are the Southern Humanities Review and The Republic of East Alabama Artists + Makers. The event is FREE and open to the public.

They are issuing an invitation to authors who wish to have booth space to promote their work and take part in a short reading, as well as to publishers and literary arts related non-profits and others. Booth space is somewhat limited and is first come−first served. Reading slots will be available in a like manner.

The deadline for participation is October 1, 2015. They need your registration form and donation of $20 by that date to hold your spot. Non-profit booth space requires no donation, but they will still need a registration form to save your spot. Bring your own booth- or, as is the case with most of us, bring your own table and chairs.

Town Creek Park is located at 1150 S Gay Street, Auburn, Alabama 36830. Parking and restrooms are available at the Park. A covered pavilion will be utilized for author readings, announcements and musical performances. Bring your own lawn chairs, umbrellas, and blankets. There will be food trucks, local coffee vendors, and various other goodies.

gumdrops

Registration forms and additional info 
More about how The Gnu's Room serves the community
How you can help a nonprofit/bookstore
The Republic of East Alabama (formerly the Revelator)
"It's A Sin to Mock A Mockingbird" by William Cotter
Cole Bryant's graphics 
Auburn Witness Poetry Prize 
Marjorie Rommel, Auburn's Poet Laureate
aaaand...
the superduper philosophy-prof-turned-poet, Kelley Jolley, who marked my papers in bright red ink and thereby earned my eternal favor

The Gnu's Room is located at 108 S 8th St, Opelika. You can speak with a fellow mammal most days at 334-705-048.

"Stagger", a poem by Maureen Sherbondy.

I first read this poem in The Broad River Review but then found an online copy at Connotation Press. The simplicity struck me- as well as the rootless texture of life since mom's death.

Stagger

Leaves stagger into the grass, drunk

on freedom and the breeze.

 

We have all fallen

from branches before.

 

We graze on grass

and fat, lazy raindrops.

 

Nothing is left

but the white rind of time.

 

Home is wherever we land.

Nodding while reading Nikky Finney's interview.

Water riffling off Montezuma Road.

Nikky Finney grew up in the South, and graduated from Talladega College in Alabama. She was "always trying to say the really hard thing in as beautiful a way" as she could.

As a child, Nikky thought art should consist of "the hard to say things and the beautiful things." In a seamless recent interview with AWP's magazine, she describes the influence of a 7th-grade teacher who required students to memorize poems, and the intimacy she developed with language after learning "poems by heart":

....Because then I had the ability to do something no one could really take away from me. The library could take the book back. My mom could say 'Go to bed' at night. But I could keep the poem so close? Something changed when I was able to do that.

I think of the phrase "to learn by heart", and how, over time, it becomes becomes "to know by heart." The words become a form of deep, inner knowledge, their significance imprinted on our hearts and minds.

The words a form of power or currency with the spirit. Words we can use as rhythms while walking. Words we can imagine while folding laundry. Words we can sing in the Birmingham city jail. Words we can use to encourage and resuscitate broken spirits (the verses of We Shall Overcome, for example). Words we can revive as lullabies to chase distant sleep. Words no one can take from us or discredit. Words that become treasures.

Watching the anglers upstream at Montezuma.

Nikky uses poetry as a vehicle for historical reconsolidation and self-discovery. Why, for example, she cannot reconcile polite manners and convention with integrity, and how she learned this. She refuses to dance with Strom Thurmond, in her words:

I have to remember this moment because in the remembering of this moment is what I'm saying about memory: we must save what we know so that we don't repeat mistakes from the past.

An excerpt from the poem, "Dancing With Strom,":

History does not keep books on the

handiwork of slaves. But the enslaved

who built this Big House, long before

I arrived for this big wedding, knew

the power of a porch.

 

This native necessity of nailing down

a place, for the cooling off of air,

in order to lift the friendly, the kindly,

the so politely, the in-love-ly, jubilant,

into the arms of the grand peculiar,

for the greater good of

the public spectacular:

 

us

giving us

away.

What we see is limpid motion.

She cites Toni Cade Bambara as a seminal influence on her writing life. Toni's house was a wreck of stacked dishes and clutter- no counter space, books piled into towers along the wall and floor- but her desk was absolutely bare- "meticulous"- apart from what she was writing at the moment.

This example of how a female rearranged her life to invite writing, living to write rather than to clean or decorate, encouraged Nikky. Toni warned, "You'll never have time to write...So therefore you must make time." 

Nikky is/was child who does not resent her view from the margins because she doesn't believe (or much care) what others make of her. The limits other people impose on her as a black female are limits Nikky does not accept or take seriously. She always felt like an "outlier"- and preferred it:

....being in the margins for me does not mean I feel marginalized. It gives me an edge. It gives me a precipice. A vantage point.

In a sense, it also gives her a place from which to fall. Leaving the South after college was terrifying, Nikky says, until she began to grow out of her "terror" and into her "curiosity". 

I have to drop the seed in the ground so it grows from wherever I've been.

Unlike other American poets, Nikky believes history cannot be silenced. She is a witness to the voices of the present- and this emerges as a thread between lines and pieces. She engages inexplicably tragic characters- those stunted by history from moving forward- including a suite inspired by the ontological quandary that is Condoleezza Rice. (Steve Earle's "Condi, Condi" comes to mind.)

For Nikky, history is the story some people get to tell about what happened. Her poems challenge the received wisdom and "historical truth" by enlarging the lens through we envision what happened. In a Zinnian fashion, she adds the overlooked voices to enrich the history we tell and sell to one another. I love her for that.

As the child of political defectors raised on white-bread southern patriotism, I find my political and poetic commitments do not reside in separate spheres, and though I admire writers fortunate enough to compartmentalize, we must acknowledge the ability to write outside politics is a specious sort of privilege. Perhaps, even, a fashionable muzzle.

 

NIKKY FINNEY, THE PERSON

The Beauty and Difficulty of Nikky Finney (NPR)
Excerpts and readings from Head Off and Split (National Poetry Foundation)
"Questions of Faith", an interview (Poetry Society of America)
"So I Became A Witness" interview (Sampsonia Way)

"Heart, Truth, and Justice" interview (Lambda Literary)
National Book Award Acceptance Speech (YouTube)

 

HER POETRY 

"He Never Had It Made" (US Library of Congress)
"The Girlfriend's Train" (Soul Incites)

"The Blackened Alphabet" (The Bottom of Heaven)

"Making Foots" (The Poetry Center at Smith College)

"The Aureole" (Feministing)

"Red Velvet" (Except In Dreams)

"The Greatest Show On Earth" (Punch-In-The-Face Poetry)

"Sign Language" (The Poetry Center at Smith College)

"A New Day Dawns" (Moving Poems)

"Sam I Am" (Huffington Post)

"Hate" (Project Muse)

"The Clitoris" (Structure and Style)

"Heirloom" (Academy of American Poets)

"Sex" (The Poetry Center at Smith College)

Excerpt from poem titled "Our Vague and Vapid Love".

Photo taken by Lydia Stefanescu, June 2015.

 

Vague: indefinite or indistinct in nature or character. In France, vague implies the ever-shifting contour of an ocean wave. I’ve never met an ocean wave that settled.

 

Vapid: without liveliness or spirit; dull or tedious. A conversation about the limitless configurations of ocean waves will drift towards tedium.

 

Vague: the expression of unpillowed morning breath reviewing the one-night stand.

 

Vapid: phrases like one-night-stand given the unsettled ambiguity of mornings-after.

 

Vague: a loose line of faces spilling across the city sidewalk promising to wait, the murmur of shuffled feet.

 

Vapid: how much you like me on Facebook. How ardently I wait for your like.

 

Vague: directions by compass.

 

Vapid: a look I left behind, a lost look, the man my lost look makes of you.

 

[Read the rest of this poem and a few others online at Sophie's lovely Dirty Press.]

The Day Before

 

The day before 
you would have
turned sixty-seven
is a sterile
waiting room
doused in beige.
The beginning
is a paisley
print. The
feeling is toes
tingling.

The day before 
is a red
and black
biohazard sign.
But not like
Stendhal. The
trash inside
is potential
cata strophe.

The day before
is fluorescent
lighting under which
only the black
nurse remains
beautiful.

The day before
is unplanned
by the party
no one will
be having.
Confetti is
a fleck
in the doctor's
pupil. Knuckles
crack like
fireworks.

The day before
is a rubber wheel
skidding across
shiny, waxed floors
while the nurse
draws blood
from beneath
heavy-steepled
eyes. 

The day before
your birthday
a color wheel
dies.

Meditations on the country of marriage...

[from my tarot reading at kentuck]

You are the known way leading always to the unknown,
and you are the known place to which the unknown is always
leading me back. More blessed in you than I know,
I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing
not belittled by my saying that I possess it.

(Wendell Berry, "The Country of Marriage")

In the country of marriage, the only bureaucrats are persons who cannot bear to share an institution with others who threaten their formulas.

In the country of marriage, citizens wear rings as passports and those who wear rings act like Americans in the customs line.

Americans expect to receive special privileges by nature of their citizenship.

Sometimes I am ashamed to be a citizen of this country of marriage that defines itself by what it keeps out.

The country of marriage is always in motion. 

The movements that sustain it are the ones which begin with the cover drawn over two heads. The doors we close against other motions.

A wave is the way a hand moves against time. A wave is the way we wash our goodbye.

But what else is the wave in my eyes? What is a wave except maybe running away fast hoping water is strong enough to stop you?

In the country of marriage, there may be tourists. We may call these tourists "children."

We may believe these tourists owe certain duties to the soil ravaged by their enthusiasm. 

But a tourist is a tourist. A tourist is one whose feet seek the feel of foreign lands.  

What is a siren except beckoning and warning in the same breath?

What is a breath except the way air moves through one body and then another?

We are native nowhere. 

We are the fairy tale that gives rise to a foreign language. 

Our love is a lexicon against the world that says we must be this. We must be that.

As if marriage is a country we enter to please the world we are trying to escape.

We are inside the house of looking out for what comes in.

We are inside the country knowing others may wander through without tasting. The words are magic but the weather is common. The weather is nothing we can hold.

Pieces that stuck in my head from the recent issue of Cloudbanks.

A lady frog pauses: a princess in
disguise. She hears, she hears, she hears.

He is music to whatever she has for ears.

[Russell Rowland, "Sounds Like...."]

there exists a kind of gravity that's sometimes called love.

[Aimee Penna, "At the Museum of Natural Sciences"]

....The footprints
of your last woman still fresh
on the ground around you. 

[Francine Witte, "When we meet up at the Parker Avenue Grille"

"Raiment", a poem by W. S. Merwin.

 

Believing comes after
there were coverings
who can believe
that we were born without them
he she or it wailing
back the first breath
from a stark reflection
raw and upside-down
early but already
not original

into the last days
and then some way past them
the body that we
are assured is more
than what covers it
is kept covered
out of habit which
is a word for dress
out of custom
which is an alteration
of the older word costume
out of decency
which is handed down
from a word for what
is fitting

apparently we believe
in the words
and through them
but we long beyond them
for what is unseen
what remains out of reach
what is kept covered
with colors and sizes
we hunger
for what is undoubted yet dubious
known to be different
and our fabrics tell
of difference
we dress in difference
calling it ours

[Source: Five Points, 10th Anniversary Issue, Vol. 10]

"The Envoy of Mr. Cogito" by Zbigniew Herbert.

 

Go where those others went to the dark boundary   

for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize

 

go upright among those who are on their knees

among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust

 

you were saved not in order to live

you have little time you must give testimony

 

be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous   

in the final account only this is important

 

and let your helpless Anger be like the sea

whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten

 

let your sister Scorn not leave you

for the informers executioners cowards—they will win

they will go to your funeral and with relief will throw a lump of earth   

the woodborer will write your smoothed-over biography

 

and do not forgive truly it is not in your power   

to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn

 

beware however of unnecessary pride

keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror   

repeat: I was called—weren’t there better ones than I

 

beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring   

the bird with an unknown name the winter oak

 

light on a wall the splendour of the sky   

they don’t need your warm breath

they are there to say: no one will console you

 

be vigilant—when the light on the mountains gives the sign—arise and go   

as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star

 

repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends   

because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain   

repeat great words repeat them stubbornly

like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand

 

and they will reward you with what they have at hand   

with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap

 

go because only in this way will you be admitted to the company of cold skulls

to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland

the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes

 

Be faithful Go

"Maiden Name", a poem by Philip Larkin.

The days of rain and clover.

Marrying left your maiden name disused. 
Its five light sounds no longer mean your face, 
Your voice, and all your variants of grace; 
For since you were so thankfully confused 
By law with someone else, you cannot be 
Semantically the same as that young beauty: 
It was of her that these two words were used. 

Now it's a phrase applicable to no one, 
Lying just where you left it, scattered through 
Old lists, old programmes, a school prize or two, 
Packets of letters tied with tartan ribbon - 
Then is it scentless, weightless, strengthless wholly 
Untruthful? Try whispering it slowly. 
No, it means you. Or, since your past and gone, 

It means what we feel now about you then: 
How beautiful you were, and near, and young, 
So vivid, you might still be there among 
Those first few days, unfingermarked again. 
So your old name shelters our faithfulness, 
Instead of losing shape and meaning less 
With your depreciating luggage laden.

Arboretum and analytic posturing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Various excerpts from "Analytic Posturing" series currently online at the NewerYork. Take a peek.

Stella Radulescu's hallowed memory holes.

Reading Stella Vinitchi Radulescu's I Scrape the Window of Nothingness scooped me out so thoroughly that only scaffolding remained. The scaffolding and the notes jotted down in a sketchbook while crouched on a rock in the arboretum. A sample:

untitled 3

the truth belongs
to those
who never say
good-bye

or lie about
being
here    in love
with falling
gods

Where to begin? I'll begin in the black hole- the place where the literature of dissent abandoned its respect for language. Start with the sparse aesthetic of the political dictatorship, how it led to the absurdism of Eugene Ionesco, the veiled fruits of Herta Muller. What remains after totalitarianism (and utopian propaganda) rendered ordinary words meaningless.  

Now progress to the shores of democracy where people know billboards better than the native plants in their backyards- look around, it's a brave new world and nothing is out of your reach if you're willing (and able) to buy it.

Alas, the hyper-mediated consciousness of consumer culture does not resuscitate language. Perhaps there is disappointment for the political exile upon discovery that democracy honors language by accident- and only on occasion. 

The poet returns to the page with a mistrust of what man creates to make sense of things. No man-made signs can be trusted to offer truth. The words betray as swiftly as clock hands put us at another border, begging to be accepted into another country where only the moon is familiar.

But there are seasons, stars, and particular forms of light by which the world can be known. To read Radulescu is to re-learn geography. To jettison the GPS maps for enfleshed topography. To tell time by what we glimpsed in childhood faces or the heat of a mother's hand. 

lend me your tongue
I buried mine a long time ago
there was no place for such a flame...

And then to hide what we know in our marrow but cannot afford to say- maybe because it fails to signify but really there are no words. No words unmolested.

The scene in Radulescu's poems winds through a distinctly liminal space- the thin skin stretched between light and dark. The space where superstitions are more legible than street signs. The space becomes the place where one expects the epiphany. For Radulescu, the poet's sacred absolutions- the pen, the paper, the attentive expectation- rarely give rise to revelation. She remains alone with a past she can't verbalize and a pen that draws blood without offering us a sentient body.

Other things I found: There are dogwood blossoms but they don't feel green. The flower's sensuality is held back. We are deprived of the resonance by which a bloom holds our attention. There is the ghost of Paul Celan. There is a moon (an eternity of moons). And other characters, or words, which return to re-orient us. There is ice, silence, wind, time, and light. There are eyes, scars, vowels, shadows, children, lovers... 

The visual aspects are not effusive. In this regard, her poems resemble Eastern Orthodox icons more than photographs, oil paintings, or watercolors. Nothing of gouache's tender, wistful touch. The heaviness of holy things- gold foil on wood, the abstracted solemnity of faces who have seen holy things and yet cannot speak of them. The point at which silence morphs into reverence. The point at which she earns my trust.

She brings us to this point again and again and then refuses to go any further. I savor the non-adulatory awe- love the courage of language so bare you can see the swollen joints, the skinny knees knocking together.

Ultimately, what I find in Radulescu's poems is inseparable from what I know about being a Romanian defector: the past is easy to recount but impossible to translate. So I trust the bark of a tree for what it doesn't say. Maybe only a tree is equipped to handle the holy. Maybe the televangelists despise what they cannot touch. 

a poet dying seeks refuge and
sets the page on fire

Radulescu offers her poems to a culture marked by impatience, a culture disinterested in the ineffable. Her courage comes from refusing to cater, pander, or prevaricate. Among my favorites from this book- "1955"; "bells & bones"; "rough winter, cold meals"; "starting point"- emblematic of her voice.

Sketch by George Terry McDonald [source]

I Scrape the Window of Nothingness will be available for purchase on March 12th, but you can pre-order a copy now from Orison Books.

"But why should I do this if you just finished saying Radulescu doesn't offer any revelations or certainties? Why bother if the poems won't fulfill me?"

Because any poet who fulfills you is a one-night stand on the bedside table; and what seems acrobatic at night looks foppish on two legs. Fulfillment is only temporary, a flash in the pan, but the silence of unspeakable things beguiles indefinitely. This is Radulescu's poetic gift- to convey the ineffablility of exile's place and the way language desecrates as much as it preserves. Read her for want of a moon.

"femme bleue" (in French)
"the earth begins" (translated by Luke Hankins)
"night in four voices" (in French)
"flood" (YouTube reading by the author)
"some words suicidal" 
more poems at Orison

Tomatoes, crusty bread, and feta cheese: A poetic combination.

And the truth is the first girl I ever kissed, tasted like tomatoes.

And I know this, because the second girl I ever kissed tasted like pepper.

It wasn’t unpleasant.

It’s just that I was expecting tomatoes.

 (Excerpt from Koyczan's "Tomatoes")

A poetic feast of tomato poems...

"Cherry Tomatoes" by Sandra Beasley
"Tomatoes" by Shane Koyczan
"Ode to Tomatoes" by Pablo Neruda (plus riotous illustration)
"September Tomatoes" by Karina Borowicz
A shape poem variant on a tomato poem by Victor Hugo
"Patio Tomatoes" by Krista Lukas
"Tomatoes" by Stephen Dobyns
"Roma" by Matthew Dickman
"After Tomato Picking" by Maria Garcia Teutsch
"Fried Green Tomatoes" by Pris Campbell
"Diary from a Tomato Cannery, 1912" by Sandy Solomon
"Tomato Hornworm", a great teaching poem
"I Used to Like Tomatoes" by Flora Veit Wild

Image source: Gathering Books

Surreptitious daydreams while homeschooling.

While the kids work on their journals, I admire the sunlight and find myself captivated by the conversations of recently-read authors in my head. The motif is a combination of Ellis Island and Atlanta, Georgia, though I don't have any particular story I'm trying to tell about either. 

 The extraordinary grandchildren portrait

SAUL BELLOW: "Though everybody wished to be an American, everybody's secret was that he hadn't suceeded in becoming one."

The extraordinary family portrait.

LISEL MUELLER: "At her wedding, a woman gave up
half of her name
and exchanged it for another.
Half of her is public,
subject to trade; the other
private, treasure and loneliness,
what he thinks of as her ,
what she would share, if she could."

 The King's cross-stitch design and handwork

SAUL BELLOW: "Dreams are readmitted only through the Ellis Island of science, by officials qualified in the legitimate interpretation of dreams. Music we bootleg. We bring it across the threshold surreptitiously."

LISEL MUELLER: "At night, with the lights out
and the TV turned up,  
a woman whispers his secret name:  
it frightens and excites him,
like the hundredth name of God."

 The Eldest recoagulates.

SAUL BELLOW: "When the noise dies down you'll find yourself with the "I" you first knew when you came to know that you were a self-- an event which occurs quite early in life. And that first self is embraced with a kind of fervor, excitement, love-- and knowledge! Your formal schooling is really a denaturing of that first self."

HERBERT LOWENSTEIN: "If you are a poet, I hope you can use language not just as it is, an oily lubricant for the frictionless working of the system."

All family portraits were taken by the talented Wildnei Suane. You can see more of his work online at Willarts and schedule a photo session with him if you happen to be in Atlanta. Because Brazilian photographers rock.

Kansas Truck Stop.

A scrap flower by the Eldest and a decades-old poem found in one of my diaries

 

Fear smells like old boots
left in a gas station restroom,
the kind you never wanted to put on
stinking from miles away
yet everything begins with this lack
for anything better to wear.

The long-legged
cowboy hat cocky
tries to pay for my gas
a heart races, doom sounds 
like spinning vinyl
revolving doors
exits bloom into prospects
his eyes twinkle
Southern boy blue.

Fear tastes like a beard
after chicken at Denny’s  
two shots of tequila 
spiked us into sharing
the laugh that cinches the deal
not BOGO but one of a kind
desire crisped by the deep fry.

The salt from here
unforgettable puckers.

A poem about Soddy Daisy, TN.

The day we read "The Legend of Atalanta".

Here's the first stanza from my poem, "Soddy Daisy, TN":

We’ve been driving since the sun
rose neon as Vegas.
Respite shares two letters
with Soddy Daisy, and two
is enough for us. 

Read the remainder in issue 5 of Brickplight.

On the planet of Mars.

Astronomy with Shel Silverstein.

An excerpt from the poem, "Stag Hunt".

The frog we saw near a beautiful flower.

I tell you it’s too late for anything
but you seem very nonchalant about our dilemma’s solution,
both players must shoot off one of their legs so they can’t chase
the hare, you say, as if legs are just words to throw around in a game.

Think only how clean and cauterizing, this solution,
the only fair solution to the dating dilemma being
voluntary, mutual self-mutilation.
You look happy for once.
We go from Rousseau's story to playing a game
where winning involves accepting a known loss.

Read the rest online for free in Issue 5 of Brickplight.

The writing life: Characters, editors, poems, and perversity of spirit.

In my spare (and stolen) time, I've been absorbed by the characters in my novel- how they developed unpredictably, as if they ran away from me and took on a life of their own. Sometimes, I am the ungrateful parent who wishes they'd behave more like obedient children- fit the expectations I have of them. Other times, I am grateful for the way they float outside my grasp, defying my notions of goodness, my expectations of what a character should be.

Julia Alvarez says you should write about something you haven’t figured out--write your way through to an answer. Embrace and pursue discomfort. Take surprise as a boon. That is the mind-bendingly awesome part.

Then you prepare to present your baby to the the editors. Much like opinionated parents, most editors have a specific philosophy- a bias towards sleep training or attachment parenting or metered verse. The rejection letters come with the profusion of fall foliage, and I take comfort knowing that every editor feels passionately about their choices, every "no" makes every "yes" all the sweeter. 

There's nothing like the way the heart swells an octave when an editor says "yes". Nothing.

Still, the writer wonders- am I fooling myself? Do these poems, stories, or books deserve to be read? Do they add anything to the world? 

In comes Ruthi Thorpe to rescue me from misgivings and self-pity. In an essay for Poets and Writers, she says the only two things a writer needs is “a love of books” and “perversity of spirit,” or the ability to remain unfazed by valid criticism and keep on chooglin'.

“You have to fall in love with the dark formless place where the words come from. You have to be addicted to that deep-sea inner world that is the reading and writing of books. And you have to be willing to ignore just about everything else.”

Ruthi, thank you for reminding me not to take the darkness personally- not to be sad when editors or fellow mothers see things differently. Life is richer for these differences. 

On the surprising side of things, I have three poems in Brickplight this month. 

"Letter to An Unknowing Pissant" was inspired by a conversation I overheard at the playground- a conversation between a father-in-law and a wide-eyed, worried young mother. He was so cruel to her- and his cruelty made him look small.

"Soddy Daisy, TN" was written on the car ride back from a trip to the Smoky Mountains with my one and only beautiful sister- and our families to boot. I imagine all sorts of things on long drives. All sorts, all flavors.

"Stag Hunt" was inspired by my fascination with game theory and a game theoretic experiment that Ed Lopez finished for his economics dissertion in Virginia way back when. I learned so much from participating. Like economics in general, the economics of love is reductive. We make decisions based on assumptions about what the other person is thinking or feeling- then we pretend our assumptions are actually truths. Such is the social construction of reality. 

Take a gander over to Brickplight and see the exquisite compilation of poems selected by Jason Barber for Issue 5, including poetry by Arthur Plotnik, Fassbinder-aficionado Drew Pisarra, flophouse dandy Harley Lethalm,  Tim Kahl whose "oh" stops traffic,  and the tender voice of John Grey.

A poet's happiness: The slice-and-dice of it.

In a 1985 issue of the Black Warrior Review, I came across "A Poet's Alphabet" by William Matthews. I couldn't keep two lines in particular from running through my head:

"Happiness is not wholly an accident, some prosperous suburb of luck. We create our work, and the work changes us."

When I looked back on how my understanding of happiness has changed over the years, it's hard to recognize myself (as opposed to my culture and conditioning) in previous iterations. Happiness is so many things- and happiness is mistaken for so many other things. 

Happiness is not a decent job with medical benefits. That's just a lucrative career.

Happiness is not a prodiguous harvest of heirloom tomatoes. That's just gazpacho.

Happiness is not a purple silk bustier. That's just a prop. Possibly a mis-en-scene.

Happiness is not front-row seats at Carnegie Hall. That's just being loaded.

Happiness is not "well-behaved", finely-groomed children tucked into church pews. That's just control.

Happiness is not a 20-year wedding anniversary. That's just modern economics.

Happiness is not a new puppy. That's just a pet.

Happiness is not winning the Georgia State Lottery. That's just wasted money.

Happiness is not discovering a 24-hour strip club that serves burgers just opened on your street. That's just entitlement.

Happiness is somewhere between making out with a man on Coney Island and the cheap mermaid necklace you keep as a souvenir.

Not the thing itself- just the way it throws you back against the jetties, the way it breaks you a little, then leaves you awestruck.

Thomas Rain Crowe, a poet of place.

Wandering through the archives of The Southern Nature Project, I came across an insightful interview with Thomas Rain Crowe, a globe-trotting poet and translator who nevertheless maintains a committed relationship with his "place" in a small Smoky Mountain community in North Carolina's Tuckasegee watershed. 

Crowe worn many hats- founder, writer, supporter, mentor- has been instrumental as a founder, writer and supporter of a number of activist organizations and publications in the region of the Southern Appalachians, such as The Canary Coalition, AMUSE (Artists and Musicians United for a Safe Environment), the Southern Biodiversity Project, WNC Environmental Leadership Council, Green Line, Wild Mountain Times and Smoky Mountain News.

Spending as much time as I did living and working with and around Gary Snyder as I did in Northern California in the 1970s, a lot of his bioregional ethic, his Zen Buddhism, his poetics rubbed off on me. In some ways quite literally. It was he, for instance, who suggested that I come back to North Carolina to spread the bioregional message- which is what I did, eventually, in December of 1978. Snyder led by example. There were many in those years who have gone on to do interesting and important things that were nurtured by their apprenticeships with Snyder.

Poets like Crowe remind me that we all come from a place. Many times, this "place" informs and inspires our writing. Our dislocations and disconnections from place make it difficult to sustain belief in more than billboard ephemera. I thank Prophet, Gnome, and the Eldest for reconstituting "place" anew each day. 

"Lullabye", a poem by the irascible Albert Goldbarth.

 

LULLABYE by Albert Goldbarth

sleep, little beansprout
don’t be scared
the night is simply the true sky
bared

sleep, little dillseed
don’t be afraid
the moon is the sunlight
ricocheted

sleep, little button
don’t make a fuss
we make up the gods
so they can make us

sleep, little nubbin
don’t you stir
this sky smiled down
on Atlantis and Ur

"Garment", a poem by Langston Hughes.

 

GARMENT

by Langston Hughes

The clouds weave a shawl
Of downy plaid
For the sky to put on
When the weather's bad.

I love this brief poem by Langston Hughes for the way in which it personifies the sky. The image is unforgettable- accessible to little folks once you explain a shawl. 

"I Hear the Guitar", a poem by David Mason.

 

Gnome rides her birthday bike, unicorn helmeted.

I HEAR THE GUITAR

by David Mason

The shadow of a bat
across my page at night
is lighter than a thought
and just as late.

I drink to the guitar
and passing girls who wear
hibiscus in their hair,
scenting the air.

I'd like to be the termite in David Mason's back porch. His words build images that tend to stick fast in my head, forgotten and rediscovered like bubble-gum on the sole of seldom-worn shoes. This poem was published in The Pinch (Spring 2006). 

If this is your first taste of Mason, I suggest you sample the delicious "A Bit of Skin".

"Teleology", a poem by A. R. Ammons.

Some things
are so

big that
it's hard

to tell
you're going

round going
round them.

Gardening with a few words from Wendell Berry.

Excerpts from Wendell Berry's poem, "The Farm", circa 1991.

Work done in gratitude,
Kindly, and well, is prayer.
You did not make yourself,
Yet you must keep yourself
By use of other lives.
No gratitude atones
For bad use or too much.

This is not work for hire.
By this expenditure
You make yourself a place;
You make yourself a way
For love to reach the ground.

"The Prisoner", a poem by Charles Simic.

He is thinking of us.
These leaves, their lazy rustle

That made us sleepy after lunch
So we had to lie down.

He considers my hand on her breast,
Her closed eyelids eyelids, her moist lips
Against my forehead, and the shadows of trees
Hovering on the ceiling.

It’s been so long. He has trouble
Deciding what else is there.
And all along the suspicion
That we do not exist.

"Ohio", a poem by Charles Rafferty.

Gnome walks the line at a park in
Dublin, Ohio earlier this year.

The state quarter celebrates our love
of sky, minting the Kitty Hawk and the man
on the moon together: the first step
and the first flight growing improbably
from that same Ohioan soil. If I had
my own quarter, I’d stamp it with a girl
who sung me to glass that glittered to bits
and the wife who glued me back.
Or with the skyline of Derby
and a wasp-filled cupola at Fairfield Hills.
Or with the Beatles and the darkened dial
of my car radio. Or with a Gemini capsule
and a jetliner slamming itself to marigolds.
It’s possible to love the ground too much.
Before I’d ever flown I had a fear of flying,
which is really a fear of falling, which is also
a fear of pain—and how can a life be lived
except by accepting pain? So once
when I was twenty, I stepped off a Cessna
at three thousand feet above a field
of daisies and goldenrod. I remember letting go,
then nothing. Then a stillness, a floating,
the motor of the plane receding like a bug.
I hung there clutching a dandelion plume—
my legs in a dangle above the field
that kept on rising to where I was.

This poem was published in the Summer 2013 issue of Raffle. 

Four poems by Maya Angelou, in memory of a beautiful human being.

A woman of many voices

Because there will never be another voice that hits all the high notes while still finding the strength to growl- never another song like the many that flowed from the lips and fingers of Maya Angelou. 

INSOMNIAC

There are some nights when
sleep plays coy,
aloof and disdainful.
And all the wiles
that I employ to win
its service to my side
are useless as wounded pride,
and much more painful.

Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes

WEEKEND GLORY

Some clichty folks
don't know the facts,
posin' and preenin'
and puttin' on acts,
stretchin' their backs.

They move into condos
up over the ranks,
pawn their souls
to the local banks.
Buying big cars
they can't afford,
ridin' around town
actin' bored.

If they want to learn how to live life right
they ought to study me on Saturday night.

My job at the plant
ain't the biggest bet,
but I pay my bills
and stay out of debt.
I get my hair done
for my own self's sake,
so I don't have to pick
and I don't have to rake.

Take the church money out
and head cross town
to my friend girl's house
where we plan our round.
We meet our men and go to a joint
where the music is blue
and to the point.

Folks write about me.
They just can't see
how I work all week
at the factory.
Then get spruced up
and laugh and dance
And turn away from worry
with sassy glance.

They accuse me of livin'
from day to day,
but who are they kiddin'?
So are they.

My life ain't heaven
but it sure ain't hell.
I'm not on top
but I call it swell
if I'm able to work
and get paid right
and have the luck to be Black
on a Saturday night.

THESE YET TO BE UNITED STATES

Tremors of your network 
cause kings to disappear. 
Your open mouth in anger 
makes nations bow in fear.

Your bombs can change the seasons, 
obliterate the spring. 
What more do you long for ? 
Why are you suffering ?

You control the human lives 
in Rome and Timbuktu. 
Lonely nomads wandering 
owe Telstar to you.

Seas shift at your bidding, 
your mushrooms fill the sky. 
Why are you unhappy ? 
Why do your children cry ?

They kneel alone in terror 
with dread in every glance. 
Their rights are threatened daily 
by a grim inheritance.

You dwell in whitened castles 
with deep and poisoned moats 
and cannot hear the curses 
which fill your children’s throats.

WOMAN WORK

I've got the children to tend
The clothes to mend
The floor to mop
The food to shop
Then the chicken to fry
The baby to dry
I got company to feed
The garden to weed
I've got shirts to press
The tots to dress
The cane to be cut
I gotta clean up this hut
Then see about the sick
And the cotton to pick.

Shine on me, sunshine
Rain on me, rain
Fall softly, dewdrops
And cool my brow again.

Storm, blow me from here
With your fiercest wind
Let me float across the sky
'Til I can rest again.

Fall gently, snowflakes
Cover me with white
Cold icy kisses and
Let me rest tonight.

Sun, rain, curving sky
Mountain, oceans, leaf and stone
Star shine, moon glow
You're all that I can call my own.

"Wait", a poem by Galway Kinnell.

Art by a student of Westwood Elementary,
on display at the Bama Theatre.

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair, music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

Mustard greens, zinnias, and rosemary: Poems growing from garden soils.

 

I found this first poem on Tweetspeak, alongside a delicious recipe for collard greens. The thought of "eating and drinking poems" makes so much sense to me in the context of a carefully tended garden.

CUTTING GREENS by Lucille Clifton

curling them around

i hold their bodies in obscene embrace

thinking of everything but kinship.

collards and kale

strain against each strange other

away from my kiss making hand and

the iron bedpot

the pot is black,

the cutting board is black,

my hand,

and just for a minute

the greens roll black under the knife,

and the kitchen twists dark on its spine

and I taste in my natural appetite

the bond of live things everywhere.

An excerpt from Mona Van Duyn's poem, "A Bouquet of Zinnias", where the description of colors sticks to my head.

"In any careless combination they delight.
Pure peach-cheek beside the red of a boiled beet
by the perky scarlet of a cardinal by flamingo pink
by sunsink orange by yellow from a hundred buttercups
by bleached linen white. Any random armful
of the world, one comes to feel, would fit together.'

Thyme Will Tell has a fascinating description of rosemary's historical uses as a sacred and very special plant. Though not, technically, a poem, the passages certainly inspire and contextualize many a poem.

Rosemary doesn't just stand for memories. Recent research indicates that it may keep you from losing yours! Even in ancient times, rosemary had a reputation for stimulating mental activity. Today it is being investigated as a possible treatment for senility.

Rosemary may also stand for remembrance because it "recalls" its color and scent so well. "For you," a character in The Winter's Tale comments, "there's rosemary and rue; these keep/ Seeming and savour all the winter long. . ."

The herb was originally carried to funerals simply as a protector against infection. It soon became customary, however, for mourners to drop sprigs of it onto the coffin as a promise that they would not forget the deceased. Woven into the bride's wreath at Tudor weddings, it reminded the happy couple not to forget their vows also.

It was so closely associated with marriage, in fact, that the nurse in Romeo and Juliet could ask, "Doth not rosemary and Romeo begin both with the same letter?" This may be due to its supposed empathy with Venus, the mother of romantic love (Eros). Like the herb, she was also supposed to have sprung from the sea. Unfortunately, later in Shakespeare's play, the friar has to adjure Juliet's mourners to "Dry up your tears, and stick your rosemary/ On this fair corse."

Perhaps because of its association with sacred rites, rosemary gained a reputation as a holy plant. Considered efficacious against black magic, it docorated church festivals, especially those celebrating Christ's birth. "Down with rosemary and so," writes the poet Herrick. "Down with the baies and mistletoe,/ Down with the holly, ivie all/ Wherewith ye deck the Christmas hall."

A charming tradition holds that the Virgin Mary threw her blue cloak over a rosemary bush during the flight into Egypt, transforming its formerly white flowers. For this reason, the Spanish call it romero, the pilgrim's flower, and contend that it will never presume to surpass the adult height of Christ.

An old manuscript sent to Queen Phillippa of England by her mother claims that rosemary "mighteth the boones and causeth goode and gladeth and lighteth all men that use it. The leves layde under the heade whanne a man slepes, it doth away evell spirites and suffereth not to dreeme fowle dremes ne to be afeade. But he must be out of deedely synne for it is an holy tree. Lavender and Rosemary is as woman to man and White Roose to Reede."

This association of rosemary with masculinity seems to be directly contradicted, however, by another old belief that the herb would only thrive where the woman of the house ruled the roost. I suspect that many bushes were subjected to surreptious snippings!

Meaning "dew of the sea," rosemary has also been called polar plant, compass-weed, or incensier, the latter because it sometimes took the place of more expensive incense.

The ancients burned rosemary, often along with juniper berries, not just for the pleasant smell, but as a disinfectant. Strewn along with rue in the dock at trials, rosemary protected spectators from gaol-fever.

Rosemary Fact Sheet (Herb Society of America)

"Waiting", a poem by Raymond Carver.

Left off the highway and
down the hill. At the
bottom, hand another left.
Keep bearing left. The road
will make a Y. Left again.
There’s a creek on the left.
Keep going. Just before
the road ends, there’ll be
another road. Take it
and no other. Otherwise,
your life will be ruined
forever. There’s a log house
with a shake roof, on the left.
It’s not that house. It’s
the next house, just over
a rise. The house
where trees are laden with
fruit. Where phlox, forsythia
and marigold grow. It’s 
the house where the woman
stands in the doorway
wearing sun in her hair. The one
who’s been waiting
all the time.
The woman who loves you.
The one who can say,
“What’s kept you?”

Pansies and chimps: An amusing comparison.

We added this to our flower notebooks and colored the pansy and chimpanzee in a way that highlighted their difference. I love seeing other faces in flowers- such a fun way to explore the personalities and hidden sides of plants.

"Those Being Eaten By America", a poem by Robert Bly.

Sometimes we fail to find the geocache.

The cry of those being eaten by America,
Others pale and soft being stored for later eating

And jefferson
Who saw hope in new oats

The wild houses go on
With long hair growing from between their toes
The feet at night get up
And run down the long white roads by themselves

The dams reverse themselves and want to go stand alone in the desert

Ministers who dive headfirst into the earth
The pale flesh
Spreading guiltily into new literatures

That is why these poems are so sad
The long dead running over the fields

The mass sinking down
The light in children’s faces fading at six or seven

The world will soon break up into small colonies of the saved

Aside to a front-yard thistle.

Oh thistle.

Thou art a solitary, singular, front-yardish fellow,

a sight for making eyes sore.

"Only fools would pick such fallow soils",

I can't help muttering

(a way of saying without speaking).

And all those prickles for protection

just so you can saunter the lawn

draped in shameless scarlet.

 Still, I admit that no one else

wears raspberry beret so very well,

all haughty and rather huffy.

"Taking the Hands", a poem by Robert Bly.

Prophet works on making a pass.

Taking the hands of someone you love,
You see that are delicate cages…
Tiny birds are singing
In the secluded prairies
And in the deep valleys of the hand.

Telling the stories in a Poet's daffodil.

Cora Millay and her three daughters lived in the Coffin House in Newburyport, a Maine town that sidled up to the waters of the Merrimac River. It was a house in which every one of its women turned and churned poems. 

Reading Nancy Milford's biography of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay lit an image, perhaps even an association, in my mind, a line between two dots that harbors at least one story or poem. It is a relationship between a flower and what a pen does to a blank sheet of paper. 

Narcissus poeticus (Poet's Daffodil, Nargis, Pheasant's Eye, Findern Flower, and Pinkster Lily) was one of the first daffodils to be cultivated, and is frequently identified as the narcissus of ancient times—often associated with the Greek legend of Narcissus. Linnaeus, who gave the flower its name, might have done so because he believed it was the one that inspired the tale of Narcissus, handed down by poets since ancient times.

In her childhood journals, Edna describes the yard being "infinite" with the flowers of Narcissus poeticus. Given the intoxicating fragrance of its bloom, the possible metaphors abound, especially once you learn that the Poet's daffodil, like all narcissi, is poisonous when eaten.  Unlike other narcissi, however, this flower is extremely dangerous to consume- and even to keep. The scent is powerful enough that it can cause headache and vomiting if a large quantity is kept in a closed room. 

Do something beautiful with that fact. Here's a handout I created for the Eldest this morning.

The stories in a Poet's daffodil (PDF)
Free handout describing Narcissus poeticus in history, myth, and legend.

JOURNAL PROMPT: Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay credits the poet’s daffodil with bringing poetry to her childhood days. Write a poem or a letter adopting Edna’s childhood perspective where she explains why the daffodils covering her front yard exposed or elicited poetry. Consider using the sonnet form for your poem, since this was one of the poetic forms in which Millay excelled.

"If I should learn, in some quiet, casual way...", a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

If I should learn, in some quite casual way,
  That you were gone, not to return again—
Read from the back-page of a paper, say,
  Held by a neighbor in a subway train,
How at the corner of this avenue
  And such a street (so are the papers filled)
A hurrying man—who happened to be you—
  At noon to-day had happened to be killed,
I should not cry aloud—I could not cry
  Aloud, or wring my hands in such a place—
I should but watch the station lights rush by
  With a more careful interest on my face,
Or raise my eyes and read with greater care
Where to store furs and how to treat the hair.

"Declaration of Love," a poem by Carilda Oliver Labra.

DECLARATION OF LOVE

(written during the Cuban Missile Crisis, October, 1963) 

I ask if I'm wise
when I awaken
the danger between his thighs,
or if I'm wrong
when my kisses prepare only a trench
in his throat.

I know that war is probable;
especially today
because a red geranium has blossomed open.

Please, don't point your weapons
at the sky:
the sparrows are terrorized,
and it's springtime,
it's raining, the meadows are ruminating.
Please,
you'll melt the moon, only night light of the poor.

It's not that I'm afraid,
or a coward,
I'd do everything for my homeland;
but don't argue so much over your nuclear missiles,
because something horrible is happening:
and I haven't had time enough to love.  

I came across this poem in my dog-eared copy of Women On War.  I appreciate the way she holds the ordinariness of love yet to be lived against the tremendous import of nuclear missiles and Cold War politics.

According to my book, Carilda Oliver Labra is known as one of Cuba's prominent poets and "one of the island's first feminist poets to champion women's rights to an erotic life without the constraints of Catholicism". Though her love poems made her famous, her Song to Marti paid tribute to the revolutionary hero. This poem was written in response to the 1963 Cuban missile crisis which brought the modern world to the brink of nuclear war.

You can learn more about Labra and read a few other poems at the delicious Drunken Boat. 

"Foxtrot From A Play", a poem by W.H. Auden.

The soldier loves his rifle,
   The scholar loves his books,
The farmer loves his horses,
    The film star loves her looks.
There’s love the whole world over
    Wherever you may be;
Some lose their rest for gay Mae West,
    But you’re my cup of tea.

Some talk of Alexander
    And some of Fred Astaire,
Some like their heroes hairy
    Some like them debonair,
Some prefer a curate
    And some an A.D.C.,
Some like a tough to treat’em rough,
    But you’re my cup of tea.

Some are mad on Airedales
    And some on Pekinese,
On tabby cats or parrots
    Or guinea pigs or geese.
There are patients in asylums
    Who think that they’re a tree;
I had an aunt who loved a plant,
    But you’re my cup of tea.

Some have sagging waistlines
    And some a bulbous nose
And some a floating kidney
    And some have hammer toes,
Some have tennis elbow
    And some have housemaid’s knee,
And some I know have got B.O.,
    But you’re my cup of tea.

The blackbird loves the earthworm,
    The adder loves the sun,
The polar bear an iceberg,
    The elephant a bun,
The trout enjoys the river,
    The whale enjoys the sea,
And dogs love most an old lamp-post,
    But you’re my cup of tea.

"Infidelity", a poem by Louis Untermeyer.

Buds on a tree by the Scioto River in Dublin, Ohio.

You have not conquered me—it is the surge

   Of love itself that beats against my will;

It is the sting of conflict, the old urge

   That calls me still.

 

It is not you I love—it is the form

   And shadow of all lovers who have died

That gives you all the freshness of a warm

   And unfamiliar bride.

 

It is your name I breathe, your hands I seek;

   It will be you when you are gone.

And yet the dream, the name I never speak,

   Is that that lures me on.

 

It is the golden summons, the bright wave

   Of banners calling me anew;

It is all beauty, perilous and grave—

   It is not you.

I love this poem for the way Untermeyer reveals the hope at the heart of infidelity- the strange sparkle of an unrealized dream, the way it becomes possible to cherish a fantasy, or its mere possibility. A love poem to a character of our invention. Compelling and destructive.