let my words turn into sparks

It's April 30, which means that this is the last poem of the month. Time is kind of weird, right? This is not an April poem, or even a spring poem; it's actually a Yom Kippur poem, which is maybe a little weird to post in April. But for me, this time of year is always a transitional moment, and I think this poem is the right one to be going on with, this year.

On the birthday of the world
I begin to contemplate
what I have done and left
undone, but this year
not so much rebuilding

of my perennially damaged
psyche, shoring up eroding
friendships, digging out
stumps of old resentments
that refuse to rot on their own.

No, this year I want to call
myself to task for what
I have done and not done
for peace. How much have
I dared in opposition?

How much have I put
on the line for freedom?
For mine and others?
As these freedoms are pared,
sliced and diced, where

have I spoken out? Who
have I tried to move? In
this holy season, I stand
self-convicted of sloth
in a time when lies choke

the mind and rhetoric
bends reason to slithering
choking pythons. Here
I stand before the gates
opening, the fire dazzling

my eyes and as I approach
what judges me, I judge
myself. Give me weapons
of minute destruction. Let
my words turn into sparks.

—Marge Piercy (b. 1936), "The birthday of the world," from The Crooked Inheritance (2006), although in this case from The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems, 1980-2010 (2012).

See you next year, friends. ♥

sail through this

                            (at St. Mary's)

may the tide

that is entering even now

the lip of our understanding

carry you out

beyond the face of fear

may you kiss

the wind then turn from it

certain that it will

love your back     may you

open your eyes to water

water waving forever

and may you in your innocence

sail through this to that

—Lucille Clifton (1936-2010), "blessing the boats," in this case from Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000. 

poetry is the human voice

Poetry, I tell my students,

is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves

(though Sterling Brown said

"Every 'I' is a dramatic 'I'"),

digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,

emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find

in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God

in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.

Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,

and I'm sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)

is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

—Elizabeth Alexander (b. 1962), "Ars Poetica #100: I Believe" from American Sublime, 2005. 

I taught my last class of the semester, today; as always happens near the end of poetry month, I have started to think about why I do this every year, and what it is about poetry that continues, always, to hook me; also, I really love Elizabeth Alexander. 

(now again)

Sometime in the last ten years, my copy of Anne Carson's gorgeous translation of Sappho, If Not, Winter (New York: Vintage, 2003)—which, it should probably be noted, I bought for a rather remarkable January-term class on Sappho and Catullus in 2004—disappeared. I don't know if I lost it in one of my many moves since, or loaned it to someone and never got it back, but it took me a long time to admit that it was probably gone for good. I finally replaced it this year, and that means it's time for Carson's Sappho. This is one of my favorite fragments (although it's hard to pick favorites; they're all pretty exceptional. Even fragment 176, lyre lyre lyre).

            ]

            ]work

            ]face

            ]

            ]

            if not, winter

            ]no pain

            ]

]I bid you sing

of Gongyla, Abanthis, taking up

your lyre as (now again) longing

            floats around you, 

you beauty. For her dress when you saw it

stirred you. And I rejoice. 

In fact she herself once blamed me

            Kyprogeneia

because I prayed

this word: 

I want

—Sappho (b. c. 615 BCE), fragment 22, translated by Anne Carson (b. 1950), from If Not, Winter (2003). In her introduction, Carson writes: "In translating I tried to put down all that can be read of each poem in the plainest language I could find, using where possible the same order of words and thoughts as Sappho did. I like to think that, the more I stand out of the way, the more Sappho shows through. This is an amiable fantasy (transparency of self) within which most translators labor" (x), and, later: 

When translating texts read from papyri, I have used a single square bracket to give an impression of missing matter, so that ] or [ indicates destroyed papyrus or the presence of letters not quite legible somewhere in the line. It is not the case that every gap or illegibility is specifically indicated: this would render the page a blizzard of marks and inhibit reading. Brackets are an aesthetic gesture toward the papyrological event rather than an accurate record of it. ... Brackets are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp—brackets imply a free sense of imaginal adventure. (xi)

I love a lot of things about Anne Carson, but perhaps my favorite is the poetic grace with which she approaches scholarly practice. It is an adventure.

time will say nothing but I told you so

I will never run out of Auden poems. This is partly because he was incredibly prolific, and partly because I adore him. This one is a classic; it's also a villanelle, which is one of my favorite poetic forms; I love it more than I can say.

Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Suppose the lions all get up and go,
And all the brooks and soldiers run away;
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.

—W. H. Auden (1907-1973), "If I Could Tell You," October 1940.

verbs that move mountains

Courtesy of wintercreek, who (as always) has the best taste in poetry. I posted an Ingrid de Kok poem last year, and I kind of love her. This one gets under my skin.

Some stories don't want to be told.

They walk away, carrying their suitcases

held together with grey string.

Look at their disappearing curved spines.

Hunch-backs. Harmed ones. Hold-alls.

Some stories refuse to be danced or mimed,

drop their scuffed canes

and clattering tap-shoes,

erase their traces in nursery rhymes

or ancient games like blind man's buff.

And at this stained place words

are scraped from resinous tongues,

wrung like washing, hung on the lines

of courtroom and confessional,

transposed into the dialect of record.

Why still believe stories can rise

with wings, on currents, as silver flares,

levitate unweighted by stones,

begin in pain and move towards grace,

aerating history with recovered breath?

Why still imagine whole words, whole worlds:

the flame splutter of consonants,

deep sea-anemone vowels,

birth-cable syntax, rhymes that start in the heart,
and verbs, verbs that move mountains?

—Ingrid de Kok (b. 1951), "Parts of Speech," from Terrestrial Things (Cape Town: Kwela/Snail, 2002). 

a monster in the shape of a woman

I had dinner with a couple of awesome astronomers tonight, so this is sort of for them—though also because I love it, and because it's been on my to-post list for a long time, and because it's not really poetry month with Adrienne Rich.

                 Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750-1848)
                     astronomer, sister of William; and others.

A woman in the shape of a monster   

a monster in the shape of a woman   

the skies are full of them

a woman      'in the snow

among the Clocks and instruments   

or measuring the ground with poles' 

in her 98 years to discover   

8 comets

she whom the moon ruled   

like us

levitating into the night sky   

riding the polished lenses

Galaxies of women, there

doing penance for impetuousness   

ribs chilled   

in those spaces    of the mind

An eye,

          'virile, precise and absolutely certain'

          from the mad webs of Uranusborg

                                                            encountering the NOVA   

every impulse of light exploding 

from the core 

as life flies out of us

             Tycho whispering at last

             'Let me not seem to have lived in vain' 

What we see, we see   

and seeing is changing

the light that shrivels a mountain   

and leaves a man alive

Heartbeat of the pulsar

heart sweating through my body

The radio impulse   

pouring in from Taurus

         I am bombarded yet         I stand

I have been standing all my life in the   

direct path of a battery of signals

the most accurately transmitted most   

untranslatable language in the universe

I am a galactic cloud so deep      so invo-

luted that a light wave could take 15   

years to travel through me       And has   

taken      I am an instrument in the shape   

of a woman trying to translate pulsations   

into images    for the relief of the body   

and the reconstruction of the mind.

—Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), "Planetarium," 1968, from The Will to Change (1971), though in this case from The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950-2001 (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 2002). 

shine forth, thou star of poets

Today is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, as well as his alleged birthday. There are a lot of celebrations happening, and I did think about a more creative poetry selection. But the truth is, this is still and always my favorite celebratory Shakespeare poem, however overplayed it might be, and however often I have posted it in years past.

To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name,
Am I thus ample to thy book and fame;
While I confess thy writings to be such
As neither man nor Muse can praise too much.
'Tis true, and all men's suffrage. But these ways
Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise;
For seeliest Ignorance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right;
Or blind Affection, which doth ne'er advance
The truth, but gropes and urgeth all by chance;
Or crafty Malice might pretend this praise,
And think to ruin where it seem'd to raise.
These are as some infamous bawd or whore
Should praise a matron. What could hurt her more?
But thou art proof against them, and, indeed,
Above the ill-fortune of them, or the need.
I, therefore, will begin. Soul of the age!
The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage,
My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further, to make thee a room:
Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still, while thy book doth live,
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.
That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses;
I mean, with great but disproportion'd Muses.
For, if I thought my judgment were of years,
I should commit thee, surely, with thy peers.
And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence, to honour thee, I would not seek
For names; but call forth thund'ring Aeschylus,
Euripides, and Sophocles to us,
Paccuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead
To life again, to hear thy buskin tread
And shake a stage; or when thy socks were on,
Leave thee alone, for the comparison
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome
Sent forth; or since did from their ashes come.
Triumph, my Britain! Thou hast one to show
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time!
And all the Muses still were in their prime,
When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm
Our ears, or, like a Mercury, to charm.
Nature herself was proud of his designs,
And joy'd to wear the dressing of his lines,
Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit
As, since, she will vouchsafe no other wit.
The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes,
Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please;
But antiquated and deserted lie,
As they were not of Nature's family.
Yet must I not give Nature all! Thy art,
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.
For though the Poet's matter Nature be
His art doth give the fashion. And that he
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat
(Such as thine are), and strike the second heat
Upon the Muses' anvil, turn the same
(And himself with it), that he thinks to frame;
Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn!
For a good Poet's made as well as born;
And such wert thou! Look how the father’s face
Lives in his issue; even so, the race
Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines
In his well-turned and true-filed lines;
In each of which he seems to shake a lance
As brandish'd at the eyes of Ignorance.
Sweet Swan of Avon! what a sight it were
To see thee in our water yet appear,
And make those flights upon the banks of Thames
That so did take Eliza, and our James!
But stay, I see thee in the hemisphere
Advanc'd, and made a constellation there!
Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage
Or influence, chide, or cheer the drooping stage;
Which since thy flight from hence hath mourn'd like night,
And despairs day, but for thy volume's light.

—Ben Jonson (1572-1637), "To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare: and What He Hath Left Us," prefatory poem to the First Folio of 1623 (and, speaking of the First Folio, check out the Folger Library's First Folio Tour, which includes a digital version).

fainting I follow

I spent today at a pretty great one-day conference sponsored by my department and organized by some of my colleagues. In the last talk, the speaker brought Frank O'Hara (1926-1966)—who, serendipitously, I posted yesterday—into conversation with Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)—who, serendipitously, I have only posted once before. This is not the Wyatt poem that was discussed in the talk, but it's one of the most famous, and up there among my favorites.

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind, 

But as for me, hélas, I may no more. 

The vain travail hath wearied me so sore, 

I am of them that farthest cometh behind. 

Yet may I by no means my wearied mind 

Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore 

Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore, 

Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind. 

Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt, 

As well as I may spend his time in vain. 

And graven with diamonds in letters plain 

There is written, her fair neck round about: 

Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am, 

And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

—Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542), "Whoso List to Hunt." 

There's a fairly widespread assumption that Wyatt wrote this poem about Anne Boleyn, which may or may not change a person's reading of the poem. Wyatt is widely credited (along with the Earl of Surrey and some others) with bringing the sonnet into English, and this is certainly a sonnet; it's also one of Wyatt's closest imitations of Petrarch, and can arguably be considered a (loose) translation of sonnet 190 from Petrarch's Canzoniere. Like a lot of poetry of the period, this poem appears in many different variant forms, punctuated in a variety of ways; I snagged this version from the good old Poetry Foundation and have preserved their punctuation and style choices, though they do not attribute their version. The poem was first published in Tottel's Miscellany in 1557. 

the day lady died

This is not the poem I thought I was going to post today, but it's the first poem I think of, every time a musical icon dies. 2016 has been a terrible year for that, and so this is for Prince, and for Bowie, and for all the rest. 

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille day, yes

it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton   

at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner

and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun   

and have a hamburger and a malted and buy

an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets   

in Ghana are doing these days

                                                        I go on to the bank

and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)   

doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life   

and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine   

for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do   

think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or   

Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres

of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine

after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE

Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and   

then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue   

and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and   

casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

—Frank O'Hara (1926-1966), "The Day Lady Died," from Lunch Poems, 1964, but reportedly written on the day Billie Holiday died, July 17, 1959. 

rivers ancient as the world

Variations on a theme: I was reading around in the Harlem Renaissance, after posting Claude McKay yesterday. Then I was looking for Harriet Tubman poems, in light of today's currency news, and thinking about Langston Hughes's "Freedom Train," which is not really about Tubman or the Underground Railroad, except for the ways in which it is; then I realized that I have never actually posted my favorite Hughes poem. I can't even tell you why this one is my favorite, but it is; it's a classic.

I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its
     muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

—Langston Hughes (1902-1967), "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," 1920/21, though in this case from Collected Poems, 1994. 

america

Today is the New York Primary, in which I am about to go vote, and I thought a thematic sonnet for the occasion seemed appropriate. I also really, really love this poem. If you live in New York, please vote today!

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate,
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.

—Claude McKay (1889-1948), "America," from Liberator (December 1921).

heart with its hands full

I post a lot of heart poems. Here's another one.

The heart shifts shape of its own accord—
from bird to ax, from pinwheel
to budded branch. It rolls over in the chest,
a brown bear groggy with winter, skips
like a child at the fair, stopping in the shade
of the fireworks booth, the fat lady's tent,
the corn dog stand. Or the heart
is an empty room where the ghosts of the dead
wait, paging through magazines, licking
their skinless thumbs. One gets up, walks
through a door into a maze of hallways.
Behind one door a roomful of orchids,
behind another, the smell of burned toast.
The rooms go on and on: sewing room
with its squeaky treadle, its bright needles,
room full of file cabinets and torn curtains,
room buzzing with a thousand black flies.
Or the heart closes its doors, becomes smoke,
a wispy lie, curls like a worm and forgets
its life, burrows into the fleshy dirt.
Heart makes a wrong turn.
Heart locked in its gate of thorns.
Heart with its hands folded in its lap.
Heart a blue skiff parting the silk of the lake.
It does what it wants, takes what it needs, eats
when it's hungry, sleeps when the soul shuts down.
Bored, it watches movies deep into the night,
stands by the window counting the streetlamps
squinting out one by one.
Heart with its hundred mouths open.
Heart with its hundred eyes closed.
Harmonica heart, heart of tinsel,
heart of cement, broken teeth, redwood fence.
Heart of bricks and boards, books stacked
in devoted rows, their dusty spines
unreadable. Heart
with its hands full.
Hieroglyph heart, etched deep with history's lists,
things to do. Near-sighted heart. Club-footed heart.
Hard-headed heart. Heart of gold, coal.
Bad juju heart, singing the low down blues.
Choir boy heart. Heart in a frumpy robe.
Heart with its feet up reading the scores.
Homeless heart, dozing, its back against the Dumpster.
Cop-on-the-beat heart with its black billy club,
banging on the lid.

—Dorianne Laux (b. 1952), "Heart," from Smoke, 2000.

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

Apparently I missed April 16 last year, too, and the 15th the year before that, so there's definitely a pattern to my poetry month planning. Ooops. An old favorite, today, since there hasn't been any e. e. cummings around here in awhile:

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
                                                      i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

—e. e. cummings (1894-1962), "i carry your heart with me," 1952.

shattered

This is probably my favorite Louise Glück poem of all time. 

The great thing

is not having 

a mind. Feelings:

oh, I have those; they 

govern me. I have 

a lord in heaven 

called the sun, and open 

for him, showing him

the fire of my own heart, fire 

like his presence.

What could such glory be

if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters, 

were you like me once, long ago, 

before you were human? Did you 

permit yourselves

to open once, who would never 

open again? Because in truth 

I am speaking now 

the way you do. I speak
because I am shattered.

—Louise Glück (b. 1943), "The Red Poppy," from The Wild Iris, 1992. 

this is the second of our reign

I was going to wait until I was home with my three different editions of Donne, but I have a few minutes now, between a full day of work and my dinner plans, so here we go. IT'S MY BIRTHDAY. IT'S A DONNE YEAR. IT'S TIME FOR THIS POEM.

All kings, and all their favourites,
    All glory of honours, beauties, wits,
The sun itself, which makes time, as they pass,
Is elder by a year now than it was
When thou and I first one another saw.
All other things to their destruction draw,
    Only our love hath no decay;
This no to-morrow hath, nor yesterday;
Running it never runs from us away,
But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.

    Two graves must hide thine and my corse;
    If one might, death were no divorce.
Alas! as well as other princes, we
—Who prince enough in one another be—
Must leave at last in death these eyes and ears,
Oft fed with true oaths, and with sweet salt tears;
    But souls where nothing dwells but love
—All other thoughts being inmates—then shall prove
This or a love increasèd there above,
When bodies to their graves, souls from their graves remove.

    And then we shall be throughly blest;
    But now no more than all the rest.
Here upon earth we're kings, and none but we
Can be such kings, nor of such subjects be.
Who is so safe as we? where none can do
Treason to us, except one of us two.
    True and false fears let us refrain,
Let us love nobly, and live, and add again
Years and years unto years, till we attain
To write threescore; this is the second of our reign.

—John Donne (1572-1621), "The Anniversarie" or, sometimes, "The Anniversary" (not to be confused with the Anniversaries) from Songs and Sonnets, here with modernized spelling and punctuation courtesy of E. K. Chambers, I think. I mean, honestly, whatever. I could yell about editorial practices for years, but let's just let the poem be, today.

the gods of wind and sun

Of the many poetry books I own, Billy Collins's Ballistics is one of my favorites. It's a fantastic collection, and my copy is peppered with post-it notes. This poem was not, in fact, marked by a post-it from previous reading, but I think it's the right poem for me today.

With only a two-and-a-half-inch wooden goose
to keep me company at this desk,
I am beginning a new life of discipline.

No more wandering out in thunderstorms
hoping to be hit by a bolt of lightning
from the raised hand of Randall Jarrell.

No more standing at an open window
with my lyre strings finely tuned
waiting for a stray zephyr to blow my way.

Instead I will report here every morning
and bend over my work like St. Jerome
with his cowl, quill, and a skull for a paperweight.

And the small white goose with his yellow
feet and beak and a black dot for an eye
is more than enough companionship for me.

He is well worth the dollar I paid for him
in a roadside trinket shop in New Mexico
and more familiar to me than the household deities

of this guest cottage in the woods—
two porcelain sphinxes on the mantel
and a pale, blank-eyed Roman bust on a high shelf

on this first morning without you—
me holding a coffee I forgot to pay for
and the gods of wind and sun contending in the
     crowded trees.

—Billy Collins (b. 1941), "Separation," from Ballistics (2008).

like those knowing flowers

I am trying to recuperate my sense of wonder and joy in what I do, today, so here is a poem about books and the people who love them. K. posted this poem yesterday, and reminded me how much I love it; plus, I think it's time for something from before 1700.

Bright books! the perspectives to our weak sights,
The clear projections of discerning lights,
Burning and shining thoughts, man’s posthume day,
The track of fled souls, and their milkie way,
The dead alive and busie, the still voice
Of enlarged spirits, kind Heaven’s white decoys!
Who lives with you lives like those knowing flowers,
Which in commerce with light spend all their hours;
Which shut to clouds, and shadows nicely shun,
But with glad haste unveil to kiss the sun.
Beneath you all is dark, and a dead night,
Which whoso lives in wants both health and sight.
     By sucking you, the wise, like bees, do grow
Healing and rich, though this they do most slow,
Because most choicely; for as great a store
Have we of books as bees of herbs, or more:
And the great task to try, then know, the good,
To discern weeds, and judge of wholesome food,
Is a rare scant performance. For man dyes
Oft ere ’tis done, while the bee feeds and flyes.
But you were all choice flowers; all set and dressed
By old sage florists, who well knew the best;
And I amidst you all am turned a weed,
Not wanting knowledge, but for want of heed.
Then thank thyself, wild fool, that wouldst not be
Content to know—what was too much for thee!

—Henry Vaughan (1621-1695), "To His Books."

the one rapture of an inspiration

I was in a Hopkins mood today, and then K. found me the right one. I actually asked her to read a different poem on the same page, and then she was like, "no post this one," and she was absolutely right. In the 1918 notes, Robert Bridges writes that this was the last poem G. M. H. sent to him.

The fine delight that fathers thought; the strong
Spur, live and lancing like the blowpipe flame,
Breathes once and, quenchèd faster than it came,
Leaves yet the mind a mother of immortal song.
Nine months she then, nay years, nine years she long
Within her wears, bears, cares and moulds the same:
The widow of an insight lost she lives, with aim
Now known and hand at work now never wrong.
     Sweet fire the sire of the muse, my soul needs this;
I want the one rapture of an inspiration.
O then if in my lagging lines you miss
The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation,
My winter world, that scarcely breathes that bliss
Now, yields you, with some sighs, our explanation.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), "To R. B. April 22, '89." Received in Autograph by R. Bridges on April 29. This is actually a more traditional sonnet than many of his, but god did Hopkins have a way with the sonnet.

what doesn't change

Yesterday night, on the subway home from a very lovely evening of friends and birthday celebrations, I asked N. what poem I should post. She said, "a poem about a train," and I laughed and then went home and posted Neruda. But I kept thinking about train poems.

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.

—Naomi Shihab Nye, "Trying to Name What Doesn't Change" from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland: Far Corner Books, 1995). As always, I love her.

te amo

A little late night Neruda for you guys, just because:

No te amo como si fueras rosa de sal, topacio

o flecha de claveles que propagan el fuego:

te amo como se aman ciertas cosas oscuras,

secretamente, entre la sombra y el alma.

Te amo como la planta que no florece y lleva

dentro de sí, escondida, la luz de aquellas flores,

y gracias a tu amor vive oscuro en mi cuerpo

el apretado aroma que ascendió de la tierra.

Te amo sin saber cómo, ni cuándo, ni de dónde,

te amo directamente sin problemas ni orgullo:

así te amor porque no sé amar de otra manera,

sino así de este modo en que no soy ni eres,

tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mía,

tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño.

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,

or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.

I love as certain dark things are to be loved,

in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms

but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;

thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,

risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.

I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;

so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

—Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), XVII from Cien sonetos de amor or One Hundred Love Sonnets, 1959, translated by Stephen Tapscott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). This is not my favorite sonnet from One Hundred Love Sonnets (I posted that one in 2011), but it's definitely on the short list.

do not remember me

I read a bunch of Audre Lorde today, as one does during National Poetry Month (and sometimes also at other times). Here is one I particularly love—and, incidentally, one that is actually a little less furious about the world than I thought the poem I posted today might be, especially when I started reading Lorde.

I have studied the tight curls on the back of your neck
moving away from me
beyond anger or failure
your face in the evening schools of longing
through mornings of wish and ripen
we were always saying goodbye
in the blood in the bone over coffee
before dashing for elevators going
in opposite directions
without goodbyes.

Do not remember me as a bridge nor a roof
as the maker of legends
nor as a trap
door to that world
where black and white clericals
hang on the edge of beauty in five oclock elevators
twitching their shoulders to avoid other flesh
and now
there is someone to speak for them
moving away from me into tomorrows
morning of wish and ripen
your goodbye is a promise of lightning
in the last angels hand
unwelcome and warning
the sands have run out against us
we were rewarded by journeys
away from each other
into desire
into mornings alone
where excuse and endurance mingle
conceiving decision.
Do not remember me
as disaster
nor as the keeper of secrets
I am a fellow rider in the cattle cars
watching
you move slowly out of my bed
saying we cannot waste time
only ourselves.

—Audre Lorde (1934-1992), "Movement Song," in this case from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton and Company, 1997), and courtesy of the Poetry Foundation.

kill something

Carol Ann Duffy has a way with the poetic phrase and narrative voice that leaves me sort of breathless and wide-eyed, and sometimes slightly terrified. I have learned from Wikipedia that, until 2008, this poem was taught in the GCSE curriculum, and then removed because of the subject matter. What is your supervillain origin story? 

Today I am going to kill something. Anything.

I have had enough of being ignored and today

I am going to play God. It is an ordinary day,

a sort of grey with boredom stirring in the streets.

I squash a fly against the window with my thumb.

We did that at school. Shakespeare. It was in

another language and now the fly is in another language.

I breathe out talent on the glass to write my name.

I am a genius. I could be anything at all, with half

the chance. But today I am going to change the world.

Something's world. The cat avoids me. The cat

knows I am a genius, and has hidden itself.

I pour the goldfish down the bog. I pull the chain.

I see that it is good. The budgie is panicking.

Once a fortnight, I walk the two miles into town

for signing on. They don't appreciate my autograph.

There is nothing left to kill. I dial the radio

and tell the man he's talking to a superstar.

He cuts me off. I get our bread-knife and go out.
The pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm.

—Carol Ann Duffy (b. 1955), "Education for Leisure," from Standing Female Nude, 1985. 

without contraries is no progression

I'm about halfway through the third book of K. J. Charles's Society of Gentlemen series, which is wonderful and amazing and—as my friend Emily put it—probably going to ruin me for all other historical romances. There's rather less Blake in A Gentleman's Position than there was in A Seditious Affair (don't even talk to me about Seditious Affair, I love it too much to be coherent), but I'm still thinking about Blake.

I've had the The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in my poetry month back pocket for a long time. Since the very first year I did this, in fact, when I was taking a truly phenomenal seminar called "Milton and the Romantics" with one of the best professors I have ever had. I've never posted it, because it's long and weird and difficult and only questionably poetry—a little poetry, but mostly essay and art. Also, because Blake is legitimately batshit. When I last posted Blake, I posted a pair of poems that look more like poems, and are a little more easily understood; mostly I don't post Blake, because I have a hard time choosing, and I always want to post the long, weird, complicated, incomprehensible ones. As impossible and incomprehensible as this one is, though, I feel like maybe it's time. So, behind the cut for length, William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790. (Plus a bonus.)

to live in this world

Today is April 5, and the 5th (holy shit) anniversary of my brother's memorial service. In the past few years, I've posted a variety of poems about grief and death and other forms of memorial poetry, both on this day and on other days (my tags are still a work in progress, but: grief poems, ave atque vale, elegies). One of the strangest things about moving my whole poetry archive over, though, has been looking at all the poems I posted before my brother died, including my very favorite poem about death, then and now: Mary Oliver's When Death Comes.

I thought I would go back to Mary Oliver, this year:

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

—Mary Oliver (b. 1935) "In Blackwater Woods" from American Primitive, 1983. 

world is suddener

Snow in April is not that uncommon in many of the places I have lived while doing National Poetry Month, but it's uncommon enough that I don't often get to post snow poems. Today, however, as I write this on a train from Boston to New York (we just pulled into Providence), looking out at a snow-dusted New England landscape, this poem feels not only appropriate but inevitable. Or maybe I'm just saying that because my brilliant friend Allie reminded me of its existence yesterday.

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes –
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands –
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

—Louis MacNeice (1907-1963), "Snow," from Poems, 1935. MacNeice was part of Auden's circle, about which I have many, many feelings. As I was looking up the date and publication information, I also stumbled across a fairly lovely short essay about this poem, for those of you who are interested in such things and/or would like some accompanying reading.

what we discovered in the renaissance

Better than even odds that I got this one from wintercreek.

I don't believe in it myself, that lost world

of absolute coherence:

Vermeer's The Kitchen Maid where light glazes the jug

and the milk of paradise pours into the basin.

The girl's grip is steady as she gauges the flow,

it's a task two hands

can manage. The milk still steams

from the cow, the cow flicks her tail

and goes on grazing in a field of gold.

Heraldic crows inscribe arrows from heaven:

the path all good news travels.

The farmer wipes his brow but when he

looks up all he sees is the sun, a cloud

of midges, the distance left

to plough.

In Les Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berri the frame

is frozen, the farmer perfected

as in an attitude of prayer, but this

is art. Say he is praying—suppose

his youngest boy has diphtheria.

His wife sat up all night brewing herbal tea but the farmer

needed to sleep. There's been too much sun, a hail

of poisoned darts, they're going to lose

the crop. Crows, after all, are carrion birds;

see how they circle the thatched roof

of the hut?

And as for Vermeer's bountiful maiden, note

her pensive face.

She's careful not to spill a drop because

she's a servant, indentured at ten

to a prosperous family.

From the swell of her bodice we might guess

she's carrying the burgher's child.

We could make it a sad story.
What we discovered in the Renaissance was perspective.

—Susan Glickman (b. 1953), "For My Students In English 108 Who Complain That All Modern Literature Is Too Depressing" from The Power to Move (Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1986).

body politic

I spent today (and yesterday and Thursday) at a big academic conference, having a lot of feelings about the Renaissance. Relatedly, I have been sitting on this poem for a few years, waiting for the right moment.

Elizabeth, The Lodge at Woodstock, 1554

Less than the charting of each dawn’s resolutions,
less than each evening’s trickle of doubt,
less than a crown’s weight in silver, a diamond’s                
scratch against glass, less than the touted

ill luck of my rich beginnings—and yet
more than Eve’s silence, my mute ingratitude.
More than music’s safe passage, its rapturous net,
more than this stockpile of words, their liquid solicitude;
       
more desired than praise (the least-prized of my dreams),
less real than dreaming (castle keep for my sins),
more than no more, which seems
much less than hoped-for, again—

one mutiny, quelled; one wish lost, a forgotten treasure:
to live without scrutiny, beyond constant measure.

—Rita Dove (b. 1952), "Lines Composed on the Body Politic: An Accounting" from Shakespeare’s Sisters: Women Writers Bridge Five Centuries (Folger Shakespeare Library,  2012). Shoutout to both the wonderful Folger Shakespeare Library, and the wonderful Rita Dove.

you cannot make a keepsake of this season

HELLO FRIENDS. Today is April 1, which means that it is, once again, National Poetry Month in the U.S., i.e. the best month of the year. I began posting poetry for National Poetry Month in 2007, which makes this the TENTH YEAR I have done this—not the 10-year anniversary, but the tenth year—and I still have not run out of poetry. I don’t anticipate running out of poetry any time soon. National Poetry Month has been with me through a lot of major life changes and big events, through living in two different countries and four different cities, through highs and lows and a whole lot of graduate school; it’s one of my great constants, and I’m thrilled to be doing it again this year. 

In honor of the ten years, and the changing spaces of the internet, I have made this new dedicated poetry blog, here at The Cruelest Month. I am using this blog both to archive all my years of National Poetry Month past (still a work in progress, as is the tagging system, but it will get there), and to post new poems going forward. I will be doing some cross-posting this year (it’s a hard habit to break), but mostly linking to this blog; I encourage those of you who enjoy National Poetry Month to read (and comment, if you want to) here.

To start us off, this year, a poem that is about spring, and feelings, and time: 

                  I snap the twig to try to trap

the springing and I relearn the same lesson.

You cannot make a keepsake of this season. 

Your heart’s not the source of that sort of sap,

lacks what it takes to fuel, rejects the graft,

though for a moment it’s your guilty fist 

that’s flowering. You’re no good host to this

extremity that points now, broken, back at

the dirt as if to ask are we there yet.

You flatter this small turn tip of a larger 

book of matches that can’t refuse its end,

re-fuse itself, un-flare. Sure. Now forget

again. Here’s a new green vein, another

clutch to take, give, a handful of seconds.

—Dora Malech (b. 1981), "Each Year," 2010. I just discovered Dora Malech, and I kind of love her. Check out her website: here.