blues

Happy Shakespeare's birthday! Here is a poem about Shakespeare. I have a migraine so that's all the commentary I have in me tonight, but this is a fun poem.

        Essay #1 Mrs. Goldberg's AP Intro to Lit

Shakespeare understood the blues.
He knew parting was such sweet sorrow.
Mr. Shakespeare was the main MC
Of the Elizabethan scene and so I figure

To be or not to be (similar to how you be?)
Be as timeless as hell and as universal
Since such questions never go out of style.
I only wish Othello had sussed out Iago

And taken Iago down to the crossroads
And asked Iago the devil's true-true name.
Juliet is like Lady Gaga (in my HBO rewrite)
And Romeo lives in Harlem with his moms—

Though that's only his nom-de-plume.
He wants to be the first rapper with a PhD.
And Robert Burns smiles to keep from crying
And when he penned the best-made plans

Of mice and men (not rats) often go astray
What he really meant was shit happens.
Dead Old White Men they knew the blues
Though they didn't always know what

They knew okay maybe not even in 1619
By which time Shakespeare was Auld Lang
Syne and Burns was not yet in this world
But the blues isn't stuck on color or CP time.

—Calvin Forbes, "Shakespeare and the Blues," from the October 2016 issue of Poetry Magazine.

count my hopes

This is for Earth Day, but it also now makes me think about Maybe Happy Ending, which we saw in New York last week and absolutely loved. There are some parallels, although this is not (obviously) a poem about fireflies.

so I count my hopes: the bumblebees
are making a comeback, one snug tight
in a purple flower I passed to get to you;

your favorite color is purple but Prince's
was orange & we both find this hard to believe;
today the park is green, we take grass for granted

the leaves chuckle around us; behind
your head a butterfly rests on a tree; it’s been
there our whole conversation; by my old apartment

was a butterfly sanctuary where I would read
& two little girls would sit next to me; you caught
a butterfly once but didn't know what to feed it

so you trapped it in a jar & gave it to a girl
you liked. I asked if it died. you say you like
to think it lived a long life. yes, it lived a long life.

—Fatimah Asghar, "I Don't Know What Will Kill Us First: The Race War or What We've Done to the Earth," originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 8, 2019 (where you can listen to the poet read the poem), by the Academy of American Poets.

the improbable lady

I'm slightly more organized this year than I have been for the last few years of National Poetry Month, which means I have some real bangers coming up in the last week of the month. But I'm starting this week here, with Saeed Jones; I saw someone describe this poem as "heartbreakingly lovely," and it really is—I've had it on my list since I first read it at poetryisnotaluxury in 2023.

In this field of thistle, I am the improbable
lady. How I wear the word: sequined weight
snagging my saunter into overgrown grass, blonde
split-end blades. I waltz in an acre of bad wigs.

Sir who is no one, sir who is yet to come, I need you
to undo this zipped back, trace the chiffon
body I've borrowed. See how I switch my hips

for you, dry grass cracking under my pretend
high heels? Call me and I'm at your side,
one wildflower behind my ear. Ask me
and I'll slip out of this softness, the dress

a black cloud at my feet. I could be the boy
wearing nothing, a negligee of gnats.

—Saeed Jones, "Boy in a Stolen Evening Gown," from Prelude to Bruise (Coffee House Press, 2014).

imp my wing

Every time I post a George Herbert poem on or around Easter I think to myself, "but what if I posted 'Easter Wings' instead?!" The problem with "Easter Wings" is that it's a pattern poem, so the way it's displayed on the page is essential, and that is very annoying to code here in a way that reads effectively. Conveniently, however, the Wikipedia entry about the poem has some images of both manuscript and early print editions, and the text of the poem can be read at Poetry Foundation. So for Easter, go read "Easter Wings," if you care to, and feel some type of way!

And here's a bonus poem, because I was reading through The Temple (it's devotional poetry season) and I really love this one. I missed a day earlier in the month, so I think we can double up on Herbert—it has been a few years.

Who sayes that fictions onely and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beautie?
Is all good structure in a winding stair?
May no lines passe, except they do their dutie
            Not to a true, but painted chair?

Is it no verse, except enchanted groves
And sudden arbours shadow course-spunne lines?
Must purling streams refresh a lovers loves?
Must all be vail'd, while he that reades, divines,
            Catching the sense at two removes?

Shepherds are honest people; let them sing:
Riddle who list, for me, and pull for Prime:
I envie no mans nightingale or spring;
Nor let them punish me with losse of ryme,
            Who plainly say, My God, My King.

—George Herbert (1593-1633), "Jordan (I)" from The Temple, 1633. I took it from the Helen Wilcox edition of The English Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 2007). This isn't exactly a sonnet (it's fifteen lines), but it follows a lot of sonnet rules, including the turn after line ten. And it's very much in conversation with Sidney and Donne, especially. I love how cranky Herbert is about other poetry, like, "COME ON, GUYS, I CAN WRITE TOTALLY STRAIGHTFORWARD LOVE POETRY ABOUT GOD, OKAY?" (Spoilers: he cannot, he's still a metaphysical poet.)

define life

Every single one of Terrance Hayes' American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin is absolutely fucking stellar. I posted one last year, and I'm posting another one this year, but I really recommend the whole book. I like posting sonnets with other sonnets because I love looking at all the things the form can do. Sonnets are magic!! Hayes' sonnet (which I'm posting for today) also directly references the Rilke sonnet I'm posting as a make-up poem for April 16. And if you've been around here at basically any point in the past 18 (?!?!) years of poetry posts, you know I love poetry in conversation with other poetry.

Rilke ends his sonnet "Archaic Torso of Apollo" saying
"You must change your life." James Wright ends "Lying
In a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island,
Minnesota" saying "I have wasted my life." Ruth Stone ends
"A Moment" saying "You do not want to repeat my life."
A minute seed with a giant soul kicking inside it at the end
And beginning of life. After the opening scene where
A car bomb destroys the black detective's family, there are
Several scenes of our hero at the edge of life. A shootout
In an African American Folk Museum, a shootout
In the middle of an interstate rest stop parking lot,
A barn shootout endangering the farm life. I live a life
That burns a hole through life, that leaves a scar for life,
That makes me weep for another life. Define life.

—Terrance Hayes, "American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin" ["Rilke ends his sonnet"] from American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018).

*

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

—Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), "Archaic Torso of Apollo," in this case from Ahead of All Parting: Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell and published by Modern Library (1995).

here in the midst of it

A little Jay Hulme for Good Friday, don't you think? I love this one.

He's here in the midst of it -
right at the centre of the dance floor,
robes hitched up to His knees
to make it easy to spin.

At some point in the evening
a boy will touch the hem of His robe
and beg to be healed, beg to be
anything other than this;

and He will reach His arms out,
sweat-damp, and weary from dance.
He'll cup this boy's face in His hand
and say,

                my beautiful child
there is nothing in this heart of yours
that ever needs to be healed.

—Jay Hulme, "Jesus at the Gay Bar," from The Backwater Sermons (Canterbury Press, 2021). Jay Hulme has some great notes on this poem's theology on his website.

going where I'm going

We're flying home today after a pretty great week of theatre and friends and birthdays (I am very tired but also very happy), so I'm posting this one from the airport. Too on the nose, or just on theme? Either way, Ada Limón never misses.

Every time I'm in an airport
I think I should drastically
change my life: Kill the kid stuff,
start to act my numbers, set fire
to the clutter and creep below
the radar like an escaped canine
sneaking along the fence line.
I'd be cable-knitted to the hilt,
beautiful beyond buying, believe in
the maker and fix my problems
with prayer and property.
Then, I think of you, home
with the dog, the field full
of purple pop-ups—we're small and
flawed, but I want to be
who I am, going where
I'm going, all over again.

—Ada Limón, "The Problem With Travel," from Bright Dead Things, 2015.

islands and lemons

This is a summer poem, and it's not actually that summery today. But it's also a New York City poem, and a love poem, and I've been wanting to post it while in New York for a while. We'll be down on Bleecker later tonight to see a show at the Lucille Lortel.

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor,
for the eternal idleness of the imagined return,
for rare flutes and bare feet, and the August bedroom
of tangled sheets and the Sunday salt, ah violin!

When I press summer dusks together, it is
a month of street accordions and sprinklers
laying the dust, small shadows running from me.

It is music opening and closing, Italia mia, on Bleecker,
ciao, Antonio, and the water-cries of children
tearing the rose-coloured sky in streams of paper;
it is dusk in the nostrils and the smell of water
down littered streets that lead you to no water,
and gathering islands and lemons in the mind.

There is the Hudson, like the sea aflame.
I would undress you in the summer heat,
and laugh and dry your damp flesh if you came.

—Derek Walcott (1930-2017), "Bleecker Street, Summer," from Collected Poems: 1948-1984 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986).

a thousand windows and a thousand doors

I was thinking about going back to Auden for today, my 40th birthday, even though I changed the birthday rules in 2020. It's my 40th birthday! Also, I make the rules and can do what I want! I haven't posted any Auden in a couple of years, but I've been thinking about him—and, honestly, he was so prolific that I could just post Auden poems for a few hundred years—and then we went to the New York Public Library today and spent a while walking through the New Yorker Exhibit. And look, I really tried not to post this poem, because it's fucking depressing; it's also incredibly relevant, and also they have a draft manuscript that Auden sent to Benjamin Britten in 1939 in the exhibit at NYPL, so like. Here we are. Warnings for Nazis, etc.

Say this city has ten million souls;
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes,
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair;
Look in the atlas and you'll find it there.
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

In the village churchyard there grows an old yew;
Every spring it flowers anew.
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that.

The Consul banged the table and said,
"If you've got no passport, you're officially dead."
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

Went to a Committee; they offered me a chair,
Asked me politely to return next year.
But where shall we go today, my dear, where shall we go today?

Came to a public meeting; the speaker stood up and said,
"If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread."
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.

Thought I heard the thunder, rumbling in the sky.
It was Hitler over Europe, saying, "They must die."
O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.

Saw a poodle wearing a jacket, fastened with a pin;
Saw a door open and a cat let in.
But they weren't German Jews, my dear, but they weren't German Jews.

Went down to the harbor and stood upon the quay;
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free,
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.

Walked into a wood; saw the birds in the trees,
They had no politicians and sang at their ease.
They weren't the human race, my dear, they weren't the human race.

Dreamt I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows, and a thousand doors.
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

Ran down to the station to catch the express;
Asked for two tickets to Happiness,
But every coach was full, my dear, but every coach was full.

Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.

—W. H. Auden (1907-1973). This is the poem as it was originally published, as "Song," in the April 15, 1939 issue of The New Yorker, but it's more widely known as "Refugee Blues." In the manuscript draft that Auden sent to Britten in March of 1939, it's just called "Blues"—and as the exhibit notes, the poem is set in a meter borrowed from blues music. The poem often appears with some alterations when it's published as "Refugee Blues" (as it is in my edition of Auden); Auden frequently edited after publication, and sometimes went on editing basically forever, so textual consistency with his poems is always very fun. Anyway, thanks for this one, Wystan. I sure do not love that it still hits so hard 86 years later, but I am very grateful that we had poetry then, and still have poetry now.

all the golden nights

This one's for all the shows we've seen (one more on Tuesday, or maybe two if we win a lottery for a Wednesday matinee), and especially for Audra McDonald in Gypsy today. And thanks to my wife for the poem suggestion. ♥

This is the quiet hour; the theaters
Have gathered in their crowds, and steadily
The million lights blaze on for few to see,
Robbing the sky of stars that should be hers.
A woman waits with bag and shabby furs,
A somber man drifts by, and only we
Pass up the street unwearied, warm and free,
For over us the olden magic stirs.
Beneath the liquid splendor of the lights
We live a little ere the charm is spent;
This night is ours, of all the golden nights,
The pavement an enchanted palace floor,
And Youth the player on the viol, who sent
A strain of music through an open door.

—Sara Teasdale (1884-1933), "Broadway," from Rivers to the Sea, 1915. I love a sonnet.