Poetry & Poets in Rags

A beautiful travelogue on Basho is where we begin. Our next step is to the end of verse. This leads us on through poetry by Mary Jo Bang, Christopher James, Paulann Petersen, and one you wouldn't want to miss by Ellen Bass, and another by Lawrence Raab, among others. And tonight, these straw-and-cotton sandals will take us into April, National Poetry Month, about which we have a couple articles as well.

But before we get to April, the results for the InterBoard Poetry Community's March competition are in. Three poems were selected by Elena Karina Byrne, who completes a wonderful winter season of judging. (Thank you, Elena.) Congratulations to the poets and the forums with the winning poems. In first place is "I, Raptor" by Brenda Levy Tate of Pen Shells; in second "deliquesce" by Lynze of Salt Dreams, and in third place, Susan B. McDonough's poem "Double Vision" workshopped at Blueline Poetry Forum.

Thanks for coming by. I am glad your voyage brought you here.

Yours,
Rus

Our links:

IBPC: Poetry & Poets in Rags

Poetry & Poets in Rags blog

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*posted by Rus Bowden at 7:45 PM* 0 comments links to this post

when his house burned to the ground in a fire that obliterated much of Edo. He wrote:

Tired of cherry,
Tired of this whole world,
I sit facing muddy sake
And black rice.

In 1684 Basho made a months-long journey westward from Edo, which occasioned his first travel account, Journal of a Weather-Beaten Skeleton. In Basho's day travel was by foot and lodging was primitive. But despite these rigors he set out again in 1687 and a third time in 1687-1688, journeys recounted in Kashima Journal and Manuscript in a Knapsack. Both were written in a genre that Basho profoundly refined--haibun, a mixture of haiku and prose.

from National Geographic: On the Poet's Trail
also National Geographic: On the Poet's Trail: Interactive Travelogue
also National Geographic: On the Poet's Trail: Photo Gallery

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in 2008, just 8.3 percent of adults had read any poetry in the preceding 12 months. That figure was 12.1 percent in 2002, and in 1992, it was 17.1 percent, meaning the number of people reading poetry has decreased by approximately half over the past 16 years.

Sunil Iyengar, the NEA's director of the Office of Research and Analysis, says the agency can't answer with certainty why fewer adults are reading poetry. He and others believed the opposite would be true, largely because of poetry's expansion onto the Internet. "In fact," he says, "part of our surmise as to why fiction reading rates seem to be up might be due to greater opportunities through online reading. But we don't know why with poetry that's not the case."

from Newsweek: The End of Verse?

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In a letter to Assia, he wrote that "Nicky has impetigo on his face--a spread-up wound the size of a shilling, beside his nose, developed from a scratch. So he's off school, and I'm sending him with ointment from Webb. Every little scratch he gets just lately turns immediately septic".

In another letter to her, he proudly reported that "Nicky is evidently a very good painter at school. They've both become mad about Plasticene." He encouraged his son to draw and paint, rewarding him with a shilling for good work, and nothing when he thought it was careless.

from Telegraph: Ted Hughes, the devoted father

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of writing verse for the Royal Family is "thankless" and even gave him a case of writer's block.

Yet, speculation about who may follow in his footsteps is growing, with bookmakers making Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy firm favourites.

Here is a rundown of some of the names in the frame for the UK's most prestigious--and arguably unenviable--post in poetry.

from BBC News: Poet Laureate: Runners and Riders

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. . . What kind of foundation would they make for our house?

My friends were perplexed. Were they our bones or their bones?
. . . The Americans left years ago and took their bones with them.

These skeletons, scattered all over our land,
Belong only to Vietnamese,
--"Quang Tri" in Mountain River: Vietnamese Poetry from the Wars 1948-1993.

There is no easy rebuilding after war. Literally or metaphorically, the survivors of the war are building upon the skeletons of the soldiers who fell while fighting for them.

from Crookston Daily Times: Poetry and the Vietnam War: The power of words to heal

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during the Joseon Kingdom (1392-1910), has long been consigned to oblivion for modern Koreans who learn it only in their high school days.

But the traditional poetry has been revived in an English translation by Prof. Lee Sung-il, who retired from the English Department of Yonsei University last month.

from The Korea Times: Ancient Korean Poems Resonate in English

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bewildering multitudes. Some poems incite, others console, as the poet--maestro of his own response and impresario of ours--looks inward and out. "The century of the exiled,/the book of the exiled./The brown century, the black book,/this is what I must leave/written and open in the book,/exhuming it from the century/and bleeding it in the book," he writes in "Saddest Century," one of the final poems here, "those who keep leaving behind/their loves and their mistakes/thinking that maybe maybe/and knowing never never/and it was my turn to sob/this dusty wail/for those who lost the earth/and to celebrate with my brothers . . . the victorious buildings,/the harvests of new bread."

from Los Angeles Times: 'World's End' by Pablo Neruda

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asked [Ellery] Sedgwick if he were sure he wanted to publish Frost's poems. "Yes," said Sedgwick. "Sight unseen?" asked Frost. "Sight unseen," said Sedgwick. Pulling from his pocket the three poems he had read at Tufts only the night before, Frost waved them under Sedgwick's nose, while, according to Frost, Sedgwick made little grabs for them. "Are you sure that you want to buy these poems?" Frost inquired.

from The Atlantic: The First Three Poems and One That Got Away

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are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore are the best qualified to run the farm--in fact there couldn't have been an Animal Farm without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs."

Eliot's rejection might have been prompted by the political situation at the time, when Russia was regarded as an essential ally to defeat Hitler.

Animal Farm was only published in August 1945, three months after the war in Europe ended.

from Telegraph: T.S. Eliot rejected George Orwell's Animal Farm because of its 'Trotskyite' politics

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Once

Once there was my life and it was a thing

from Record: Poet's perfect profession

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by Christopher James

from The Guardian: Farewell To The Earth by Christopher James
also The Guardian: Christopher James wins the National Poetry Competition

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on its head, that to prune means to lose. He is saying no, it's a concentration, a revitalization, a "focus of energy" so that we can spring back stronger than ever.

In the second couplet, Castro doesn't warn us of dire consequences but encourages us to go ahead and cut, perhaps even the limb we may be standing on. In the falling, in the brushing ourselves off and standing up, who knows what we will discover--perhaps nothing less than who we really are. Then again, we might discover that we can fly.

Poet in a Tree

for Gabor G. Gyukics

from Walter Bargen: The Post-Dispatch: Missouri Poets: Michael Castro

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who talk about poetry at all often talk about its "relevance to life," meaning the life we've all agreed is true. But the greatest power of poetry may be the wild, individual voice that's nothing like what we've thought of as life, before.

And about this time of year, those who talk about poetry at all will complain that a poem should be easy to understand, or why bother? But when we dumb poetry down, pretty soon we've eliminated the possibility of the deep engagement with the sometimes seemingly intractable language, which can change us.

from Fleda Brown: Traverse City Record-Eagle: On Poetry: A challenge for Poetry Month

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[Seamus] Heaney selected a pair of poems to read in honour of what many call "the sacramental Cohen," one of which he also delivered, IIRC, at the Nobel ceremony, 1984's "The Underground."

He also read one of the most nearly perfect poems exquisitely suited to this Holy Season in our (now) shared language, "A Drink of Water" (1979):

Here, (said poetry-blogging she, donning her critical cap), Heaney first creates a world inhabited by the sacred dignity of the catch-as-catch-can quotidian consonant with the past and redolent with those oppressive "Troubles":

from Judith Fitzgerald: The Globe and Mail: On Other Words: Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney honoured

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"The perfect poem," [Erin] Mouré additionally muses, clearly equivocating vis-à-vis that earlier question, the one that's struck her as germane to all it is a poet shapes and makes, "the perfect poem is the one that touches me at the moment of reading and exposes me to something outside my being that, paradoxically, shows me that in me, too, is something that is outside of my being. Language is mine, and is not mine. The language of the poem shatters the cogito, which was always never unified: the language of the poem pulls the mask of self-unity off the cogito, I guess."

Cogito ergo doleo? Does Mouré think a poem can change the world?

from Judith Fitzgerald: The Globe and Mail: On Other Words: Traversing the mysterious Mouréan terrain

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"The Robin's my Criterion for Tune," contains a famous line that the poet used to describe her world-view, "Because I see--New Englandly." And because she looked with the eyes of an American New Englander, she dramatizes the things she sees and experiences in her neck of the woods with pride of place.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Dickinson's The Robin's my Criterion for Tune

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The problem with the portrayal of this poor little rich girl is that it is painted by a person who knew the wealthy woman at age twenty and then did not see her again until the privileged woman was forty-three. Yet the speaker expects her readers/listeners to accept this pathetic portrayal as factual.

This poem sneers at this woman and draws conclusions about her life about which it is impossible for the narrator to know.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Kay's Pathedy of Manners

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In the eleventh quatrain, the speaker's companion branches into the many lives the speaker has lived. Not only has he crossed these fields and valleys as a youth, but also as he was maturing to adulthood, he experienced these pleasant hikes many times at many different times of his life, thus "like the cloudy shadows/Across the country blown/We two fare on for ever,/But not we two alone."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: March Poet--A. E. Housman

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By clicking on the U. S. map offered in this section of the Web site, the reader can locate his own state to find out about events close to home. In addition to National Poetry Month activities, however, the state site includes information about the state's poet laureate, if it has one, and a list of other poets who hail from the state.

Of all of the projects and activities, the "Poetry Map" feature is probably the most useful one offered for the dissemination and promotion of poetry information.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: National Poetry Month--April 2009

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The speaker refers to the notion that light-skinned, blonde women were held in higher esteem than dark-skinned, raven-haired women. This fact, of course, simply reflects the part of the world where the speaker resides--in a zone where less sun would encourage less melanin production in human skin and hair.

The object of Petrarchan sonnets, "Laura," is described as "fair-haired," and some of the "dark lady" sonnets protest against the idealization of women found in these and earlier highly romanticized poems.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 127

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The speaker then comically creates the image of his lips changing place with the keys on the keyboard. Her fingers are gently pressing those keys, and he would prefer her fingers be playing over his lips. He offers the melodramatic notion that her fingers playing over those "dancing chips" or keys is "Making dead wood more bless'd than living lips."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 128

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The speaker makes it clear that the human mind is capable of understanding that the strong sex urge should be eschewed, except for procreation; thus he claims that the whole world knows this fact, yet the irony of the human condition plays out time and time again: despite the knowledge of right behavior, the human often falls pray to the false promise of "the heaven that leads men to this hell."

Instead of heeding the warning from the soul and from the great spiritual leaders and from great philosophical thinkers who have warned against this satanic act, the weak human being allows himself to be sucked into this depravity over and over again.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 129

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Many beginners in the study of yoga easily grasp the idea that they are not the physical body, but it is more difficult to grasp that they are also not the mind. The body is readily available to sense awareness, but the mind seems to be as invisible (unsensedetectable) as the soul is. One cannot see, hear, taste, touch, or smell the mind.

But the mind is as delusion-invoking as the body. And in yoga meditation, the beginner learns quickly that the mind is even harder to control than the body.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Yogananda's I Am He

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into the lives of everyday people. Many people don't read poetry anymore, but they should, because it holds many answers to our concerns, or clues for how we can cope.

Like, for example, what if you need help accepting your ugly shoes because the economy is poor and you can't afford to buy a new pair?

from Kristen Hoggart: The Smart Set: Ask a Poet: What Would Ovid Do?

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toward what you would rather be doing than earning a living, and in America this usually means Being An Artist. This is the true American dream. Winning the lottery is a faint hope, becoming a sports hero is a daydream, but publishing poetry is the ambition of one-third of the American people and another third are thinking about writing a memoir.

from Garrison Keillor: Chicago Tribune: Spring reminds that we'd rather be artists

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Fiction
by Mark Strand

I think of the innocent lives

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Fiction by Mark Strand

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Meditation on Ruin
by Jay Hopler

It's not the lost lover that brings us to ruin, or the barroom brawl,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Meditation on Ruin by Jay Hopler

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No Matter How Far You Drive
by Louis Jenkins

I sat between Mamma and Daddy.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: No Matter How Far You Drive by Louis Jenkins

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Suddenly
by Louis Simpson

The truck came at me,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Suddenly by Louis Simpson

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Teaching Poetry to 3rd Graders
by Gary Short

At recess a boy ran to me

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Teaching Poetry to 3rd Graders by Gary Short

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When Somebody Calls after Ten P.M
by Bruce Dethlefsen

Suicide Aside
by Bruce Dethlefsen

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: When Somebody Calls after Ten P.M by Bruce Dethlefsen

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Why We Speak English
by Lynn Pedersen

Because when you say cup and spoon

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Why We Speak English by Lynn Pedersen

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*posted by Rus Bowden at 7:12 PM* 0 comments links to this post

I am starting to strain to hear things, but I am glad to have gotten to that age, all the same. Here's a fine poem by Miller Williams of Arkansas that gets inside a person who is losing her hearing.

Going Deaf

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 209

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*posted by Rus Bowden at 7:09 PM* 0 comments links to this post

presents many puzzles. Why does Clytemnestra's lover seem to quote Scripture? Why, if speakability is Carson's aim, would she have one of her characters declare, "Look at him, look how he drips unhealth--shudder object!" Why would Helen be referred to--distractingly, jarringly--as a "weapon of mass destruction"?

Similar vagaries of pitch arise through Carson's decision to replicate Aeschylean word-coinages, where two words are compounded into one.

from Brad Leithauser: The New York Times: Family Feuds

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*posted by Rus Bowden at 7:08 PM* 0 comments links to this post

yet it has a presence drawn on postcards and ashtrays. Lechliter sets up his story, then shifts to first-person experience of being alone on "dusty backroads" and "railroad tracks," places that evoke solitude. In these wanderings, his jackalope becomes a female, despite her masculine rack of antlers. She hides, survives, and leaves behind an intangible aroma. Is she not real?

The Jackalope

from Denise Low: Ad Astra Poetry Project: Gary Lechliter (1951 - )

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I flew to L.A. and then drove to the Mojave Desert, where I spent a few days wandering around Joshua Tree National Park. Being alone under the warm blue sky made me feel closer to my mother, as it often has. I felt I could detect her in the haze at the horizons. I offered a little prayer up to her, and, for the first time since she died, I talked out loud to her. I was walking along past the cacti, when I looked out into the rocky distance. "Hello mother," I whispered. "I miss you so much."

from Meghan O'Rourke: Slate: The Long Goodbye

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A Jury of Her Peers is longer on context than on textual interpretation. [Elaine] Showalter carefully traces the evolution of fiction, poetry and nonfiction written by women and analyzes their reception in the literary marketplace. In between short biographical sketches of the writers, she highlights features of their literature, noting, for instance, that many of the earliest works by women in America were captivity narratives like Mary Rowlandson's. She charts the rise of the domestic novel in the 1850s and the concurrent rise in female readers. She demonstrates that women writers at the beginning of the 20th century saw the short story as the most authoritative form available to them, and she details the advent of Gothic-tinged fiction in the mid-20th century.

from Meghan O'Rourke: Miami Herald: The evolution of female literary voices in America

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German can do without them. It's inconsistent. We tell children the apostrophe is the possessive--but not for theirs, his, hers or its. In 50 years' time, people will look at our apostrophes and think: 'What a silly mess!'

from Michael Rosen: Metro: Michael Rosen's secret to a happy childhood

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personal conflict, [Elinor Morton] Wylie retains her sharp-edged poise. This week's poem epitomises her ability to make a bold, hard metaphorical shell for difficult emotion. She packed her poems in salt, as Yeats advised, and they have lasted well. They deserve to be much better known.

Sanctuary

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Books blog: Poem of the week: Sanctuary

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form isn't simply musical. It also affords a glimpse of that Edenic world in which "the whole close patterning is seen at once./Everything is perfect, and of no concern" ("No Infelicitous Phrases Need Apply"). But Porter's present day is post-lapsarian, as his title poem, with its echo of John Lennon's apparent hubris, suggests. "Free Will for Man!" may demand the death of God, but it remains the case that it is the ideal "orchestra/at the Creation" who "can play/anything you put in front of them".

from Fiona Sampson: The Guardian: Trapped by language

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in my garden when that Sunday afternoon long ago became suddenly present to me. I put it that way because it wasn't just being reminded of something long past and remembering it. It was much more vivid than that. It was as if the present moment had become transparent and I could see that earlier day as the palimpsest upon which all of my life had, in fact, been written.

from Frank Wilson: When Falls the Coliseum: That's What He Said: The moment of knowing

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by Paulann Petersen

It was middle June

from CounterPunch: Poets' Basement: Four Poems by Paulann Petersen

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Section 3 - Write text - p.22

Jessica Elton is learning how to text

from The Guardian: The Saturday poem: Section 3 - Write text - p.22 by Lorraine Mariner

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In the half-mist of Golden Gate Park,

from Kansas City Star: Poet's Corner: 'Translation' by Randall Mann

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by Lawrence Raab

from The New Yorker: Poetry: The Poem that Can’t Be Written

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Trench Names
by A. S. Byatt

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Trench Names

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I give my ears to sunlit piercings,

from The Oregonian: Poetry: "Testament"

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Isaac

Isaac was our dog, you see.

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: Isaac

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from Calder Wood Press includes this poem in memory of the writer's father, and the Scottish bandleader Jimmy Shand. The exuberance and vitality of these dancers and the music is irrepressible.

Keep it Simple, Son

from The Scotsman: Poem of the Week: Irene Brown

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By Matthew Zapruder

from Slate: "Poem for Hannah" By Matthew Zapruder

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by Ellen Bass

The god of atheists won’t burn you at the stake

from The Sun Magazine: Poetry: Ode To The God of Atheists

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factual observations, with no enjambements and no logical progressions between lines, mimics some of the condition it describes; but also draws an uneasy distinction between "It"--the condition, implacable and alien--and "him", the frightened and struggling boy, negotiating as best he can between his own limits and those of his family. Despite the dispassionate veneer--appropriate to his son's more machine-like moments--[Les] Murray delivers a powerful poem of humour, sadness, love and, surely, admiration.

It Allows a Portrait in Line Scan at Fifteen

from The Times Literary Supplement: Poem of the Week: It Allows a Portrait in Line Scan at Fifteen by Les Murray

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an essay about the history of psychotropic drugs, I started a poem that used the names of these drugs as a kind of incantation. This lead me to recall what my college roommate, who killed himself, had once said about Thorazine, that it was "handcuffs for the mind." Eventually, this provided an avenue back to the poem I had wanted to write about my maternal grandmother.

from The Washington Post: Poet's Choice: Michael Collier

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six years old, the son of Opposition leader David Cameron and his wife Susanna.

He had suffered from cerebral palsy and epilepsy.

from The Shields Gazette: A poem for tragic Ivan

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in Alaska, said: "Here he found somewhere he could be himself."

However, if Nicholas Hughes assiduously shunned the neon light that flashed around his parents' past, he was always close to his father.

Father and son shared a lifelong fascination with nature; Ted Hughes' wonderful, and savage, poetry of the wild and his son's avid studies of fish, their habits and habitat. Ted Hughes wrote to a friend of how he and Nicholas fished together in Africa, Ireland and in Alaska's 'dreamland'; how they 'lay awake, listening to wolves'.

Tragically, it emerged just last week that it was his father's death from cancer in 1998 that triggered Nicholas Hughes's depression.

from Independent.ie: A son lost to the deep wounds of Plath's sad death

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to childhood, in the hunt for a solemn and simple happiness. The presence of the verbs conjugated in the future predominates, projecting themselves into the future whilst weighing up the upsetting burden of today. The future is constellated with nostalgia, of a recurring past.

Our homage to Ilaria [La Commare] is a well-meaning translation of her 'Linden tree grains', an example of her skilled wordplay and her prose of poetic strokes, both volcanic and original.

Linden tree grains

from The Poetry Round: Ilaria La Commare's poetry in movement
also coffeefactory: cafebabel.com editor Ilaria La Commare, 30

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and reading. He was also very proud of winning the Hugh MacDiarmid Tassie for the best poem written in the Scottish language.

Bill loved to travel and was fluent in French and German.

from Hamilton Advertiser: Former libraries chief Bill dies at age of 69

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in 1986, he was succeeded by Mike Bowler, who edited the op-ed page until 1994.

"It was easy taking over because Gwinn had everything in place, and he passed along a great tradition to me. It was a good, lively page," said Mr. Bowler, who was The Sun's education editor and a columnist when he left in 2004.

"My contributors weren't necessarily professional writers. We had a cabdriver, a 13-year-old kid and people in prison. We had people from all walks of life. And we did poetry. We had lots of poetry," Mr. Bowler said.

from The Baltimore Sun: Gwinn F. Owens

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(Gov. Dick Riley tried to spread the appreciation for verse by appointing three poet laureates during his eight years in office.)

Rees' body of work ranged from poetry to literary criticisms to translations of Homer and Aesop. He also wrote children's books, often illustrated by Edward Gorey, with fanciful names such as "Gillygaloos and Gollywhoppers," "Teeny Tiny Duck and the Pretty Money" and "Windwagon Smith."

from The State: Ennis Rees: USC professor, state poet dies

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who police say was fatally stabbed by her brother on Saturday in a bloodbath in their home, speaks of a strong woman much like her friends described her. Revelus, who was of Haitian descent, had just returned from Milton High School, where she had rehearsed the poem, "Acquaintance," and was to deliver it at a poetry jam on Thursday night.

Acquaintance

from Associated Press: Before stabbing, Mass. poet talked of strength

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who has died aged 90, had reasons to be grateful to the novelist Muriel Spark, his one-time lover, but her characterisation of him as the fifth-rate, pushy writer Hector Bartlett in A Far Cry from Kensington (1988) was not among them. Nor were her pronouncements on his 1963 work, Muriel Spark: A Biographical and Critical Study. "If Mr Stanford had applied to me," she wrote, "I would have advised against this undertaking."

But, 50 years after they parted, his poems seemingly inspired by the affair appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) for several years, conjuring up too the doomed 1890s poets he identified with and championed.

from The Guardian: Derek Stanford

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abroad and obtained an MA from Cambridge followed by a D.Litt et Phil from Leiden in 1955, following his father's academic interest by researching the poetry of a classical Greek poet and author, Pindar.

Viljoen also followed his father's keen interest in politics.

from iafrica.com: Gerrit Viljoen dies

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book of poetry, From Ink and Sandalwood, described as a collection of works by a woman caught between the two cultures that most influenced her life--American and Chinese.

The poems centered on her parents, her family and topical subjects such as President John F. Kennedy's assassination. The book won the 1991 Thorpe Menn Award for Writing Excellence from The Kansas City Star, beating some heavy hitters, including the late Dan Quisenberry of Kansas City Royals fame.

from The Kansas City Star: Cecile Franking Wu was a poet in running shoes

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