Words, words, words

So I’m at Arches National Park (well, at the moment, technically in a cafe in Moab). I think if anywhere is going to teach me to appreciate sand, this is it. The sandstone formations are SWEET, but after arriving here at 7:30 AM from Aspen to get a campsite and then hiking for a couple hours, it got too hot to move. At 10 AM, my car thermometer read 95 degrees and I was unable to hike in more than a sports bra and shorts. My camelbak was sticking to my shoulders. Thus, after some consideration of the intentions of this trip, I decided to camp out tonight and then stay in a hotel for the next two nights. Lame, I know, but I can’t hide out in this cafe for 3 days during the mid-day heat. Also, I don’t smell that great :).

Other than the ghastly heat (bochornoso, I’d call it in Spanish), all’s well. Aspen was fun, especially the 3 days I spent camping just outside the town. And now I’m here being romanced by the desert. Hopefully I’ll also find something to do in Moab, since I haven’t yet found the hippie mecca everyone talks about. This cafe is a start, but I have a feeling there’s more. In any case, the writing and reading are going well when it’s cool enough to sit outside. It feels good to be out of ritzy Aspen, into somewhere new.

This summer, I’m adventuring around the West. Here’s the plan:

June 3-14: home (Memphis, TN)

June 14-16: drive to Colorado

June 16-21: stay with family outside of Boulder, CO

June 22-27: Aspen Writers Foundation Conference in Aspen, CO

June 27-July 12: camping, hiking, and generally looking for America in Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico

July 12-18: Taos Writers Conference in Taos, NM

July 22-27: Santa Fe Writers Conference in Santa Fe, NM

July 27-August 4: drive up the Pacific Coast Highway to San Francisco

August 4-14: stay with family in SF, then drive back to Memphis with my brother

late August: drive my brother to school at Cornell and then back to Amherst for orientation

If anyone reading this has suggestions for things to do along the way or wants to meet up, please let me know! I’ll also be posting updates here on my thoughts along the trip as they pertain to poetry. And, well, maybe some that don’t have anything to do with poetry. Anything could happen.

Mary Jo Salter, an editor of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, was the Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer in the Humanities from 1984 to 2007 and is currently a professor in the Writing Seminars program at Johns Hopkins University. She has published six books of poetry. The following poem is from Open Shutters, published in 2003.

Trompe l’Oleil, by Mary Jo Salter

All over Genoa
you see them: windows with open shutters.
Then the illusion shatters

But that’s not true. You knew
the shutters were merely painted on.
You knew it time and again

The claim of the painted shutter
that it ever shuts the eye
of the window is an open lie.

You find its shadow-latches strike
the wall at a single angle,
like the stuck hands of a clock.

Who needs to be correct
more often than once a day?
Who needs real shadow more than play?

Inside the house, an endless
supply of clothes to wash.
On an outer wall it’s fresh

paint hung out to dry-
shirttails flapping on a frieze
unruffled by any breeze,

like the words pinned to this line.
And the foreign word is a lie:
that second l in l’oeil

which only looks like an l, and is silent.

***

This is a bit of an introduction to Salter. I’m going to post another poem of hers, a longer one about James Merrill, in a few days when I have time to type it in. Happy Commencement.

Michael Collier is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Dark Wild Realm. He visited Amherst last year and read this poem.

Common Flicker, by Michael Collier

Old nail pounding your way
into bark or creosote,
intermittent tripod
of legs and beak,
derrick larvae driller,

when I look up from
my mind I see what
you are: feather-hooded,
mustached, gripped
to the steady perch;

an idea of the lower
altitudes sparged
with color, a tuber
of claws and wings
and an eye unmarred.

Wing-handled hammer
packing the framer’s blow,
face stropping the hardness,
drumming and drumming,
your song is your name.

This will cure me,
you declare. This will
heal the fractured jaw,
soothe the vibrating helve
so I can eat, so I can sing.

Edna St. Vincent Millay was a poet “whose passionate celebration of bohemian hedonism and defiant assertion of female independence made her the embodiment of the Jazz Age” (Twentieth Century American Poetry). Millay wrote on subjects considered inappropriate for women at the time, making her quite the controversial figure at the time.

First Fig

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!

Second Fig

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

***

Two poems, two figs, to different ways of seeing destruction. The second is more dramatic, but the first introduces the reader to everyday tragedy and its power as a subtle force of life.

WCW was a poet during the imagist movement who found an American voice in his formal innovations. This Is Just to Say is a classic for poetry classes because of the way Williams explores the simple beauty of his language.

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

***

Just “so sweet/ and so cold,” refreshing in all it says without literally saying much at all.

Kay Ryan is the recent winner of the prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and the author of, most recently, The Niagara River.

Waste, by Kay Ryan

Not even waste
is inviolate.
The day misspent,
the love misplaced,
has inside it
the seed of redemption.
Nothing is exempt
from resurrection.
It is tiresome
how the grass
re-ripens, greening
all along the punched
and mucked horizon
once the bison
have moved on,
leaning into hunger
and hard luck.

***

Ryan’s metaphors are dizzying, yet they are so on point that the reader can’t get lost in another world the way one might with Wordsworth. Instead, Ryan spins her reader round and round in the familiar until we, drunken on her words, see exactly what she wants us to. Here, she seems to echo one of my favorite poems, Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art.

One Art, by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

***

Ryan brings Bishop’s questions into her self-contained universe of a poem. She may allow a bit more levity into her own poem, but she still manages to treat the subject with a gravity that envelops the reader in a cycle of life and death that’s inevitable yet still surprising. These two women speak across generations, and Ryan recognizes the necessity for a dialogue on these female American poets and their voices within the American canon. We’ll see if it takes root sometime soon.

High Windows, by Philip Larkin

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

***

I’m going to let Larkin speak for himself; he can certainly shut me up.

John Hennessy is the poet in residence at UMass who just released a book last year, Bridge and Tunnel. This poem is one of my favorites from the book. Listen to it; it’s great on the page but its sound is incredibly resonant.

Bachelorhood

by John Hennessy

Argument—hostile sex—burgeoning dread:
Phoebe said. Box me at Connacht’s Irish bar
again, love. But all my brilliant crack was feldspar,
her hillside’s silver eucalyptus dead.
I dated slim Persephone instead.
Anti-depressants warmed our winter star;
in the mailroom, someone else’s unlocked car,
wherever we might get caught, she made our bed.

Too bad I felt confined by public space
despite her kinky talk, black net and lace,
and Zoloft’s little death anticipates
those ashes greater than the greatest lust:
Persephone can never forget we’re dust,
separate. I spent some time a celibate.

***

Quite the sonnet. Each time I read this poem, I feel it ringing in my ears for awhile afterward. Seems like the essence of the ideal sonnet: sonorous and full of contradiction.

I’m feeling a Greek trajectory taking root; I’ll try to avert too much of that. But I’m really enjoying the daily poem-search that’s coming with this blog.

Dreamboats, A Ballad

Sleep is the only rest we get;

It’s then we are at peace:

We do not have to mop the floor

And wipe away the grease.

We are not chased around the hall

And tumbled in the dirt

By every dimwit nobleman

Who wants a slice of skirt.

And when we sleep we like to dream;

We dream we are at sea,

We sail the waves in golden boats,

So happy, clean and free.

In dreams we all are beautiful

In glossy crimson dresses;

We sleep with every man we love,

We shower them with kisses.

They fill our days with feasting,

We fill their nights with song,

We take them in our golden boats

And drift the whole year long.

And all is mirth and kindness,

There are no tears of pain;

For our decrees are merciful

Throughout our golden reign.

But then the morning wakes us up:

Once more we toil and slave,

and hoist our skirts at their command

For every prick and knave.

***

A few years ago, Margaret Atwood published a novel that took its form from Greek myths brought together to create the story of Penelope, Odysseus’s wife. Atwood took the image of Penelope’s weaving and rending of her famous shroud and put it to work in writing The Penelopiad. She spins and tears various story lines while romancing her readers with the same skill of performance and presentation with which Penelope charms her suitors.

While Margaret Atwood is a fine fiction writer, her poetry, appearing in the form of a Greek chorus, holds Penelope’s story together. The chorus, made up of Penelope’s maids who Odysseus killed upon returning to Ithaca, recounts Penelope’s life from a distance, through someone else’s lens. Atwood uses language in more manipulative and skillful ways in these chapters, calling her reader’s attention to the subtly marginalized place Penelope and the women around her occupy in their world.

After embracing the complexities her language can offer in her art, Atwood can create a poem like the one above, combining an advocating voice for the women speaking with their reality without becoming trite or self-righteous.