Tag: Poem Worth Reading

When I was in third grade, my school bus driver was named ‘Slice,’ and he was the coolest. His hair was blond and spiked, held in place by gravity-resistant gel. In the front seat – where not even the nerdiest of nerds dared sit – he kept a Styrofoam container filled with icepacks and cans of orange Slice soda, which he sold for twenty-five cents, instead of the usual pop machine fifty. Before school, my friends and I would each chug one down to get our morning sugar fix – our teachers and parents probably didn’t think Slice was the coolest. But best of all, he drove what might in retrospect be called dangerously fast, so we would get to school early. Instead of dropping us off, though, he would crank up KDWB and drive around the block three or four extra times, letting us climb over the seats and run up and down the center aisle, so long as we promised not to hurt ourselves. Man, he ruled. Then he moved to Alaska, which I’m pretty sure is bus driver code for getting fired.

Every year at about this time I’m reminded of Slice, because I see the big yellow buses start to make their rounds around the city. Empty of children, the drivers and supervisors go through their routes, as if practicing will make them any more adept.

What this all means, of course, is that the school year is coming up. Zooming ten years ahead of third grade, college students are beginning their treks of various lengths across the country, packing their hand-me-down cars with "carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks…stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and hairdryers and styling irons…the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags – onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut crème patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints." (From the first page of Don Delillo’s White Noise – a wonderfully relevant book even though I don’t know what Waffelos are.)

Something about sixty-eight degrees and sunny with a cool breeze always makes me nostalgic and weepy. Oh my gosh – good poetry also makes me nostalgic and weepy. Synergy.

I couldn’t find any good verse on mildly subversive bus drivers, so this one goes out to the college kids (somewhat ironically, as it’s more about leaving school than arriving there…sorry…suckers)…and to former English majors about to embark on their Kerouac kicks, and to anyone who has a long commute each day and finds the means to enjoy it. In fact – not to get political here – the Road Trip seems to me a very American entity, and with gas prices doing what they’re doing, one wonders how much longer it can remain a pastime. Let’s sing it some praises, shall we?

"Song of the Open Road" (part 1)
by Walt Whitman (who rules, like Slice does)

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.)

I live over by Kenwood Elementary School…and steal their wireless Internet signal from time to time…somewhat by accident…Anyway, they’ve been doing a lot of construction on the school this summer. Right now they’re working on replacing the windows, I think, and there’s a big yellow cherry picker that goes up and down the side of the building, and a guy who takes out the old frames and puts in the new ones and then, I imagine, eventually washes the panes.

I’ve been watching this for a few days now, and then read this poem by Stephen Dunn, from his Pulitzer-winning collection Different Hours, which shares the same central image. Buy it here. His work, to my mind, is filled with big themes, and tempered descriptions of them. Like all fantastic poets, he has a knack for pointing out those things we all know about, but don’t necessarily notice until someone explains how amazing they are. Different Hours largely has a somber tone to it, which Dunn explains, somewhat coyly, is the result of his being an optimist (because he always expects good things to happen, he’s often let down).

Better than I’m able to set a background for the poem, perhaps the poet himself, will explain a bit about his work.

The following is taken from an interview with Guernica:

Dunn: But the world is always somewhat vicious. I take that as a given, but at various times in various circumstances that fact will be no more than a shadow or an echo behind the poem. Other times it will be more manifest. I try to write myself into articulations of half-felt, half-known feelings, without program. I’m always working toward getting my world and, hopefully, the world outside of me into a version that makes sense of it. Viciousness requires the same precision as love does.

And this is from an interview with Nightsun, Frostburg State University’s litmag.

Dunn: The notion of restraint and extravagance has interested me for a while, I think especially because I tend to be someone who is temperamentally restrained. The great danger for somebody like me is that he might employ restraint out of habit, as opposed to employing it to heighten effects. I think restraint matters when it is harnessing something of size, something a little uncontrollable, something wild. I use the example of Fred Astaire, who seemed to me and to everybody, always under control. He was really using his skill to regulate emotion and to keep out the extra gestures that make art feel false.
I like the poets of extravagance too. I love Whitman, I love Ginsberg’s "Howl," but I’m just not that kind of expansive poet.

 

So here it is:

"Men in the Sky"

Leaves are falling as the telephone men
ascend to the tops of poles.
They are riding a magic long-armed
machine. No need anymore to climb.
To speak through wires is as natural now
as falling leaves, natural as men in the sky.
The telephone men in the cupped palm
of the long arm are reducing the static,
helping me reach far out of town.
They are beautiful in their hard orange
plumage. Finches and cardinals: mere birds
by comparison, unchangeable, nervous.
It’s a shame the men must come down.
I stood next to them at the 7-Eleven
at lunch break, heard them order ham
and cheese on a hard roll, Dr. pepper.
I saw them get out of their trucks
and spit. Now the leaves graze
their shoulders suddenly more golden
for having touched them. My phone
is ringing. It’s one of the telephone men,
the highest, the one with a sufficiency
of tools around his waist, calling to see
if everything’s all right. Everything isn’t.

We’ve been having some pretty ridiculously great weather lately. If I had a real job (sorry, Mom), I probably would have played hooky last week to go and hang out by one of the lakes. Instead I just read a bit by Calhoun, but without the sense of freedom (or guilt) of having emancipated myself from a necktie.

Anyway. The poetic equivalent to our early summer comes, I think, in the verses of former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins. Whenever I finish one of his poems, I just feel so damn pleasant afterwards.

Maybe here’s why (from an interview with Collins conducted by The Cortland Review):

Collins: Most of the devices used in poetry-meter and rhyme and assonance and the other kinds of tropes or effects-are really meant to give the ear pleasure in a way that prose does not. Poetry also appeals to the ear because poetry is an interruption of silence. A poem should be preceded by silence and followed by silence. A poem for me displaces silence the way your body displaces water.

Or maybe here’s why (from an interview with Collins conducted by Terra Incognita):

Collins: I am extremely reader-conscious, perhaps because I am tired of reading poems that seem to ignore the reader. I feel that I am talking to a reader/listener as I write, so that a good deal of my effort is just to make the poem clear. To get things in the right sequence so that the poem is easy to follow. Not just easy, but easy to follow because the poem is going somewhere, and I want the reader along to share whatever surprises the journey may hold. I try to begin the poem on a common ground, which is a way of assembling a little group around the campfire of the poem. Scoutmaster Collins will then tell some scary stories.

Or maybe here’s why (from an interview with Collins conducted by Guernica):

Collins: There’s a great pleasure in-I wouldn’t say ease, but maybe kind of a fascinated ease that accompanies the actual writing of the poem. I find it very difficult to get started. There are just long gaps where I can’t find a point of insertion, I can’t find a good opening line, I can’t find a mood that I want to write into. But once I do, once a line falls out of the air, or I get a little inkling of a subject and I recognize that, it’s like the sense that a game has started. Part of writing is discovering the rules of the game and then deciding whether to follow the rules or to break them. The great thing about the game of poetry is that it’s always your turn-I guess that goes back to my being an only child. So once it’s under way, there is a sense of flow.

And now one of his poems. This is from his Nine Horses collection. (Click the link to buy it…)

Aimless Love

This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.

In the shadows of an autumn evening,
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor’s window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.

This is the best kind of love, I thought,
without recompense, without gifts,
or unkind words, without suspicion,
or silence on the telephone.

The love of the chestnut,
the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.

No lust, no slam of the door –
the love of the miniature orange tree,
the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower,
the highway that cuts across Florida.

No waiting, no huffiness, or rancor –
just a twinge every now and then

for the wren who had built her nest
on a low branch overhanging the water
and for the dead mouse,
still dressed in its light brown suit.

But my heart is always propped up
in a field on its tripod,
ready for the next arrow.

After I carried the mouse by the tail
to a pile of leaves in the woods,
I found myself standing at the bathroom sink
gazing down affectionately at the soap,

so patient and soluble,
so at home in its pale green soap dish.
I could feel myself falling again
as I felt its turning in my wet hands
and caught the scent of lavender and stone.

The introduction to this week’s Poem Worth Reading is taken from Bart Schneider’s forthcoming novel, the highly Minneapolized The Man in the Blizzard:

"Sometimes I wonder why Americans are as afraid of poetry as they are of al-Qaeda. Screw the ones who’ve decided that poetry’s an effete enterprise. Let ‘em party with the homophobes. It’s the others who concern me, the folks who claim they don’t get it, who think they’re too dumb to read poetry. Thing is, they’re not willing to be dumb enough. That’s their problem. If you want to get inside a poem, you need to dumb down your senses. That’s where the receptors are. You need to accept that you don’t know. Why should you know? What’s the matter with a little mystery? They think the poem’s a theorem. If they can’t solve it, if they can’t control it, then they’re afraid of it. It’s so American to want it all or nothing. If you can’t conquer it, what good is it? Americans have become so frozen with fear, they’ve lost their sense of play. It’s time to lighten up and lower our expectations. It’s time to rediscover our basic fluency. If a man’s not fluent, if he ain’t got flow, what chance does he have to converse with his soul?"

Isn’t that kind of great?

And now the actual poem. This week’s Poem Worth Reading is by Mohja Kahf, whose stuff I recently accidentally came across in a back issue of The Paris Review. The brief bio goes: She’s Syrian-American, and kicks the ass of any stereotype that might be affixed to her. This one’s from her latest collection, E-Mails from Scheherazad. She also has a novel, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, which is probably worth checking out. Bladao.

"Hijab Scene #7"

No, I’m not bald under the scarf
No, I’m not from that country
where women can’t drive cars
No, I would not like to defect
I’m already American
But thank you for offering
What else do you need to know
relevant to my buying insurance,
opening a bank account,
reserving a seat on a flight?
Yes, I speak English
Yes, I carry explosives
They’re called words
And if you don’t get up
Off your assumptions
They’re going to blow you away

The introduction to this week’s Poem Worth Reading is taken from Bart Schneider’s forthcoming novel, the highly Minneapolized The Man in the Blizzard:

"Sometimes I wonder why Americans are as afraid of poetry as they are of al-Qaeda. Screw the ones who’ve decided that poetry’s an effete enterprise. Let ‘em party with the homophobes. It’s the others who concern me, the folks who claim they don’t get it, who think they’re too dumb to read poetry. Thing is, they’re not willing to be dumb enough. That’s their problem. If you want to get inside a poem, you need to dumb down your senses. That’s where the receptors are. You need to accept that you don’t know. Why should you know? What’s the matter with a little mystery? They think the poem’s a theorem. If they can’t solve it, if they can’t control it, then they’re afraid of it. It’s so American to want it all or nothing. If you can’t conquer it, what good is it? Americans have become so frozen with fear, they’ve lost their sense of play. It’s time to lighten up and lower our expectations. It’s time to rediscover our basic fluency. If a man’s not fluent, if he ain’t got flow, what chance does he have to converse with his soul?"

Isn’t that kind of great?

And now the actual poem. Or actually, this week it’s not an actual poem. Rather, this is a segment from the beginning of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, whose language and progression I found to be somewhat poetic. Originally it was in paragraph form, but it broke down fairly easily into stanzas.

"The Seniors in St. Jude"

Nobody laughed at seniors in St. Jude.

Whole economies, whole cohorts, depended on them.
The installers and maintainers of home security systems,
The wielders of feather dusters and complicated vacuums,
The actuaries and fund managers, the brokers and tellers
The sellers of sphagnum moss and nonfat cottage cheese and nonalcoholic beer
And aluminum stools for sitting in the bathtub with

The suppliers of chicken cordon bleu or veal Parmesan
And salad and dessert in a fluorescently lit function room at $13.95 a head for Saturday night bridge clubs

The sitters who knitted while their charges dozed under afghans,
The muscular LPNs who changed diapers in the night,
The social workers who recommended the hiring of the LPNs,
The statisticians who collated data on prostate cancer and memory and aging,
The orthopedists and cardiologists and oncologists and their nurses
Receptionists and bloodworkers,
The pharmacists and opticians,
The performers of routine maintenance on American-made sedans with inconceivably low odometer readings

The blue-uniformed carriers of Colonial-handicrafts catalogues and pension checks,
The bookers of tours and cruises and flights to Florida,
The projectionists of PG-rated movies at theaters with Twilight Specials,
The drafters of wills and the executors of irrevocable trusts,
The radio patrolmen who responded to home-security false alarms and wrote tickets for violating minimum-speed postings on expressways,

The elected state officials who resisted property-tax reassessment,
The elected national representatives who kept the entitlements flowing

The clergy who moved down corridors saying prayers at bedsides,
The embalmers and cremators,
The organists and florists,
The drivers of ambulances and hearses,
The engravers of marble markers

and the operators of gas-powered Weed Whackers who swept across the cemeteries in their pollen masks and protective goggles and who once in a long while suffered third degree burns over half their bodies when the motors strapped to their backs caught fire.

Welcome to a possibly special edition of Poem Worth Reading. The very title of this Cracking Spines segment — that is, Poem Worth Reading — is jeopardized with today’s entry. But because this is a blog, and should thereby not be held to any qualitative standards (self-imposed or otherwise), and because I got the go-ahead from my editor, who said I could post "basically anything…," I’ve decided to go ahead and put up some of my own scribblings. I figure it’s Memorial Day, so maybe there’s less readership, anyway.

The back-story (feel free to skip): My grandparents own a cabin not far from the Twin Cities, and I was up there this weekend to celebrate the holiday, incidentally by myself (there was leftover pizza, there was beer, there was NBA basketball [if you know my family, you know they don’t know what a tent is, let alone a cabin…yes there’s cable here, but I don’t have it in my regular home, and that’s how I justify watching it]).

On Sunday, at about five o’clock in the evening, my aunt called, waking me up from my nap. Naturally I was pissed. She said thunderstorms were headed my way. Though normally rain has a soporific effect on me, the ringer of the cabin phone is kind of like a dog whistle for humans, and I couldn’t get back to sleep. So I said, “Screw it” — sadly, I said it out loud — and went out onto the screened-in porch to watch the gathering storm.

I may appreciate a poem from time to time, but I don’t write ‘em. Nevertheless, immersed as deeply in the woods as a member of my family can hope to get (there’s no Wi-Fi here, at least, and my cell phone is on ‘roam’), watching the boats on the lake return in unison to their docks, then watching the rain fall from a strangely low sky, I realized there was a pen in front of me, and a blank piece of paper.

"Haikus," I thought (thankfully silently). I don’t mean to take anything away from the Japanese poets that have mastered brevity, nor imply that my haikus are as meaningful or worthwhile as theirs (sadly, a couple of mine tend toward Yoda-esque syntax and conjugation). But let’s face it: As far as poetry goes, the haiku is a fairly accessible form — concise, quick-striking, sometimes poignant. They’re kind of like puns (except sometimes poignant). So really, though Freud may say otherwise, the ultimate goal of this post isn’t necessarily to get more exposure for my writing and launch a new career. Rather, I hope it’s a sort of call-to-arms for all the would-be poets out there, too intimidated by meter and rhyme to grab their journals and head for their various solitudes.

And I invite all you fearless readers (I really do love puns) to post your own haikus in the ‘comments’ section. (Though please refrain from the likes of "Max Ross: Egomaniac/ where’s Whitman? Or Eliot?/They’re better than you" and so on. Unless you have one that’s really, really good.)

Also, for those interested, I found the header illustration here.

So here goes:

Fat green leaves beaten
by rain. I’d have picked them from
their twigs, anyway

At least the pontoon
has a canopy. Thank God
our boat won’t get wet.

In grade school I learned
to make rain sounds with clapped hands;
microwaved popcorn.

Glass door is open,
screen door is shut; sound of rain –
but no rain – enters.

Something literary
about rain: its ambition
to rise back up

Polaroid lightning
to remember later how
hard it really rained.

I stand here wearing
my grandfather’s sweatpants, and
write about the storm.