Category Archives: Poetry

William Matthews’ Janis Joplin

February’s Music post: William Matthews’ “The Penalty for Bigamy is Two Wives”

William Matthews’ prose poem “The Penalty for Bigamy is Two Wives” has so many great descriptions of music it almost makes you forget how hard it can be to describe music. Joplin’s voice breaks out “in hives of feeling.” Music, in the words of the speaker’s friend, “throws you back into your body, like organic food or heroin.” Then there’s the image of the pain in his friend’s singing voice “like the silhouette of a dog baying at the moon, almost liver-shaped, a bell hung from a rope of its own pure yearning.” And then, back to Janis again, her voice running up and down the body “like a fire that has learned to live on itself” and then, there comes the amazing description of listening to dead Janis sing as being “Grief’s beautiful blowjob.” Now that is one hell of a line.Continue reading “William Matthews’ Janis Joplin”

Briefly Reviewed: Satan is Real and Suzy Zeus Gets Organized

I picked up Satan is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers by Charlie Louvin (and Benjamin Whitmer) off a random shelf because of the totally amazing cover, was intrigued by the blurbs even though I didn’t know who Charlie Louvin was, started reading and then realized I totally should have known who he was because I know his songs, which folks like Emmylou Harris, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, and Alison Krauss have covered (“I Don’t Believe You’ve Met My Baby,” “If I Could Only Win Your Love” etc.). The Louvin Brothers’ swooping, interchanging harmony inspired the Everly Brothers and others, and they were reportedly Elvis Presley’s favorite gospel duo (and the reason why Presley, despite this, never covered them is herein explained).Continue reading “Briefly Reviewed: Satan is Real and Suzy Zeus Gets Organized”

“Country Song”

This year’s monthly series focus will be on music poems (2012 was Months poems and 2013 was Animals). First up, the incomparable A.E. Stallings’ “Country Song” from her collection Olives.

“Death was something that hadn’t happened yet,” is how it starts, one of the many lines which does many things at once. Death was something that hadn’t happened yet, in the song? to the speaker? The answer to both being yes. Another line that does similar multitasking comes just a few later, “It seeped up through the dashboard’s oubliette.” What does, the “hour of broken luck” in the line just before? Death from the first line? The country song? All of the above, even though grammatically of course the subject of that sentence Continue reading ““Country Song””

2013

2013 ends on a great note, with another poem of mine published in online journal  The Broken City‘s music-themed issue, just posted today! (My poem, “At the Bardot,” is on page 9). 13 was a bit my lucky number this year — I had work in Beatdom‘s #13 issue too, and (though it was doesn’t work for a number-13 trifecta) I was terribly excited to be in issue #89 of FIELD this fall.

And now, after a quick reminder that you can sign up to receive an email alert when there’s a new post in the new year towards the bottom of the page (the “Yes Please” button on the lower left under where it says “Be Alerted To New Posts”), here’s my traditional quick look back at what I read and watched this year… first the books:Continue reading “2013”

Death of a Naturalist & The Skunk

For this month’s animal poems post, it is with great pleasure I direct your attention to two by the late, great Seamus Heaney.

“Death of a Naturalist” is one of those poems you pretty much just have to call perfect. It’s evocative, its language is wonderful and trips off the tongue, its images are vibrant, the line breaks thrill with their little tensions, the combination of sentimental nostalgia and gross realism delights — you know, perfect.  The love of words underlying it all, and the personality that comes through, the humor and respect for the place and time under discussion. I love especially the words, love saying out loud lines like “I would fill jampots full of the jellied / Specks to range on the window-sills at home” and “All the year the flax-dam festered in the heart / Of the townland; green and heavy headed” and oh I could go on.Continue reading “Death of a Naturalist & The Skunk”

FIELD #89 arrives in the mail

FIELD #89 has arrived! I’m so happy to say you can find my poem “Spider Plant Boulevard” on page 92, in addition to a symposium on Gerald Stern and poems by one of my grad school profs, Sandy McPherson, plus Dennis Schmitz and Bob Hicok who I’ve talked about here before, and lots of other fine folks whose company I’m so delighted to be keeping. You can get ahold of FIELD at some bookstores and through Oberlin College Press, and, for your various iDevices, on LitRagger.com.

FIELD89 Fall 2013

My proto-dream-house, my crypto-dream-house

Because it was my birthday last week, I want to talk about “The End of March” by Elizabeth Bishop. I always respond to it, even more so than any of her other poems which I also love, with that sort of delight you get when someone gives you a gift that is totally “you” (i.e. unexpected but perfect).

“The End of March” begins “It was cold and windy, scarcely the day / to take a walk on that long beach” (don’t you just love to do that too, take walks on the beach when it’s too cold to do so, and so no one else is?).

The first stanza continues with description of the beach, Bishop’s typical noticing eye comment on the initial description to further precision: “Everything was withdrawn as far as possible, / indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken, / seabirds in ones or twos” etc. She speaks of the wind, well not just the wind it’s “The rackety, icy, offshore wind” blowing back “the low, inaudible rollers” and let’s pause a moment there to savor the rhythm/sound/mouth shape of saying that phrase aloud, “the low, inaudible rollers” Continue reading “My proto-dream-house, my crypto-dream-house”

Briefly Reviewed: Hicok, Estes, Kasischke

Brief reviews of Elegy Owed by Bob Hicok, Space, in Chains by Laura Kasischke, and Tryst by Angie Estes.

Bob Hicok’s Elegy Owed

I really like Hicok’s sensibility in this new collection, the diction mix, the word play, the self-consciousness, and the honesty that holds it all together. Many of the poems have sentences that run on a long time, over many lines (or the entire poem is one sentence) and the best of them unspool through subject after subject, turning sometimes on word play, sometimes on dark humor, sometimes on metaphor, loose in the sense athletes or musicians talk about being loose when they’re at their best. Continue reading “Briefly Reviewed: Hicok, Estes, Kasischke”

Counting Sheep

In Laura Jensen’s poem “Sleep in the Heat” — which begins “I switch on the light” because of course one can’t sleep in the heat — the speaker says, after lovely insomniac descriptions of the clock, crickets, and dizzy dark,

I try to balance — one sheep fills me,
one is a shapeless chance,
one disobedience, one regard.
They feel I do not deserve them;
they are sleepy and kept up all night.Continue reading “Counting Sheep”

“The Bear”

One of the ways the world can be divided is into people who love Galway Kinnell’s “The Bear” and people who hate it. It seems to be one of those poems that sparks little middle-ground reaction. The first time I read it I found it so very gripping, and moved with the poem. Occasionally on re-reads I admit I get mostly just the intellectual tickle of satisfaction from the last couple of lines, the transformation of the hunter’s transformation into metaphor, but other times, particularly hearing or reading it aloud, the whole thing still works wonders on me.

If you haven’t read it before, please do, and see which camp you fall into. Feel free to comment below. It’s available both in print and this video from 1973 of Kinnell reading it aloud.