Category Archives: Poetry

Technology

One of the many reasons I admire A.E. Stallings’ “Sestina: Like” and Bruce Beasley’s “Year’s End Paradoxography” so much is that the modern technology/modern world is integrated in those two poems in the way farmland or city streets or the human body are in so many other poems — thoroughly, and as metaphor, and amongst other topics, and not called out per se, and in ways that feel (though only time will tell on this point) like the poems will survive with their strengths intact even after the technology they engage with has moved into obsolescence.

Based on my admittedly totally unscientific general sense of the poetry I myself read, a flip through the Best American 2012 anthology, and some poking about this week in the searchable online poem databases of the Poetry Foundation and The Academy of American Poets, I feel I can say (until proven otherwise — please feel free to bring my attention to other poems in the comments box below) that current-day technology doesn’t show up as much in contemporary poems as you’d think it would.Continue reading “Technology”

“Look, you have milk”

Whoops! So there went June I guess.

But now back to it — here’s this month’s Animal poem, “Sister Cat” by Frances Mayes (on that Poetry 180 project site Billy Collins did during his Poet Laureate tenure — I recommend exploring, lots of good poems there).

This is one of those enclosed poems, a type of poem that I frequently resist — I tend to like it less when a metaphor’s expansion is too fully explained. But I like it here, I think because such a cat’s cries are both familiar enough to me and strange enough in themselves to carry the burden of such explanations/abstractions.

The human’s firm reaction to the finicky cat, “Look, you have milk. / I clink my fingernail / Against the rim. Milk.” is spot-on, and I like the progression of analogous movements, “the light on / when it is on,” the other Frances, then back to the cat with those lovely short sentences so evocative of a cat’s movement, “She stalks / The room. She wants.” And the ending, back to the cat’s, and therefore ours too, otherworldly and impossible desires, “Milk / Beyond milk. World beyond / This one, she cries.”

That ending, by the way, is a good example of the power of word order. Switched around, “She cries / World beyond this one” just has nothing going for it. The tension of the line break “World beyond / This one” brings the emphasis to both “beyond” and “this one,” and it works so much better to end with the focus back on the physical cat rather than the abstract idea.

From Word to Poem

As I mentioned before, I’m teaching a workshop at the Attic Institute in Portland this summer, June 30-July 28. Here’s little insight into the word-to-poem process, and a sample of some of the kind of fun we’ll have with words in the workshop (for which you can register here — would love to have some of you in class!).

I was flipping through my Dictionary of Contrasting Pairs this morning, because the radio keeps playing a song that says, “The opposite of love’s indifference,” which has me thinking about opposites, traditional and re-defined. And I came across the entry for “austral/septentrional,” which I now know are rareish equivalents of north and south when used adjectivally (so a ‘septentrional state’ is a northern country, an ‘austral wind’ a south wind).

Which is cool, if pretty obscure, but the entry also had this tidbit about Australia: Continue reading “From Word to Poem”

Dennis Schmitz’s “The California Phrasebook”

Dennis Schmitz’s poem “The California Phrasebook” has one of those similes in the first stanza that will make you forever look at an everyday object differently, in this case stop lights:

West of the Sierras where
the Central Valley drifts on its crusts of almond
orchards, the fields
die in a holiday accident,
the freeways snapping
back in the dust like severed
arteries while the accomplished
doctor of silence stitches the evening
closed with stoplights which
never hold.

The doctor of silence; stoplights which never hold; the fields dying in a holiday accident — I mean, wow! And this opening California-as-corporeal image is only the beginning of a whole string of images which illuminate how you can look at something regular from another perspective, a perspective expanded, made both immediately recognizable and strange, and complicated.

Schmitz’s poems, at least in the collection I have (which is About Night, his 1993 Selected and New collection) consistently serve up an thoroughly vivid image and then swerve with it to somewhere not weird exactly, not gothic exactly, but somewhere that borders all the dark and twisty places. The line breaks are caesuras of a big breath to finish out the thought, of emphasis in the rhythm of a master storyteller who’s telling the story by looking at what you’d say are all the wrong/tangential details, but there the whole scene anyway, the whole main point of the story told anyway.

Continue reading “Dennis Schmitz’s “The California Phrasebook””

I Still Love My Wicked Wicked Ways

Sandra Cisneros’s 1991 books My Wicked Wicked Ways was one of the first collections I read seriously as poetry outside of class. This was early high school — at about the same time Carl Sandburg, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath were big for me. (Cisneros is of course the author of The House on Mango Street, which I also love and think everyone should read.)

I picked it up My Wicked Wicked Ways again recently and I still love some of these poems, just love. You always have these vague ideas, early on, about who poets are, what kind of person a poet can be, should be. I don’t know if this was true for everyone but for me Sexton and Plath, the crazy suicidal confessionists, or Dickinson the recluse in a white dress were sort of the readily available models when I was first getting going in poetry seriously, in terms of how to be a female poet. Sexton, Plath, Dickinson — or Sandra Cisneros, precise and beautiful and sometimes sad but also always so alive and full of beautiful images and style. Continue reading “I Still Love My Wicked Wicked Ways”

Poetry Workshop This Summer

I am happy to announce that I’ll be teaching a summer poetry workshop at The Attic Institute (on upper Hawthorne in Portland) as one of their Summer Teaching Fellows. The workshop starts the end of June and runs for 5 weeks on Sunday afternoons. I’m really looking forward to it, and plan to have a lot of fun with this workshop.

Made of Words Poetry Workshop:

William Carlos Williams said, “A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.”  A love of words is likely what drew you to poetry in the first place. In this workshop we’ll take words as both subject and inspiration, exploring the possibilities of single words as well as more broadly discussing tone and diction. We’ll do in-class workshopping and discussion, and a whole variety of generative exercises using words as our creative springboard. We’ll talk about personal favorite words and words with social/cultural significance, explore the verbing of nouns and other instances of “messing with language,” take a look at the effect of generic versus specific terms, investigate some etymology, and more.

Registration link and more info here. If you’re in the Portland area, please consider signing up!

“The Work” in Andrew Feld’s Raptor

For this month’s animal poem, “The Work,” from Andrew Feld’s new collection Raptor.

Andrew Feld’s Raptor, which I picked up after reading Pamela Alexander’s review of it in the latest FIELD, is full of poems (which range from the heavily featured birds of prey to folks on their way to Sturgis to Johnny Carson) exhibiting excellent control of language, deft images, underlying but controlled rage, simultaneous emotional closeness and observational distance, and unexpected precise edginess.  Before I get to “The Work,” which along with “Cascade Raptor Center: Capture” and one of the Sturgis poems, “There,” are my favorites of many strong contenders, a couple sample stanzas from “The Art of Falconry,” which follow mention of an analogy of late-life marriage:Continue reading ““The Work” in Andrew Feld’s Raptor”

A.E. Stallings’ Olives

A.E. Stallings writes lovely poems. Lovely poems that are also of the gritty real, but they look at the world through clear, feeling but not crying, eyes. A classicist by training, she works in rhyme-and-meter forms (with the sort of deft touch that kind of makes all this free verse emphasis feel silly), and she’s won a number of awards, including a MacArthur “Genius” grant. Her poems tend to balance as equally well the demands of emotion and intellect as they do form and content.

Olives, published in 2012, has poems about ancient Greece, poems about daily life, poems about motherhood and children, poems about arguments and olives and telephones. When one, as one does, starts to talk about “the state of contemporary poetry,” her books should be part of the argument for a strong state of contemporary poetry, full as they are of both fine craft and thought.

Her poems are also often funny (it’s really tempting here to make some sort of joke about an archaic smile, but I won’t). The first section of “Four Fibs” (the form of which uses the Fibonacci sequence to determine the number of syllables per line) for instance, goes,Continue reading “A.E. Stallings’ Olives”

Poetry Month = Poetry Everywhere

The thing I like about having a National Poetry Month is of course that poetry’s visibility gets raised. At least a little if you’re not looking for it, and quite a bit if you are.

Here are some links to a few of the cooler poetry-related things I’ve seen this week:

Many bookstores do Poetry Month sales (Powell’s is having a 15% off all poetry books all month sale) but a bunch of independent presses (including some of the major independents) are offering a twist on the usual BOGO — Buy One Give One: buy one book of poetry, get one free to pass on to someone else. A great way to spread some great  contemporary poetry around. Presses include Tin House Books, Coffeehouse Press, Archipelago Books, BOA Editions, Copper Canyon Press, Milkweed Editions, Red Hen Press, Sarabande Books, and YesYes Books. Details and links to all those presses on Tin House’s blog.

The Knopf Doubleday Poem-A-Day: you can sign up to get their poem-a-day in your inbox every morning this month, and they are always excellent poems (and include links to audio recordings, the book from which the poem came, and more info about the poet). I was especially pleased to see my former professor David Young’s translations of Basho on the first day.

Pulitzer Remix: poems made from text pulled from the pages of various Pulitzer Prize-winning novels (you can sign up to get emails of all poems, or just of poems from specific books). I like collage-y projects like this.

The Sonnet Project, takin’ it to the streets —Continue reading “Poetry Month = Poetry Everywhere”

Tyger Tyger

This month’s Animal poem: William Blake’s “The Tyger”

The first four lines of Blake’s “The Tyger,” or at least the first two, are so firmly rooted in the canon they’ve nudged its way into the common lexicon. “Tyger tyger burning bright / In the forests of the night.” But how quickly after 10th grade English (unless you’re teaching same) do we forget the rest. Or I did at least. But after looking at it awhile again I find “The Tyger” feels very fresh to me, a couple hundred years of being a classic poem notwithstanding. The wondering tone of the questions, the awe, and most especially, that at the end of stanza after stanza of questions, the speaker is still stuck on the first question asked — who could have made something like a tiger? (with one small but important  change).

A teacher told me once that part of the exquisite energy of those first lines is that the last syllable is missing — it should be “brightly.” Instead we bite off the end of “burning bright” and there’s a thudding pause before the next line, that’s matched by “of the night” — we hear the same missing syllable after “night” even though you would never say “of the nightly.” But that missing rhyme holds such force in the ear. “Tyger tyger burning bright, [thud] / In the forests of the night [thud].” Continue reading “Tyger Tyger”