Category Archives: Poetry

Body Parts

I mentioned two creepy hand poems a few months back, Charles Simic’s “Bestiary for the Fingers of My Right Hand” and John Keats’ “This living hand…,” the latter especially a great Halloween poem, with the gothic cinematic dead hand gesturing toward the living at the end, which got me thinking about body part poems, and Halloween has me thinking about Frankenstein’s monster in all its various incarnations, which got me wondering what a Frankensteined “body of poetry” would look like…

The “Eyes:” from William Matthews: “Light bored / into his eyes but where did it go?  / Into a sea of phosphenes, / along the wet fuse of some dead  / nerve, it hid everywhere and couldn’t / be found.”

Just below the eyes, the nose, placed smack in the middle, and hard to take seriously even if you’re not talking about a stitched-together monster. Continue reading “Body Parts”

October

I love the month of October. I love the high-blue-beautiful-sky days and the slower, lower, gray sky days. October is really the only month of fall we get in the Northwest — after that it’s pretty much just rainy winter. October, when we get our brief glimpse of trees turning colors. October, with its way of reveling in transition. October, cold at night but still mild enough during the day to affect whatever you were planning on doing not at all. October, still with some thin sun left for us.

“October” is a not-uncommon poem title. “October” by Bill Berkson has a nice take on the manifold nature of the month. I like the just slightly surreal quality of the images, they’re just slightly turned from dead-on (“warm / and loving like a death grip on a willing knee” and “snow bleeds softly from her shoes,” etc.).

And Jacob Polley’s “October” has a beautiful distinction between a day time blue sky contrasted with that “bluer home-time dark.” It’s a lovely meditation Continue reading “October”

Reading across Komunyakaa’s “Changes; or…”

“Changes; or, Reveries at a Window Overlooking a Country Road, with Two Women Talking Blues in the Kitchen” is a two-columned jazz poem by Yusef Komunyakaa (from the New Poems section of 1994’s Neon Vernacular) that, like a great piece of jazz music, I get something more out of with every reading.

On the left side of the page, Mary and Eva Mae, friends from childhood, are “talking B-flat blues” in the kitchen, catching up on the (cheating) men and (loose) women they used to know. Meanwhile on the right, Mary’s grandson, “just dragged in / From God only knows where,” and “Nice as a new piece / of silk,”  is thinking about jazz, all kinds of jazz from Philly Joe Jones to Billie Holiday to Charles Mingus to John Coltrane, and memory, and black culture, and the way thoughts move between them. The poems starts with an “A-one, two, three” of men’s names, “Joe, Gus, Sham . . . ” putting us in music territory from the start.Continue reading “Reading across Komunyakaa’s “Changes; or…””

Bishopian

Elizabeth Bishop is the most important poetry god.

The most important in my personal pantheon, I mean.

And more generally, I don’t think you can love poetry and not love Elizabeth Bishop.

I’ve touched on most of my other major gods in this blog before (Mark Doty, Yusef Komunyakaa, and the most recent addition, Larry Levis), but haven’t said much yet about her. One must tread lightly when analyzing one’s gods, after all. But I’ve been writing Poetry Dork posts for exactly a year now, so it’s about time I paid Bishop some attention here.

Doty, Komunyakaa, Levis, and Bishop are poets who “are it” for me. They do what poetry is supposed to do, what I want it to do. They write poems that are and do what poems are and do when they are at their best.Continue reading “Bishopian”

Two Hand Poems

John Keats‘ “This living hand…” is one of the awesomest little poems ever. It’s so wonderful and so creepy! The speaker’s hand, if it were dead, would “So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights / That thou would wish thy own heart dry of blood / So that in my veins red life might stream again.” And that final gesture, Keats’ no, here it is, alive, “I hold it towards you” — ooh! Shivers. I will be bringing this poem up again come Halloween. This poem is genuinely haunting — the message is first that you’ll miss me, then that I’ll haunt you, then that you’ll want to die to resurrect me, but no no no don’t worry, here’s my hand (that will haunt you!).

Charles Simic has a memorable poem called “Bestiary for the Fingers of My Right Hand,” a poem that describes each finger in turn, images going from Gerhard Gluck-y to Odilon Redon-y (the creepy paintings, not the flower-in-a-vase ones) to Hieronymous Bosch-y.Continue reading “Two Hand Poems”

James Dickey

I usually start talking about James Dickey‘s poems by saying, “The one where…” The ideas behind the poem, the context and ‘what happens’ — the vision, in other words — is what sticks with me so much more than individual lines.

The one where the stewardess is falling to earth (“Falling“); the one where he puts on the taxidermied head of a boar and becomes the boar as it’s being hunted, years ago, by his now-dead father (“Approaching Prayer”); the one where the hobo is nailed to a train car by his hands and feet (“To a Folk-Singer of the Thirties“); the one where the speaker is in the pantry thinking about dropping bombs on his suburban neighborhood from the plane he flew during the war (“The Firebombing“); the one about animals being predators in Heaven (“The Heaven of Animals“); the one about the half-sheep, fathered by a farm boy, who dies right after birth (“The Sheep Child“); the one where the soldier drinks water from a dead soldier’s helmet and sees his memories (“Drinking From a Helmet”); the one with the surreal colors in the grass and the horses, (“The Dusk of Horses“); the one about the shark trashing the house (“The Shark’s Parlor“).

Intensity and life are the two themes I’d call out if I was asked to call out two themes in his poems. Or maybe it should be intensity and life-and-death. Continue reading “James Dickey”

Sonnets, The Gritty Ones Especially

The soufflé cliché feels apt for sonnets, the cliché about them falling down a lot, and even though I’ve never made a soufflé, or even watched someone make one, and can’t remember the last time I ate one, I’m going to go with it.

So. The sonnet is just like the soufflé. All are made with the same ingredients, but only a few turn out right. Most collapse. It’s all in the technique and the quality of the ingredients. I’ve been working my way through The Making of a Sonnet (eds Hirsch and Boland), a pretty thorough anthology divided mostly by century (Sixteenth – Twentieth), with sections also for sonnets about sonnets (‘The Sonnet in the Mirror’) and sonnets of lengths other than 14 lines. And I don’t like most of them.

Which isn’t saying much — percentage-wise I probably don’t like most of any type of poetry. Like all the other arts, for every shining peak of a poem there’s a ginormous iceberg of crap poems waiting to sink you. And sonnets have been written around for 500 years now, so that’s a big iceberg.

However, the sonnets I like I tend to love. Broadly speaking I feel more strongly, I think, about the sonnets that I like, than, for instance, the ghazals that I like.Continue reading “Sonnets, The Gritty Ones Especially”

May(ish)

Whoops! I neglected to do a “Months” post for May. Here, belatedly, are two May poems  — “Ending” by May Swenson (heh), and “You May Leave a Memory, Or You Can Be Feted By Crows” by Dick Allen, which you will note has the word May in the title (heh again).

“Ending” is sort of a silly poem, a Dr. Sueussian, or perhaps more Shel Silverstein-ian, reincarnation/death meditation. What I like about this poem is basically that, that insouciant-but-still-saying-something tone, as well as the idea of the inner self as a little clear bug. And May, the month, is a little silly anyway. An extension of April’s showers without yet June’s blue skies.

“You May Leave a Memory…” refers to this painted scroll, “Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains.” It’s a nice portrait; I like the man in this poem. There’s quite a tradition of American poets writing about Chinese artists, some of which are very lovely poems, worth seeking out (as, of course, are the Chinese artists).

June soon…

Superheroes

In anticipation celebration of The Avengers (whoohoo! I hope, anyway), let’s look briefly at A. Van Jordan’s collection Quantum Lyrics, which puts comic book superheroes and heroes of physics together, among other topics, in quite nice poems. (I’m not at all scientifically inclined, as I’ve mentioned before, but I do like the general ideas of physics, the ideas I can almost understand for a moment at a time, anyway, and what’s not to be intrigued by about superheroes?)

Albert Einstein’s personal life, his wives and his civil rights involvement, gets a lot of attention in the collection as well. Sample poem titles: “The Flash Reverses Time,” “The Green Lantern Unlocks the Secrets of Black Body Theory,” “Marian Anderson,” “The Atom and Hawkman Discuss Metaphysics,” “Sculpting the Head of Miles Davis.”

The Einstein poems use a lot of filmic conventions, “FADE IN” and “CUT TO:” and “INSERT SHOT” and so forth, that section adding up to a sort of documentary film made out of poems. In the prose poem “Einstein Defining Special Relativity,” the scientist’s notebook Continue reading “Superheroes”

Larry Levis

I discovered Larry Levis only a few months ago. (I feel the same way about that as I did about seeing Spinal Tap for the first time only last year. How could I have been missing out for so long!)

Larry Levis, who died unexpectedly in 1996 at age 49, wrote six books of poetry, including one published posthumously. His early work is lovely but his later work is what I’ve been obsessively re-reading. The poems’ sprawl, or maybe sweep is a better word —  it is never scattered or unfocused. The tone/voice. The sensibility.

And then of course, there are the great images, for instance “he hears the geese racket above him / As if a stick were held flat against / A slat fence by a child running past a house for sale” and “Heaven was neither the light nor was it the air, & if it took a physical form / It was splintered lumber no one could build anything with.”

Robert Mezey called Levis’ poetry “the nourishing shock of fresh ideas that rise from the work of the true poet.” Continue reading “Larry Levis”