In spite of the cost of living, its still popular.
Kathleen Norris
Ascension
by Kathleen Norris
Why do you stand looking up at the skies? . . Acts 1:11
It wasn’t just wind, chasing thin gunmetal clouds across the loud sky; it wasn’t the feeling that one might ascend on that excited air, rising like a trumpet note.
And it wasn’t just my sister’s water breaking, her crying out, the downward draw of blood and bone…
It was all of that, the mud and new grass pushing up through melting snow, the lilac in bud by my front door, bent low by last week’s ice storm.
Now the new mother, that leaky vessel, begins to nurse her child, beginning the long good-bye.
Mrs. Adam
By Kathleen Norris
I have lately come to the conclusion that I am Eve, alias Mrs. Adam. You know, there is no account of her death in the Bible, and why am I not Eve? Emily Dickinson in a letter, 12 January, 1846
If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it’s really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting.
Sharon Olds
His Stillness
By Sharon Olds
The doctor said to my father, “You asked me
to tell you when nothing more could be done.
That’s what I’m telling you now.” My father
sat quite still, as he always did,
especially not moving his eyes. I had thought
he would rave if he understood he would die,
wave his arms and cry out. He sat up,
thin, and clean, in his clean gown,
like a holy man. The doctor said,
“There are things we can do which might give you time,
but we cannot cure you.” My father said,
“Thank you.” And he sat, motionless, alone,
with the dignity of a foreign leader.
I sat beside him. This was my father.
He had known he was mortal. I had feared they would have to
tie him down. I had not remembered
he had always held still and kept quiet to bear things,
the liquor a way to keep still. I had not
known him. My father had dignity. At the
end of his life his life began
to wake in me.
I wonder what the divorce rate is among poets? In particular how many first marriages survive? No matter what a poet writes, whether autobiographical or not, there is a tendency for readers to think it is, particularly family members. It’s why poems written in the style of confessional poetry, in first person, can be difficult reading, there is little wiggle room for the reader, unless you view every poem as fiction, a product of imagination. Who is the greater exhibitionist; the painter or the nude, the poet or the reader, the artist or the gallery?
I find it interesting that Olds views the sonnet form as stifling and I find it liberating. I like structured verse because it provides a canopy under which I can get out of the bright sun and allows fiction to mingle with experience more readily into a nice rosy shade of pink reading glasses.
There are many sides to every failed marriage, particularly if there are children involved and the marriage went on and on, well into their young adulthood; then every member of the family will have their opinion on the matter. When a poet eulogizes their failed marriage in poetry, it takes on a whole new level of sentimentality, there becomes multiple deaths, the death of possibilities. I wrote a number of poems about my failed marriage. None of them were any good. I am not as talented a poet as Olds in that regard. Poetry of failure is not as inspiring as the poetry of discovery, but maybe it’s equally as important. The poetry of failure serves as a glue, to remind us all, that life is complicated. We all fail in our lifetimes, particularly in our marriages. Its just a matter of degrees. Olds’ poem below was a good reminder to myself, to not be so quick to burn the past without forethought as to the portent of the memories that go up in that rich smoke of the lives that were worth living long ago. Even those lives that ended in divorce.
The Easel
by Sharon Olds
When I build a fire, I feel purposeful – proud I can unscrew the wing-nuts from off the rusted bolts, dis- assembling one of the things my ex left when he left right left. And laying its narrow, polished, maple bones across the fire, providing for updraft – good. Then by flame-light I see: I am burning his old easel. How can that be, after the hours and hours – all told, maybe weeks, a month of stillness – modelling for him, our first years together, smell of acrylic, stretch of treated canvas. I am burning his left-behind craft, he who was the first to turn our family, naked, into art. What if someone had told me, thirty years ago: If you give up, now, wanting to be an artist, he might love you all your life – just put your gifts into the heart’s domestic service. What would I have said? I didn’t even have an art, it would come to me from out of our family’s life – what could I have said?
Why has our poetry eschewed The rapture and response of food? What hymns are sung, what praises said For home-made miracles of bread?
Louis Untermeyer
University of One
by Franz Wright
And I’ve lost my fear of death here, what death? There is no such thing. There is only mine, or yours– but the world will be filled with the living. Mysteriously (heavy dear sky-colored book), too, I have been spared the fate of those who love words more than what they mean! My poem is not for example a blank check in pussyland anymore, nor entry in the contest for the world’s most poignant suicide note. Now I have to go–, but meet my friend Miss April snow.
Northern Pike
by James Wright
All right. Try this, Then. Every body I know and care for, And every body Else is going To die in a lonliness I can’t imagine and a pain – I don’t know. We had To go on living. We Untangled the net, we slit The body of this fish Open from the hinge of the tail To a place beneath the chin I wish I could sing of. I would just as soon we let The living go on living. An old poet whom we believe in Said the same thing, and so We paused among the dark cattails and prayed For the muskrats, For the ripples below their tails, For the little movements that we knew the crawdads were making under water, For the right-hand wrist of my cousin who is a policeman. We prayed for the game warden’s blindness. We prayed for the road home. We ate the fish. There must be something very beautiful in my body, I am so happy.
Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product’s something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.
Richard Wilbur
The Death of A Toad
by Richard Wilbur
A toad the power mower caught, Chewed and clipped of a leg, with a hobbling hop has got To the garden verge, and sanctuaried him Under the cineraria leaves, in the shade Of the ashen and heartshaped leaves, in a dim, Low, and a final glade.
The rare original heartsblood goes, Spends in the earthen hide, in the folds and wizenings, flows In the gutters of the banked and staring eyes. He lies As still as if he would return to stone, And soundlessly attending, dies Toward some deep monotone,
Toward misted and ebullient seas And cooling shores, toward lost Amphibia’s emperies. Day dwindles, drowning and at length is gone In the wide and antique eyes, which still appear To watch, across the castrate lawn, The haggard daylight steer.
In the spring of 2019, all the factors aligned for a small explosion of baby toads the end of May everywhere in Minneapolis. It had to be the right combination of moisture, temperature and soft moon light for toad pick up bars. Regardless suddenly in every back yard, every front yard and in every school yard, where there was even a tiny bit of grass and shade there were baby toads in multitudes. Fortunately the lawn that I was helping to keep cut, was tiny, with ample places for baby toads to hop off to safety. The first mowing, with Wilbur’s poem firmly in my mind, I went slow, mowing around them mindfully, even leaving some grass uncut where there were too many toads to let pass in the pedestrian zone. But the things that help baby toads prosper are the same things that nurture grass, and so with the lawn turning into the rough at the U. S. Open after a week and it being even harder to see them, I tearfully admit there was some carnage. Okay, there was lots of carnage, the herd was thinned. By mid June I was still trying as best I could to mow around the survivors, but I began to realize that sometimes when I purposefully went on the other side of a toad I spotted in my path, it would at the last minute jump into harms way, possibly suicidal over the loss of his pals from this evil contraption built to torment them from the week ago, or on a fools errand, sent by the toad general to make a mighty stand against the steel tank. It never ended well, no ceremonial burial beneath the rhubarb like Wilbur, no 21 gun salute. By August I stopped trying. I realized I actually killed less, and by now we were down to maybe .001% of the original population, if I just moved in a straight line at a reasonable speed and let them get out of the way. The survivors had figured it out as long as I acted consistently, the tornado staying in tornado alley where it belongs.
Despite my first hand summer long reality TV experience with Richard Wilbur’s famous poem, you would think I had figured it out then. In fact, Wilbur’s poem just made me more annoyed as the summer passed, I disliked it all the more. It felt pointless, the poem and all the toad slaughter. It wasn’t until the Ukraine war began, and men, women and children, unarmed, are being attacked by tanks, that I suddenly had a connection to Wilbur’s poem. I have no idea what Wilbur intended when he wrote it, but it feels to me like the poetic narration to the CNN clip of the family killed in a mortar attack crossing the street in Kyiv, their deaths replayed over and over again on YouTube, their heart blood seeping out on the pavement.
The problem right now, for me, is that its harder and harder to believe that good always defeats wrong, that light always overcomes darkness. Does it? Not for that family. Not for George Floyd. And maybe the point of Wilbur’s poem is to remind us of this fact; sometimes you have to get lucky and hop at just the right moment in the right direction.
Last night on the way home from work I stopped by my local Trader Joe’s to pick up a few things. There was a car alarm on a late model Toyota going off a few cars away in the parking lot, blaring its sad song. I went in and shopped and came out and it was still at it. Just as I started pulling out of my parking spot, a man approached me, shivering, asking if I could roll down my window. I stopped and we looked at each other for maybe two seconds. We were the same age. He was conspicuously under dressed for the current temperature and wind chill. He had fear in his eyes and I realized I probably did too. The spate of high profile car-jackings across the Twin Cities the past year running through my mind and he probably thinking the same, “is this guy crazy?” I rolled down my window. He said; “I am the biggest idiot in the world, but I think I locked my keys in my car, and I set off the alarm trying to get in, can you help me?” A white person calls the police when you lock your keys in your car and they send out a nice young cop to unlock it for you, even free of charge in Elk River, or they dispatch a tow truck with a door jimmy. In Minneapolis, black men do not call the police to help them open their cars. I said; “sure, hop in.” He guided me to his house about 4 miles away, and he said as we pulled up, “I will be right back, I know where my extra key is, it will only take a minute.” He looked me up and down briefly. His eye’s downcast, imploring silently, unsaid; “are you going to take off the minute I get out?” I didn’t. He came back in about 3 minutes. We drove back and chatted the whole way. I asked him “where are you from?” He said, “Queens”. I asked, “Mets or Yankees?” He laughed, “Yankees!” I said “damn, those Yankees eat the Twins for breakfast.” He laughed again and said, “you have no idea how much I appreciate this.” As we approached his car, he hit the fob and the alarm stopped. I fist bumped him as he climbed out, winked and said, “We were on a mission from God!”, doing my best Blues Brothers imitation. He smiled and said, “I loved that movie. I still lived in New York when Belushi died.” To which I thought, man, was that death pointless….
Chronic Condition
by Richard Wilbur
Berkeley did not forsee such misty weather, Nor centuries of light Intend so dim a day. Swaddled together In separateness, the trees Persist or not beyond the gray-white Palings of the air. Gone Are whatever wings bothered the lighted leaves When leaves there were. Are all The sparrows fallen? I can hardly hear My memory of those bees Who only lately mesmerized the lawn. Now, something, blaze! A fear Swaddles me now that Hylas’ tree will fall Where no eye lights and grieves, Will fall to nothing and without a sound, I sway and lean above the vanished ground.
Teach me, like you, to drink creation whole/ And casting out myself, become a soul.
Richard Wilbur
A Barred Owl
By Richard Wilbur
The warping night air having brought the boom
Of an owl’s voice into her darkened room,
We tell the wakened child that all she heard
Was an odd question from a forest bird,
Asking of us, if rightly listened to,
“Who cooks for you?” and then “Who cooks for you?”
Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,
Can also thus domesticate a fear,
And send a small child back to sleep at night
Not listening for the sound of stealthy flight
Or dreaming of some small thing in a claw
Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.
Richard Wilbur is one of the most celebrated poets of the 20th Century. Few racked up the awards like him; two Pulitzers, the Bollinger Award, Poet Laureate of the United States (the second after Robert Penn Warren), the Frost Award, and you can go on and on. I have honestly never understood or even much liked Wilbur because I never understood his most anthologized poem – TheDeath of a Toad, until the start of the Ukraine war. And now, I relate to it and him completely differently. It made me go back and reassess Wilbur and I found him surprisingly humorous. I also realized what I had always missed before, the context of his use of animals as metaphors and symbols for the tragedy and violence of human existence are informed by a perspective of having survived WWII as a soldier.
Born into men of letters, the descendant of both a father and grandfather who were editors, it was only natural that Wilbur would find a way to make a living with words. Wilbur may be a little too formal for today’s mainstream poetry taste’s. Even in his heyday he was accused by critics that he favored the smoothness of his poetry, picking the rhyme and meter over emotion and content. But, I think that’s rubbish. There’s nothing wrong with wordsmithing in my opinion if the reader can figure out the emotion on their own easy enough. We never accuse a song writer of being too in love with the rhyme in their lyrics, even when the lyrics are complete nonsense, as long as the song writing and singing are first rate and deliver the emotion. Let’s give poets the same freedom to operate. If the reader can’t summon a little emotion of their own, well then, the poet can bring a reader to the handkerchief, but they can’t make them cry….
There is a sneaky complexity to some of Wilbur’s word choices that I had never considered before reading him this week. Take the poem above. Linger on the second word – warping. What’s being warped? Reread it and ponder how darkness changes the things we see in the light and how we all domesticate, normalize, our fears.
The poem below, read it the first time aloud, enjoy the smoothness of the words, don’t give it much thought as to meaning. Then read it again, now that your subconscious has an idea of what lays ahead, and this time consider how much of the imagery and ideas are a defiance of the God of war. Is his reference to a soul unshelled, the idea of it living beyond the husk of our mortal body, or has it survived, intact, endless mortars raining down, surviving as if it hadn’t occurred? Is it a prophet coming to the streets of your city, or soldiers of war?
Advice to a Prophet
By Richard Wilbur
When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God’s name to have self-pity,
Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.
Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?—
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone’s face?
Speak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters. We could believe,
If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip
On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,
These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken
In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Our job is to become more of who we are. The growth of a poet seems to be related to his or her becoming less embarrassed about more and more.
Marvin Bell
Around Us
by Marvin Bell
We need some pines to assuage the darkness when it blankets the mind, we need a silvery stream that banks as smoothly as a plane’s wing, and a worn bed of needles to pad the rumble that fills the mind, and a blur or two of a wild thing that sees and is not seen. We need these things between appointments, after work, and, if we keep them, then someone someday, lying down after a walk and supper, with the fire hole wet down, the whole night sky set at a particular time, without numbers or hours, will cause a little sound of thanks—a zipper or a snap— to close round the moment and the thought of whatever good we did.
Is it cowardice to feel like I can only listen to small bits of the endless news and interviews coming out of Ukraine? I know that being an active witness to fascism is an important part of denying its power, its grip on the oppressed. Witnessing is an act of resistance as long as we hold our democratic governments accountable for actions to help overcome Putin, but it feels like too little when tanks are rolling on civilians. I feel impotent. I know that poetry is not cowardice. I wonder what Marvin Bell would be writing if he were alive today?
Bell was born in New York City, whose parents had immigrated from Ukraine. Bell wrote frequently about his themes of family and reconciliation in the context of his Ukrainian heritage. A celebrated educator at the University of Iowa from 1965 to 2005, he influenced and mentored some of the best American poets of the last 50 years, including Rita Dove, John Irving and Joy Harjo. He was the first poet laureate of Iowa in 2000, while winning numerous awards and honors during his long career.
In listening to National Public Radio interviews with Ukrainians from around the globe, one of their concerns is for their elderly parents who are reliving the invasion of Ukraine during World War II. Several have expressed disbelief that their parents are witnessing tanks rolling into their country once again. It feels like madness because it it is.
Ending With a Line From Lear
by Marvin Bell
I will try to remember. It was light. It was also dark, in the grave. I could feel how dark it was, how black it would be without my father. When he was gone. But he was not gone, not yet. He was only a corpse, and I could still touch him that afternoon. Earlier the same afternoon. This is the one thing that scares me: losing my father. I don’t want him to go. I am a young man. I will never be older. I am wearing a tie and a watch. The sky, gray, hangs over everything. Today the sky has no curve to it, and no end. He is deep into his mission. He has business to attend to. He wears a tie but no watch. I will skip a lot of what happens next. Then the moment comes. Everything, everything has been said, and the wheels start to turn. They roll, the straps unwind, and the coffin begins to descend. Into the awful damp. Into the black center of the earth. I am being left behind. The center of my body sinks down into the cold fire of the grave. But still my feet stand on top of the dirt. My father’s grave. I will never again. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never.
Fourteen Lines 