Category Archives: Great Poems Online

Poetry Roundup: Huntington, Luddy, Hecht


Some poetry collections that have recently come across my desk:

Cynthia Huntington’s The Radiant has been on my must-read list ever since a poem from this collection, “The Rapture”, made the rounds on my poetry listserv. (It’s reproduced on the website of Four Way Books, which awarded Huntington their Levis Poetry Prize in 2003.) The book is well-named because a sublime light pierces through her treatment of even the darkest subjects, as in “The Rapture”, describing the seizure that heralded the onset of her multiple sclerosis:


I remember standing in the kitchen, stirring bones for soup,
and in that moment, I became another person.

It was an early spring evening, the air California mild.
Outside, the eucalyptus was bowing compulsively

over the neighbor’s motor home parked in the driveway.
The street was quiet for once, and all the windows were open.

Then my right arm tingled, a flutter started under the skin.
Fire charged down the nerve of my leg; my scalp exploded

in pricks of light. I shuddered and felt like laughing;
it was exhilarating as an earthquake. A city on fire

after an earthquake.
…

A lover’s betrayal is another of the book’s main storylines. Here, she is equally at ease flinging visceral curses at the other woman (“I want to throw stones at her mother’s corpse,/send her children to name-change foster homes”) and depicting the austere beauty of the Cape Cod coastline where she goes to face down her solitude. The latter theme connects the luminous poems in the first section, “On the Atlantic”, where pain and peace somehow coexist in concise verses whose every word feels bought at a great price. From “Vale”:


This vale of tears, this world…
As in: the valley of the shadow
of death, the cloud, the fall,
the unknowing. As when he said
“I’ve had another life”
and his face was lit with escape.

This world is where we die:
place of gardens and fires,
water carried up from streams.
Water carves itself a home
in the lowest place. Can only rest
when there is nowhere to fall.
…

There is no easy hope here, and yet The Radiant is anything but despairing. Though stylistically more accessible, it reminded me of Katie Ford’s Deposition, one of my favorite poetry books, which is similarly haunted by an ineffable God who is sensed through absence and obedient suffering. In “Hades”, Huntington writes that God made the dog “Stunned by desire,/mistaking the vastness /of his hunger for a taste/of the eternal”:


It’s always the same,
so awkwardly sad,
how they stare at you
when you’re making dinner
or having tea and reach
for a biscuit–how they’re
transfixed with wanting.
“It’s not the real God,”
you tell them, “not the food
of this earth.”
But they don’t believe you,
and are not saved,
and that is why a dog
is set to snatch and growl
at shades, starving forever
before the dismal gates.

My only criticism of Huntington is that she sometimes falls too much in love with her own best lines, repeating them more than once in the same poem. Some writers like to do this to give free verse more structure, but I find that it usually dilutes the effect of the line in question, making it seem like a clever prepared remark rather than a spontaneous outcry compelled by the emotions of the poem. The illusion of unguardedness is important to maintain, however much we know that poems this good are the product of careful craft.

****

Wolf Heart is North Carolina author Karon Luddy’s first poetry collection. By turns sassy, nostalgic, heartbreaking and wise, these poems cover some of the same territory as her hilarious and moving young-adult novel Spelldown, about an irrepressible adolescent girl whose love of learning provides an escape from small-town poverty and her father’s alcoholism. As a writer who works in both genres, I found it instructive to see how new facets of the same events were revealed, depending on whether the narrator was the young girl, masking her vulnerability in sarcastic down-home prose, or the mature woman poet, able to assemble the fragments of memory into a clear-sighted yet compassionate picture of a troubled family.

Luddy’s poetic style is simple and straightforward, but she has a gift for apt phrases, folksy yet with a sting. For instance, in “What They Didn’t Cure”, about her father’s hospitalization for pneumonia, she selects a few key details to expose both personal and class-based tensions:

…Has he been crazy like that before? the doctor asked.
No, but he drinks an awful lot, Mama said,
then hung her head
like a little girl who’d been
caught killing a kitten.

Delirium tremens–the doctor pronounced
as if he’d solved the riddle of the Sphinx.
A week later, pneumonia cured,
they discharged my father, his eyes shining like
black marbles he’d won from the Devil.

****

I really wanted to love Jennifer Michael Hecht’s new poetry collection, Funny. Her first collection, The Next Ancient World, came out from Tupelo Press around the time of the 9/11 attacks, and brilliantly anticipated the disorientation of a late-stage empire waking up to the news that its historical moment would pass away like all others before it. For Hecht, a historian and philosopher, humor is always connected to its cognate, humility. As she explains in Funny‘s concluding theoretical essay (which is worth the cover price all by itself), comedy generally arises from someone else’s lack of self-knowledge. Something is funny because we, the outsiders, see the absurdity of a situation that the participants are dead serious about.

In this sense, humor can be a leveling political force, similar to the study of history. To show that ideas have a history, as Nietzsche did in The Genealogy of Morals, is to make formerly self-evident truths appear contingent, and thereby open up space for other ideologies. Hecht’s most recent nonfiction book, The Happiness Myth, applies this genial skepticism to various conceptions of the good life from ancient times to the present. (This book is so well-written that she nearly persuaded me to get high and march in the Greenwich Village Halloween parade, which suggests that the Athenians had a point about the dangers of philosophy.)

Funny is a high-concept book that unfortunately didn’t animate its theoretical skeleton to my satisfaction. I loved the premise: each poem is an extended riff on a somewhat corny joke, imagining back-stories for the characters and exploring what their predicament reveals about human alienation and mortality. I bought the book on the strength of “Hat Trick”, one of the best in the collection, which I read on The Cortlandt Review website. Other favorites in this book were “A Little Mumba” and “Chicken Pig”. Too many of the poems, though, were not as tightly written, feeling more like scattered notes for a philosophy lecture, without an emotional investment in the characters.

I wonder whether Hecht has fallen prey to a type of spiritual exhaustion that I’ve seen in writers who look too long at death without forging a connection to the transcendent. It’s the same mood that darkens absurdist-philosophical comedies like Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life or Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide series, as well as the later works of poets Stephen Dobyns and Mark Strand. Perhaps “life as cosmic joke” falls flat by Hecht’s own standards because a godless universe has no outside vantage point from which we can laugh at our own short-sightedness on earth. There’s no possibility of getting outside, no larger context to shrink our agonies down to scale. Without the Divine, perhaps there can be no Comedy.

Christmas Carol: Sing a Different Song


Sing a different song now Christmas is here,
sing a song of people knowing God’s near:
The Messiah is born in the face of our scorn,
sing a different song to welcome and warn.

Shout a different shout now Christmas is here,
shout a shout of joy and genuine cheer:
Fill the earth and the sky with the news from on high,
shout a different shout that all may come by.

Love a different love now Christmas is here,
love without condition, love without fear:
With the humble and poor, with the shy and unsure,
love a different love. Let Christ be the cure!

Dance a different dance now Christmas is here,
dance a dance of war on suffering and fear:
Peace and justice are one, in the light of the sun,
Dance a different dance, God’s reign has begun!


Music: Different Song John Bell (20th C)
Words: The Iona Community (20th C)

Hear the music here. Merry Christmas!

Readings for Christmas Eve: Darkness and Light


The Christmas season is a time of contrasts. In a dark cold night, the light of a star offers hope. The King of Kings is born in a humble manger. The church’s Advent readings draw this contrast even sharper. When the society around us is celebrating with holly-jolly cartoon characters and piles of presents, we’re asked to think about repentance, prophecy and the end times.

Why dwell on sin and death as preparation for Christ’s birth? Otherwise we would miss the true world-colliding awesomeness of the event. “Peace on earth, goodwill to humankind,” we say, as if good intentions made it so. But peace and solidarity are fragile flames, always in danger of being blown out by the dark winds of violence, power struggles and prejudice. Forget this and we forget to shield them against the enemies that arise within and without. God as infant is not merely born into love and cuddles, but into all the vulnerability of being human in a sinful world. Like all of us, he is born to die — but not only to die, as Easter tells us.

So Christmas is not the end of the story. It is still part of the between-times that do not reach their resolution until the Second Coming, and so we read Bible passages about the continuing war between darkness and light.

Yet light will win in the end. How do we know? Not because of overpowering military force, but because of this baby who was born. How improbable, how full of grace.

Christmas Bells
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
    And wild and sweet
    The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
    Had rolled along
    The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till, ringing, singing on its way
The world revolved from night to day,
    A voice, a chime,
    A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
    And with the sound
    The Carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
    And made forlorn
    The households born
Of Peace on earth, good-willl to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
‘There is no peace on earth,’ I said;
    ‘For hate is strong,
    And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!’

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
‘God is not dead; nor doth he sleep!
    The Wrong shall fail,
    The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men!’

Elisha Porat: “Metamorphosis”


        To the memory of Arieh Lahola

He did not attempt to saw the bars
but carried his cage around on his back:
days, nights, years, ages.
And when the gleam of the water beckoned,
the small pleasant ripples tempting him,
its heavy weight pulled him to the depths.

He did not kick and did not rail
just sank, succumbing to
the river: resigned, passive, estranged,
so far from the Land of Israel.

He did not chant and did not speak,
language deserted him in the bubbles
empty, soft, dizzying.
His throat was waterlogged and he
choked, stifled, was transformed
and floated, voiceless and without language:
A rhythmic hum emanated from him,
his swollen legs twitched
and his arms beat like those of a drummer.

        Translated from the Hebrew by Cindy Eisner

Read more work by Israeli poet Elisha Porat in the journal Deep South, from which this poem is reprinted by permission. Deep South is a publication of the University of Otago, New Zealand.

More Thoughts on the Prose-Poem


In the latest issue of Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry, my friend Ellen LaFleche reflects on how the prose-poem genre, occupying a space that is betwixt and between, can be especially fruitful for exploring the identity disruptions produced by illness:


I experience diabetes as a disease that lives on and between boundaries. For example, the person newly diagnosed with diabetes is told that they have “control” over the disease process. Achieving this “control” involves a difficult regime of diet, exercise, self-education, glucose monitoring, frequent labwork, and numerous visits to specialists. But diabetes is also a progressive disease, a reality that even the most dedicated diabetic cannot change. And even someone with tight control over their blood glucose levels can experience complications. So the idea of “control” is both a reality and an illusion. Some experts claim that diabetes can even be “reversed” with various dietary supplements such as cinnamon capsules or fenugreek seeds. These did not work for me, and I had to struggle with feelings of guilt over not being able to miraculously reverse my illness. Perhaps the most confusing boundary was when a specialist told me that I could be a “healthy person with an illness.” What did that mean? Was I ill, or healthy? Or both? Can a person be both ill and healthy at the same time?…

I had written and published four prose poems before I realized how strongly I had tapped into my unconscious feelings about illness. All of the fairy tale characters were struggling with some form of disability or illness. In my first prose poem, Rapunzel has suffered a stroke (a possible complication of diabetes.) (“Rapunzel Recovers from a Stroke”, Patchwork Journal, online here) She cannot speak, so she spits fire at the nurse who wants to cut off her archetypal long hair. Rapunzel’s hair is her power. I realize now that this poem helped me to prepare myself for a possible future complication. Yes, I will spit fire at any person who tries to take away any part of my power or dignity.

In “Identity Theft”, (Silkworm, 2007) Rumpelstiltskin experiences rage at his situation. He has been promised the queen’s firstborn son – he did, after all, save the queen’s life by spinning straw into gold. But the queen refuses to honor her side of the bargain. She deceives him by stealing his identity. Rumpelstiltskin has lost control – something that I deeply fear as a try to manage my illness – and he feels justifiable anger. He splits in half, “a kind of split personality.” Only after seeing this prose poem in print did I realize that the words “split personality” reflect my struggles over the daily duality of control vs. non-control, over the strange duality of illness vs. health.
Ellen’s poetry appears in this issue of Wordgathering, along with African poets Tendai Mwanaka and Omosun Sylvester, and other well-known names.

I used to tell people that I was a poet because I had too short an attention span to write prose. (So how did I end up writing two novels at the same time?) At the Poets.org site, Lynn Emanuel’s entertaining, edgy prose-poem “The Politics of Narrative: Why I Am a Poet” echoes this sentiment:


…And then he smiled. And that smile was a gas station on a dark night. And as wearying as all the rest of it. I am many things, but dumb isn’t one of them. And here is where I say to Jill, “I just can’t go on.” I mean, how we get from the smile into the bedroom, how it all happens, and what all happens, just bores me. I am a concep- tual storyteller. In fact, I’m a conceptual liver. I prefer the cookbook to the actual meal. Feeling bores me. That’s why I write poetry. In poetry you just give the instructions to the reader and say, “Reader, you go on from here.” And what I like about poetry is its readers, because those are giving people. I mean, those are people you can trust to get the job done. They pull their own weight. If I had to have someone at my back in a dark alley, I’d want it to be a poetry reader. They’re not like some people, who maybe do it right if you tell them, “Put this foot down, and now put that one in front of the other, button your coat, wipe your nose.”

So, really, I do it for the readers who work hard and, I feel, deserve something better than they’re used to getting. I do it for the working stiff. And I write for people, like myself, who are just tired of the trickle-down theory where some- body spends pages and pages on some fat book where every- thing including the draperies, which happen to be burnt orange, are described, and, further, are some metaphor for something. And this whole boggy waste trickles down to the reader in the form of a little burp of feeling. God, I hate prose. I think the average reader likes ideas.
…
Read the whole piece here.

Poemeleon Prose-Poem Issue Now Online

 

Online literary journal Poemeleon has just released its latest issue, which is devoted to the prose-poem. In addition to poetry by Jimmy Santiago Baca, Christina Lovin, Eve Rivkah, Cecilia Woloch, yours truly, and many others, Ann E. Michael contributes a thought-provoking essay about typography as a conveyor of meaning.


Poetry has been represented through the typographic art for several centuries; but until recently, few poets have spent much time considering how typography affects the form of the poem. After all, the printed page seems “merely” physical, inanimate, without the breath, rhythm and music that vivify the poem in performance (even if the reader performs it silently, while reading). The printed page has traditionally been the realm of the editor or designer, not the poet who is more accustomed, perhaps, to confrontations with the blank page. But now that we can, essentially, typeset our work as we compose, poets are becoming more aware of how margins, line spaces, and tabular settings can be indicators in the work and alter the form in which the poem is presented—can animate it further. I think prose poets, in particular, could discover in typography a tool with which to push this flexible form in interesting directions.

In verse, a good poem is more effective with its line breaks intact. Even lacking line breaks, the form will peek out from the justified margins because the rhythm, the rhyme, the breath is imbedded. A verse-poem’s line operates on rhythm (and, when read aloud, breath) foremost, with phrasal pacing as a sort of minor premise. With prose, semantic pacing, and the sentence as a unit, have the upper hand. Pacing and rhythm are dependent upon syllabic stress, word choice, sentence length, punctuation, and line breaks, which act as visual cues. In prose poems, the writer/editor’s choice of margins on the page may also be used as visual cues.

With prose poetry, perhaps even more than with free verse, because the formal structure is not on the surface, traditionalist detractors may assume that the form is a thoughtless free-for-all. Prose poetry removes the familiar cues of rhyme, meter and line breaks that tell us “this is a poem”. Like abstract painting, this can foreground other aspects of the artist’s materials that we formerly overlooked. Though it risks becoming gimmicky (a flaw I find in much “concrete poetry”), creative typography can illuminate the significance of the visual choices we make when writing and reading.

Aficionados of the prose poem can read more examples and essays on the subject in the journal Double Room.

“The Race Unwon” and Other New Writing by “Conway”


My prison pen pal “Conway”, who is serving 25-to-life at a maximum-security facility in California for receiving stolen goods, has sent me another packet of exciting new work this month:

The Race Unwon
by Conway

Like withered old leaves on a Hanged mans tree
absorbing the useless sun’light they save
to power only an abandoned memory
inside dreary chill shadows of his grave

with unquenching air recycled-n-stale
our sun was walled out of existence
unable to recover warmth from the veil
brought on by the shame of persistence

unnatural walls, kneeling left pleading
yet still a judgment remains sitting
among the rubble of babylons leading
thrown-up, jumbled enormous forbidding

In these volumes of created humanity
necromanced from the living dead
Baptized by fire with insanity
running cold as the blood being shed.

Chase me away from their stench
erase their stench from me
I’ve no more vengeance to quench
nor do I desire this bitter memory

though the waves still sing your song
over & over with pounding pain
those stone-washed kisses so strong
break on the horizon in vain

On the border this concrete grows
a burial ground for the spurned
as conspicuous injustice glows
gleefully while innocents burned

into my barbed-wire cradle I settle
as it winds-n-twines around twirled
trapped inside this thorny nettle
no sunbeam’ steal into our world

left abandoned we learned to choose
we allow nothing into our heart
sad but true, the worst race we lose
will be those we never did start…

****

Trapdoor

Our eyes have groped thine melted sands
us trees in the snow reaching out for warm light
suffocated by whiteness.

the Sun only dissolved the asphalt
reflected the concrete, crumbling like stale crackers.

All these faces tied together on the same chain
staring out through a teasing televisions lens;
A world of opportunity offered and taunted
without scents, never relents.

So close, but yet so far away;
This distant planet’s rebuked
by icy winds
forgetting their place in the pecking order
listening for prompts
still the only sounds offered
turned into useless static
untuneable noise, apologizing
for a despicable crowd’s opinion; wonder
about thunder’s irrelevance.

When the earth falls open, to swallow your soul
then, like a trapdoor spider
closes back up to hide the hole…

****
In the Chalk

I never liked the chalk board in school
it reminds me of another day
when my sister went away
they called her JANE DOE
because no one claimed her body when she died
But, I was there that day
it was the last time I cried

You see this woman had a future growin’ up
but now that’s all in the past
she grew up in the ghetto some say way too fast

At first she went to church
it gave her proper focus as she excelled
when situations became tough she hardly made a fuss
from the madness she rebelled

All the players in the hood kept missin’
whenever they tried to get at her
and though their game was tight
to her they didn’t matter

but as the years went by
her attitude began to change for the worse
her demeanor decomposed, and
she started dressing like a tramp and began to curse

she put her pops to shame
and started getting passed around a lot
so he blamed it on our mom, said it was her fault
for all the slutty clothes she had bought
“just look at how the girl walks
and God have mercy the way she talks”
she’s only just a child and already got a kid
you can’t blame it on the daddy
it must be something the momma done did

They both knew her life was in danger
when she started walkin that walk
but never thought the day would come
they’d find her in the chalk

I found her outline that night
on the corner of our street
under a streetlight where all the gangsters meet

I snuck out of the house
and watched them take the yellow ribbon down
when those cops cars rolled away
I approached the spot with a frown

That chalk told a story of an empty death
of someone all alone
an angry pool of blood was in the chalk
when I saw it I started to groan
I fell to my knees and started to cry
I looked up in tears and asked “God O why”

Why sister did you have to leave
you told me God was just, you made me believe

My tears were falling in the chalk
as I lay in her last place
then the sky burst open and lightning flashed
I looked up and saw her face
there were tears in her eyes
as she looked down on me with a smile
then the rain washed the chalk and blood off the sidewalk
I followed it for a while

down the gutter it went and finally to a drain
and when it disappeared
I swear I felt my sister’s pain

When I graduated college
I came back to pay her a last visit
I sat down by the drain pulled out my diploma
I graduated sister this is it

I couldn’t hold it in no more
my tears started falling
they fell into the drain and I swear
I heard my sister’s voice to me calling

She told me she was happy
I grew up to be an honest man
“keep working for the future do right the best you can”

Just remember one last thing
“talk is only talk”
you can always walk away
don’t end up in the chalk…

****

Notwithstanding the above poems, Conway also has a comic side, as in this recent exchange from our letters. On Nov. 3, I wrote:


With the advent of cold weather, squirrels have invaded the roof above our bedroom. It’s amazing how much noise they can make, considering their size. It sounds like a hockey game up there. Adam tried throwing pepper in the hole (he even had the carpenter cut a little door in the wall for this purpose), then hanging an inflatable owl off the dining-room window, and now we have the bedroom computer playing owl-sounds all day. Whoo whoo! Whacka whacka! As of today, the roof-repair guys are finally here to patch the hole, so the exterminator can come and not worry that the critters will get back in as soon as he leaves. The rule is that if he catches them alive, he either has to kill them or release them on our property—too bad, because I can think of a few people to whom I’d like to deliver a sack of live squirrels.

He responded on Nov. 27 with the following anecdote:


A friend of mine got the shaft on a business transaction. She was not able to physically recoup her losses and law enforcement was out of the question, if you know what I mean. So, homegirl goes down to the pet store and buys $40 worth of crickets, then she buys 5 Hefty trashbags full of packaging peanuts. Enters the domicile of the party and dumps crickets & nuts all over the building. Chirp! chirp! yee haw!

Poetry Roundup: Teicher, Rodriguez, Rose


In the course of researching winners of major contests for the next Winning Writers newsletter, I came across some exceptional poems online that I wanted to share with readers of this blog. One of my New Year’s resolutions for 2008 will be to get caught up on my review copies because there are so many exciting new books being published. Here, samples of three very different authors:

Jennifer Rose’s second book, Hometown for an Hour, has won several prizes including the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award. Structured as a series of postcards from cities ranging from Gettysburg to Mostar, the book explores experiences of rootlessness and belonging. For instance, in “Provincetown Postcard“, she writes:

The street’s deserted,
as if a villain and the sheriff were
about to shoot it out, though nobody
peers from behind these shutters
except the endless pairs of sunglasses
staring toward June. Eight o’clock.
A church bell and one foghorn sing an aria
so poignant I want to cry. The marina
swizzles its lights into the harbor.
It’s Tuesday. I must be the last tourist
in P-town. How paradoxical “home” is–
you must get sick of it to earn the right
to have to stay in spite of that. I’ve never been
able to take any place for granted
like these year-rounders I see scratching
their lottery tickets at the Governor Bradford.
Where would they go with their winnings?
How do we know where we belong?
…

Read more poems from this book at her website.


Chicano author and activist Luis J. Rodriguez has written several acclaimed volumes of poetry as well as a memoir about growing up in the gangs of East L.A. He is now an advocate for disadvantaged youth, and the founder of Tia Chucha Press in Chicago. Read excerpts from his work at the Academy of American Poets website. In the title poem from his collection The Concrete River, he depicts barrio youth getting high on inhalants to escape from their bleak urban landscape into a beautiful, dangerous hallucination:

…We aim spray into paper bags.
Suckle them. Take deep breaths.
An echo of steel-sounds grates the sky.
Home for now. Along an urban-spawned
Stream of muck, we gargle in
The technicolor synthesized madness.

This river, this concrete river,
Becomes a steaming, bubbling
Snake of water, pouring over
Nightmares of wakefulness;
Pouring out a rush of birds;
A flow of clear liquid
On a cloudless day.
Not like the black oil stains we lie in,
Not like the factory air engulfing us;
Not this plastic death in a can.

Sun rays dance on the surface.
Gray fish fidget below the sheen.
And us looking like Huckleberry Finns/

Tom Sawyers, with stick fishing poles,
As dew drips off low branches
As if it were earth’s breast milk.

Oh, we should be novas of our born days.
We should be scraping wet dirt
        with callused toes.
We should be flowering petals
        playing ball.
Soon water/fish/dew wane into
A pulsating whiteness.
I enter a tunnel of circles,
Swimming to a glare of lights.
Family and friends beckon me.
I want to be there,
In perpetual dreaming;
In the din of exquisite screams.
I want to know this mother-comfort
Surging through me.
…

Read the whole poem here.


Craig Morgan Teicher’s collection Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems won this year’s Colorado Prize for Poetry. In this poem, “Ten Movies and Books”, first published in La Petite Zine, disjointed capsule summaries of unnamed classic movies and books turn out to be more about the reader’s bewilderment and longing than about the books themselves. Excerpt:

9

The twist is that, the whole time,
while he’s been trying to help
the boy, who is plagued
by his ability to see and speak with the dead,

Bruce Willis is dead. I’m sorry.

I’ve ruined another movie. But someone else
probably told you already. It’s still good, even if

it’s ruined for you.

*

Poems are meant
    to be read
in private, in bed, when

no one else is in the bed
    with you.
Never speak about poems.

Never tell anyone that you
    have heard
of them. Every poem

that someone discusses
    with someone
else disappears or breaks.

In fact, even reading a poem
    to yourself
hurts what little chance it has.

10

Holden Caufield
is pissed about everything.

He goes on and on.
Everyone just wants to make him better,
but he is too beautiful

for the world. Maybe everyone is
until they turn sixteen
or seventeen. After that,

maybe only some are too beautiful.
…

****
I will break Teicher’s rule #9 by directing you to read the whole poem here.

 

Christina Lovin: “Coal Country”


I.
What I can’t remember, and what I can:
my mother washing coal dust from the necks
of Mason jars filled with last summer’s jams
and vegetables, their lids and rings black
with grit, contents obscured then visible
beneath the touch of a damp flannel rag
she wiped across hand-printed labels,
then dipped again into an enamel pan
where gray water settled from suds to silt.
Those cloths were always discarded, never
used for dishes again, deemed unfit
for the kitchen. Fifty years are over
now: I’ve known sullied cloth and family:
how some stains never wash out completely.

II.
Some stains never wash out completely,
but my mother’s mother, Mary, would scrub
worn work camisas for the soiled but neatly
oiled and pompadoured Mexican railroad-
tie men who came to coal country laying
the wooden ties two thousand to the mile.
Boiled in lye, bleach in the wash and bluing
in the rinse, the shirts emerged starkly white
and innocent as angels. But these iron horsemen
of the Apocalypse, bearing spikes and crosses
for coal and cattle, carried pestilence
with them in that Spring of early losses-
my grandfather dead of flu in ’17-
not knowing the damage that would be done.

III.
Not knowing the damage that could be done
we swam in the bright green lake of caustic
water. We thought it daring fun to plunge
beneath the foamy surface, opalescent
with chemicals that oozed unseen from dull
slag heaps: gray hillocks of thick detritus
left from the processing of newly-mined coal.
Knox County was blessed with bituminous
veins, cursed with the scars of its retrieval.
By the sixties, production had slowed down
to a handful of mines that were viable:
the older underground shafts abandoned,
while strip mining left the once-lush landscape stark,
rusted hoppers spilled coal beside old tracks.

IV.
Railroad hoppers spilled coal beside new tracks
as my mother, at ten, scurried along
the crisply graveled rail bed, packing sacks
of burlap with the fuel that had fallen
from overfilled cars. On her lucky days,
the bags grew heavy quickly and no snow
fell across the hills or, ankle-deep, lay
filling up the trackside ditches below,
where the tiny tank town of Appleton,
Illinois, lay crammed into the valley.
And sometimes, when the weak winter sun
grew thin as gruel from a caboose galley,
kind wind-burned men climbed atop the coal cars
and the black heat was gently handed down to her

V.
This was how the black heat was handled: First,
the topsoil was peeled back by bulldozers
and piled aside for reclamation. Burst
through with draglines, the veins lying closer
to the surface were fractured, making it
easy to scoop the coal from the ground.
Crushed and separated, refined for what-
ever use it was destined: fine powder
for the power plant at Havana, coke
for steel, stoker coal for industry, egg and lump
for the furnaces of homes. Shale, sandstone,
pyrite-impurities-were hauled away and dumped
like wasted lives: what helps and what hinders
and what remains: dead ash and cold cinders.

VI.
And this is what remained: dead ash and cold cinders,
carried in an old coal hod to the driveway,
dumped in the low places. Rusty clinkers
of stony matter fused together by
the great heat of what warmed our little home
on sharp winter mornings. And in summer
the sunlight spiked off the marcasite nodes:
jewels that scraped and stung, lodging under
the skin of my shins and knees when I fell
from my bike to the cinders and gravel.
White scars remain to remind and foretell:
the last delivery truck of T.O. Miles;
shadows filling empty corners of the coal
room: one small, high window like a square halo.

VII.
One small, high window with a square halo
of light around the ill-fitting metal door:
coal lumps heaped up the walls. Dust billowed
through the air, covering the worn brick floor,
my father’s tools stored inside for the winter,
and the many shelves of calming jars, contours
soft beneath a veil of dull black. Heat sent
rising through the grates above and the roar
of the ancient furnace were a living
pulse to which we pressed our ears and bodies,
until the natural gas lines reached us, ending
our affair with coal. But like lost love’s memories
swept clean, damp days a dark stench still rises and chokes
with what I can remember, and what I won’t.


Copyright 2006 by Christina Lovin. Reprinted by permission.

Christina’s poem has won numerous prizes, which should come as no surprise. Most recently, it was awarded the “Best of the Best” prize from the online journal Triplopia, a contest for poems that have already won first prizes in other contests. Triplopia editor Tracy Koretsky’s commentary on “Coal Country” is a model of how poetry critiques should be written, full of insights into poetic form, prosody, and layers of meaning. Read the commentary and Tracy’s interview with Christina here.

What? You haven’t bought Tracy’s novel Ropeless yet? What’s the matter with you? Go here now.

“Once Again” by “Conway”

 

“Conway”, my pseudonymous correspondent at a maximum-security prison in central California, has gone another round in our poetry war with “Once Again”, a response to my poem “A Difference of Opinion”, which was itself inspired by Stephen Dobyns’ “Artistic Matters” from his 1996 book Common Carnage. And the beat goes on…

A Difference of Opinion
by Jendi Reiter (1996)

Once there was only the mud
and one-celled things with just enough 
    purpose
internal to themselves to be alive,

but too soft to fossilize, leaving no trace
of themselves in history except the evolved 
    pattern
for whose sake billions of them were flung away 
    by nature

like soldiers or confetti.
Finally the moment came
when they began to prey upon one another,

cell against cell, and only then
did nature sit back in satisfaction
to watch the sharp beauty of spikes grow,

the monumental callousness of armor,
the cunning of hooks, all the hard immortal 
    variations
that make scientists exclaim, “Wonderful life

in which there are so many things to study!”,
as Cain’s children cried,
those founders of music and brass and 
    iron artifice.

To be a predator is to know many things.
The prey knows one big thing: how to run.
From this single-mindedness the idea of 
    purity grew.

That took care of us for centuries.
Now we know only many little things again,
but purity makes us fear to let them collide.

For nature, who fears no decisions,
the purpose of difference is war.
The best head may arise,

a brighter feather, a harder hand.
Of all the newborn spiders casting their threads 
    on the wind
a few survive, the rest are birds’ food and 
    dust.

The purpose of speech is hesitation.
Even utopias can’t be discussed
in case the lion and the lamb

have a difference of opinion,
the lamb feeling entitled to a paradise of 
    its own
where it needn’t pretend to forgive

the lion, who simply wants to go on
being haughty and idle and unshaven.
That black fly keeps buzzing and banging against 
    the window

of your study, disturbing the reasoning
of the opinions you’re writing. What keeps you
from crushing it with your thumb?

###

Once Again
by Conway (2007)

An Amoeba brought forth a cure
the lure of life, end of boredom
from the dull lull of granite.

Then, incontent to be alone
it detached, dated itself (literally)
connections were made, to be broken

leaving a token to share, or
care for, when splitsville came.
For shame! could this be incest?

We detest the word, action
but that bird, those bees, flowers
trees all carry the same obnoxious disease.

Life, O’so simple the sound
that separates us from dirt
the ground that becomes granite.

Is this all we can expect of our planet
or will we be separated again
like an amoeba to begin

a separation nullified
the preparation multiplied, infin.;
to be tossed in a soup

as the stomach turns, churns
“these are the days of our lives”
brought to you by, our sponsor.

That all mighty amoeba, he who
she do — always leave you
alone to split, then spit again

on the hand that feeds
or lonely heart that pleads
bleeds the land then leaves

a mess, of amoeba bodies strewn
behind the trail instead, wed
as earth swallows up her dead.

So now you see, the dirt
is not so boring as once thought
for here the granite’s caught

feeding while it sleeps
seeding though life weeps
through the soil of earth.

We find nature in this story
the glory of our planet
from the dull lull of granite…