February 2012
1 post
Antiphonal Pantoum on the Song of Songs
Seems like maybe this is the right day to post a draft from a series I’m writing, on and off, of riffs and variations on that ancient anthology of erotic poems. Also, an intriguing batch of interpretive links is here.
Canticle I
Unhinge, God, my lover’s mouth
and let him kiss me
with the kisses of his mouth
so I will forget wine.
And let her kiss me.
And her word is a balm.
So I will...
January 2012
10 posts
“As the laureate says, poetry is condensed. Text is not condensed, it is...”
– Geoffrey Hill (via ayjay)
Potsherds & Arrowheads by V. Penelope Pelizzon →
“Yes, the depressing part is handling the bits and shreds, then shoveling almost all of them back into the midden. A poet reading through archival work is bound to obsess:Are my poems the rubble of my era? Every page illustrates how nearly impossible it is to make something that’s not simply your age’s typical flaked point. Recent studies of Neanderthal DNA show how closely modern humans are...
‘Why Write Novels at All?’ →
This is where “The Marriage Plot”’s titular enjambment of literature and love — those two beleaguered institutions — is so clarifying. Think about it: I can love you because I want to feel less alone, or I can love you because I want you to feel less alone. But only the latter requires me to imagine a consciousness independent of my own, and equally real.
April Snow by Matthew Zapruder : The Poetry... →
Looking for snow poems, I found this.
AJ writes a Kindle single →
ayjay:
Since the publication of my book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, a number of people have asked me about my history as a reader: what I read when I was younger, how my reading shaped my own development, and so on. They are sometimes surprised to learn that almost all of my…
The Poetry of Deep Winter by Annie Finch →
“[W]henever I drive and find clay exposed in roadside cuts I gather it, carry it...”
– —Henry Varnum Poor from his A Book of Pottery: From Mud Into Immortality
Experience v. Occasion
I’ve thought a lot about this question because, though I’m hardly leading the escapist life of Calvino’s Reader, I too am a Reader of sorts: Reader for this magazine. As such, I see an enormous quantity of work by poets who are hoping for publication. Ironically, it often seems that it’s an inability to get past one’s own experience that causes many of these poems to...
December 2011
2 posts
“What I’m kind of hoping is that this is just kind of a pause, while we...”
– Neal Stephenson. And all God’s people said AMEN. (via ayjay)
manasto:
A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery...
November 2011
2 posts
“Before the crisis years of the AIDS epidemic I had that sense that one does of a...”
– Mark Doty (via ayjay)
“When we actually start to look at the fundamentals, it seems children learn by...”
– In conversation: Alison Gopnik - The Interview - Macleans.ca (via ayjay)
October 2011
7 posts
A Little Apocalypse Poem
Because this is, again, the end of it all, I revised this poem. Who wants this one? Let me know, and I’ll make it a postcard and send it along.
If You Knew the Hour
You would not gather the children close & bunker them
against the day but loose them into the sun’s damning,
unglazed with sunscreen.
Seeing them so free to dig in the yard for...
Post Poem for Sarah C.
Sarah is a fine fiction writer, and she (almost) learned to like poetry. What she loved most, besides offering detailed advice on her peers’ work, was sitting in this window sill with a book or journal. Here’s the postcard poem she requested, along with an image (below) I took of her working one afternoon.
Tracing the Ginkgo Leaf
If you’ve ever lived near a female ginkgo tree in the fall, you’ll know how beautiful their leaves appear in autumn sunlight, and how their berries, when crushed, smell like __________. I lived for a fall with one in the driveway.
I am hoping Grace, a wonderful and surprising poet herself, won’t mind this sad poem showing up in her mailbox. This one draws a bit on a poem by...
Vintage & Anchor: The 10 Oldest Books Known to Man →
July 2011
8 posts
“I’m rather against professionalism—(I only wish I could type better—) and...”
– Elizabeth Bishop in a letter to Pearl Kazin, 1953 (from Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence. Ed. by Joelle Biele. New York: FSG, 2011. vii-viii)
7 tags
3 tags
Post Poem #11, for Mike
Here is a “jealousy” for a grade school and high school classmate who now flies planes and teaches pilots in Saudi Arabia. “Old Testamentish” was, indeed, his line.
This was the image I wish I could’ve put on the other side, but I needed the space for the address:
4 tags
Post Poem #10, for Amie
My cousin, Amie, responded to my call for poems by requesting a poem about our grandfather’s chair, which I own (and had recovered in an unfortunate mauve back in the early 90s). I was surprised about the directions the poem took me. More thoughts on that below the image.
About ten years ago, Billy Collins, while warning about the “limits of memory driven poetry,” quoted Auden...
2 tags
Annotated Post Poem #9, for Hannah
My daughter is away at camp. Her brother and I went camping for a night at a state park in Indiana. We set up our tent, made s’mores, burned things in the fire, slept and came home. Then I wrote (and annotated) this card.
Post Poem #8, for Melody
The Chicago Picasso—irresistible fun, even for Gwendolyn Brooks. So how could I avoid joining the kids sliding down its incline when I was in Chicago last Sat.?
And how could I avoid writing about it, especially for my former colleague and still good friend Melody, who saw the pic and said I had made Picasso happy.
5 tags
Post Poem #6, a riff for Dan L.
The erstwhile Dan L, improv artist, musician, and clever fellow, had spectacular suggestions/requests for his poem.
I will write more later to accommodate his spectacular ideas. In the meantime, a simple riff combining Dan’s prompts and this great postcard of Duke Ellington.
8 tags
Post Poem #5, for Dan T.
This is the image I printed on the front of the card, and the poem below on the other side, for biblical scholar and theologian Dan T, whose most recent book is about Ecclesiastes:
June 2011
8 posts
6 tags
Post Poem #4 for Abigail, in Vermont
Abigail, a poet from Vermont, asked for something on the theme of place. My son helped with this one, clearly.
st
Post Poem #7, for Stephen and Christina
Next to my condo complex is a house where a dude breeds dobermans (dobermen?). They wake me up every day. I know this poem plays on stereotypes—dog, German, otherwise. But it’s for a friend who teaches philosophy and sometimes dresses up as Nietszche. Also, my son asked what he could do because he was bored. I said, paint something? He chose the dogs he could see from his window. The...
9 tags
3 tags
“Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows about,...”
– Frank O’Hara from “Personism: A Manifesto”
5 tags
3 tags
Post Poems
Dear Friends— Inspired by several sources (ask me if you really want to know), I’m embarking on a new project. I’m inviting anyone who knows me/whom I know, to send me your mailing address and I will send you an original poem, written just for you, on a postcard, for free!
I’ll do my best to make the poem as personal as possible—maybe something about our...
May 2011
2 posts
4 tags
Excerpt from a Rapture-Fear Essay
Drafted this just about a year ago. The whole thing is about 5,000 words, and it’s been submitted to a journal where I’d like to see it published, so I don’t feel like I can post the whole thing. But I also don’t feel like I can miss this once in a lifetime (or last in a lifetime?) chance to trot it out.
An excerpt from Enraptured:
I was 8 or 9 the first...
Scrawny cry
That scrawny cry—it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
—Wallace Stevens from “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself”
April 2011
6 posts
Easter Wings by George Herbert : The Poetry... →
And just to balance things out
Easter by Jill Alexander Essbaum : Poetry... →
Holy Saturday, 1998
The skies should not be so bright nor the traffic of birds and cars so quick, so sure of harmony and speed, so strong of voice and engine that they sing and move without hesitation, without pause to hear their thin notes and power doppler and mingle into a kind of suburban praise chorus, the sort we used to sing in college, the words prismed through an overhead projector and splayed across white...
Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward →
Maundy Thursday on the Run
Old poem, from about 10-12 years ago, about the strange Christian practice of foot washing, something we observe on Maundy Thursday as part of Lent. Go ahead. Try it out in the mall yourself. Let me know how it goes.
Maundy Thursday, On the Run
“You also ought to wash one another’s feet.”—John 13:14
To find a body willing is hard. In the mall, I asked old women, young men, a few...
My 64 Poetic Go-To Words →
March 2011
4 posts
Paul Plays a Bourrée | Paul Plays a Bourree - a... →
One of about 40 Bach poems from over the years, this one about Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird,” a song he wrote based on a Bach tune he used to play at parties, on a lark. Ha. Lark.
“I often found myself putting the novel down, and I didn’t always want to pick it...”
– The Pale King Review - Esquire
[via Luke]
(via portraitoftheartistasayoungman)