I Said to the Wanting Creature

I Said to the Wanting Creature

I said to the wanting-creature inside me:
What is this river you want to cross?
There are no travelers on the river-road, and no road.
Do you see anyone moving about on that bank, or nesting?
There is no river at all, and no boat, and no boatman.
There is no tow rope either, and no one to pull it.
There is no ground, no sky, no time, no bank, no ford!

And there is nobody, and no mind!
Do you believe there is some place that will make the
soul less thirsty?
In that great absence, you will find nothing.

Be strong then, and enter into your own body;
there you have a solid place for your feet.
Think about it carefully!
Don’t go off somewhere else!

Kabir says this: just throw away all thoughts of imaginary
things, and stand firm in that which you are.

 Kabir (trans Robert Bly)

 what it means

The speaker addresses the part of himself that wants/desires/craves. He says to that part that there is no place “where the soul is less thirsty”: there’s no place where those cravings will go away. Instead of trying to rush off to a better place, know yourself and be content.

 why I like the poem

 I find the tone of this poem delightful. The speaker chastises himself while being full of wonder. Normally, I’m not a fan of exclamation points, but here the speaker just feels so full of wow! wow! that I didn’t mind them.

 craft

 This is one of the poems that Dia and I picked for our epiphanic article, so here’s a preview of what we’ll be talking about. This poem follows the five-step model we uncovered for making a powerful poem that centers around an epiphany.

Step 1: ground the speaker in the real world

 “There are no travelers on the river-road, and no road.

Do you see anyone moving about on that bank, or nesting?”

 All of this happens in a real word of rivers, roads, banks, nesting birds.

Step 2: Make a bridge into a whirl

“What is this river you want to cross?”

In this case, he literally uses the word “cross.” It’s a literal crossing, but it’s also a crossing between states of mind, moving to an out-of-body/out of mind experience.

Step 3: The whirl

 “There is no river at all, and no boat, and no boatman.
There is no tow rope either, and no one to pull it.
There is no ground, no sky, no time, no bank, no ford!

And there is nobody, and no mind!”

In this whirl, the entire real world has been erased as well as the body and the mind. We are gone, gone, gone.

Step 4: The epiphany

 “Do you believe there is some place that will make the
soul less thirsty?
In that great absence, you will find nothing.

Be strong then, and enter into your own body;
there you have a solid place for your feet.
Think about it carefully!
Don’t go off somewhere else!”

This is what the speaker has now realized: There is no better place. You’ve got make it work right here.

 Step 5: Return to the everyday

 “Kabir says this: just throw away all thoughts of imaginary
things, and stand firm in that which you are.”

Suddenly another voice enters the poem. It’s like someone has been observing the speaker all this time and now speaks up. The speaker is no longer alone in the ungrounded land of epiphany.

Stay tuned for all the methods we discovered for these 5 steps.

From the Desire Field

From the Desire Field

what it means

 Two lovers are in bed together. The speaker has anxiety and insomnia. She’s going to cope with them by reframing. Because she trembles with anxiety, she’ll call it “desire” instead. She says her mind at night is like a beast wandering the fields. She tries to reframe insomnia as something beautiful like spring. Near the end of the poem, she stops trying to cope on her own and asks her lover to help her, to tell her a story that will help her go to sleep.

You can look at something awful and see it as beautiful.

It's ok to admit you need help and to accept it.

why I like the poem

Did you find this poem completely incomprehensible on the first reading? I did. I often talk to friends (looking at you Jim) about the difference between hard poetry that is hard because it’s poorly written gobbledygook and hard because it asks the reader to think hard, to read slowly and carefully, to believe the poem will reveal itself to you with enough effort. That’s frankly why I like this poem. I found it hard, but the more I worked at it, the more I figured out until it blossomed in front of me. I’ve started asking my friends to guide me through fields of art they know well (still looking at you Jim) and trust me when I say they can understand a good hard poem with some support from their trusty poetry guide.

craft

Did I mention that Dia and are writing a book (very early stages) where we share craft moves we learned from reading other poets? Here’s a sample page based on this poem.

Craft move: Imply the premise.

Section of the book it goes in: Leaps

Example: “From the Desire Field” by Nathalie Diaz

I don’t call it sleep anymore.
             I’ll risk losing something new instead—

Analysis:

Here the logical argument she is making is: calling something by its name means you risk losing it. She starts by saying what she won’t do given that premise: I don’t call it sleep anymore. And then what she will do because of that premise: I’ll risk losing something new instead—

She never says the premise. The reader has to infer it. This is also an incredible way to sneak in a wisdom statement; you assume its truth.

Debby’s Tries

Premise: counting 5 things you see can stop you from killing yourself.

I take a breath and say out loud:

yellow leaf in the driveway

songbird

bright red Japanese maple by the front stairs

the brass knob set too high

the yellow door

I repeat for as long as it takes—

scorching seconds, frozen hours.

I want to live.

DB

Premise: If you knock on the stranger’s door, you risk becoming a new person.

We have new neighbors.

            I won’t risk changing my life.

DB

Moses

Moses

 Give me your hand. We have to cross

the river and my strength fails me.

Hold me as if I were an abandoned package

in a wicker basket, a lump that moves

and cries in the twilight. Cross the river

with me. Even if this time the waters

don't part before us. Even if this time God

doesn't come to our aid and a flurry of arrows

riddles our backs. Even if there is no river.

Luis Alberto de Cuenca

Translated from the Spanish by Gustavo Pérez Firmat

what it means

There is an unnamed threat. Maybe a persecution, a war, but we are not safe here, and we need to escape. I ask you to help me make it to a new place and to come with me. Even if the story we are telling ourselves is not true in all its facts, it’s emotionally true; we need to escape.

We are as precious as Moses. We might not be named by God as important, but we are important.

why I like the poem

I feel so much love in this poem. That first line “give me your hand” is a command, but a command to be together. Same with “hold me.” I also really like this way of using the Bible. The writer assumes we all know about Moses being left in a basket in the bullrushes. The poem builds off that background knowledge.

craft

That last line blows my mind. You mean you are allowed to undercut the facts you just laid out? This is not the cop-out of “it was all a dream.” This is like the energy of being thrust off the earth into a new equally valid but much stranger space.

There’s also a lot of cool duplicating with variation in here. Like “We have to cross the river” becomes “cross the river with me” and the three “even ifs.”

Fairy-tale Logic

Fairy-tale Logic

Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks:

Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,

Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,

Select the prince from a row of identical masks,

Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks

And snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote,

Or learn the phone directory by rote.

Always it’s impossible what someone asks—

You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe

That you have something impossible up your sleeve,

The language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak,

An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke,

The will to do whatever must be done:

Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son.

A.E. Stallings

what it means

Fairytales ask us to do impossible tasks, but we are up to the challenge with our own magic or will to do the excruciating. 

Sometimes to survive we betray ourselves.

why I like it

I like mythology and fairy tales, and I like that Stallings knows this world so well she can write authoritatively in the voice of any of the characters or about the genre as a whole. I heard her read this fall, and she was witty and wise. I feel the poem is the same way. It taught me something new about fairy tales and then the ending does this fabulous turn from cheerful to devastating.

craft

Stallings is all about form. She only writes in form, but some how she makes it seem effortless. This sonnet doesn’t feel forced, no weak rhymes.  I love the conversational tone. I am a little surprised at the capitalization of the first words. That seems a bit old school for the tone of this poem, but, of course, fairy tales are very old school.

Under the River Go the Faces of Everyone I Have Ever Loved

Under the River Go the Faces of Everyone I Have Ever Loved

I think the world broke a world record today

For the number of people in it who cried.

Iggy Pop cried, as did most of Greenland.

Five hundred babies cried at exactly 2:43 AM

And another five hundred at 2:44. The President

Has a secret room where he likes to go shed tears.

Not even the Secret service know about it.

What if I told you the President called me up

Crying. He did. I told him, Buck up, little tomato.

Talent scouts cried at the dearth of talent.

Frogs got the blues bad in the chemical bog.

Worst of all were the spilled milk drinkers

Who sobbed like it was the end of the world. It was.

When the devil cries, he sheds tears of real diamonds.

The contestant eliminated for making

A bland risotto cried, but thanked everyone

For the opportunity to cry. I got a surprise call

From my ex, who never calls, calling me in tears,

Something about her new husband’s prognosis.

You could hear him in the background, banging

Around, lumbering, swearing to anyone how he

Was going to the kitchen to make some goddam eggs.

That’s their secret passcode for baby, let’s fuck.

You cried that time your pearl of toothpaste fell

Off its toothbrush and landed in the pedestal sink,

And you cried that time your car hit a mama deer

And it’s gotten to the point like you and me and everyone

I know and even half-know, have been crying ever since.

John Loughlin

Copper Nickel

Under the River Go the Faces of Everyone I Have Ever Loved 

John Loughlin 

what it means

Here we are with the whole world in tears, the death of everyone we have ever loved.

I’m not sure what it means.  Here’s a guess. Yeah, the stupid pop culture stuff we cry over like losing a reality cooking contest on tv is stupid and fake, but it’s not. It’s part of the general despair and sadness we are all feeling as we get the terminal diagnosis for ourselves and the planet.

why I like it

Dare I say it. This poem is funny. I mean, yes, I know it’s all about crying and everyone I know and half-know going under the river, but Iggy Pop? That’s funny.  Buck up little tomato is really funny. I love how this poem can be both hilarious and devastating at the same time.

craft

So, on the one hand I’m a strong advocate for concrete details and on the other hand, magic realism delights me. Those babies, the president. . . the author is making these details up to convey the enormity of the whole world in tears.

I can imagine the author, journal in hand, pulling out random notes about the day the ex called, and a half remembered image of a pearl of toothpaste and letting them all find their way into this poem. I want to jam as much disparate stuff, as much real and unreal into one poem.

You are in the dark, in the car

You are in the dark, in the car

Claudia Rankine

what it means

Racism is endemic in the United States.  It is in every fiber of our beings.  The stress of racism is killing Black people.

why I like it

Sure, there are plenty of stories about racism that happens in worlds totally different than mine—the South, the hood—but this work is about racism in my upper middle class academic world. It hurts. It hurts like hell, but I want to know it.

 Claudia Rankine is one of the most important poets writing in America today.  I heard her read in 2016. She was incredible. She combined videos and photos with these poems.  

craft

 Let’s not argue about the definition of poetry right now, shall we.  This is some hybrid—a lyric essay, a book long poem, an argumentative essay made of poems— this is in the poetry world right now.

Magdalene--The Seven Veils

Magdalene—The Seven Veils

Marie Howe

what it means

 Mary Magdalene, the prostitute in the Bible that Jesus embraced as one of his disciples, is explaining the devils in her. The devils are the types of things that happen to us all—worry, compulsion, fear that no one would understand you.

 We are all plagued by devils.

 Mary Magdalene is not so different from any of us.

why I like it

 Don’t you love the idea of busyness as a devil? And of course, worry.  She had me right there.

 I can’t say Howe is my new favorite poet because I’ve been reading and loving her work since I read her book What the Living Do some time in the late nineties.  But Howe is certainly my current role model because she does in this book exactly what I’m trying to do in my new book—retell a Biblical story in poetry with lots of modern references thrown in.  I find this poem funny, conversational, and giving me new insights into what a devil is and how it works in your life.

craft

I like how this poem sets up the context in the title and epigram and then jumps right in.  This taking a Biblical figure and mixing in modern day stuff as though that woman is living right here in our world—that is exactly what I’m trying to do in my work, so it gives me great permission to see her doing it.

I’m fascinated by how she revisits the seven devils, but they keep changing.  It would have never occurred to me to do that. 

Apocrypha of Light

Apocrypha of Light

 On the first day, light said
Let there be God.
And there was God.
Light needed shape to move inside,
a likeness tawny and thick-maned.
It strode into the absence we call night
and what it tongued
sparked visible then glowed,
warmed by its golden spittle.

 It splashed and rolled in water
till rivers and seas could not be parted
from its gleam. It lingered
on the hourglass
of August pears; on blackbird,
bear scat, calves’ blood;
on the hand of the beloved,
it’s unlikely flare.

 It went everywhere, glossed all
that waited to be seen. At last
it slipped into the farthest corner – 
there, it stumbled. Stopped.
Hid its brightness and would not move.

 What in the dark did it wish it hadn’t found?

 Not arbutus limbs, an otter’s head
just above the sea; not orange pips,
fish fin, a panther’s muscled plush.

 Now you make a list of things.
Remember light’s likeness, remember
this is the beginning of the first day. 

Lorna Crozier

what it means

 This is an origin myth about the start of the world except in this version Light is the originator and makes God as well as everything else.  Light is powerful but not all powerful.

 We all need to make an origin myth.  We all need to know what is in our dark.

 why I like it

Rachel Rose suggested I read Crozier after I told her I was working on poems about the Bible.  So, I like that Crozier’s taken on this same project. I happen to love Bible stories and origin myths and variations there of. I like this image of the initial power of the world being like a lion licking us into being. But, I picked this poem for the “Now you make a list of things.” That line gives me shivers every time, how it turns to the reader and makes them think about what in the dark they wish they hadn’t found.

craft

 Well, that line “Now you make a list of things” is breaking the fourth wall. How often do I turn and address the reader? Never. The lists she makes of where light lands and where it doesn’t are so interesting. She jumps from the natural world to the hand of the beloved from the quotidian orange pips to the romantic and powerful panther. Poems are supposed to juxtapose and surprise us like this. Note to self.

[if to say it once]

If to say it once 

And once only, then still

To say: Yes.

And say it complete,

Say it as if the word

Filled the whole moment

With its absolute saying.

Later for “but,”

Later for “if.”

                      Now

Only the single syllable

That is the beloved,

That is the world.

Gregory Orr

[untitled] 

Gregory Orr

what it means

Say yes.  Open your whole heart. Drop all your fears and hesitations. Say yes to love.  Say yes to loving the world and being a part of the world.  God is yes.

why I like it

Gregory Orr is my new favorite poet. I know I said that about Jess, but they both thrill me in different ways. And they are both doing exactly want I want to do as a poet. Unlike Jess who brings in history, politics, identity, as well as the playwright’s craft of creating characters and a narrative, Orr, in this book at least, is all worship.  Every poem is a prayer.  He reminds me a lot of Ladinsky’s translations of Hafiz, just ecstatic yes.  

Like prayer, this poem reminds me of my deepest values. This is how I want to be in the world. I don’t want to be caught by petty insecurities or even real doubts and fears. I want to throw myself open to the beloved in an ecstatic yes.

 craft

 Ok, my next goal is to write a poem with this level of authority in the speaker’s voice.  I mean the audacity of just telling the reader how to be at the deepest spiritual level. I also like the short words and short lines. One craft element you won’t realize from this poem alone is really this entire book is one poem.  The individual poems aren’t titled and the book is called How Beautiful the Beloved.  I highly recommend it.

The Golden Shovel

The Golden Shovel

The Golden Shovel

 Terrance Hayes

what it means

 In the first section, a father and son are out exploring the night, including a pool hall. They witness a neighbor hit his son. We learn this is discipline for the types of behavior that eventually end this boy up in prison or possibly for defending his ma. I got confused in that part. But this section ends with the father and son praying together to survive.

In the second section, I’m not sure what’s going on. Is this homeless people in a tent city? It’s much more imagistic than narrative. “Born lost and cool/er than heartache.” I don’t know what this means, but it makes me think African American, homeless, young hip and denied.

 This is what it’s like to be Black in America.

 why I like it

 I love this father and son. I got caught up in their lives, hoping they would make it. I’m always fond of getting stories, especially of lives I don’t know, through poetry. The second stanza feels more like listening to music: it moves me but I don’t understand lines like “What we/break is what we hold. A sing-/ular blue note.” And then, I really like this poem for the craft.

craft

 Hayes invented a new form called a Golden Shovel. I’m guessing a lot of you know the Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “We Real Cool.”  Here it is:

 We Real Cool

 THE POOL PLAYERS. 

                   SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

Now, look at the last word of every line in Hayes’ poem. If you read down, you will read this poem. And, oh my gosh, he does it twice. First, I love the magic of that crafting. I’ve tried to write a golden shovel and, as often happens with form, it helps you say things you hadn’t expected.  But I also like how the two poems talk to each other, how you have a second layer of meaning to the Hayes poem because the Brooks poem is embedded in it.

What is Known

What is Known

                           for my brother Michael

the office            my desk         phone

ringing   our mother’s voice   the news

the office            my desk         phone ringing

our mother’s voice

the news in my hand   the office desk

phone ringing   mother’s voice in my hand

her voice in my hand ringing

our mother        her voice        the news

ringing   ringing

Elizabeth Austen

What is Known

Elizabeth Austen

what it means

 A woman answers the phone.  Her mother is calling to tell her her brother has died.  I’m not sure you can get all that from this poem alone, but I read the poem as part of Austen’s book, Every Dress a Decision, and poems about the death are interspersed so eventually a fuller picture emerges.   

 Shock, death, grief create gaps in our lives.  We don’t flow as we normally do.  We speak and think in stutter stops and in fragments.

 Death is so huge we cannot grasp it, so we grasp at tiny objects and sounds to ground ourselves.

why I like it

I’ve known about Austen for years because when I first came to Seattle, I took her workshop on reading poetry out loud—so helpful.  She was recently the Washington State poet laureate and taught a workshop I went to on making great titles.  All this has little to do with why I like this poem, but I just want to say, I like her whole book, Every Dress a Decision, and I just picked this poem.

 Love, death. . . poets struggle to write about the big topics without being redundant, boring, or cliché.  I think this poem does so. 

 craft

 Simple words, repetition, white space in the lines, lack of punctuation.  I mean, for heaven’s sake, this poem only has eight main words.  How is it possible to tell so much with so little?  The repetition reflects the speaker’s inability to find the words to talk about her brother’s death.  The white spaces hold all that she isn’t saying.  And the lack of punctuation reiterates that there is no control or closure over this moment.

Are All the Break-Ups in Your Poems Real?

If by real you mean as real as a shark tooth stuck

in your heel, the wetness of a finished lollipop stick,

the surprise of a thumbtack in your purse—

then Yes, every last page is true, every nuance,

bit, and bite. Wait. I have made them up—all of them—

and when I say I am married, it means I married

all of them, a whole neighborhood of past loves.

Can you imagine the number of bouquets, how many

slices of cake? Even now, my husbands plan a great meal

for us—one chops up some parsley, one stirs a bubbling pot

on the stove. One changes the baby, and one sleeps

in a fat chair. One flips through the newspaper, another

whistles while he shaves in the shower, and every single

one of them wonders what time I am coming home.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Are All the Break-Ups in Your Poems Real?

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

what it means

The poet is asked the age-old question: did you make this up?  First, she chastises the questioner: even if the details are made up, every dang emotion is real, and that’s what matters, right?  Right?! Then, she answers flippantly that it is also real that she married all those men she broke up with and imagines her life with them all.

why I like it

She’s just having so much fun with this poem. I can’t wait to try the exercise, imagine what my ten husbands are doing around the house right now. And that last line is such a zinger, turning what seems like a rather nice fantasy into a not so nice one. This poem feels a bit like a stand-up comedy routine.

craft

I love the sounds in this poem just listen to “shark tooth stuck” all one syllable, all jabbing at you. And then “stuck” ends one line, “stick” the next, such fun with language.  Did you notice this is a sonnet?  Well, a blank verse sonnet.  It doesn’t rhyme, but it does take some wild flights of fancy and contain them.

Six Years After My First Son’s Death

Six Years After My First Son’s Death

At my younger son’s baseball practice,
a dad talks about his two boys—
all that energy and wrestling at bedtime.

I know I should use the old bread
when I make my son a sandwich,
but I open the new.

It’s wasteful.

Like the hours I spent
pumping milk for my dead son.

Memories of my two boys
flash like reflections
off windshields.

The two of them jumping on the bed,
shrieking with joy,

until they broke the lamp—
shards of glass.

Light
wasted all over the floor.

Chanel Brenner

Sugar House Review

Six Years After My First Son’s Death

Chanel Brenner

what it means

A mother has lost a son, but you knew that from the title.  A mother resents a man whose sons are still alive. Is it really wasteful to have poured time, love, and energy into someone who then dies? Yeah, I don’t think she really thinks so, but these lines

 Like the hours I spent
pumping milk for my dead son.

 feel like a flash of anger at the universe for taking her son.

 That “waste” that shows up three different ways in the poem is giving me shivers.  What does it mean that the light has been wasted? It is a wrong that cannot be corrected.

 Anger. Resentment. The beauty of brothers.  

why I like it

Well, you know I have an affinity for plain spoken poems, grounded in the real with strong imagery to carry the emotions.  That pretty much describes this poem.

The tiny detail of wasting the bread to give this remaining son the very very best breaks my heart along with the self-castigation for doing so.

craft

How do you write about the unspeakable? This poem tackles the death of a son. I’m not sure I could write about such a topic without overwhelming myself and the reader with emotion. This poem uses small moments and symbols to carry the emotions a bit more quietly while still being devastating.

I’ve recently been to a title workshop, and I’m fascinated by this one. It sets the scene, creates an expectation, does tons of emotional work, so the poem can zoom in on little details.

x

x obeys algebraic laws,

but resists particularity.

It’s the placeholder of uncertainty

like the notion of God.

A variable, a kiss, a chromosome, x signs

legal documents in two concise strokes.

It could be me, you, or the number of poppies

we planted out back by the fence last Sunday.

After so many days of rain, the afternoon

was sunlit, translucent. Perfect as an integer.

Mary Peelen

Quantum Heresies

X

Mary Peelen 

what it means

The symbol x means something in math, but it also means many different things in the real world. Math is not distinct from God, nature, and love. 

Abstract intellectual thought is not distinct from the real world.

You are my beloved.

why I like it

I believe it. There’s a certain authority to this voice (and if I knew how she created it, I’d be all over it) where I believe what she has to say about math and God. I also like how it moves from a philosophical discussion to basically a prayer of thanksgiving for a perfect day with the beloved.

about the book

Math as trustworthy parent. Math as infinite gorgeous support. What a delightful surprise for those who might fear math. In these poems, numbers come alive and math lets us see the beauty and devastation in the world, connects us to faith, and interweaves with all aspects of being human.

craft

Check out these line breaks:

It’s the placeholder

of uncertainty

like the notion of

God.

Every time the poem moves to a new line, I am surprised. 

 I’m intrigued by the “you.” I tend not to address some unknown you, but here the next few lines clearly establish the “you” as someone who shares a house and probably a life with the speaker. I’m going to try bring in a “you” late in a poem.

 My review of her book Quantum Heresies is up onthe Adroit Journal.

Ruby’s Bar Graph

Ruby’s Bar Graph

Ruby inserts Justin Timberlake’s photo behind the creaky plastic window in her wallet, so each time she opens it, she can hear him singing God must’ve spent a little more time on you. She memorizes his birthday (1/31/81), favorite color (baby blue), favorite word (crunk), and parents’ names (Lynn and Charles Randall). During study hall, Ruby makes a bar graph of how much time God has spent on her classmates, where x = hours and y = beauty. On you on you on you, you, Justin sings, lifting his arm to point at her.

Lisa Low

published in Waxwing

Ruby’s Bar Graph 

Lisa Low

 what it means

 A Junior High girl has a crush on a teen idol. She uses the crush to enhance her self image.

 The route to loving ourselves is not always smart or good.

 We all need to find a way to love ourselves.

 why I like it

 All the concrete banal details crack me up, and I believed them.

I suppose you want me to say something wise about why this works as a prose poem and what actually a prose poem is, but I’m stumped. I don’t know why we’d call this a prose poem and not a mini-story for instance. It doesn’t matter to me. No matter what, the final image slays me every time. My heart beats a little faster, and I start to cry when Justin points to her.

I happen to like poems that are plain spoken and easy to read while still packing an emotional wallop.  

 craft

 I love that this is a story poem not an “I” poem. That distance gives me room to hate and love Ruby a little more.  I have no idea if Low made Ruby up, but I hope so. I imagine her pulling details from her own life and the heart wrenching agony of being a preteen to create Ruby.

 Low is being very careful with syntax. Every sentence is a different music. 

Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude 

Ross Gay 

what it means

Gratitude overall, even in the face of drug abuse, inner city rot, mental illness. Notice the world and be grateful. Notice your friends and be grateful. Notice the small kindnesses strangers do for each other and be grateful. There is so so much to be grateful for.

why I like it

I heard Ross Gay read at the Seattle Arts & Lectures series, and it was joy beginning to end. He grinned the whole time. He told us about his gratitude journal. He told us about the garden he helped build in the inner city. I just wanted to hang out with him the rest of my life.  

I mean how can you not get happy with a line like “the compost writhe giddy and lick its lips” or this:

I can’t stop

my gratitude, which includes, dear reader,

you, for staying here with me,

for moving your lips just so as I speak.

Here is a cup of tea. I have spooned honey into it

Anyone offers me honey, I’m there.  And even though I did get tired reading this poem, how can I resist when he knows it too but can’t help himself because he is so full of gratitude?  

craft

He is breaking the fourth wall and speaking directly to the reader.  I still don’t think this is a typical technique, but now, I really want to try it.

This is a really long poem, and one of the things I want to learn is how to write long poems.  One way is long sentences. Notice that first stanza uses lots of fabulous diction to twist and turn its way through one question.  He also uses those semi-colons for all their worth. I suspect that he kept the gratitude journal for years and then plumbed it for moments to put in this poem. I think he might have also kept a “things that make me miserable” journal and found ways to be grateful for them.

Besaydoo

Besaydoo

Besaydoo 

Yalie Kamara

 what it means

A mother and daughter are sitting in the car drinking coffee. They overhear two probably Black American teenagers talking to each other. The mother cannot understand them, but the daughter parses out “Alright, Be safe dude.” The family adopts the phrase “Besaydoo” as a mantra to get themselves through difficult times. 

Those others aren’t so different from us. 

We are all living in a danger zone and we must care for each other.

why I like the poem

 Like the speaker, I find the moment extremely tender too, one teenage boy in a danger zone telling another to be safe. I also have a secret family language like “applesauce talk” or “Moo” that have become touchstones of connection in my family.

craft

Really interesting turns in this poem. The scene in the car watching the boys is three stanzas, with a turn in the middle as the mother realizes what the boys are saying. Then there’s a bigger turn to how the family uses the saying in a stanza, and then an even bigger turn to what it means to speak a spell out loud, the power and risk of it. Each turn gives me shivers. 

martha promise receives leadbelly, 1935

martha promise receives leadbelly, 1935

when your man comes home from prison, 

when he comes back like the wound 

and you are the stitch, 

when he comes back with pennies in his pocket 

and prayer fresh on his lips, 

you got to wash him down first. 

you got to have the wildweed and treebark boiled 

and calmed, waiting for his skin like a shining baptism 

back into what he was before gun barrels and bars 

chewed their claim in his hide and spit him 

stumbling backwards into screaming sunlight. 

you got to scrub loose the jailtime fingersmears 

from ashy skin, lather down the cuffmarks 

from ankle and wrist, rinse solitary’s stench loose 

from his hair, scrape curse and confession 

from the welted and the smooth, 

the hard and the soft, 

the furrowed and the lax. 

you got to hold tight that shadrach’s face 

between your palms, take crease and lid 

and lip and brow and rinse slow with river water, 

and when he opens his eyes 

you tell him calm and sure 

how a woman birthed him 

back whole again.

Tyahimba Jess

martha promise receives leadbelly, 1935

Tyehimba Jess

what it means

Leadbelly (1888-1949) was an African American blues musician who spent seven years in prison.  Martha Promise was his wife.  I found this rather amazing video of the two of them. This poem speaks from Martha’s voice about helping Leadbelly transition from prison to home by literally washing him.  

why I like it

Tyehimba Jess is my new favorite poet.  He’s published two books: Leadbelly, which tells Leadbelly’s life story through the various people in his life, including him; and Olio, which looks at the lives of African-American performers before and after the Civil War.  Both books take a person or period of history that fascinates me and tell the story through poetry.  It’s almost like reading a play with each character getting their chance to speak.

This poem makes me cry.  I like the hope in it—that it is possible to wash away the pain of prison.  And that extra layer that even if it isn’t possible, you just convince your love that it is; “you tell him calm and sure,” and your confidence will rescue him.  I like that the speaker knows it is her job to care for him.  I feel such great love, confidence, and responsibility in this poem.  It makes me want to be a better person.

craft

Blues music sets the pattern for this poem.  The Academy of American Poets says, “A blues poem typically takes on themes such as struggle, despair, and sex. It often (but not necessarily) follows a form, in which a statement is made in the first line, a variation is given in the second line, and an ironic alternative is declared in the third line.”  

You can hear that rhythm underlying the repetitions in the first stanza and stretched out over the next three.  Of course, Leadbelly was a blues musician, so this is a very clever convergence of form and meaning, but I also like how the blues, which can be so much about endurance, is here used to talk about recovery.  

I’m also in love with the vocabulary in this poem. I like the specific healing herbs like wildweed and just the music of “the furrowed and the lax.” I particularly like all the connotations of calling Leadbelly “shadrach,” a Biblical man who walked through flames because he refused to bow down to the man.  

katherine with the lazy eye. short. and not a good poet

katherine with the lazy eye. short. and not a good poet.

what it means

 A woman finds out that a high school classmate has been found dead in an abandoned building, her body twisted. There’s an implication that she has been raped. The speaker didn’t even like Katherine and certainly kept her distance from the slow ugly girl, but she finds herself grieving.

 The speaker realizes she might not be so different from Katherine.

 Everyone deserves care and respect. 

 why I like the poem

 One aspect of poetry is taking an unvarnished look at yourself. For that, this poem wins gold stars. I cannot look away from how the speaker holds herself accountable for how she thinks of Katherine as other—bad poet, bad morals, loser in jobs and love. I want this level of courage.

 She also takes a theme I hold dear—that everyone is of value—and does it without annoying moralizing. 

 craft

 It’s both extremely concrete in its scene setting—the McDonald’s uniform, the styrofoam cups—and very subtle in how it parses out other information. How do we know that the speaker and Katherine are Black? Because of the picnic tables full of white people. What we see over there, tells more about what’s center stage. The attack on Katherine happens off stage but this line “your body was supposed to be as twisted as / it was gonna get” lets me know it was brutal.

 Think if she had just called this poem “Katherine.” Boring. In the biz, we call that a placeholder title, the one you put down as you are writing. This title is so funny—a lazy eye is funny in an uncomfortable, are we really going to mock other people’s flaws kind of way; the uncapitalized fragments with periods are funny syntactically; and calling someone else a bad poet in your poem is funny in a did she really just throw that much hubris on the page? I laugh uncomfortably every time I read this title. And by making me find it funny, harris makes me culpable. Because I have laughed, I too am on the journey with the speaker; I feel ashamed, and I too realize that Katherine is someone’s beautiful baby. 

Pike's Peak: 1957

          Pike's Peak: 1957

There was the week my mother drove from Texas
to Colorado with her parents, her sister
on the jump seat in the back of the station wagon
the trunk itself bountied full of sunflowers
my child mother picked roadside wrought with ants that crept
from the petals but how could she know?
She never saw them.

When they got to Pike's Peak her mother swam the lake
in a swimsuit pink and faded, hair slicked back
against her head, face washed free and eyelashes
invisible blonde and newborn.

Small waves splashed stones as she climbed
from the water, towels quickly in her hands
on her children, and sometimes my mother remembers
how later she wanted to see her, the woman
from the water again just dripped
just bright, just blurred in the sun
so fresh and vibrantly rendered.

Andrea Spofford
The Pine Effect

---

Pike's Peak: 1957
Andrea Spofford

what it means

A daughter is telling a story her mother told her about a trip her mother took. 

We have moments where we see the world in a completely new light.  Seeing her mother emerge from the lake is such a moment:

from the water again just dripped
just bright, just blurred in the sun
so fresh and vibrantly rendered.

why I like it

I know this moment of suddenly seeing someone you love and who is so familiar in a new light.  It's magic.  I also like the secrets in the poem.   We know the ants are a problem, but we don't know what happened.  I like how this moment is in such liminal space--between states, between one view of the mother and another, between the water and the land.

I feel like there's a second story this poem hints at: what does it mean that the mother told her daughter this story about her childhood? what does that tell us about the current relationship?  I appreciate the layers in this poem.

craft

Spofford is good at turning nouns into adjectives or verbs.  In this poem, "bountied," is her made up word that works so well.  I definitely need to try out this technique.

It's hard to pick the right details and depth with which to tell a story.  In this poem, each stanza is its own close-up of a small moment that add up to the larger whole.  It makes me wonder whether the author started with a much larger story and narrowed down or invented from a bare outline.