Six Words

January 24, 2013January 30, 2013 / Carolyn O / Leave a comment

You’ve probably heard of the possibly apocryphal Ernest Hemingway six-word short story: “For sale. Baby shoes, never worn.”

I’ve been thinking about this flashiest of flash fictions since I saw bits of the inauguration on Monday, when Senator Lamar Alexander stood up and quoted Alex Haley’s personal motto: “Find the good and praise it.”

I love that.

That’s what I’m trying to do, in a small way, here.

And while we’re on the subject of the inauguration, here’s a commentary on the Inaugural Poet’s work, from Alexandra Petri at the Washington Post. Do yourself a favor and don’t read the comments on the piece — people can be truly awful. Ms. Petri gently questions the efficacy of contemporary poetry, through the lens of what she sees as a less-than stellar Inaugural poem. (For another take on contemporary poetry, read Dana Gioia’s “Can Poetry Matter?” here.)

I didn’t see Mr. Blanco read, but it’s the rare occasional poem (and by that I mean a poem written for a public occasion or event) that I find moving or unstilted. Poems aren’t essays; it’s difficult to write one in the best of circumstances, and to write one for a huge audience on a specific theme is more difficult still. Modern audiences aren’t as aurally attuned as the groundlings of Shakespeare’s theatre, or the audience at nineteenth-century recitals, so there’s another challenge.

Ms. Petri asks, “Can a poem still change anything?”

Of course.

Poems change us. Poems written five hundred years ago, poems written yesterday. Poems we write and poems we read. Poems ask us to see the world, even if it’s just a tiny piece of the world, in a new way, ask us to feel a loss or an exultation not our own, ask us to admit our own vulnerabilities, our own inability to know everything. That’s the thread that runs between William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just To Say” and Milton’s impossibly epic–in the true sense of the word–Paradise Lost, which asks its reader to confront questions about life, death, God, fate, sin, knowledge, art, education, war, suffering, love, parenthood, childhood, creation, poetry itself. And more.

Poetry changes us because we change when we face these questions.

“a music that he didn’t hear”

January 22, 2013January 29, 2013 / Carolyn O / Leave a comment

This week, I’m learning Robert Hass’s “Envy of Other People’s Poems.” In ten lines, it asks us how our perception of others’ perceptions of us (get that?) changes us, how myth becomes wrapped in fact. I love the way he describes the sounds of the sea that Odysseus can’t or won’t hear.

“Envy of Other People’s Poems” appears in Hass’s Time and Materials, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. You can find the book here. (“Etymology” is one of my other favorites from the collection.)

“My tippet–only tulle”

January 15, 2013January 29, 2013 / Carolyn O / Leave a comment

This week, I’m returning to a poem I first read in the eleventh grade, Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death.” I loved it then for its vivid imagery and off-rhymes, and now for that and for the deft balance between humor and horror. And that dash at the poem’s end — masterful.

Here’s the poem:

Because I could not stop for Death – 
He kindly stopped for me –  
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –  
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility – 

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –  
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –  
We passed the Setting Sun – 

Or rather – He passed us – 
The Dews drew quivering and chill – 
For only Gossamer, my Gown – 
My Tippet – only Tulle – 

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground – 
The Roof was scarcely visible – 
The Cornice – in the Ground – 

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads 
Were toward Eternity –

“Inside half-heaven unfolds”

January 9, 2013January 29, 2013 / Carolyn O / 1 Comment

Most Like an Arch This Marriage

John Ciardi (1916-1986)

Three years ago today, my now-husband got down on one knee on a very, very cold beach (in his hometown on Cape Cod), and proposed. The scene behind him looked like an Edward Hopper painting; the waves were blue and barely white-tipped, and a pale house with black shutters on bluff, far, far down the beach stood out against the sky. The air was so cold that it gave everything we saw an extra sharpness. Each rock and stone stood out against the nearly cloudless sky and the coarse sand of the beach.

We got a feel for that extra sharpness when we both fell, laughing and crying, after I tried to hug Ben. Monuments of grace we are not, but we’re lucky, three years later, to be as happily in love as we were that day.

This week I thought I’d memorize one of the six poems that our friends and family members read at our wedding (we chose two prose selections too, but that’s for another time). My dear friend Aaron read “Most Like An Arch This Marriage” for us, and you can read it here.

“life’s not a paragraph”

January 1, 2013January 30, 2013 / Carolyn O / Leave a comment

[since feeling is first]

E.E. Cummings (1894-1962)

It’s the first of the year, so a poem that includes “first” in its first line seems appropriate.

For years, starting with an unfortunate foray into “anyone lived in a pretty how town” with a dreadful textbook and checked-out teacher, I was turned off by Cummings’s unconventional punctuation, phrasing, linebreaks, and structure. But now, firmly ensconced in my late twenties, life looks a little more messy than it did at sixteen, and so I rather like the way the lines of this poem splay across the page. I like that I’m left wondering what the “best gesture” of the speaker’s brain might be.

You can read the poem that begins, “since feeling is first” here, at the Writer’s Almanac, and you may find more about E.E. Cummings here, at The Poetry Foundation.