Poetry

In Memoriam: Claudia Emerson

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Poet Claudia Emerson, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for her collection Late Wife, died last Thursday.

Her other collections include Pinion (a long poem in two voices), Pharaoh, Pharaoh, and The Opposite House, which is forthcoming in 2015.

Here’s her graceful poem “Pitching Horseshoes,” recommended by a friend who studied with Ms. Emerson some years ago.

——-

Last week I posted a short note about Mark Strand; poet Mark Wunderlich (whose most recent collection, The Earth Avails, I reviewed here) has written a lovely tribute to Strand, which I highly recommend. You can find it here, on Bennington’s faculty blog. 

“This morning / when the chill that rises up from the ground is warmed”: Linda Hogan’s Dark. Sweet.

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Last year around Thanksgiving, I talked at little about Joy Harjo’s “Eagle Poem,” and I think I’d like to make it a tradition on the blog to feature poems by Native American poets during Thanksgiving week.

photo (9)I just finished reading Dark. Sweet.*, Linda Hogan’s new and selected poems, and I highly recommend it. Ms. Hogan, a writer and environmentalist, is a member of the Chickasaw Nation, and her poetry reflects both historical and contemporary Native American experience. Her poetry is deeply engaged with nature and personal experience; I loved its lyricism and its emotional engagement. The poems are particularly powerful in they way they capture the tension between the importance of place—rocks, trees, animals, water—and a profound and abiding sense of displacement.

That sense of displacement is evident early in the collection; take the poem “Heritage,” in which the speaker recalls the gifts and images she associates with her family: “From my family I have learned the secrets / of never having a home” (19).

Sometimes a poem drew me in with specific detail, like “Saving,” in which the speaker describes how she, and her mother, and her daughter save things “for good” as my family would say–the clothes that are too nice to wear, the “best towels”—and then expands from the carpe diem note into an exploration of the darkness at the end of each day and the ways we can step out of time.

In “Disappearances,” the speaker recalls traveling with a woman whose “eyes were full”

with the certain knowledge
that it is a good thing to be alive
and safe
and loving every small thing
every step we take on earth. (41)

All things to be thankful for—because, as we know too well, or maybe not well enough, not everyone is safe, or alive, or able to love every step we take on earth.

If you’d like to read one of Ms. Hogan’s poems in full, you can read the marvelous “Deer Dance” on her website (scroll down), and the Poetry Foundation has also collected some of her poems here.

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes, which did not affect the content of my review.

“A little this side of the snow / And that side of the haze”

/ Carolyn O / 1 Comment

It is November, and high time for an Emily Dickinson poem.

Or two. I’m unpredictable.

[IN A LIBRARY]

A precious, mouldering pleasure ’tis
To meet an antique book,
In just the dress his century wore;
A privilege, I think,

His venerable hand to take,
And warming in our own,
A passage back, or two, to make
To times when he was young.

His quaint opinions to inspect,
His knowledge to unfold
On what concerns our mutual mind,
The literature of old;

What interested scholars most,
What competitions ran
When Plato was a certainty.
And Sophocles a man;

When Sappho was a living girl,
And Beatrice wore
The gown that Dante deified.
Facts, centuries before,

He traverses familiar,
As one should come to town
And tell you all your dreams were true;
He lived where dreams were sown.

His presence is enchantment,
You beg him not to go;
Old volumes shake their vellum heads
And tantalize, just so.

[NOVEMBER]

Besides the autumn poets sing,
A few prosaic days
A little this side of the snow
And that side of the haze.

A few incisive mornings,
A few ascetic eyes, —
Gone Mr. Bryant’s golden-rod,
And Mr. Thomson’s sheaves.

Still is the bustle in the brook,
Sealed are the spicy valves;
Mesmeric fingers softly touch
The eyes of many elves.

Perhaps a squirrel may remain,
My sentiments to share.
Grant me, O Lord, a sunny mind,
Thy windy will to bear!

“Who now shall refill the cup for me?”

/ Carolyn O / 6 Comments

Today is Veterans Day in the United States, and Armistice Day and Remembrance Day in other parts of the world; we honor military veterans on this date because the armistice that ended World War I went into effect in the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

I thought I’d mark the day by discussing a poem by one of the war poets; as regular readers know, the literature of the Great War is one of my particular areas of interest, though I’ve been delayed  when it comes to my World War I Reading List post (I should have it in time for the centenary of the end of the war . . . ). However, since I’ve talked about Sassoon, Owen, Graves, Rosenberg, and Blunden already this year, I thought I’d detour (though that’s a misleading word) into the work of one of their contemporaries.

"Tolkien 1916". Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tolkien_1916.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Tolkien_1916.jpg

“Tolkien 1916”. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tolkien_1916.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Tolkien_1916.jpg

Typically pictured as a twinkly-eyed, pipe-smoking scholar,  J.R.R. Tolkien is not often remembered as a veteran, though readers of The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and The Hobbit may know that he served during the First World War; he fought in the Battle of the Somme. Most of his comrades were killed after he was sent back to England to recover from an illness; he spent the rest of the war weak and ill, though he served in various garrisons on the home front.

In the preface to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien wrote, contradicting those who supposed the work was an allegory for the Second World War, that the book was not an allegory, and that in any case the war that shaped him first began in 1914: “By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.” In 1918 Tolkien was twenty-six.

Here’s a link to Tolkien reading “Namárië,” or Galadriel’s Lament, the poem of the week in honor of Tolkien and all other veterans. He reads the poem in Elvish (Quenya, for those keeping score), and you can read the English version below the video.

If you’d like to read more about Tolkien’s experiences during the First World War and their influence on his writing, reliable sources recommend John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth.

In Memoriam: Galway Kinnell

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Strong Is Your HoldPoet Galway Kinnell died last week, and so this weekend, I took Strong Is Your Hold, his last collection, off the shelf and read through it.

It’s beautiful: direct and yet tender, unflinching in the face of death, and very, very human, encompassing both the ugly and the transcendently lovely. He wrote a musical, welcoming free verse that is incredibly appealing.

If you’ve enjoyed the perennial favorite “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps,” or “The Bear,” I highly recommend you pick up Strong is Your Hold. Here’s a link to “Why Regret?,” the last poem in the collection, to give you a sense of its tone.

My favorite poems in the book were  the  tender poems about his first wife, Ines, and their children, as well as three elegies for his friends. I was struck by how easily I cried reading them; I love poetry, but it doesn’t often provoke me to tears. The volume also includes “When the Towers Fell,” a long poem about September 11th, which I think is the best poem I’ve read about the tragedy.

The New York Times’s obituary quotes Galway Kinnell on poetry: “To me,” he said, “poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.”

The person best suited to write an elegy for Galway Kinnell is, of course, Galway Kinnell, but while we wait for someone else to try her hand, here are the lines from Walt Whitman from which Kinnell took his title:

Tenderly—be not impatient,
(Strong is your hold O mortal flesh
Strong is your hold O love.)

“We were born before the wind”: Van Morrison’s Lit Up Inside: Selected Lyrics

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Lit Up InsideVan Morrison’s collection of lyrics, Lit Up Inside*, is out today, and if you’re a fan, you’re going to want to pick it up. Famously private, Mr. Morrison doesn’t often comment on his work, so this selection (roughly 100), which is about a third of his total output, is itself a statement.

The lyrics chosen range from the famous early work (“Moondance,” “Gloria,” “Brown Eyed Girl”) to songs from his recent catalogue. Many are grounded in the singer’s native Ireland, in its cities and working people (the introduction by Eammon Hughes focuses in particular on urban geography), and of course in Van Morrison’s romantic lyricism and interest in the divine.

Like his music, the lyrics collected in Lit Up Inside often defy categorization; some are really lyrics alone, requiring music to reach their potential greatness; some read like Beat poetry; some are prayers. All of them made me want to listen to Van Morrison, which is perhaps the best compliment I can pay the book. 

Thanks to Lit Up Inside, I just revisited two of my favorite albums.  Astral Weeks is just plain brilliant, and who doesn’t love Moondance? “And It Stoned Me” is one of the best songs about childhood of all time. “Crazy Love” is on my top-five list of greatest love songs. “Everyone” was our wedding recessional, and now our son likes to dance to it on sunny Sunday mornings. 

I have maybe five of his forty-odd albums, so I’m not a die-hard Van Morrison fan by any means, but this selection gave me the opportunity to focus on the lyrics alone, and thus Mr. Morrison’s engagement with literature, religion, history, and social concerns (reflected in Mr. Morrison’s choice of the venerable and independent City Lights as the United States publisher).  But it also made me think about how poetry and music make each other, and I think for Van Morrison, even more than, say, Leonard Cohen, the two are inextricably linked.  If you’d like to know Van Morrison better, I wholeheartedly recommend Lit Up Inside.

Here’s a link to “Into the Mystic,” which is the poem of the week.

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes, which did not affect the content of my review.

“the stooping haunted readers”: Louis MacNeice’s “The British Museum Reading Room”

/ Carolyn O / 2 Comments

I just got a copy of Van Morrison’s Lit Up Inside (City Lights), and I’m looking forward to diving in soon (I hope to talk about it in next week’s poetry post).

In the meantime, here’s a poem by another Irishman, Louis MacNeice, which has nothing to do with brown-eyed girls. “The British Museum Reading Room” is, I think, my favorite poem of his, and I hope you’ll tell me what you think in the comments!

In Memoriam: Carolyn Kizer

/ Carolyn O / 3 Comments

Carolyn Kizer, who won the Pulitzer Prize nearly thirty years ago, and who was one of the most respected American poets, died last week. As is too often the case, I do not know her work as well as I ought to, but I’ll be taking the time this week to read some of her poems; perhaps you will too?

I commend to you her utterly charming poem “A Child’s Guide to Central Ohio” and the fiery yet funny “Pro Femina.” Her final collection of poems appeared in 2001–Cool, Calm, and Collected: Poems 1960-2000. 

If you have a favorite Carolyn Kizer poem, please tell me about it in the comments section!

On Meditation and Poetry and Neil Fischer’s [As if the moon could haul through you]

/ Carolyn O / 10 Comments

CarolynOliver_MountAuburnCemetery_October2014I’ve been thinking about mindfulness lately, which is, I realize, sort of ridiculous; instead of thinking about mindfulness, I should just be mindful, right?

I do try, but then there’s always something in the back of my mind– a project for a client, how much Christmas gift-planning I have left (hey, I start early but my Decembers are very relaxed), books to read, reviews to write, wondering if my son will ever outgrow the vegetarian-except-for-bacon-phase, wondering what color I’d paint my front door if I owned a house with paintable front door (purple, but what shade?), how often I should be checking to see if Leonard Cohen is going on tour again,  which houseplant I’ve brought closest to death this week, how much I wish Parks & Rec season 7 was on right now . . . and so on.

I have a few friends who practice meditation,and they seem calmer and better adjusted than I feel, but every time I think about getting a meditation app or reading a book about how to meditate, I’m distracted by something (often a small something who likes to wear three shirts at once, demands very specific, non-findable episodes of Super Why, and recently expressed a need for a “poem-book,” thereby bringing his mother to tears).

Which is all a long way of saying that my one small step toward meditation is reading poetry. Sometimes—most of the time—I can’t read a full collection, but one poem? I can do that.

So this week I’ve been reading and re-reading Neil Fischer’s [As if the moon could haul through you], which is gorgeous, and is about clearing the mind, even if it fills the reader’s with heady images (“the purl of south-bending river”—I swooned, almost).

“Please take / care of me”: Henri Cole’s “Dandelions (II)”

/ Carolyn O / 8 Comments

photo 1 (23)Two of the best presents I’ve ever gotten myself are subscriptions: one to the New York Review of Books (this takedown of Jeff Koons makes my heart sing), and one to Poetry.

It just so happens that this month’s issue of Poetry includes poems by a couple of my favorite poets, one of whom is Henri Cole. I’m declaring his poem “Dandelions (II)” the poem of the week, partly because it’s excellent and partly because it wrestles with questions I’ve been thinking about quite a bit this week, thanks to an interesting article in The Atlantic and Katy Butler’s book Knocking on Heaven’s Door (review to come).  From what do we derive value and pleasure in life, and how do we weigh those values and pleasures as we become old or sick? How can we best care for those who cannot care for themselves? How do we deal with endings?

photo 2 (20)On a related note, I just finished reading Louise Glück’s new collection, Faithful and Virtuous Night. It’s stunning, and I highly recommend it.