Last Day of April

At my class meeting last week, the instructor, when asked about his appearance on a Colorado Public Radio program to talk about poetry, said he really didn't like National Poetry Month. "We should celebrate poetry and the arts all year," he said.

I agree. That's the problem with delegating a month or week or day to anything. Earth DAY? We live on the earth. We should think about it every day. Ideally, poetry would be more a part of people's lives throughout the year. Part of my goal for the blog this month was to allow readers to think and write about poetry on their own terms, in the hopes that more poetry would begin to permiate their lives.

I think that all of the guest posts allowed us to do just that. We considered poetry as a place of refuge and poetry as a guilty pleasure. We saw how poetry can connect friends throughout the years or... in my lucky case... be a catalyst for a new and lasting relationship. We read original poetry, saw connections between poetry and music, and considered the source of poetic inspiration.

As you can see by the relatively small number of posts by me over the past 30 days, I could have never have celebrated National Poetry Month alone. I actually did a lot of poetry-related work this month, for my class and on my manuscript, but sadly not as much as I wanted was for the blog. So, as April turns to May, I want to extend my invitation for guest bloggers. I can think of at least three people who had hoped to write guest posts, but like me, were too busy to get to it in April. If you would like to help me in extending the spirit of National Poetry Month throughout the rest of the year, I would still love to hear from you. And I, as much as I am avoiding it, still have to finish my "History and Influences" series. In fact I think I am going to vow that part 4 of it will be this next post on this blog. And I have a lot of cute Easter pictures and a list of new Amelia words to post. So maybe that will help hurry me along.

On this last day of April, though, I will leave you with a few more poetry-related links.

This is the radio program that featured my instructor mentioned above, Chris Ransick.

And finally, one of my favorite poets, Kay Ryan, won this year's Pulitzer Prize for poetry. You can read about her life and see some of her poems here. Her poems are like tiny, dense universes. Read them twice, aloud, for wonderful surprises in sound and subject.

And until the next time, happy poetry.

Special Guest Post-

All of the guest posts have been special to me, but this one was written by someone whose writing--be it an email, a legal brief, a note on a birthday card, or what's below--always makes me fall for him a little harder.

Until I got to college, I saw poetry as I suppose many teenagers do -- an outlet
for emotion and pent-up angst. My first poetry class, one on 20th century poetry, changed all that. For the most part, I couldn't understand the poetry we read on my own. But the instructor -- Dr. Lensing, for those who took English classes at UNC -- was very good at explaining them, not just what they meant, but the subtle beauties in sound, texture, and rhythm. I liked virtually everything we studied, but I was particularly drawn to the likes of Philip Larkin, e.e. cummings, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Frost. I suppose these poets are very different from one another, but one thing they have in common -- and probably what drew me to each of them -- is their relative straightforwardness. They all write beautifully precise poems using simple language and form. No need for a dictionary or a scholar's command of literature. By now I've realized that, like Liz Self, I like poetry I don't have to work too hard at.

Which brings me to the real subject of this post. I met Kim in college. There were a lot of things I fell in love with about her, but a main one was her writing. I bragged to my roomates about it and made them read her poems. (None were poetry-reading types, but they were patient.) Kim wrote (and writes) like all the poets I like write. Her poems are direct, precise, and uncluttered by allusions I don't understand. There is nothing pretentious about them. Since this is for her blog, I won't go on and on, but I love her writing. These days I don't read much poetry on my own. But I read all of Kim's poems, at least once she's ready for me to see them, and I'm proud to think of myself as something like an editor or at least someone who can make reasonably intelligent comments and suggestions. I suppose all this is to say that, for me, poetry is intertwined with my life with Kim. It was one of the first things I loved about her and remains so.

Guest Post: On subjectivity or just a rant really

Today's post was created by an old high school friend of mine, Chad Edwards. Chad, a musician, created a piece of music to accompany a poem by Emily Dickinson. Listen to the song and read the poem below. You can hear more of Chad's work on his blog, There's A Lot to Hear, which is now included on my blog list. Thanks, Chad, for this great multi-media post!




Emily Dickinson's I Felt a Funeral, in my Brain


I'll make a very subjective statement about subjectivity now: all is within the domain of subjectivity. Yes... everything period. Is that an oxymoron? Yeah, probably, but oh well, welcome to life! Right now you could easily and correctly be saying to yourself, you're full of it,
because breathing air is not subjective, my friend! All right, I won't deny you your subjective opinion so we'll just move on.

Why would I be talking about subjectivity when Kim's blog topic is poetry since it's National Poetry Month? Well, when it comes to the perception of poetry/art, subjectivity to me is the alpha and the omega, so to speak (well all perception in general but I'm struggling not to derail this sucker here). Without this subjectivity all art would have a correct/incorrect way or be either good or bad, right or wrong, black or white, and so on. Though I don't see much usefulness coming from that sort of situation.

While thinking about what to write about for the blog, I was looking into the poem I chose for the song: "I felt a funeral in my brain," by Emily Dickinson. I noticed the many interpretations of the meaning of the poem itself. Now there is nothing inherently wrong with trying to discover the meaning behind things...in fact, I'd venture a guess and say that this searching could very well be a big part of our existence! But many times I worry that people seem to think there is an exact way to interpret a poem or any art form. In my opinion, no interpretation is correct, or incorrect.

The real beauty behind art is that we are always both creating and participating within and with the art form itself. Something interesting I've found over time is the malleability of meaning behind art and how your personal interpretations can change even from moment to moment. At one point in your life you can get something profound from a piece of art, and later that same piece could cause an entirely different reaction, or none at all. While working on the song, I had to think about the poem, the many ways I could interpret it, and how the friend I wrote the song for would as well. I created sounds to go with each section, adding yet another layer of subjectivity to what was there in the text combined with both my feelings at the moment and my interpretion of hers. This subjectivity in art is what makes it a blast for me both to participate in and ponder upon. Everyone is held together by the structure of the form yet each person is having their own unique experience.

Well I guess in the end the point being just simply that beauty is in the eye of the beholder... and I guess I could have saved a whole lot of everyone's time by just posting that, huh? But hey, isn't that what blogs were created for?

Since Amelia is shocking the nation by sleeping past 5 am, here are some pictures and a quick update.



This is her adorable strawberry/watermelon dress (I say watermelon; everyone else seems to think it's a strawberry). She loves breakfast and is learning to eat with a fork and spoon. Sometimes she delicately puts the fork or spoon near her eye and says, as a joke, "Eye?" Then I say "Not your eye, your mouth!" and she grins and puts the utinsel in her mouth. It is scary game for mommy, who does not want her child to blind herself, so I am hoping she gets tired of it soon.

Speaking of saying things, Amelia is talking more and more. Too many new words to remember or list, but she repeats so many things now! Here are a few:

Both
Silly
Suki (no more Gee; we are sad)
Back! (As in, when Suki tries to slip out of the door to the yard, "Suki, back!")
Work ("Daddy work")
Silly

And she likes to play repetition games with words. If I say "You're silly!" She says, "Momma?" and I have to say "Momma's silly!" Then, "Daddy?" and I say "Daddy's silly! Then Suki, Nanny, Poppa, Guru, Ew, Heather, Micah...



Playing in the tub



I couldn't resist this...



or this.

Special Guest Post!

Today's lovely poem and post are brought to you by Gano, also known as Mary Sanderford, Amelia's great-grandmother.

This poem spoke to me, especially the first two lines, after I had the opportunity to visit my childhood friend, now in a nursing home.

I had not seen her in probably twenty-five years--what fun we had talking of our childhood experiences, things none of my present friends would even know about.

There seem to be people and friends for all seasons of our lives--and I thank God for that.

A Friend

by Oliver Wendell Holmes

There is no friend like an old friend
Who has shared our morning days,
No greeting like his welcome,
No homage like his praise.

Fame is the scentless flower
With gaudy crowns of gold,
Bur friendship is the breathing rose
With sweets in every fold.

History and Influences, Part 2

As I have mentally traced my poetic "career," I have realized that my falling in love with poetry has been a falling in love with writing. As in, with my own writing--not that I have loved everything I have written (I certainly have not) but with being able to write. After the childhood experience of reading "The Listeners," I didn't really read poems for a long time. I had some great teachers, including Chuck Sullivan at NC Governor's School, who explained poems to me in a way that made me love them, but I wasn't exactly discovering or reading any poetry on my own. In college, I was lucky enough to have a roommate/best friend who was interested in creative writing. I decided to take a fiction class, but, as chance would have it, that class was full. Introduction to Poetry was open, so I took that instead. Ever since my first assignment from Alan Shapiro to write ten rhyming couplets describing a view through a window, I have been hooked on writing poems.

Typing that out, it seems pretty obvious, and I am sure I am not alone. I remember starting the poetry classes I taught by asking the students, "What is poetry?" Almost everyone included in their answer the idea of self-expression. Perhaps stereotypically, that answer always made me think of an angst-ridden teen scribbling sad or angry poems in a notebook, but it's true. Even if you are not a writer, you have probably written a poem. And if you have ever written a poem, think back--it was probably sparked by some deep emotion or vivid experience, something you had to flesh out for yourself, in your own words.

I say all of that to explain my realization that the poets who have most influenced me have been the poets who have said things I want to say. Whatever their style or specific subject matter, their words, at some point in my life, rang so true to me that when I read them, it was as if I had said them myself (or so I wished, anyway).

Today's post (which took 5 days to write) is about two of those poets: Sylvia Plath and Mary Oliver. These two poets have a lot of differences, but, in my mind anyway, they also have a lot in common. They are both poets I discovered outside of any classroom, and their heightened attention to their subject matter, different though it is, created poems that were exactly what I needed to read at two particular points in my life.

First, Sylvia Plath. It's very unoriginal for a young white woman who writes poems to say she was influenced by Sylvia Plath, but there you have it. I was reading Plath during my second year of college, a time in my life when, for whatever reason (being far away from home; subsisting exclusively on glazed donuts and plain bagels; new-found feminist rage; a long, rainy winter; unrequited love) I was sad a lot. Sometimes I was deeply, deeply sad, and sometimes I was angry. I had a group of girlfriends who were going through a similar time, and we read Sylvia Plath.

Why Plath? I also read a lot of Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich, but Plath particularly stands out to me as an influence. Part of it has to be her biography. She was pretty and smart; she had a rocky love life with another famous poet; she killed herself by putting her head in a gas oven. That shouldn't be glamorous, but it was to me at the time I most loved Plath, and I know I am not alone. There is even a a movie about Plath's life. Perhaps it was the shock value of her life that attracted me to her at first. But what held my attention was her poetry.

My favorite Plath poem is "Elm." You can read the poem here.

I don't really want to explicate the poem, but I will say that I came across the fact that the poem was first published under the title "Elm Speaks" or "The Elm Speaks." Maybe I am slow, but I never thought of an elm speaking until I read that. Rereading the poem with the idea that the elm is speaking kind of clears things up a bit. To me, before I thought of that, I just had the idea that the speaker was like the elm.

And at the time I discovered this poem, I was like the elm too. The end of this poem especially seemed to speak to me:


I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?——

Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.

If we want to be literal about the speaker being an elm, the "dark thing that sleeps in me" is an owl. But to a depressed and confused 20-year-old, the dark thing is/was the depression and confusion. And sometimes, in college, learning for the first time about feminism and colonialism and environmental destruction and the world's history of wars and who knows what else (liberal arts college, anyone?) I often felt "incapable of any more knowledge."

But besides the poem's subject matter, what struck me about this poem was the way it sounds. Plath's use of alliteration, rhyme, and repetition create these awesome, knife-like lines at just the right moments in the poems. Rhyming "that thing in me" with "malignity" is amazing. (Several of my teachers have commented on Plath as a champion rhymer; I am pretty sure one of them called her one of the best rhymers of the 20th century.) And that last stanza is, like a nightmarish nursery rhyme, is simply haunting:

these are the isolate, slow faults that kill, that kill, that kill.

When I was 20, those lines were in my head for months.

Then. Something happened.

Maybe the lines rang even truer? I fell in love with sadness for awhile. It fell in love with it because it was real, but paradoxically, that made it false, a kind of mask. A fault that could, in fact, kill. Like the myth of the crazy artist, it was dangerous.

I didn't want to be sad anymore, but my art was rooted in sadness. Then I discovered Mary Oliver.

Actually, Dean discovered Mary Oliver. And he gave me her book Dream Work. And then I married him.

This is Mary Oliver's "The Summer Day," which I already posted a few days ago. "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" Not end it by putting my head in an oven, thank you all the same.

I want to make it very clear, though, that I am not blaming Sylvia Plath for her sadness, nor am I intending to trivialize her death. Mental illness and depression are very real things. And Plath's depression and despair were real, and her death was tragic. But I don't think it was depression and tragedy that made her an artist. In fact, I think remembering Plath's suicide over her poetry cheapens her art and her life.

For me, I had reached a point at which I was in danger of wearing depression as an artistic mask. Just as Plath's poetry gave me words to name my sadness, even rage, Oliver's poetry gave me words to answer it. (In fact, in her poem "Members of the Tribe," which is not online, she does something similar, if not just that.)

Here are some poems by Mary Oliver that are online. Scroll down and read "The Journey."

Now read the first poem, "Wild Geese."

These poems are still, in my mind, tinged with a certain sadness. They are not the stuff of greeting cards. There is "despair," even "terrible melancholy." But, almost like an ars poetica, these poems allow a way out of the sadness. The way is living, choosing to live in the physical world, and if you are a writer, it is writing.

Overall, I don't find Oliver as technically exhilarating as Plath, but in my favorites of her works, the rich, almost photographically-precise images build with a measured, straightforward voice to create poems with just as much power as Plath's. Obviously, the voices are very different. But both are honest and direct. They are real. Those are certainly three qualities I hope for in my own poetry.

So thank you, Sylvia and Mary, for creating your poems.

Whew. Stay tuned for part 3, when I tackle either the Romantics or the Modernists. Or maybe both?

It's not poetry, but...

it IS fantastic! I always wanted to create a Peep diorama when I lived in DC. In honor of the pure fun of creativity, enjoy this slideshow!

Today's Post, now with part two!

As of 1:20 GMT, this post is now complete with part two.

I woke up to an email from Luli, aka "Ew," who is home from a week-long visit to Colorado. (We miss her and "Goo" terribly already.) She sent me a link to artist Austin Kleon's article, How to Steal Like an Artist. It's great. Read it.

After I posted the link to the article this morning, I decided to try Kleon's idea of newspaper blackout. You can see examples of Kleon's blackouts here. (I found this site through http://www.austinkleon.com/.) Basically, Kleon takes a page from a newspaper and blacks out many of the words. The remaining words make a poem. This idea of blacking out has always intrigued me. The poet Mary Ruefle did something similar in her book A Little White Shadow, using a 19th century book with the same title and blacking out text to make a new book of poems. And I haven't seen it, but the poet Ronald Johnson did the same thing with Paradise Lost. You can read a review of both of those here.

All of this is a kind of "found poetry," which is simply poems found in the world. My students loved found poetry. I used to do a lesson in which students cut out words from newspapers and magazines and glued them together to make poems. Another fun thing is to sit around and eavesdrop, writing down words you overhear, and make a poem out of them.

Since I conveniently had Sunday's Denver Post scattered all over my kitchen table, I decided to try a blackout poem this morning with Amelia.



You can see my poem on the right and hers on the left. She did a greenout poem.

After about 5 minutes Amelia was done with blackout poems and had moved on to something more interesting



so I had to stop. I was going to publish the text of my poem but, sadly, it was lost when someone spilled milk on the newspapers. It wasn't that great, anyway, although it was fun to make. Even though the technique is simple, it takes some effort to create a good blackout poem. You need to read the text and have an idea. Or maybe not. Maybe I am taking the fun out of it. I would like to find an old book and black it out a la A Little White Shadow. I'll put in on my list of poem projects.

Switching gears, today is Poem in Your Pocket day. I had planned to really celebrate this day by sending out poems to everyone I knew, but it snuck up on me. So please take a minute to download your own pocket poem here. You click on a pocket with whatever word intrigues you most. I already read "moo" and "glass."

Finally, in non-poetry news, we visited Jes, Kim and Micah for Jes's 30th birthday last weekend. Micah remains super cute and he got a new hat:



Here are Amelia and Micah sizing each other up.



And, in conclusion, here is Amelia wearing a lot of bibs.

Sylvia Plath's "Black Rook in Rainy Weather"

Today's post on one of my favorite poems, Sylvia Plath's "Black Rook in Rainy Weather", is by Tyler Mills, a poet and former UMD classmate of mine who is so cool she has her own website. You can read the poem at the link above or at the end of Tyler's post.

This poem is maybe a little trickier to follow that some of the ones I have recently posted, so I will enter teacher mode for a moment to get you started, and tell you that a rook is a bird (according to my dictionary, it's "a gregarious Eurasian crow with black plumage and a bare face"). If you find yourself getting lost in the poem, try reading straight through the line breaks until the end of each sentence. Thanks, Tyler, for this great post!

This day in the second week of April, a cold rain has been soaking into the concrete of the walkways that lead to the looming buildings of my city university. It is the kind of morning when rusty drips find your scalp through the cracks in the platform overhang, the train is late, and people crush you against a metal bar with their damp coats. Later, the fluorescent lights of your composition classroom show rows of pale, tired students sitting in front of the crinkled pages of their homework.

I pull out a huge pink costume scarf from my backpack like a magician, but instead of it transforming into a long knotted rope to lead us out the window, I fold the fabric in half and wear it. A few students smile.

Whimsy. I’ll take it!

For those of us in a semester cycle (or those who experience spring’s seasonal tax-season stress), National Poetry Month occurs at a time when one’s own creative projects become buried under laundry, library books, and unopened junk mail. “April is the cruelest month,” writes T.S. Eliot in “The Waste Land.” Crocuses spike from the mud along a chain link fence, but we can’t help but smell the dirt and think of its duality—life and death—and the rain that makes this duality even more present to us. The earth is being creative, but even as we comment on its changes, our own struggle for creativity seems wan in comparison.

More bedraggled students wander into my classroom, and I point out that when they go outside, they will be able to see tiny yellow buds appearing on the bushes outside the building. A few more smile. The classroom is thawing slowly, but thawing.

In this second week of National Poetry Month, I keep returning to Sylvia Plath’s “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” and what we—poets and non-poets alike—can expect from inspiration at a time when inspiration can seem just out of reach or absolutely absent. Plath’s poem begins this way:

On the stiff twig up there
Hunches a wet black rook
Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.
I do not expect a miracle
Or an accident

To set the sight on fire
In my eye,

The black rook “[a]rranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain” promises design. The act of arrangement seems like a mind dealing with the problem of mood and deciding what to do with it. I love how the beginning of this poem acknowledges the speaker’s search for inspiration, especially in the way the stanzas break on “accident” after the speaker confesses, “I do not expect a miracle.” But “an accident”—enjambed, hanging out in the white space of the poem’s weather—throws us into even more uncertainty. Chance cannot even “set the sign on fire/ In my eye”.

What then?

If the mood of the weather cannot give us the bird, or even some abstract “accident” inspiration, what hope is there for us in the month of April? The speaker wants “some backtalk/ from the mute sky,” but the sky remains “mute.” Yet what I love about “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” is the poem’s turn that happens next:

I can’t honestly complain:
A certain minor light may still
Lean incandescent

Out of kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then—

The speaker “can’t honestly complain”? (And, we can read some word play in “honestly.” Is the speaker being conversational, or is she saying that complaining would be dishonest?) One reason that the poem gives us is the presence of “minor light” that she finds in the gloom: playing off of the domestic space of the “kitchen table or chair” and created perhaps by the speaker’s own will (by the word “incandescent,” suggesting a bulb switched on). April might be “mute” to us. But,
With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content

Of sorts. Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles.

The speaker’s voice is hesitant, self-correcting, and critical. But, honest. And, poetry at its best.

You can read the entire poem on the Poetry Foundation’s website: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178972 .

Three Poems

by my sister, Heather! These are about our grandparents and great-grandmother. Thank you, Heather, for these beautiful poems.

Poem About Granny

She was strong as strong as can be,
and now here stands a willow tree.
It represents her standing tall,
I remember it from when I was small.
We planted it when she was here,
when I look at it, it brings me tears.
Tears of laughter, shrieks, and joys,
from all the young girls and boys,
for these are her grandchildren children can't you see,
playing in the willow tree.

Nanny's Cooking

The kitchen was filled with good smells and love,
we miss her great meals, she is now up above.
Cooking was her favorite thing,
I bet Papa felt like a king.
Everyone would clear their plates,
nobody could resist the wait.
Over the last helping we would fight,
each and every single night.

Papa Brown

Papa Brown is always working,
always up to something, always smirking.
Practical joker, you better watch out...
For his mongoose is out and about!
Walk up to the cage if you dare,
but be sure to take extra care.
"That thing is wild!" he'd always say,
and it would always make his day,
to throw that animal high in the air,
for it was just a teddy bear.

From Poetry 180

Poetry 180 is/was a project whose goal was to expose high school kids to one poem a day (the 180 being the 180 days of the school year). The idea was that the poem was simply supposed to be read aloud. No analysis, no discussion. Just read and heard. Some of the poems from poetry 180 were collected in a physical book, and it was one of my favorites when I was teaching. Overall, the poems in it are what Liz called guilty pleasures: not simple poems, but poems that you can "get" on a first read. And I agree with Liz that that is a good thing. It's what I hope my poems are. Sure, there are elements of my own poems (I hope) that become more apparent on a rereading, and technical aspects that only those who have recently studied literary terms might be able to name. But I still hope that anyone, scholar or not, poetry-lover or not, would be able to pick up one of my poems and get something out of it on a first read.

In the spirit of guilty pleasures, I will offer today some of my favorite poems from the Poetry 180 project. Read them once, maybe aloud! Enjoy.

This one is a perfect one to start with, considering our conversation about analyzing poems, or not:


"Introduction to Poetry" by Billy Collins

I always liked this one because it is about numbers:

"Numbers" by Mary Cornish

A nice short one:

"Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter" by Robert Bly

I love the end of this one:

"The End of April" by Phylis Levin

And this is one of my favorite poems of all time. Luli made the last sentence of this poem into a poster for my high school classroom.

"The Summer Day" by Mary Oliver

18 Months

Amelia is 18 months old today. I remember holding her as a 3- or 4-month-old at the park, watching a mom with an 18-month-old. I thought we would never make it that far, and how great it would be when we did.

We did, and it is.



Breakfast



Wait--there's something on my hand!




She didn't want to wear this tutu, but we got it on her for a few minutes.




Happy 18 months, Amelia.

On Bakhtin, poetry, and country music

Today's post is brought to you by Liz Self. Liz, a PhD student, teacher, mother of two, and my dear friend, is also the author of the blogs AD and BD. I love this post and found myself nodding in agreement as I read. Thank you Liz!

I am not a poet. I know that every English teacher likes to think that they can have their kids read and write some poems and call them poets (in the hopes of making them like poetry and authentic writers), but I am not a poet. There’s something about poetry and being a poet that is at odds with my nonfiction reading and writing self.

I like poetry, some poetry. But I mostly like poetry I don’t have to think too hard about. I’ll analyze the theme of some fiction, critique the author’s tone in some nonfiction, even get into a little drama (Cyrano de Bergerac really saved drama for me; ironic since he is, in the play, a poet). But I don’t want to have to think too hard about poetry. I like my poetry like I like my country songs* – it just has to sound good and be a little fun or say a little something about life. I don’t want to get too deep. I know there’s a lot of poems I’ve heard and thought, “Ooh, I like that,” and there’s way more to it than I even realize. But I don’t want to know all that. I just want to like my poems.

I recently read some Bakhtin for my sociocultural theories class, and he talks about the role of different genres. He writes, “Each genre is only able to control certain aspects of reality. Each genre possesses definite principles of selection, definite forms for seeing and conceptualizing reality, and a definite scope and depth of penetration.” He continues later, “The artist must learn to see reality with the eyes of the genre. A particular aspect of reality can only be understood in connection with the particular means of representing it.” I know it is a favorite assignment for English teachers to have students transpose texts into different genres – turn a dialogue in some fiction into a drama piece or a newspaper article into a poem. I’m not sure Bakhtin would like that. I think poetry has a place, and it’s not something that can be interchanged with other genres.

One of my favorite poems of all times – and the poem I always started every poetry unit with (yes, former English teacher here, too) – is Marianne Moore’s “Poetry.” Most people know it from the first few lines (or even words: “I, too, dislike it…”). The full poem, though, goes on to make several important points. First, it talks about getting to read poetry with contempt for it. That appealed to me. Second, it talks about “the genuine” in poetry, and that resonated with me, too. And it made me think about, with respect to Bakhtin, poetry’s place in the world (both literary and otherwise). Poetry for me is something that I want to connect with. I can read fiction and nonfiction and drama about all kinds of things that baffle and confuse and frustrate me. But poetry – I just want to like it. I want to go, “Hey, that makes sense to me.” Moore writes, “We do not admire what/we cannot understand.” I can understand a complicated poem – my AP scores from high school attest to that – but I don’t want to work that hard if I want to like it. And I’m not saying that poems that are easy for me to understand aren’t deep poems or are “light” literature. I’m saying that for me, poetry’s place is simply to resonate with me, to make me feel something – not so much to make me think. I go to my fiction and nonfiction for that. My sense is that it’s different for others, though. Poetry might be just the place for others to go to get a mental workout. For me, I want it to be more like People magazine – something light and fun and just enjoyable. A guilty secret, perhaps.

So what are my guilty pleasures? Most of them are African American poets. There is universally among them a freshness and directness that belies the depth (both literary and experiential) beneath. I read and learned about these poets while teaching my predominantly African American students (at an all-girls school) and fell in love with the themes and styles. I like a variety – almost anything by Nikki Giovanni (love “Kidnap Poem”), Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” (read it and then look at this photo of Chris Rock, taken by Annie Leibovitz), “Incident” by Countee Cullen, Alice Walker’s “I Said to Poetry.” Maya Angelou is a given – the woman is genius. On and on, I could go. But one of my absolute favorites is Lucille Clifton. This woman knew how to capture a perspective, a life experience, womanhood, African American womanhood, in poetry. Who else could write “homage to my hips” and “to my last period.” The one I loved to teach: “i am accused of tending to the past.” There’s a depth to these poems that reveals the African American experience and a breadth to them that makes their message universal to any reader while retaining their roots. Some are for fun; some are very serious. But all of these poems are about the genuine.

These are not simple poems. These are not poems written to be someone’s guilty pleasure. But that’s how I enjoy them – the sound, the feel, the movement, the first read. I know there’s more there, and perhaps one day I’ll read more into it. But for now – I’m gonna do what real poets do and just feel it. (Insert the sound of snapping fingers here.)

*Interestingly, one of the earliest poems I remember reading and totally missing the point on was John Donne’s “The Flea.” the thing over and over and never realized it had anything to do with sex. I think my literary analysis professor (a frightening Russian man with bushy beard who was suspect of my German last name) thought I was an idiot. He may be right. But then a few months ago I heard Brad Paisley’s song, “Ticks,” and this time I did know it was about sex. So evidently I can be taught. And furthermore, this really makes my point about the relationship between poetry and country music.

History and Influences

My poetic past (ha) is littered with huge projects I was going to complete. The title of this post is/was the title of one of those big projects. I was going to reread (or, to be more truthful, read in full for the first time) the entire Norton Anthology of Poetry. And, on this long, long roll of paper I had purchased, I was going to illustrate a timeline of my poetic influences, including excerpts from my favorite poems.

First I was going to complete this project before Amelia was born. Then during her first year. I did get started, beautifully illustrating (if I do say so myself) some Anglo-Saxon riddles. For those of you who don't have the Norton Anthology of Poetry in front of you at the moment, that got me through maybe the first 4 millimeters of the giant book. When we moved to Denver, I just decided to throw the whole project out, both figuratively and literally.

Anyway, every time I have tried to decide what I am going to post about poetry during this month, I kept going back to that project. Apparently it is something I need to do. So I thought I could try a version of it here, writing a series of posts about some of my more memorable poetic influences. Today's post will be the first of that series.

My life as a poet began when I read a poem I loved. It was in an elementary school literature text book--I don't remember what grade I was in, maybe 5th. Before I read this poem (and, to be honest, for a long time after) I was more of a fiction fan. I loved reading stories but I found poems rather tiring. That day, however, I was bored in class and I had probably already secretly read all of the stories in the book. So I decided to tackle a poem. I choose one with an intriguing illustration of a man on horseback in a mysterious looking forest, one with a compelling first line.

"Is there anybody there?" said the Traveler--

It was Walter de la Mare's "The Listeners," and it was the first poem I ever really read, on my own, in full. I think part of my problem with reading poetry, both then and now, was the way I read. I am not sure how to describe it but when I read prose my eyes or brain seem to take in chunks of text at once. It let (and still lets) me be a fast reader, but it's a sloppy way to read. It made me good at reading a lot of stories in a short amount of time, but impatient with reading poetry, probably because it is a terrible way to read poetry. (And I'm not saying it's a great way to read anything.) When you read poems too fast, you miss the whole point of reading a poem in the first place.

So when I decided to really read, not just absorb, this unknown poem in my literature book, I made myself be patient and read it slowly, line by line, word by word.

You can do the same now and read the poem here.

There, in whatever little classroom I was sitting in, secretly reading a poem while the teacher taught math or something, I was enthralled. It probably helped that it was narrative--it had a story--but what drew me in was more than that. It was the sound of things, the rhythm of the language, and the mystery.

I love the poem's rhythms. If I were teaching, I would point out all the anapests, which create a feeling of movement or motion in the poem.

Uh oh, now I have to be a teacher for a minute:

A "foot" in poetry means a metrical unit. Usually it is a group of two or three syllables. We (by we I mean teachers and poets, mostly) talk about the two or three syllables in a foot in terms of stressed and unstressed syllables. For example, the stressed syllable in Amelia is the second one: AMELia. The stressed syllable in Kimberly is the fisrt: KIMberly.

An anapest is a foot of poetry that contains two unstressed syllable followed by a stressed foot.

So the line

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

kind of sounds like this if you read it aloud

And his HORSE/ in the SIL/ ence CHAMPED/ the GRASS/ es

The last two feet up there--I have divided the feet by the slash marks /-- are called iambs. They are one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Some say they sound like a heartbeat: da DUM, da DUM. Iambs are considered the norm as far as meter in poetry. In other words, it is argued, and I think it is true, that English as a language contains a lot of iambs, so we tend to hear them as a norm or a base line for rhythm.

When you start to vary from iambs, you can create different feelings or moods through sound. The first two feet up there are the anapests, and they are quicker than the iambs because they pack an extra syllable into the foot: da da DUM. It kind of sounds like a horse galloping, which fits this poem well, doesn't it?

"The Listeners" tends to vary between anapests and iambs, which creates an interesting soundscape. I couldn't have explained any of this at the time, but looking back, the poem's meter definitely had a lot to do with my enchantment.

Okay, I think my teacher moment is over. The test will be next week; I hope you took notes.

Besides all rhythm, the poem contains a lot of nice alliteration (which is repetition of the same consonant sounds):

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
of the forest's ferny floor

Hear all the "s" sounds? Not just at the beginning but also within many of the words. And the "f" sounds?

That kind of thing is all through the poem. Plus, it rhymes.

And, besides all that, it is a poem you can make sense, of, story-wise, which I, for one, enjoy. This traveler is here, fulfilling some kind of promise. But no one is in the house.

Or are they?

During a web search for the poem I came across a snippet of an essay arguing that the readers of the poem are the listeners. Interesting. But I had never thought of that before today, and I don't think that kind of analysis is necessary in enjoying the poem. It's a mystery, a paradox even, these listeners. And that's part of what makes it a poem.

Guest Post: On Rod McKuen

Today's post is brought to you by my mom!!!

I think you are right that poetry is misunderstood as to hard. I wish I had had a teacher who knew how to teach it. Any teacher I had taught that poetry had to rhyme. I don't think that is true.

I think I must have been a poet at heart because I have attempted to write a lot but I always slam dunked it in the trash can after I read what I wrote. I missed the chance to see a famous poet when I was in high school. He came to our school in honor of a student who had been struck and killed by a car as he was walking. The student's name was Jeff Hefner and the poet was Rod McKuen. They must have met earlier. I was sick that day so I missed the experience but I bought a few of his books, which are no longer in my possession. I liked his poetry. One of my favorites is "Thirty-Six."

Note: I also found this Rod McKuen site that discusses the last words of the poem and posts the poem in a slightly different version. Also, I think I might have to steal the idea of missing hearing the poet speak for a poem. Hmm. Thanks, Mom!

Guest Post: How poetry made me feel smart

On the second day of NPM, our first guest post! Although many people might say poetry makes them feel anything but smart, this hilarious essay by my dear friend Corrie shows how poetry can be a place of solace. After six years of being an awesome high school teacher, Corrie now works as a private tutor to her beautiful baby boy. Enjoy!


I remember an oversized Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes on our bookshelf in the basement. In my best teacher voice I would recite “Little Miss Muffet Sat on a Tuffet” to all my imaginary students. It was a very good thing that the little poems rhymed and that I had memorized the illustrations because being 4 or 5 I couldn’t properly read yet. These facts were ignored by my parents who claimed to friends and family members that I could already “read as good as any grown up.” I also loved Dr. Seuss and Shel Sliverstein --who taught me that if you write poetry, you can be a man with a very odd name. I remember the weight of Where the Sidewalk Ends hunkering me down as I lumbered off the school bus.

In middle-school I had several brief love affairs with boys who wrote me sonnets and odes. Of course none of us knew what either of these poetry titles meant. But they sounded classy right? Your odds of getting to first base were particularly good if you composed a sonnet entitled “Ode to Corrie.” Also, if you could rhyme anything with Corrie besides “hunkie dorie” you might get to hold my hand.

In the dark days of high school, I tried to counterweight my cheerleading uniform with copies of Longfellow and Dickinson. After Friday’s game of chanting “Hit ‘em again, Hit ‘em again, Harder, Har, DER!” to my quarterback boyfriend, I appeased the part of my brain that called me a stereotyped airhead by staying up late and memorizing “The Day is Done” or Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” I then told myself that I was really moving up in the world by dumping the quarterback for a soulful dreamer I met on the beach, doing what? You guessed it, writing his own poetry.

In college I had Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman” taped to my dorm room door. Between classes I would sit on walls or on patches of grass smoking and writing in journals—sometimes poems, sometimes pieces of nothing that someone maybe somewhere might call poetry. Both the smoking and the writing and Maya Angelou’s poem taped to my dorm room door made me feel capable of getting through four years without my family. I was mature. I was smart. I read and wrote poetry, had gotten into Carolina and was taking classes where they asked me to read very old guy’s work –Keats, Shelley, Shakespeare. I found out that as long as I raised my hand to answer some open ended question thereby breaking the horrific silence in the room, the professor gratefully agreed with me.

My total and complete failure of attempts to teach poetry to high school students somehow continued to make me feel smart. I could see them thinking I knew what e.e cummings’ “1(a…(a leaf falls on loneliness” was about, and they were pissed that I wouldn’t just tell them. They really wanted things to rhyme. I abandoned all hope of ever teaching Elliot while reading Gatsby. I found the titillation of Burn’s titled poem in Catcher in the Rye always got good reviews.

The first time I sang “Row row row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream” to my nine month old, he squealed like a pig and looked up at me with eyes that said “Awesome!” And I felt, brilliant.

The Cruelest Month*

I woke up this morning full of thoughts and ready to write. By (Amelia's) naptime I am worn out. I have lost all of my energy. She has been on full speed since the moment she woke up. We heard her in her crib yelling "No! No!" As soon as she got out of bed she wanted to "See! See!" everything in her path. We spent at least 5 full minutes naming all the items on a high bathroom shelf. The moment she came downstairs she was off and running. It took about five more minutes for the floor to be covered with Cheerios, baby dolls, and crayons.

Anyway. It was a good morning, just nonstop.

Oh and on the weaning front I decided it was better to cut back a little more quickly than I originally planned. Yesterday Amelia nursed only 4 times, remarkable since we went to toddler yoga--the last time we went, she nursed about 150 times in 45 minutes. Today she has nursed only twice, one long session right when she woke up and a short session when we came downstairs. If I stay on track from yesterday she will only nurse one more time, around 5:00 pm.

SOOO--seamless transition between breastfeeding and poetry--it's officially National Poetry Month. I am sure celebrations are abounding. I have been having a hard time deciding what to write about for my first post. I thought I might start with why I wanted to mark this month on my blog. For one, I don't think poetry gets enough attention. I think it is misunderstood as too hard, something mysterious and inscrutable. And to be honest--some of it is. But I think I also have been trying to figure out how to integrate more poetry into my own life, in which I exist primarily as a Mom, aka Homemaker. For pretty much all of my previous life, at least since late high school, literature in general and poetry in particular have been my main focuses, something I spend much if not most of my time reading, thinking about, studying, and teaching. But now... not so much. And, despite the fact that I have a graduate degree related to poetry, sometimes I feel lost answering people's basic questions about poetry in my life. These are questions like what kind of poetry I write, who are my main influences, even who are my favorite poets. So I guess I want to explore some of those questions here too.

Today, though, let's read some poems. Poets.org, which is a website I love, has collected a group of poems about poetry. A good place to start, I think. I am going to link to a few of them, and use these examples to explain some of the reasons I love poetry.(Note: any time the text is a different color, you can click on it to see the website I am linking to.)

I love poetry because it so often lets you connect seemingly unconnected things in a way that is often magical. In this poem by Sharon Olds, "Take The I Out," the title alludes to the idea that the personal self, or "I", doesn't belong in poetry. But in the poem, the I quickly becomes something else (while also remaining the first thing). And the end it becomes something else again.

I love poetry because it can let you create an entirely new universe. In this poem by John Brehm, "The Poems I Have Not Written," the title launches the poem into a world of hypothetical, of "ifs" and "mights" that lets the speakers live, for the space of the poem, somewhere else. Plus, it's funny.

And, despite what I said before, I love poetry because sometimes it IS mysterious and hard to figure out. The sad thing is that poetry tends to be taught in a very analytical way, as though poems had one right answer. As a (former?) teacher myself, I see the value in helping students learn to puzzle through poems, and one important way of doing that is helping them find in poems what others have found before them. However, an equally important skill is imaginative thinking. Let this poem, "And It Came to Pass" by C.D. Wright (who is one of my favorite poets for mysterious images and sentence fragments) mean whatever it means to you. And if parts of it don't make sense, let it not make sense. Read it--maybe read it aloud. And let it be.

If you have more time, read some more of these poems about poetry. And there is still time to send ideas for guest posts! Until tomorrow... happy NPM.

*A note on the title: if you have a couple of hours and a good tolerance for migraines, see this webpage. I'm sorry, I just couldn't resist the allusion.