RIP Bill Knott

SONNET

Bill Knott

The way the world is not

Astonished at you

It doesn't blink a leaf

When we step from the house

Leads me to think

That beauty is natural, unremarkable

And not to be spoken of

Except in the course of things

The course of singing and worksharing

The course of squeezes and neighbours

The course of you tying back your raving hair to go out

And the course of course of me

Astonished at you

The way the world is not

I enjoyed this poem a lot when I encountered it on today's AAP Poem-a-day. I love its ease and casual (seemingly casual) brilliance, hallmarks of Knott's verse. Then I discovered by scrolling down that its author had died only a couple of weeks ago. Quite a shock.

I first encountered Knott online about ten years ago, ordered his renowned early collection, "The Naomi Poems" at considerable cost through Abe Books, and then his self-published selected, "Goodbye to Prisoner", from the blog of the author himself. We had some correspondence, but he struck me as cagy and bitter, with a harsh penchant for self-deprecation that seemed both a kind of exaggerated put-on, but also genuine, borne of profound self-hatred.  Then I got very busy, and our dialogue fell off.  This article in the New Yorker confirms those impressions, and tells us more about his life and work. Like one of the writers quoted there, I learned to admire him from a distance.

Is the "not" at the end of the first and last lines a play on the author's name? It certainly becomes so, inevitably, in that final, fatal light. (A light all good poetry is written in, of course.)  Anyway, RIP at last, Bill.  Your work will endure.

SUNDAY POEM

MY SKELETON
by Jane Hirshfield



My skeleton,

you who once ached

with your own growing larger



are now,

each year

imperceptibly smaller,

lighter,

absorbed by your own

concentration.



When I danced,

you danced.

When you broke,

I.



And so it was lying down,

walking,

climbing the tiring stairs.

Your jaws. My bread.



Someday you,

what is left of you,

will be flensed of this marriage.



Angular wristbone,

cracked harp of ribcage,

blunt of heel,

opened bowl of the skull,

twin platters of pelvis–

each of you will leave me behind,

at last serene.



What did I know of your days,

your nights,

I who held you all my life

inside my hands

and thought they were empty?



You who held me all my life

inside your hands

as a new mother holds

her own unblanketed child,

not thinking at all.

SUNDAY POEM

W.S. MERWIN
___________________________________________________

THANKS


Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

Rosalind Brackenbury: Poety in a time of War

I enjoyed this Wislawa Szymborska-type poem written by an American (well, actually a British-born author living in America). It was the Academy of American Poets' Poem of the Day.

Szymborska, like other Eastern European poets of her generation that survived both communist and fascist dictatorships, found her liberation in an unadorned style, free of the kind of rhetorical flourish she associated with demagoguery - a style that expressed ironies of her times in the coldest, hardest, simplest way.

It’s a measure of the temper of our own times that this kind of poetry is being written (by someone at least) over here in North America.



POETRY IN A TIME OF WAR


I want to forget their names, the generals,
advisors, puppet rulers,
the puffed-up and the brought-low,

I want not to know them,
not hear their plans, their excuses,
the President and the President's men,
the Pope with his white smoke for voodoo,

the suits, ties, teeth, insignia,
the guns, the names of trucks and weapons.

I want to forget them all,
to be washed of them,
to begin again: where no one knows who anyone is,
or what he believes.

To give my attention to:
frangipani leaves uncurling,
the smell of jasmine,
one person helping another across a street;

to the seeds,
to the beginnings; to one clear word for which
there is no disguise and no alternative.

An intelligent use of pathetic fallacy

Robert Bly
_____________________________

What Things Want


You have to let things
Occupy their own space.
This room is small,
But the green settee

Likes to be here.
The big marsh reeds,
Crowding out the slough,
Find the world good.

You have to let things
Be as they are.
Who knows which of us
Deserves the world more?

"The Second Fallacy"

C.Dale Young has an excellent poem up at The Chronicle of Higher Education.  The commentary is well worth reading too...

Robert Bly: The Sympathies of the Long Married

Oh well, let's go on eating the grains of eternity.
What do we care about improvements in travel?
Angels sometimes cross the river on old turtles.

Shall we worry about who gets left behind?
That one bird flying through the clouds is enough.
Your sweet face at the door of the house is enough.

The two farm horses stubbornly pull the wagon.
The mad crows carry away the tablecloth.
Most of the time, we live through the night.

Let's not drive the wild angels from our door.
Maybe the mad fields of grain will move.
Maybe the troubled rocks will learn to walk.

It's all right if we're troubled by the night.
It's all right if we can't recall our own name.
It's all right if this rough music keeps on playing.

I've given up worrying about men living alone.
I do worry about the couple who live next door.
Some words heard through the screen door are enough.

Dean Young: Selected Recent and New Errors

My books are full of mistakes

but not the ones Tony’s always pointing out

as if correct spelling is what could stop the conveyor belt

the new kid caught his arm in.

Three weeks on the job and he’s already six hundred

legal pages, lawyers haggling in an office

with an ignored view of the river

pretending to be asleep, pretending

to have insight into its muddy self.

You think that’s a fucked-up, drawn-out metaphor,

try this: if you feel you’re writhing like a worm

in a bottle of tequila, you don’t know

it’s the quickness of its death that reveals

the quality of the product, its proof.

I don’t know what I’m talking about either.

Do you think the dictionary ever says to itself

I’ve got these words that mean completely

different things inside myself

and it’s tearing me apart?

My errors are even bigger than that.

You start taking down the walls of your house,

sooner or later it’ll collapse

but not before you can walk around

with your eyes closed, rolled backwards

and staring straight into the amygdala’s meatlocker

and your own damn self hanging there.

Do that for awhile and it’s easier to delight   

in snow that lasts about twenty minutes

longer than a life held together

by the twisted silver baling wire

of deception and stealth.

But I ain’t confessing nothing.

On mornings when I hope you forget my name,

I walk through the high wet weeds

that don’t have names either.

I do not remember the word dew.

I do not remember what I told you

with your ear in my teeth.

Further and further into the weeds.

We have absolutely no proof

god isn’t an insect

rubbing her hind legs together to sing.

Or boring into us like a yellow jacket

into a fallen, overripe pear.

Or an assassin bug squatting over us,

shoving a proboscis right through

our breast plate then sipping.

How wonderful our poisons don’t kill her.

 

-- First appeared in Poetry, July-Aug 2008

Charles Harper Webb: Prayer for the Man Who Mugged My Father, 72

May there be an afterlife.

May you meet him there, the same age as you.
May the meeting take place in a small, locked room.

May the bushes where you hid be there again, leaves tipped with razor-
       blades and acid.
May the rifle butt you bashed him with be in his hands.
May the glass in his car window, which you smashed as he sat stopped
       at a red light, spike the rifle butt, and the concrete on which you'll
              fall.

May the needles the doctors used to close his eye, stab your pupils
       every time you hit the wall and then the floor, which will be often.
May my father let you cower for a while, whimpering, "Please don't
              shoot me. Please."
May he laugh, unload your gun, toss it away;
Then may he take you with bare hands.

May those hands, which taught his son to throw a curve and drive a nail
       and hold a frog, feel like cannonballs against your jaw.
May his arms, which powered handstands and made their muscles jump
       to please me, wrap your head and grind your face like stone.
May his chest, thick and hairy as a bear's, feel like a bear's snapping
       your bones.
May his feet, which showed me the flutter kick and carried me miles
       through the woods, feel like axes crushing your one claim to man-
       hood as he chops you down.

And when you are down, and he's done with you, which will be soon,
       since, even one-eyed, with brain damage, he's a merciful man,
May the door to the room open and let him stride away to the Valhalla
       he deserves.
May you—bleeding, broken—drag yourself upright.

May you think the worst is over;
You've survived, and may still win.

Then may the door open once more, and let me in.

Anis Shivani: What Is the State of American Poetry? Leading American Poets Speak

Anis Shivani: What Is the State of American Poetry? Leading American Poets Speak

When this article appeared in Huffington post three weeks ago, I immediately posted it to Facebook, as a kind of bookmark for myself, where it also got some positive response from literary readers. Posting there was a simple click-click process. It's more cumbersome to cross-post attractively on Blogger -- especially to import an eye-catching image.

Anyway, at the time I was too busy to read it myself, but there's a lot of worthwhile material here, which I'm reading now -- interviews with Clayton Eshleman, Annie Finch, Ron Silliman, and Danielle Pafunda, along with videos, poems on pdfs, and further links to their works. Anis Shivani did a really good job in bringing these poets to a wider audience. (CBC could take a cue here...)

To me articles like this are of particular interest, since they form a natural follow-up to my own article "Can Poetry Matter -- 15 Years After", itself a response to the seminal essay by Dana Gioia that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, now 19 years ago.

David Trinidad: 9773 Comanche Ave.

Having grown up in '50s/'60's cookie-cutter suburbia, this is one I can relate to... maybe you, too.

9773 Comanche Ave.
by David Trinidad

In color photographs, my childhood house looks
fresh as an uncut sheet cake—
pale yellow buttercream, ribbons of white trim

squeezed from the grooved tip of a pastry tube.
Whose dream was this confection?
This suburb of identical, pillow-mint homes?

The sky, too, is pastel. Children roller skate
down the new sidewalk. Fathers stake young trees.
Mothers plan baby showers and Tupperware parties.
The Avon Lady treks door to door.

Six or seven years old, I stand on the front porch,
hand on the decorative cast-iron trellis that frames it,
squinting in California sunlight,
striped short-sleeved shirt buttoned at the neck.

I sit in the backyard (this picture's black-and-white),
my Flintstones playset spread out on the grass.
I arrange each plastic character, each dinosaur,
each palm tree and round "granite" house.

Half a century later, I barely recognize it
when I search the address on Google Maps
and, via "Street view," find myself face to face—

foliage overgrown, facade remodeled and painted
a drab brown. I click to zoom: light hits
one of the windows. I can almost see what's inside.

Book Recommendation: Pris Campbell: Sea Trails

Here's a book I enjoyed.  Pris Campbell's best poems celebrate sensuality and passion in direct, plain-spoken language that is nevertheless revelatory.  This particular book is a blend of prose, poetry and photographs concerning a journey on a sailing sloop that also served -- in retrospect -- as an attempt to save a failing relationship.  The attempt -- almost needless to say -- failed, but the discoveries made on the journey affirm life in a more essential kind of way.

I always enjoy a well-rendered blend of prose and poetry. To be frank, not all the poems in the book pack the kind of intensity that others that I've read of hers have, but the book has its own earthy authenticity, adding up to a truly pleasant read like a warm cup of coffee on a cold day.

One of my favourite poems is Original Sin, featured below. The lognotes fill us in on practical details a landlubber like myself would be unlikely to learn otherwise, and produce sketches of temporary communities set up between wayfarers which would be impossible on land. The book is a journey into new territories, but also -- and more deeply -- into memory.  Thoreau is a definite precedent: indeed, this book could be described as a Waldenesque experience on the waves.

Sea Trails is available at Lummox Press and Amazon; signed copies of the book are available via the author's website. 


Original Sin

When Adam bedded Eve in these dark pines
I wonder if they laughed in their nakedness,
threw kisses at lopsided stars.
I doubt Adam searched for other Eves to ogle,
found fault or ignored her.
He likely never took joy in jabbing her
with sharp twigs or thorns.
I dream of them cooing blissfully,
serpent and apple still in their future.

Our boat swings with the tide, waking us.
He slides inside. My very own Adam,
already tainted by original sin.


Sea Speak

The Chesapeake opens beneath us,
a woman spreading her skirt wide
to greet the Atlantic, already throbbing
with September winds at her feet.
I learn to lay down a trot line,
haul hungry crabs to the surface, tossing
the lucky red-bellied females back.
I learn that fish gasp in upper Bay
pollution, that sea grass cries,
that watermen chug out at dawn past
clanging buoys and clearing mist
hoping to net their catch for the day.
I learn that heaven is right here
in these blue waters, the upside-down sky,
that the spirits of old sailors walk
on our bow at night, telling lost stories
about Tangier Isle, Shanks, Queens Ridge,
Piney Island. I learn how love
of the sea can rush right through you
with the wind, until your heart is translucent
with joy as intense as pain.

Keith Waldrop

"If you read a review of Keith Waldrop's 'Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy,' this year's winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, there's a good chance it will include the word 'postmodern' or 'avant-garde.' These are terms that put a lot of readers on guard, signaling experimental verse."

Tracking down Sauls...

Trolling the net, I found this poem by Roger Sauls, published in Ploughshares back in '83. I quite enjoyed it in all its well-honed concision -- its images stayed with me all day. Otherwise, no other poetry by him is to be found online, as far as I can determine.

It is interesting that he merits mention in The Neglectorino Project, a well-meaning blog that attempted to find, track down and celebrate worthy but obscure & forgotten poets referred to as "neglectorinos" (a term coined by Ron Silliman, in fact). That project ran for only a few months, back in 2006. Sadly, it seems to have fizzled, out of... neglect.

There, one Don Riggs writes:

Roger Sauls and Richard Williams, two slightly older (than I was at the time) poets in Chapel Hill who were guiding lights; Roger was very minimalist, lapidary (Light Poems by Roger Sauls, The Loom Press 1974 was out of print but I found a copy that had fallen behind a bookshelf in a store in 75, I forget the more recent book's title, pub. by The Bench Press) , while Richard was whoa way crazy in some ways (Savarin by Williams, Ardis 1977 is the last published work I know of his -- hilarious and very very scary in places), what has happened to them?

Minimalist, lapidary... these values are exemplified by that Ploughshares poem. Makes Saul's appreciation of my book all the more remarkable.

Robert Creeley

ECHOES

Step through the mirror,
faint with the old desire.

Want it again,
never mind who's the friend.

Say yes to the wasted
empty places. The guesses

were as good as any.
No mistakes.

-- From Selected Poems (originally from Mirrors)
Supporting material for a review forthcoming in The Rover.

Robert Creeley

SAD WALK

I’ve come to the old echoes again,
know it’s where I’ve been before,
see the same old sun.

But backwards, from all the yesterdays,
it’s still the same way,
who gets and who pays.

I was younger then,
walking along still open,
young and having fun.

But now it’s just a sad walk
to an empty park,
to sit down and wait, wait to get out.

-- from On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay (2006)
supporting material for a review forthcoming in The Rover

Frederick Seidel

Today's poetry.org daily poem is an engaging oddball choice. I had never heard of this guy, but would like to read more of his work. Click on the his name to read about the extreme controversy his first book stirred up.

Ode to Spring
by Frederick Seidel


I can only find words for.
And sometimes I can't.
Here are these flowers that stand for.
I stand here on the sidewalk.

I can't stand it, but yes of course I understand it.
Everything has to have meaning.
Things have to stand for something.
I can't take the time. Even skin-deep is too deep.

I say to the flower stand man:
Beautiful flowers at your flower stand, man.
I'll take a dozen of the lilies.
I'm standing as it were on my knees

Before a little man up on a raised
Runway altar where his flowers are arrayed
Along the outside of the shop.
I take my flames and pay inside.

I go off and have sexual intercourse.
The woman is the woman I love.
The room displays thirteen lilies.
I stand on the surface.

Rita Dove

Ludwig Van Beethoven's Return to Vienna
by Rita Dove

Oh you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn,
or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me....
The Heiligenstadt Testament

Three miles from my adopted city
lies a village where I came to peace.
The world there was a calm place,
even the great Danube no more
than a pale ribbon tossed onto the landscape
by a girl's careless hand. Into this stillness

I had been ordered to recover.
The hills were gold with late summer;
my rooms were two, plus a small kitchen,
situated upstairs in the back of a cottage
at the end of the Herrengasse.
From my window I could see onto the courtyard
where a linden tree twined skyward —
leafy umbilicus canted toward light,
warped in the very act of yearning —
and I would feed on the sun as if that alone
would dismantle the silence around me.

At first I raged. Then music raged in me,
rising so swiftly I could not write quickly enough
to ease the roiling. I would stop
to light a lamp, and whatever I'd missed —
larks flying to nest, church bells, the shepherd's
home-toward-evening song — rushed in, and I
would rage again.

I am by nature a conflagration;
I would rather leap
than sit and be looked at.
So when my proud city spread
her gypsy skirts, I reentered,
burning towards her greater, constant light.

Call me rough, ill-tempered, slovenly— I tell you,
every tenderness I have ever known
has been nothing
but thwarted violence, an ache
so permanent and deep, the lightest touch
awakens it. . . . It is impossible

to care enough. I have returned
with a second Symphony
and 15 Piano Variations
which I've named Prometheus,
after the rogue Titan, the half-a-god
who knew the worst sin is to take
what cannot be given back.

I smile and bow, and the world is loud.
And though I dare not lean in to shout
Can't you see that I'm deaf? —
I also cannot stop listening.

Today's Poetry month daily poem from Poem.org. A fine dramatic monologue, this one captures Beethoven's regal, tempestuous nature as he confronts his growing deafness. I love the first three stanzas, the vivid picture they create of the calm paradise to which he has retired, belied by the dread of his own approaching storm. I can almost hear growing crescendos of his 6th symphony, the Pastorale --although he may have been totally deaf by the time he got to that composition. Where I find the poem gets flabby is in the final two stanzas. Too talky, too equivocal, too much commentary. If I were to revise this poem, I would take away the explanation of Titan. Who needs it? Just the name Titan is enough. And end the poem with

I smile and bow, and the world is loud.
And I dare not lean in to shout
Can't you see that I am deaf?
-- for I am always listening.

Rae Armantrout

Unbidden
by Rae Armantrout

The ghosts swarm.
They speak as one
person. Each
loves you. Each
has left something
undone.

•

Did the palo verde
blush yellow
all at once?

Today's edges
are so sharp

they might cut
anything that moved.

•

The way a lost
word

will come back
unbidden.

You're not interested
in it now,

only
in knowing
where it's been.

The third Poetry Month daily poem from Poets.org. Not bad, two out of three that grab me. (Last year, I think it was two or three in the entire month.) According to Poet.org's write-up on Rae Armantrout,

In the preface to her selected poems, Veil, Ron Silliman describes her work as: "the literature of the anti-lyric, those poems that at first glance appear contained and perhaps even simple, but which upon the slightest examination rapidly provoke a sort of vertigo effect as element after element begins to spin wildly toward more radical...possibilities."

This poem exemplifies those remarks.

Jack Gilbert

Like this one from Jack Gilbert. It's the first National Poetry Month Poem-a-day from Poets.org .

Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina
by Jack Gilbert

There was no water at my grandfather's
when I was a kid and would go for it
with two zinc buckets. Down the path,
past the cow by the foundation where
the fine people's house was before
they arranged to have it burned down.
To the neighbor's cool well. Would
come back with pails too heavy,
so my mouth pulled out of shape.
I see myself, but from the outside.
I keep trying to feel who I was,
and cannot. Hear clearly the sound
the bucket made hitting the sides
of the stone well going down,
but never the sound of me.