The Poetry Conversation

For the New Year

December 31, 2018

Amidst all the noise, this quiet welcome.

TO THE NEW YEAR
W. S. Merwin

With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible

PETER EVERWINE: “A Radiant Clarity, a Luminous Stillness”

November 27, 2018

Peter Everwine, the wonderful poet and lovely man, died on October 28th of this year. It’s a big loss, most immediately to the Fresno poetry community, and also to the wider community of poets and writers. In the wake of his death, there’s one grace note, one gift of good timing. Peter’s last reading, on September 12 at Respite on the River, was beautifully filmed and is available here. Peter was a banjo player as well as a poet, and the film opens with a trio of musicians, including Megan Mohigian–who told me about Peter’s death, sent me the link to his reading, and introduces him here. The reading itself begins at 6:22.

My semester as Distinguished-Poet-in-Residence at Fresno State was one of the best times I had during my years of teaching as a visiting writer, and meeting and spending time with Peter was one of the highlights. The poetry community there centered on Phil Levine and his lovely wife Franny, Connie Hales, Chuck Hanzlicek, and Peter, and radiated out from there to include other poets and writers, students in the program, and others just drawn to the conversation. I’d read and loved Peter’s first book, Collecting the Animals,early on, and the man behind the poems turned out to be charming, funny, sly, warm, lovely. In the copy he gave me of his book Working in the Song Fields: Poems of the Aztecs, he wrote “for Sharon–These songs–not Monk or Mingus, but no moldy figs either. Much love, Peter.” The subtitle above comes from a blurb by Ed Hirsch on the back of from the meadow: Selected and New Poems, published in 2004, and I can’t imagine a better description of his work. I’m including a couple of favorites here, but I urge you to watch him in person. And stay to the end to see a beautiful picture of Peter as a young man playing the banjo.

A SMALL STORY

When Mrs. McCausland comes to mind
she slips through a small gap in oblivion
and walks down her front steps, in her hand
a small red velvet pillow she tucks
under the head of Old Jim Schreiber,
who is lying dead-drunk against the curb
of busy Market Street. Then she turns,
labors up the steps and is gone . . .

A small story. Or rather, the memory
of a story I heard as a boy. The witnesses
are not to be found, the steps lead nowhere,
the pillow has collapsed into a thread of dust . . .
Do the dead come back only to remind us
they, too, were once among the living,
and that the story we make of our lives
is a mystery of luminous, but uncertain moments,
a shuffle of images we carry toward sleep—
Mrs. McCausland with her velvet pillow,
Old Jim at peace—a story, like a small
clearing in the woods at night, seen
from the windows of a passing train.

AFTER THE FUNERAL

We opened closets and bureau drawers
and packed away, in boxes, dresses and shoes,
the silk underthings still wrapped in tissue.
We sorted through cedar chests. We gathered
and set aside the keepsakes and the good silver
and brought up from the coal cellar
jars of tomato sauce, peppers, jellied fruit.
We dismantled, we took down from the walls,
we bundled and carted off and swept clean.
Goodbye, goodbye, we said, closing
the door behind us, going our separate ways
from the house we had emptied,
and which, in the coming days, we would fill
again and empty and try to fill again.

Drafts of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art”

October 23, 2018

Ever since I first read Bishop’s “One Art,” I’ve suggested that the villanelle form be retired, like a star basketball player’s jersey. That’s my way of saying that her poem feels like such a perfect mesh of form and content, how could anyone write a compelling one in its wake? I can’t read it–to myself or in a class–without choking at the end. The tension between the emotions and the form’s restraint exactly balances the two. There is great grief but no self-pity, no blame (except of herself), and nothing that makes me feel as if I’ve intruded on something too private, despite the powerful emotions.

The poem is a perfect translation of personal experience into art, and the result is so seamless it never occurred to me that there was any intermediate stage until the drafts were published in Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, edited by Alice Quinn. The first draft is the most surprising, closer to notes than to a poem, and full of all the ranting and whining that are so beautifully left out of the last draft. By the second draft, she starts to work with elements of the form, and it begins to take shape as a poem. I’d read discussions of the drafts, but never all the drafts themselves, because they appear in the book as typescript with indecipherable handwritten changes. But last year I came across an essay online that prints them all legibly and also discusses them in thoughtful and interesting ways. It’s from a blog I want to point you to, bluedragonfly10. The writer uses only her first name, Beth. The blog began in 2007 and continued until 2013, with nothing since. Beth is a writer, artist, and teacher, lived or lives in Colorado, and is incredibly smart about literature. Her essay on Bishop’s drafts is the best thing I’ve read on them, and the only complete printed versions I’ve found so far. (I’d be interested to know if there are others.) I highly recommend you read around in her entries–I’ve just started myself, and they’re fascinating.

Here’s the first draft of “One Art,” followed by the final version. You can find everything in between in the bluedragonfly10 blog post. Seeing the process gives me hope, and makes me more willing to write the bad stuff on the way to the better stuff.

HOW TO LOSE THINGS/?/THE GIFT OF LOSING THINGS

One might begin by losing one’s reading glasses
oh 2 or 3 times a day–or one’s favorite pen.

THE ART OF LOSING THINGS
The thing to do is to begin by “mislaying.”
Mostly, one begins by “mislaying”:
–these are almost too easy to be mentioned,
and “mislaying” means that they usually turn up
in the most obvious place, although when one
is making progress, the places grow more unlikely
–This is by way of introduction.
I really want to introduce myself–I am such a
fantastically good at losing things
I think everyone shd. profit from my experiences.

You may find it hard to believe, but I have actually lost
I mean lost, and forever two whole houses,
one a very big one. A third house, also big, is
at present, I think, “mislaid”–but
Maybe it’s lost too. I won’t know for sure for some time.
I have lost one long [crossed out] peninsula and one island.
I have lost–it can never be has never been found–
a small-sized town on that same island.
I’ve lost smaller bits of geography, like
a splendid beach, and a good-sized bay.
Two whole cities, two of the
world’s biggest cities (two of the most beautiful
although that’s beside the point)
A piece of one continent–
and one entire continent. All gone, gone forever and ever.

One might think this would have prepared me
for losing one average-sized not especially–exceptionally
beautiful or dazzlingly intelligent person
(except for blue eyes), (only the eyes were exceptionally
beautiful and
But it doesn’t seem to have, at all…the hands looked
intelligent)
the fine hands<

a good piece of one continent
and another continent–the whole damned thing!
He who loseth his life, etc…–but he who
loses his love–never, no never never never again–

And the final version:

ONE ART

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Gwen Head and Dragon Gate Press

September 30, 2018

I learned recently that the poet and publisher Gwen Head died in April of this year. It’s a sign of the times that I found out through amazon. I’d ordered a Laura Jensen book I’d lost somewhere along the way, Memory, that was published by the press Gwen founded, Dragon Gate, in 1982. It came from an independent seller, and when I saw the return address, Dragon Gate, my eyes filled with tears. The press had long been shut down, and I’d been out of touch with Gwen after we’d both moved away from the northwest and Gwen’s own memory had begun to fail. I contacted the seller, who has most of what’s left of the Dragon Gate inventory, and he told me about her death. My online search for mentions of Gwen and her own poetry books, and of Dragon Gate and its publications, confirmed how quickly the poetry universe I’ve known is disappearing under the avalanche of the present.

There will be a memorial for Gwen at Open Books in Seattle next February, but for those of you who don’t know her or the press, I want to offer a little introduction here. I’d be grateful if those of you who did have a connection to her would pass along any stories you have.

Gwen published four volumes of poems: Special Effects (1976) and The Ten Thousandth Night (1979) in the Pitt Poetry Series; Frequencies (University of Utah Press, 1992, which included selections from the first two books in addition to new poems); and Fire Shadows (LSU, 2001). Amazingly, you can find them all for sale online.

Gwen founded Dragon Gate press in the early eighties, to publish poetry and short fiction. She did an enormous amount of research in advance, and set it up in her home in Port Townsend, Washington (Scott Wolf’s Gray Wolf was once in part of that same house, so it must be embedded with poetry). She published books by Laura Jensen, Linda Gregerson, Richard Blessing, Henry Carlile, Joan Swift, Richard Ronan, Jim Simmerman, Katharine Hake, John Woods, Jeanne Murray Walker, Anthony Piccione, and many others. All small presses are labors of love, and Dragon Gate was no exception: she provided a home for good work that might not have made its way into the world without her generosity.

Here’s Gwen’s poem “Rain” from Frequencies. I also recommend a beautiful pantoum in the same volume, “The Swans of Saigon.”

RAIN

Rain is the original stereotype,
billions of identical units, each intent
on the din of its own tiny bit of information:
about ice crystals, say, at forty thousand feet,
wind shear, or the pollen count
on the Siberian tundra.

It begins like a sprung nerve, twitching.
An invisible junco lands
on the laurel. Then a flock of them.
Something plays the ferns like a marimba.
It continues, in Satie’s directions, monotonously, whitely–
like a nightingale with a toothache.
But this is more accurately rodent weather:
a clatter of nails and tail-tips on roof and walls,
the sour smell of a sickroom,
fear of bites while sleeping.

Awake and needing something, I go downtown.
Rain draws the maimed in thunderous masses
out into the slick streets as if to a shrine.
The dwarfs, the obese, the amputees, the mumblers, the dropsical
old women whose feet would make fine umbrella stands
crowd stupefied beneath the gray fountain
to be healed or drown,

and my taxi driver, taking a wrong turn, asks, “Lady
why do you look so sad?
You must be some kind of artist.”

Between the Lines

June 21, 2018

The amazing poet Terrance Hayes was just on npr, talking about his new book, American Sonnets for my Once and Future Assassin. I heard him read some of these strange, powerful poems in Seattle last year and I’m looking forward to the book. But what’s on my mind now is a phrase he used about how a poet is always trying to activate the space between the lines. I hurried to write that down: activate the space between the lines. The idea is one I think about all the time, but have ne’er so well articulated. I try to point to it when I talk to students about the rhythm of the line, about tautness rather than slackness, about making a poem rather than saying something. What I’m getting at is how those lines create a force field in the spaces between them.

I think these force fields exist in metric poems and free verse, in parts of long poems (you know them when you come to them in Wordsworth’s Prelude, for example) and some whole shorter poems. I think it’s what took the top of Emily Dickinson’s head off. Poems that have this can be translated, but they can’t be paraphrased. I can’t offer a more specific definition, but here are some examples of the electricity I mean, the sparks leaping across the white space.

First, this familiar early 16th century lyric:

O Western wind, when wilt thou blow,
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!

***

FLY
W. S. Merwin

I have been cruel to a fat pigeon
Because he would not fly
All he wanted was to live like a friendly old man

He had let himself become a wreck filthy and confiding
Wild for his food beating the cat off the garbage
Ignoring his mate perpetually snotty at the beak
Smelling waddling having to be
Carried up the ladder at night content

Fly I said throwing him into the air
But he would drop and run back expecting to be fed
I said it again and again throwing him up
As he got worse
He let himself be picked up every time
Until I found him in the dovecote dead
Of the needless efforts

So that is what I am

Pondering his eyed that could not
Conceive that I was a creature to run from

I who have always believed too much in words

***

IN THE EVENING
Jean Valentine

In the evening
I saw them

their little
open boats

carrying us
across the blood water

their invisible company
their invisible company

you beauty I never
did not know

no time
no place

you beauty
little ferryman

***

ETYMOLOGICAL DIRGE
Heather McHugh

‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear.

Calm comes from burning.
Tall comes from fast.
Comely doesn’t come from come.
Person comes from mask.

The kin of charity is whore,
the root of charity is dear.
Incentive has its source in song
and winning in the sufferer.

Afford yourself what you can carry out.
A coward and a coda share a word.
We get our ugliness from fear.
We get our danger from the lord.

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Sharon Bryan