Here again is the post from two weeks ago, when something went wrong with the zoom link.  Fingers crossed that it will work this time.

This week I want to try something a little different.  Most of the poems I’ve posted here in the past are ones I know well or at least know a little.  But what I’d like to talk about this week is that first encounter with a poem–what it looks like and feels like, how you decide to keep reading or skip it, how the poem takes you in and you take it in.  So I’ve picked a few poems without reading them, and I won’t post them here, just share my screen during this week’s Fridays at 4 (eastern time) zoom discussion, and we can take them on together.

For me, that first encounter is usually a kind of blur, a necessary beginning.  To begin with, I know only what it looks like on the page–whether it’s long or short, block or stanzas, uses long, medium, or short lines.  As I begin to read I’m listening first for the poem’s music, whether it’s meter or free verse.  Then I get a sense of its voice, and I notice vivid images.  I’m trolling for something that will make me want to stay. As brief and superficial as that first reading is, I’m not going to read the poem again unless something pulls me in–the poem’s music, an image, a compelling speaking voice (voice of the poem, not the poet), language that sparks, lines that are taut, not slack, a surprising thought.  If I don’t find any of that, if the poem is spouting clichés, if it feels plodding rather than energetic, I’m already on to the next.

If something does grab me, I’ll read more slowly the second time, noticing the title and thinking about how it might connect to the poem as I go.  I’ll be paying more attention to the images, and to what the poem is actually saying.  Then I’ll read it another time or two, trying to get it whole in my mind.  Next I’m going to pay attention to where it takes place–in the speaker’s head, or in an external scene?  Does it stay in one place or move around?  And where is it in time–in present tense, a few moments?  Or  does it move from the present, to memories of the past, then back to the present?  Is it a sort of fairy tale or fable, where time is irrelevant?

Somewhere in here I’m going to look up any words I don’t know, or that I have a sense are used in a particular way in the poem.  And I’m going to look up other elements of context I think might be helpful.  Every time I do I’m going to read the poem again, seeing how the new information illuminates it.

Then I’m going to read it again, and read it aloud again, and probably read the book it’s a part of, and maybe everything that poet has written.  But for now let’s stick with one poem at a time.

There are no poems here as examples this time.  Just think about your own reading of a poem, and maybe make some notes.  What draws you in?  What keeps you out?  I’ll bring 4 or 5 poems I haven’t read to this week’s discussion, and we’ll trying going through these steps as we read them a first time and a second and a third.  I’ll send the zoom link on Thursday.

  I hope you’ll all join me in celebrating CHARLES SIMIC’S poetry, prose, and life this week.  I’m repeating the post from June 7, 2022, because it’s a good starting point.  What I’m hoping is that everyone who loves his work will join in and post a favorite poem or prose poem here, and best of all bring it to this week’s Fridays at 4 (eastern time) to read to the group.  I’ll be sending the zoom link on Wednesday this week (please let me know if you haven’t received it by Wednesday night, so I can correct that), and I hope you’ll share it with anyone you know who might be interested.  But please don’t post it on any social media–that’s when we get zoom bombers.  His death is a big loss, but we can summon up his presence by reading his work together.

Here’s the earlier post:

Following up on last week’s post about Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, I want to talk about another Eastern European poet, Charles Simic, who was born in 1939 in what was then Yugoslavia.  I first read his poems in about 1970, when I was just beginning to write seriously, and his work opened doors in my mind that I didn’t even know were there.  That first excitement only deepened over time.  The tone reminds me some of Szymborska’s in its humor in the face of great tragedy.  But Simic’s work also summons up the magic of fairy tales–the impossible described very matter-of-factly.  In addition to his numerous books of poetry, he’s also published several that collect his essays and memoir fragments, which I find as compelling as his poems.  He won the Pulitzer prize in poetry for a collection of prose poems, The World Doesn’t End, which remind me of Joseph Cornell’s boxed assemblages.  Simic wrote an insightful book on Cornell’s work, and I think of Simic’s poems as similar to those boxes.  I’m including here one of the earliest poems of his I read, from Dismantling the Silence, one  about wartime from The Book of Gods and Devils, a prose poem from The World Doesn’t End, and three brief prose passages from his memoirs.

Simic didn’t arrive in this country until he was sixteen.  Why has he always written in English, and not his native Serbian? “For poetry to be used as an instrument of seduction, the first requirement is that it be understood. No American girl was likely to fall for a guy who read her love poems in Serbian as they sipped Coke.”

 

FORK

This strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird’s foot
Worn around the cannibal’s neck.

As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat,
It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
Its head which like your fist
Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.

*

TWO DOGS
for Charles and Holly

An old dog afraid of his own shadow
In some Southern town.
The story told me by a woman going blind,
One fine summer evening
As shadows were creeping
Out of the New Hampshire woods,
A long street with just a worried dog
And a couple of dusty chickens,
And all that sun beating down
In that nameless Southern town.

It made me remember the Germans marching
Past our house in 1944.
The way everybody stood on the sidewalk
Watching them out of the corner of the eye,
The earth trembling, death going by…
A little white dog ran into the street
And got entangled with the soldiers’ feet.
A kick made him fly as if he had wings.
That’s what I keep seeing!
Night coming down. A dog with wings.

*

[untitled]

We were so poor I had to take the place of the
bait in the mousetrap.  All alone in the cellar, I
could hear them pacing upstairs, tossing and turn-
ing in their beds.  “These are dark and evil days,”
the mouse told me as he nibbled my ear.  Years
passed.  My mother wore a cat-fur collar which
she stroked until its sparks lit up the cellar.

*

One night the Gestapo came to arrest my father.  This time I was asleep and awoke suddenly to the bright lights.  They were rummaging everywhere and making a lot of noise.  My father was already dressed.  He was saying something, probably cracking a joke.  That was his style.  No matter how bleak the situation, he’d find something funny to say.  Years later, surrounded by doctors and nurses after having suffered a bad heart attack, he replied to their “how’re you feeling sir” with a request for some pizza and beer.  The doctors thought he had suffered brain damage.  I had to tell them this was normal behavior for him.

*

There was an old cemetery nearby [where Simic lived with his pregnant mother in Belgrade during WW II] with a huge church, and beyond it the fairgrounds, where supposedly, they were shooting German prisoners.  We met a pack of children on the way who said that they were from the circus.  It was true.  There used to be a circus tent on the fairgrounds in the early years of the war, but now only a few trailers were left on its edge.  These were odd-looking children.  They wore the strangest clothes–unmatched, wrong-sized costumes–and they jabbered, speaking a foreign language among themselves.
“Show him what you can do,” said my friend, who had met them before.  They obliged.  A little boy stood on his hands.  Then, he removed one hand and was left for a moment standing on the other.  A thin, dark-eyed, dark-haired girl leaned back until her head emerged from between her legs.  “They have no bones,” my friend whispered.  The dead have no bones, I thought.  They fall over like sacks of flour.

*

All able men were conscripted and the fighting was fierce.  Belgrade was a city of the wounded.  One saw people on crutches on every corner.  They walked slowly, at times carrying a mess kit with their daily ration.  There were soup kitchens in which people got their meals.  Once, chased by a friend, I rounded the corner of my street at top speed and collided with one of these invalids, spilling his soup on the sidewalk..  I won’t forget the look he gave me.  “Oh child,” he said softly.  I was too stunned to speak.  I didn’t even have the sense to pick up his crutch.  I watched him do it himself with great difficulty.

  Here again is the post from two weeks ago, when something went wrong with the zoom link.  Fingers crossed that it will work this time.

This week I want to try something a little different.  Most of the poems I’ve posted here are ones I know well or at least know a little.  But what I’d like to talk about this week is that first encounter with a poem–what it looks like and feels like, how you decide to keep reading or skip it, how the poem take you in and you take it in.  So I’ve picked a few poems without reading them, and I won’t post them here, just share my screen during this week’s Fridays at 4 (eastern time) zoom discussion, and we can take them on together.

For me, the first reading is usually a kind of blur, a first encounter, a necessary beginning.  At first glance I know only what it looks like on the page–long or short, block or stanzas, long, medium or short lines.  When I begin to read I know almost nothing–maybe I can tell  whether it’s free verse or meter, what the voice sounds like, a little of what’s happening, and any vivid images.  As brief and superficial as that first reading is, I’m not going to read the poem again unless something pulls me in–the poem’s music, an image, a compelling speaking voice (voice of the poem, not the poet), language that sparks, lines that are taut, not slack (whether it’s meter or free verse), a surprising thought.  If I don’t find any of that, if the poem is spouting clichés, if it feels plodding rather than energetic, I’m already on to the next.

If something does grab me, I’ll read more slowly the second time, noticing the title and thinking about how it might connect to the poem as I go.  I’ll be paying more attention to the images, and to what the poem is actually saying.  Then I’ll read it another time or two, trying to get it whole in my mind.  Next I’m going to pay attention to where it takes place–in the speaker’s head, or in an external scene?  Does it stay in one place or move around?  And where is it in time–in present tense, a few moments?  Or  does it move from the present, to memories of the past, then back to the present?  Is it a sort of fairy tale or fable, where time is irrelevant?

Somewhere in here I’m going to look up any words I don’t know, or that I have a sense are used in a particular way in the poem.  And I’m going to look up other elements of context I think might be helpful.  Every time I do I’m going to read the poem again, seeing how the new information illuminates it.

Then I’m going to read it again, and read it aloud again, and probably read the book it’s a part of, and maybe everything that poet has written.  But for now let’s stick with one poem at a time.

So there are no poems here as examples.  Just think about your own reading of a poem, and maybe make some notes.  I’ll bring 4 or 5 poems I haven’t read to this week’s discussion, and we’ll trying going through these steps as we read them a first time and a second and a third.  I’ll send the zoom link on Thursday.

It feels like time to look at some new poems–but new is a relative term.  Most of these are recent, but some are just new to me, poets whose names I’ve known but haven’t read at all or haven’t read closely.  Poems from recent books by poets whose previous work I do know.  New ways of seeing and hearing, of taking in the world and giving voice to it.  Most of these are new to the blog.  Poets are always torn between reading new work and re-reading long time favorites, and of course we do both, shuttling back and forth between them, sometimes resisting the ones new to us, arguing with them, then seeing what they mean, all that they open our hearts and minds to.

I hope you’ll take time to research a little context for ones you don’t already know.  Feel free to add your comments here and bring them up at this week’s Friday discussion.  Please note that this week only it will be two hours earlier, at 2 eastern time.

Here are two poems from Rick Barot’s book The Galleons.  In the first one, the person described is the speaker’s grandmother.

THE GALLEONS, 1

Rick Barot

Her story is a part of something larger, it is a part
of history. No, her story is an illumination

of history, the matchstick lit in the black seam of time.
Or, no, her story is separate

from the whole, as distinct as each person is distinct
from the stream of people that led

to the one and leads past the one. Or, her story
is surrounded by history, the ambient spaciousness

of which she is the momentary foreground.
Maybe history is a net through which

just about everything passes, and the pieces of her
story are particles caught in the interstices.

Or, her story is a contradiction, something ordinary
that has no part in history at all, if history is

about what is included, what is made important.
History is the galleon in the middle

of the Pacific Ocean, in the middle of the sixteenth
century, swaying like a drunk who will take

six months to finally reach his house.
She is on another ship, centuries later, on a journey

eastward that will take weeks across the same ocean.
The war is over, though her husband

is still in his officer’s uniform, small but confident
among the tall white officers. Her hair

is marcelled like a movie star’s waves,
though she has been too sick with the water’s motion

to know that anyone sees her. Her daughter is two,
the blur of need at the center of each day’s

incessant rocking. Here is a ship, an ocean.
Here is a figure, her story a few words in the blue void.

 

FLEA

At a certain point I stopped and asked
what poems I could write, which were different

from the poems I wanted to write, with the wanting
being proof that I couldn’t write those poems, that they

were impossible. What I could do
was different from what I wanted. To see this

was the beginning of work that could be work,
not simply pursuit after pursuit that was

bound to fail, yearning for qualities that were not mine
and could not be mine. Aiming for a muscular

logic that could be followed by a reader’s mind
like an old stone wall running along a landscape, I got

nothing so solid or continuous. The authority
I wanted dissolved always into restlessness,

into a constant gathering of images whose aggregate
seemed like things that had come to settle

inside a glove compartment. I had no faith
in my flaws, but I had a grudging faith

in the particular. There was the actual stone wall,
its mongrel irregular blocks harmonized into use, rich

and ordinary as a soul. There was the flea
that landed on my forearm one night as I sat reading.

The black speck of it, then the outsize sting.
The flea that is an insect, has no wings, can jump

vertically seven inches and horizontally thirteen inches.
The flea that looks, through the magnifier,

like the villain spaceship from a science-fiction movie,
that can live for years in good conditions, and lives

by drinking the blood of animals and birds,
in a practice that is called, by science, hematophagy.

 

*

from Obit, Victoria Chang’s book written about her many losses surrounding her father’s illness and her mother’s death.  It includes prose poems and lined poems.

OBIT [Language]

Victoria Chang

Language—died again on August
3, 2015 at 7:09 a.m. I heard about
my mother’s difficult nights. I hired
a night person. By the time I got
there, she was always gone. The
night person had a name but was like
a ghost who left letters on a shore
that when brought home became
shells. Couldn’t breathe, 2:33 a.m.
Screaming, 3:30 a.m. Calm, 4:24
a.m. I got on all fours, tried to pick up
the letters like a child at an egg hunt
without a basket. But for every letter
I picked up, another fell down, as if
protesting the oversimplification of
my mother’s dying. I wanted the night
person to write in a language I could
understand. Breathing unfolding,
2:33. Breathing in blades, 3:30.
Breathing like an evening gown,
4:24. But maybe I am wrong, how
death is simply death, each slightly
different from the next but the final
strike all the same. How the skin
responds to a wedding dress in the
same way it responds to rain.

 

from OBIT [The Blue Dress]

The Blue Dress—died on August 6,
2015, along with the little blue flowers,
all silent. Once the petals looked up.
Now small pieces of dust. I wonder
whether they burned the dress or just
the body? I wonder who lifted her up
into the fire? I wonder if her hair
brushed his cheek before it grew into a
bonfire? I wonder what sound the body
made as it burned? They dyed her hair
for the funeral, too black. She looked
like a comic character. I waited for the
next comic panel, to see the speech
bubble and what she might say. But her
words never came and we were left
with the stillness of blown glass. The
irreversibility of rain. And millions of
little blue flowers. Imagination is having
to live in a dead person’s future. Grief is
wearing a dead person’s dress forever.

 

 

 

*

AN ISSUE OF MERCY, #1   from Jeffers’ book The Age of Phillis, poems about Phillis Wheatley

Honorée Fanon Jeffers

Mercy, girl.
What the mother might have said, pointing

at the sun rising, what makes life possible.
Then, dripped the bowl of water,

reverent, into oblivious earth.
Was this prayer for her?

Respect for the dead or disappeared?
An act to please a genius child?

Her daughter would speak
of water, bowl, sun—

light arriving,
light gone—

sometime after the nice white lady
paid and named her for the slave ship.

Mercy: what the child called Phillis
would claim after that sea journey.

Journey.
Let’s call it that.

Let’s lie to each other.

Not early descent into madness.
Naked travail among filth and rats.

What got Phillis over that sea?
What kept a stolen daughter?

Perhaps it was mercy,
Dear Reader.

Mercy,
Dear Brethren.

Water, bowl, sun—
a mothering, God’s milky sound.

Morning shards, and a mother wondered
if her daughter forgot her real name,

refused to envision the rest:
baby teeth missing

and somebody wrapping her treasure
(barely) in a dirty carpet.‘

Twas mercy.
You know the story—

how we’ve lied to each other.

*

 

FLOATERS

Arthur Sze

Driving past a phalanx of white tombstones

along a south-facing slope

 

I recall, “No one hates war like soldiers,”

from a mechanic replacing

 

an oil pump to a Fiat engine; then another floater

appears when I blink—

 

peach blossoms on flowing water

into the distance—

 

and, as I ponder how a line written in 740

stays present tense—

 

a curved thrasher nests in a cleft of spined cholla—

a man, on ayahuasca,

 

types with his hands, and his hands disappear;

he types with his hands,

 

and his hands disappear—shimmer the words

as his hands disappear.