National Poetry Month Recommendation: Marianne Moore

Here's something you can't say of many Modernist poets: in 1968, Marianne Moore threw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium. (Take that, Skipwith Cannell!) I understand it was a big, sweeping curve that just nicked the outside of the plate, and that Mel Stottlemyre asked her for some pointers later that evening.

She also suggested the names Intelligent Whale and Utopian Turtletop to Ford Motor Company. They went with Edsel.

(Both of those stories sound like elaborate hoaxes. I sort of wish they were, and I'd thought of them.)

A fine article on Moore is here.

Here's a poem called "To A Giraffe":

If it is unpermissible, in fact fatal
to be personal and desirable

to be literal—detrimental as well
if the eye is not innocent—does it mean that

one can live only on top leaves that are small
reachable only by a beast that is tall?—

of which the giraffe is the best example—
the unconversational* animal.

When plagued by the psychological,
a creature can be unbearable

that could have been irresistible;
or to be exact, exceptional

since less conversational*
than some emotionally-tied-in-knots animal.

     After all
   consolations of the metaphysical
   can be profound. In Homer, existence

   is flawed; transcendence, conditional;
   "the journey from sin to redemption, perpetual."

(Pardon the font change. It was the only way I could get the line breaks and spaces right.)

And this is "A Jelly-Fish":

Visible, invisible,
  a fluctuating charm
an amber-tinctured amethyst
  inhabits it, your arm
approaches and it opens
  and it closes; you had meant
to catch it and it quivers;
  you abandon your intent.

I'll let Moore's work speak for itself. Honestly, I don't know what I could say that would be worthy.

* My thanks to the eagle-eyed and (I assume) Marianne Moore fancying J.C.P, who caught my mistaken transcription. I had had "unconventional" and "conventional" in place of "unconversational" and "conversational".

National Poetry Month Recommendation: Robert Hayden

It's the last day of National Poetry Month. I must admit I'm sad to see it go. I've been enjoying finding favorite poems and poets and sharing them.

I'll give you a few today. And use the comments fields to recommend your own. I'll drop them all in a final post.

I attended a lecture by A. Van Jordan (recent Guggenheim fellow, which I mentioned earlier) last July, and he introduced me to the work of Robert Hayden. Jordan discussed the poem "American Journal." Here's a selection, but you can follow the link on the title to read the entire thing:

here among them  the americans  this baffling
multi people  extremes and variegations  their
noise  restlessness  their almost frightening
energy  how best describe these aliens in my
reports to The Counselors

disguise myself in order to study them unobserved
adapting their varied pigmentations  white black
red brown yellow the imprecise and strangering
distinctions by which they live by which they
justify their cruelties to one another

and later:

america  as much a problem in metaphysics as
it is a nation earthly entity an iota in our
galaxy  an organism that changes even as i
examine it  fact and fantasy never twice the
same  so many variables

I like this voice he's using. There's a level at which this is a poem about the African-American experience. (Hayden was African-American, born in 1913 in Detroit, and started having his work collected in the '60s.) Hayden was given to depression, near-sighted, spent much of his life in books. He was an outsider, a member of no movement. So there's another level as well. The voice in the poem is his own: the observer, unaffiliated to any organized human endeavor. And unaffiliated as he is, he can see the cracks in the paint, and the whole of the painting, and report on both.

(We don't have a copy of his Collected Poems in right now, but we can get it. Call us to place an order at 1.800.335.READ or 206.634.3400. We do have some of his work in The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry, though.)

Nation Poetry Month Suggested Reading

Robert Pinsky offers a strong, spirited defense of difficult poetry here.

And Steve, a fellow shelver, recommends reading this poem by Paul Violi, "Appeal to the Grammarians".

National Poetry Month Recommendation: Brooks Haxton

In January I attended a lecture by Brooks Haxton. During the lecture, Brooks was thorough, intelligent, funny, but just a little distracted. That was because as he was lecturing, his son was competing in a poker tournament. And doing well. He ran off at the end of the lecture to check on his son's status.

Let's just say Dad had reason to be happy when the last flop fell.

This floors me: Brooks Haxton has a book that features a blurb by Eudora Welty. Seriously. The Eudora Welty. This Eudora Welty:



She said:

"The poems in Brooks Haxton's Traveling Company are extraordinary. I value their beauty and their strength, one by one, and their accumulating power to move their reader's own responding imagination. It is a pleasure to recommend this fine book."

Another writer who praised Haxton is Walker Percy. He said of the book Dominion:

"These are extraordinary poems, strikingly original, rich, comic, and beautiful in the use of language."

The authors of one of my favorite collections of short stories, and one of my favorite novels (last archived post on this page) both called Brooks Haxton's work extraordinary.

I think that this is the literary equivalent of having Samuel L. Jackson tell you he thinks you are a total bad-ass. And then having Bruce Lee concur.

This is a poem called "I Am" from Uproar: Antiphonies to Psalms:

And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God. Psalm 40

The fog I call the world is not a cloud of atoms
only, but a cloud of feelings, and ideas. I mind
my little bumps. I grieve. I think about non-being.
All I do is what my flesh can do, yet everything
my flesh can do feels strange. I am the swelling
of a salt sea onto an armature of chalk, the calm
of a tidal pool where brain cells live, the wind,
the lightning storm where thought flares into thought.
I taste damp sparks inside my tongue. If sayings
gather under the name of Faith, or Art, I let them
when they let me let them, and my mind clears.

National Poetry Month Recommendation: Bill Holm

Here's another for today. Bill Holm is a Minnesota poet. I dig him. (Of the three books that come up when you search our stock, only Playing the Black Piano and Eccentric Islands are the Bill Holm being recommended here. The other Bill Holm is good, too.)

He writes confidently about music, art, life's tragedy and promise—and he can be pretty funny, too.

Here's the opening stanza of "Playing Hadyn for the Angel of Death":

The piano tells things to your hands
you never let yourself hear from others:
Calm down, do your work, laugh,
love reason more, your mask less.
God exists, though not as church said.
To understand this language, you must
sometimes patiently play the same
piece over and over for years, then
when you expect nothing, the music
lets go its wisdom.


And this from "My Old Friend AT&T Writes Me A Personal Letter":

"Dear Mr. Holm,
Post office box one-eighty-seven may
be a terrific place to live, but for you—
it's more than just a home.
It's also a place to do serious business..."
Dear Company,
How well you understand
my needs—my life—
how every night we light
tiny candles to dine
on a roast sparrow (nowhere
for leftovers, you know),
drink a small young burgundy
(no space here for a wine to grow
old and big) then lie down
on our narrow bed for a little love.


Both of these poems are in Playing the Black Piano.

National Poetry Month Recommendation: Christian Hawkey

Here's another recommendation from Jacob, who wrote about Zbigniew Herbert earlier this month—and is the man who can do this.

The Book of Funnels
Christian Hawkey

"Mein Gott, nothing can be said less of The Book of Funnels than it set in me a new and profound hope in the future of contemporary poetry. Within you will find nothing of posturing, overwrought mechanics, or worse still, poems that turn a blind eye to language & metaphor which has been the bailiwick of contemporary poetry to date. Here, instead, is the work of a young poet that goes unabashedly & playfully into his phonetics & semantics to come out with a shining vicissitude."


Here are the opening lines of a poem called "Goya's Grotesquerie":

I don't know the story of his last days
but they ended, as always, in walls,

& what are "they" but so many palms
lining the dictator's long drive—

he's in the Yellow Room
smoothing his glass moustache,

he's sipping Lapsang souchong
& feeding a piece of cuttlebone

to a caged nightingale—tired bird.

National Poetry Month Recommendation: Stevie

I haven't done nearly enough recommending of women who write poetry this month. I apologize. Here's a quick plug for the great Stevie Smith.

I can't describe her any better than Clive James did, so I won't try: "Stevie Smith is a rare bird, a Maltese falcon. English literature in the modern age, crushed by the amount of official attention paid to it, needs her strangeness, the throwaway artistry that takes every trick, the technique there is no point in analyzing because you would have to go on analyzing it forever...When she is in form she can deconstruct literature in the only way that counts—by constructing something that feels as if it had just flown together, except you can't take it apart."

This is "Not Waving but Drowning":

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.


Go here to listen to her reading it.

National Poetry Month Recommendation: Calef Brown

A good thing to do with poetry is to start reader's young. I've been neglecting the youth readers this month, but here's a recommendation to correct that.

I shelved the Kids' Books section a while back, and came across the crazy, colorful paintings and poems of the wonderful Calef Brown. His illustrations have appeared all over: Harper's, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone—even Business Week.

His flat paintings compliment his clever little poems quite well. And his books are loads of fun. Buy one for the kids in your life.

Here's "Kansas City Octopus" from Polka-bats and Octopus Slacks:

Kansas City Octopus
is wearing fancy slacks.
Bell-bottom,
just got 'em,
fifty bucks including tax.

Red corduroy
and boy-oh-boy,
they fit like apple pie.
Multi-pocket snazzy trousers
custom made for octipi.

Fantastic plastic stretch elastic
keeps 'em nice and tight.
Kansas City Octopus
is looking good tonight.


On his website, you can see some of the poem/illustration combinations. Enjoy.

National Poetry Month Recommendation: Campbell McGrath

I'm fond of the Italian writer Italo Calvino. I like his novels. I like his collections of short poetic prose pieces. Great stuff, all around.

When I read the first section of Campbell McGrath's Florida Poems, it reminded me of Calvino's Invisible Cities.

The section, called "Flora & Fauna." And then it seems to have a subtitle: "A City in the Clouds." The section is a suite of poems about a city in the clouds, a city with slaves, birds, and alligators. And people. And advertising. And Happy Meals one Sunday a month.

This is the first three stanzas of a poem called "The Last Days":

The last days of the city in the clouds were in many ways
like those that had gone before: each morning
the sun rose from beneath them
in a corona of atmospheric fire; each night
it slipped beneath the velvet omphalos of the horizon.

But as the raw and fragile tissue of the clouds
was sucked into the maw of the unresting pumps
not only did the outlying regions diminish
but the fundamental clouds of the city grew ever thinner,
and as they thinned they rose to a greater height,
and the cold wind of the jetstream assailed them
in their lattice dwellings built for gentler climes.

Things were lost: bottles, alarm clocks, cases of rifle shells


It's Campbell McGrath's imaginative power that draws me to him. It's his specificity of language that keeps me reading.

I think I owe you another

I didn't post a poetry recommendation on April 2. That was a weekday. I was shelving. I should've at least brought something to your attention. Sorry.

Maybe I'll two next Monday.

Here's a little something else for today, though. A coworker, Karen, gave me this poem about Dylan Thomas by her mother, E. Kathleen England:

The Ballad of Dylan Thomas

In the druidical mists of South Wales
Was once spawned a genius wild
Who vowed he'd become a great writer
When he was still only a child.
It was of being Dylan Thomas that he died.

"I'd rather be a poet any day
And thrive on guile and beer," said he.
"If I act like a bard, poor and wicked,
Then that's what I surely shall be."

Though his writings made him quite famous
He was always searching for more.
Near the end he cared only for drinking;
The work he once loved, now a chore.
It was of being Dylan Thomas that he died.

One night in a room in the Chelsea Hotel
Dylan Thomas declared to a friend,
"I've just downed eighteen straight whiskies
And I fear they may well spell my end."

Caitlin, possessed of ten-thousand demons,
Smashed a cross and a statue of Mary.
Dylan swore he would die before he was forty;
Now at thirty-nine his remains she must bury,
For he had died of being Dylan Thomas.

Nowadays in the Chelsea it's rumored
A lady burns candles all of the time
To discourage the ghost in the hallway
Who whispers, "Room 205 is still mine."

And more often than not she burns incense
To fend off the mists rising round.
She says the room reeks of raw whiskey.
Though never a bottle she's found.
It was of being Dylan Thomas that he died.

(When Margaret Taylor, a friend and benefactor, learned of the death of Dylan Thomas she allegedly said: "He has died of being Dylan Thomas.")


Kathleen England is 83, and has lived with Parkinson's Disease for many years. She dreams of publishing, and is working on, a book of poetry. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, studied verse with Nelson Bentley for 12 quarters since 1985, and has been published in The Written Arts, Matrix, Spindrift, Quaint Canoe (where she received third place in the "cat poem" contest), Scarabogram, Art's Focus (second honorable mention in the Illustrated Poetry contest), and the Henry Art Gallery Art Writing Competition (second prize).

It is our pleasure to share this poem with you. My thanks to Kathleen and Karen for providing it.

National Poetry Month Recommendation: Maurice Manning

(If you look closely at some of my recommendations, you'll detect a thread holding them together. Not all. But some.)

I saw Maurice Manning read a few of the poems from his new book Bucolics about a year ago, and I've been waiting to read them on my own ever since. And now I can.

There are 70 wonderful, small poems in Bucolics. They are in a single voice, a man who is addressing his creator. He calls the creator Boss. The poet Mark Jarman says of the poems: "In these marvelous addresses to the Almighty, Maurice Manning reminds us of our agrarian roots and that our best metaphors for the ineffable all spring from the soil. These psalms, powerful and hectoring, tautological and unique, are reminiscent of King David's. They are spellbinding."

They certainly are. Sometimes they are funny. Sometimes they are a little sad. Often they have an image that is sublime, and a metaphysical implication that is stunning.

Here is "XLVII":

I put my face against
the horse's shoulder Boss
I breathed into the frost
so white upon his coat
I saw the patch I left
a darker spot as dark
as darkness gets I let
the horse cut through the field
the spot was looking out
an empty eye unblinking
unblinking Boss which one
of us was that supposed
to be O was it you
so steady Boss or was
that patch of empty me

National Poetry Month Recommendation: Keats

I've spent a lot of time on contemporary poets. But let's not forget the poetry that has stood the test of time. Three cheers for John Keats. Here's a section from the lovely "Ode on Melancholy":

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of gloved peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.


Go read the rest of it here. "Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips..." Now that is a line of poetry.

National Poetry Month Recommendation: Albert Goldbarth

Again, I apologize for not putting up a National Poetry Month recommendation yesterday. Very, very busy. Two today.

(And, no. The links weren't a hint. Just links to a couple of really good poets. Here's another one, too: meet Van Jordan, new Guggenheim fellow.)

Today, I'd like to recommend the "wacky, talky, and fat poetry" of two-time National Book Critics Circle Award winner Albert Goldbarth.

Goldbarth works in many moods, can be antic and deadly serious, and his poems are unmistakably his own. There's a wonderful new collection called The Kitchen Sink that I covet.

Here's a poem called "Buchenwald:"

originally, the beech woods of that area.
They have a quiet grandeur, when we edit
historic associations out of them. Bole after bole:
a quiet and recurrent grandeur. There was a copse
not far from my childhood neighborhood, the sun among the trunks
like clear, sweet speech and punctuation. I also
think of these sluggish summer evenings lately near the highway
where the mill pollution veils the lowering light
in especially glorious drifts of smoky tangerine and deep, seared rose.
—How even appreciation
of beauty becomes a betrayal.


There's so much to admire in that poem: the colon in the title, the way it is a part of the piece, the first real word of the poem, but because it is a word so packed with weight, it sits above the rest. On the page, it is a cinder block, squashing the rest of the poem with its significance. We have the moment when the poem acknowledges itself as a work of poetry—"like clear, sweet speech and punctuation," because poetry is meant to be read aloud, but exists punctuated on a page. And then there are the "glorious drifts of smoky tangerine and deep, seared rose," that betray us.

Good stuff.

National Poetry Month Recommendation, Tomorrow!

Busy, busy, busy shelving. Promise to give you two recommendations tomorrow.

Until then, please enjoy Ron Silliman's blog or learn a little more about Eleanor Wilner.

National Poetry Month Recommendation: John Olson

How about another local? A close second to Russell Edson on my list of favorite prose poets is John Olson. He was once a Stranger Genius. (And probably still is, in their books...certainly is in mine.)

Here is a selection from a poem called "The Man Whose Eyes Clutched Cherubim," which appears in his book Free Stream Velocity:

...One is often confused by facial expression. It is vital to reveal eyes. All is eternal. Outside of our skulls the profusion of stars is an encore that churns above the steeples, repeating oblivion in waves of kelp and Florentine silks. Fossils and suns and fossil suns drop light in the rain during a perception of rubies. It is gratifying to paint a river. Puerto Rico cries out for lemons. Our chariots are pulled by clay hummingbirds whose throats obey the sepia of our convulsive sanctity. I have rubbed the hides of the buffalo until they slobbered like lightbulbs. Mustard laminates the meat. The traction of stars ingratiates infinity.


There it is, a torrent of images, odd juxtapositions. Bemusing in a small section like the one above. Confounding, even. But it accretes over a full poem, and becomes bright, shimmering beauty over an entire book. Love that John Olson.

National Poetry Month Recommendation: A Little More Brian Turner

Last night on KCTS (Seattle's PBS station), I watched one of the episodes of America at a Crossroads, and saw previously mentioned poet Brian Turner. Follow this link to see the page for the episode, which was called "Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience."

You'll find two of Turner's poems there.

National Poetry Month Recommendation: Heather McHugh

What is there to say about UW's Heather McHugh that will really do her justice? She's flat out amazing. Pete Turchi does a fine job of describing all that is good about her here.

She has her own website.

She has poetry on that site just made for the web.

She was a National Book Award finalist.

She did a wonderful Katz Lecture that you can hear on the web.

Here is the end of the poem "What Poems Are For," which can be found in Hinge & Sign:

The poem
is for something,
and the world is small.

I'll give you that.

National Poetry Month Recommendation: Russell

Russell Edson is my favorite prose poet. He may also be my favorite poet poet.

His work is dream logic, fable, psychology, mischief, tragedy, comedy, violence, and love. They never fail to amuse and astonish me. They never fail to make me feel better.

The Believer published this fantastic look at his work. Read it to learn more about him.

This is a poem called "Super Monkey" from The Rooster's Wife:

He was creating a super monkey by grafting pieces of a dead parrot to a morhpined monkey.

When the monkey awoke he was covered with green feathers and had a beak. His first words were, Polly wants a cracker.

It's historic! No monkey will have ever said this before!

And so super monkey will be given all the crackers super monkey can eat, until super monkey sickens of crackers and says, Polly wants a banana. Which will be another historic quotable!

Then he'll begin work on superduper monkey who with proper grafting will be able to sing like a canary...


His poems tend to end with that ellipsis. (The Rooster's Wife has at least one that ends in a question mark.) I like the implications of that ellipsis. You reach the end of the poem, but not the end of the story. Instead, he provides readers with an opening.

Nation Poetry Month Shout-Out

Congratulations to poet Eric McHenry, associate editor at Columns Magazine, who has won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.

National Poetry Month Recommendation: Sommer & Hacker

Jay, our head book buyer, offers two suggestions:

Continued
Piotr Sommer

"If you like Szymborska, Milosz, Zagajewski, or Zbigniew Herbert [Oh, and we do!], check out Piotr Sommer."

The great John Ashbery says: "Piotr Sommer is the great poet of 'everyday lonliness, contrary to your self, perhaps.' Like Frank O'Hara, whom he has translated into Polish, he is on the lookout for what he calls 'improper names'—the very ones that allow us to construe the unkempt and taciturn world that surrounds us."

Essays on Departure
Marilyn Hacker

"A fine overview of one of our finest poets."

The estimable Edmund White says: "Marilyn Hacker joins a miraculous facility with poetic forms (sonnets, ballades, sestinas) to a shockingly intense sensuality. Not unlike Baudelaire, you might say, and indeed like him, she shares a taste for excess, drink, Paris, women, crowds. 'Enivrez-vous!' Baudelaire ordered his readers. Marylin Hacker has taken his advice seriously."