Pages Rustle: Featured Poet Brian Daldorph

Every so often, I'll be featuring a new poem, my thoughts on the work, and a conversation with the poet. I hope you'll enjoy and come back again for the next installation!

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This week's poem from:




From the Inside Out: Sonnets



By Brian Daldorph



Woodley Press








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Fall

He needs this cell. It was getting cold
out there and he’d done all the drugs he could buy.
It was either jail or die.
Sometimes he thinks he’s getting too old
for this shit, but it’s too late to start over
with some sweet-eyed lover
who says, “You and only you are the man I love.”
He’d be late for his wedding again,
and what woman would choose a man with a cracked brain?
He sees the young punks in here scared
about what they’ve gotten into, not
the cocky kids they were on the street who dared
to run faster than the cops. He ended up in this cell
where it’s warm enough. And three hot meals.


***




“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation”
Henry David Thoreau


Brian Daldorph’s book of “From the Inside Out: Sonnets” utilizes many variations of the sonnet form. The sonnet form seems particularly appropriate for “Fall” and the other poems which are set in a jail cell. The poem, like the subject, must make do with a limited amount of space and breathing room. In the condensed lines we learn a great deal about the inhabitant of the cell: a sketch portrait in minimum of a habitual drug user, with a knotty life story at last taking ownership of his past actions. This is a poem of a man whose quite desperation has led him to an almost unthinkably constrained life.

In “Fall,” the tight construction of the sonnet requires a compression of the narrative but Daldorph manages, with some carefully selected modifiers, to imply quite a bit of the character’s back-story. One of the appealing aspects of this sonnet is the poet’s use of eye or sight rhyme that helps to reinforce the subject matter through the form: things are not always how they look. The reader doesn’t always get what he or she expects the form to provide, especially when the sonnet is read aloud.

Restraint might be the best adjective to describe the narrator’s approach; in looking quietly, Daldorph manages to fill the poem with an intensity of implied emotion. It would be easy to treat the convict with disdain for his ruined life, but somehow this portrayal is more sympathetic than one might expect. The sympathetic view succeeds in this poem because it is not didactic, the constrained form of the sonnet helps the poet to hold the emotional rein in check and prevent the all too easy slide into moralizing. One way the narrator builds this sympathy is through the contrast between the older inmate and the “young punks.” This portrayal shows the subject recognizing his younger self in the youth who aren’t so cocky now on the “inside.” The regret, although implied, is clear.

The way the inmate acknowledges his own faults and misgivings allows the reader a glimpse at how tenuous our civilized lives are and how difficult life must be when through addiction and poor choices the last way to provide food and shelter also means paying with one’s freedom. As Henry David Thoreau stated, “the cost of a thing it will be remembered is the amount of life it requires to be exchanged for it.” The cost for the inmate seems terribly high.


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Q & A with Poet Brian Daldorph




Q: I’m interested in hearing about your work in the Douglas County Jail. How did you become a poet in the jailhouse? How has that influenced your work?

Brian Daldorph: I've been working at Douglas County Jail since 2001. Years go by! Two of my colleagues in the English Dept set up the program, and when they left, I took over. I've had many different teaching experiences in my career, including teaching in Japan and Senegal, but my jail teaching's been my best experience of all. It's endlessly exciting to see that the art form I love can bring so much to people in dire circumstances. I've learnt so much from my long commitment to jail work. My new book, Jail Time, is about my teaching there, and some of the people I've met.


Q: The speaker’s point of view in this poem is sympathetic in the manner it catalogs the inmate’s losses and lost opportunities. And there are so many hints towards a back-story that this poem feels like it might be a condensed version of a story. How did this poem come to be?

Brian Daldorph: This jail poem is really an amalgam of stories and characters from the jail. True of many of the poems. This is the artistic element, really. To take the raw material and try to transform it into something coherent, more than the sum of its parts.


Q: The photographs at the section breaks in your book show a ruined world that is fascinating in its decay; are you the photographer as well? Is your writing particularly inspired by the visual arts?

Brian Daldorph: These photographs are by my exceptionally talented former student, Matt Porubsky. (I collaborate with him in a number of different ways). I asked him for photographs that caught the mood of the poems rather than intentionally illustrated them, and these are the haunting poems he produced, visual poems really.


Q: For you, what are some of the advantages and disadvantages of the sonnet form?

Brian Daldorph: The title of my book, From the Inside Out: Sonnets, has several ideas. My idea about writing sonnets is that if you work with the form consistently, which I did, writing hundreds of sonnets over a 6 to 8 year period, then you can internalize the form and write out from the form rather than writing into it as though it's set out in front of you. I love the strong form of the sonnet, how it intensifies language, yet the poet can push against it and make use of it in any number of ways.

One more point I'd like to add: Jail Time published by Original Plus (England) and I'm very pleased with it. I think it catches a lot of what I've experienced with my jail teaching over the years. (purchase information: Jail Time)

I liked what Mike Caron had to say about Jail Time and it seems and apt description of “Fall” as well:

"What these poems do provide is something akin to dispatches from a nearby place we are far too conditioned to see as a foreign country. If we pay attention to Brian’s poems we may discover the inhabitants of that place are not so alien as we imagined. The distance is really not that great."
--Mike Caron, Programs Supervisor, Douglas County Jail

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Three More Poems to Note:

“Rambler”
“Fire”
“Prodigal Winter”

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Poet’s Biography:


Brian Daldorph teaches creative writing, literature, and writing at the University of Kansas. He has also taught in Japan, Senegal, England, Zambia, and the Douglas County Jail. Two books of his poems, The Holocaust and Hiroshima: Poems, and Outcasts, were published by Mid-America Press. Jail Time, a collection of poems written about his writing class at the Douglas County Jail, was published in April of this year.






For more about this poet see his page at Kansas Poets .

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Purchase Information: Woodley Press and elsewhere on the web.

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Brian also has an upcoming reading:

TWP POETRY READING SERIES @ THE JOHNSON COUNTY LIBRARY Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - 7:00 pmJohnson County Public Library, 9875 W. 87th, Overland Park, KSPoets Brian Daldorph and Bill Bauer. Brian Daldorph, teacher at the University of Kansas and Douglas County Jail, edits Coal City Review. Bill Bauer's Pear Season and The Boy Who Ate Dandelions, published by Mid-America Press, was selected by The Kansas City Star as one of its most noteworthy books of 2006.

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Upcoming on Pages Rustle: work from Tim Mayo’s The Kingdom of Possibilities.





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Pages Rustle: Featured Poet John Gallaher

Every so often, I'll be featuring a new poem, my thoughts on the work, and a conversation with the poet. I hope you'll enjoy and come back again for the next installation!


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This week's poem from:

Map of the Folded World

By: John Gallaher

Akron Series in Poetry

University of Akron Press













***

Anecdote of the Little Houses

They're folding maps out across the yards,
over the houses
on the north side of the street
and on the south.

Look, darling, they say, the houses
are all lit up.
It's a summer night, in blue.

In the houses, they've gotten new clothes
and they're trying them on.
They're saying yes,

and they're saying no,
whenever they step from a room.
They're saying, I think so, and is, or isn't.

The people
are folding maps out
across the streets.

Time keeps running out, they say,
and there keeps being more of it
as the surfaces flash by.

And below,
after they stop at their houses,
the lines rise above the lines.

The red and blue lines
rising and falling all night
in their sleep.

***

The experience of reading John Gallaher’s work is a bit disconcerting in both its stick- figure familiarity and its other-world strangeness. Not surprising for a book entitled “Map of the Folded World,” there is an eerie two-dimensionality to the reality portrayed. It is as if suburban America was dropped into Plato’s cave and Gallaher is writing of the shadows. This is “our” American life but rendered from outside the houses looking in. I’m reminded a bit of the dispassionate tone of Raines in “A Martian Writes a Letter Home,” especially in the way that a lack of emotion is projected onto the anonymous inhabitants of the poem. (There are several other parallels in the poem’s subject matter as well: a discussion of time, the way the way things flash by, and ending in sleep)

But even in its strangeness this poem is also very connected to the poetry that has come before. The title alludes to Wallace Steven’s “Anecdote of the Jar” and with the way a simple object reorders the perception of reality from that of wilderness to that of inhabited land. Similarly, the maps of “Anecdote of the Little Houses” create a reordering of the three dimensional world into a two-dimensional “surface” world lacking the former’s complexity and depth.

In some ways, the poem distills us to our common parts: “They’re saying, I think so, and is, or isn’t” like we all do at one point or another. But the speaker doesn't seem to connect with the other inhabitants of the poem. Perhaps he might be critical of the contemporary society that is content to sleep peacefully in a superficial world, or he may merely be looking at the landscape as an outsider, not willing to adopt for himself the way other people live. Or perhaps, more optimistically, the speaker is trying to accept the way Americans live without passing judgment. The marked dispassionate tone keeps the reader guessing.

The poems highlights as well, our human, domesticated desire to have the way mapped out for us, to only go where the lines lead us and our easy satisfaction of living between the very lines that box us in and limit us. I like the Rorschach blot ambiguity of the red and blue lines above the sleepers, which may be the telephone and cable lines which are our umbilical cords to the media–driven reality we live in, or the lines on the map of our towns and suburbs that contain and constrain us, or even lines on the monitors representing our breathing and heart-rates blinking out towards our inevitable ends. Nevertheless, we feel safe in that mapped off world; we can sleep.



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Q & A with Poet John Gallaher

Q: I’m very much always looking for a poem’s “significance,” and this is a poem that is in some ways resistant to a single way of understanding. As the poet, do you subscribe to McLeish’s idea that “a poem should Be/ not mean”?

John Gallager: A teacher of mine, Wayne Dodd, used to say that a poem should “mean AND be.” I always liked that formulation, and would like to, as he would say, associate myself with those remarks. But I feel like that might be hedging, to leave it at that. I am drawn to moments where meaning is deferred, knowing that meaning is inevitable, as our lives contain meaning, or embody meaning. So yes, I would side with the “Be” if such a choice were demanded. (And again, to remind myself that there’s a lot of meaning tucked away in that “Be.”)

Q: I notice in your biography that you’re originally from Oregon and now have settled in the Mid-West. How have your many relocations affected your work?

John Gallaher: I’ve lived all over the place. From Portland, I went to Wichita, where I moved when I was adopted. Then my family moved to Orange County California, and then on to Birmingham, Alabama, and Long Island, New York. As an adult, I’ve lived in central Texas, Athens, Ohio, Conway, Arkansas, and now, finally, in Maryville, Missouri, where I’ve now been for seven years (with my wife and children).

I’m quite sure that these relocations have had a large impact on my work. They’ve certainly had a large impact on me. I always dread the question: “So, where are you from?”

Q: In “Anecdote of the Little Houses,” you’re certainly flagging Wallace Steven’s poem “Anecdote of the Jar.” Would you consider Wallace Stevens & Modernists to be a major influence on your writing? Or do you look more towards the New York School poets?

John Gallaher: The only two Library of America editions that I’ve purchased are the Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery ones. I know their work better than I know anyone else’s. So, if that might be evidence, I suppose the answer would have to be that I have a foot in each world. But, truth to tell, I read the poetry of Rae Armantrout (and Michael Palmer, Martha Ronk, and Charles Wright, as well) and numerous others nearly as much. There’s such a large world of reading out there, and I adore so much of it, I’d hate to narrow myself to one (or even two) influences. And that’s just poetry. I’m also very interested in painting. That’s probably had as much (or maybe even more) influence on the way I see things, or attend to things as poetry has had.

Q: I wonder in a “chicken versus egg way” about the creative process. Did you write the poem first and then find the title or did the title come first. How did this poem come to be?

John Gallaher: From what I can remember, the poem came to be around the image of the map rising and falling over the people as they sleep. I like looking at paintings quite a bit, and I often like to think up paintings that don’t exist. Painting can allow for a very specific, even neutral, stance toward a scene. I’m quite envious of that. Paintings are accepted more easily by viewers, I think. There’s more of a social aspect to them. They call out for the viewer to participate, and viewers usually seem fairly willing to do so. I wish poetry were more like that.

As for the title, I simply love the “anecdote” form, as it filters through Stevens. Calling a poem an “anecdote” is one of the ways I to try to get the reader into a participatory circumstance with the poem. I toyed with calling it (among other things I no longer remember) “Anecdote of the Map,” but in the end I liked the intimacy of “house.” “Map” seemed a little too abstracted to me, though now, looking back at it, I kind of wonder if that might have worked better.

I keep a little notebook with me at all times, and in it I write whatever comes to mind. That’s where I get most of the lines and titles that I use. I’m not sure in this case which came first, but I usually always write from a title first, though I often go back and revise the title later. I change things a lot. I like to revise. “You must revise your life,” as they say.

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Three More Poems to Note:

"What We're Up Against"

"Poem for the End of January"

"In the Direction of X. In the City of Zero."

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Poet's Biography:

John Gallaher is the author of the books of poetry, Gentlemen in Turbans, Ladies in Cauls (Spuyten Duyvil, 2001), The Little Book of Guesses, winner of the Levis Poetry Prize, from Four Way Books, and Map of the Folded World, from The University of Akron Press, as well as the free online chapbook, Guidebook from Blue Hour Press. Other than that, he's co-editor of The Laurel Review and GreenTower Press. Currently he's working on a co-authored manuscript with the poet G.C. Waldrep, titled Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, which is forthcoming from BOA Editions in Spring 2011.




For more about this poet see his blog: Nothing to Say & Saying It .

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Purchase Information: University of Akron Press and elsewhere on the web.

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Upcoming on Pages Rustle: work from Brian Daldorph's From the Inside Out: Sonnets

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Pages Rustle: Featured Poet Amy Fleury

Every few weeks, I'll be featuring a new poem, my thoughts on the work, and a conversation with the poet. I hope you'll enjoy and come back again for the next installation!


This week's poem from :


Beautiful Trouble

by Amy Fleury

Crab Orchard Series in Poetry

Southern Illinois University Press








Commotions of the Flesh

after a line from Epicurus

To live in the world
is to live in the body,
the deepest heap of wants.

To hell with the mind
and is pursuit of its own
proper good. I am concerned here

with the commotions of the flesh.
Living in the fissure between desire
and the having, I have failed,

failed, failed to control myself.
From tooth to tongue, gullet to gut,
I have taken in the religion

of pork chop and gin, tasted
red meat and confection,
nectarine and absinthe.

And I have been pulled along
by the wild vein-song of sex,
the hunger that coils in the blood.

My children sing out to me
from their hammock between my hips;
they coax my fingers to touch.

Forgive me my weaknesses,
for bleeding and sweating and snoring,
for giving in to gravity’s tug.

Forgive my shivering, these tears,
this stomach rumble and bone-racket,
this agitation of the willful heart.


***

As the old saying goes “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” and the speaker in “Commotions of the Flesh” clearly knows about weakness in the face of temptation. What I like about the poem is that it takes on some heavy theological concerns: what to do with ourselves when we have God that gives us a messy disobedient body and then asks us to deny that body? She says she won’t address the mind thereby eliminating the need to address other struggles: those of faith, doubt, intellect, meaning and understanding. We have a hard enough time with the body alone.

Even though the speaker says “to hell with the mind” the whole poem is filled with motion, the verbs throughout: pursuit, pulled along, coils, sweating, rumble, agitation. These all show the speaker’s mind in conflict and in turmoil, not in peaceful repose. The speaker demonstrates the difficulties of being in the world, and of failing to do the difficult things that are asked of us.

We’re only different from the animal rule of instinct by our ability to reason, to deny ourselves these desires of the sensual world: our “deepest heap of wants.” And how often the mind fails to control the body’s deep instincts: we drink too much, eat too much, and let our drive for sex overwhelm our mind’s “pursuit of its own proper good.” How difficult is “control,” when it means attempting to overcome what we’re physically hardwired to do? The poem takes us right back there to the Garden, where we try to not eat of the forbidden fruit.

The poem doesn’t give us the stereotypical apple but provides us instead with “pork chop and gin” and “nectarine and absinthe.” (With that “sin” unmistakable in the middle.) After a stanza that ends with “religion” these shine in high relief as things denied: the unclean meat, the alcohol, the sweet flesh of the nectarine standing in as the fruit of knowledge. The next stanza even hints at the serpent that led to damnation, here as “the hunger that coils in the blood.” What can we do in the end but ask for forgiveness and live with our “willful heart,” our agitated, troubled selves with choices always before us, always the apple there within our reach.



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Q & A with Poet Amy Fleury

Q: I often wonder where the seeds for poems come from. You quote Epicurus at the start; what were you reading when you began to form this poem? Or can you tell us a little about how this poem came to be?

Amy Fleury: I was actually reading Marcus Aurelius's Meditations in which Aurelius quotes Epicurus extensively. This was the match that lit the bit of kindling I'd already had, which was the first stanza of the poem: "To live in the world/is to live in the body,/ that deepest heap of wants." I'd been pushing that phrase around for awhile, but that just seemed too aphoristic. Sometimes you just have to wait around for something to knock loose the rest of the poem, and that is what happened with this one.


Q: The speaker of the poet says "to hell with the mind" but the whole question of the poem seems to be questioning if the mind is actually capable of controlling the body, do you think this is a question that poetry can address and provide a satisfactory answer? Should poetry even try?

Amy Fleury: Poetry should try everything, but having said that, I'd also say that I believe poems, and art in general, should be more about asking than answering, more about nuances than absolutes. I suppose this is the same as Keats's notion of negative capability--to live with mystery and uncertainty without the need to resolve them. The irony, of course, is that one can't ever wholly dismiss the mind, just as one can't dismiss the body.


Q: In a way, this poem acts much like one of John Donne's sonnets, at the end there's a bit of a turn and it is difficult to tell which way to read those last two stanzas and I like how there's a bit of ambiguity there for the reader. Do you read Donne? Do you see any of his influence in your work, here?

Amy Fleury: It's been many years since I've actively read Donne, though I spent a great deal of time with his poems and those of other Metaphysical poets when I was a student and admired them very much. Your question prompted me to flip open the Holy Sonnets and my eye was immediately drawn to the nineteenth which begins:

Oh, to vex me, contraries meet in one:
Inconstancy unnaturally hath begot
A constant habit; that when I would not
I change in vows, and in
devotion.

Struggling with contradiction seems to be a central occupation of life, for instance considering what we ought to do and what we want to do (which is not always contradictory).


Q: After reading this poem, it seems that the world is full of both wonder and temptation, is this the "Beautiful Trouble" of the book's title?

Amy Fleury: Interestingly, I didn't realize how obsessed I was with this until after I'd compiled the manuscript, which really speaks to the revelatory nature of the writing process. It comes up again and again in the poems, how we need sorrow to know joy, hunger to appreciate satiety, trouble to recognize peace, and so on.


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Three More Poems to Note:


"Aurelia Waiting"

"A Prayer for Intercession"

"Sonnet for Dissonance"


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Poet's Biography

Amy Fleury is a native of Nemaha County in rural northeast Kansas, and graduated from Nemaha Valley High School. She earned her bachelor’s degree and her M.A. from Kansas State University, Manhattan, and her M.F.A. from McNeese State University.

Fleury’s work has appeared in American Life in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, North American Review, The Southeast Review, Laurel Review, 21st, and The Yalobusha Review. Southern Illinois University Press published her first collection of poetry, Beautiful Trouble, in 2004. It was the winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, and was also included in a list of 100 notable books of 2004 published by The Kansas City Star. Her book was given the number one spot on the “cream of the crop” list, the top ten of the 100 originally listed.

Amy Fleury has been a recipient of the Nadya Aisenberg Fellowship from the MacDowell Colony and a Kansas Arts Commission fellowship in poetry. She lived in Topeka, Kansas, where she taught creative writing for ten years at Washburn University, where she was Professor. As of the Fall of 2008, she became the poet in the M.F.A. program at her alma mater, McNeese State University. Biography from poet's page at : Kansas Poets

For more about this poet see her pages at the Map of Kansas Literature .


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Purchase Information:

Southern Illinois Press and elsewhere on the web.



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Upcoming on Pages Rustle: work from John Gallaher's Map of the Folded World.


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Pages Rustle: Featured Poet Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

Each week through April and into May, I'll be featuring a new poem, my thoughts on the work, and a conversation with the poet. I hope you'll enjoy and come back again for the next installation!

This week's poem: "Conviction" from:


Work is Love Made Visible

by Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

West End Press







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Conviction

To the topmost branch of the cedar tree
that has lost most of its limbs to one storm or another
the mockingbird has returned.
He swings with delight on the supple branch
as it bends and sways in the gusty March wind.
He chortles his song and everyone else's
and answers my out-of-tune whistle with glee.
Does he not notice that each year his favorite tree
stands more bare and scarred, that it
weeps great rivers of fragrant resin and groans
and creaks at the slightest spring breeze or
is this his reason for returning, that
the tree could not survive the winter without
the conviction that the mockingbird would return
to sing of regeneration to newly forming branches
and to bring gladness where once there was only despair.


***

Most of us are familiar with the mockingbird, that jack-of-all-songs in the garden and fields, which is why he works well as a metaphor in this poem. "Conviction" is a poem that comes late in the book, a book filled with people: mothers, sisters, brothers, but mostly the women of the family who have been the keepers of the family stories, the ones who put down roots, whose work is made visible through plates delivered to customers at diner tables, through gardens filled with tomatoes, through handmade garments. So, it's a bit of a surprise to come across the bird and this broken tree, and a poem that seems to be a fairly straightforward and descriptive.

It's a lovely poem about what endures, how much we measure by what we've lost and perhaps more importantly, how too often we see the world not for the possibilities inherent but defined only by what is missing. I like how this poem slyly addresses the cyclical nature of the family, showing how grief and loss ebb and flow, how the losses in the family appear more evident, more damaging, to those who stand between generations, and especially so to those who are the storytellers and who chronicle the family's history.

The mockingbird, who we're never sure if he's chortling with us, or at us, acts to reframe the brokenness of the world into possibility. Even if the tree (and then by extension, the family) has lost branches, suffered trauma, and continues to suffer because of those losses, there's still the hope for future generations, continued growth, and a renewal come spring. And of course, the bird could be wrong, too. Too many branches might break; the tree could at last succumb to the weather, to the storms that have battered it. But this is how we go on, the new springs from the old which falls away, in turn. Perhaps, the mockingbird in this poem might just be that “thing with feathers,” hope for the future embodied and all of our songs remembered and sung back to us.


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Q & A with Poet Jeanetta Calhoun Mish


Q: Tell us a little bit about the photos that punctuate the book. Did you use the photos as writing prompts?

Jeanetta Calhoun Mish: Well, not exactly. Most of the poems in the book were already written when I discovered in my granny's album the photo-postcard of my great-great grandmother and the handwritten note on the back of it that closes the poem, "This is where I feed the hungry." I knew some of Grandma Mary Ellen's story, about how she'd lost her husband and
sons to a mysterious poisoning, but I did not know what happened to her after that. That poignant line, scribbled in pencil on the back of the photo, made me want to find out more about her, and then the poem happened around her story. Only after writing this poem in response to the picture did I realize that many of the poems I'd been writing could be attached to family photographs and movies. It may be that I had carried the images I saw in photo albums and during holiday movie nights in my head so long they became poems. My mother was astonished when I began asking for very specific photographs that I had not seen in years, but remembered clearly. I asked for the photos after I wrote the poems, though, so they weren't prompts in the usual sense, with the exception of "A Woman's Inheritance," which was a revision of a poem I'd been trying to write for a long time but that had resisted my efforts until I found the photos of my Aunt Polly as Rosie the Riveter and of the mysterious woman holding a baby in a christening gown. Both photos are directly referenced in the poem.


Q: There is an earlier poem in the book, "My Sister's Sacrifice." How do you see these two poems working together?

Jeanetta Calhoun Mish: This is one of the poems for which I requested a photo that my mother didn't remember having until she looked through her album. I recalled visual images of actual events that seemed to be reenactments of what turned out to be a perfect recollection of the photograph. It's as if my memories of the many, many, "last times" I saw my sister, as she was leaving, had become crystallized in my mind in the form of the remembered photo. The palimpsest imagery of "real memory" and "memory of photo" is very difficult to explain! However, discussing the poem's memory/imagery is actually less difficult than discussing its emotional genesis, even though my sister has recently returned to the family. For me, this poem is an act of forgiveness and an attempt to reach across a great emotional divide. It wasn't until I received your reading of "Conviction," in preparation for this interview, that I could see the connection between the two. I wrote "Conviction" for my husband who is figured as the (actual) mockingbird in the (actual) tree in our back yard. It is he who patiently taught me how to love with trust again, and through the poem "My Sister's Sacrifice" I attempted to refract what I had learned through his love and his patience with me into my relationship with my sister. I want to thank you again, Amy, as I did in our correspondence, for your sensitive and thoughtful reading of "Conviction," which has shown me connections I didn't consciously realize were there.


Q: There's a sense in this poem of the essentialness of returning again to home. Do you see yourself, too, as the bird who comes back home to retell and thus preserve the family through poetry?

Jeanetta Calhoun Mish: I came home driven by a profound land and sky homesickness, so strong it had physical components. I wonder if birds have a similar feeling when migrating back to their nesting grounds from winter roosts? Much of my family had moved, so the overwhelming ache for home I felt was truly about place, not about family. Perhaps can we call it, in reference to the literary, "sense of place" dysphoria? I left Wewoka, Oklahoma as soon as I graduated from high school; like I was "shot out of a cannon" as they say around here. Like lots of other small-town kids (Dorothy, are you listening?), I was hungry to see the
world and to have what I was sure were exciting new experiences unavailable at home. About twenty-five years later, I accepted the visceral fact I could not physically separate myself from Oklahoma any longer. I needed the lightning storms, the tornadoes, the exquisite cornflower blue sky, the spring dominated by purple (red buds, henbit), the purifying late-summer heat, the unrelenting wind. I also admitted to myself that it was against my raising to complain about my state's shortcomings from a distance and not do anything positive to
help. I came back in 2003 and I continue to put my shoulder to the wheel in many different venues to do what I can with my capabilities to help make Oklahoma the best place it can be, culturally, socially and educationally. Of course, realizing "you can't go home" and/or "going home" both have powerful emotional and metaphorical associations that are deeply tied to ideas of family and origins, so to make the choice to come home also meant, for me, to take up my family obligation as "the writer," which includes "the family history keeper," "the poet," and "the one who writes our obituaries."

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Three More Poems to Note:

"Falling Stars"

"Story Teller"

"For Michael"

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Poet's Biography:

Jeanetta Calhoun Mish is a native Oklahoman returned home after twenty years to study for her PhD in American Literature and to grow good tomatoes. Her poetry collection, Work Is Love Made Visible, was published by West End Press (in distribution partnership with the University of New Mexico Press) in March 2009. She lives in Norman, Oklahoma, with her husband, an engineering professor; they have a combined family of three sons, all between the ages of 17 and 19. Her mother and grandmother live just down the road.

She has participated in poetry readings and workshops for more than 20 years, including repeat performances as a founding member of the Woody Guthrie Poets at the Woody Guthrie Free Folk Festival in Okemah, Oklahoma. Other venues include Telluride Institute’s Native American Writers Program; The Taos Poetry Circus Invitational Reading; Red Dirt Book Festival; Scissortail Creative Writing Festival, C.W. Post Poetry Center at LIU; New York State Writers Institute Community Voices Series and Readings Against the End of the World, both in Albany, NY; and The Knitting Factory in New York City.

Jeanetta’s chapbook, Tongue Tied Woman, won the Edda Poetry Chapbook Competition for Women in 2002. She has published poetry recently in LABOR: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas, Oklahoma Today, Poetry Bay, and in “Walt’s Corner” of the The Long-Islander. Mish’s creative non-fiction essay, “This Oklahoma We Call Home,” appeared in the Fall/Winter 2008 issue of Crosstimbers. Anthology publications include poems in Returning the Gift and The Colour of Resistance. Jeanetta gives workshops in schools and libraries for both the Oklahoma Arts Council’s Teaching Artists’ Program and the Oklahoma Humanities Council’s Poetry Out Loud! Program.

For more information, visit http://www.tonguetiedwoman.com/.


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Purchase information: University of New Mexico Press and elsewhere on the web.

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Pages Rustle: Featured Poet: Carole Weatherford

Each week through April (possibly longer!) I'll be featuring a new poem, my thoughts on the work, and a conversation with the poet. I hope you'll enjoy and come back again for the next installation! This week, a "Blog Tour Stop" from Carole Weatherford as she discusses her book this week across several different blogs!


Featured Poem: "Intro: What Shall I Say" from:



Becoming Billie Holiday




by Carole Weatherford




Boyds Mills Press/Wordsong

Carole Weatherford's introduces the poem:

When the anti-lynching song Strange Fruit debuted in 1939, Time Magazine’s music critic described Holiday as “a roly-poly young colored woman with a hump in her voice,” the critic claimed that the singer was drawn to “Strange Fruit’s” blues-i-ness rather than its social content. The critic ultimately dubbed the song “a prime piece of musical propaganda” for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Becoming Billie Holiday imagines the response of 25-year-old Billie to the 1939 article.


Intro: What Shall I Say?

The way Mom toted around
that magazine with my photo inside,
you’d have thought
I was Woman of the Year.
I don’t blame Sadie. Wasn’t everyday
that a colored face appeared in Time;
let alone her only child.
I was proud too till I read
what that two-bit critic wrote.
Called me “roly-poly;” said I wouldn’t diet,
was stuck on my own voice
and cared for tunes but not the words.
What did he know
about my taste in food or music?
I never even talked to the cat,
and he dare not cross my path.
If he does, he’ll get a mouthful,
hear just how I got to Harlem
and became Lady Day.
Oh, the tales I’d tell.


***

This poem (and the project as a whole) desires to set the record straight, to portray Lady Day in a sympathetic light that honors her way of understanding her world, her desires, and to reclaim her personal voice to work in counterpoint to the way Billie was portrayed in the media.

Even though there are historical documents that can be accessed, such as the one from the Time, they only tell part of her story and often from an arm's length distance but the poems invite us in for a closer examination of Lady Day's life and experience that still are relevant and fascinating today. Here's what Carole Weatherford says about the project:

Billie Holiday is my muse and she herself enlisted me to write her book. Ialmost didn't write it for fear that it would have limited appeal. Then an
eighth grade girl admiring Billie's likeness at the Great
Blacks in Wax Museum convinced me that Lady Day never ceases to
be hip.


I wrote this book because Billie deserves to be better understood. I tried to portray her with empathy. My advance copy of the book arrived the day after what would have been Billie’s 93rd birthday—a belated gift. I thanked her for letting her song come through me.

***

You can find out more about the book at the publisher's site: Wordsong
and read more of her discussion on how her verse memoir Becoming Billie Holiday came to be as Carole's blog tour continues this week.

Next stop: April 7th at Beth Revis's blog : Writing It Out where Carole talks about her inspiration and approach to writing the poems.

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You might also be interested in listening to Lady Day sing her iconic song:

"Strange Fruit"

and if you're a jazz fan, here's a review of the book from all about jazz.

****

Carole Boston Weatherford is a New York Times best-selling author and has 32 books of poetry, nonfiction and children's literature, including Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom, winner of an NAACP Image Award, Caldecott Honor Medal and Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration. Becoming Billie Holiday and Before John Was a Jazz Giant both won Coretta Scott King Honors; Birmingham, 1963 won the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award and the Jefferson Cup; The Sound that Jazz Makes won the Carter G. Woodson Award from National Council for the Social Studies; and Remember the Bridge: Poems of a People and Freedom on the Menu: The Greensboro Sit-ins both won North Carolina Juvenile Literature Awards. Her books have been short-listed by the International Reading Association, National Council for the Social Studies, and Bank Street College of Education and named best books of the year by the American Library Association, School Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, and New York Public Library. Winner of the Ragan-Rubin Award from the North Carolina English Teachers Association and a two-time North Carolina Arts Council Writers Fellow, Carole teaches at Fayetteville State University and resides in High Point, N.C., with her family. A Baltimore-native, Carole is the daughter of Carolyn Boston and the late Joseph A. Boston, Jr.

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Purchase Information: Amazon and elsewhere.

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Pages Rustle: Featured Poet Kevin Rabas

Second in the series Pages Rustle is a poem by Kevin Rabas. Each week through April (possibly longer!) I'll be featuring a new poem, my thoughts on the work, and a conversation with the poet. I hope you'll enjoy and come back again for the next installation!

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Featured Poem "Mermaid and Drowing Sailor" from:


Bird's Horn & Other Poems

By Kevin Rabas

Coal City Review Press







****


Mermaid and Drowning Sailor


I.

Tonight, under the full moon, she has gone
underwater, her red hair thick and flowing
just above some underwater jet stream, billowing
up, her fingers touch, naked, she looks into the drowned
sailor's eyes, waiting. Will he awaken? Behind her,
the glass, placid face of the water.
Above, shining through, the cosmos,
and some galaxy she feels tonight, forming, nascent,
behind her, lit also by the lights of his boat, overturned,
spectral highlights warming her kelp hair. She descends,
tracking the drowning man, watching, praying.



II.

Clown fish gather, sea horses,
anemone move their porcupine quills.
No luck. More bubbles escape
the side of the sailor's mouth, a pearl necklace
of air, escaping; one half of the lung going.
This does not faze her, his body softening,
the body giving now to the underwater jet stream,
gaining speed, drifting quick. She follows quickening,
tracking, her eyes darkening, sensing he may awaken;
he may awaken, before his corpse settles at the edge of the abyss.


****

There is a sense of strangeness and wonder in this poem: the telescoping view of the ocean, sky, cosmos, all acting as concerned but unhelpful witnesses; the artful details of the sailor's death; the uncrossable abyss, the otherness, that divides the inhabitants of the ocean and the drowning man. I'm intrigued by this mermaid, another of those mythical sirens who draws men down to where they cannot survive, with her (almost) innocent, prayerful curiosity, her desire to see him awaken in her realm, her universe.

I can't comprehend all this poem offers on the first read; there's more to see, there's more to think about than the gloss of "mermaid watches man drown." The poem holds a myriad of possibilities, explanations, avenues of approach. Perhaps the easiest way to understand the poem is as a tale of lovers who cannot bridge their differences despite their best attempts. She is beautiful, he is swept away, he cannot thrive in her natural environment, though he's tried. His boat attests to his attempt.

But it's that idea of otherness, that prayer, that repeated "he may awaken;/he may awaken" as invocation, those hints that there is even more to grasp in this poem that makes me want to read the poem again. I feel the pressure of that sky, that galaxy over her shoulder, the man on the cusp between the vastness of the cosmos and the abyss of the sea. What is a human body? We are minutia, comparably.

We soften, we change, we age, we die. What more could the mermaid do? She knows no other way than this way of the sea, gill and fin. She cannot understand why the sailor (so alike her, yet so different) will not awaken. Aren't we as humans as strange to one another as the clown fish and anemone, and often as prickly? And when it comes down to another person's death(no matter how much they are cherished or loved) or even just in moments of crisis in another's life--what more could any of us think to do, besides watch and pray and hope and follow? And so often, we fail to comprehend what the small thing is that we could do to make things right. We miss the signs that would show us and allow us to reach out in help, one to another.



****

Q & A with Poet Kevin Rabas


Q: This poem is one of a few poems about the sea in your book. I'm reminded of the old joke about the sailor who takes his anchor and walks, finally settling where someone asks him "what is it that you're carrying?" How does a poet from Kansas end up writing poems about the sea?

Kevin: As you know, Kansas was once underwater. Almost everything we see in terms of the land is made out of oceanic sediment, and so perhaps the sea is still with us here, although the water has left. We can’t help thinking about it. My parents are from around Lake Wilson, and during their childhoods they could walk out into a field and find shark teeth. It reminded them of what the land they were standing on once was.

For this particular poem, I found inspiration in the foreign film Sex & Lucia. If I remember correctly the film opens with a male novelist naked and underwater in the ocean. It is night, and he is committing suicide. They surface together and make love. So, my poem, unintentionally, is a version of that opening. On the special features of the film, there is a still photo slide show, and from one of those slides I found the image I was looking for in the poem. There is the woman who “saves” the novelist, her hair spread out around her, underwater, and the lights behind and above her looks like stars and a glimpse at the universe. I thought she looked a bit like I imagine a mermaid might, and drawing upon the classic tales of sailors and mermaids, I started my poem. Also, of course, as a young person I was very taken with the Daryl Hannah/Tom Hanks movie Splash, about a mermaid who follows a man onto the land. So, I guess all of these things came together, much of it subconsciously, in the poem

Q: I know that many of your poems are jazz inspired, and maybe I'm just not enough of a jazz aficionado to see it, but is this poem linked to a particular jazz song?

Kevin: You know “All Blues” comes to mind as a jazz standard (“The sea; the sky; you and I”); however, I don’t know if I was thinking of it. I do try to get at jazz phrasing, when I can. I often write runs that are long and spur-of-the moment, as a bop player might, but there is a difference. I can go back and change them. I can revise.

Q: "Mermaid and Drowning Sailor" is in a section of your book that is titled "A Thousand Ways of Holding." I'm reminded of Derrida's idea of the supplement, that in a way we create objects (especially writing) to help us substitute for something that has gone missing in our lives, even though the created object also acts as a (sometimes unhealthy) reminder of that missing piece and prevents us from moving forward. How do you see the "Mermaid" poem and "Ways of Holding" interacting with each other?

Kevin: I was focused a lot on breath in this poem, thinking what would it be like to lose your breath gradually as you sunk? I swam competitively in high school and was a lifeguard for three summers, and so I remember that feeling, of losing your air and sinking, during extreme exercises and while wrestling underwater. Also, I was diligently practicing yoga in Lawrence when I wrote this poem, and part of my practice was to do exercises where I controlled and watched my breath. My yoga teacher was a good friend, and when I learned I would soon leave Lawrence, I knew I would miss her and the practice of yoga. So, breathing intentionally became attached to thoughts of separation and loss. I did focus on the ways of the breath, and yoga, when I wrote this poem. The bit about the lungs in the poem came right from what I was learning from that practice of intentional breathing.

Of course, the loss of anyone is a bit like a drowning. They sink into memory, and all I often remember are memories that are locked as images and words, as scenes—as sequences that mimic the episodes we see when we think we might lose everything, those snap shots or videos of our last moments that the brain triggers with its intense chemicals.

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Three Poems More Poems to Note:



"First Evening"

"Tiger Shark"

"Reseed"





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Poet's Biography

Kevin Rabas co-directs the creative writing program at Emporia State University and is co-editor of Flint Hills Review. He has two books of poetry, Bird’s Horn and Other Poems (Coal City Review Press) and Lisa’s Flying Electric Piano (Woodley Press). He is the winner of the Langston Hughes Award for Poetry.

More about Kevin can be found at the Map of Kansas Literature and at the author's website.

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Purchase Information: Amazon.com and elsewhere on the web.

Poetry as Witness

I've discussed before "what poetry does" and one of the things is that poetry can act as witness. The best of these witness poems engage us at an emotional level vs. a didactic level and help us to understand the perspective of the person who is suffering and the reactions of those around him or her. Politically, a single person's expressed suffering tends to move us more than the "millions of people who have starved to death" type of data that is so often vaunted on the news.

Here is an interview, and another news source provides an article and poems from a poet from North Korea whose work tells of the suffering of the people. For the poet writing as Jang Jin Sung, writing is overtly a political act, so much that he must write under a pseudonym in exile after defecting from the North. He swam a river with the poems tucked in a chest/ or next to his chest. The language is unclear on that point in the article. Poetry as courage: strength to persevere, from the heart.

Small Poem: Western Wind

Western Wind
(anonymous)

Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ! If my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!

***

Anonymous.

***

Poetry cross pollinates music.

Listen to the Agnus Dei section here. (midi file) See an example of Agnus Dei

Now see here: John Taverner.

Thanks to this guide for the directional marker!


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Dipping from the Well: Edgar Lee Masters

I've always been enchanted by the dramatic monologues in
Spoon River Anthology.

This one today struck a chord with me. I used to be ruled by fear in so many ways, that people would judge me & find me lacking. But my recent experiences with cancer have taught me that life is too short!! too short to not take risks, and try what you'd like to try and to be yourself. It's always been important to me to be a good person, to follow the moral values I was raised with. I always felt slightly abashed by my faith & my beliefs, but I followed them anyway. But, I guess I care less about being called a fool than I ever did before. I rather raise the sail and reach the sea.

from George Gray

. . .And now I know that we must lift the sail
And catch the winds of destiny
Wherever they drive the boat.
To put meaning into one's life might end in madness,
But life without meaning is the torture
of restlessness and vague desire--
It is a boat longing for the sea, yet afraid.

---Edgar Lee Masters

Blessings,
Amy

Dipping from the Well: Milosz

This is the first in series of extracts of poems from writers who have come before. Not necessarily their best work, but rather what caught my eye.


***

Tell me, for once at least laying
Caution aside, and fear and guarded speech,
Tell me, as you would in the middle of the night
When we face only night, the ticking of a watch,
The whistle of an express train, tell me
Whether you really think that this world
Is your home?

-- "An Appeal"

from New and Collected Poems 1931-2001 by Czeslaw Milosz

***

Poem Most Recently on my Mind

When I Consider How My Light Is Spent
by John Milton

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide;
"Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
Either man's work or His own gifts. Who best
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at His bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait."


******************************************


I have been thinking about times of crisis recently and what the purpose of crisis is in a life. Certainly there is a wake-up call sensation that occurs when a person is plunged into a situation out of their control. I think about how I'll be remembered by my children, will they know without a doubt that they are loved by me? Will they remember only the times I grouched? I remember those days, I take them to heart:

February: 8 a.m.
by Amy Unsworth

Barely daylight, and I have been cruel
to two of those I love: the child who would not find
his coat, the dog who would not brave the cold.

What poison rises before the sun, bitter and dark
to mar the beginnings of the day? Already, I’m
on my knees, begging, for grace, for sunlight

to pierce, to break, the cover of clouds,
to shine down on us all: the boy waving curbside,
the dog returned to dreaming, my curtained heart.

I wonder if Milton knew, in his struggles documented above, how much of a comfort his poem would be to others as they too struggle to attend to the simple yet difficult task of waiting. I often subscribe to the "make it so" school of thought. Set the goal, make it so. But at times like this, when the doors seem firmly shut, I wonder if it isn't all for a reason I cannot yet comprehend. I feel as if the universe demands that I stand and wait. And so I listen to the words from centuries before to find some wisdom there. And breathe. And wait.

Another's Skin

I'm reminded today (again) that we can never know what it is like to live in another's skin. We try hard with poetry at times to make that deeper connection with others, yet still, still we cannot know. We that remain can only speculate.

There's rosemary, that's for remembrance;
pray,love, remember: and there is pansies,
that's for thoughts.

Our world is smaller, and poorer, today.

In his words, here.

Aprille

is already here, Poetry Month and all. I'm getting the emails from the poets.org site and I like that the poems are from recent books of poetry. I also am on another list serve that likes to send poems from Tu Fu or Li Po. I think after awhile the combination of the moon and its reflection on the water would get old, but I love these poems translated from the Chinese. I can't explain it. I think it is because I too am in love with the moon. Yesterday, it was early evening and the full moon was almost transparent rising over the prairie. Someone was doing their burn down; which in Kansas means burning off all of the dead prairie grass from the past year so that new can grow. The smoke was drifting in a thin veil. The sunlight was still the color of fresh lemons. I swear the cows were beautiful, in their various colored coats (cream, brown, black, and spotted) in the fresh green of the fields.

Connections

There is a very readable interview with Gary Snyder at the Poetry Foundation with links to a nice selection of his work. I've always been fond of his "Axe Handles" even though I'm not as certain who's work is shaping me. Pound, yes. Snyder, perhaps. So many that it's impossible to choose. Auden for certain.

I like "The Bath" as well. I like how these poems show a sense of connection between the generations. There's a hope there that I find intensely reassuring.

Skating at the edge of the Wood

Musee des Beaux Arts
by W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

What triggers this?

No Second Troy
by WBY

WHY should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great.
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

***

I know what triggered the poem for Yeats; historical context can tell us much about that failed love affair, and her subsequent devotion to the cause.

****

But I can't figure out why this is the poem on my mind today. Is it that it is pointless to argue with one's self about what one is committed to? Or that I need to accept others for what they are? And not take other's unkindness to heart? But I haven't felt critical of myself or of others recently.

Is it that other passions are just as valid as my passions? But, I know this already; I try to acknowledge this in my day to day life as much as possible.

Why this poem, today?

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In the new Poetry

I found the editorial to be rather interesting this month. "In Praise of Rareness" argues that perhaps editors should publish less poetry. And for the most part, I agree. If you've ever picked up a Collected by a favorite poet and then realized that you've read their best work in the anthologies, then you'll know what he's talking about. He claims that "regular people" (those not involved in the writing poetry life) have singular favorite poems rather than favorite authors.

What do you think? Do you feel cheated by the 10 poems that comprise this month's edition? Or do the drawings make up for it?

But then I think about all the wonderous variety of poetry that doensn't always find a home and I sometimes wish to take more chances with what I read and accept.

And I learn from the poems I read, even if they're not the best-of-the-century quality. I listen to the voices; I look at the trends; I listen for music in a poet's work; I look for poets to go on my "watch list," a list I keep of younger poets whose work demonstrates a spark, a hint, a whisper that they will have more to say.

Should we not comb the haystack?

Heart's Needle

I'm returning to "Heart's Needle" today. Somehow with all the madness in the world over the last few days, this poem has been on my mind. It is that last line: "We try to choose our life." We try, yet the world intrudes. Sickness and death intrude. Hunger, strife, and agony intrude.

They cannot imagine even failing to reaching the benchmarks they've set. Some feel they will go mad, some feel that shame would overcome them. I want to tell them that they can carry on despite the intrusions. A passion is beautiful but life exists beyond. Even after the intrusions, one must kindle hope. Small, secret perhaps, but hope even as we grieve what has past and what we must yet endure.

a mind of winter

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

-- from Harmonium , 1923


I find it amazing that poems that I've read time and again can suddenly begin to speak to me. As if they have been speaking a language I had yet to acquire, and all at once I begin to understand more fully, beyond the dribs and drabs of images into the language of the soul.

Hyperbole? Perhaps.

Poorer Today

The world is poorer today. We lost Robert Creeley yesterday.

From Four Days in Vermont

Soon going day wanders on
and still tree's out there waiting
patient in time like a river and
truth a simple apple reddened
by frost and sun is found
where one had left it in time's company
No one's absent in mind None gone
Tell me the truth I want to say
Tell me all you know Will we live
or die As if the world were apart
and whatever tree seen were only here apparent
Answers, live and die. Believe.