Sounds, Sounds -- Poetry, Poetry

Poem of the Day:
"Everywhere the Earth is Opening" by Jennifer Richter
Threshold


This evening I attended a poetry reading, a small portion of the Boston Poet Tea Party (information to be found here). As my friends who graciously joined me fell asleep, I rediscovered the joy of hearing poetry.

Words, like music, are meant to be heard; studied certainly, but also heard. Forget the page where the words are planted -- "[f]orget the fields" -- and instead listen to syllable topple upon syllable, and bricks of consonance breaking on the hard, hard earth.

Maybe, read this aloud:

Everywhere the Earth Is Opening

After eight dry months of dirt,
this morning glowed all grass
and my pomegranate bush
finally boasted its knobby fruit.

Though mistakenly called apple
in that first search for skin
through the vine, I mean
another myth, another love altogether:

I mean that fruit that draws a curtain of earth
between mothers and daughters.
First light, I stooped low to the ground
but there were no deals to make

—she is dying, my mother's mother,
and won't make it till I touch down—
so I plucked each red bead
and littered them on the lawn, left them.

Mother, how can you possibly be next?
Everywhere the earth is opening
into slits that smell alive
and, between them, blooms.

Follow me, step into the soil.
Forget the fields. Let the others look.
We will always be daughters
and the dazzling seeds go down easy.



Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

Prose/Poetry

Poem of the Day:
"All the Old Weapons" by Moira Egan
Spin


All the Old Weapons

Who's the one who said it? All the old weapons
poems lay down, bladelessly or just rusty
fall to prose in paragraphs safe as houses.
(Lock up the gun case.)

Here beside me pick out the weapons once you
used to slice through language or love. Achilles,
tent the blanket round us and heal these tenden-
cies past believing.

Ancient rhythm, cardiac wisdom beating
punctuates the body with rhyme and reason.
Silence treats us equally, linking pulses.
I hear your blood flow.

I'm the reliquary whose artist carved her
center's empty space to hold something sacred,
petrified as the bog-heart buried ages
I don't remember.

Absinthe, teardrop, water of life I may be
only drinking all that I know of useful,
bottles, battles, settlements, as I watch us
learning the language.


Today I spoke with a friend who asked me if I'd written anything lately. I promptly, and with regret, responded "no." Yet, upon reconsideration I retracted my first answer. I have been writing for a music blog for the past month, and that certainly is writing -- writing with deadlines and word limits. But, I have not written poetry in some months and this to me meant that I have not written. Period.

Read Egan's first stanza; prose is the 'new' dangerous, the gun case in the house, the 'middle-class violence.' But, the "old weapons" of poetry resound much more strongly within, and writing is not writing if it's not verse, and rhythm and metaphor layered upon metaphor.

A mental block perhaps; a difference in preference.


Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

Vitamin D & Death

Poem of the Day:
"Pillow Talk" by Jeni Olin
Hold Tight: The Truck Darling Poems


Today, en route to my internship, I browsed the NY Times -- thank you iPhone. Of particular interest was an article in the Personal Health section entitled "What Do You Lack? Probably Vitamin D." The article spoke of a growing consensus among doctors: what today's people lack most in their diet is vitamin D. But actually the most efficient way to get vitamin D is not through the avenue of food choice but via sun rays. For instance, the article suggests "going outside in summer unprotected by sunscreen...wearing minimal clothing from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. two or three times a week for 5 to 10 minutes." Needless to say my Irish skin crawled.

Olin writes of her dead loved one; "Death, the great highlighter, makes us all shine/a bit more dearly" (lines 11-12). He is a brilliant orb, and Olin's speaker "needs sunblock/against [his] blinding legacy" (line 12-13). Her tone is ambiguous though. It is hyperbolic ("I used to get my cardio up/by just sleeping next to you"), and therefore at times sarcastic. Yet, the final line is loose in speech, suggesting a relinquishing of her prior tone and a true affection for the man she has lost. Olin sighs in finish, "OMG I miss you" (line 21).

Brightness, brightness, brightness. Olin is ablaze beneath her dead lover's "legacy," and the NY Times is proposing I be ablaze as well, sans sunscreen -- dream on newspapermen. This girl burns with a swiftness you haven't seen.


Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

Whispers

Poem of the Day:
"A Winter Morning" by Ted Kooser
Delights & Shadows


A Winter Morning

A farmhouse window far back from the highway
speaks to the darkness in a small, sure voice.
Against this stillness, only a kettle's whisper,
and against the starry cold, one small blue ring of flame.


I have an air conditioner in my room that I run every night. I need to be ice cold in order to fall asleep.

The air conditioner is fairly loud. It hums softly, but emits some, for lack of a better word, gurgling crashes of sound.

Yet I have not once been woken up by my air conditioner. Despite claims of being the world's lightest sleeper I have slept soundly every night, cold and sonically peaceful.

Perhaps my air conditioner is Kooser's "kettle's whisper" coming up "[a]gainst the stillness," nudging it slightly, but not breaking it. It is a welcome whisper, a soft chatter of which I can't understand a word. But I stay asleep, sound asleep, rocking in and out of the window-side motor gossip.


Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

Art: When We Make Things

Poem of the Day:
Eric Ekstrand's "Appleblossom"
Poetry, October 2008


Ekstrand's short poem concerns itself with art and the powers of representation. In the first sentence he addresses a higher being, writing, "When History turns soldiers into battles, you turn them into grass" (line 1). In considering history and spiritual force Ekstrand's speaker considers himself and his own power: "But for these men who died with grunts/and clangs in their ears, for their horses with snapped legs, I haven’t got/the art to make them into anything" (lines 2-4). Although the speaker is vividly perceptive of the horror endured by soldiers ("grunts/and clangs in their ears") he doubts his ability to reconstruct such torment.

I felt accomplished today at my internship. I had pushed myself further in my writing and was rewarded with praise and a sense of self-pride. It was a risk, but perhaps we aren't artists until we leap, fall, get back up and leap again.

Someone must have been looking out for me; art seems to sit in a tenuous balance between reality and surrealism, and if successful, art stands solid, connecting the two worlds. But often it seems that some force unknown to us provides art with its sturdy spine, making it function for reasons we can't often put into words.

I think this is the point that Ekstrand is trying to establish in the final lines of his piece. He writes:


I fold the grass in the shape
of a man, very literal, very primitive and leave it on
the field and say, “Forgive me valorous men for my ineptitude.”
Just then, the little man falls down in the wind and—huh!—there is art.


It is not until "the little man falls down in the wind" (line 7) that he becomes art, a successful albeit false representation of reality. An intangible force pushes Ekstrand's "primitive" grass-man into the realm of art, where before it sat, field-atop, as a flop.



So here's to that dim force, and the art that glistens because of it.


Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

Dinner Date

Poem of the Day:
"A Marriage in the Dolomites" by D. Nurkse
Poetry, June 2009

By choice, I ate dinner alone tonight. It was an act of exclusion that I savored; I love to eat food while watching a great sitcom -- tonight's choice was 'Parks and Recreation' starring the hilarious Amy Poehler -- and to indulge in sweet, sour, laughs.

You can indulge too: I ate a salmon burger with goat cheese and mustard, rice with carrots, and cherries -- 20 of them -- for dessert.

Please, let the slobbering continue. Here is Nurkse's poem in entirety:



A Marriage in the Dolomites


We communicated by cheeses,
unwrapping them gingerly,
parting the crust with a fork,
tasting dew, must, salt,
raising an eyebrow,

or we let chianti talk for us,
rolling it in the glass,
staring—it was dark and shiny
as the pupil, and stared back—
or we undressed each other;

we took long walks hand in hand
in the vineyards, the pastures,
resenting each other bitterly
for our happiness that excluded us
as surely as the world did,
mountain after mountain.


Cheese. Italian wine. Italian mountain ranges. What is not delectable about this poem? Well, perhaps Nurkse's conclusion. The savory becomes sour as his speaker realizes that his indulgence has turned to abandonment, abandonment of social regard for any relationships outside that which he shares with his loved one. The two walk through "vineyards...pastures" (line 12), places devoid of people, as Nurkse sets this scene of loneliness, broken up only by the food, so sweet and delicious, that spots the landscape.

The final line of the poem portrays a feeling of entrapment: "mountain after mountain," as if the mountains build upon one another, fencing in the speaker. He is trapped, "excluded" by happiness. It's a catch-22 of sorts.



Mine was only one dinner date...just one dinner date with myself. No empty fields to boast of -- or cry of? -- yet.


Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

The Prophesying of a Capital Letter

Poem of the Day:
Abraham Lincoln's "Abraham Lincoln"
PoetryFoundation.Org


Lincoln was not short, but his poems were:


Abraham Lincoln
his hand and pen
he will be good but
god knows When



This poem is simple and straight, perhaps what all presidents should be. While Lincoln avoids overstatement and the flowery form of metaphor, he utilizes capitalization; what stands tall stands tall for a reason.

"When" is capitalized without regard to the rules of English grammar, but by doing so Lincoln is suggesting a beginning. It is not literally the beginning of a sentence, as most capital letters suggest, but the beginning of a leader. Lincoln ends his poem not because he has nothing more to say but for precisely the opposite reason: he is unfinished. His story is to be continued, of this he is confident. He has only to finish the sentence he began when he capitalized "When."




This summer I have worked harder than the season normally suggests one should. I work 20 hours a week, intern 6 hours a week, and spend about 15 hours a week writing and interviewing for my internship. I have always fiddled with the idea of becoming a writer, and now as I spend much of my time writing I feel Lincoln-confident in capitalizing my own words, and beginning a sentence that may preface, hopefully, a writing career.

In fact, this blog may be my "When."


Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

Esteem

Poem of the Day:
"The Spider and the Ghost of the Fly" by Vachel Lindsay


Once I loved a spider
When I was born a fly,
A velvet-footed spider
With a gown of rainbow-dye.
She ate my wings and gloated.
She bound me with a hair.
She drove me to her parlor
Above her winding stair.
To educate young spiders
She took me all apart.
My ghost came back to haunt her.
I saw her eat my heart.


Everyone has admired someone who seems untouchable.

My friend Abby, whom I met in Ireland, is visiting this weekend. I admire her numerous times over. She makes me laugh like no other person. She is self-deprecating, modest and humble, smart, witty and generous. Her visit thus far has been great.

But my admiration of her has never been self-destructive, never one in which Abby has felt power enough to eat "my wings" (line 5).

I enjoy Lindsay's simplistic language, his blunt delivery. In the final line of his piece he uses this to create a tension between the otherworldly and the human: "My ghost came back to haunt her./I saw her eat my heart" (lines 11-12). The spider, because he acts in the final line, seems to 'win' this war, to successfully overcome the fly. In effect the fly's admiration kills him.

I cannot understand this. I admire myself too much to admire someone in a self-destructive or self-critical way. I learn from others, but, as I like to think, not at the expense of myself.


Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

Books

Poem of the Day:
"ROYGBIV" by Fred D'Aguiar
Poetry, December 2008


Today was a day of books; talking about books, being surrounded by books, but not reading books. Just soaking up books and thinking about why I love books.

D'Aguiar recounts learning how to speak in preschool. He remembers "[t]he shoemaker's wife" (line 1) who ran the preschool and how she beat the practice of recitation into the children. He writes, "She made us recite and learn by rote./Our trick was to mouth words, sound/As if we knew what we would one day/Come to know" (lines 4-7). D'Aguiar's speaker spends much of the poem remembering only the beatings, how "[s]he made us settle our feet on the mud/Floor of her daub and wattle hut and she/Wielded a cane cut from wood" (lines 10-12).

At the close of the poem the beatings evaporate quickly, the sting still fresh but the beauty of learning speech, of one day being able to read, quite clear:


so we stilled our feet
And spoke the words in the right order
For colors in a rainbow until the very

Thing took her place in front of us
Arranged in cuneiform, polished,
Brandishing a window to climb out


Today after meeting with a few friends in Harvard Square I ran into the Harvard Coop to escape the rain. I walked through the shelves of books, not looking, just placing myself among them. I felt safe from the rain, and excited about the world, about the thick paper coats, "a window to climb out," eying my wet sweater.


Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

Poem of the Day:
"A Country Boy in Winter" by Sarah Orne Jewett
American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century


The wind may blow the snow about,
For all I care, says Jack,
And I don’t mind how cold it grows,
For then the ice won’t crack.
Old folks may shiver all day long,
But I shall never freeze;
What cares a jolly boy like me
For winter days like these?

Far down the long snow-covered hills
It is such fun to coast,
So clear the road! the fastest sled
There is in school I boast.
The paint is pretty well worn off,
But then I take the lead;
A dandy sled’s a loiterer,
And I go in for speed.

When I go home at supper-time,
Ki! but my cheeks are red!
They burn and sting like anything;
I’m cross until I’m fed.
You ought to see the biscuit go,
I am so hungry then;
And old Aunt Polly says that boys
Eat twice as much as men.

There’s always something I can do
To pass the time away;
The dark comes quick in winter-time—
A short and stormy day
And when I give my mind to it,
It’s just as father says,
I almost do a man’s work now,
And help him many ways.

I shall be glad when I grow up
And get all through with school,
I’ll show them by-and-by that I
Was not meant for a fool.
I’ll take the crops off this old farm,
I’ll do the best I can.
A jolly boy like me won’t be
A dolt when he’s a man.

I like to hear the old horse neigh
Just as I come in sight,
The oxen poke me with their horns
To get their hay at night.
Somehow the creatures seem like friends,
And like to see me come.
Some fellows talk about New York,
But I shall stay at home.


Today was finally a cooler one; up until now I had almost been wishing for winter, almost.

Jewett's speaker finds his manhood in wintry labor, as his father tells him he must do a man's work now. Most likely he will chop wood, feed the horses, mend the barn.

I have found not my adulthood, but my old age, my elderhood, in this heat. It reached 90 degrees nearly every day for the past two weeks. Finally, I can breathe. Finally, I can stop walking slowly, laboring under the burden of the sun, high and heavy in the sky.

It's time to take back my youth from the heat. Here goes nothing...
(Grabs boxing gloves, thrusts them on hands, and puts game face -- sometimes mistaken for frightened face -- on).


Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

Riddles and My Denseness

Poem of the Day:
"A Psalm of Freudian Life" by Franklin Pierce Adams


Sometimes I can be dense...Mom insert anecdote [here].

Last night, while babysitting (yes, another post about those I sit) a ten-year old outwitted me with a riddle. It goes like this:



There is a couple on a honeymoon flight to France. The plane crashes. Every single person dies. The couple survives. How?



I had three guesses, but squandered all three: "They flew to the honeyMOON instead of France? They had parachutes. They had secret plane-crash-surviving powers?"

When I first read Adams' poem I did not pick up on his sarcastic tone. He's writing about Freud at a time when Freudian notions seem absurd, but are very popular. He writes, "Life is yearning and suppression;/Life is that to be enjoyed;/Puritanical discretion/Was not spoke by Dr. Freud" (lines 5-8).

Adams concerns himself with Freud's notion of the id, and the child-like drive to act according to pleasure; a total hedonism, "Nothing matters but Yourself" (line 24). He is slyly (I did not catch it until a second or third read) critical of Frued's theory of the id, and the idea that all humans are egotistical beings. Were there "Stories that perhaps another/Sailing o’er life’s Freudian sea--/A forlorn and dream-racked brother—-/Reading, might say, 'How like me!'" (lines 29-32).

There are a few witticisms that I initially wrote off as archaic word choices, and beyond my understanding. Adams writes, "Sleep is long, and dreams are straying,/And our hearts, though they may falter,/Still, like sexiphones, are playing/Wedding marches to the altar" (lines 15-18). I typed 'sexipohone' into Dictionary.com, certain that it was an antiquated form of 'saxophone.' But alas, it does not exist. Adams manufactured the word, clearly ridiculing Freud's sexualization, fooling me once again.

The answer to the riddle is this:


Every single person died. The couple had just gotten married, and were therefore not single.


Curse you poets and ten-year olds with your wit and intellect!


Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

"Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee."

Poem of the Day:
John Donne's "The Flea"
PoetryFoundation.Org


Tonight I babysat my friend Gabe (5 years old). He possesses the energy of a caffeinated elephant, but thankfully without the strength of the African giant. He also has a very foul sense of humor; he seems to be at the age where the human body, and all its waste, is alluring beyond measure.

Tonight Gabe asked me if he could smell my butt.

I was getting him ready for bed. He was fighting the transition from day clothes to night clothes, as I weighed the pros and cons of a Star Wars or Snoopy pajama set (I eventually went with Snoopy, as I thought it would divert nightmares). Gabe, in the process of taking off his shorts and holding back fits of giggles, asked me, "Can I smell your butt?"

I promptly discouraged such an act.

Donne's "The Flea" is a strange reflection upon love through a wholly corporeal occurrence; Donne's speaker fixates upon a flea which has sucked the blood of both himself and his female lover ("And in this flea our two bloods mingled be"). He thereby posits that he and his woman friend have shared more than, one might argue, an evening in bed (lines 5-9). By sharing blood through a third party Donne apprehends a new and deeper bondage between he the woman of which he writes. For, as he writes, it becomes clear to him that "This flea is you and I" (line 12).



I like to think that Gabe's strange request of me was in truth a form of affection, that he wanted to get physically close to me, albeit uncomfortably close, in order to express the emotional closeness he feels. Really he wanted to say, "Audrey you are a great babysitter, I love you, you are so fun. Never leave me."

But instead he desired nothing more than to press his nose up to my behind and inhale.


Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

Meeting Again

Poem of the Day:
"Luke Havergal" by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Twentieth Century American Poetry


Robinson's poem is haunting in its authority and slyly sinister instruction. He writes to Luke Havergal (relationship otherwise unknown to the speaker) urging him to "Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal,/There where the vines cling crimson on the wall, And in the twilight wait for what will come" (lines 1-3). What will come is his love, "The leaves will whisper there of her" (line 4), but first Luke Havergal must go to the western gate, a gate without dawn ("where western glooms are gathering,/The dark will end the dark"); Robinson is urging Luke Havergal to meet his love in death.

Tonight I attended my second and last book club at the Boston Public Library, featuring Kitty and Dorothy. I have written of them before, and like to imagine them as a two-part series in this book of daily writings. I wish they could feature more, but the book club is only monthly, and there is no August meeting.

Dorothy and Kitty are elderly; Dorothy hurt her hip and now must walk with a cane, and Kitty has trouble reading text without fresher eyes, or thick thick glasses, to call upon. We said our goodbyes tonight, and they, grandmotherly in tone, wished me luck at school and in my years beyond (Dorothy teased me, 'You're a straight-A student, aren't you?').

The final stanza of Robinson's poem mirrors the first, but now with much more urgency. Instead of telling Luke Havergal to "[g]o" to the western gate he says, "There is the western gate," as if Luke Havergal needs no convincing, only direction. With simply this, he can meet his death and finally his loved one.

Robinson's poem made me think of Dorothy and Kitty, and whom they must miss in old age. It cannot be easy to watch a friends' failing health, and to have to do this many times in one year. It cannot be easy to want to join your friends.


I will miss my summer grandmothers, my old soul companions.


Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

Those Are Some Complicated Feelings.

Poem of the Day:
Carl Sandburg's "How Much?"
The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg


Tonight I went with a friend to the movie theater. We saw The Kids Are All Right; Julianne Moore and Annette Bening have aged well.

The film follows (don't worry, I won't spoil anything) a lesbian couple and their two children as the kids contact and begin a relationship with their biological father. Things get messy, and as their 'father' is inserted into the nook of their lives, that which has been kept beneath the surface begins to boil up.

The movie is brutally honest, and thereby darkly humorous, about the trials of marriage and family. And too is Sandburg. His poem is short. Here it is:


How much do you love me, a million bushels?
Oh, a lot more than that, Oh, a lot more.

And tomorrow maybe only half a bushel?
Tomorrow maybe not even a half a bushel.

And is this your heart arithmetic?
This is the way the wind measures the weather.


His speaker directs his questions towards another, presumably a lover, who measures his/her love in bushels, a unit of measure defined by Dictionary.com as "a unit of dry measure containing 4 pecks, equivalent in the U.S. (and formerly in England) to 2150.42 cubic inches or 35.24 liters (Winchester bushel), and in Great Britain to 2219.36 cubic inches or 36.38 liters (Imperial bushel)." How's that for precise.

Clearly, the speaker is aware of the ridiculousness of his partner, but he is also aware of the tidal quality of love and that it is not simple nor easy to maintain a relationship. The heart is in flux with the mind, and constantly. It is often unreadable. Hence, Sandburg's last line of the poem and its complete absurdity.


And is this your heart arithmetic?
This is the way the wind measures the weather.


How can one measure the weather (or love, for that matter)? And how can the wind measure the weather -- is not the wind part of the weather? How can we, as humans, measure love? It is a billowing world of which we are a part. It is our weather. And perhaps, if not for this fact alone, it is beyond our control.



Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

The Remains

Poem of the Day:
"Street Dog" by Amrita Pritam
Poetry, September 2007


Pritam's poem has been translated into English; I think this, in part, accounts for the hauntingly simple tone her language takes. She writes of a breakup, and the move that ensues: "When we were saying our farewells/and our house was up for sale" (lines 5-6). With a dose of sarcasm she personifies the now artifacts of this life, writing how a vine that hangs over the door was "confiding something to us/—or grumbling to the faucet" (lines 12-13).

Pritam's piece seems to be a straightforward slice of nostalgia, told in a very narrative tone. I maintained such impressions even when she came to the subject of the poem, the "street dog" and how he, "catching the scent/wandered into a bare room/and the door slammed shut behind him" (lines 18-20). At first, I thought little of this canine.

But Pritam leads us to the end and the "dog's carcass" (line 26), found three days later, as the speaker shows the house to its new owners. She writes how she did not hear the dog bark, but only knew he lay there from the foul odor that reached her before opening the door. Her relationship has ended; a carcass for a carcass.

Walking home tonight, after attending a concert in Central Square, I heard a lonely man playing Spanish guitar. By nature Spanish guitar is of a nostalgic romance, light and yearning and wistful.

As the soft manipulations of the instrument reached me, I was reminded of the dog's carcass, how he quietly succumbed to death and how some relationships go softly, without a bark -- a foul odor is all: "and even now, all of a sudden, I smell that odor" (line 29).


Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

Gluttony

Poem of the Day:
"Philosopher Orders Crispy Pork" by Heather McHugh
Poetry, July/August 2008

My roommates, Steph and Dan, have gone to bed. I am quickly fading. We simultaneously entered the realm of 'food coma,' having gorged ourselves on pizza, sweets and beer. 'Tis the TGIF cuisine.

McHugh makes me laugh with her eloquent portrayal of the simple, and perhaps wholly human, desire to eat pork. She writes, "As for his fat,/I’d give up years yes years of my/own life for such/a gulpable semblable" (lines 4-7). What a glorious way to write that one wants a steaming lump of bacon; she goes so far in her high poetic grace as to use the word "semblable," an archaic term for 'resemblance.'

To me, victim to an ever-approaching food coma, McHugh's poem seems not ridiculous. Passion makes poetry, and humans are passionate about food. There are countless television programs about food, books, conventions, legacies passed down among families like priceless heirlooms.

But McHugh, in her final lines, acknowledges the absurdity of her poem's subject:


The world

won’t need those seventeen more
poems, after all, there being
so few subjects to be treated. Three

if by subject we mean anyone
submitted to another’s
will. Two if by subject we mean

topic. One if by death we wind up
meaning love. And none if a subject
must entail

the curlicue’s indulgence of itself.


McHugh, you go after that pink curlicue, you cook it up real nice. Poet, you devour, because why should we not eat with a voracious appetite the things we desire so? It is such passion that makes poems, whether they be for a lover or a pig...

Though I hope these are never one and the same.


Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

Weathering Pound

Poem of the Day:
Ezra Pound's "A Virginal"
Selected Poems of Ezra Pound


The weather has been strange here in Boston. For the past few days it has been unbearably humid and rainy. This morning it looked as if the skies would be grey forever, they had never been blue, it was all a hoax. And then, at midday, it was beautiful as if all was forgiven and no one felt slighted by the morning gloom.

Pound's piece reflects upon a tumultuous relationship with a female. In the first line we see glints of this tumult. He writes, "No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately" (line 1), creating tension in the speaker's discrepant commands; is she the one leaving, or has he left her?

Regardless, their relationship was one of insurmountable love. He describes his life with her, writing, "For my surrounding air hath a new lightness;/Slight are her arms, yet they have bound me straitly/And left me cloaked as with a gauze of æther" (lines 3-5). The unnamed 'she' is heavenly, exuding "lightness" and a fabric of ether.

Because of her angelic qualities the speaker refuses to take another, and "spoil [his] sheath with lesser brightness" (line 2). But, beyond the nearly ravenous detail of the speaker's love for this woman, there remains an unresolved tension between love and pain. Returning to the second line of the poem, we see that Pound uses the word "sheath" to describe the place in which his new lover would reside, replacing his old. Hence, his lover is a sword to him. She certainly protects, covering him in a "gauze of ether," but she is also harmful, her arms binding him "straitly."

The weather in Boston is Pound's lady. She has been charming, beautiful beyond question, until this week. She has been villainous with her storms. Yet today, when after days of rain she became luminous once again, all was forgotten. Instead of screaming "Go from me" as Pound begins to do, us Bostonians have welcomed her back -- Lady Weather, that is -- remembering her ability to be "[s]oft as spring wind that’s come from birchen bowers"(line 10).


Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

Scout

Poem of the Day:
"Bust of a Young Boy in the Snow" by Sarah Gorham
The Best American Poetry, 2006

Tonight I attended a celebration of To Kill A Mockingbird. Published fifty years ago this month, the book was spoken of by three scholars and then the film was shown.

Gregory Peck is an attractive older man.

One of the scholars, a history professor at Boston College, spoke of Harper Lee's narrator choice: Scout. The rebellious six-year old is wise but naive, stumbling upon life lessons as if they were speed bumps on a road upon which she cannot yet legally drive.

Gorham writes of a child, a dead child. He is remembered by a bust, now laden with snow in the winter, "disarming the winter visitor" (line 4). She describes it in frank detail: "Lips apart, ear like a split/oyster, rough erosion/crawling up his nape/and, over the cheek, a verdigris birthmark" (lines 8-13). He is not yet human to her, his birthmark is described as the result of bronze being exposed to the elements. Not a birthmark of skin.

Gorham is frank like Scout. This memorial is an "unsettling head" (line 6). No one wants to be reminded that children die too. Scout almost died at the hands of Bob Ewell.

Scout's childlike soul is eternal. Her thoughts can be read as an adult, and still she seems alive, just a little farther south, keep driving and you'll find her. Gorham's child is also made eternal. But, his resurrection is unnatural and alarming to the speaker ("A little boy's eyes/in winter,/opened rigid and wide"). He is haunting.

I choose Lee's running, leaping Scout. Gorham's "tarnished dimple and fold/of neckskin" (lines 27-28) is a reminder that individual children can pass, whereas Scout and Lee remind us that childhood remains for a lifetime.


Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

Oh The Places You Will Go

Poem of the Day:
"We Will Stray" by Michael Davitt
Poems From the Irish


Gavitt's poem, translated from the original Irish, responds to an excerpt of a poem by Seán Ó Ríordáin: "An answer, I still think, is death/To question is to live --/We will stray another while/And see the land." And, as seems appropriate, Gavitt's poem begins, "we will stray" (line 1).

He writes:

"we will stray/south-west by south/from the north-west/we will expect/the heat of the voice/we will seek/Almighty God/and in the rite/of candles and skin/in Cashel of Munster/we will singe our barren bards/in a bonfire/and scatter their ashes/on the mildew of tradition" (lines 1-14).

Of a people for whom immigration is the inevitable tide of every folktale, Gavitt recognizes the movement of the Irish people, both wanted and unwanted.

Today I bought an iPhone. I traded in a phone that could hardly do anything (but do what phones were originally designed to do, I suppose) for a phone that can, supposedly, do everything.

Walking home, new phone in hand, I was surprisingly wary. I was wary of all that it promised, its shine and its smallness. What power did I now have that I didn't have before?

Gavitt's free verse poem ends with an anaphora, a device which he uses to stress the movement of a collective people: "we will change/we will go proud/we will go low/we will go" (lines 56-59).

The Irish had boats at their fingertips, and now airplanes. I have a nearly weightless hunk of metal and computer 'parts' of which I know nothing.

I know that I "will go," but where?


Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

Days of Seamless Sound

Poem of the Day:
"Of all the Sounds despatched abroad" by Emily Dickinson
Final Harvest


Of all the Sounds despatched abroad,
There's not a Charge to me
Like that old measure in the Boughs--
That phraseless Melody --
The Wind does -- working like a Hand,
Whose fingers Comb the Sky --
Then quiver down -- with tufts of Tune --
Permitted Gods, and me --



My days are quilts of seamless sound: guitar-playing on the street, subway travel, typing, the yell of bus brakes. Dickinson writes of a more natural symphony, one conducted by the wind and played by the "Birds...overhead" (line 23) and the "merry Dust" (line 18) of risen souls. Each of these musicians sings beautifully, harmonizing "In Seamless Company" (line 34).

I thought I would dislike city life, that coming from a fairly rural (definitely suburban) lifestyle would make me ill-prepared to live in a place where people cram into small cars and are hurled to their jobs. But, there is a melody to be found in the urban setting. I can now sense when a bus is near by the shrill call of its rev, and I like this. I like being able to do this.



I hear you Dickinson. But these sounds are good too. You have your "fleshless Chant" (line 28) and I my fleshy, steely trill.


Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

Mark Strand

Poem of the Day:
Mark Strand's "Man and Camel"
Man and Camel


As I have steered this blog through the past month and a half I have learned that poems and days are not dissimilar creatures. Most have a pacing, unique to its author, a rise and fall that often begins to fall at the end and at the night. Some days are bad, some poems are bad. Days are painful, while poems are too hard to be written.

Today I experienced the most ultimate weaving of day and poem thus far: I walked to the Longfellow National Historic Site to hear Mark Strand read. Therefore, the poem I've chosen for today is one that I also heard today, recited by the author himself.

Strand is a very tall man, striking in his elderly good looks and sense of dress. His humor is also very dry; I laughed in the summer heat.

His poem is surreal -- it reminds me very much of James Tate -- and because of this Strand seems to be warding off the age he mentions in the first line ("On the eve of my fortieth birthday/I sat on the porch having a smoke" (lines 1-2)). While the speaker enjoys his cigarette, a man and a camel happen by. Strand seems neither surprised nor amused. Only when both creatures begin to sing does he take note: "the two of them began to sing./Yet what they sang is still a mystery to me --/the words were indistinct and the tune/too ornamental to recall" (lines 6-8).

Strand's speaker attempts to bring reason to this singing, as if the song is the strangeness of the situation and must be explained. He thinks, "The wonder of their singing/its elusive blend of man and camel, seemed/an ideal image for all uncommon couples./Was this the night that I had waited for/so long?" (lines 12-16). And, we begin to sense a desperateness in the speaker's voice; why is he looking to a singing man and camel for recognition, for an "ideal image of uncommon couples" for which he "had waited for/so long."

Alas, the majesty of the man and camel is broken in the final lines when they circle back to address the speaker on his porch, saying only, "'You ruined it. You ruined it forever'" (line 21). The voice of the final line seems dual; could it be both the poet speaking to a form of himself ("You've ruined the poem") or indeed the man and camel talking to Strand's speaker, accusing him of ruining their surreal existence and action by attaching his pathetic meaning to it?

I don't need to have this question answered. I heard the poem today, from the poet, and Strand's breezy annunciations of each word brought life to something that now, seems duller when on the page.




I suggest reading poetry aloud.

Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

Rebirth

Poem of the Day:
"Legend" by Craig Czury
What Have You Lost?


It is not until the close of Czury's poem that I begin to sense the spiritual nature of his subject. He begins "Legend" with an address: "Even while you were looking straight at me/you were always somewhere else, very far away" (lines 1-2). Immediately I think, "Lover's quarrel; this poem must be about a lover's quarrel." But Czury ends his poem with the line, "And your breath was so warm/and sweet that it took me very far away inside me/to a place where I was born, growing up before I was born" (lines 8-10). And, I begin to rethink.

This morning I attended a Kundalini Yoga class, my very first of its kind. I should have been skeptical when my classmate, in place of a standard yoga mat, rolled out a white bearskin rug. And I was. The moment the fur hit the floor I began to reconsider my decision to attend the class.

After doing 26 variations of a squatting pose meant to awaken my sexual organs, inhaling with my tongue curled, and envisioning my own birth including my 'trip down the birth canal,' I was, according to the instructor, reborn. Because I had breathed like a laboring woman for seven minutes (yes, I did that) I had, in some sense, given birth to a new version of myself.

Excuse my cynic tone, but I am cynical. Yoga to me has always been a focus on the physical that brings me closer to a spiritual space; the harder I push my body, the more my mental energy fights back and when I can ignore my mind and work only within my physical self I feel that I have reached what I believe to be a spiritual place. I have yet to find personal benefit from a yoga practice that is solely spiritual-based, though this is not to say that it is not this way for others.

The last words of Czury's poem, therefore, forced me to rethink this morning's Kundalini Yoga encounter. My previous views remain. But, I don't ignore the fact that there is a divine place to be reached and in quite unique ways. Czury's speaker has found it in "the trees,/the air that brought me the trees, the stones/and everything I walked in and out of" (lines 5-7). This love that I presumed he spoke of in the first few sentences takes on a more ethereal quality, a love for a divine being cultivated by the natural world.

In the end Czury feels reborn because of his spiritual encounter. Kundalini Yoga, though it tried very earnestly, did not provide for me the feelings of rebirth.

Elsewhere looks promising.


Bearskin Rugless,
A Poem A Day Audrey

Timeless, Age(more)

Poem of the Day:
"Vacant Lot" by Paul Jenkins
Radio Tooth


Tonight with my visitors, my parents, I enjoyed a stroll into Harvard Square -- my father on the other hand, enjoyed a crawl into Harvard Square -- to get food and drinks. We spent most of our time following an elderly couple -- this will give you an idea of our pace -- who seemed so utterly content, arm in arm, with their lives and their night.

Jenkins' speaker seems to be a late twenty-something, or an early thirty year old. Either way, he is much younger than either of the older pair from tonight's ramble. I can sense this almost immediately. In the first line of his poem Jenkins writes, "These rooms are where we live but not for long" (line 1).

I have noted this of my life countless times. I believe that I spend most of my time packing and unpacking, re situating myself in a new place be that Connecticut, Ghana, Ireland or Boston.

"If it's wholeness you want you better search somewhere else/And privacy and safety because all I know/Is there's less horizon every time I look" (lines 4-6)." Certainly Jenkins' lines could be considered person-specific, but I think of them as age-specific. His speaker seems angry because of life's uncertainty, because of a lack of contentment he has found with it.

To me this poem is the antithesis of tonight's pair, the elderly couple who led my parents and I into Harvard Square. They were happy to drift along in each other's company.

At one point, the woman went to walk into the post office, at 9 PM at night. She laughed, turned around to her husband and said "Oh, do you want to go in here?"

I think he said something along the lines of, "Well, why not?" Life had fed them, they were full and it is wholeness, that which Jenkins' speaker has not yet found, that sits deep in their bellies.


Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

Restore

Poem of the Day:
Donald Hall's "Ox Cart Man"
Fifty Years of American Poetry


Hall creates for us the image of that which self-sustains. He writes of a man, the "Ox Cart Man," who mines potatoes in October (lines 1-5), shears and bags wool in April (line 6).


In October of the year,
he counts potatoes dug from the brown field,
counting the seed, counting
the cellar's portion out,
and bags the rest on the cart's floor.

He packs wool sheared in April, honey
in combs, linen, leather
tanned from deerhide,
and vinegar in a barrel
hopped by hand at the forge's fire.



He then sells it all, including his cart and his ox, at the Portsmouth Market, returning home with the glint of silver.


When the cart is empty he sells the cart.
When the cart is sold he sells the ox,
harness and yoke, and walks
home, his pockets heavy
with the year's coin for salt and taxes


Having sold what he sowed, he begins, out of necessity, to restore himself and his livelihood, stitching a new harness for the new ox, carving the new yoke for the new cart that will carry the new load to the same market.

In the rhythm that Hall's "Ox Cart Man" portrays, life is defined as a pattern of breaking and restoring, of selling off everything in an act of renewal and then rebuilding.

Our bodies follow a similar rhythm. When we push too hard we must make time to restore.

Coming upon Friday, I have noticed this same rhythm in my weeks. Monday and Tuesday I am renewed, bringing all my weekend wares to sell at the market. By Thursday I return home, perhaps richer but my energy field is barren. I must sleep, eat and rebuild, minding always Hall's wise voice.


Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

Sounds, Actions in the Boston Public Library

Poem of the Day:
"Hour" by Christian Hawkey
The Best American Poetry, 2006


Excerpt from "Hour"

My sixth sensurround
is down, my second skin
the skin I'm stepping
into: I lick
a new finger & hold it up
to the wind: O my beloved
what. O
my beloved what. O my
beloved shovel-nosed mole
can I clean the soil

Today after work I inhabited, for 3 hours at least, a thick wooden table at the Boston Public Library, reading materials for my senior essay.

During a spout of my research-reading I spotted a new table member in the bottom left corner of my glance. From the start I could tell that he had no book-related intentions; he came not to read, borrow or browse. Instead, he entered the library in order to luxuriate in the air-conditioning and rest his eyes.

He was homeless. I make no assurances that this assumption is correct but judging from his alienated look (bags, dirty clothes, emaciated build) and the fact that he merely rested in the library before moving on (to what, I know not) convinced me that the library to him was a solace, more so than I could ever imagine.

Hawkey's poem is sonically-focused and for that reason it is intense on the ear; he creates friction with varying sounds, his soft round vowels ("O," "shovel-nosed mole") and his hard abrupt consonants ("black, sightless," "tiny, webbed feet").

Thick wooden table at hand's length, I was the softness of Hawkey's poem, but also the less real. Much of his soft sound comes from his use of the archaic "O," a usage both superfluous and a bit absurd in a poem that concerns a mole. Also, "beloved." He uses the word often. It is both sonically light and out of place with the soiled rodent subject.

My library vagabond. Hawkey looked to him when he sounded out, "do you hear me/in the tunnel next to you" (lines 25-26). "[T]unnel next to you" rushes on with harsh disregard, the double "n" in "tunnel" pushing the reader quickly into the abrupt "next" and "to." In such lines Hawkey relays the reality of a mole's underground life. And, the life of my table-mate, not reading. Trying to cool down and to find a bit of comfort.

I wanted to tell him to grab a book, that if he wanted to escape not just the outside heat but his current situation a story was the best way. But, I kept to myself and escaped him instead.


Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

The Hot Haze of Browning

Poem of the Day:
"A Lovers' Quarrel" by Robert Browning
My Last Duchess and Other Poems


Today's heat was vigorous; it was a cloud of smokey smokey strength and air so thick it was almost solid.

Such is similar to my reading of Browning. One of the only Victorian poetry books among my modern collection, I forgot how troublesome rhyme, form and length are to me. I need space -- physical space on the page and space from rhyme and other devices that tighten and fix a poem's rhythm.

Despite this, Browning's poem is sonically pleasing: "Oh, what a dawn of day!/How the March sun feels like May!" (lines 1-2). May sun aside, he and his lover have quarreled and the beautiful weather is wasted on him.

He continues on, drawing for us a pastoral scene. Browning writes, "Runnels, which rillets swell,/Must be dancing down the dell,/With a foaming head/On the beryl bed/Paven smooth as a hermit's cell" (lines 8-12).

Despite the beauteous field that his words conjure, I am caught in the thickness of the AABBA rhyme scheme -- at times it reads limerick-y.

I think on any other day I would really enjoy Browning. Today is just a hot day. I want space to breathe and walk and time to cool off. Whereas Browning's March day is full of a May sun, my July day was full of the sun, right up against the earth, nuzzling its way onto my wilting shoulder.

Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

Contemporary Dance & Funerals

Poem of the Day:
"At the County Museum" by Ted Kooser
Delights & Shadows

I've been reading a lot of Kooser lately. I like his simplicity of form and his humble diction. And well, his author picture is just the cutest 'old man' photo this side of the Charles.

Tonight I took my first contemporary dance class in six months (see the post regarding my first ballet class in six months). I am in pain, but it was an amazing feeling to return to dance once again. Absences are that much sweeter when you can return.

The content of Kooser's poem belies the title; "At the County Museum" is a haunting poem about death. Kooser writes, "Blacker than black, the lacquered horse-drawn hearse,/dancing with stars from the overhead lights,/has clattered to a stop" (lines 1-3). He continues on, writing of the now museum-housed horse-drawn hearse and the many stops it took when in use, emptying itself at each: "How many times must a thing like this be emptied/to look so empty?" (lines 11-12).

This line brought me to my dance class this evening. Much of contemporary and modern dance is focused upon round shapes, emptying and filling ones belly, arms, etc. Kooser's poem, one about a naive encounter with rituals of death, made me ponder the limits of the human body. Can we ever "look so empty?" Can our bodies ever portray the loss inherent in a museum display of a horse-drawn hearse, "its oak spokes soberly walking,/each placed squarely in front of the next" (lines 7-8)?

Kooser's poem ends with the speaker's notice of a black cushion in the hearse. The poet writes, "And on the board bench where dozens of drivers/jounced year into year...is a black plush cushion that for each, for a time,/helped to soften the nearness of death" (lines 17-20). And, in a stationary object, Kooser's speaker better understands death, its forms and how we cope.

Is there a way to understand this same thing by means of a moving body, by motion and not display? Dance me a dance.


Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

The Colors

Poem of the Day:
"Sonnet" by Wilfred Owen
The Poems of Wilfred Owen


Fireworks and the Fourth of July, as commonly paired as Barbie and Ken. We wait until the sun sets and it is dark enough to see the lights.

Owen's poem acknowledges homage, particularly his homage to Keats in the wake of the poet's death. Owen writes, "Three colours have I known the Deep to wear;/'Tis well today that Purple grandeurs gloom,/Veiling the Emerald sheen and Sky-blue glare" (lines 1-3), opening his sonnet with a focus on the sadness inherent in color choice, that is "[P]urple." Keats has recently died and this is his wake.

The surrounding sky too, in Owen's piece, is mourning; "lowly-brooding clouds now loom/In sable majesty around" (lines 4-5) and to the poet "they bear/Watery memorials of His mystic doom/Whose Name was writ in Water" (lines 6-8).



Just as Owen looks to the sky for answers in the wake of immense grief, we too turn to the sky in the act of recollection. For instance, in what direction do we look during the Fourth of July but above? On what do we focus our attention other than the "Purple grandeurs gloom"?

Colors are both a subject of mourning and of celebration; on the Fourth it seems that we acknowledge a rainbow, "[E]merald sheen" and "[S]ky-blue glare," of remembrance.


Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

The Strength of a Name

Poem of the Day:
Irving Feldman's "Terminal Laughs"
The Best American Poetry, 1995


Feldman writes of an encounter he had with what I can only perceive as a celebrity that has fallen from the limelight, a so-called "'Gregorio Nunzio Corso'" (line 26). Feldman recounts how Corso, in the midst of the speaker's party and "a gulp/away from getting smashed" (lines 2-3), insults his name remarking, "'Irving Feldman...what kind of name is that for a poet?'" (lines 11-12).

As an aspiring writer, the opening of this piece clearly made me reconsider my name, and also, how often I proclaim my name to others. Today: 2 times. First, I had to announce my name to the receptionist at my yoga studio so she could sign me in as a member. Second, I had to introduce myself in order to get into a concert for my internship; I was listed as "Audrey M.", a name-shortening that saved an instance of pedantic spelling -- "M...c...G..."

Feldman's poem ends thirty years from where it began. He is at a party once again with Corso, though now the speaker has achieved fame -- whatever fame there is to be had from publishing poetry -- with his writing. Corso, thirty years older and "half toothless" (line 78), greets him by saying, "'Irving Feldman, huh? Just another pretty name'" (line 84), and the poem promptly ends.

What changed the title of "Irving Feldman?" Was it his 'fame' or Corso's embarrassment at his inability to age gracefully?

I too like to think that my name will strengthen with age, that I will only become more prouder that it is mine and that I get to announce it twice daily. But, who can know -- who can say what wear these titles we wear will face?


Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

Drooling, Ga Ga

Poem of the Day:
"The Old People" by Ted Kooser
Delights & Shadows

Tonight I saw Lady Gaga in concert; it was one of the most aesthetically-pleasing pieces of performance art I've ever seen.

And, when I consider the concert in conjunction with the day's poem, I am forced to grin.

I did not see too many "[P]antcuffs rolled, and in old shoes" (line 1) among the beating mass of concertgoers. Kooser's elders' "ears/are full of night: rustle of black leaves/against a starless sky" (lines 8-10), whereas my ears have not stopped ringing since I got home.

Gaga is not for the light-hearted, light-footed nor the light-liver. She is raging, youthful and sexual. She is overwhelming, but extremely pleasing.




I wonder if Kooser likes the song, "Poker Face."

Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey

Reflection

Poem of the Day:
Louise Gluck's "Civilization"
The Seven Ages

Gluck writes of, what I think is an often debated word use, "civilization." She envisions it as a force permeating the human race at an evolutionary speed: "But the facts persisted. They were among us,/isolated and without pattern; they were among us,/shaping us" (lines 14-16). In Gluck's eyes, it is up to the human mind to bring shape to these "facts," to apprehend the world deeply "though it could never be mastered" (line 31).

At the one-month mark of my self-challenge I have had time -- not much, since I have a job and an internship -- but some time to reflect upon the process of encountering, at times head-first, a poem a day. It has been difficult many days to find a connection between an instance in my day and a published poem; one is certainly more crafted than the other. But nonetheless it has only supported the concept that poetry is written of the most raw moments, those moments that at first, second, and third glance seem so mundane. The poem takes the time to look a fourth time. Such patience delivers a flourish of language that brings to life the daily grind that binds us.

Gluck's poem is fitting, though I think she overestimates the array of the world. She writes, "They [facts] were among us,/not singly, as in chaos, but woven/into relationship or set in order" (lines 28-30). I think that the order is not ours to discover , but ours to create.

I like to think that's what this small project is about -- creating a semblance of order among my diurnal waking and the persistent power of verse.

Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey