Author: tgifreytag

Poem-a-Day April 3: The Desert Night

In Midber / In the Desert
IN THE DESERT

11.

The stillness of the night disturbed your rest.
The piteous communication of coyotes
wept drop by drop into your breast.

So you went outdoors,
were joined together with the desert night,
encircled by mysterious distances,
surrounded by nocturnal fortresses.
But overhead —
An intimate, brightly-laden sky,
A low-lying heaven, heavy with pellucid pearls
and stuffed with sparkling spangles,
is about to fall of its own weight.
It must be lifted up,
supported by a set of chuppah poles.

A wedding in the black of night!
Here comes the bride, the bride!
Make way, here comes the bride!

Hello Friends,

Yitshok Elhonon Rontsh, or Isaac E. Ronch, was born in 1899 in Poland and spent much of his later life in Los Angeles, California, where he composed poems, essays and other works in Yiddish. This excerpt from section 11 of a translation of “In the Desert” was published in 1970.

The desert was the place in Southern California where Ronch felt most viscerally connected to desert scenes and experiences recorded in the Torah. For Ronch, the desert was a landscape that collapsed centuries and continents, and his poems set in the desert frequently blur the lines between his present day reality, visions, the ancient past, and the future.

If you’re interested in the original Yiddish, the entire poetry collection In Midber (In the Desert) is available to download here. If your name is Dara Weinberg and today is your birthday, a 1970 first edition copy of this poetry collection, with dust jacket, illustrated with drawings by Marc Chagall, and signed by Ronch, awaits you the next time you make the journey from Poland to Los Angeles.

Love,
Ellen

Poem-a-Day April 2: Train Tracks

Trying to Name What Doesn’t Change

Roselva says the only thing that doesn’t change
is train tracks. She’s sure of it.
The train changes, or the weeds that grow up spidery
by the side, but not the tracks.
I’ve watched one for three years, she says,
and it doesn’t curve, doesn’t break, doesn’t grow.

Peter isn’t sure. He saw an abandoned track
near Sabinas, Mexico, and says a track without a train
is a changed track. The metal wasn’t shiny anymore.
The wood was split and some of the ties were gone.

Every Tuesday on Morales Street
butchers crack the necks of a hundred hens.
The widow in the tilted house
spices her soup with cinnamon.
Ask her what doesn’t change.

Stars explode.
The rose curls up as if there is fire in the petals.
The cat who knew me is buried under the bush.

The train whistle still wails its ancient sound
but when it goes away, shrinking back
from the walls of the brain,
it takes something different with it every time.

Hello Friends,

It’s a nearly universal experience to read or hear the same words over again, and have them mean something different to us, isn’t it? How human of us!

Something we didn’t touch directly on with yesterday’s “Vocabulary” poem is how the meaning of even a single word changes over time and in different contexts — context in sentence, in a room, in the mouth of a particular speaker, in the walls of the brain it reverberates in. You could make an argument that a word signifies something slightly different every single time it’s used — as Humpty Dumpty* argues in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass when he says (in a rather scornful tone), “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

Today’s poem, from the Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye in her 1995 collection Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, is in part about how much of a poem’s, a word’s, a sound’s, a train’s meaning — at the very least half — belongs to the listener, the reader, the audience.

You know that saying about the tree falling in the woods, whether it makes a sound or not if nobody hears it? Is it any less mysterious when the tree falls and people do hear the sound — how much the tree determines what the sound it makes sounds like, and how much the people listening determine that sound? And how much something so much bigger.

You think about that tree, or the train whistle, and don’t ever let anyone tell you that you got the meaning of a poem “wrong,” ok? It’s entirely possible for a poem to mean something to you that the poet never intended — you could argue it’s not only possible, but inevitable. But that doesn’t make the meaning you read wrong; it just makes it yours.

For what Edna St. Vincent Millay hears in the train whistle, see “Traveling.” And for another take on what doesn’t change when stars explode, see Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Shampoo.”

April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating with my own eclectic selection of 30 poems by 30 poets, and some of what they mean to me. Thank you again for letting me share this month with you.

— Ellen

* This is the same Humpty Dumpty who, when Alice asks him, “Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem ‘Jabberwocky’?”, replies, “I can explain all the poems that ever were invented—and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet.” One of the amusing things about Humpty Dumpty’s character is that when he’s the speaker, he attributes 100% of the control over language’s meaning to the speaker (or writer). But when Humpty Dumpty is the listener, he attributes 100% of the control over language’s meaning to the listener (or reader).

Poem-a-Day April 1: Vocabulary

Hello, Friends, and Happy National Poetry Month!

Have you ever fallen in love with a word, just one word? Have you ever just been tickled that a particular word exists — maybe it’s slang in your region, maybe it’s jargon in your profession, maybe it’s a term in your native language with no precise English translation.

Jason Schneiderman’s “Vocabulary” is not about alientating other people or ranking yourself above them with something you memorized off the back of a flashcard. I love this poem because it conveys what it means to discover and share the meaning of words from a place of personal inquisitiveness — from a place of wonder and love.

The very word “vocabulary” can never be fully separated from elitism and hierarchy: there is always inclusion and exclusion in the words we choose. But that doesn’t have to get in the way of learning to love to learn.

Or so says the kid who copied pages of the dictionary just for fun.

Vocabulary

I used to love words,
but not looking them up.

Now I love both,
the knowing,

and the looking up,
the absurdity

of discovering that “boreal”
has been meaning

“northern” all this time
or that “estrus”

is a much better word
for the times when

I would most likely
have said, “in heat.”

When I was translating,
the dictionary

was my enemy,
the repository of knowledge

that I seemed incapable
of retaining. The foreign word

for “inflatable” simply
would not stay in my head,

though the English word “deictic,”
after just one encounter,

has stuck with me for a year.
I once lost “desiccated”

for a decade, first encountered
in an unkind portrayal

of Ronald Reagan, and then
finally returned to me

in an article about cheese.
I fell in love with my husband,

not when he told me
what the word “apercus” means,

but when I looked it up,
and he was right.

There’s even a word
for when you use a word

not to mean its meaning,
but as the word itself,

and I’d tell you what it was
if I could remember it.

My friend reads the dictionary
for its perspective on culture,

laughs when I say that
reference books are not really

books, but proleptic databases.
My third grade teacher

used to joke that if we were bored
we could copy pages out of the dictionary,

but when I did, also a joke,
she was horrified rather than amused.

Discovery is always tinged
with sorrow, the knowledge

that you have been living
without something,

so we try to make learning
the province of the young,

who have less time to regret
having lived in ignorance.

My students are lost
in dictionaries,

unable to figure out why
“categorize” means

“to put into categories”
or why the fifth definition

of “standard” is the one
that will make the sentence

in question make sense.
I wonder how anyone

can live without knowing
the word “wonder.”

A famous author
once said in an interview,

that he ended his novel
with an obscure word

he was sure his reader
would not know

because he liked the idea
of the reader looking it up.

He wanted the reader,
upon closing his book, to open

another, that second book
being a dictionary,

and however much I may have loved
that author, after reading

that story
(and this may surprise you)

I loved him less.

What’s your relationship to the dictionary? Post a word you fell in love with once below!

Cheers,
Ellen

Of Poets and Pockets

Hello Friends —

Poem in Your Pocket Day 2013 is here!

Have you ever thought about why the National Poetry Month folks decided on “Poem in Your Pocket Day”? Poets came up with this day, so you already know there’s not going to be one straightforward answer — there are going to be layers of possible meaning. But I think it’s worth noting they could’ve picked another analogy for small or short — they could’ve made up “Bite-Size Poetry Day” or “Poem In Your Thimble Day” or “Poem That When Curled Up Into A Tiny Scroll Fits In Your Inner Ear Day.”

The poet’s ear elates at alliteration of course, but I think the “pocket” of “Poem in Your Pocket Day” is about more than that — these poets didn’t pick “Pint-Sized Poem Day” or “Post-It Poem Day” for instance.

They also didn’t pick “This Impossibly Long Poem Is Never Gonna End Day.”

So what is the relationship between the pocket and the poem? In modern day, the pocket is a clothing compartment universally known for storing words that we want to remember (as in notes to ourselves, to-do lists, passwords not to forget on the way back to our desks), as well as words that we intend to share (as in, taking your notecards out of your pocket as you walk up to the podium to deliver your speech). These two acts — remembering and sharing — are at the heart of what Poem in Your Pocket Day aims for, remembering and sharing poems. I would argue the pocket evokes the compact, square-but-not-quite-square form of the stanza — the original poetic building block, going back to before humans even wrote down our words, back when we just memorized our stories in order to tell them to each other again, and so invented rhyme and meter to make our stories easier to remember. The stanza is a pocket. The pocket is a stanza. The pocket is an envelope. A mouth. Your pocket (even more than a pocket or the pocket) is most often made of cloth, weaving in a long-standing analogy between fabric and language, that fine line between cloth and paper. And perhaps most importantly, your pocket is frequently associated with a location close to your heart.

For me, “pocket poems” are the poems short enough not to intimidate the poetry-wary — the friendly, the highly sharable poems. “Pocket poems” are poems that we keep in our heads — poems short enough to memorize, thereby reenacting on a small scale the very invention of poetry. And “pocket poems” are also the poems (of any length) that we keep close to our hearts — that we may “pull out,” as if from a pocket, on any given day, any hour, because they help us construct meaning from that given moment in your lives. The best, the most pocket-y-est of “pocket poems,” are all of those at once.

Today your friend Ellen and various other poetry enthusiasts scattered throughout the country will be handing out conveniently pocket-sized poems on the street to unsuspecting passers-by. Even when I’m feeling extra-introverted and not-so-courageous, or super-overworked-busy, I have never been sorry to have taken a couple of hours one day a year to hand poems to strangers. It is a truly rewarding experience — just try it; you’ll know soon enough what I mean. If you think this April might be your April to try it, here’s a PDF of pocket-sized poems for printing out, cutting out, and handing out. The Academy of American Poets — the folks who officially bring you National Poetry Month — also have a collection of pocket poems here. Some other suggestions for you from the Academy:

  • Add a poem to your email footer for the day
  • Post a poem on your blog or social networking page
  • Text a poem to friends
  • Start a street team to pass out poems in your community
  • Post pocket-sized verses in public places
  • Project a poem on a wall, inside or out
  • Urge local businesses to offer discounts for those carrying poems
  • Start a “poems for pockets” swap or give-a-way in your school or workplace

And, don’t forget: If today is not your day, no one knows when “real” Poem in Your Pocket Day is anyway — so take some poetic license! You’re pretty much good through the end of April / National Poetry Month. Or whenever.

Enjoy.
Ellen

The Shirt

The shirt touches his neck
and smoothes over his back.
It slides down his sides.
It even goes down below his belt—
down into his pants.
Lucky shirt.


Pocket-sized “The Shirt” by Jane Kenyon was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 7, 2009 and Poem-a-Day April 22, 2007.

Where Have All the Poems Gone?

Hi Friends,

It’s come to my attention that some of you noticed a lack of poems in your inbox this month.

For the past many years, I’ve celebrated National Poetry Month by sharing with all of you little bits of what I love about poetry — via one poem per day, delivered to your email inbox, for the duration of the month: 30 days. 30 poems. 30 poets.

One of my weaknesses is that I really suck at doing things half-assed, watered down, or sloppily slapped together; I have an extremely difficult time lowering my standards for myself and my own work — like, to a fault; it’s a problem. This April, I found that I wasn’t gonna be able to do my poem-a-day series all-out, the way it deserves to be done — so I haven’t done it all.

But that’s not right, either. I do still want to celebrate poetry month with each you. So, some thoughts:

1. Send me a poem this April? Include a little note about why it’s a favorite of yours, or why you think it’s a poem I might like, or a comment or a question you have about the poem.

2. Six Aprils’ worth of poem-a-days are yours to revist or explore for the first time here at meetmein811.blogspot.com. Do you have a favorite previous poem-a-day, one that still sticks with you all these Aprils later?

3. I’m going to email you next week about Poem in Your Pocket Day, which is officially April 18 this year, but works well on pretty much any day in April.

4. Brackets! Poets! Powell’s Books! 3 of my favorite things, all rolled into one. Check out Powell’s Books’ new experiment this April, Poetry Madness.

5. A poem! for you! for April! (below) A thank you to Jeannine for reminding me that e.e. cummings has probably written more of my favorite poems specifically about April and spring than any other poet. What other poets do you think might rival Cummings for the (Poet)King of Spring title?

6. As always, you can learn more about National Poetry Month at the website of the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org.

I hope that you’re all doing well!

Love,
Ellen

when faces called flowers float out of the ground
and breathing is wishing and wishing is having—
but keeping is downward and doubting and never
—it’s april(yes,april;my darling)it’s spring!
yes the pretty birds frolic as spry as can fly
yes the little fish gambol as glad as can be
(yes the mountains are dancing together)

when every leaf opens without any sound
and wishing is having and having is giving—
but keeping is doting and nothing and nonsense
—alive;we’re alive,dear:it’s(kiss me now)spring!
now the pretty birds hover so she and so he
now the little fish quiver so you and so i
(now the mountains are dancing,the mountains)

when more than was lost has been found has been found
and having is giving and giving is living—
but keeping is darkness and winter and cringing
—it’s spring(all our night becomes day)o,it’s spring!
all the pretty birds dive to the heart of the sky
all the little fish climb through the mind of the sea
(all the mountains are dancing;are dancing)

— E.E. Cummings, from XAIPE (1950)

BOOKS I LEFT BEHIND AT POWELL’S

A LIST, A LOVE LETTER, A POSTCARD TO MYSELF — SEPTEMBER 2012

The poetry section at Powell’s Books is more expansive than the 811 aisle of many a library. Upon landing at PDX, I hopped on the MAX and proceeded directly to W. Burnside & 10th — my #1 destination whenever in Portland, OR. That first afternoon, I made it from A through F. Two days later, I made it through to Z. Just in the poetry section.

If I had a million dollars and any empty shelf room, I’d’ve given some of these beautiful creatures a loving home… Alas I didn’t even have the nerve to take photos in the aisles, but what I do have is this list.

DROOL-WORTHY / IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND / NEVER SEEN BEFORE:

  • #1 Hymn to the Gentle Sun by Sister Mary Norbert Korte (1967 1st edition of the poet’s first book, published in Berkeley CA, good condition… you’d probably have to track down the “Redwood Mama Activist” herself to find another copy like this one)
  • #2 Dorothy Q Together With a Ballad of the Boston Tea Party & Grandmother’s Story of Bunker Hill Battle by Oliver Wendell Holmes (late 1800s, 1st edition, identified by pg. 50 ‘flashed’ instead of ‘clashed’)
  • #3 Slick But Not Streamlined by John Betjeman with an introduction by W.H. Auden (1947, gorgeous 1st edition with dust jacket)
  • #4 Come In by Robert Frost (1943, 1st edition with dust jacket, full of illustrations, gorgeous)
  • #5 Tabret & Harp by Marion Armstrong (1967 — I think 1st & only edition) …you can find other Marion Armstrong, but not this one. Page 11 particularly caught my ear:

Brightly, oddly,
Greedy as a shark,
The teeth of the ungodly
Glitter in the dark.

  • #6 Richard Aldridge, Fantasy Poets series pamphlet (opens four ways), marked for one shilling — (1956, published in Britain — Aldridge was a Fulbright scholar studying at Worcester College, Oxford, at the time this was printed. This is so rare I’d wonder if Aldridge himself might not have a copy and want this one.)
  • #7 Rootabaga Pigeons by Carl Sandburg (kids’ book by the poet, lovely gilded hardback edition, good shape)
  • #8 History of Prostitution by William W. Sanger, Eugenics Publishing Co. (worn but not bad for mid-1800s printing) I want this partly for fascination/curiosity’s sake, and partly because I don’t want anyone else to have it who might try to falsely associate it with Margaret Sanger

… AND THAT’S MOSTLY JUST IN THE POETRY SECTION. I DIDN’T EVEN MAKE IT INTO THE RARE BOOK ROOM.

OTHER TEMPTATIONS LEFT BEHIND:

  • Shelf Life, the Powell’s documentary DVD
  • To Herland & Beyond by Ann J. Lane (I have a Herland obsession — 1912 Charlotte Perkins Gilman all-female dis/utopia novella)
  • Word on the Street by Richard Nagler (2010, photos of a single word in urban scenes, as graffiti, sign, etc.)
  • Going Postal by Martha Cooper (2009, photos of mailing label street art)
  • Destroy This Memory by Richard Misrach (2010, photos of graffiti messages on post-Katrina abandoned buildings)
  • How To Avoid Huge Ships and Other Implausibly Titled Books (2008 — what can I say? I am that sucker who is attracted to books comprised mainly of photos of the covers of other books)
  • Complete Nonsense by Edward Lear (1996 reprinting in a hand-colored edition I’d never seen before)
  • Field Work by Seamus Heaney (1979, 1st edition — not rare, but still a really nice copy)
  • Instructions to the Double by Tess Gallagher (1994, known poet and known press, so you’d think it wouldn’t be that hard to find, but it is)
  • Pursuit by Erica Funkhouser (2002, Houghton Mifflin imprint, so not hard to find)
  • John Kinsella — someone gave Powell’s a copy of almost every book this Australian nature poet has ever written
  • The Important Thing by Margaret Wise Brown (Goodnight Moon author, this title recently reintroduced into circulation)
  • Here by Wislawa Szymborska (you know, that Polish poet who won the Nobel Prize who’s not Czeslaw Milosz)
  • All of Us by Raymond Carver
  • Tongue and Thunder by David Cloutier (1980, Copper Beach — not Canyon — Press)
  • A Moon Over Wings by Tom Aslin (2008, Clark City Press)

Did I mention I love Powell’s? Go buy some books — you know you love them.
http://www.powells.com

POEM-A-DAY APRIL 2012

Poem-a-Day April 30: No time

End

There are
No clocks on the wall,
And no time,
No shadows that move
From dawn to dusk
Across the floor.

There is neither light
Nor dark
Outside the door.

There is no door!

————————————–

Hello Friends —

Well, that’s it! “End” by Langston Hughes (included in his Selected Poems (1959)) concludes this April’s poem-a-day series on this, the last day of National Poetry Month 2012. We’ve visited poems from 1000 and poems from 2012; ballad, haiku, abecedarius, concrete poetry, found poetry, quatrains, heroic couplets, and free verse; poems about family, love, death, war, money, transience, David Bowie, Dorothy Allison, Julius Caesar, birds, housework, and grilled cheese sandwiches. I hope that a poem or two spoke to you, and I thank you very much for indulging me in this celebration of works I love.

If you would ever like to re-visit a poem, you can find a list of the poem-a-days I’ve sent you this month (as well as past years) at meetmein811.blogspot.com. As always, you can also learn more about National Poetry Month at the website of the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org.

Thank you,
Ellen

Poem-a-Day April 29: I must’ve dreamed I was gravity

Hello Friends —
“I dreamed ________” or “and then I woke up” are about as cliché premises in poetry and fiction as you can get, like a bad pick-up line. And yet there’s something endearing about a certain kind of pick-up line so absurd it would only ever occur to a poet to even attempt to pull it off — and fail/succeed beautifully at it.
Enjoy.
Ellen

Dear Tiara

I dreamed I was a mannequin in the pawnshop window
of your conjectures.

I dreamed I was a chant in the mouth of a monk, saffron-robed
syllables in the religion of You.

I dreamed I was a lament to hear the deep sorrow places
of your lungs.

I dreamed I was your bad instincts.

I dreamed I was a hummingbird sipping from the tulip of your ear.

I dreamed I was your ex-boyfriend stored in the basement
with your old baggage.

I dreamed I was a jukebox where every song sang your name.

I dreamed I was in an elevator, rising in the air shaft
of your misgivings.

I dreamed I was a library fine, I’ve checked you out
too long so many times.

I dreamed you were a lake and I was a little fish leaping
through the thin reeds of your throaty humming.

I must’ve dreamed I was a nail, because I woke beside you still
hammered.

I dreamed I was a tooth to fill the absences of your old age.

I dreamed I was a Christmas cactus, blooming in the desert
of my stupidity.

I dreamed I was a saint’s hair shirt, sewn with the thread
of your saliva.

I dreamed I was an All Night Movie Theater, showing the
flickering black reel of my nights before I met you.

I must’ve dreamed I was gravity, I’ve fallen for you so damn hard.

By Sean Thomas Dougherty from Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line (2010)

Poem-a-Day April 28: Sweeping

Hello Friends —
Today’s heroic couplets are brought to you by Julia Alvarez. First published in Helicon Nine magazine (1985), this poem is also included in her collection Homecoming (1996).
Enjoy.
Ellen

How I Learned To Sweep

My mother never taught me sweeping.
One afternoon she found me watching
t.v. She eyed the dusty floor
boldly, and put a broom before
me, and said she’d like to be able
to eat her dinner off that table,
and nodded at my feet, then left.
I knew right off what she expected
and went at it. I stepped and swept;
the t.v. blared the news; I kept
my mind on what I had to do,
until in minutes, I was through.
Her floor was as immaculate
as a just-washed dinner plate.
I waited for her return
and turned to watch the President,
live from the White House, talk of war:
in the Far East our soldiers were
landing in their helicopters
into jungles their propellers
swept like weeds seen underwater
while perplexing shots were fired
from those beautiful green gardens
into which these dragonflies
filled with little men descended.
I got up and swept again
as they fell out of the sky.
I swept all the harder when
I watched a dozen of them die.
as if their dust fell through the screen
upon the floor I had just cleaned.
She came back and turned the dial;
the screen went dark. That’s beautiful,
she said, and ran her clean hand through
my hair, and on, over the window-
sill, coffee table, rocker, desk,
and held it up—I held my breath—
That’s beautiful, she said, impressed,
she hadn’t found a speck of death.

“How I Learned To Sweep” by Julia Alvarez was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 24, 2009.
Poet Julia Alvarez was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 10, 2010.