April 2009

Poem-a-Day, April 21: Today is weather.

Hum

The days are beautiful
The days are beautiful.

I know what days are.
The other is weather.

I know what weather is.
The days are beautiful.

Things are incidental.
Someone is weeping.

I weep for the incidental.
The days are beautiful.

Where is tomorrow?
Everyone will weep.

Tomorrow was yesterday.
The days are beautiful.

Tomorrow was yesterday.
Today is weather.

The sound of the weather
Is everyone weeping.

Everyone is incidental.
Everyone weeps.

The tears of today
Will put out tomorrow.

The rain is ashes.
The days are beautiful.

The rain falls down.
The sound is falling.

The sky is a cloud.
The days are beautiful.

The sky is dust.
The weather is yesterday.

The weather is yesterday.
The sound is weeping.

What is this dust?
The weather is nothing.

The days are beautiful.
The towers are yesterday.

The towers are incidental.
What are these ashes?

Here is the hate
That does not travel.

Here is the robe
That smells of the night

Here are the words
Retired to their books

Here are the stones
Loosed from their settings

Here is the bridge
Over the water

Here is the place
Where the sun came up

Here is a season
Dry in the fireplace.

Here are the ashes.
The days are beautiful.

— Ann Lauterbach, Hum (2005)

“Hum” by Ann Lauterbach was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 17, 2007.

Poem-a-Day, April 20: this midnight moment’s forest

The Thought-Fox

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

These fox prints were printed by Ted Hughes in his first collection Hawk in the Rain (1957).

April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating by emailing out my own selection of one poem per day for the duration of the month. To learn more about National Poetry Month, or to subscribe to a more official-like Poem-a-Day list, visit www.poets.org.

— Ellen

Poem-a-Day, April 19: Sonnet = dresser.

Nothing in That Drawer

Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.

— Ron Padgett, Great Balls of Fire (1990)

Poem-a-Day, April 18: Un-humm-m! . . . Yes!

Madam and the Phone Bill

You say I O.K.ed
LONG DISTANCE?
O.K.ed it when?
My goodness, Central
That was then!

I’m mad and disgusted
With that Negro now.
I don’t pay no REVERSED
CHARGES nohow.

You say, I will pay it —
Else you’ll take out my phone?
You better let
My phone alone.

I didn’t ask him
To telephone me.
Roscoe knows darn well
LONG DISTANCE
Ain’t free.

If I ever catch him,
Lawd, have pity!
Calling me up
From Kansas City.

Just to say he loves me!
I knowed that was so.
Why didn’t he tell me some’n
I don’t know?

For instance, what can
Them other girls do
That Alberta K. Johnson
Can’t do — and more, too?

What’s that, Central?
You say you don’t care
Nothing about my
Private affair?

Well, even less about your
PHONE BILL, does I care!

Un-humm-m! . . . Yes!
You say I gave my O.K.?
Well, that O.K. you may keep —

But I sure ain’t gonna pay!

Hello Friends,

Today’s public service announcement on accidential overages and crappy ex-boyfriends comes from Madam Alberta K. Johnson to you courtesy of Langston Hughes in his 1949 collection One-Way Ticket. This poem is also included in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (1995).

O.K., Bye!
Ellen

“Madam and the Phone Bill” by Langston Hughes was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 29, 2007.
Poet Langston Hughes was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 10, 2011.

Poema-del-Dia, 17 de Abril: Corazon malherido

La Guitarra

Empieza el llanto
de la guitarra.
Se rompen las copas
de la madrugada.
Empieza el llanto
de la guitarra.
Es inútil
callarla.
Es imposible
callarla.
Llora monótona
como llora el agua,
como llora el viento
sobre la nevada.
Es imposible
callarla.
Llora por cosas
lejanas.
Arena del Sur caliente
que pide camelias blancas.
Llora flecha sin blanco,
la tarde sin mañana,
y el primer pájaro muerto
sobre la rama.
¡Oh guitarra!
Corazón malherido
por cinco espadas.

The Guitar

The weeping of the guitar
begins.
The goblets of the dawn
are smashed.
The weeping of the guitar
begins.
It is useless
to silence it.
It is impossible
to silence it.
It weeps monotonously
As water weeps,
As wind weeps
over snowfields.
It is impossible
to silence it.
It weeps for things
far away.
Sand of the hot South
that begs for white camellias.
It weeps, arrow without a target,
Evening without a morning,
And the first bird dead
On the branch.
Oh, guitar!
A heart stabbed to death
by five swords.

Hello Friends,

This English version of Federico García Lorca‘s “La Guitarra,” from his collection El poema del cante jondo (1921), combines pieces of translations by Cola Franzen, Curt Hopkins, and Harper’s Magazine (July 2008). This poem can also be found in the 2007 bilingual edition of Lorca’s Selected Poems.

“La Guitarra” begs to be set to flamenco guitar, and several musicians over the years have answered that cry — here’s one interpretation by Cuban singer-songwriter Vicente Feliu, performing in Buenos Aires in September 2007.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Poem-a-Day, April 16: Some rift between

MYTH

I was asleep while you were dying.
It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow
I make between my slumber and my waking,

the Erebus I keep you in, still trying
not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow,
but in dreams you live. So I try taking

you back into morning. Sleep-heavy, turning,
my eyes open, I find you do not follow.
Again and again, this constant forsaking.

Again and again, this constant forsaking:
my eyes open, I find you do not follow.
You back into morning, sleep-heavy, turning.

But in dreams you live. So I try taking,
not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow.
The Erebus I keep you in — still, trying —

I make between my slumber and my waking.
It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow.
I was asleep while you were dying.

Hello Friends,

Much like Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle “One Art,” Natasha Trethewey’s “Myth” conveys the impossible enormity of loss through the tightness of the form employed to contain it — as strict or stricter than any villanelle or pantoum. The structure of “Myth” evokes ancient myths of reflection — Narcissus, Echo — and also gestures toward the perfect symmetry and circularity of 11th-14th century courtly love epics (wherein moral outcomes are determined by simple formulas, codes… the good guy always wins, and nobody dies in his sleep).

I had a hard time choosing which poem from Natasha Trethewey‘s 2006 collection Native Guard to send to you; if you like this one, you won’t be disappointed by checking out the whole book.

To learn more about National Poetry Month, or to subscribe to a more official-like Poem-a-Day list, visit www.poets.org.

Best,
Ellen

Poet Natasha Trethewey was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 18, 2010.

Poem-a-Day, April 15: in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word

The Unknown Citizen

(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

Hello Friends,

Congrats to those of you who got your taxes finished on time this year — I don’t know about you, but I’d take Auden over an Audit any day.

“The Unknown Citizen” comes from W.H. Auden‘s 1940 collection Another Time, and is also included in his Collected Poems (2007). For more on the poem as Marble Monument, see William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

To learn more about National Poetry Month, or to subscribe to a more official-like Poem-a-Day list, visit www.poets.org.

Best,
Ellen

“The Unknown Citizen” by W.H. Auden was featured again for Poem-a-Day April 1, 2010.

Poem-a-Day, April 14: Oddly like grace

What the Angels Left

At first, the scissors seemed perfectly harmless.
They lay on the kitchen table in the blue light.

Then I began to notice them all over the house,
at night in the pantry, or filling up bowls in the cellar

where there should have been apples. They appeared under rugs,
lumpy places where one would usually settle before the fire,

or suddenly shining in the sink at the bottom of soupy water.
Once, I found a pair in the garden, stuck in turned dirt

among the new bulbs, and one night, under my pillow,
I felt something like a cool long tooth and pulled them out

to lie next to me in the dark. Soon after that I began
to collect them, filling boxes, old shopping bags,

every suitcase I owned. I grew slightly uncomfortable
when company came. What if someone noticed them

when looking for forks or replacing dried dishes? I longed
to throw them out, but how could I get rid of something

that felt oddly like grace? It occurred to me finally
that I was meant to use them, and I resisted a growing compulsion

to cut my hair, although, in moments of great distraction,
I thought it was my eyes they wanted, or my soft belly

—exhausted, in winter, I laid them out on the lawn.
The snow fell quite as usual, without any apparent hesitation

or discomfort. In spring, as I expected, they were gone.
In their place, a slight metallic smell, and the dear muddy earth.

Hello Friends,

When compulsion pulls farther and farther away from perfectly harmless, I like to return to what the angels left on page 5 of Marie Howe‘s 1987 collection The Good Thief.

I am celebrating National Poetry Month by emailing out my own selection of one poem per day through April 30. To learn more about National Poetry Month, or to subscribe to a more official-like Poem-a-Day list, visit www.poets.org.

Enjoy.
Ellen

“What The Angels Left” by Marie Howe was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 28, 2007.

the sweet small clumsy feet of April [13, Poem-a-Day]

if i have made,my lady,intricate
imperfect various things chiefly which wrong
your eyes(frailer than most deep dreams are frail)
songs less firm than your body’s whitest song
upon my mind—if i have failed to snare
the glance too shy—if through my singing slips
the very skilful strangeness of your smile
the keen primeval silence of your hair

—let the world say, “his most wise music stole
nothing from death”—
you only will create
(who are so perfectly alive)my shame:
lady through whose profound and fragile lips
the sweet small clumsy feet of April came

into the ragged meadow of my soul

—E.E. Cummings, Is 5 (1926)

Today’s poem is for Cathy. Happy anniversary, my love.
— Ellen

“if i have made,my lady,intricate” by E.E. Cummings was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 12, 2007 and Poem-a-Day April 13, 2011.
Poems by E.E. Cummings were also featured for Poem-a-Day April 13, 2008 and Poem-a-Day April 20, 2010.

Poem-a-Day, April 12: Berkeley Street Cannibals

BALLAD

Tell me the evening,
tell me the day,
and tell the night
to stay away.

Tell me a story,
tell me a game,
tell me everything
except my name.

Tell me a picture,
tell me a song,
tell me what
went wrong.

Hello Friends,

Today’s balladeer is Julia Vinograd, from Berkeley Street Cannibals: Selected Poems, 1969-1976.

The ballad form pre-dates the written word and is firmly rooted in the oral traditions of storytelling and song. Along with being one of the most ancient, the ballad is also one of the most universal poetic forms: it can be found across almost every language, every country, every culture, and every century — right on through twentieth century Berkeley, California.

April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating by emailing out my own selection of one poem per day for the duration of the month. If you wish to be unsubscribed from this Poem-a-Day email list at any time, please reply to this email with a friendly unsubscribe request (preferably in heroic couplet form). You may also request to add a consenting friend to the list, or even nominate a poem.

To learn more about National Poetry Month, or to subscribe to a more official-like Poem-a-Day list, visit www.poets.org.

Enjoy.
Ellen

“Ballad” by Julia Vinograd was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 25, 2011.
Poet Julia Vinograd were also featured for Poem-a-Day April 20, 2007.