Category: April 2019

POEM-A-DAY APRIL 2019

Thank you so much for joining me this month! We packed a lot into 30 days — including couplets, tercets, quatrains, haiku, sonnets, ghazal, spoken word, and trochaic dimeter; poems from the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, and 2000s; poems from each of the past five decades; poems by Black poets, Latinx poets, Asian American poets, Arab American poets, Native American Poets, Mixed Race poets, and white poets; poems by people of different religions and economic backgrounds; poems by queer poets, straight poets, non-binary poets, men, women, and one six-year-old — just to name a few!

The recap below includes links to each post, a bio for each poet, and (where applicable) the book each poem can be found in.

Poem-A-Day April 30: serving the messy deep into the dead eggplant evening

Hello Friends,

It’s the end of poetry month! I usually send you some kind of “End” or “Never Never End” or “I wished for another poem” type of poem on April 30, and today is no different: “So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye” by sam sax (excerpt below) appeared in the December 2018 issue of Poetry magazine.

Thank you so much for joining me this month! We packed a lot into 30 days — including couplets, tercets, quatrains, haiku, sonnets, ghazal, spoken word, and trochaic dimeter; poems from the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, and 2000s; poems from each of the past five decades; poems by Black poets, Latinx poets, Asian American poets, Arab American poets, Native American poets, mixed race poets, and white poets; poems by queer poets, straight poets, non-binary poets, men, women, and one six-year-old — just to name a few! Anecdotally, I would say the most loved poem-a-day this year was Poem-A-Day April 21: “Theories About the Universe” by Blythe Baird. And the least loved poem-a-day was “Heavy.” No one liked “Heavy.” Maybe too heavy.

I hope you encountered a poem or two you enjoyed, or learned something new about poetry.

Later this week I will post a re-cap of the month on meetmein811.org, including links to more information about each poet and links to a book each poem appears in (where applicable) if you’re interested in reading more.

Y’all are the best! Thank you again for listening.

In 811,
Ellen

So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye

goodbye city. goodbye stoop. goodbye rush hour traffic plume.

goodbye feminist qpoc weed delivery group. goodbye cheap noodle

spot on the corner. goodbye drag bar next door serving the messy

deep into the dead eggplant evening. goodbye drunks screaming

about literally nothing below my window. goodbye window & all

it’s seen & forgiven. goodbye urine stains talking shit between

parked cars. goodbye stars erased from the polluted heavens. goodbye

getting my steps in. goodbye highway streaked red & white with

shipments of grapefruit trucked in by the refrigerated crateful.

goodbye angels dressed in thrifted robes. goodbye locusts—

                              i’ll see you in a decade or so.

i’m beguiled by & guided by goodbyes: meaning go ye with god :

meaning ghost-flushed & godless : meaning guided by some guy away.

who cares who? some new charon who smiles big as a river. who

rivers big as i ferry with him toward death. the city you’re in now

will never be the city you live in again. the ferryman with his good

bile smiles good with his good will toward men. with his good

guiding arm. no need for goodbyes when i got this phone where

i can visit both my living and my dead.

■


This is an excerpt. You can read the full poem here.

Poem-A-Day April 29: Heavy

Heavy

The narrow clearing down to the river
I walk alone, out of breath

my body catching on each branch.
Small children maneuver around me.

Often, I want to return to my old body
a body I also hated, but hate less

given knowledge.
Sometimes my friends—my friends

who are always beautiful & heartbroken
look at me like they know

I will die before them.
I think the life I want

is the life I have, but how can I be sure?
There are days when I give up on my body

but not the world. I am alive.
I know this. Alive now

to see the world, to see the river
rupture everything with its light.

■



Hieu Minh Nguyen is a queer Vietnamese American poet and performer based in Minneapolis. Nguyen was also featured for Poem-A-Day April 18, 2018: “Ode to the Pubic Hair Stuck in My Throat.”

Poem-A-Day April 28: I love and I love!

Hello Friends,

There are a variety of poetry and prose pieces devoted to imagining what animals think and say. Something I want you to notice about today’s poem from Samuel Taylor Coleridge is that “my Love” has no gender. Coleridge could as easily be writing about a male and female dove or this trio of eagles:

A rare trio of bald eagles -- two dads, one mom -- are raising eaglets together in one nest

Eagles are not one of the birds poets have traditionally associated with love (perhaps due to their serious faces?), but they are a species that “mate for life” — behavior humans associate with love — returning to the same nest to produce and raise young with the same co-parent(s) year after year.

Not all the birds named in this poem mate for life, so whether he meant to or not, I like to think Coleridge is celebrating a variety of loves here, and not just long-term monogamous love.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Answer to a Child’s Question

Do you ask what the birds say? The Sparrow, the Dove,
The Linnet and Thrush say, “I love and I love!”
In the winter they’re silent—the wind is so strong;
What it says, I don’t know, but it sings a loud song.
But green leaves, and blossoms, and sunny warm weather,
And singing, and loving—all come back together.
But the Lark is so brimful of gladness and love,
The green fields below him, the blue sky above,
That he sings, and he sings; and for ever sings he—
“I love my Love, and my Love loves me!”

■

Poem-A-Day April 27: It is evening in the antiworld

Hello Friends,

Poetry might be most stereotypically associated with topics like Romance or Nature, but poems can also be found in genres like Comedy, Horror, or — in this case — Science Fiction.

A palindrome, as you may recall, is a word or phrase that is spelled the same both forwards and backwards — such as “kayak” or “Was it a car or a cat I saw?” Martin Gardner, the writer cited in the epigraph of today’s poem, also coined the term Semordnilap (palindromes spelled backward) to refer to a word that spells a different word in reverse — as in, stressed is the semordnilap of desserts.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Palindrome

There is less difficulty—indeed, no logical difficulty at all—in imagining two portions of the universe, say two galaxies, in which time goes one way in one galaxy and the opposite way in the other . . . Intelligent beings in each galaxy would regard their own time as “forward” and the time in the other galaxy as “backward.”
—Martin Gardner, in Scientific American


Somewhere now she takes off the dress I am
putting on. It is evening in the antiworld
where she lives. She is forty-five years away
from her death, the hole which spit her out
into pain, impossible at first, later easing,
going, gone. She has unlearned much by now.
Her skin is firming, her memory sharpens,
her hair has grown glossy. She sees without glasses,
she falls in love easily. Her husband has lost his
shuffle, they laugh together. Their money shrinks,
but their ardor increases. Soon her second child
will be young enough to fight its way into her
body and change its life to monkey to frog to
tadpole to cluster of cells to tiny island to
nothing. She is making a list:
          Things I will need in the past
               lipstick
               shampoo
               transistor radio
               Sergeant Pepper
               acne cream
               five-year diary with a lock
She is eager, having heard about adolescent love
and the freedom of children. She wants to read
Crime and Punishment and ride on a roller coaster
without getting sick. I think of her as she will
be at fifteen, awkward, too serious. In the
mirror I see she uses her left hand to write,
her other to open a jar. By now our lives should
have crossed. Somewhere sometime we must have
passed one another like going and coming trains,
with both of us looking the other way.

■



“Palindrome” can be found in Alive Together: New and Selected Poems (1996) by Lisa Mueller.

Poem-A-Day April 26: It is I you have been looking for

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

■



Hello Friends,

“Kindness” can be found in Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (1995) by Naomi Shihab Nye — a poet who has been featured several times before, including:

Poem-A-Day April 8, 2017:
“Famous” by Naomi Shihab Nye

Poem-A-Day April 29, 2016:
“Burning the Old Year” by Naomi Shihab Nye

Poem-A-Day April 17, 2015:
“Making a Fist” by Naomi Shihab Nye

Poem-A-Day April 2, 2014:
“Trying to Name What Doesn’t Change” by Naomi Shihab Nye

I won’t say this about every single poem I’ve ever featured, but these four in particular are each very powerful and absolutely worth your time to give a read.

For another take on “you must lose things,” see also Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” — which I maybe didn’t explain that well in this post from 2008 (there’s so much more that could be said about this poem!), but here it is anyway.

Enjoy.
— Ellen

Poem-A-Day April 25: snakeskin

Autobiography of Eve

Wearing nothing but snakeskin
boots, I blazed a footpath, the first
radical road out of that old kingdom
toward a new unknown.
When I came to those great flaming gates
of burning gold,
I stood alone in terror at the threshold
between Paradise and Earth.
There I heard a mysterious echo:
my own voice
singing to me from across the forbidden
side. I shook awake—
at once alive in a blaze of green fire.

Let it be known: I did not fall from grace.

I leapt
to freedom.

■



Hello Friends,

Why has no one given Eve snakeskin boots before?! Thank goodness Ansel Elkins showed up to fix that for us.

I hope you’re enjoying poetry month!

— Ellen

Poem-A-Day April 24: That yellow line

Hello Friends —

You can listen to today’s poem-a-day instead of reading it: Andrea Gibson’s “Your Life” is available here.

Watch Andrea Gibson's Your Life on YouTube
Aside from being spoken word, “Your Life” harkens to another literary tradition: the letter to one’s younger self. This piece, particularly the ending lines, are also arguably a nod to Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day.”

Enjoy.
Ellen

Poem-A-Day April 23: Since it’s his birthday…

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

■



Hello Friends —

Happy Bard Day! April 23 is celebrated as the birthday of William Shakespeare. The Bard was supposedly born on this day in 1564 and also supposedly died on the exact same day 52 years later, April 23, 1616. The monologue above is from Act V, scene 5 of Macbeth, when Macbeth learns of Lady Macbeth’s death.

Ever wonder how Shakespeare was able to stay in perfect iambic pentameter so much of the time? Well, it certainly didn’t hurt that he made up over 1,700 of the words he used — often taking known words and twisting them into new parts of speech; noun into verb, verb into adjective, etc. — so that they fit into his syllabic structure. In addition to individual words, Shakespeare also coined many phrases we still use today.

Other literary works that derive their titles from just this one Shakespeare passage include “Out, Out —” by Robert Frost and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner.

Whether it’s today’s selection or “Jabberwocky” (those of you who have been on this list a few years!) or another piece that speaks to you, I strongly encourage you to pick a poem to read out loud to someone else, at least once a year, and consider learning it by heart. When you’ve memorized a poem, no one can ever take it away from you. Even locked in a dark cell. Or stranded on a deserted island. Or in the last syllable of recorded time.

Memorization is why we invented rhyme and meter and poetry itself in the first place! So an orator could travel from place to place and recite a piece, or one generation could pass on a story to the text. The first poems were never written down; they were all oral and committed to memory, aided by patterns in rhythm and sound we now call poetry. That memorization skill is a bit of a lost art — but I still think one of the most poetic things you can do is to memorize a poem.

Shakespeare indicates in many places he understands the power of words to outlive their authors. While his character Macbeth says in this passage “and then is heard no more,” it’s possible or even likely Shakespeare dreamed and aspired toward a world in which these very words were heard over and over again, even after his own death. You could argue Shakespeare believed the opposite of what this, one of his most famous passages, actually says. This passage may be more about conveying thoughts and feelings that many people have experienced, about how existence feels sometimes — rather than making fundamental claims about the nature of existence. Did Shakespeare in his wildest dreams ever imagine his words would last 450 years, or that they would be performed every single day, not only in England but around the world? Probably not. But here we are.

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

Poem-A-Earth-Day April 22: a favorite child of the universe

the earth is a living thing

is a black shambling bear
ruffling its wild back and tossing
mountains into the sea

is a black hawk circling
the burying ground circling the bones
picked clean and discarded

is a fish black blind in the belly of water
is a diamond blind in the black belly of coal

is a black and living thing
is a favorite child
of the universe
feel her rolling her hand
in its kinky hair
feel her brushing it clean

■

“the earth is a living thing” can be found in The Book of Light (1993) by Lucille Clifton.