Category: writing

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Where the poem comes from: Robert VanderMolen

A few months ago Poetry Daily did me the favor of introducing me to the work of Robert VanderMolen. In case you have not seen his work, I am passing this gift along to you.

Bob lives and works in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He published his first collection when he was still an undergraduate at Michigan State University. His most recent collection, “Water,” published by Michigan State University Press, is reviewed in the current issue of Poetry.

The poem here, “A Mist,” appeared last winter in the Laurel Review.

A Mist

But my fever made me long
For New Jersey. I told my husband
I liked it here, but I didn’t want to die
In Michigan. Does that seem so odd?
You lie in bed wishing one of the dominoes
Had fallen in a different direction. You look at your body—
When you need affection life seems so meager

Thank you for meeting me here.
I know I’m not like I once was, but who is.
I favor men with some meat on them.
It’s pleasant to be warm like this.
I’m not accustomed to being carefree

The woods so dark in winter behind the house

There are times I feel like I’m looking in,
My face against the glass of the slider
Like a woodchuck’s, my skin all covered in bristly hair—
I’d prefer alternatives
A smallish career in the arts, let’s say. A plan of some sort.
Even the day the oven caught fire
Everyone seemed to have somewhere else to go…

I kept hacking away at this poem for (perhaps) 3 or 4 years–at one time it was two pages in length. Cutting out the fat, so to speak. Maybe 12 years ago I was having dinner at the house of the president of Grand Valley University, a woman at my table, an editor, was saying she loved Michigan but didn’t want to die here. Came from Brooklyn, NY. as a young woman, as I recall. Which was the original germ of the piece–on a piece of paper I found years later in my desk. Then some other snippets–someone telling me about looking in a window rather than out, unhappy. So the poem evolved into a small narrative–though it took a while

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Confessions of a poetry contest judge

I’ve just picked the winner of a poetry book contest. My first time as a judge. And I am feeling good about my choices (yes, choices–there were also honorable mentions) but sad, to paraphrase Robert Frost, that I could not choose more and be one contest judge.

I felt honored to be asked to make this selection. And I felt the loss for the non-winners (let’s not call them losers). True, there were a few books that went pretty quickly into the “not” pile. But the largest stack was “maybe” and here lay the hopes and dreams I felt most keenly. It was hard work and I had more than a few nights of dreams prompted by anxiety about the task and the responsibility.

There’s the worry about objectivity, first of all. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s primarily in the eye of the beholder and the conscience of the judge. I knew many of the authors of these books, and I’m sure that’s often the case in contests. Since these entries were not anonymous, you could easily make a case for some kind of favoritism. But you’d be wrong. I tried scrupulously to make sure I was not giving unfair advantage to poets I knew. Or unfair disadvantage either, for that matter.

And of course, it’s all apples and oranges. The books were all over the place in terms of theme, style, and intent. But I tried to figure out how well each book succeeded in being itself. I wasn’t trying to equate, say a spiritual descendant of “The Bell Jar” with one more in the X. J. Kennedy mode. I was just trying to see which seemed to be most successfully the book it was meant to be.

What I came away with after I was finished was a sense of huge affection and respect for the poets who entered the contest. All poets are putting so much at risk when they put themselves on the page. I once heard a singer and songwriter say, “All my songs are autobiographical; they’re just not about me.” With a poet, it’s just the other way around. Whether or not they’re autobiographical, the writer always shows through.

One of riskiest maneuvers of all is entering a poetry contest because you have to declare to yourself and the person who will read your work that you care very much about this. And that you are trusting the reader to treat your work with respect. You do that with any reader, but with a contest judge the stakes are higher.

So here, finally, is my confession to you authors of the stack of books now just off to the side of my desk. My feelings for you are tender and grateful, respectful of your efforts, admiring of your resolve. You are the ones who follow your dreams, who honor your words, who notice the world and offer it for us to share. Thank you.

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Where the poem comes from: Esther Schor

I first met Esther Schor when she was in Boston to talk about her biography of Emma Lazarus. The book was fascinating and I enjoyed meeting Esther and being introduced, as well, to her poetry collection, “The Hills of Holland.”

Here is a poem of hers that was published in Southwest Review. It is a poignant tribute to a friend. Interestingly, for me, the poem also has faint echoes of Emma Lazarus’s own most famous poem, “The New Colossus,” which is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.

La Rambla

In memory of SB

Astride a globe atop a column
precisely where he disembarked
a precious haul of six Caribs

whose dark backs the sisters scrubbed
with boar bristles, whose pale souls
the bishop biscuited and claimed

for Christ, Columbus hails
the funicular, a spider’s belly
dangled over stevedores

glutting a ship’s dark hold
with cava. Whose idea, to string
this filament from Barceloneta

to Montjuic, to tip up to the sky
empty sarcophagi
incised with alephs and acanthus leaves,

reborn as rustic troughs?
Three hundred sixty-four days a year,
when we’re not here, parakeets

in cages held aloft by fishing line
taunt ocellated geckos,
vitreous, appalled,

behind each stacked terrarium
a muraled predator.
You’ve found another way

to be afar, after making the best
of a bad situation and getting on
in years, having kept all options

open, like the errant river
leaving a mudcaked rut of a bed
to Moors who called it ramla,

meaning bed of a seasonal river,
and never returned, bent
on a life undersea, shimmering,

inconsequent. On Catalunya’s flags,
Wilfred the Hairy’s four bloody fingers
tell his sons to avenge him, not telling them

how. You’ve found another way
to stay afloat, like a crescent of lime
in icy claret, laid with your girl

whose death no one thought to avenge,
a way not to hear the cloister geese
hymn the virgin martyr Santa Eulalia,

the white doves hatched from her throat
pecking the ears of men
who tore her flesh with iron hooks,

torched her cornsilk hair, a way to prove
nothing at all, so like these human statues
poised for coins–gilt and kohl-rimmed

Cleopatra, cycling fly, Che in olive drab,
his thrust fist unfatigued – still lives so like
your own, lived hand to mouth,

one flash at a time. Let me
carry you off, in pixels, in a tiny silver box.

I was traveling in Barcelona when I received the sad news that my friend, the poet Saul Bennett, had just died; he had had a heart attack while taking a glass of water from the tap. I had two immediate thoughts. First, leave it to Saul to die standing up. Second, I knew that Saul would be buried with his beloved daughter, Sara, who died just as suddenly–but of an aneurysm and in her early twenties. Until his mid-sixties, Saul had been a Madison Avenue advertising executive; witty, charismatic and generous, he had spent decades living in Great Neck and commuting to New York. Sara’s death changed all that. He abruptly retired, moved with his wife, Joan, to Woodstock, N.Y., and started to write poems. His first book,  ”New Fields and Other Stones,” both chronicled his grief and brought him back to life; through it, he was reborn as a poet. As I wandered down La Rambla, the pedestrian thoroughfare full of living statues and petshops, Saul wandered with me, along with his great loss–Sara–and his great choice–poetry. In the Cathedral, I was overwhelmed by a painting of the violent death of the virgin martyr Santa Eulalia; unlike the death of Wilfrid the Hairy, hers was, like Sara’s, unavenged, perhaps unavengeable. Or perhaps Saul knew better; as understated and muted as his grieving poems are, they take a swipe at death and leave a mark. The poem is an elegy for both Saul and Sara, and an homage to his Saul’s new life in art, “lived hand to mouth/one flash at a time.”

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Where the poem comes from: Lloyd Schwartz

I met Lloyd Schwartz eight years ago. It was two nights after the twin towers fell and we were two of four poets reading at Borders at Downtown Crossing. The reading had been planned long in advance. As it turned out, the room was filled with people in search of the solace poetry might offer and the comfort of being together.

Since then I ‘m always delighted to have a chance to hear him, and the poem he’s given me to share with you here, Proverbs from Purgatory,” is a favorite. It is from his book “Cairo Traffic.” Lloyd is the editor of the Library of America volume of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry and is the Pulitzer-Prize-winning classical music editor for “The Phoenix.” and a reviewer for NPR’s Fresh Air.

Just seeing the words on the page lets me hear Lloyd’s quiet, measured reading that brings out the gentle humor and poignancy of the work. Here is what he says about the poem:

“I think one of my most peculiar poems is one in my last book called “Proverbs from Purgatory.” It’s a series of twisted old maxims and hints at but never reveals a narrative. It has several sources. My late friend Michael McDowell (who wrote the screenplays for Beetlejuice and Tales from the Darkside: The Movie) would return to Boston with tales from the dark side of Hollywood, often quoting various Hollywood figures. ‘I know this town like the back of my head’ and ‘I’ll have him eating out of my lap’ were two amazing lines I wanted to do something with.

“They also reminded me of a game I used to play in high school, where we’d mix up a couple of proverbs to see how funny we could make them. Perhaps the greatest version of this impulse is Blake’s ‘Proverbs from Hell,’ from ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ (“’he cistern contains, the fountain overflows,’ ‘If a fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise’; ‘Enough!—or too much’; and of course, ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’). I was hoping that through this ‘processing’ some new wisdom might emerge—I once introduced the poem as ‘a pre-Postmodern exploration of the instability of language.’ Then along came W, our un-elected leader, to prove that the inability to make logical sense, however hilarious, was either utterly useless or truly dangerous.

“Around the time I started to work on the proverbs, some friends were involved in an incident that threatened to open large rifts in that particular social fabric. Without ever becoming explicit references, many of the perverted proverbs about friendship in the poem surely emerged from that situation. (My poem ‘A True Poem,’ which begins, ‘I’m working on a poem that’s so true, I can’t show it to anyone,’ was another poem stemming from that experience.) At the same time, a couple of friends (Gail Mazur, Robert Polito) also suggested several additions to the poem that I found irresistible.

“I think it’s both my funniest poem—I love to read it aloud because it gets laughs—and probably also my darkest. And if both aspects of it are true, then maybe it’s a success. It was first published in ‘The Paris Review’ in 1995, and in a 1996 interview in the magazine ‘Civilization,’ George Plimpton, the ‘Paris Review’ editor, talking about humor in literature, mentioned that it was one of his favorite poems in his latest issue. It’s one of the ‘reviews’ of my work I value most.”

PROVERBS FROM PURGATORY

It was déjà vu all over again.

I know this town like the back of my head.

People who live in glass houses are worth two in the bush.

One hand scratches the other.

A friend in need is worth two in the bush.

A bird in the hand makes waste.

Life isn’t all it’s crapped up to be.

It’s like finding a needle in the eye of the beholder.

It’s like killing one bird with two stones.

My motto in life has always been: Get It Over With.

Two heads are better than none.

A rolling stone deserves another.

All things wait for those who come.

A friend in need deserves another.

I’d trust him as long as I could throw him.

He smokes like a fish.

He’s just a chip off the old tooth.

I’ll have him eating out of my lap.

A friend in need opens a can of worms.

Too many cooks spoil the child.

An ill wind keeps the doctor away.

The wolf at the door keeps the doctor away.

People who live in glass houses keep the doctor away.

A friend in need shouldn’t throw stones.

A friend in need washes the other.

A friend in need keeps the doctor away.

A stitch in time is only skin deep.

A verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.

A cat may look like a king.

Know which side of the bed your butter is on.

Nothing is cut and dried in stone.

You can eat more flies with honey than with vinegar.

Don’t let the cat out of the barn.

Let’s burn that bridge when we get to it.

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

Don’t cross your chickens before they hatch.

DO NOT READ THIS SIGN.

Throw discretion to the wolves.

After the twig is bent, the barn door is locked.

After the barn door is locked, you can come in out of the rain.

A friend in need locks the barn door.

There’s no fool like a friend in need.

We’ve passed a lot of water since then.

At least we got home in two pieces.

All’s well that ends.

It ain’t over till it’s over.

There’s always one step further down you can go.

It’s a milestone hanging around my neck.

Include me out.

It was déjà vu all over again.

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Where the poem comes from: Miriam Levine

For the past few days I’ve been reading “The Dark Opens,” by Miriam Levine. Despite the title, or maybe in perfect accord with it, this is a luminous book filled with wise and tender observations of the world in finely-crafted poems. Oddly, as I prepare this blog post, I see that one of the book’s blurbs was written by Denise Duhamel, whose line provided a take-off point for the poem by Dustin Brookshire which I featured in the last “Where the poem comes from.”

Miriam lives not far from me in Boston area and we finally met face to face just recently after e-mailing back and forth for months. She is the author of three previous poetry collections, a novel, a memoir, and a non-fiction book. And I always enjoy reading her blog, which often includes her photographs.

Here is Miriam’s poem, “Daughter,” from “The Dark Opens,” and her discussion of how it came to be written:

Daughter

You beg for a tattoo like your friend’s.
A band of stars at your ankle.
There’s no way to escape regret.
Indelible dye makes it worse.

Growth spurts knock you out.
The cold makes you drowsy.
That’s nothing new.

Don’t sleep too long.
Dark night never gets tired of holding you.

Get up and remember the song.

You can sing as you dart and kick:
I have to be careful when I dance.
My dye-job is fading.
And white hair grows at the roots.

What do you want me to do? Lie here with you?

Or break every mirror and never go out?
I’ll wait for the sun to light us both.

You’re on your feet. We’re facing the same way,
the sun does what it’s supposed to do,
the mirror angled to the window,
your face just behind mine.

What was the inspiration for my poem, “Daughter”? At first it might seem the poem was sparked by an actual experience: mother, Miriam Levine, finds her daughter sleeping too much, urges her to get up. In fact, I have no daughter. The event described in the poem did not happen. What, then, inspired the poem? It was my reading Anne Carson’s translation of a newly discovered poem of Sappho’s in which the Greek poet, who was born c. 610 BCE, addresses the young. Here are the first three stanzas of the poem:

You, children, be zealous for the beautiful gifts
of the violetlapped Muses
and for the clear songloving lyre.

But my skin once soft is now
taken by old age,
my hair turns white from black.

And my heart is weight down
and my knees do not lift
that once were light to dance as fawns.

(New York Review of Books, Oct. 20, 2005)

I hadn’t written about aging, but Sappho’s poem helped me get at the subject and to connect both with my long past young slothful self and to the imagined contemporary girl longing for a tattoo. I try to bring age and youth together. “Daughter” is about coming to life, to the dance, to poetry and song, about choosing love and connection and escaping regret. I must have been aware of all of these things, just as I was aware of the tattoos I saw inked into tender young skin, but it took Sappho’s poem to wake me. Does any of this add to the appreciation of “Daughter”? Probably not, but it may help to know that poets find “the violetlapped muses” in the work of other poets.

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Where the poem comes from: Dustin Brookshire

I first met Dustin Brookshire online when he contacted me a few months ago after hearing one of my poems read on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac. He invited me to add a brief essay to his blog feature, “Why I Write,” and I was delighted to be there among poets I greatly admire like Dorianne Laux and my friend and mentor Patricia Smith. Most recently the featured poet is Alan Shapiro, whose essay is fascinating.

In 2008 Dustin founded LIMP WRIST magazine and Quarrel, a blog focused on poetry revision. He has been featured at poetry readings in Atlanta and Savannah and his work has been published in numerous online magazines as well as in Atlanta’s DAVID magazine. Besides writing poetry and thinking up provocative poetry projects, Dustin serves on the Atlanta Queer Literary Festival Committee, and is a political activist who tries to keep elected officials on their toes.

As part of my series on poems’ starting places, Dustin talks about his poem, “Stuck,” which originally appeared in O&S:

“I am working on a project with Robert Walker, a poet and graduate student at Virginia Tech.  We share a love and a passion for the work of Denise Duhamel, and we send each other lines from Denise’s poems.  Whatever line is sent must become the first line of our own poem.
 
“’Stuck’ starts with a line from Denise Duhamel’s ‘Mille Et Un Sentiments’: “I feel like I may be repeating myself, that I’m totally stuck”  While I obsess on many things in my life, I find myself severely stuck on two topics: my parents’ use of the “f” word during my childhood and a sexual assault by an ex-boyfriend.  Both topics can be difficult to write about, whether it is because of reliving the incidents through words or simply for the fear of how my poetic voice sounds through my words.
 
“Ostensibly, it seems as if ‘Stuck’” comes from Denise’s line, but as Denise once said, “As poets, I think we all write from a deep wound.”  And, for me, that is exactly where “Stuck” comes from—a deep wound.

STUCK
 
I feel like I may be repeating myself, that I’m totally stuck
on the words of my mother and father, You’re Fat.
Father:  I’ve never seen a fat person who looked happy.
Mother:  You don’t want to be like your grandmother.
Don’t tell your father I said that.   I haven’t even told
my new therapist about my calorie counting parents.
We’re stuck on the rape. How I’m stuck with anger.
How I’m stuck on not crying about it.
I tell her I tear up when I think about it, sometimes.
She tells me tearing up isn’t crying, isn’t release.
Then I become stuck on changing the topic.
You see, I have a way with being stuck,
stuck between forgiving and forgetting.
 

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Where the poem comes from: Sandra Kohler

Here’s another one of my posts that answers my ongoing question,”How did that poem come to be written?” This poem, “Maybe Sibelius,” is by my friend Sandra Kohler.

Sandy, a former member of the English department at Bryn Mawr College, is the author of two books, “The Country of Women,” published by Calyx Press; and “The Ceremonies of Longing,” which was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press and won the 2002 Associated Writing Programs Award Series in Poetry. She has been a recent “featured” poet in Diner, Natural Bridge, and The Missouri Review, and has a poem in the new issue of The New Republic.

“Maybe Sibelius” was published in PMS: poem/ memoir/story #4, 2004.

   Maybe Sibelius

This morning there’s a bit of Sibelius lodged
in my brain, a motif, repetitive, longing.
When I put words to it, they’re the Beatles’
–”I’ve got to get you into my life.” Last night,
wild thunderstorms, lightning for hours after
the storm passed over. I dream you and I
are making love in a room next door to grief,
that bleak presence aphrodisiac. This after a day
on which you irritate me, I bore you. At cross-
purposes, we gesture concessions, fail to signal
anything more than a vague wave at some mirage
of compromise. I think you’re obsessed with
our son, you that I’m obsessed with the garden.
I know what I’m not talking about, I only guess
what you’re not. In the dream we are dancing
while making love, to improbable music, maybe
Sibelius. What is it I must get into my life?
Long lapses, rests in the music. My heart turns
over when I catch myself thinking if you died
I’d become a hermit. I already know what that
dream signals: on the other side of the wall from
bliss there is anguish. I can’t sleep nights though
I’m not obsessing about anything. The story is a
ronde: A loves B who yearns for C who’s mad
about A. A is the question, B the answer, C is
the demurrer. Yes, I’m obsessed with the garden.
I want to spend all day on my hands and knees,
smelling the soil. I want another life to listen to
opera, one to read Dante, one for Proust. One
in which to become a hermit. I’m jealous when
our son answers your emails, not mine. The rain
is a sudden burst, deluge. You are what I have
to get into my life. You are what I have. What
if, hurtling through these storms, we forget to
touch, to make the gesture that will heal us?

Sandy says, “This is one of the poems I’ve been writing recently (over the past 10 years or so) that I think of as “old married love poems.” One of the things I try to get at in them is the complexity and volatility of our emotional lives, the way we feel contradictory impulses and desires, experience rapid changes in the weather of a relationship. Love poems traditionally focus more narrowly on desire and on the ideal nature of the beloved; I want to tell a different kind of truth about love. And I also love being able to allude to my passion for Sibelius in a poem.”

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The words we choose to use

I’ve written frequently about the power of words. It’s something I feel strongly about. I’ve talked about how we teach little children to “use your words” to make themselves understood instead of fighting or biting or throwing tantrums. I’ve written about being vigilant not to let our words lose their meaning. The most mundane and silly example of that is when we ask for a “tall” coffee at Starbucks when what we really want is their smallest size. And, of course, more insidious recent examples include legislative naming rights like “Defense of Marriage Act” and “Patriot Act.”

I thought about words and their power again the other day when I read Ellen Goodman’s outstanding op-ed piece, The Myth of the Lone Shooter, about the murder of Dr. George Tiller. She makes the point that, again and again, the person supposedly acting alone to commit a appalling act like Scott Roeder’s has been aided and abetted by a universe of people shooting hateful words from the hip.

The pen, as we’ve all been taught, is mightier than the sword and the two together are an unbeatable combination, for good or ill. In the case of Roeder, the word, written and spoken, sharpened the sword, morphed its use into a righteous act, and whispered self-deception into his ear. The words came from Bill O’Reilly et al. ranting onscreen, from the Operation Rescue people shouting at women entering abortion clinics, from opportunistic public figures glomming onto an issue, and from private citizens who are kind to their dogs and buy Girl Scout cookies and generally think of themselves as good people. And from any one of us who plays fast and loose with the power of what we say.

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A few well-chosen words

How would you tell your life story in six words?

I recently saw a book called “Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.” Ironically, for a book dedicated to brevity, it weighs in at 225 packed pages. But it’s hard to put down.

Those bite-sized stories are like potato chips–you just keep wanting just one more. “Tried not loving you. Didn’t work.”…“Wheelchair, crutches, walker, cane, second grade.”…“Lucky in everything else but love.”…“Birthmother found me through mom’s obituary.”… “Awkward girl takes chances. Fun ensues.”… “42. Just received BA. Now what?”…“Striving for perfection. Will fall short.” How can you stop reading?

And how can you stop wondering, especially if you’re a writer, which six you would use as your defining letter to the world? Writing long is easy. But writing really short and really significant…what would you say?

But here the strange thing. The stories look fascinating in the book, but if you go to the book’s web site, you see that people often send in more than one entry. And as soon as you have three or four “six-word memoirs” from someone, it’s, well, a little boring. The first six words that tell your story are compelling but after that it’s simply the next six words. It sounds like, “oh, one more thing.” Reading them feels like a good lesson in self-editing. “Good wind. City Island. Sunday sailing.”…”Sunny. Good wind. Sailing is freedom.”…. Okay….

Anyhow, it’s that “boiling down to essence” quality that makes a good short story successful. I just finished Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest short story collection, “Unaccustomed Earth,” which, like all her work, I enjoyed tremendously. Aside from the deftly drawn and complex characters, I love the peek into the lives of Bengalis who have emigrated to the United States, and all the local details are fun. But the ending of the final story left me stunned and now, several days later, I’m just beginning to be able to pick up another book. Have you read it?

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Where the poem comes from: Susan Donnelly

A couple of weeks ago I started a series on how a poem comes to be written, just because it’s something I always enjoy knowing about. I started with a poem by Afaa M. Weaver. Here’s one by Susan Donnelly.

Susan is a respected and widely-published poet and teacher who I am fortunate to have as a friend and neighbor. Her poem here, “Time,” is from her most recent collection, “Transit.” Here is how she describes writing “Time.”

“This poem was one of the fortuitous ones which jumped out whole, surprising its author and taking its own expression as it went along.  I had been musing on how often, after large and horrific events or crimes, one heard of the need for closure, the necessity to move on.  This call seemed to come particularly from leaders or governments responsible for the crimes.  I decided they’d been doing this for a long time, perhaps as far back as Cain’s murder of Abel.  As soon as he spoke, Cain “kicked aside a turnip” (produce was the issue, after all) and I saw that things were taking an Irish turn, as evidenced in his parents’ diction.  Later, I continued this unexpected cast in choosing as one of my villains Cromwell, so murderous to the indigenous Irish people.

“I was happy to see by its end that the quirky poem had expressed just what I had wanted to say about tyrants’ hypocritical verbiage: “healing”, reconcile”, as well as our tendency to look away, move past or gloss over crimes that must be remembered, confronted and judged.”
 
 
                              TIME

“It’s time to move forward,” said Cain,
kicking aside a turnip.
“time to put the past
behind us.”  He frowned at his parents.
Where else would it be then? they wondered,  
who’d had only scraps of it
and a desolate future,
“Yes, time,” said Cain again

and walked away.  Attila, too, cried “now
let there be healing!” on a hill
above a smoking village.
He and his soldiers could still
smell roasted flesh,
pick out here and there
a lump twitching.  “Time,”
— he swung one blood-smeared arm wide

over the quick and dead —
“to come together as one people. . .”
“In short, reconcile!” snapped Cromwell,
who measured ambition
by the tree-dwelling, feckless Celts.
Himmler fanned his face:
“Ja, it is here too scorching.  Let us move on.”