Washington Post Poet's Choice

Saffron · Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 8:31 pm Post subject: Washington Post Poet's Choice

Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, September 14, 2008; BW12

I never stop wondering why my favorite poets of the previous century are Polish. When Nazi occupiers were replaced by equally brutal Stalinists, the cataclysm must have bled irony into the nation's poetry. Books by poets from the former Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, which also endured invasion, are sprinkled throughout my library, but only translations of Polish poetry make whole shelves sag.

Anna Kamienska is one lesser-known beauty from the generation that spawned Nobel laureates Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska. Skepticism pervades their work; Kamienska's sounds less sardonic, more desperate to make sense of random carnage. Her poem "The Return of Job" suggests how much worse survival can be than affliction.

Job didn't die

didn't throw himself under a train

didn't croak in a vacant lot

the chimney didn't spew him out

despair didn't finish him off

he arose from everything

from misery dirt

scabs loneliness

In the way people dust themselves off after tornadoes, Job kept on. But how ghastly his blessings must have seemed after his gargantuan losses.

. . . Job survived

washed his body of blood sweat pus

and lay down in his own house again

New friends were already gathering

a new wife was breathing new love into his mouth

new children were growing up with soft hair

for Job to touch with his hands

But this Job can endure his losses more easily than he can God's offer of a new life with abundance:

Wouldn't it be better for you Job

to rot in a lost paradise with the dead

than to wait now for their nightly visit

they come in dreams they envy you life

Wouldn't it be better happy Job

to remain dirt since you are dirt

The pustules washed off your hands and face

ate through your heart and liver

You will die Job

Wouldn't it be better for you

to die with the others

in the same pain and mourning

than to depart from this new happiness

You walk in the dark

wrapped in darkness

among new people

useless as a pang of conscience

You suffered through pain

now suffer through happiness

Excerpts from "The Return of Job" by Anna Kamienska are from "Astonishments: Selected Poems of Anna Kamienska." © 2007. Used by permission of Parclete Press.

Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently "Sinners Welcome."

DWill · Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 9:28 pm Post subject:

Thank you, thank you, for posting the column. I tried once before, but had trouble tranferring the formatting of the Wash. Post online version of the column. But you figured it out, no surprise. She presents a good little piece each week. Have you seen any of her stuff?
DW

Saffron · Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2008 12:08 pm Post subject:

DW, I had not previously read any of Mary Karr's poetry. I am at present investigating. Here is a link for anyone that would like to join me.

Mary Karr

Thomas Hood · Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2008 1:28 pm Post subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Karr

http://www.blueflowerarts.com/mkarr.html
-- contains "DISGRACELAND"

Saffron · Posted: Sun Sep 21, 2008 10:54 am Post subject: Sept. 21, 2008

Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, September 21, 2008; BW13

When prose cult figure David Foster Wallace committed suicide on Sept. 12, he succumbed to the depression that's murdered too many literary titans. The loss slammed into my solar plexus like a black medicine ball, knocking the wind out of me. Almost 20 years back when David crossed my path, I was battling my own black mood, and David tried -- patiently, assiduously -- to cheer me up. He softly thwacked tennis balls at me and edited my paltry attempts at an essay. Thanks to him, I'd find in my office mailbox rap mix tapes he'd annotated with his not-yet-famous footnotes.

Those days, I was still young enough to indulge my misery by rereading John Berryman's "He Resigns," penned shortly before he leapt into the Mississippi River: "Age, and the deaths, and the ghosts./Her having gone away/in spirit from me. Hosts/of regrets come & find me empty.//I don't feel this will change./I don't want any thing/or person, familiar or strange./I don't think I will sing // any more just now;/or ever. . . ."

How could David's manic genius have gone as dark as this? I'd assumed, from our scant communication during the past decade, that we'd both outgrown our melancholia. For days, I've trolled my poetry shelves for the right words to grieve with, the way an insomniac pharmacist -- desperate for sleep -- might pick through her tinctures. At first, I sought Heather McHugh's sweet variation on Rilke's goodbye poem, which is spoken by a dying man: "My friend, I must leave you./Do you want to see/the place on a map?/It's a black dot. // Inside myself, if things/all go as planned, it will/become a point of rose/in a green land."

Rilke's afterlife here becomes an eternity of green in which he can blossom like a rose, as no doubt David will in the minds of his devoted readers. But, ultimately, this childhood snapshot by Weldon Kees, a poet and presumed suicide, captures the innocent melody of my early friendship with David, while permitting -- sandwiched in the center stanza -- some rage against adding his death to the planet's roster of horror:

1926

The porchlight coming on again,

Early November, the dead leaves

Raked in piles, the wicker swing

Creaking. Across the lots

A phonograph is playing Ja-Da.

An orange moon. I see the lives

Of neighbors, mapped and marred

Like all the wars ahead, and R.

Insane, B., with his throat cut,

Fifteen years from now, in Omaha.

I did not know them then.

My airedale scratches at the door

And I am back from seeing Milton Sills

And Doris Kenyon. Twelve years old.

The porchlight coming on again.

Dear David Foster Wallace, thanks for the light.

("He Resigns" is from "Delusions, Etc." Copyright 1972 by John Berryman. "Four Poems after Rilke" is from " Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968-1993." Copyright 1994 by Heather McHugh. Reprinted with permission of Heather McHugh. "1926" is reprinted from "The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees," edited by Donald Justice, by permission of the Univ. of Nebraska. Copyright © 1962, 1975 by the Univ. of Nebraska.)

Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently "Sinners Welcome."

Saffron · Posted: Sun Sep 21, 2008 9:20 pm Post subject: Addendum to Poet's Choice 9/21/08

I thought it would be helpful to give some information on David Foster Wallace.

David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 novel "Infinite Jest," was found dead Friday night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department.

www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-wallace14-2008sep14,0,246155.sto ry

Saffron · Posted: Sat Sep 27, 2008 8:46 am Post subject:

I am just back from the largest Poetry Festival in North America; still tired and damp, but full. One of the things I brought back is a book, Now & Then by Robert Hass. It is a collection of his Poet's Choice columns from 1997-2000. I highly recommend this book.

Saffron · Posted: Sun Sep 28, 2008 5:12 pm Post subject:

POET'S CHOICE

By Mary Karr
Sunday, September 28, 2008; BW12

While I can't claim that Syracuse University, where I teach, is an artistic vortex à la Paris in the 1920s, I can brag that for 50 years astonishing poets have traipsed up its snowy hill for classes in the English department housed in a gray stone building that was once filmed as the Addams Family house. In the 1960s, Delmore Schwartz (the youngest bard to take the Bollingen Prize) mentored young Lou Reed, whose band (the Velvet Underground) subsequently revolutionized rock. Pulitzers went to former professors Stephen Dunn, Donald Justice and W.D. Snodgrass, the latter of whom poked fun at his role in academia: "I haven't read one book about/A book or memorized one plot./Or found a mind I did not doubt./I learned one date. And then forgot." Hayden Carruth memorialized the school's short-story genius Raymond Carver in "Ray."

There's no agreed-upon Syracuse "school." But all these luminaries -- however different in sensibility and style -- move me without verbal frou frou or puffed up pyrotechnics. In "What Goes On," Dunn describes a marriage coming apart, then, after the wife's illness, repairing itself:

After the affair and the moving out,

after the destructive revivifying passion,

we watched her life quiet

into a new one, her lover more and more

on its periphery. She spent many nights

alone, happy for the narcosis

of the television. When she got cancer

she kept it to herself until she couldn't

keep it from anyone. The chemo debilitated

and saved her, and one day

her husband asked her to come back --

his wife, who after all had only fallen

in love as anyone might

who hadn't been in love in a while --

and he held her, so different now,

so thin, her hair just partially

grown back. He held her like a new woman

and what she felt

felt almost as good as love had,

and each of them called it love

because precision didn't matter anymore.

And we who'd been part of it,

often rejoicing with one

and consoling the other,

we who had seen her truly alive

and then merely alive,

what could we do but revise

our phone book, our hearts,

offer a little toast to what goes on.

This story of a wife's betrayal and her husband's fidelity unto death stings me with the awareness that small, unnoticed nobility endures in our midst.

W.D. Snodgrass's "April Inventory" is from "Heart's Needle." Copyright 1959 by William Snodgrass. Reprinted with permission of Knopf. Stephen Dunn's "What Goes On" is from "Different Hours: Poems." Copyright 2000 by Stephen Dunn. Reprinted with permission of Norton.

Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently " Sinners Welcome. "

Saffron · Posted: Sat Oct 04, 2008 8:56 pm Post subject: October 5, 2008

Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, October 5, 2008; BW12

When Hayden Carruth died this week at 87 from a series of strokes at his home in upstate New York, American letters lost another colossus. He was an infantryman in World War II and came home to battle -- in prose and verse -- for causes ranging from nuclear disarmament to ecological farming. Like Robert Frost, he drew on the rural landscape and characters. He could orchestrate a symphony from plain American speech. "Regarding Chainsaws" opens when the admittedly "greenhorn" speaker is given an old chainsaw: "Bo Bremmer give it to me that was my friend,/though I've had enemies couldn't of done/no worse." He gets "a bursitis in the elbow" after yanking the cord "450 times." Eventually, Old Stan (a neighbor) buys it from him. But a few days later when he asks how the chainsaw is working, Stan says, "I tooken/it down to scrap, and I buried it in three/separate places yonder on the upper side/of the potato piece. You can't be too careful/. . . when you're disposing of a hex."

Unlike Frost's wise old country titans, these men fight with modern machinery in a climate where they, too, face becoming rusty and obsolete:

I quit stopping by to see old Stan, and I

don't feel so good about that neither. . . .

. . . Stan was taken away

to the nursing home, and then he died. I always

remember how he planted them pieces of spooked

McCulloch up above the potatoes. One time

I went up and dug, and I took the old

sprocket, all pitted and et away, and set it

on the windowsill right there next to the

butter mold. But I'm damned if I know why.

I'd like to end with one of the tender love lyrics he assembled during his late marriage to poet Joe-Anne McLaughlin Carruth:
Forty-Five

When I was forty-five I lay for hours

beside a pool, the green hazy

springtime water, and watched

the salamanders coupling, how they drifted lazily,

their little hands floating before them,

aimlessly in and out of the shadows, fifteen

or twenty of them, and suddenly two

would dart together and clasp

one another belly to belly

the way we do, tender and vigorous, and then

would let go and drift away

at peace, lazily

in the green pool that was their world

and for a while was mine.

Carruth was ours for a while, and the green world was greener for his words.

"Regarding Ch ainsaws" is from "Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991" (Copper Canyon, 1992). "F orty-Five" is from "Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey: Poems, 1991-1995" (Copper Canyon, 1996). Reprinted with permission of Copper Canyon Press.

Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently "Sinners Welcome."

Saffron · Posted: Mon Oct 13, 2008 7:05 am Post subject: 10/12/08

Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, October 12, 2008; BW12

Back in high school, I fell in love with Bill Knott's visionary poems, some only a few lines long. As American bombs in Vietnam were accidentally killing children, he penned this tiny gem: "The only response/to a child's grave is/to lie down before it and play dead."

His poem "Death" almost celebrates dying as parcel of the poet's dreamy hermeticism, that need to turn inward: "Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest./They will place my hands like this./It will look as though I am flying into myself."

Knott, who still produces some of the finest American experimental verse, became a cult figure partly through a suicide hoax in 1966. After collecting rejection slips for years, he sent a mimeographed note to several poetry editors saying something like "Bill Knott died an orphan and a virgin." His subsequent work was published under the pen-name Saint Geraud, a character in a 19th-century porn novel who runs an orphanage and sodomizes his charges. The fact that Knott landed in an orphanage after his father's suicide makes both the hoax and the nom de plume mirror-images of what we deduce might have been his private tortures.

Knott came out from behind his mask with his second book, Auto-Necrophilia. He's an iconoclast who pokes fun at the whole culture, as in "Some of My Problems": "I recently killed my father/And will soon marry my mother/My question is:/Should his side of the family be invited to the wedding?"

Knott embodies what poet and critic Octavio Paz describes as modern poetry's "heroic-burlesque remedy," for in trying to marry the sublime to the ridiculous, he's attempting, perhaps futilely, to unite humor and love, life and art. In "A Lesson From the Orphanage," he uses the brutal social structure of foundlings to refute war:

If you beat up someone smaller than you

they won't (and histories prove this) tell:

look at those people on the opposite side

of the planet: they want to beat us up but

they're smaller so that's okay. Not okay is

that most of us will die in the war between

us and them, because small equals (and mice

prove this) sneaky: their spies could spirit all

our nuke aids away and we'd never know --

nick the rocket-satellite knockout Star Peace

Comcodes right out of our shrinking pockets,

even our doomsday (the FBI can prove this)

doodads, the ones we mean to use on them,

the rats: and so when they kill us will we

have killed enough of them to win, whose

fist figures bigger in the end? And what's it prove? --

In the Orphanage, hell, even if they do tell

on you there's no one for them to tell it to.

Through pathological paranoia, Knott says, we create our own hell -- that final, capital-O Orphanage -- in which no celestial parent remains to hear our pious tattling.

"The only response," "Death" and "Some of My Problems" appear in Bill Knott's "Selected and Collected Poems." Copyright 1977 by Bill Knott. Reprinted with permission from Sun Press. "A Lesson From the Orphanage" is from "The Unsubscriber: Poems." Copyright 2004 by Bill Knott. Reprinted with permission of Farrar Straus Giroux.

Saffron · Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2008 8:49 pm Post subject: 10/19/08

Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, October 19, 2008; BW12

In this election year when the cost of health care looms large for most of us, anybody would profit from reading this sad lyric by Roger Fanning, an only child who nursed both parents to their expensive graves within a single year.
Hospital Sidewalk

In this hospital they itemize the cost

of a person's deathbed down to the last aspirin.

They charge twenty-five dollars for fake lamb's wool

on which, after surgery, patients bleed.

People die with eyes fixed on digital clocks

which flip numbers every minute, dollar signs flying.

So adroit is Fanning's wizardry with the vernacular that this sounds almost ordinary at first glance, like a complaint overheard on the bus. But listen to the artistry here: the first two lines with their hissing "s" sounds (itemiZe, person'S, laSt aSpirin), and the imagery -- "fake lamb's wool" (like the redemption of a false "lamb" or Christ), the eyes fixed on digital clocks, the sleight-of-hand in which numbers morph into dollar signs.

In the second stanza of this gem, Fanning goes from general gripes to a specific hospital where he's paying the bill and is inconsolable:

The sidewalk out front has blades of grass

shooting up through cracks. A ladybug

(not much bigger than a decimal point) could climb

to the highest tip and fly away home

to save her children. I wonder if little things comfort

anyone. Not me. The business of love is living big.

This speaker can't be comforted by the tiny pin-dot ladybug who wants to rescue her children, yet paradoxically he enjoins us to love big by observing the small.

Another unlikely survivor touches me in his poem "Frog."

My car passed over him but I could see

in the rearview mirror he was okay.

Then again, is a thing so soft ever safe?

Contemplating the frog's vulnerability, the speaker continues on his way:

I drove on to sit by a bed in Intensive Care,

where my father slept among machines. As if grateful

for wet grass, the frog wept with all his skin,

so happy, so helpless: not dead, not dead.

Fanning's sonic diction recreates the frog's ribbet-ribbet rhythm in the last two metrical feet: NOT dead, NOT dead. Undoubtedly, that's what the son's heart is hoping.

"Hospital Sidewalk" and "Frog" are from "The Island Itself" (Penguin, 1991).

Saffron · Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2008 2:49 pm Post subject: 10/26/08

Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, October 26, 2008; BW12

Real life has enough horror without adding ghouls and ghosts to the mix. Here's a scary fact you'll want to know about Paul Guest: At the age of 12, he was permanently paralyzed in a bike accident. That's the least interesting aspect of his work, but it did produce this startler, "User's Guide to Physical Debilitation," from a forthcoming book of his poems:

Should the painful condition of irreversible paralysis

last longer than forever or at least until

your death by bowling ball or illegal lawn dart

or the culture of death, which really has it out

for whoever has seen better days

but still enjoys bruising marathons of bird watching,

you, or your beleaguered caregiver

stirring dark witch's brews of resentment

inside what had been her happy life,

should turn to page seven where you can learn,

assuming higher cognitive functions

were not pureed by your selfish misfortune,

how to leave the house for the first time in two years.

It's both agonizing and funny for an invalid to joke about his "bruising marathons of bird watching." And Guest's humor often disarms me before he ambushes me with longing. Losing a potential love makes his joy in a mid-January burst of spring both funny and sad in this wry poem:
The Lives of the Optimists

So the jonquils are fooled into flaming up

though it's January. The bricks soak

in heat like ruddy sponges.

Walking home, I hide

within whatever's radiant.

A bird whose name I've never bothered

to learn sings its farewell

to winter. It's January. Tomorrow

we'll grieve. Or the next

day, but not this thawed instant,

not in this false blush

of lilac. In my bones, the old scores

with the earth are laid to rest

and each dyspeptic grudge

blossoms into frantic, sweet, careening

love. In your bones,

the tidal hymns of blood.

This heedless smile once was yours.

So too my hands,

themselves fooled

by the tilt of the earth, the white face of a star.

Guest's twisting syntax, his poetic phrasing -- "tidal hymns of blood" -- and his wicked wit about "each dyspeptic grudge" make more palatable the grief of the lost love. It's her face that blinks past us, I think, disappearing in the white face of a star.

"User's Guide to Physical Debilitation" and "The Lives of the Optimists" are from "My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge" (Ecco, 2008).

DWill · Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2008 6:09 pm Post subject:

Wow. That second one, "The Lives of the Optimists," is great! (I wonder about his "walking home." Interesting that he doesn't let his biography limit the kind of persona he adopts.) And notice that our very own Saffron got "Poet's Choice" to us a day before it will be published in print! That's the kind of good stuff you get here in Passion for Poetry (pardon the shameless promotion).
DWill

Saffron · Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2008 8:52 pm Post subject:

For anyone interested in more Paul Guest.

Paul Guest

The website has both print and audio of Guest' poems.


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