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."

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

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

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

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

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

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.story

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.

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 a 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. "

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."

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.