I was working my way through these poems and want to thank saffron for posting them. There are many poets, good ones, "out there," laboring in obscurity. But I suppose they get their reinforcement from the other poets who respect their work and from the small segment of the public who pays any attention to poetry. The only poem here I didn't like very much was Henri Cole's "Beach Walk." I especially liked the Thomas Lux poems, the one by Ada Limon (love it when humor and seriousness combine), and my favorite of all was "Quarantine" by Boland. That is one for the ages. It had a feel about it like C. McCarthy's novel "The Road," grim and tragic yet against all odds, sweet.

(Edit:I haven't gotten yet to the two saffron just posted. Have to run out and mow down my meadow so the septic guys will have an easier time digging up my drain field. How's that for an obscure reference? It's a reference that will cost us about 4 thousand bucks, is all I know.)

DWill wrote:I was working my way through these poems and want to thank saffron for posting them. There are many poets, good ones, "out there," laboring in obscurity. But I suppose they get their reinforcement from the other poets who respect their work and from the small segment of the public who pays any attention to poetry. The only poem here I didn't like very much was Henri Cole's "Beach Walk." I especially liked the Thomas Lux poems, the one by Ada Limon (love it when humor and seriousness combine), and my favorite of all was "Quarantine" by Boland. That is one for the ages. It had a feel about it like C. McCarthy's novel "The Road," grim and tragic yet against all odds, sweet.

I am glad you've been enjoying the poems; you should consider going to the Festival. It really is an amazing event - like nothing else. Here is a little background so you can get an idea of just how many people attend and cheer for the poets.

From the festival website:
The Dodge Poetry Festival is widely acknowledged as the largest poetry event in North America, representing the most eminent poets from the late 20th and early 21st centuries. These four-day celebrations of poetry have been called "poetry heaven" by former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass, "a new Woodstock" by the Christian Science Monitor, and simply "Wordstock" by The New York Times.

The Festival, held in even-numbered years since 1986, has drawn a combined audience of approximately 140,000 attendees from 42 states, including 17,000 high school teachers and 42,000 high school students who attended without charge and traveled from as far away as Florida, Maine, Minnesota and California. On each of these four Fall days, ten or more separate stages offer events simultaneously for audiences of 100 to 2,000 people. Originally held in Waterloo Village, the Festival found a new home in Newark’s Downtown Arts District in 2010.

Another by Gregory Orr ~

Some Part of the Lyric

Some part of the lyric wants to exclude
the world with all its chaos and grief
and so conceives shapes (a tear, a globe of dew)

whose cool symmetries create a mood
of security. Which is something all need
and so, the lyric's urge to exclude

what hurts us isn't simply a crude
defense, but an embracing of a few
essential shapes: a tear, a globe of dew.

But to what end? Are there clues
in these forms to deeper mysteries
that no good poem should exclude?

What can a stripped art reveal? Is a nude
more naked than the eye can see?
Can a tear freed of salt be a globe of dew?

And most of all—is it something we can use?
Yes, but only as long as its beauty,
like that of a tear or a globe of dew,
reflects the world it meant to exclude.

Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966. She earned an M.A. in poetry from Hollins University and M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts. Her first collection of poetry, Domestic Work (2000), was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry.

Here is a tip for understanding the title: ves·per·tine 1. Of, relating to, or occurring in the evening. 2. Botany Opening or blooming in the evening.


Vespertina Cognitio


Overhead, pelicans glide in threes—
their shadows across the sand
dark thoughts crossing the mind.

Beyond the fringe of coast, shrimpers
hoist their nets, weighing the harvest
against the day's losses. Light waning,

concentration is a lone gull
circling what's thrown back. Debris
weights the trawl like stones.

All day, this dredging—beneath the tug
of waves—rhythm of what goes out,
comes back, comes back, comes back.

For a full list of the poets that will be at this year's Dodge Poetry Festival follow this link:
http://www.dodgepoetry.org/at-the-festi ... val-poets/

After looking through the list, I think there is something for everyone. Here is another poet -


C. K. Williams

In 1936, C. K. Williams was born in Newark, New Jersey. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Wait: Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010); Collected Poems (2007); The Singing (2003), which won the National Book Award; Repair (1999), winner of a Pulitzer Prize; The Vigil (1997); A Dream of Mind (1992); Flesh and Blood (1987), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Tar (1983); With Ignorance (1997); I Am the Bitter Name (1992); and Lies (1969).

Williams has also published five works of translation: Selected Poems of Francis Ponge (1994); Canvas, by Adam Zagajewski (with Renata Gorczynski and Benjamin Ivry, 1991); The Bacchae of Euripides (1990); The Lark. The Thrush. The Starling. (Poems from Issa) (1983); and Women of Trachis, by Sophocles (with Gregory Dickerson, 1978).

Among his many awards and honors are an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and a Pushcart Prize. He served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Williams teaches in the creative writing program at Princeton University and lives part of each year in Paris.

The Gaffe

1

If that someone who's me yet not me yet who judges me is always with me,
as he is, shouldn't he have been there when I said so long ago that thing
I said?

If he who rakes me with such not trivial shame for minor sins now were
there then,
shouldn't he have warned me he'd even now devastate me for my
unpardonable affront?

I'm a child then, yet already I've composed this conscience-beast, who
harries me:
is there anything else I can say with certainty about who I was, except that I,
that he,

could already draw from infinitesimal transgressions complex chords
of remorse,
and orchestrate ever-undiminishing retribution from the hapless rest
of myself?


2

The son of some friends of my parents has died, and my parents, paying
their call,
take me along, and I'm sent out with the dead boy's brother and some
others to play.

We're joking around, and words come to my mind, which to my
amazement are said.
How do you know when you can laugh when somebody dies, your brother dies?

is what's said, and the others go quiet, the backyard goes quiet,
everyone stares,
and I want to know now why that someone in me who's me yet not me let
me say it.

Shouldn't he have told me the contrition cycle would from then be ever
upon me,
it didn't matter that I'd really only wanted to know how grief ends,
and when?


3

I could hear the boy's mother sobbing inside, then stopping, sobbing
then stopping.
Was the end of her grief already there? Had her someone in her told her
it would end?

Was her someone in her kinder to her, not tearing at her, as mine did,
still does, me,
for guessing grief someday ends? Is that why her sobbing stopped
sometimes?

She didn't laugh, though, or I never heard her. How do you know when
you can laugh?
Why couldn't someone have been there in me not just to accuse me, but
to explain?

The kids were playing again, I was playing, I didn't hear anything more
from inside.
The way now sometimes what's in me is silent, too, and sometimes,
though never really, forgets.

Next up - Richard Blanco

Somewhere to Paris

The sole cause of a man's unhappiness
is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.
PASCAL, Pensées

The vias of Italy turn to memory with each turn
and clack of the train’s wheels, with every stitch
of track we leave behind, the duomos return again
to my imagination, already imagining Paris—
a fantasy of lights and marble that may end
when the train stops at Gare de l’Est and I step
into the daylight. In this space between cities,
between the dreamed and the dreaming, there is
no map—no legend, no ancient street names
or arrows to follow, no red dot assuring me:
you are here—and no place else. If I don’t know
where I am, then I am only these heartbeats,
my breaths, the mountains rising and falling
like a wave scrolling across the train’s window.
I am alone with the moon on its path, staring
like a blank page, shear and white as the snow
on the peaks echoing back its light. I am this
solitude, never more beautiful, the arc of space
I travel through for a few hours, touching
nothing and keeping nothing, with nothing
to deny the night, the dark pines pointing
to the stars, this life, always moving and still.


The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation has started up posting Festival Poets on their Poetry Friday blog. Here is the link to the post about Richard Blanco.
http://blog.grdodge.org/2012/06/29/poet ... Program%29

Ni-ice .. thanks Saffron, I like the Blanco poem, I'll look up more of his poetry. I think this poem would speak to anyone who has traveled from one city to another in Europe, particularly to Paris ... I think the 'idea' of Paris, the imagery of Paris, is so strong that where one is coming from doesn't matter, quite inconsequential really. And there is something about train travel that has a 'personal journey' feel about it, much more so than air travel IMO.

giselle wrote:Ni-ice .. thanks Saffron, I like the Blanco poem, I'll look up more of his poetry. I think this poem would speak to anyone who has traveled from one city to another in Europe, particularly to Paris ... I think the 'idea' of Paris, the imagery of Paris, is so strong that where one is coming from doesn't matter, quite inconsequential really. And there is something about train travel that has a 'personal journey' feel about it, much more so than air travel IMO.

I like the Blanco poem too. I look forward to hearing him read.

Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah

by Patricia Smith

My mother scraped the name Patricia Ann from the ruins
of her discarded Delta, thinking it would offer me shield
and shelter, that leering men would skulk away at the slap
of it. Her hands on the hips of Alabama, she went for flat
and functional, then siphoned each syllable of drama,
repeatedly crushing it with her broad, practical tongue
until it sounded like an instruction to God, not a name.
She wanted a child of pressed head and knocking knees,
a trip-up in the doubledutch swing, a starched pinafore
and peppermint-in-the-sour-pickle kinda child, stiff-laced
and unshakably fixed on salvation. Her Patricia Ann
would never idly throat the Lord’s name or wear one
of those thin, sparkled skirts that flirted with her knees.
She'd be a nurse or a third-grade teacher or a postal drone,
jobs requiring alarm-clock discipline and sensible shoes.
My four downbeats were music enough for a vapid life
of butcher-shop sawdust and fatback as cuisine, for Raid
spritzed into the writhing pockets of a Murphy bed.
No crinkled consonants or muted hiss would summon me.

My daddy detested borders. One look at my mother's
watery belly, and he insisted, as much as he could insist
with her, on the name Jimi Savannah, seeking to bless me
with the blues-bathed moniker of a ball breaker, the name
of a grown gal in a snug red sheath and unlaced All-Stars.
He wanted to shoot muscle through whatever I was called,
arm each syllable with tiny weaponry so no one would
mistake me for anything other than a tricky whisperer
with a switchblade in my shoe. I was bound to be all legs,
a bladed debutante hooked on Lucky Strikes and sugar.
When I sent up prayers, God's boy would giggle and consider.

Daddy didn't want me to be anybody's surefire factory,
nobody's callback or seized rhythm, so he conjured
a name so odd and hot even a boy could claim it. And yes,
he was prepared for the look my mother gave him when
he first mouthed his choice, the look that said, That's it,
you done lost your goddamned mind. She did that thing
she does where she grows two full inches with righteous,
and he decided to just whisper Love you, Jimi Savannah
whenever we were alone, re- and rechristening me the seed
of Otis, conjuring his own religion and naming it me.

Oh boy, do I like this one! What a joy of a poem. There is an interesting juxtaposition of the visceral and elemental joy of eating an apple and the cultural references to the loaded history of the apple. The cultural references are a kind of short hand for some of the problematic or dualistic aspects of our western culture - not bad for a short little poem. I will be sure to check out this poet at the festival.

A Short History of the Apple

by Dorianne Laux

The crunch is the thing, a certain joy in crashing through
living tissue, a memory of Neanderthal days.
—Edward Bunyard, The Anatomy of Dessert, 1929


Teeth at the skin. Anticipation.
Then flesh. Grain on the tongue.
Eve's knees ground in the dirt
of paradise. Newton watching
gravity happen. The history
of apples in each starry core,
every papery chamber's bright
bitter seed. Woody stem
an infant tree. William Tell
and his lucky arrow. Orchards
of the Fertile Crescent. Bushels.
Fire blight. Scab and powdery mildew.
Cedar apple rust. The apple endures.
Born of the wild rose, of crab ancestors.
The first pip raised in Kazakhstan.
Snow White with poison on her lips.
The buried blades of Halloween.
Budding and grafting. John Chapman
in his tin pot hat. Oh Westward
Expansion. Apple pie. American
as. Hard cider. Winter banana.
Melt-in-the-mouth made sweet
by hives of Britain's honeybees:
white man's flies. O eat. O eat.

Dorianne Laux
Borrowed from Poets.org




In 1952, Dorianne Laux was born in Augusta, Maine. She worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, a maid, and a donut holer before receiving a BA in English from Mills College in 1988......About Laux's work, the poet Tony Hoagland has said, "Her poems are those of a grown American woman, one who looks clearly, passionately, and affectionately at rites of passage, motherhood, the life of work, sisterhood, and especially sexual love, in a celebratory fashion."..... Laux has taught at the University of Oregon's Program in Creative Writing. She now lives, with her husband, poet Joseph Millar, in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she serves among the faculty at North Carolina State University's MFA Program.