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Washington Post Poet's Choice

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November 11, 2009

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Poet's Choice: 'November 11 -- 2004' by Kim Addonizio

By Kim Addonizio
Sunday, November 15, 2009

The first time I visited The Wall, the Vietnam veterans memorial in Washington, I was overwhelmed by the power of all those names, each name a life lost. But each name also a life honored and remembered. I think that's one impulse of poetry: to name what passes, trying to hold it in our hearts a little longer.

The opening line of "November 11" came into my head on Veterans Day in 2004 complete with that grandiose "O" and exclamation point. I was driving to the gym, thinking what I have often thought: "Wow, it's all creation and destruction at the same time, every moment." As I was working on the poem and started naming, I found I didn't want to stop. I wanted to fix those people in memory. But I soon saw what an impossible task that was; there were -- are -- too many dead. That's partly what the poem is about. The rain is for me the astonishing dailiness of all this death, so much of it from war and violence.

I used some Iraqi women's names because that's what I thought about, the women there who were dying and losing their loved ones. And the four American soldiers were listed in the San Francisco Chronicle that day, part of the ongoing body count. The exclamation points are meant to be both sincere and ironic, just as the rain becomes both the beauty of being alive and the continuation of all of our forms of ignorance.

NOVEMBER 11 -- 2004

O everyone's dead and the rain today is marvelous!

I drive to the gym, the streets are slick,

everyone's using their wipers, people are walking

with their shoulders hunched, wearing hoods

or holding up umbrellas, of course, of course,

it's all to be expected -- fantastic!

My mother's friend Annie, her funeral's today!

The writer Iris Chang, she just shot herself!

And Arafat, he's dead, too! The doctors refuse

to say what killed him, his wife is fighting

with the Palestinians over his millions, the parking lot

of the gym is filled with muddy puddles!

I run 4.3 m.p.h. on the treadmill, and they're dead

in Baghdad and Fallujah, Mosul and Samarra and Latifiya --

Nadia and Surayah, Nahla and Hoda and Noor,

their husbands and cousins and brothers --

dead in their own neighborhoods! Imagine!

Marine Staff Sgt. David G. Ries, 29, Clark, WA.: killed!

Army Spc. Quoc Binh Tran, 26, Mission Viejo, CA: killed,

Army Spc. Bryan L. Freeman, 31, Lumberton, NJ -- same deal!

Marine Lance Cpl. Jeffrey Larn, 22, NY, you guessed it!

O I could go on and on, for as long as I live!

In Africa, too, they've been starved and macheted!

The morning paper said the Serbs apologized

for Srebrenica, 7,800 Muslims murdered in 1995,

I know it's old news, but hey, they're still dead!

I almost forgot my neighbor's niece, 16 and puking in

Kaiser Emergency, the cause a big mystery

until the autopsy -- toxic shock syndrome,

of all things -- I thought that was history, too,

but I guess girls are still dying; who knew! I run

for two miles, my knees hurt, and my shins,

I step off and stretch for a bit, I go back outside

into the rain, it feels chilly and good, it goes on

all day, unending and glorious, falling and filling

the roof-gutters, flooding the low-lying roads.

Kim Addonizio's fifth poetry collection, "Lucifer at the Starlite," was recently published by W.W. Norton.
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November 22, 2009

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Poet's Choice: 'Watermelon in the Afternoon' by John Gallaher

By John Gallaher
Sunday, November 22, 2009

We travel from our small town near Kansas City to Austin, Texas, two or so times a year to see family, stopping in Dallas to see my wife's grandmother, who is in her 90s. We've been doing this for several years. Our children, now 7 and 3, aren't much for sitting and talking, so every visit I find myself following them up and down the halls and little courtyard of the assisted-living community in which she lives.

I'm in the habit of keeping a small 3x5 notebook with me, and while we were walking on one recent visit, I wrote down the opening sentence of what became this poem. The rest of the poem came about quickly, as a fairly straight report of that visit and my attempt to think along with it while my kids and I wandered the halls. We were there on a day they were cleaning out one of the rooms near the main lobby. It was summer, and there was watermelon.

Writing the poem was something of a challenge for me, as I had never written a poem opening with the image of grandmothers before, and I wasn't sure how the tone was going to work. In fact, I can't think of another poem of mine that even has the word "grandmother" in it. I'm sure there must be one. I have several with watermelons in them.


Watermelon in the Afternoon

Several grandmothers are in a half-circle

eating watermelon from plastic cups.


Let us not forget to act differently.

Let us not forget

to start the music, to play the music loud.


And stir the chairs as they empty.

And close the rooms.


Call the families, then. The several families

down the hall.


Go tell the skinny girls.


The trees are up against the windows.

The wind is up against the trees. And everyone lies down

where they fall.


And this other part, where we think only

watermelon, only

flaring color.


Who knows you should have had

more sense?


Who knows there is more sense?

"Watermelon in the Afternoon" appears in John Gallaher's new collection of poems, "Map of the Folded World" (University of Akron Press).
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November 29, 2009

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Poet's Choice: 'Monday' by Randall Mann

By Randall Mann
Sunday, November 29, 2009

WP BOOKSTORE

"Monday" began on a Friday, in April 2007, when I flew to Palm Springs for what I hoped would be a romantic weekend with someone I thought I knew. Well, it was a disaster from the start: He was a lovely specimen, but when leaving the Palm Springs airport, on a little spin around town, he grandly pointed out the "Andrew Lloyd Webber" house on one block. (He meant Frank Lloyd Wright.) And it went downhill from there. I suggested that we catch Tarantino's three-hour "Grindhouse," the longest movie in the multiplex, in an attempt to kill time and conversation. During it, I texted my friends choice malapropisms uttered by my date. I was haughty, and I left Palm Springs in a huff.

Very early Monday, when I returned to San Francisco, I grew more and more dispirited, mostly with myself, with my pettiness and impatience. That morning, while i waited in Dolores Park for the J-Church streetcar to take me to work, the contrast of beauty and waste in the park, of syringes discarded by the tracks near wildflowers, prompted me to think, then think again, about this young man's beauty, which was his magnanimity, and my lack thereof. So the poem "Monday," like that long weekend, moves from hope to disdain to cruel self-knowledge and then, ultimately, back to hope.


WP BOOKSTORE
Monday

While you wait for the J train, for work, think

of your new boyfriend, who loves apostrophes,

sizzle-pants, and you.

Who pointed out the "Andrew Lloyd Webber" house


and said his feelings have started to "Escalade."

You'll forgive him for now, smarty pants.

(Your last, the crisp progressive, declawed

his cat to save his Ethan Allen chairs.) Besides,


there's such promise, such furniture and new sex!

Look: wildflowers bloom in the streetcar tracks;

a syringe lies in the grass. It isn't

beautiful, of course, this life. It is.

"Monday" is from "Breakfast with Thom Gunn," by Randall Mann. Copyright © 2009 by the University of Chicago
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December 6, 2009

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Poet's Choice: 'Mike the Winger' by Robert Polito

By Robert Polito
Sunday, December 6, 2009

"Mike the Winger" is from a new collection "Hollywood & God," which mixes poetry and prose, fiction, autobiography and even essay. The book tracks a continuum along what traditionally you might style "transcendence" and what we've come to tag "celebrity culture," and Mike is one of its patron saints.

The city of "Mike the Winger" is Quincy, Mass., where I lived from age 8 through college. The walk to Saint Ann's School took us down Hillside Avenue, along South Central Avenue to Newport Avenue, then through a mysterious concrete tunnel under the tracks of the old New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad and onto St. Ann's Road. The afternoons Mike appeared on his bicycle with a basket of new records at the foot of the South Central Avenue hill were rare and special, and rumors swirled about his circumstances, most of the stories at once confident and implausible. Was he a Korean War Vet, way older than he looked? A junkie? Retarded? Schizophrenic? A genius until some goons pounded his head with a pipe in a schoolyard fight?

Mike loomed a bit of a phantom -- but so did Quincy, amid its granite quarries, ancient water tower, Vaudeville Mondays at the Wollaston Theater (into the '70s!), sad beach (despite twin yacht clubs) and Quincy Square disintegrating around its Richardson Library and historical Adams House. But Quincy Square also contained "Remicks of Quincy," the posh clothing store a few doors down from Sears, where, if you were lucky, you might see Lee Remick visiting her father, Frank, and Jason's Music and Luggage, your destination for sheet music, instruments and the latest LPs. I made a pilgrimage to Jason's every Saturday, and so did Mike.

Mike the Winger

City of Presidents,

City of the Granite Railway and Fore River Shipyard.


But city too of condoms ground into our pitcher's rubber,

and city of water rats and black leeches floating in the spring runoff.


City of the first Howard Johnson's, the first Dunkin Donuts,

city of Lee Remick modeling summer dresses for her father's store,


And city now where Beatles albums drop from the sky

as Mike the Winger speaks from inside a circling crowd --


Pockmarked, pimpled and blazing,

he looks, Tommy LeBlanc said, like someone set his face on fire

then stomped it out with golf shoes.


As he straddles his new Black Phantom,

as he rocks on his new red Keds,

as he pounds his wire basket of new LPs,


Mike demonstrates the legendary gesture that gave him his name.

"I play 'em once, then I wing 'em," he says --


Every afternoon Mike spins his own Top 40 from his bike

like a paperboy launching the Patriot Ledger across our lawn --


"Those Rolling Stones? Those Beach Boys? Those groups all you kids like?

They're OK. But man, I love them Beatles --

they wing up real good!"


What about his parents? Where does he grab all that cash?

Nobody stops to ask,

caught in the awe of the grander phenomenon --


Manna from heaven --


Records eased from their jackets and arced into air --


Records pristine and gleaming in trees,

records scratched and gritty on the streets,


Amid shouts of Go Mike, Go nuts, Go wingnut,

Come on Mikey baby wing one over here --


The hits just keep on coming . . .


The dead are everywhere,

but if Mike is still alive,

he'd be tracking retirement age --


Though how do you retire from something like winging?

Mere technological obsolescence? Mike frustrated by CDs,

casualty to a digital age?


Maybe winging records is like making movies,

or saying Mass,

your calling --


You do it until you can't do it anymore.


Mike worshipped the early Gods of rock 'n' roll,

Chuck Berry, Elvis, Little Richard, and Buddy Holly,

then he winged everybody else..

None of the records Mike tossed have ever gone away.

Who would have guessed that?

City of John Adams and John Quincy Adams, our 2nd & 6th Presidents.

City of Miles Connor, rockabilly singer & art thief.

City of Robert Polito.

City of Mike the Winger.

Robert Polito, director of the graduate writing program at the New School, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for "Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson" (1995). His most recent books are the poetry collection "Hollywood & God" (University of Chicago Press) and "Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber" (Library of America).
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December 13, 2009

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Poet's Choice: 'Domestique' by Heather McHugh

By Heather McHugh
Sunday, December 13, 2009;


Here's a little bagatelle from among my more accessible pieces. It's a kind of affectionate outburst that communicates something of the poet's (The Poet's!) implication in the service industries of everyday life.

I assume that the pronoun "they" in the poem's penultimate line can comprehend all the co-habitants in a daily life's doghouse. There may be traces here of my recent reading of Voltaire (in small prescriptive gulps, for doses of ironic vivacity, in moments filched from classrooms, kitchens, airports and laundry-rooms). In an entry entitled "Optimism" (from his "Reason by Alphabet"), we find one salutary account of the source of human sorrows:

"The Syrians had a pretty story about man and woman, who were created in the fourth heaven; they tried eating a cake, though ambrosia was their usual food; ambrosia was exhaled through the pores, but the cake made a new problem. They asked an angel to direct them to the W.C. 'See that little globe down there?' he said. 'That's the earth, the latrine of the universe.' Man and woman hastened down, and have lived here, with evil, ever since."

The auras around the word evil have darkened a bit, I suspect, since this translation was made. Perhaps these days, one would change the phrase "with evil" to "in a fallen state." In any case, here's my modest contribution to the literary lineage of such stories, a poem the subtitle of which could have been "After the Fourth Heaven."


DOMESTIQUE

Surfaces to scrape or wipe,

a screwdriver to be applied

to slime-encrusted soles, the spattered

hallways, wadded bedding -- and, in quantities astounding

(in the corners, under furniture, behind the curtains)

fluff and dander spread by curs the breeder called non-shedding.

It's a dog's life I myself must lead, day in, day out --

with never a Sunday edition --

while they lie around on their couches like poets,

and study the human condition.

This poem appears in my new book, "Upgraded to Serious" (Copper Canyon Press).
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December 20, 2009

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Poet's Choice: 'I Have Behind the Sky a Sky' by Fady Joudah

By Fady Joudah
Sunday, December 20, 2009;

This poem is part of a long sequence, "Eleven Planets at the End of the Andalusian Scene," that Mahmoud Darwish wrote in 1992 to commemorate the 500th year of the expulsion of Arabs and Jews from Granada, Spain. The poem is followed by another epic that takes us across the Atlantic where we listen to "The 'Red Indian's' Penultimate Speech," but not before Darwish lays out his vision of what happens after time proclaims a new end or a new beginning. This poem is remarkable if only for invoking the spirit of reciprocity and love with the poetry of the early 20th-century writer Federico García Lorca. There is a circular bond between these two great poets, who borrowed from the same well of language in the way love drinks from a "bedouin moon."


I Have Behind the Sky a Sky

I have behind the sky a sky for my return, but I

am still polishing the metal of this place, and living

an hour that foresees the unknown. I know time

will not be my ally twice, and I know I will exit

my banner as a bird that does not alight on trees in the garden.

I will exit all of my skin, and my language.

And some talk about love will descend in

Lorca poems that will live in my bedroom

and see what I have seen of the bedouin moon. I will exit

the almond trees as cotton on the brine of the sea. The stranger passed

carrying seven hundred years of horses. The stranger passed

right here, for the stranger to pass over there. I will soon exit

the wrinkles of my time as a stranger to Syria and the Andalus.

This earth is not my sky, yet this sky is my evening

and the keys are mine, the minarets are mine, the lanterns are mine, and I

am also mine. I am the Adam of two Edens, I lost them twice.

So expel me slowly,

and kill me quickly,

beneath my olive tree,

with Lorca . . .

Excerpted from "If I Were Another," by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Fady Joudah (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). © 2009 by Mahmoud Darwish Estate. Translation Copyright © 2009 by Fady Joudah. All rights reserved.
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December 27, 2009

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Poet's Choice: 'Off a Side Road Near Staunton' by Stanley Plumly

By Stanley Plumly
Sunday, December 27, 2009;

I was coming back from a reading in southern Virginia, mid-October, driving along a major north-south highway. Looking to my right at the start in the change of color in the great hardwoods of the Shenandoah, my eye followed the ridge of the Blue Ridge itself. I had to stop. And at the first turn-off to a side road, I did. It was a Monday or a Tuesday, an ordinary day, no one in sight anywhere. Only the dull ocean underroar of distant truck traffic. It was a golden day, actually. The fields falling away in front of me were one kind after another -- pasture, lapsed meadow, cut corn, a few trees, then forest, then pine and hardwood going on and on up the mountains. I had long since got out of the car and walked a bit toward what was beginning to resemble a serious landscape in a painting, one of those that can go either way: trite or something discovered. It had started to rain, even though much of the sky was still clear and sunlit, mixed with clouds that seemed to run exactly with the tops of the treelines. Looking at it all, standing there a while, I saw it as a picture that might pull you in and give you permission to disappear, so that someone seeing it -- this landscape -- on a wall might pick you out as a small figure, so small as to be ambiguous, barely visible in a field at evening.

When I got home, I more or less wrote the poem as it stands: a 14-liner in couplets.

OFF A SIDE ROAD NEAR STAUNTON

Some nothing afternoon, no one anywhere,

an early autumn stillness in the air,

the kind of empty day you fill by taking in

the full size of the valley and its layers leading

slowly to the Blue Ridge, the quality of the country,

if you stand here long enough, you could stay

for, step into, the way a landscape, even on a wall,

pulls you in, one field at a time, pasture and fall

meadow, high above the harvest, perfect

to the tree line, then spirit clouds and intermittent

sunlight smoky rain riding the tops of the mountains,

though you could walk until it's dark and not reach those rains --

you could walk the rest of the day into the picture

and not know why, at any given moment, you're there.

Stanley Plumly is the author, most recently, of "Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography" (Norton, 2008).
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