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I thought I'd start a new thread for the Poet's Choice for the new year. Enjoy!

Poet's Choice: 'Temple Beth Israel' by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

By Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Sunday, January 3, 2010;



In the spring of my 13th year, my mother took her life. It's not an unusual story, though that seems unusual to say. She had been ill my whole life and was, in some ways, a ghost the entire time I knew her. Now I can use terms like "borderline personality disorder." Back then there was just a mother who was sometimes home drinking TAB but more often gone, in some nameless hospital.

What was it she wanted that I wanted too? Often the answer was: for God to hear me. My mother wanted that, and as she got sicker, it seemed to be all she wanted. Sometimes she thought God did hear her, and sometimes his absence made her home feel so full of nothingness that I can't remember what happened. After she died, I tried to stop believing. It wasn't until I was asked on a radio show what I did instead of keeping a journal and said, "Pray" that I realized I'd never stopped speaking into and with that deep silence.

My collection of poems "Apocalyptic Swing" contains faith and violence and all manner of music. One of those poems, "Temple Beth Israel," takes its name from a synagogue that was bombed in the summer of 1964. It considers faith and doubt co-existing in a world that does not welcome all of us. It is a letter about learning and risking joy in the face of tremendous loss. A love letter to a world in which faith and hope are unconquerable because they are boundless.


Temple Beth Israel


I thought I would write to you about the bombings


Of all those churches and temples in the South.



But instead I took a corner and there


Like the sun I wake to in this distant city



A boy resplendent in his yarmulke and Lakers


Jacket. It has happened before but we are almost



Champions now. In the arena, on the radio,


On every school bus there is the song of our city



Winning something. He was no higher than


My chest, heaving from a run as I tried to burn



Off a night of restless dreams. I thought


I would write about the people standing on the corners



In the midst of all that rubble and destruction


But here are the fathers carrying their sons to shul



And my legs are moving like I always dreamt they could.


If I talk to you amidst all this traffic and choose



To speak of joy instead of the suffering of so many,


People laughing in the streets: Shenandoah, La Cienega,



Doheny with its schools and girls in their long skirts


Does it make this less of a poem? How do we make a world



When so many don't want us here? Here are the boys


In their black suits and golden jackets. Here are the hills



Dry from months with no rain. Here I am learning


To read again. We sound the alarm and it is as sweet



As it is sorrowful. Our hands are in the air. We are running.


We are using our legs. We are holding buckets of water



And bright flags. We wear jerseys with the names of temporary


kings upon them. We are breathing. We are breathing.


We are almost champions now.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of "The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart" and "Apocalyptic Swing."

Poet's Choice: 'Thirty Illegal Moves in the Cloud-Shape Game' by Aaron Belz

By Aaron Belz
Sunday, January 10, 2010;

The Apostle Paul wrote, "When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me." Because I am interested in the way children make sense of the world, this statement has always intrigued me. A child sees language itself as a novelty; beyond that, a child must begin to understand the rules that govern its relationships with other people, from the most intimate and developed, to the official and institutional, to hundreds of casual encounters with strangers. Children soon discover that the system is complex and sometimes inconsistent. After about 25 years, a normal, well-adjusted adult has the rules by rote, and language has long ago become mundane.

So there's a problem on both ends. While for children the world is disorienting and full of wonder, for adults it's too familiar and predictable, full of groceries, cable bills and therapists. Writing poetry helps me bridge the gap. I find an immense amount of energy in discussions I have with my own children -- the oldest is now 11 -- and many of my poems derive from those discussions. A couple of years ago my youngest daughter and I were playing the "Cloud Shape Game," and she pointed to one rather amorphous cloud and said it looked like a cloud. Obviously, she was right. Just as obviously, to a veteran player of the game, she was breaking one of the unwritten rules. But my mind was racing: Do some clouds look more like clouds than others? Is there an ideal kind of "cloudness"? If so, maybe she was onto something. This led me to try to articulate the rules of the game, which led to the following poem.

Thirty Illegal Moves in the Cloud-Shape Game

Potatoes

Waves

Ghosts

A Rorschach blot

Fuzz

Clouds

A dragon head

Chèvre

A puddle

Cloth

A swab

Crumpled up paper

A blob

Trees

Jelly

Scallops

Fungi

Hair

Milk

A piñata

Chamois

Sheep

Feta

A fist

Algae

Alsace-Lorraine

Quiche

Stew

Bubbles

Pudding

Aaron Belz teaches English at Providence Christian College in Ontario, California. His second book, "Lovely, Raspberry," is forthcoming from Persea.

Here's the kind of reader I am: I had to make sure he didn't list 29 or 31. I would make the dragon head legal, though.

Poet's Choice: Rachel Loden's "Miss October"
"Miss October" began in annoyance and ended somewhere entirely else. Hugh Hefner's E! Entertainment television show "The Girls Next Door" debuted around the time of its writing, and (in clicking channels one night) I was treated to images of a then near-octogenarian Mr. Hefner indefatigably flogging the program in his robe and slippers.

I had not yet seen the recent tweet that alerted me to the sale of "6 vols of PLAYBOY, signed by Hefner w a piece of his PJs," but that delicious bit alone might have triggered the birth of this poem. For what is "a 7 x 7 cm piece of Hef's famous silk pajamas, worn by the great man himself" (as advertised by the publisher) but a religious relic, one exquisitely appropriate for our times?

I shouldn't have been surprised that "Miss October" had plans for me beyond exasperation and bemusement. For years my poems about the undead and uneasy 37th president of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, had taken me places that would have made even a zombie from Yorba Linda recoil in horror.

Both "Miss October" and my Nixon poems carried me back to Washington, D.C., where I was born, and where my father, a deejay and actor, lost his livelihood during the McCarthy era, but that was one way station among many. Poems have their own itineraries, issued only on the fly.

"Miss October" (very unusually) emerged in a single fit of scribbling, precisely the wet and glossy piece you'll find below.


MISS OCTOBER

If I have to be a playmate
In my time on earth
I want to be the girl
Of drifting leaves, cold cheeks

And passionate regrets.
I think Hef loves October best
Because although he cannot
Say so, he is this close

To death. December
In its stealth has hung
Long spikes of ice
Around his sagging ears, his

Sex. So in October
I'll be the centerfold of gay
Pretense, the girl who says
We're at our blondest

And most perilously beautiful
Right before we check out
Of the manse.
Soon all Hef's dreaming

Will be ash, his favorite pipe
And smoking jacket,
Last vial of Viagra
Safely under glass

At the Smithsonian.
When my shelf life here
Is done and all the damp
Boys stealing glimpses

At the newsstands
Are old men, I want them
To remember how many
Playmate-months

Are gone, how many rooms
Stand empty, shutters
Drawn, the last girls slipped
Away in bright October.



"Miss October" appears in Rachel Loden's new collection of poems, "Dick of the Dead" (Ahsahta Press).



By Ron Charles | January 15, 2010; 12:52 PM ET Poet's Choice

I am sad to say I believe Poet's Choice is no more. As far as I can tell, it went down without warning or notification.

Hooray!!! It's back!!!!

Poet's Choice: "In a Beautiful Country" by Kevin Prufer

I live in a tiny town in Missouri, about 10 miles down Highway 50 from Whiteman Air Force Base. Several times a day, a B-2 bomber flies above my classroom, rumbling, beautiful and terrifying.

Sometimes, my students come to class in fatigues. They finish their homework between military and family duties. During the run-up to the Iraq War, I felt a palpable sort of tension in the local restaurants, the coffee shop, the Wal-Mart down the highway. On the one hand, we were quick to express patriotic feelings, nationalistic pride and a desire for revenge after 9/11. On the other hand, our military adventures, recounted endlessly on TV, would have very real, measurable impacts on our lives and the lives of our co-workers, loved ones and students. Today, most everyone in Warrensburg, Mo. knows someone at risk in Afghanistan, someone fighting in Iraq, someone making contingency plans for their families when they will have to be away.

"In a Beautiful Country" was born out of this anxiety and tension. In retrospect, those feelings of pride, ably manipulated by our own government and media, seem sinister. I suppose the "gold-haired girl" in the poem represents to me not the "beautiful country" of the poem's title, but an impostor version of that country we came to trust, a lovely voice distracting us from the truth of war, death and political incompetence. Here, falling in love-- with an idea, a voice -- becomes both intoxicating and, at least metaphorically, suicidal.

In a Beautiful Country

A good way to fall in love
is to turn off the headlights
and drive very fast down dark roads.

Another way to fall in love
is to say they are only mints
and swallow them with a strong drink.

Then it is autumn in the body.
Your hands are cold.
Then it is winter and we are still at war.

The gold-haired girl is singing into your ear
about how we live in a beautiful country.
Snow sifts from the clouds

into your drink. It doesn't matter about the war.
A good way to fall in love
is to close up the garage and turn the engine on,

then down you'll fall through lovely mists
as a body might fall early one morning
from a high window into love. Love,

the broken glass. Love, the scissors
and the water basin. A good way to fall
is with a rope to catch you.

A good way is with something to drink
to help you march forward.
The gold-haired girl says, Don't worry

about the armies, says, We live in a time
full of love. You're thinking about this too much.
Slow down. Nothing bad will happen.

_____________________________________________

This poem originally appeared in "Poetry" magazine. Kevin Prufer is the editor of "Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing."

Poet's Choice: "Money Talks" by Rae Armantrout

I wrote "Money Talks" in the fall of 2008 when we were hearing that the banks that had grown "too big to fail" were about to fail unless our representatives voted to give them huge subsidies. The poem really got started when I was thumbing through Vogue magazine and saw that "bondage and safari looks" were being touted that season. I thought those were some pretty interesting get-ups for the wealthy to wear as the middle class is driven towards bankruptcy. I began to imagine a personified Money sporting such styles. If you were a CEO, it might have been a good time to go on safari. Safari outfits are usually made of camouflage cloth. You might want to escape from view. On the other hand, bondage themed clothing might suggest that Money was a helpless victim, unable to help itself (or us). This vision of Money's ensembles concludes the first section. When I'd written the first part, the poem still didn't feel quite finished to me, so I let it sit for awhile. Then, not too much later, I was driving in Oakland, and I saw a billboard advertising a casino. I believe it showed an image of a roulette wheel. The only words on the billboard were the casino's name and the command, "Shut up and play!" I imagined my personified Money saying this when it was tired of lying low and being coy. Stop complaining, Money says, and get back in the endless game. You may lose your house, but the House always wins.


Money Talks

1.

Money is talking
to itself again

in this season's
bondage
and safari look,

its closeout camouflage.

Hit the refresh button
and this is what you get,

money pretending
that its hands are tied.

2.

On a billboard by the 880,

money admonishes,
"Shut up and play."

_________________________________

This poem originally appeared in the New Yorker magazine. Rae Armantrout is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, San Diego.

By Ron Charles | February 2, 2010; 9:00 PM ET Poet's Choice
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Poet's Choice: "The Story of White People" by Tony Hoagland

"The Story of White People" is one of a dozen or so poems I've written on the subject of race in America, that toxic reservoir over which our playgrounds and city halls are built. I've tried to make the poems explorations unhindered by the hedging and filling of political corrrectness or middle class Caucasian guilt. Most of the poems use a strategy of crooked speech to vocalize the deep uneasiness and confusion white Americans feel towards brown Americans; the poems try to have dark fun with the verbal taboos and truths of what one of the poems calls "Negrophobia." After all, we all know and feel a lot more than we pretend to, and our arrested speech is the essence of our arrested consciousness. In "The Story of White People," I thought I would write in the other direction, looking at what we generally feel now about the changing status of whiteness.

The Story of White People

After so long seeming right, as in
true, as in clean, as in smart,
being smart enough at least
not to be born some other color

after so long being visitors
from the galaxy Caucasia
now they are starting to seem a little

deficient; leached-out, spent, colorless;
thin-blooded, indefinite-
as in being too far and too long
removed from the original source
of whiteness;

suffering from a slight amnesia
in the way that skim milk can barely
remember the cow

and this change in status is
mysterious, indifferent, and objective
as when, at the beginning of winter,
the light shifts its angle of attention

from the mulberry to the cottonwood.
Just another change of season,
not that dramatic or perceptible

but to all of us, it feels different.

_______________________________________

Tony Hoagland, "The Story of White People" from "Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty." Copyright 2009 by Tony Hoagland. Used by permission of Graywolf Press.

This is a long post --

Poet's Choice: "Embedded in the Language" by Maxine Chernoff

"Embedded in the Language" arose from my outrage at the War in Iraq and the government policy to embed and thus restrict reporters covering it. As a child and then teenager, I was profoundly influenced by the nightly coverage of the Viet Nam War and its startling, endless line of flag-draped coffins coming home.

One of those coffins contained the remains of my cousin's husband, a young second lieutenant who was killed, as it turned out, by friendly fire, and whose wife, Barbara Sonneborn, went on to make an Oscar-nominated documentary about Viet Nam war widows, "Regret to Inform." Where were the coffins from this latest war? Where were the widows? Where were our lost soldiers, who had gone to fight, interrupting peaceful lives as mailmen, safety officers, teachers, friends, lovers, husbands and wives so that George Bush could be a "war president?"

The poem then takes on the issue of how language and images surrounding this war have been controlled by the government and how more poignant this prohibition of images and censorship of language has made the war itself. Humans want information, and when a government attempts to discourage it or twist it, they will try even harder to get at the "truth." In little scenes or vignettes, how language and information have been compromised is set against statements that interrogate this policy both politically and poetically.


Embedded in the Language

"The U.S. share of world military spending for 2006: 51%"
- Los Alamos Study Group

"I'm not a lawyer. My impression is that what has been charged thus far is
abuse, which I believe is technically different from torture."
- Donald Rumsfeld


1.
Embedded in the language
cultural proofs and tendencies
the word Brunif
to make brown or to polish.

2.
here the color, there the rubbing
interaction of text
and interpreter
never closed
bird of dawn:
a constant term.

3.
enlisted because
his mother died
he got laid off
she got convicted twice.

4.
"our national debt increased
by $2 trillion
in only five years"
(one trillion seconds
equals 31,546 years.)

5.
"Beauty is information."

6.
war coverage through
"a soda straw"
in a forty hour period
not a single story
shows people hit
by weapons.

7.
let's embed Stravinsky
let's embed aspens
let's embed history
let's embed logic.

8.
I knew a soldier
lovely in his wounds.

9.
the USO tour, said director
Wayne Newton,
featured Al Franken
dressed as Saddam Hussein,
Clint Black, Jewel and
SoulJahz, the Christian
hip hop group.

10.
dust storms gather
outside a tent
on night patrol
he listens to 50 Cent
is it multiculture yet?

11.
A figure-ground reversal
of any single aspect or facet
of holistic sensory experience
since man the symbol-maker
adjusts to anything.

12.
A California mother on TV
claims her son died
to keep her and church members
free from wearing burkas.

13.
how to make a poem
of so many terrible facts
how to re-embed
sympathy and truth.

14.
or rather un-embed
since knowing
needs a room
for quiet occupation
and sorting out of facts
white space and a reason
time and air.

15.
no coffins from this war
not allowed on the news
all desertions prosecuted
to the letter of the law.

16.
a boy from Honduras
aged eighteen
who died on February 7
citizenship granted
posthumously.

17.
"Political poems
are only the crudest
expression
of the feeling of loss,
an attempt to find
a central enemy
so that ironic tension
may be dissolved."

18.
three years to the day,
I read, "I'm reminded
of the commanders
of World War 1
who repeatedly lied
about victory over the Kaiser
as they pushed thousands of men
through the butcher shops
of the Somme,
Verdun, and Gallipoli."

19.
this too information
meant to tie on meaning
carry it on your back
use it as a shield.


19 March 2006
3rd anniversary

____________________________

By Ron Charles | February 16, 2010; 10:03 PM ET Poet's Choice
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