Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, February 1, 2009; BW12

In this cold month with its holiday for lovers, I offer this poem from Gwendolyn Brooks. The granddaughter of a runaway slave, Brooks was anointed into verse when her one-time schoolteacher mother took her to see Langston Hughes, who steered her to modernists like Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and e.e. cummings. No doubt their poems influenced her, as did the urban, streetwise Chicago school of writing. The way the speaker below is wholly absorbed by her lover echoes the work of metaphysical poet John Donne; her oddball punctuation recalls Emily Dickinson's poems. But Brooks is her own phylum.
To Be in Love

To be in love

Is to touch things with a lighter hand.

In yourself you stretch, you are well.

You look at things

Through his eyes.

A Cardinal is red.

A sky is blue.

Suddenly you know he knows too.

He is not there but

You know you are tasting together

The winter, or light spring weather.

His hand to take your hand is overmuch.

Too much to bear.

You cannot look in his eyes

Because your pulse must not say

What must not be said.

We he

Shuts a door --

Is not there --

Your arms are water.

And you are free

With a ghastly freedom.

You are the beautiful half

Of a golden hurt.

You remember and covet his mouth,

To touch, to whisper on.

Oh when to declare

Is certain Death!

Oh when to apprize

Is to mesmerize,

To see fall down, the Column of Gold,

Into the commonest ash.

The freedom his absence brings is ghastly, but revealing your ardor might reduce the romance to ash. In such a slender string of words, Brooks chronicles the shyness of a schoolgirl crush that paralyzes lovers of every age and gender.

"To Be in Love" is from "Blacks" by Gwendolyn Brooks (Third World Press, 1994 ). Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently "Sinners Welcome."

Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, February 8, 2009; BW12

For Valentine's Day, consider Ezra Pound's tender rendition of Li T'ai Po's 8th-century poem "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter." (I memorized this in junior high while mooning behind an oblivious boy's blond and buzz-cut scalp.) Pound's famously fouled-up translation galled Chinese scholars. I'm told it contains misreadings akin to finding "flower" in the word "flour." But he freed the poem from antique verse that rocked through pentameter like a wild pony. Look at how W.J.B. Fletcher transformed Li Po's delicacy into bad Longfellow:

When first o'er maiden brows my hair I tied,

In sport I plucked the blooms before the door.

You riding came on hobbyhorse astride,

And wreathed my bed with greengage branches o'er.

Blot that racket from your mind and listen to Pound in the mask of a young wife forced into marriage but grown into sweet longing:

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead

I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.

You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,

You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.

And we went on living in the village of Chokan:

Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.

I never laughed, being bashful.

Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.

Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,

I desired my dust to be mingled with yours

Forever and forever and forever.

Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed,

You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling

eddies,

And you have been gone five months.

The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.

By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different

mosses,

Too deep to clear them away!

The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.

The paired butterflies are already yellow with August

Over the grass in the West garden;

They hurt me. I grow older.

If you are coming down through the narrows of the river

Kiang,

Please let me know beforehand,

And I will come out to meet you

As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

The repetitions along with the primordial figures (horse, flower) start the poem in a child's crayon garden. But by the end, the paired butterflies echo the fleeting joy of the young couple and the devotion all Valentiners crave.

"The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter" is from "The Selected Poems of Ezra Pound" (New Directions, 1957). Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently "Sinners Welcome."

Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, February 15, 2009; BW12

Master of wit Paul Muldoon is an Irish-born whiz kid with a Pulitzer and a Princeton post, but he's neither schoolmarm nor show-off. He concocts efficient explosions that flash up into bright constellations and hang shining.

In this clever pairing of sonnets, a father waits for his daughter to finish a rehearsal. The speaker recalls himself as a teenager trudging from a performance or debate practice to his impatient mother. But Muldoon doesn't take her to task. He distracts us from such unpleasantries, just as the boy might have steered his disgruntled mother with debate topics.

How naturally the poem ripens at the end. In some ways, she devoured her son, and yet he seems to have tamed her. He exhales her warmth even now. This melding of the generations gives me gooseflesh.
THE WINDSHIELD

1.

My breath is furring the windshield

where I sit in my windcheater,

engine shut off, jolted by a rear view mirror's jolt,

and wait for my daughter

to be released from her rehearsal.

A production of Much Ado

in which she's taking the part of Ursula.

All at once I recognize that shadow

coming towards me as my own, all at once

recognize the Cathedral car park

where my mother has sat

while I've been impressed by The Pirates of Penzance

or held forth in a debate, coming through the dark

to find her turned wrong side out.

2.

To find her turned wrong side out

like a birch relieved of its bark,

a custom relieved of its consuetude,

would be to avail myself of this opportunity to remark

on the pros or cons

of the death penalty or animal captivity

or integrated education.

This house proposes that we are slaves of duty.

This house proposes that we not sully

the memory of a parent,

least of all one who sends a judder

through a child,

unleashing rather that satin-lined grizzly,

that self-same man-eater

whose breath is furring the windshield.

"The Windshield" reprinted with permission from Paul Muldoon.

Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, February 22, 2009;



For those unlucky in romance, I offer this embittered, anti-love poem by Alan Dugan to relieve the sting of last week's heart-spattered holiday. "Love Song: I and Thou" takes its mocking title from Martin Buber's philosophical treatise Ich und Du, which posits that only human relations lend life meaning. By loving others, the great 20th-century thinker contends, we engage with God -- our perpetual spouse, our Thou. Against that backdrop, Dugan's poem opens with a man in a shakily framed house, the life he has inherited or been born intoor married into.

LOVE SONG: I AND THOU

Nothing is plumb, level, or square:

the studs are bowed, the joists

are shaky by nature, no piece fits

any other piece without a gap

or pinch, and bent nails

dance all over the surfacing

like maggots. By Christ

I am no carpenter. I built

the roof for myself, the walls

for myself, the floors

for myself, and got

hung up in it myself. I

danced with a purple thumb

at this house-warming, drunk

with my prime whiskey: rage.

Oh I spat rage's nails

into the frame-up of my work:

it held. It settled plumb,

level, solid, square and true

for that great moment. Then

it screamed and went on through,

skewing as wrong the other way.

God damned it. This is hell,

but I planned it, I sawed it,

I nailed it, and I

will live in it until it kills me.

I can nail my left palm

to the left-hand crosspiece but

I can't do everything myself.

I need a hand to nail the right,

a help, a love, a you, a wife.

Usually, a grouse of this length, so unwaveringly cranky, would grate, but Dugan's wit keeps the poem progressing from line to line. As his ire cranks up, so does the outrageousness of the building project. By the end, in a side-winding manner, Dugan admits that he's built his own misery. He's in charge of this mess -- aren't we all?

A sad day for me. It has happened, Book World is no more. I can not tell if the Poet's Choice column will still run or not. Keep an eye on this thread, I will post as soon as I know anything. Apparently, some of the columns and reviews that had been part of Book World will now appear throughout the week in different sections of the newspaper.

Saffron,
Acc. to the Post last Sunday, Poet's Choice will be one of the features available online. I don't know if you want to try that and keep showing it to us here (is that legal?), but anyway thanks very much for for making this a feature of the poetry forum.
DWill

DWill wrote:Saffron,
I don't know if you want to try that and keep showing it to us here (is that legal?)
DWill

Do we really want to ask that question. I have wondered about it -- don't know.

Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, March 1, 2009; BW31

Stephen Dobyns's whimsical poem about a restless householder consulting his dog on how to escape ordinary life makes me laugh out loud. But the end delivers a knife twist to kill off the unexamined life. How do we resolve the need for comfort with desires that press us in wild directions? Sometimes like this:
How To Like It

These are the first days of fall. The wind

at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,

while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns

is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,

the desire to get in a car and just keep driving.

A man and a dog descend their front steps.

The dog says, Let's go downtown and get crazy drunk.

Let's tip over all the trash cans we can find.

This is how dogs deal with the prospect of change.

But in his sense of the season, the man is struck

by the oppressiveness of his past, how his memories

which were shifting and fluid have grown more solid

until it seems he can see remembered faces

caught up among the dark places in the trees.

The dog says, Let's pick up some girls and just

rip off their clothes. Let's dig holes everywhere.

Above his house, the man notices wisps of cloud

crossing the face of the moon. Like in a movie,

he says to himself, a movie about a person

leaving on a journey. He looks down the street

to the hills outside of town and finds the cut

where the road heads north. He thinks of driving

on that road and the dusty smell of the car

heater, which hasn't been used since last winter.

The dog says, Let's go down to the diner and sniff

people's legs. Let's stuff ourselves on burgers.

In the man's mind, the road is empty and dark.

Pine trees press down to the edge of the shoulder,

where the eyes of animals, fixed in his headlights,

shine like small cautions against the night.

Sometimes a passing truck makes his whole car shake.

The dog says, Let's go to sleep. Let's lie down

by the fire and put our tails over our noses.

But the man wants to drive all night, crossing

one state line after another, and never stop

until the sun creeps into his rearview mirror.

Then he'll pull over and rest awhile before

starting again, and at dusk he'll crest a hill

and there, filling a valley, will be the lights

of a city entirely new to him.

But the dog says, Let's just go back inside.

Let's not do anything tonight. So they

walk back up the sidewalk to the front steps.

How is it possible to want so many things

and still want nothing. The man wants to sleep

and wants to hit his head again and again

against a wall. Why is it all so difficult?

But the dog says, Let's go make a sandwich.

Let's make the tallest sandwich anyone's ever seen.

And that's what they do and that's where the man's

wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator

as if into the place where the answers are kept --

the ones telling why you get up in the morning

and how it is possible to sleep at night,

answers to what comes next and how to like it.

"How To Like It" is from "Velocities: New and Selected Poems, 1966-1992," by Stephen Dobyns (Viking, 1994).

Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, March 8, 2009;

With its change to a Web-only feature, Poet's Choice is evolving. We'll be asking a different poet each week to share with us a poem he or she has written. Mary Karr, who has been our eloquent columnist since March 2008, starts us off on this new format. -- The Editors

The heartbroken so often write poetry, but there's damn little in poetic history about heartbreak's recovery. For me it's a spiritual process in which I reconnect with the human family, and that's done through prayer. I also adore reading small, intensely morbid stories by Isaac Babel. "Konkin" opens with a group of Red Cavalry soldiers chopping up Poles, then "hugging each other with hatchets." Such were my starting points when I wrote this poem.
RECUPERATION FROM THE SUNK LOVE THROUGH THE AEGIS OF CHRIST AND ISAAC BABEL

If you spend all night reading Babel and wake on an island

metropolis on your raft bed under a patent leather sky

with the stars pecked out, you may not sense

the presence of Christ, the Red Cavalry having hacked up

all those Poles, the soldiers hugging each other

with their hatchets. This morning, my ex-man

is a caved-in box of disposable razors to ship back.

He wore a white Y on his baseball cap. Night

was a waterfall down his face.

Marry me meant, You're a life-support system

for a nice piece of ass; meant, Rent

this space. Leaving the post office, I enter

the sidewalk's gauntlet of elbows. All around me,

a locust buzz as from the book of Job. Yet I pray, I

pray: Christ, my Lord, my savior,

and my good brother, sprinkle me

with the blood of the lamb. Which words

make manifest his buoyancy in me.

If the face of every random pedestrian is prayed for,

then the toddler in its black pram

gnawing a green apple can become baby Jesus.

And the swaggering guy in a do rag idly tossing an orange

into the crosswalk's air might feel Heaven's winds

suck it from his grasp as offering.

Maybe the prospect of loss -- that potential emptiness

granted his hands -- lets him grin so wide at me.

His gold teeth are a sunburst.

When the scabby man festooned in purple rags

shoulders an invisible rifle to shoot him, he pirouettes,

clutching his chest. Light applause follows

his stagger to the curb. The assassin bows.

These are my lords, my saviors, and my good brothers.

Plus the Jew Isaac Babel, who served the Red Calvary,

yet died from a bullet his own comrade chambered.

That small hole in his skull

is the pit on the map we sailed from.

Poet's Choice: 'Lady Freedom Among Us'

By Rita Dove
Sunday, March 15, 2009;

I read this poem at the ceremony commemorating the 200th anniversary of the United States Capitol and the restoration of the Statue of Freedom to the Capitol dome on October 23, 1993. It was first published in the Congressional Record of the same day.
LADY FREEDOM AMONG US

don't lower your eyes

or stare straight ahead to where

you think you ought to be going

don't mutter oh no

not another one

get a job fly a kite

go bury a bone with her oldfashioned sandals

with her leaden skirts

with her stained cheeks and whiskers and heaped up trinkets

she has risen among us in blunt reproach she has fitted her hair under a hand-me-down cap

and spruced it up with feathers and stars

slung over one shoulder she bears

the rainbowed layers of charity and murmurs

all of you even the least of youdon't cross to the other side of the square

don't think another item to fit on a tourist's agendaconsider her drenched gaze her shining brow

she who has brought mercy back into the streets

and will not retire politely to the potter's field having assumed the thick skin of this town

its gritted exhaust its sunscorch and blear

she rests in her weathered plumage

bigboned resolutedon't think you can ever forget her

don't even try

she's not going to budge no choice but to grant her space

crown her with sky

for she is one of the many

and she is each of us