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Washington Post Poet's Choice

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Saffron

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Re: June 21, 2009

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Thomas Hood wrote:
Saffron wrote:The Garden of Eden -- a nice place to visit, perhaps, but would you have wanted to live there? Wouldn't it have been a little boring? No conflict, no surprise, no urgency, no change, no needs.
Like Denmark.
Gee, I wonder what the Danes think! Reading Katha Pollitt's poem made me think of John Milton's Paradise Lost.
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Re: June 21, 2009

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Thomas Hood wrote:
Saffron wrote:The Garden of Eden -- a nice place to visit, perhaps, but would you have wanted to live there? Wouldn't it have been a little boring? No conflict, no surprise, no urgency, no change, no needs.
Like Denmark.
Do you have any experience with Denmark, Thomas? I ask because, from afar, the country sounds so good--the greenest country in the world, citizenry reportedly quite happy. On some recent list, Copenhagen came out as the #1 city in the world. What is it that isn't being revealed?
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Re: June 21, 2009

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DWill wrote:Do you have any experience with Denmark, Thomas? I ask because, from afar, the country sounds so good--the greenest country in the world, citizenry reportedly quite happy. On some recent list, Copenhagen came out as the #1 city in the world. What is it that isn't being revealed?
DWill, I just looked at Denmark yesterday because Frank described it (by implication) as a paradise created by atheism. Atheism does not tend to create paradises :) It's a strange place. Human association is financed by the government; that is, if BookTalk were in Denmark, it would receive a subsidy. Part of the advantage, I think, is North Sea oil. Part of it is the law-abidingness of the population. Competition seems to be actively discouraged. A garbage man works five hours a day and receives about the same compensation as a bank president. Minimal consumption is encouraged. Whether they are happy or not I couldn't determine. Suicide rate and mental illness is about the same as here, and they are so polite that if they were unhappy they probably wouldn't say so. But how much of this goody-goodness can a human being stand?

Tom
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Re: June 21, 2009

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Thomas Hood wrote: But how much of this goody-goodness can a human being stand?

Tom
Lots and lots, I hope!
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June 28, 2009

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Poet's Choice By Sarah Manguso

By Sarah Manguso
Sunday, June 28, 2009

I moved into a cabin in the foothills of the White Mountains in order to isolate myself, 11 years and several hundred miles from the memory of my 1995 diagnosis with the neurological disease chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy. Thus separated from my actual life, I thought I would be able to remember it clearly enough to write about it. During this vacation someone else cooked and delivered my meals. I ate, slept, walked, swam. The rest of the time I functioned as a memory machine, remembering and writing.

But then, in the middle of my vacation, I fell in love, and life recommenced. I had to move forward and look backward at once. The past and present interacted. My writing grew complicated.

This prose poem, a love poem, is about the summer that I lived and wrote in the present and the past.

(Editor's note: To hear Sarah Manguso reading this poem, listen to the Book World podcast.)

Hello

One says Hello to the other and the moment falls from the other moments like a pebble from dark space, and again, Hello, calling to the other as if falling onto the other from dark space, and after some hours the word itself is like the small sounds we make when we touch each other with our mouths, and Hello, Hello, and now, if one wanted to greet the other, to say I greet thee, to separate the sound of the call from the other sounds, which are not calls to the other but to the space from which the pebble falls and into which time moves in all possible directions and we do not, one could not.

This poem was originally published in the journal "Slope" (2008). Sarah Manguso's memoir, "The Two Kinds of Decay" (Picador), is now available in paperback.
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July 5, 2009

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I will have to wait a week before I can access last weeks Poet's Choice -- so, look back next week.
Last edited by Saffron on Sun Jul 12, 2009 6:22 am, edited 1 time in total.
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July 12, 2009

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Poet's Choice: 'The Going' by April Bernard

By April Bernard
Sunday, July 12, 2009

This is the first poem of my new book, "Romanticism." It marks the start of a journey, a difficult but not a hopeless one.

I was standing in front of my kitchen window, looking north (not east) at the Vermont mountains and drying dishes with a fraying cotton (not holland) cloth, when A the phrase came to me: "God and love are real, but very far away." I had bought the fabric (of many more colors than just blue and yellow) in Amsterdam more than a decade ago. I had never made it into a skirt; I cut and sewed the cloth into dish towels so I could handle it often, until it dissolved from use.

Significantly, I had made that visit to Amsterdam at a time of personal crisis. The impulse to travel, to run away from trouble, is one I know well. At the moment captured in this poem, I had been planning a trip to Istanbul. But news reports of a terrorist bombing had been filling the papers, and since I had a young son, no one thought I should travel in the Mideast. I reluctantly agreed. I think I also unconsciously feared, as the poem makes explicit, that if I ran away to exotic lands, I might never come back to the responsibilities of my life as a mother. But the aloneness that the poem explores does not get solved by travel, at least not of the outward variety.

(Editor's note: To see this poem laid out correctly on paper or on your screen, click the Print button in the Toolbox. To hear April Bernard reading this poem, listen to the Book World podcast.)
The Going

The cloth edge of certainty

has shredded down to this:

God and love are real,

but very far away.

If I go to Istanbul, will I return?

That is not one of the permitted questions.

When I go to Istanbul, how will I bear to return?

I could slip into the small streets

that lead away from the souk, then run east

to the high plain and the Caucasus --

.

It's all alone, the returning,

the going. The cloth,

a soft holland whose blocks of blue and lemon

once cheered me in a skirt,

now dries dishes. God and love

are very far away, farther even

than the mountains in the east.

April Bernard's new collection, "Romanticism," has just been published by Norton. She is also the author of three previous poetry collections. She teaches at the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars and is director of creative writing at Skidmore College.
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7/19/09

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Poet's Choice: 'Madonna and Child, Perryton, Texas, 1967' by B.H. Fairchild

By B.H. Fairchild
Sunday, July 19, 2009

This poem was triggered by a visit to the Renaissance and Baroque rooms at the Metropolitan Art Museum, and in particular by my response to the paintings of Francisco de Zurbarán. The boys in the poem have been out late on a Friday night drinking and smoking weed. Afflicted by the munchies (a common term in the late '60s, though I have no idea whether it's still current), they are at the only grocery mart in town that is still open. It is not unusual for the composition of a poem to have its own rewards, and in this one I was interested to watch a rather detailed nativity scene take shape at the close of the poem, although in this case we have, instead of the three wise men, the three idiots.


Madonna and Child, Perryton, Texas, 1967

A litter of pickups nose into Sancho's Market

south of town late Friday night rinsed in waves

of pink neon and samba music from some station

in Del Rio spilling out across the highway.

Sancho's wife dances alone behind the cash box

while her daughter, Rosa, tries to quiet her baby

whose squalls rip through the store like a weed cutter

shredding the souls of the carnal, the appetitious,

indeed the truly depraved as we in our grievous

late-night stupor and post-marijuana hunger

curse the cookie selection and all its brethren

and Al yells at Leno lost among the chips,

beef jerky, string cheese, bananas for chrissakes,

that if he doesn't stop now and forever telling

Okie jokes he will shoot his dog who can't hunt

anyway so what the hell, but the kid is unreal,

a cry ascending to a shriek, then a kind

of rasping roar, the harangue of the gods,

sirens cleaving the air, gangs of crazed locusts

or gigantic wasps that whine and ding our ears

until the air begins to throb around us

and a six-pack of longnecks rattles like snakes

in my hand. And then poor Rosa is kissing

its forehead, baby riding her knee like a little boat

lost at sea, and old Sancho can't take it either,

hands over his ears, Dios mio, ya basta! Dios mio,

so Rosa opens her blouse, though we don't look,

and then we do, the baby sucking away, plump cheeks

pumping, billowing sails of the Santa Maria

in a high wind, the great suck of the infinite

making that little nick, nick sound, Rosa

smiling down, then Sancho turns off the radio

and we all just stand there in the light and shadow

of a flickering flourescent bulb, holding

our sad little plastic baskets full of crap,

speechless and dying a little inside as Rosa

whispers no llores, no llores, mija, mijita,

no llores, and the child falls asleep, lips

on breast, drops of milk trickling down,

we can even hear it breathing, hear ourselves

breathing, the hush all around and that hammer

in our chests so that forty years later

this scene still hangs in my mind, a later work,

unfinished, from the workshop of Zurbaran.

This poem is from "Usher: Poems," by B.H. Fairchild (Norton, 2009).
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July 26, 2009

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Poet's Choice: 'Seeds' by Kevin Prufer

By Kevin Prufer
Sunday, July 26, 2009

We'd driven from our rural town to Kansas City because my fiancée had been feeling out of breath recently, had had an irregular stress test, and her general practitioner wanted her to have a couple further tests at a larger hospital. We thought we'd make a little vacation of it -- have dinner out, stay in a hotel, enjoy ourselves a bit.

"The good news," her new doctor said the next morning, "is that you're in terrific health. The bad news is you need quadruple bypass surgery right away." In the end, she spent many days in the ICU, her heart stopped twice, and it was almost a year before she felt truly healthy again.

I wrote the first draft of this poem during one of my evenings alone at home, after having spent several nights hovering around her hospital bed watching her sleep. I'd just cooked dinner for myself, and the house seemed weirdly quiet. I could hear the faucet dripping in the kitchen. I built the poem around that sensation -- the unfamiliar silences of an empty house, the miles between us, the sound of the faucet in the next room.

In general, I resist writing about myself. There are so many more interesting stories in the (often invented) lives of others. This, however, is that rare exception -- a poem born immediately of worry and despair. I thought that by writing about it I could escape my sense of desperation and get some sleep; paradoxically, I also ended up preserving it.



Seeds


The pepper on the cutting board and the seeds inside it:


a tiny congregation in a doomed church.

.


Or the sliced cantaloupe and its stringy heart --


sweet and slick, the closest thing to rot.

.


I was thinking of you when, distracted, I cut my hand


so blood pearled, then, seed-like, dripped into the sink.

.


I was thinking of the thick blue vein


where the IV goes.

.


(Or the mourner who planted his wife beneath his window.


She didn't sprout. She didn't sprout.

.


Then, one day, an onion shoot,


which he devoured.)

.


Darling, do not die tonight. The doctors are good,


the hospital quiet as a pill beneath chaff-like stars.

.


Darling, I brought you flowers and sat by your bed


until the white moon rolled behind the towers.

.


These days, the faucets won't stop dripping,


and I stand in the kitchen dreaming of nurses

.


who roam the white halls like quiet animals --


and you, in your bed, unable to call them.


"Seeds" is from Kevin Prufer's upcoming collection, "Little Paper Sacrifice." His "National Anthem" was named by Publishers Weekly as one of the best five poetry books of 2008. He is the editor of Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.
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August 2, 2009

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Poet's Choice: 'The Solipsist' by Troy Jollimore

Sunday, August 2, 2009

A friend of mine once observed that a lot of my poems -- really, a surprising number -- are about the head, or the skull, or the brain. So perhaps it was inevitable that I would eventually write a poem about a solipsist: a person who thinks that he is the only person in existence and that everything else, the entire world, is just his experience, with no independent reality of its own.

I make my living teaching philosophy, but I'm always wary of putting philosophy explicitly into my poems. Randall Jarrell once warned that "poetry is a bad medium for philosophy," and, indeed, it's very hard to write a good poem that is also philosophically interesting. But in "The Solipsist," I let myself try it -- partly because solipsism is not a position I hold. In fact, the way the poem is supposed to work is that by the time you get to the end, you realize how utterly absurd and ridiculous the position is.

The poem began, like many of my poems, with a phrase that suggested a rhythm: In this case the first stanza grew out of the line "It's all in your head," and that stanza set the formal rules for the rest of the poem. The other crucial thing was a sense of the speaker, a sense of who this philosophical madman was. Once I had that . . . Poems don't ever write themselves, really. But in the best cases, you and the poem work as partners.

THE SOLIPSIST

Don't be misled:
that sea-song you hear
when the shell's at your ear?
It's all in your head.
That primordial tide --
the slurp and salt-slosh
of the brain's briny wash --
is on the inside.
Truth be told, the whole place,
everything that the eye
can take in, to the sky
and beyond into space, lives inside of your skull.
When you set your sad head
down on Procrustes' bed,
you lay down the whole universe. You recline
on the pillow: the cosmos
grows dim. The soft ghost
in the squishy machine, which the world is, retires.
Someday it will expire.
Then all will go silent
and dark. For the moment, however, the black-
ness is just temporary.
The planet you carry
will shortly swing back from the far nether regions.
And life will continue --
but only within you.
Which raises a question that comes up again and again,
as to why
God would make ear and eye
to face outward, not in?

"The Solipsist" was originally published in Poetry Magazine. Troy Jollimore teaches philosophy at California State University, Chico.
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