“Poetry” Articles

Two and a half miles: that’s how far my wife and I moved from a house where we had lived for twenty-one years to our new house. Over the two decades plus one year, we accumulated a lot of stuff. Now was the time to downsize. No time to read. No time for friends. No time to exercise. No time, no time for anything other than sorting, distributing, discarding, wrapping, packing, lifting, carrying. Rather than a long-lined Whitmanesque experience, my daily life felt more like a shorter, more tightly lined Dickinson poem.

Recently my sister alerted me to Emily Wilson’s new book of essays: Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys through Ancient Literature. I went right to the library to get it. The essays cover Sappho, Catullus, Aeschylus, and more. But I turned first to the one called “Translating the Odyssey.” It’s a long essay (sixty pages) and ambitious: Wilson’s purpose is to choose a few passages from the poem and follow each through several or sometimes all of its English translations, beginning with Chapman’s of 1616 and ending with her own.

Out of curiosity I consulted what Wikipedia has to say about this poem, and can report that Wikipedia finds it a pretty much open book, just the right thing to help tenth-graders get over their presumed dislike of or aversion to poetry. The poem is mercifully short and, according to Wikipedia, yields itself willingly to analysis.

In her superb Carnaval, Susan L. Miller’s latest poetry collection, we find the fragile intimacies of friendship and the heartbreak of their loss, as well as—among other motifs—expansive poems about Mexico’s culture and people, a country she knows well from her many travels. Mexico acts as the wellspring of Miller’s rich imagination, as in the book’s final section, Con el pincel extranjero, where we find the sequence “Birds of Mexico,” a carnivalesque tour de force drenched in particulars that go beyond showing but more toward witnessing.

Something in a literary work always remains — something heard and absorbed but not possessed, understood but not used up. When an explication is finished, the poem remains persistently and wonderfully there. I’ve closely read “Split the Lark—” many times, and I’ve realized from this ongoing experience that it contains more than I’ll ever be able to say. I couldn’t kill it even if I wanted to

I love the arts of Mexico. You can go into a city and see ancient Olmec heads in one museum, then witness extraordinary folk art in the street, and then see the work of modern and contemporary artists like Francisco Toledo or Remedios Varo or Filogonio Naxín in the local bookstore or in another museum. There’s a real appreciation for the handwork of ordinary people, and an impulse toward color and beauty everywhere. Mexicans really put that beauty into everything, high or low: home altars, oilcloth, even the little candy faces on the “bread of the dead” that my friend Delfina brought to me from Oaxaca on Día de Muertos.

Many people have written about Wendell Berry, the prolific author and agrarian advocate, since his death on August 31 this year. Berry, of course, wrote a great deal himself, leaving us much to reflect on in his many essays, poetry collections, and fiction. I’ve shared my own thoughts on his legacy elsewhere, but that assessment—like so many others—doesn’t capture the essence of the man I came to call my friend.

Scott Cairns’s latest poetry collection, Against Certainty, just published by Slant Books, is his twelfth book of poems. Cairns touches on many motifs in this new book—including “nous” (or the mind), travel, and his cancer. But for this post I want to focus on the major theme that runs through the collection: prayer.

I’d say that a good many poems in this book and previous books wrestle with prayer. I wouldn’t characterize my disposition as suggesting that prayer ever goes unanswered, but I would say that prayer as petition has come to seem a waste of time, and perhaps a waste of prayer. If prayer does anything, I’d say it offers brief moments of communion.

In John F. Dean’s poem “The Paltry Ego,” time teaches that experience impinges upon us and eludes comprehension. As children, we can build and “pilot” a boat; as we grow older, we encounter the unexpected, jolts to mind and nerve that alienate us from ourselves. Life is a long journey with twists and turns and complications, as is this poem, which is a single sentence we move through, negotiate, and seek to apprehend.

I’m enchanted by Richard Chess’s new poetry collection, The Loneliest Monk. And by the loneliest monk himself. Though not all the poems are about this (imagined) monk, I want to focus here on some that are—or at least seem to be. Chess, I should say at the start, is not a monk. But he is a practicing Jew and a poet often reaching for the mystical—qualities that his loneliest monk character shares.

In her poem “Jazz at Bradley’s,” Enid Shomer writes of “the darkness / that must be swallowed to make a song.” As we read through her latest poetry collection, we get a good sense of the darkness she has experienced in her life. She is the daughter of a cruel father. Growing up at a time when women’s roles were narrowly prescribed, she was an independent, ambitious, brilliant young woman. She has recently been living with serious health challenges. She has indeed swallowed plenty of darkness.

In his tenth volume of poetry to date—titled Sing Me a Song, She Said—acclaimed poet and biographer extraordinaire Paul Mariani (born 1940) delves into his childhood and youth in a working-class family in New York City, his evolving relationship with reading and writing, often with spiritual resonance, and—with arresting candor—the tribulations of old age.

The truth is there wouldn’t be much poetry without my faith. It all began when I was living in Beacon in a proto novitiate for young Marianists back in 1956-7. There was a poetry contest given by an order of nuns, with first prize being ten dollars. No one knew much about poetry, so I took out a book which explained scansion and wrote a sonnet focused on Good Friday. Then, at Manhattan College, poems about John the Baptist.

George Dardess’s recent post, “Imagining Mutability,” prompted me to turn to other poems about mutability. That’s one of the rewards of a good close reading: it begins a dialogue and guides us from one literary work to others. I remembered Rupert Brooke’s sonnet “Mutability,” included in 1914 and Other Poems, published in May 1915, a month after he passed away from blood poisoning aboard a hospital ship off the coast of Skyros in the Aegean Sea.

If you asked me who my favorite contemporary comic poet is, I wouldn’t hesitate a second. It’s Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003. Not that all his poems are comic—but those are the ones I keep returning to, the ones I’ll talk about in this post. Actually, comedy isn’t easy to talk about. But I think it will help if I offer you some of what I see as Collins’s favorite categories of poems.

One way I’ve found to escape or at least ease the angst that thoughts of mutability arouse in me is to check in on what others before us, and especially poets, have had to say about the word and the anxiety underlying it. Two great English poets, from very different eras, come quickly to my mind: Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) and Edmund Spenser (1552-1599).

Phyllis Wheatley’s 18th century poem piqued my curiosity about subsequent American poets of “sable race”—especially women. So I went to The Poetry Foundation website (my go-to source for poets and poems) and spent several enjoyable days searching for and reading these poets.

The Jewish poet Hayim Nahman Bialik calls upon his bird to “Sing and tell me, my little bird, / of marvels in distant places.” It’s a bit hard for me to envision the “marvels” of Israel at the moment. Like many Jewish people, I’m distraught about Israel right now. In “To the Bird,” Bialik imagines an idealized place. It’s a “land of the sun,” a place “of wonders from where / spring springs eternal,” a “land where almonds and date palms bud.”

Fortunately, after a few weeks the acute pain began to subside. Now I am returning to another obstacle, deceptively comforting, that gets in the way of my perceiving and experiencing the Divine in the work of Her creation: familiarity. Leah Goldberg’s prayer-poem, translated from Hebrew by Annie Kantar, reminds me that I am not alone in living with a dulled awareness of the amazing gift of life itself.