Poem for the Weekend: Marianne Moore

 

Before Marianne Moore became a poet, she was a teacher, then an assistant at the New York Public Library, where she began to meet other Imagist poets. Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. Moore drew much inspiration from the natural world, especially animals. A new collected edition of her poetry was released this year.

 

Talisman

 

by Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

 

Under a splintered mast,
torn from ship and cast
              near her hull,
a stumbling shepherd found
embedded in the ground,
              a sea-gull
of lapis lazuli,
a scarab of the sea,
            with wings spread—
curling its coral feet,
parting its beak to greet
            men long dead.

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Poem for the Weekend: Frank Bidart

The poet Frank Bidart's career has spanned almost fifty years. He's the recipient of many accolades and awards, most recently, this year's National Book Award. More about his writing here and here.

 

Visions at 74

 

by Frank Bidart 

 

                                            

The planet turns there without you, beautiful.

Exiled by death you cannot

touch it. Weird joy to watch postulates

lived out and discarded, something crowded

inside us always craving to become something

glistening outside us, the relentless planet

showing itself the logic of what is

buried inside it. To love existence

is to love what is indifferent to you

you think, as you watch it turn there, beautiful.

World that can know itself only by

world, soon it must colonize and infect the stars.

You are an hypothesis made of flesh.

What you will teach the stars is constant

rage at the constant prospect of not-being.                        

                      •

 

Sometimes when I wake it's because I hear

a knock. Knock,

Knock. Two

knocks, quite clear.

I wake and listen. It's nothing.

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Poem for the Weekend: Chris Forhan

Chris Forhan is an award-winning poet and a professor at Butler University in Indianapolis. His memoir, My Father Before Me, was published in 2016 and tells the story of the author's coming of age during the 60s and 70s, and of losing his father to suicide. Forhan writes of finding solace in poetry. Poems, he believes, relay "a sense of openness, of receptive attention to a life that enchants and baffles.” You can find more information about his writing here.

Gouge, Adze, Rasp, Hammer

by Chris Forhan

So this is what it's like when love
leaves, and one is disappointed
that the body and mind continue to exist,

exacting payment from each other,
engaging in stale rituals of desire,
and it would seem the best use of one's time

is not to stand for hours outside
her darkened house, drenched and chilled,
blinking into the slanting rain.

So this is what it's like to have to
practice amiability and learn
to say the orchard looks grand this evening

as the sun slips behind scumbled clouds
and the pears, mellowed to a golden-green,
glow like flames among the boughs.

It is now one claims there is comfort
in the constancy of nature, in the wind's way
of snatching dogwood blossoms from their branches,

scattering them in the dirt, in the slug's
sure, slow arrival to nowhere.
It is now one makes a show of praise

for the lilac that strains so hard to win
attention to its sweet inscrutability,
when one admires instead the lowly

gouge, adze, rasp, hammer--
fire-forged, blunt-syllabled things,
unthought-of until a need exists:

a groove chiseled to a fixed width,
a roof sloped just so. It is now
one knows what it is to envy

the rivet, wrench, vise -- whatever
works unburdened by memory and sight,
while high above the damp fields

flocks of swallows roil and dip,
and streams churn, thick with leaping salmon,
and the bee advances on the rose.                         

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Poem for the Weekend: Cecilie Løveid

 

One of the most celebrated writers in modern Norway, Cecilie Løveid writes prose, plays and poetry, but is known as a "genre transgressor." In short, she makes her own way. More information about this writer here.

 

 

THE MORNING WOMAN

 

by Cecilie Løveid

 

There is no doubt that there is a body
inside the music
The music would have made love with her
if it could
don’t you think?
If she were not a woman I mean
if she were music
Would she have made love with him if he weren’t music?
She didn’t throw herself out the window
when the music stopped
The morning woman
waits for the continuation
waits for the music
waits for a sign
Would she really have loved him if he were a man
and not music?
Where shall she find him when the music stops
other than deep inside herself
There where she is
The morning woman

 

MORGENKVINNEN

 

Det er ingen tvil om at det er en kropp
inne i musikken
Musikken ville elsket med henne
hvis den kunne
tror du ikke?
Hvis ikke hun var kvinne mener jeg
hvis hun var musikk
ville hun elsket med ham hvis han ikke var musikk?
Hun kastet seg ikke ut vinduet
da musikken stanset
Morgenkvinnen
venter på fortsettelsen
venter på musikken
venter på et tegn
Ville hun virkelig elsket ham hvis han var en mann
og ikke musikk?
Hvor skal hun finne ham når musikken slutter
annet enn dypt inne i seg selv
Der hvor hun er
Morgenkvinnen

 

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Poem for the Weekend: W.B. Yeats

I had a hard time choosing a poem today; I don't know why. Too many thoughts crowding in, too much to do. So I'll give you this classic, still good after all this time.

When You Are Old

by W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

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Poem for the Weekend: Ronald Stuart Thomas

 

Considered to be one of the most important modern Welsh poets, Ronald Stuart Thomas was an ordained Anglican priest, and much of his poetry reflects his time serving the farming population of rural, rugged Wales. Often compared with Robert Frost, "Thomas is making a universal statement... This pared-down existence, in a land of ruined beauty belonging to the past, is more human than any educated sophistication. Or perhaps one should say, it is more truly symbolic of the human predicament."

You can find more information about Thomas and his life and work here.

A Day In Autumn

by Ronald Stuart Thomas (1913-2000)
 
It will not always be like this,
The air windless, a few last
Leaves adding their decoration
To the trees’ shoulders, braiding the cuffs
Of the boughs with gold; a bird preening

In the lawn’s mirror. Having looked up
From the day’s chores, pause a minute,
Let the mind take its photograph
Of the bright scene, something to wear
Against the heart in the long cold.

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Poem for the Weekend: John Ashbery

This week, many people are sharing their favorite lines or poems written by John Ashbery, one of our very best poets, who passed on September 5th at the age of ninety. He had a long and prolific career, and touched a great many lives; find his biography here.

The New Higher

by John Ashbery (1927-2017)

You meant more than life to me. I lived through
you not knowing, not knowing I was living.
I learned that you called for me. I came to where
you were living, up a stair. There was no one there.
No one to appreciate me. The legality of it
upset a chair. Many times to celebrate
we were called together and where
we had been there was nothing there,
nothing that is anywhere. We passed obliquely,
leaving no stare. When the sun was done muttering,
in an optimistic way, it was time to leave that there.

Blithely passing in and out of where, blushing shyly
at the tag on the overcoat near the window where
the outside crept away, I put aside the there and now.
Now it was time to stumble anew,
blacking out when time came in the window.
There was not much of it left.
I laughed and put my hands shyly
across your eyes. Can you see now?
Yes I can see I am only in the where
where the blossoming stream takes off, under your window.
Go presently you said. Go from my window.
I am in love with your window I cannot undermine
it, I said.

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Poem for the Weekend: Maya Angelou

A Brave And Startling Truth

by Maya Angelou

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth

And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms

When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil

When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse

When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world

When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear

When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.

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Poem for the Weekend: Jane Hirshfield

I recently watched this documentary about the Buddha, which features many speakers but I recognized the poet Jane Hirshfield immediately, because I had recently flagged one of her poems for this feature. Kismet, I guess, especially because this poem speaks to me quite loudly today. Hirshfield has received many accolades for her poetry and she's also an essayist, a translator, and a student of Zen Buddhism who spent three years in monastic practice. I love what she says here comparing writing poems to Buddhist practice, and I'd also highly recommend her poem "On the Fifth Day," which she read at the March for Science on April 22 of this year. But for this space, here's this one:

The Weighing

by Jane Hirshfield

The heart's reasons
seen clearly,
even the hardest
will carry
its whip-marks and sadness
and must be forgiven.

As the drought-starved
eland forgives
the drought-starved lion
who finally takes her,
enters willingly then
the life she cannot refuse,
and is lion, is fed,
and does not remember the other.

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.                         

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Poem for the Weekend: James Baldwin

This week marked what would have been the 93rd birthday of the poet, novelist, essayist and social critic James Baldwin. Extensive biographical information here, including some wonderful videos about his life and times. And here you can read some of his memorable quotes.



Untitled
                                            

 by James Baldwin

 

                                            

  Lord,

              when you send the rain

              think about it, please,

              a little?

      Do

              not get carried away

              by the sound of falling water,

             the marvelous light

                on the falling water.

          I

              am beneath that water.

              It falls with great force

              and the light

Blinds

              me to the light.

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Poem for the Weekend: Kenneth Mackenzie

The Australian poet and novelist Kenneth Ivo Brownley Langwell (Seaforth) Mackenzie was a character, and his colorful biography is well worth a read. Some excerpts: 

"at Guildford Grammar School, he took no interest in sport and studied only when he felt inclined."
"wherever Mackenzie was, 'wild comedy and wild adventures tended to break out'."
"He was strong, muscular and blonde, and immensely attractive to certain women."

Sadly, Mackenzie's life deteriorated, in large part due to a drinking problem. In his early forties, he accidently drowned in a creek while bathing.

Caesura

by Kenneth Mackenzie (1913-1955)

Sometimes at night when the heart stumbles and stops
a full second endless the endless steps
that lead me on through this time terrain
without edges and beautiful terrible
are gone never to proceed again.

Here is a moment of enormous trouble
wen the kaleidoscope sets unalterable
and at once without meaning without motion
like a stalled aeroplane in the middle sky
ready to fall down into a waiting ocean.

Blackness rises. Am I now to die
and feel the steps no more and not see day
break out its answering smile of hail all's well
from east full round to east and hear the bird
whistle all creatures that on earth do dwell?

Not now. Old heart has stopped to think of a word
as someone in a dream by far too weird
to be unlikely feels a kiss and stops
to praise all heaven stumbling in all his senses...
and suddenly hears again the endless steps.

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Poem for the Weekend: Jody Gladding

Jody Gladding lives in Vermont and teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Art. She has also translated almost thirty works from French. More biographical information here.

Blue Willow

by Jody Gladding

A pond will deepen toward the center like a plate
we traced its shallow rim my mother steering
my inner tube past the rushes where I looked
for Moses we said it was a trip around the world
in China we wove through curtains of willow
that tickled our necks let's do that again
and we'd double back idle there lifting
our heads to the green rain
swallows met over us later I dreamed
of flying with them we had all the time
in the world we had the world
how could those trees be weeping?

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Poem for the Weekend: Charles Wright

Charles Wright was named United States Poet Laureate in 2014. Born in Tennessee, he's an Army veteran, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and a winner of the National Book Award. A more comprehensive biography can be found here.


Sitting at Night on the Front Porch

by Charles Wright

I’m here, on the dark porch, restyled in my mother’s chair.
10:45 and no moon.
Below the house, car lights
Swing down, on the canyon floor, to the sea.

In this they resemble us,
Dropping like match flames through the great void
Under our feet.
In this they resemble her, burning and disappearing.

Everyone’s gone
And I’m here, sizing the dark, saving my mother’s seat.
 

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Poem for the Weekend: Susan Mitchell

                                               
 
"Right now in America we are witnessing a paradigm shift in poetry, and while I think this is happening for all the reasons I have just mentioned, there is still another, maybe the most important reason: the poet's assertion of innerness, of mind, of psyche at a time when innerness is threatened by nearly all aspects of contemporary American lifestyle. Innerness refuses to be a sound byte on television. Innerness refuses to speak up at a huge poetry festival. Innerness demands that the reader slow down, take the time, pay attention. Innerness demands that the reader's attentiveness be equal to the attentiveness of the poet and the attentiveness of the poem." --Susan Mitchell

More about this acclaimed poet here.

The Dead

by Susan Mitchell

At night the dead come down to the river to drink.
They unburden themselves of their fears,
their worries for us. They take out the old photographs
They pat the lines in our hands and tell
our futures, which are cracked and yellow. Some
dead find their way to our houses. They go up to the
attics. They read the letters they sent us. insatiable
for signs of their love. They tell each other stories.
They make so much noise they wake us as they did
when we were children and they stayed up drinking
all night in the kitchen.

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Poem for the Weekend: Tracy K. Smith

 

Tracy K. Smith is our newest Poet Laureate of the United States. She's the author of three books of poetry and a memoir, and is the director of Princeton University's creative writing department. Here's an NPR article about her, with a link to hear her read one of her poems.

 

I Don't Miss It

by Tracy K. Smith


But sometimes I forget where I am,
Imagine myself inside that life again.

Recalcitrant mornings. Sun perhaps,
Or more likely colorless light

Filtering its way through shapeless cloud.

And when I begin to believe I haven't left,
The rest comes back. Our couch. My smoke

Climbing the walls while the hours fall.
Straining against the noise of traffic, music,

Anything alive, to catch your key in the door.
And that scamper of feeling in my chest,

As if the day, the night, wherever it is
I am by then, has been only a whir

Of something other than waiting.

We hear so much about what love feels like.
Right now, today, with the rain outside,

And leaves that want as much as I do to believe
In May, in seasons that come when called,

It's impossible not to want
To walk into the next room and let you

Run your hands down the sides of my legs,
Knowing perfectly well what they know.

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Poem for the Weekend: Alice Oswald

 

Last night, one of the most lucrative awards in poetry was announced in Toronto. The Griffin Poetry Prize is awarded to two poets--one Canadian and one international--and this year, the prize went to Jordan Abel and Alice Oswald, who lives in Devon, England. This poem is the first in her award-winning collection, Falling Awake. News story about her win here.

A Short Story of Falling

by Alice Oswald

It is the story of the falling rain
to turn into a leaf and fall again

it is the secret of a summer shower
to steal the light and hide it in a flower

and every flower a tiny tributary
that from the ground flows green and momentary

is one of water’s wishes and this tale
hangs in a seed-head smaller than my thumbnail

if only I a passerby could pass
as clear as water through a plume of grass

to find the sunlight hidden at the tip
turning to seed a kind of lifting rain drip

then I might know like water how to balance
the weight of hope against the light of patience

water which is so raw so earthy-strong
and lurks in cast-iron tanks and leaks along

drawn under gravity towards my tongue
to cool and fill the pipe-work of this song

which is the story of the falling rain
that rises to the light and falls again

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Poem for the Weekend: Robley Wilson

Robley Wilson writes poems, short stories and novels and has worked as a writing teacher and editor. He lives in Florida. Here is a link to a short podcast that discusses this poem.

I Wish in the City of Your Heart

I wish in the city of your heart 

you would let me be the street 

where you walk when you are most 

yourself. I imagine the houses: 

It has been raining, but the rain 

is done and the children kept home 

have begun opening their doors. 

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Poem for the Weekend: Denis Johnson

The literary world is mourning Denis Johnson today. He was a poet, a novelist and a playwright, and winner of the National Book Award in 2007 for his novel, Tree of Smoke. Of his poetic influences, Johnson claimed "My ear for the diction and rhythms of poetry was trained by—in chronological order—Dr. Seuss, Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, the guitar solos of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, and T.S. Eliot."

Johnson passed away yesterday, at the age of 67. Biographical information available here.


A Poem about Baseballs


by Denis Johnson (1949-2017)

          

for years the scenes bustled   

through him as he dreamed he was   

alive. then he felt real, and slammed

awake in the wet sheets screaming   

too fast, everything moves

too fast, and the edges of things   

are gone. four blocks away

a baseball was a dot against   

the sky, and he thought, my   

glove is too big, i will

drop the ball and it will be   

a home run. the snow falls   

too fast from the clouds,   

and night is dropped and

snatched back like a huge

joke. is that the ball, or is

it just a bird, and the ball is

somewhere else, and i will

miss it? and the edges are gone, my

hands melt into the walls, my   

hands do not end where the wall   

begins. should i move

forward, or back, or will the ball

come right to me? i know i will   

miss, because i always miss when it

takes so long. the wall has no   

surface, no edge, the wall

fades into the air and the air is   

my hand, and i am the wall. my   

arm is the syringe and thus I

become the nurse, i am you,   

nurse. if he gets

around the bases before the   

ball comes down, is it a home

run, even if i catch it? if we could   

slow down, and stop, we

would be one fused mass careening   

at too great a speed through

the emptiness. if i catch

the ball, our side will

be up, and i will have to bat,   

and i might strike out.

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Poem for the Weekend: Georgia Douglas Johnson

 

Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880-1966) was an African-American poet, one of the earliest African-American female playwrights, and part of the Harlem Renaissance. In 2009, she was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. Her biography is here.

 

The Heart of a Woman

 

by Georgia Douglas Johnson

 

The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,

As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on,

Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roam

In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.

The heart of a woman falls back with the night,

And enters some alien cage in its plight,

And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars

While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.

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Poem for the Weekend: Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) was a an American poet, writer, and editor, and the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. "Limited" is from his first collection Chicago Poems. More about Sandburg here.

Limited

by Carl Sandburg

I am riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains
     of the nation.
Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air
     go fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people.
(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men
     and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall
     pass to ashes.)
I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he
     answers: "Omaha."

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