Poem for the Weekend: Gjertrud Schnackenberg

 

The poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg was born in Washington state and studied at Mount Holyoke College, where she won the first of many poetry awards. Best known for her masterful use of prosody and blank verse, Schnackenberg's most recent book of poetry, Heavenly Questions, was an elegiac work written after the illness and death of her husband, the philosopher Robert Nozick. You can watch her read a poem from that collection here.

Signs

by Gjertrud Schnackenberg

Threading the palm, a web of little lines
Spells out the lost money, the heart, the head,
The wagging tongues, the sudden deaths, in signs
We would smooth out, like imprints on a bed,

In signs that can't be helped, geese heading south,
In signs read anxiously, like breath that clouds
A mirror held to a barely open mouth,
Like telegrams, the gathering of crowds -

The plane's X in the sky, spelling disaster;
Before the whistle and hit, a tracer flare;
Before rubble, a hairline crack in plaster
And a housefly's panicked scribbling on the air.

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Poem for the Weekend: Jose Rizal

 

Jose Rizal is a national hero in the Philippines, where he advocated peaceful resistance to Spanish rule and was executed for conspiracy in 1896. A medical doctor by training, he excelled in many arts and pursuits, including poetry. Filipino school children study his final poem, "My Last Goodbye," and his two famous novels. Nearly every town and city in the Philippines has a street named after Jose Rizal. His fascinating biography can be found here.

First Inspiration

by Jose Rizal (1861-1896)

Why falls so rich a spray
of fragrance from the bowers
of the balmy flowers
upon this festive day?

Why from woods and vales
do we hear sweet measures ringing
that seem to be the singing
of a choir of nightingales?

Why in the grass below
do birds start at the wind's noises,
unleashing their honeyed voices
as they hop from bough to bough?

Why should the spring that glows
its crystalline murmur be tuning
to the zephyr's mellow crooning
as among the flowers it flows?

Why seems to me more endearing,
more fair than on other days,
the dawn's enchanting face
among red clouds appearing? 

The reason, dear mother, is
they feast your day of bloom:
the rose with its perfume,
the bird with its harmonies.

And the spring that rings with laughter
upon this joyful day
with its murmur seems to say:
"Live happily ever after!"

And from that spring in the grove
now turn to hear the first note
that from my lute I emote
to the impulse of my love.

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Poem for the Weekend: Mary Ruefle

 

"The relationship between these two is that of the part to the whole, and in all things we have no way of ever really knowing the Whole, but we can know a part of it, and that part has to suffice. I am definitely now talking about the universe and individual lives within it, and also of the sense that every poem is just a part of something, call it a life, the poem is just one little stone, no one can see the configuration all the stones make together, but on any given day, one stone will have to suffice."

If you'd like to read more of what the poet Mary Ruefle said, you can find a fascinating interview here. Mary Ruefle is the author of fifteen books of poetry and prose, and seventy-two erasure books, which you can find explained here. And, below is one of her poems.

The Daze Poem

by Mary Ruefle

It was one of those mornings the earth seemed
not to have had any rest at all, her face dour
and unrefreshed, no particular place-- subway,
park-- expressed sufficient interest in present circumstances
though flowers popped up and tokens
dropped down, deep in the turnstiles. And from
the dovecots nothing was released or killed.
No one seemed to mind, though everyone noticed.
If the alphabet died-- even the o collapsing, the l
a lance in its groin-- what of it? The question
'krispies, flakes or loops?'-- always an indicator of
attention-- took a turn for the worse, though crumpets
could still be successfully toasted: machines worked,
the idiom death warmed over was in use. By noon,
postage stamps were half their width and worth
but no one stopped licking. Neutrinos passed,
undetected. Corpulent clouds formed in the sky.
Tea was served at four. When the wind blew off a shingle
or two, like hairs, and the scalp of the house began
to howl, not a roofer nailed it down. That was that.
When the moon came out and glowed like a night light
loose in its socket, no one was captious, cautious or wise,
though the toes of a few behaved strangely in bed--
they peeped out of the blankets like insects' antennae,
then turned into periscopes scouting to see
if the daze that was morning had actually managed to doze.                             

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Mini-Reflection: Turtles

 

I’m all about turtles lately. I guess I always have been, in some room of my mind. When I was a kid, a neighbor who babysat us had a turtle living in her back yard. Along the side of the house, where there were dense bushes and some rocks, and a trodden dirt path. But the turtle was a rare sighting. Sometimes, we looked around for him but only once in a great while would we find him exposed, maybe chewing on some grass or slowly making his way back to his corner. Her yard had an element of the wild, knowing he could be anywhere within its perimeters at any given time. I remember her telling us the turtle had been there when they bought the house, a couple of decades before I was even born. She said turtles could live to be a hundred years old, and I remember being awed by that at the time, this sand-colored being, living his simple life while tenants came and went. I wonder what happened to him?

I wrote a turtle into my most recent novel, and gave him a special relationship with one of the main characters. I think many of us writers have been drawn to the turtle as metaphor when thinking of characters. That protective shell, that seeming wisdom and zen. The long lifespan, the contemplation of which prompts us to broaden our daily preoccupations toward something grander.

 

There is an exposed rock at the northernmost end of the north lake in my neighborhood. It’s on my jogging route, so I run by it often. Once in a while, I’ll see a turtle sunning himself on its craggy surface. I always stop. A mini moment of reflection, I guess, that always centers me. But these sightings, like the times in my old neighbor’s back yard, are infrequent. Maybe once every fifty passings, maybe even less than that. Which makes today’s event extremely rare, a first-time occurrence, and I’d have to assume, maybe once-in-a-lifetime. Two turtles, basking in the sun side by side, perfectly symmetrical on that same rock. Both with wrinkled necks strained towards the sun, both shells dried in the heat, one more faded than the other but both that distinct brown/green color of common turtles. They were perfectly situated on the surface, only inches of rock around them. All sorts of metaphors came to mind, particularly the same but different, existing harmoniously. I would have loved to see how they got into position—one first, then the other? Or at the same time, in an orchestrated maneuver? And I would have loved to stay longer than the moment it took for that mini-reflection, to see what signal would prompt them to lower themselves back into the greenish water. And how that would occur—again, together, or apart? But I had to hurry off and finish my run, many things to do and many preoccupations before the next pause.

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Poem for the Weekend: Stanley Kunitz

I was surprised to find that I haven't chosen something by Stanley Kunitz as a Poem for the Weekend yet. I did blog about one of my favorite poems by him here. Kunitz attended Harvard, served in the Army during WWII, taught at several preeminent U.S. universities, and won oodles of awards for his poetry. He was named Poet Laureate in 2000, and died in 2006 at the age of 100. You can watch Mr. Kunitz read one of his poems here.

How Long is the Night

by Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006)

On the anvil of love my flesh has been hammered out.
Indifferent, in the indifferent air,
I circulate and suck the star-space in.
No one is dear to me now,
Leastly myself that sickened in the night.
I would abandon this loose bag of bones
And walk between the world's great wounds, unpitying.

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