"i can make do lord i can make do"

27 April 2022: I first heard Quraysh Ali Lansana's poetry on this episode of Poetry Off the Shelf back in 2008. I bought They Shall Run that day. 

Today, I got to meet him in person and hear him read it. It was amazing. Hearing him read "hole" brought me right back to reading the poem for the first time.

"Phillis Reimagined"

26 September 2020: Catching up on the Poetry Off the Shelf podcast today and really enjoyed this episode. Added The Age of Phillis to my reading list.

"I Come From Love"

19 July 2020: Kind of a rough and strange day here, but I listened to this really good episode of the Poetry Off the Shelf podcast on my walk this morning. It's a lovely conversation between host and guest. Nikky Finney's discussion of her work, her father's love for her, and the importance of depicting Black joy is just so moving.

"Let's have an old-world chat / about the original action items"

18 January 2020: Quiet day here. Took a long walk early to beat the bad weather, but otherwise have been inside, cleaning, doing laundry, getting work done, and thinking, thinking, thinking.

The snow was basically a no-show, but it is pretty icy out there (and let's go ahead and let that "pretty" do double-duty, as the tree branches take on a thin clear covering). So at home I've been and at home I'll stay.

Currently thinking, thinking, thinking about this Matthew Zapruder poem, which I just heard him read on the Poetry Off the Shelf podcast. I get a real kick out of something he talks about in the podcast: that the language of business and corporate culture fascinates him and kind of delights him in poetry. He notes, "I mean, it’s not mocking to me. I adore specific language. The more specific and arcane, sometimes the better." I've always felt this way, too, like, for instance, when I overhear half a phone conversation in an airport.

"Sparrow, What Did You Say?"

3 January 2020: I've been getting a fair amount accomplished these past few days, though there is still plenty of time for thinking Big Thoughts and all that. And some of that thinking (most of it?) is connected to thoughts about work, productivity, getting things done. I'm acutely aware that my life taking the shape it has has meant space for certain things that ordinarily might have been filled by other things. Anyway, this poem by Ada Limón, which I heard on the Poetry Off the Shelf podcast this morning, speaks to some of those ideas. I find it quite moving, particularly the way it pays attention to silence, freedom, and images, yet also remains a bit ambivalent about the larger questions at work.

“Sparrow, What Did You Say?”
Ada Limón

A whole day without speaking,
rain, then sun, then rain again,
a few plants in the ground, newbie
leaves tucked in black soil, and I think
I’m good at this, this being alone
in the world, the watching of things
growing, this older me, the she in
comfortable shoes and no time
for dishes, the she who spent
an hour trying to figure out a bird
with a three-note descending call
is just a sparrow. What would I even
do with a kid here? Teach her
to plant, watch her like I do
the lettuce leaves, tenderly, place
her palms in the earth, part her
dark hair like planting a seed? Or
would I selfishly demand this day
back, a full untethered day trying
to figure out what bird was calling
to me and why.

"The Garden We Share"

30 November 2019: “… a joyless world is one in which we do not acknowledge or engage each other’s pain, you know?” –Ross Gay

I listened to this episode of the Poetry Off the Shelf podcast today while doing some late fall/early winter yard work. Honestly, this is one of my least favorite chores every year—cold and depressing. But listening to this episode which is about, among other things, gardening, joy, and human connection, made the work go faster.

"Shattering The Blue Velvet Chair"

21 July 2017: “Well, who else is gonna do it?...When I think back to those days I think of this ferment, this activity, in people’s kitchens and living rooms…[They were women who said] ‘We’re not gonna wait. We are going to recognize ourselves and each other.’” –Joan Larkin, in the latest episode of the Poetry Off the Shelf podcast. I blogged about a previous episode here.

"A Change of World, Episode 2: Books that Broke Down Barriers"

3 May 2017:

"We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear." --Adrienne Rich, "Diving into the Wreck"

As I took a long walk this morning, I really enjoyed listening to this episode of Poetry Off the Shelf, which features great discussions of Plath, Sexton, Rukeyser, Lorde, and Rich. Something about my mind this morning latched especially onto Rich and this amazing poem. I feel like I get it more and more every time I read it, though "getting it" is ultimately sort of not the point. I guess what I mean is that you are never really going to understand the wreck itself, but that process of diving in and really looking around--that I get more and more.

"11 Years of Poetry Out Loud"

16 October 2016: I caught up on the "Poetry Off the Shelf" podcast this morning and found myself charmed by this episode on the Poetry Out Loud project. It's just sweet and fun to hear students recite and talk about reciting poetry.

"Your Village"

Grateful to the Poetry Off the Shelf Podcast for introducing me to this poem. So perfect for these challenging times.

"Your Village"
Elana Bell

Once in a village that is burning
      because a village is always somewhere burning

And if you do not look because it is not your village
      it is still your village

In that village is a hollow child
      You drown when he looks at you with his black, black eyes

And if you do not cry because he is not your child
      he is still your child

All the animals that could run away have run away
      The trapped ones make an orchestra of their hunger

The houses are ruin      Nothing grows in the garden
      The grandfather’s grave is there      A small stone

under the shade of a charred oak      Who will brush off the dead
      leaves      Who will call his name for morning prayer

Where will they — the ones who slept in this house and ate from this dirt — ?

"Nurture"

14 March 2014: I am grateful to the Poetry Off the Shelf podcast for this great episode on Maxine W. Kumin, who died earlier this year. The poem below really speaks to me. (Click the title link for audio of Kumin introducing and reading the poem).

"Nurture"

From a documentary on marsupials I learn

that a pillowcase makes a fine

substitute pouch for an orphaned kangaroo.

I am drawn to such dramas of animal rescue.

They are warm in the throat. I suffer, the critic proclaims,

from an overabundance of maternal genes.

Bring me your fallen fledgling, your bummer lamb,

lead the abused, the starvelings, into my barn.

Advise the hunted deer to leap into my corn.

And had there been a wild child—

filthy and fierce as a ferret, he is called

in one nineteenth-century account—

a wild child to love, it is safe to assume,

given my fireside inked with paw prints,

there would have been room.

Think of the language we two, same and not-same,

might have constructed from sign,

scratch, grimace, grunt, vowel:

Laughter our first noun, and our long verb, howl.

Wives in the Avocados

The latest episode of the "Poetry Off the Shelf" podcast is pretty terrific. Marjorie Perloff and Curtis Fox discuss "A Supermarket in California." It's a poem I know well and love. Give it a listen.

"It's That Time"

I came across the poem below while listening to the Poetry off the Shelf Podcast. W.S. Di Piero recently won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. You should listen to the interview with him.

This particular poem speaks to an experience I know well: listening to the silence and sounds of the night.

"It's That Time"

W.S. Di Piero

The silence of night hours

is never really silent.

You hear the air,

even when it doesn’t stir.

It’s a memory of the day.

Nothing stirs. Memory lags.

No traffic hushing up

and down tricky hills

among the camphor trees.

No foghorns, no streetcars’

shrilling phantoms before

they emerge from tunnels.

These absences keep us alert.

No rain or street voices,

nobody calling to someone else,

Hannah, you walk the dog

tonight yet or what?

Only certain things to hear:

The sexy shifting of trees,

the refrigerator buzzing

while Cherubino sings

the best of love is enthusiasm’s

intense abandon, a voice

in song that preys on no one

and is unconscious of its joy.

 

[Audio version of the poem here.]

"The Garage Sale as a Spiritual Exercise"

Thanks to the "Poetry Off the Shelf" podcast, I recently discovered the work of Tom Disch. This terrific little poem has stuck with me:

"The Garage Sale as a Spiritual Exercise"

Once someone loved this piece of junk

If only for a moment at the mall

With its wrappings intact

And its price so much reduced.

You need me, it whispered,

And he couldn't disagree.

So he bought it, the way he bought

Everything he'd ever been sold,

In the belief that it would do the job.

And it did, for the longest time,

And never broke down or wore out

And in fact has outlasted him,

Because here it is, a sickly blue,

In the basement of the Methodist Church,

And now it means to have you.

You sneer at it and think: No way.

You can see only its tackiness,

The virus invisible back at the mall

Which now blots out all its viable features

Like triumphant acne. You don't see

The years of loving drudgery,

The promises fulfilled.

It needs you now, don't turn away.

Take it to the lady and ask what it costs.

Don't be proud. Remember the Beatitudes

And who gets the kingdom of heaven.

I really love this one, too.

Lucille Clifton

Ever since I heard about her death on February 13, I've been meaning to write a post about the amazing poet Lucille Clifton. Then, the other day, I was catching up on some podcasts and came across this terrific tribute from Poetry Off the Shelf. Most of the podcast a reairing of a 2007 Curtis Fox interview with Clifton.

There's great material here, well worth ten minutes of your time: first off all, you get such a wonderful sense of Clifton as a person. She's funny, eloquent, and inspiring. She says that she started writing poems as a way of answering back to Emily Dickinson (!). When asked when she realized she could be a professional poet, she answers that she's still kind of waiting to find that out. She makes the point that when her first book of poems was published, her children were 7, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1. How did she find time to write with six little kids? "Well, I did what I had to do...I started in my head. I didn't write poems down until they were nearly done...Today it's called multi-tasking...then it was just being a mother and doing what one had to in the way that one had to do it."

She reads four poems, "'oh antic god,'" "jasper texas 1998," "homage to my hips," and "won't you celebrate with me."

She and Curtis Fox discuss "jasper texas 1998" in some detail, since it is less "life-affirming" than some of her other poems. Clifton gives us a richer sense of her poetic purpose when she says "I was not put here to write pretty things," but to write about life, good and bad. She also points to the poetry's endurance in the face of violence and pain: "after something like that happens [the murder of James Byrd], that I continue to write is affirming, that poetry continues to come to me."

About "homage to my hips," she states, "I am a luxury-sized woman...In the United States...we like all kind of luxury-sized things, except women, which is very annoying." Too funny. Incidentally, about a week ago, I was talking to a colleague about a seminar she will participating in about "beauty" and I went right to this poem. I love what she says here about beauty--how she challenges the dominant standards of beauty and celebrates her own. Gotta love her response to Fox's question: "Was [the poem] a response to the feminist movement?" She laughs and says, "No, it was a response to my big hips!"

She also asserts, "I am an American poet." That's a pretty cool assertion for a woman so often called an "African-American poet" or an "African American woman poet" to make. The latter two labels do matter, of course, and are worth discussing and embracing but, as we've talked about in my Ethnic American Literature class this semester, they also threaten to cordon off writers into restrictive boxes. At one point, she states, "I am interested in writing about what it means to be a human and ways to do that with grace and courage." What a woman. What a poet. Give the recording a listen. You won't be disappointed.

From the Fishouse...

One more poetry post for today, this one a gem you can find at "From the Fishouse." Although I first heard this poem on the "Poetry Off the Shelf" podcast, I have been learning more about "From the Fishouse," an audio archive of emerging poets, for several weeks now. You see, our department is hiring someone in the field of poetry and poetics this year and, as a result, I've been reading lots of application packets from perspective applicants. Lots of these folks are poets and literary scholars and several of them have poems at Fishouse, which has brought me to the site to have a listen.

Anyway, check out this poem by Tyehimba Jess. For the full experience, though, you've got to listen to the audio recording. It will knock your socks off. A note about the form: it's an example of stichomythia in which alterating lines (or in this case, half lines) are spoken by alternating characters. That's pretty essential to understanding the poem. The scene: 1934's MLA convention in Philadelphia, where the scholar Alan Lomax had taken the blues musician known as Lead Belly to perform. You can find more background on the people in the poem here and here.

"The Colonel" by Carolyn Forche

On my drive up to Long Island, listening to the "Poetry off the Shelf" podcast, I found myself blown away by the poem I'll paste below. I'll also link to the longer article about documentary poetry that accompanies it. I am a bit skeptical about the label "documentary poetry," but it is an interesting article nonetheless.

Anyway, here's the poem (some of the formatting gets messed up in blogger--the line breaks look wonky--check out the original here):

The Colonel

by Carolyn Forché

WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true. I was in his house. His wife carried

a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went

out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the

cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over

the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English.

Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to

scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On

the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had

dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for

calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of

bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief

commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was

some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot

said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed

himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say

nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries

home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like

dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one

of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water

glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As

for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck them-

selves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last

of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some

of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the

ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

May 1978

Amazing, right? That image of a bag of ears will stay with me.

Here's Philip Metre''s take on the poem (taken from the article I've linked to above):

"Carolyn Forche’s years in El Salvador (1978–81) working as a human rights activist led to this poem, in which a poet visits a colonel who lives a privileged but barricaded existence in his country. Forche’s poem, written in prose, offers itself as a documentary retelling. It ominously begins: 'What you have heard is true.' Yet this poem is interesting precisely because it contains both a documentary veneer and plenty of hints of literary artifice. In other words, it suggests the highly fictive nature of the life the colonel leads behind his walled compound, as well as the literary aspect of all documentary poetry. In the poem, the moon itself 'swung bare on its black cord over the house,' as if it were an interrogation lamp or a stage prop."

Terrance Hayes

Sigma Tau Delta is sponsoring another poetry reading at the Blue Moon Cafe tonight, and I'm thinking of reading this poem (I've pasted the whole thing below, too), one I stumbled across on a recent road-trip while I was listening to the wonderful "Poetry Off the Shelf" podcast. The lines "But to rescue a soul is as close/ as anyone comes to God" seem to be the most beautiful lines I've heard in some time--especially in reference to a man raising a child who isn't his own. The last lines are just as lovely.

The Same City

by Terrance Hayes

For James L. Hayes

The rain falling on a night

in mid-December,

I pull to my father’s engine

wondering how long I’ll remember

this. His car is dead. He connects

jumper cables to his battery,

then to mine without looking in

at me and the child. Water beads

on the windshields, the road sign,

his thin blue coat. I’d get out now,

prove I can stand with him

in the cold, but he told me to stay

with the infant. I wrap her

in the blanket, staring

for what seems like a long time

into her open, toothless mouth,

and wish she was mine. I feed her

an orange softened first in my mouth,

chewed gently until the juice runs

down my fingers as I squeeze it

into hers. What could any of this matter

to another man passing on his way

to his family, his radio deafening

the sound of water and breathing

along all the roads bound to his?

But to rescue a soul is as close

as anyone comes to God.

Think of Noah lifting a small black bird

from its nest. Think of Joseph,

raising a son that wasn’t his.

Let me begin again.

I want to be holy. In rain

I pull to my father’s car

with my girlfriend’s infant.

She was eight weeks pregnant when we met.

But we’d make love. We’d make

love below stars and shingles

while her baby kicked between us.

Perhaps a man whose young child

bears his face, whose wife waits

as he drives home through rain

& darkness, perhaps that man

would call me a fool. So what.

There is one thing I will remember

all my life. It is as small

& holy as the mouth

of an infant. It is speechless.

When his car would not stir,

my father climbed in beside us,

took the orange from my hand,

took the baby in his arms.

In 1974, this man met my mother

for the first time as I cried or slept

in the same city that holds us

tonight. If you ever tell my story,

say that’s the year I was born.

In the podcast, Hayes talks about his father hearing this poem at one of the poet's readings, and about how the two men had never before discussed the fact that he wasn't his biological dad, although it wasn't a secret. Afterwards, he explains, his father simply said, "Like that poem, man."