vasko popa | ted hughes | poetry is

Photo by Norbert Blei

POETRY DISPATCH #379 | July 24, 2012

Editor’s Note: It was a restless night. Though I had three or four or more other books going, none of them spoke at this hour in the morning, flaunted their covers, made note of the various placements of their bookmarks (beginning, middle, end) or said: “Continue.” “Read me NOW!” “Only 20 more pages to the end…”

Instead I got up from my chair, roamed the bookshelves, saw a book titled POETRY IS, discovered it was written by Ted Hughes (wondered just what it was all about)…realized I had not read Hughes in sometime…saw that the book was published in 1970…(with a receipt revealing a Chicago purchase)…wondering now if I had ever even read the book—but there, some of my underlining…a tell-tale sign I was here before…then settled into my chair again to see what POETRY IS is all about.

Instructional. It looks like a helpful book for poets starting out or stuck. It looks like it might benefit those uncreative teachers teaching creative writing workshops who are searching for somebody else’s ideas to teach writing, instead of exploring the depth of their own experience and techniques. The Table of Contents includes: CAPUTURING ANIMALS, WIND AND WEATHER, WRITING ABOUT PEOPLE…etc. With lots of good example from established poets, including: Elizabeth Bishop, Miroslav Holub, Theodore Roethke, Eudora Welty, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Etc. and, of course, plenty of poems by Ted Hughes.

Actually, it’s a pretty okay book. I’m glad I rediscovered it—if, for no other reason to remind myself: I DON’T NEED TO BUY ANY MORE BOOKS. Everything I will ever need is here. I have over 3000 of them on my shelves, some never read, others read and forgotten, some to be reread every few years…not to mention all the incredible little mags and small press publications (of every shape and size including mimeographed and Xeroxed pages) by some of the best writers in the world—most of whom will never find a national audience, a big publisher, a faithful audience of more than 50 readers (most of them friends)…writers and words destined for obscurity. YOU need (WE need) to keep these writers alive by bringing them back to life in our own libraries, by reading this significant, almost invisible literature that keeps the fields fertile. (I will return to my shelves a little later and rescue one of these writers from obscurity myself—for a half hour or so.)

BUY NO MORE BOOKS!

When I open the Hughes book, what do I immediately find but “The Small Box” written by an old, long lost (from my consciousness) Serbian poet-friend, Vasko Popa. And in the intro to the book, written by Hughes, what did I underline over 50 years ago but a passage on ‘what poetry is”.

Later the next afternoon. neither heeding or remembering my own advice…I find myself online with a bookstore…ordering a book of Vasko Popa poems…a copy of STONE ARABIA by Dana Spiotta…another copy of Stanley Kunitz’s, THE WILD BRAID (hard back) because I just gave mine to a friend…THE GENTLE INSURRECTION by Doris Betts, ZONA by Geoff Dyer, ALMOST THERE by Nuala O’Faolain…

Hopeless, utterly hopeless…I can’t afford these!… I don’t have time enough…

Which is precisely why I need them. — Norbert Blei

The Small Box

The small box gets its first teeth
And its small length
Its small width and small emptiness
And all that it has got

The small box is growing bigger
And now the cupboard is in it
That it was in before

And it grows bigger and bigger and bigger
And now has in it the room
And the house and the town and the land
And the world it was in before

The small box remembers it childhood
And by overgreat longing
It becomes a small box again

Now in the small box
Is the whole world quite tiny
You can easily put it in a pocket
Easily steal it easily lose it

Take care of the small box

vasko popa

The struggle truly to possess his own experience, in other words, to regain his genuine self, has been man’s principal occupation, wherever he could find leisure for it, ever since he first grew this enormous surplus of brain. Men have invented religion to do this for others. But to do it for themselves, they have invented art—music, painting, dancing, sculpture, and the activity that includes all these, which is poetry.

Because it is occasionally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will unlock the doors of all those many mansions inside the head and express something—perhaps not much, just something—of the crush of information that presses in on us from the way a crow flies over and the way a man walks and the look of a street and from what we did one day a dozen years ago. Words that will express something of the deep complexity that makes us precisely the way we are, from the momentary effect of the barometer to the force that created men distinct from trees. Something of the inaudible music that moves us along in our bodies from moment to moment like water in a river. Something of the spirit of the snowflake in the water of the river.

Something of the duplicity and the relativity and the merely fleeting quality of all this. Something of the almighty importance of it and something of the utter meaninglessness. And when words can manage something of this, and manage it in a moment of time, and in that same moment make out of it all the vital signature of a human being—not of an atom, or of a geometrical diagram, or of a heap of lenses—but a human being, we call it poetry.

TED HUGHES

[From POETRY IS by Ted Hughes, Doubleday, 1970]

lawrence ferlinghetti | i am waiting

Photo by Norbert Blei

POETRY DISPATCH #378 | July 4, 2012

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

I Am Waiting

I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Second Coming
and I am waiting
for a religious revival
to sweep thru the state of Arizona
and I am waiting
for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored
and I am waiting
for them to prove
that God is really American
and I am waiting
to see God on television
piped onto church altars
if only they can find
the right channel
to tune in on
and I am waiting
for the Last Supper to be served again
with a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth
without taxes
and I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed
and I am anxiously waiting
for the secret of eternal life to be discovered
by an obscure general practitioner
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting
to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and tv rights
sold in advance to the natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am awaiting retribution
for what America did
to Tom Sawyer
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
youth’s dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other up at last
and embrace
and I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder

[ from A Coney Island of the Mind. Copyright © 1958 New Directions, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti]

william stafford | purifying the language of the tribe

Man and Woman by Edvard Munch

POETRY DISPATCH No. 377 | July 1, 2012

WILLIAM STAFFORD

PURIFYING THE LANGUAGE OF THE TRIBE

Walking away means

“Goodbye.”

 

Pointing a knife at your stomach means

“Please don’t say that again.”

 

Leaning toward you means

“I love you.”

 

Raising a finger means

“I enthusiastically agree.”

 

“Maybe” means

“No.”

 

“Yes” means

“Maybe.”

 

Looking like this at you means

“You had your chance.”

[from:THE DARKNESS AROUND US IS DEEP]

vera pavlova | heaven is not verbose: a notebook

POETRY DISPATCH No. 376 | June 20, 2012

VERA PAVLOVA

Heaven is Not Verbose: A Notebook

• My writing: hard boiled. My life: scrambled soft.

• An elderly poet called me “the most beautiful woman in the world” because he could not recall my name.

• Mandelstam: “Poetry is the certainty of being right.” Brodsky: “Poetry is the school of uncertainty.” I am not certain about any assertion.

• Poetry should be written the way adultery is committed: on the run, on the sly, during the time not accounted for. And then you come home, as if nothing ever happened.

• Pick a piece of wood floating in the river and follow it down the current with your glance, keeping the eyes constantly on it, without getting ahead of the current. This is the way poetry should be read: at the pace of a line.

• Went to bed with an unfinished poem in my mouth and could not kiss.

• Inspiration: when I have confidence in myself.

• –I will never use makeup as long as I live, and then at the funeral parlor they will put it on me
  –Not if you expressly forbid it in your will.
  –Why should I? Let them: for once in my life I will look pretty.

• To write in spite of everything, even when generally speaking there is nothing to spite.

• To help a poem hatch, I went to get some groceries. Paid the cashier, got my change, came home with a finished poem and no groceries.

• How do I feel about people who do not understand my poetry? I understand them.

• Being well-known means knowing almost nothing as to who knows you and what they might know about you.

• Suddenly you realize that only what you have put into poems can be considered lived through. That is how you become a poet. And at that point you begin, consciously or otherwise, living the kind of life that is fraught with poetry. That is how you cease being human. The former happens abruptly, the latter gradually, both irrevocably.

[From: POETRY, April, 2012

Vera Pavlova was born in Moscow. She is the author of seventeen collections of poetry and five opera librettos. Her first collection in English is IF THERE IS SOMETHING TO DESIRE, Knopf, 2010]

karla huston | page 5 | spring 2012 number 14

POETRY DISPATCH #375 | May 31, 2012

Karla Huston
WHAT TO WISH ON
PAGE 5

Editor’s Note: It’s good to see two favorite Wisconsin writers, poet Karla Huston. and poet/writer/publisher, R.Chris Halla, come together in this latest PAGE 5, Spring 2012, Number 14.

Halla has been publishing his unique Page 5 on-and-off / occasionally / whenever-the-spirit-moves, finances allow, for going on twenty years now. I think Gary Busha’s, THE OL’ MAN (another little beauty) was the last in 2009.

Fold a 17×12 inch sheet of quality paper in half, fold it again, and there you have it: 5 pages, front cover, back cover (Halla’s own drawings usually/perfectly gracing the cover and inside), two pages of poems on the first opening, and as many poems as you can get on the full opening.

Karla packs all that space with a sure sense of poetry-self and a command of ordinary/extraordinary language that makes even hurtful love worth living for, knowing as only poets do, what’s good for you.

Did I say two favorite writers? Make that three. One of Wisconsin’s finest poets, Mariann Ritzer, provocatively pens her praise (beyond ‘blurb’) for Karla’s work on the whole back page.

What a joy these poems, what a perfect package everything and everybody coming together in five pages. What a deal: $3.00. –Norbert Blei

PAGE 5
R. Chris Halla, E&P
W6175 Aerotech Dr.
Appleton, WI 54914

BLACKBERRY BRANDY

The first time I drank it,
I thought it was cough syrup,
it was so sticky sweet and biting.
After prom, my boyfriend offered
a sip while we sat in his car,
a ’49 Ford with a huge bench seat
perfect for making out.
He tried to get fresh–me heated
and woozy–but even then
I was not going down
that road, his blackberry tongue
in my mouth, hands slipping
into something lacy.
Later and down from my brandy high
I combed Grecian curls from my hair,
each fat coil unfurled–until it was finished.
Clearly I was finished with my boyfriend
because by then he’d taken off,
and I was there with girlfriends
who were in far worse shape.
I never drank blackberry again,
though, I confess to sloe gin,
the crimson drizzle tasting worse
than brandy going down
and coming up, l learned to like
little shorties at a quarter a pop,
to dance in the flash of blacklights,
There was a war going on
in my head and in a place I’d never been,
but in two years, the boys in my class,
many, would be gone. And my guy—
off serving his stint and that car
with its itchy seats–gone,
and my taste for brandy replaced
by beer and a new boyfriend to please,
a new set of rules to swallow.

MOST OF ALL

He’s got it right, the friend who wrote
about a woman wearing a man’s shirt,
the way she can pull his scent to her
and feel his arms around her again.
I think a man likes to see a woman
dressed in his shirt: the sleeves
dangling and the buttons and holes
that go together backwards, the stupid
grin on his face when she tells him
she’s going to pee, and he asks to watch.
She wraps the shirt more tightly
tries to fit her body into every
stitch and seam. She likes the way
the shirt holds her, so soft and so manlike:
that, and the sigh of his breath
in every thread, Yes, that most of all.

A Note On What To Wish On

by Mariann Ritzer

I want to fail in love with poetry the same way I’ve always fallen in love with men–quickly. Karla Huston’s seven unencumbered poems in this collection let me do just that. And then these poems take me on a journey off the interstate and onto the backroads, the country roads where I can hear the wonderful sounds of assonance and consonance in lines and phrases that take me up and down hills, around curves — quickly, slowly. And, as with falling in love, I want some surprises — the kind that make me go back and realize it was the craft, it was each poem’s attention to detail, each poem’s emotional veracity that sustained me.

It’s important to read these poems in sequence first. You don’t want to miss the narrative these seven gems tell collectively about love and sex (and the abyss between). You don’t want to miss how these things can masquerade for each other when you are in the throes of blackberry brandy or wearing a man’s shirt and nothing else or falling painfully out of love while listening to Rod McKuen’s “divine sorrow of words.”

When you’ve read them all, go back and find the moon’s chalky face, dandelions taking flight, the deep dreams of love. Take the slow country road. You’ll fall in love all over again like I did. You’ll know What To Wish On.

seamus heaney | digging

POETRY DISPATCH #374 | May 26, 2012

SEAMUS HEANEY

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

[from: OPEN GROUND: Selected Poems 1966-1996]