Lucille Clifton: Blues in the Night

National Poetry Month seems to have spilled over into May as I'm still getting "Poem-A-Day" emails and it's a good thing, too. Since there was, at best, a handful of poems worth writing home about, it was refreshing to see this powerful, moving, mysterious piece by Lucille Clifton, one of our finest bringers of the word:

sorrows

who would believe them winged
who would believe they could be

beautiful who would believe
they could fall so in love with mortals

that they would attach themselves
as scars attach and ride the skin

sometimes we hear them in our dreams
rattling their skulls clicking

their bony fingers
they have heard me beseeching

as i whispered into my own
cupped hands enough not me again

but who can distinguish
one human voice

amid such choruses
of desire

Lucille Clifton

Here is a video of Clifton reading two poems, "Aunt Jemima" and "Afterblues" at the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival:







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Today is the anniversary of the passing of blues harp great, Paul Butterfield. Here he works out on the classic Charles Brown version of "Driftin' Blues."

the night is long
my bottle, empty
my house, set apart

Issa
translated by David Lanoue

best,
Don

Robert Hass Reads Issa, Thoreau Grinds Away & Damned Baseball Haiku

Cover by John Bennett

Ran across a number of interesting pieces this week, including a video of Robert Hass reading Issa haiku at the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival. This short reading (less than 2 minutes) of 9 poems perfectly captures the playfulness and humor that endears Issa to so many. In addition, it a a model of how to perform haiku, no easy task. It misses the immense sadness of Issa, the other dimension that contributes to his immortality, but that was not the point of this reading as may be readily seen. This reading is part of a larger series entitled Poetry Everywhere, which includes such poets as Charles Simic, Lucille Clifton, Sharon Olds, and Robert Frost.

Fine, fine stuff. I've made it a permanent link in the Issa section of the sidebar.

In Monday's post, I mentioned The Blog of Henry David Thoreau; here is another gem from that journal, entitled Grinding Away.

Mary Karr has recently taken over the Poet's Choice column in the Washington Post and it has taken me a little time to warm up to her style and tastes. A recent post in which she began by admitting she never liked Emily Dickinson did the trick; she mentioned the anecdote that has long been making the rounds that you can sing almost any Dickinson poem to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas." Try it with Because I could not stop for Death.

Hmn.

Her latest column takes on something I just can 't abide: baseball haiku. It's not the fault of the haiku; I can't stand baseball fiction, baseball short stories etc. (n.b.: I am a big baseball fan). However, in her column covering the recent publication of Baseball Haiku: American and Japanese Haiku and Senryu on Baseball, she quotes the work of George Swede, among others. Congratulations to George, one of our finest purveyors of the haiku form. He ably proves why in the two poems quoted in the article:


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empty baseball field
a dandelion seed floats through
the strike zone

video ball game
through knotholes in the old fence
evening sunbeams

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Now, there are a couple of baseball haiku that even I like. The first is simply perfect and the use of the single word "evening" in the second has me on my back waiting for my tummy to be scratched (and you thought you could never really please an editor).

This week's selection of poems from a past issue of Lilliput Review takes us back to #89, July 1997. As the summer season begins, here are a couple of seasonal works from back then:


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Tentative Summation

A poem is ocean -
without shore.

Tim Scannell

in my hand--
the rock smoothed
by part of the Pacific Ocean

Gary Hotham

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And two by the late Joseph Semenovich:


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narcissi

i present
whoever i am
both subject and object

and just like narcissus
how unlucky can you get
the pond became

the verb
he drowned
himself in

my step-father's paintings

the black rocks
the green frothy water breaking over them
the sky pulled apart like the innards of a pillow
one screaming gull

outside
the heavy trucks/the grinding
gears/the chug-a-lug
the way the world

is

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best,
Don


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