Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry

As with most things in life, anonymity might be a strength or a weakness, an act of courage or an act of cowardice.

Yet, away from the (real) world of social interaction, we are all anonymous, no? What, after all, is this grand seeking of self if not an anonymous light revealing, however briefly, if we are lucky, the all, the Oversoul.

Yes, you're right, this is a strange way to begin a meditation on a simple book of brief poems but there you are. Perhaps it will be something of a brief light itself.

Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry is an anonymous act of formidable courage, a shining of a dual light on one shared thing.

The book's genesis grew out of a long-time correspondence between two friends, two fellow poets. When a life event of some magnitude intruded on their lives, a spark was lit between these two friends which resulted in a lyrical exchange of brief resonant poems.

The poems in Braided Creek are printed without attribution: who wrote what is unknown.

So, friend, we might ask why should we care if the poets themselves didn't bother to sign their individual pieces?  The answer, of course, is precisely for that reason: in their anonymity we, the readers, are brought close, so very close to the source of things in the precision of the words themselves. As the poets efface ego, obliterate personality, with a wink and a nod, before us we can see the work become the Thing itself.

Turtle has just one plan
at a time, and every cell
buys into it.

 

No, this isn't haiku but its essence is pure, the essence of pure haiku, purer than the vast majority of what passes for that form today. 

Not necessarily better, but purer.

The brown stumps
of my old teeth
don't send up shoots
in spring.

Indeed, they don't, but they send up something else, do they not? Why, it takes seed right there, right there in your mind, in the very moment.

So much to live for.
Each rope rings
a different bell.

This reminds me of a lesson Joseph Campbell used to use to illustrate a fundamental concept of Buddhism and Hinduism, or the Oversoul or the Atman or whatever we are calling it this week.

In the classroom, Campbell would point to the light fixtures. We are each all as individual bulbs, our own little lights shining. And here on the wall is the switch.

And what, friend, is electricity, the energy? 

The crumpled candy wrapper
is just another flower
to the rain. 

The reader can sense how very close we are to the thing itself. Ask Cid Corman: is this is a haiku or not, if a thought like that matters at all.

I can hear him now ...

In the electric chair's harness,
one man hauls all the darkness.

I don't know what this means, per se, but I sense, I feel what it is saying, all the way to the tiny hairs on the neck of my soul.

Nothing to do.
Nowhere to go.
The moth has just drowned
in the whiskey glass.
This is heaven.

Oh, my, yes it is. Deny it at your own peril. 

I could go on and on, example after unsigned example - there are 4 poems per page in Braided Creek and there are 86 pages. These are brief, swift arrows aimed at the heart of things.

This is a perfect book to tuck in your bag, carry to the park, read at the bus stop - a bit of mobile revelation, you bring the electricity. What, you need to sit 20 minutes a day for the rest of your lives, you say, for a bit of the promised satori? Take a couple of these at the park or the bus stop, sitting in the dentist's office, or just upon rising in the morning or reclining in the evening. 

Why not? After everything, what else might you have to lose?

Today a pink rose in a vase
on the table.
Tomorrow, petals.

best,
Don

PS Get Braided Creek from an independent bookseller. Or a boxless mega-giant. One thing I can say - it was the best book I read in 2014 and I read a parcel of good books.

just touching
the cherry blossom petals
brings tears

                    Issa
                    translated by David G. Lanoue

Photo by Macao

 PPS  Click to learn how to contribute to Wednesday Haiku
 

Gary Dop's On Swearing

This week's post from American Life in Poetry has a moving poem about World War II veterans. I thought I'd pass it along ...

American Life in Poetry: Column 189

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

In celebration of Veteran's Day, here is a telling poem by Gary Dop, a Minnesota poet. The veterans of World War II, now old, are dying by the thousands. Here's one still with us, standing at Normandy, remembering.


On Swearing

In Normandy, at Point Du Hoc,
where some Rangers died,
Dad pointed to an old man
20 feet closer to the edge than us,
asking if I could see
the medal the man held
like a rosary.
As we approached the cliff
the man's swearing, each bulleted
syllable, sifted back
toward us in the ocean wind.
I turned away,
but my shoulder was held still
by my father's hand,
and I looked up at him
as he looked at the man.


American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2007 by Gary Dop. Reprinted from "Whistling Shade," Summer, 2007, by permission of Gary Dop. Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Celebrating Veteran's Day to me almost seems an oxymoron. Perhaps it is technically correct, but commemorating I believe is the finer term.

The moment captured in those last 5 lines ...


best,
Don

Tapping the Barometer, Why Buddha Sat Under the Tree, and Joe Pesci in Pittsburgh

The sad news of recent days is that the death of Hayden Carruth is reverberating through various poetic communities (no, I don't think there is only one, in practice or theory). Ed Baker was kind enough to send along notice, and point to a poem well worth sharing.

Agenda At 74
Tap barometer, burn trash,
put out seed for birds, tap
barometer, go to market
for doughnuts and Dutch
Masters, feed cat, write
President, tap barometer,
take baby aspirin, write
congressman, nap, watch
Bills vs. Patriots, tap
barometer, go to post
office and ask Diane if
it's cold enough for her,
go to diner and say "hi,
babe" to Mazie, go to
barber shop and read

Sports Illustrated, go
home, take a load off,
tap barometer, go to
liquor store for jug
(Gallo chablis), go
home, pee, etc., sweep
cellar stairs (be careful!),
write letter to editor,
count dimes, count quarters,
tap the fucking barometer ...

Hayden Carruth

This so perfectly captures a day in the life of an aging poet that it almost takes the breathe away with its understated quality and matter-of-fact resonance.

Beautiful.

Yesterday's poetry appreciation session went well, though not quite as I expected. Part of an overall package of programs for lifelong learners, the general attendance had been between 15 and 17; yesterday, there were 9. So it was cozy and comfortable. After a half hour intro, we got into the poems and folks didn't quite respond to the questions I'd prepared to stimulate discussion, so the session transmuted into more traditional class, with me riding herd all the way. Folks were much more comfortable with this and, as I pointed out various aspects of the poems (in a declarative rather than inquisitive manner), they began to respond and responded very well. Since I noticed three faces from last year, I didn't want to repeat poems I'd covered then so asked them where to start. One person wanted to hear the Ted Kooser poem ("For You, Friend"), so I told them I had two poems to lead into it and proceeded to show them how one poem directly and indirectly influenced the other. They were taken with the similarity of imagery (which the relationships are built on) and we just took off from there. They were enthused enough with the three poems ("Donal Og - Broken Vows," "Funeral Blues" by Auden, and "For You, Friend), that I decided to stretch it and go for the Shakespeare "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day"), which really spun out well from the Kooser. They loved it, particularly when I read Howard Moss's poem of the same name:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Who says you're like one of the dog days?
You're nicer. And better.
Even in May, the weather can be gray,
And a summer sub-let doesn't last forever.
Sometimes the suns too hot;
Sometime it is not.
Who can stay young forever?
People break their necks or just drop dead!
But you? Never!
If there's just one condensed reader left
Who can figure out the abridged alphabet,
-----After you're dead and gone,
-----In this poem you'll live on!

I did this in my best "drop dead" Jersey accent and they loved it - when I heard the unrestrained laughter, I knew they were enjoying poetry and, so, I'd accomplished what I came for.

One of the more enlightening moments for me came during the questions that were asked as we were wrapping things up. One person in particular asked why is it that many times when she hears poets read, on places like the NewsHour, they just sound so flat and they drone on and on. As I paused to answer, everyone in the room was either vocally assenting or nodding their heads at this observation and I realized poets are very often their own worst enemies. My response was that I'd chosen works I love and greatly admire and those kinds of works for me contain a great deal of emotion that needs to be conveyed. They are works I believe in.

Everyone seems to lament the fact that no one reads poetry anymore and yet, when we have the opportunity to put our best faces forward, we drone on and on and on. And it is not just a matter of entertainment, though this too is a factor. A woman I ran into at the library an hour after class stopped me to say how much she enjoyed the session and how moved she always is by Auden's "Funeral Blues," to the point she has difficulty listening to it, yet finds it immensely powerful even in the extreme emotion it invokes. She noted how she could never have expressed those emotions in words yet the poet had gotten it perfectly. I told her the old adage was true: we look to our poets to speak for us, they give us our own voice.

That, friends, is poetry, to be touched deeply, to be moved permanently.

If you write something, you better believe in it. And if you believe in it, when you read it spin it like the bottle you want to land on just the right spot ...

In other news, the Basho Haiku Challenge entries will be accepted up until midnight this evening. The response has been quite amazing and I'm very pleased. I finished up David Landis Barnhill's translations, Bashō's Haiku, and had intended to report on that today but am running out of space and time, so I'll postpone it until next week. Suffice to say that of the over 700 haiku, I marked 35 that grabbed me.

Eventually, when I run out of back issues to feature, I've got a couple of ideas about featuring different work here on a weekly basis. One of the ideas I mentioned previously is to showcase work from the books on the Near Perfect list (157 and counting). Though I'm not going to begin that now, I ran across a video of one of the poets on the list, the amazing and powerful and moving Etheridge Knight. Here is a video rendition of his poem, "The Idea of Ancestry."







This week's featured back issue is a special one, issue #75, from January 1996. As a milestone number, I came up with the idea to solicit poems, all to be entitled "Why Did Buddha Sit Under the Tree." I received lots of work and featured 14 poems in the issue, 13 entitled "Why Did Buddha Sit Under the Tree" (the 14th was called "The Joke" - and that's another story). So, here's a handful of the best, including the "Winner":




Why Did Buddha Sit Under the Tree
there is no tree
no Buddha
& no contest.

please go home.

C Ra McGuirt
"Winning"poem

Why Did Buddha Sit Under the Tree
Because.
Because he is.
Because he is waiting.
Because he is waiting for you.

Evans Burn

Why Did Buddha Sit Under the Tree
To learn that
the words of
the prophets are
written on
subway walls.

Alan Catlin

Why Did Buddha Sit Under the Tree
When you read Nazi books
why do you always turn
straight to the pictures?

Noelle Kocot

Why Did Buddha Sit Under the Tree
Buddha did not sit
under the tree.
The tree stood
next to Buddha.

Laura Kim

Why Did Buddha Sit Under the Tree
When two or more are gathered in my name

Marty Campbell

Best of luck and thanks to everyone participating in the Basho Haiku Contest,

Don

On Death in Western Culture

The following is the current column from American Life in Poetry. I was moved enough by the poem to register in order to be allowed to reprint the column in its entirety. I thought it was something readers of this column would find meaningful.

I was struck while reading this that when Western writers confront death, their sensibility often shifts to an Eastern tone. Obviously, we all die. Somehow in the West, we compartmentalize life to such an extent that death goes over here. When reading the great Eastern writers and poets, death seems always to be present.

None of these reflections, though sparked by his poem, have anything to do with Stuart Kestenbaum per se. They are just the not-particularly-original, though hopefully somewhat pertinent, observations of someone who is currently steeped in Eastern poetry.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------


American Life in Poetry: Column 181

Stuart Kestenbaum, the author of this week's poem,

lost his brother Howard in the destruction of the twin towers of the

World Trade Center. We thought it appropriate to commemorate the

events of September 11, 2001, by sharing this poem. The poet is the

director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts on Deer Isle, Maine.

Prayer for the Dead

The light snow started late last night and continued

all night long while I slept and could hear it occasionally

enter my sleep, where I dreamed my brother

was alive again and possessing the beauty of youth, aware

that he would be leaving again shortly and that is the lesson

of the snow falling and of the seeds of death that are in everything

that is born: we are here for a moment

of a story that is longer than all of us and few of us

remember, the wind is blowing out of someplace

we don't know, and each moment contains rhythms

within rhythms, and if you discover some old piece

of your own writing, or an old photograph,

you may not remember that it was you and even if it was once you,

it's not you now, not this moment that the synapses fire

and your hands move to cover your face in a gesture

of grief and remembrance.

Stuart Kestenbaum

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation
(www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also
supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-
Lincoln. Poem copyright © 2007 by Stuart Kestenbaum. Reprinted
from "Prayers & Run-on Sentences," Deerbook Editions, 2007, by
permission of Stuart Kestenbaum. Introduction copyright © 2008
by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser,
served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the
Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited
manuscripts.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------

best,
Don

Gerald Stern, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the Despair That Is Modern Poetry

Cover by Wayne Hogan

Well, just when I thought I had everything reasonably under control I realized I've fallen behind in replies to poetry submissions, the bread and butter of a little magazine, or at least this one. So, although I'd planned to concentrate on proofing and tweaking the layout for issues #163 & 164 this weekend, I believe I'll be concentrating more on the mentioned work at hand.

For those waiting an inordinately long amount of time (over 90 days), my apologies. I should have that corrected within two weeks.

I mentioned in one of two posts last Sunday that I have been reading Gerald Stern's new book, Save the Last Dance. I finished it up yesterday and won't comment in depth until I've gone through it again at least once more, but confess to being mildly disappointed. As is usual with most modern books of poetry, there were 3 or 4 poems that grabbed me. This is exactly opposite to my usual reaction to Stern: there are usually only 3 or 4 poems that don't grab me. But, before I get ahead of myself, I obviously have some rereading to do. I'm also reading Adam Zagajewski's new volume, Eternal Enemies. Zagajewski is another poet I usually enjoy very much and I'm having a similar reaction, though there are more than 3 good poems. Perhaps more on that front later. In the meantime, here is one of the poems by Gerald Stern that did grab me (plus an audio of Stern reading it last year):


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Death By Wind

As for those who face their death by wind
and call it by the weird name of forgiveness
they alone have the right to marry birds,
and those who stopped themselves from falling down
by holding the wall up or the sink in place
they can go without much shame for they
have lived enough and they can go click, click
if they want to, they can go tok, tok
and they can marry anything, even hummingbirds.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


I'm not sure if I'm getting a bit jaded, having a little "modern" poetry burnout, or if these are just two more examples of books that prompted my quest for books of poems that are nearly perfect. The reader contributed list is currently up to 36 books. If you'd like to make a suggestion for the list, just leave it in a comment to this post or send it in an email to lilliput review at google dot com. Meanwhile, I may find myself scurrying back to Han Shan's Cold Mountain, Basho's never ending road, or Issa's most accommodating, if decidedly disheveled, hut.

A tip of the hat goes out to Rus Bowden at The Poetic Ticker for pointing the way to last week's column by Ted Kooser at American Life in Poetry. Though I'm not much for parody, the item he posted last week by R. S. Gwynn is too good in and of itself not to share. First the much esteemed original by Gerard Manley Hopkins:


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things—
---FFor skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
-------For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnuts fall; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
__And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
_Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
__With swift, slow, sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
_________Praise him.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Here is R. S. Gwynn's Fried Beauty, from the original American Life in Poetry post:



----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fried Beauty

Glory be to God for breaded things—
_Catfish, steak finger, pork chop, chicken thigh,
___ Sliced green tomatoes, pots full to the brim
With french fries, fritters, life-flow onion rings,
_-Hushpuppies, okra golden to the eye,
____ That in all oils, corn or canola, swim

Toward mastication's maw (O molared mouth!);
__Whatever browns, is dumped to drain and dry
______On paper towels' sleek translucent scrim,
These greasy, battered bounties of the South:
------------------ Eat them.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Yes, refreshing as that is, I believe a return to Cold Mountain is in order very soon. For now, it's time to take a look at some poems from Lilliput Review #86, from January 1997. This one opened with a beauty by Mary S. Rooney (with one more to follow):


---------------------------------------------------

The wheel is geared

carved for movement, and we,
born in winter, move,
are moved forward
_____________into spring

knowing only:
this apparent fixity of seasons,
this sweet, uncertain wobble
____________________of earth.

M. S. Rooney

---------------------------------------------------

one after the other--
the last sound
the wave makes

Gary Hotham

---------------------------------------------------

"Lust For Life"

smoking a cigarette, bleached
by the tv light at 1 a.m.
watching Iggy Pop
Sufi dance across an all white
sound stage on MTV

God, i wish
my dead uncle
had lived to see
this

Mark Borczon

---------------------------------------------------

Answer from Tibet

When the wind
increases
to blizzard
and your feet
are not your
own, and your open arms
write without notion, that
is a prayer
flag, my friend

M. S. Rooney

---------------------------------------------------

Scattered diamonds
__far below the skyscrapers:
Life isn't so beautiful.

Kiyoe Kitamura

---------------------------------------------------

One final note about something I am reading and enjoying very much: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. For many years I had been scared off this title as too complex, too hard, overwhelming etc.; I've found, in fact, that for me it is just the opposite. Though character names can be a bit difficult to follow, there is a family tree at the beginning of the book that untangles any twisted skeins. This is the art of storytelling at its finest, the oral tradition in written form. Though Louise Erdrich has long been one of my favorite contemporary writers, it's taken me until now to make the connection between these two writers. Fine stuff, indeed. And, if you are still scared off, check out Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold. It is one of my favorite novels and clocks in at an unthreatening 120 pages. I don't think you'll be sorry.


Until the next go round,
Don

Mary Oliver, Pantheism, and the Big G

Cover by Kevin Friend

Lots of very interesting poetry related news this week, beginning with Mary Oliver. As something of an early preview to my posting of a review of her new book of poems, Red Bird, on Eleventh Stack (a blog from my day job), here's that post, which will be appearing next week, possibly in a slightly different form:

"Even at her most agnostic, her most atheistic, Mary Oliver was always a spiritual, even a religious, writer. Her embracing of nature is all-encompassing, recalling the preoccupation of no less a poetic figure than William Wordsworth. In recent years, as seen in her last few books, she has evinced a new found faith beyond the more general pantheism that always seemed to be just below the surface of many of her finest poems.

I have to admit, I approached this newer work with the kind of trepidation one has when hearing of a life-altering event involving a close friend; confronting a new found faith in others that one does not necessarily share can be a daunting thing, most especially when it concerns an old friend. I'm happy to report that, as may be seen in her new collection of poems, Red Bird, this faith is not only a logical extension of her previous beliefs, it in fact firmly accentuates what has come before.

Mary Oliver's wide appeal beyond the usual poetry reading community is easy to understand; her poems are rendered in simple basic vocabulary, are no less beautiful for that simplicity, and concern the every day world around us. Her perception of things is acute; she points out in nature what we all might see if we took the time and had the patience to truly look. Beyond capturing the moment, she also supplies the resonance from which meaning may flow. When she is good, she is transcendent. When she is average, she is at least always interesting. Red Bird is a volume that may be read straight through and then bears, in fact induces, repeated readings. It is cohesive in that its overarching theme is present throughout. There are more than a handful of excellent poems here. Listen to this excerpt from Straight Talk from Fox:

Don't think I haven't

peeked into windows. I see you in all your seasons

making love, arguing, talking about God

as if he were an idea instead of grass,

instead of stars, the rabbit caught

in one good teeth-whacking hit and brought

home to the den.

Highlights include this poem, along with Invitation, Night and the River, There is a Place Beyond Ambition, We Should Be Prepared, This Day and Probably Tomorrow Also, the fabulous Of Love, I am the one; well I could go on. There is even a powerful political poem, Of the Empire, that telescopes the general to the particular in a most damning fashion. If you listen closely, you may find there is a message just for you, as in the beginning of Invitation:

Oh do you have time

to linger

for just a little while

out of your busy

and very important day

for the goldfinches

that have gathered

in a field of thistles …

There is a wisdom here, the wisdom of long life, of loss, of longing, and of acceptance. But most of all there is beauty, a beauty not to be missed."

Oddly enough, while reading this book through a second time, I got to thinking once again about the idea of a near perfect volume of poems. Red Bird contains many, well, not very good poems. Yet, still and all, it is a very good collection, precisely because the inferior work in this case informs the overall collection. The overarching theme is consistent throughout and, in one sense, though obviously supplying its subject, it also strengthens its voice. Here is a little 4 line poem that perfectly captures what I try to get at in the review:



So every day

So every day
I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth
of the ideas of God,

one of which was you.



Now, if the G word puts you off, so be it; for me, the spiritual element is almost Buddhist, especially in light of Oliver's preoccupation with nature and its resonance in our lives. If you do nothing, pick this book up in your local independent shop or Borders or B & N (or, better still, your library) and read one poem: Of Love. It alone is worth the cover price (and more).

Some interesting tidbits around the web include the Village Voice reprint of an article from April 1958 written by Kenneth Rexroth on the Beats. Ted Kooser, the subject of a recent post here, is participating in a project sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and the Library of Congress entitled American Life in Poetry, which supplies "a free weekly column for newspapers and online publications featuring a poem by a contemporary American poet and a brief introduction to the poem ..." Poetry bloggers take note: at 161 columns and counting, that's a lot of presupplied content. For poetry lovers there are a lot of new poems to be exposed to, by both well and relatively unknown modern American poets.

In addition, there is a great 20 minute documentary on one of my favorite contemporary poets, Gerald Stern, entitled Gerald Stern: Still Burning, at the website Poetry Matters Now, which features a parcel of video readings and is worth a bookmark.

And, finally, in the news department, can it be true that the poetry volume that moved an entire generation, A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, is really be 50 years old? And, of course, anyone that would ask that question ... If by some chance you haven't read this one, don't hesitate; it most certainly would be on my list of the most important books of poems of the last century.

Well, believe it or not there is more, but the day job beckons. So, in closing, here are some sample poems from Lilliput Review #94 (December 1997), the cover of which appears above.


the rain
knits us
with threads
of silver

Albert Huffstickler

from Epistles

A word, once sent abroad,
flies irrevocably.

Quintus Horace

And then there is this one line gem - I do love one line poems:




celibacy, a masking forcibly redundant

Sheila E. Murphy

Finally,




Cosmoses were
swinging in the war-ruined city:
softly like now.

Kiyoe Kitamura

Till soon (or next Thursday, whatever comes first),

Don

Kooser's Valentines, Franz Wright, and Charles Simic

Had email from a local friend recommending some recent work by some of my current favorite poets. There is a new poem in the current New Yorker by the always interesting, deeply resonant Franz Wright, entitled The World of the Senses. The current Virginia Quarterly Review has 4 poems by Charles Simic featured, as well as an archive of things they have published by him, 3 of which grabbed me: An Address With Exclamation Points, Meditation in the Gutter, and House of Cards. All of them are well worth a look.

Someone I haven't connected with yet, until this month, is Ted Kooser. I'm not sure why; perhaps I had typecast him as a typical Midwestern poet, someone whose subjects and sensibilities are not things that often show up on my radar. In some recent reviews, I read about his latest collection, Valentines, and was intrigued. So when a copy came in for our "International Poetry Collection" at the library, I grabbed it. As he explains in his author's note, Kooser tells how he began sending out annual Valentine poems in 1986 to at first a select group of 50 women, the poems being printed on standard postcards. 21 years later, his list had burgeoned to 2600 and, he implies, all the printing and postage was getting to be a bit much. So the last card went out in 2007 and this book collects all the poems together, with one last one written especially for his wife.

The work in Valentines at once celebrates and transcends the genre of occasional verse. The poems are, of course, all relatively short since they were originally published on postcards and I have the feeling that different poems here will appeal to different people. I thought these two were quite good:



For You, Friend

this Valentine's Day, I intend to stand
for as long as I can on a kitchen stool
and hold back the hands of the clock,
so that wherever you are, you may walk
even more lightly in your loveliness;
so that the weak, mid-February sun
(whose chill I will feel from the face
of the clock) cannot in any way
lessen the lights in your hair, and the wind
(whose subtle insistence I will feel
in the minute hand) cannot tighten
the corners of your smiles. People
drearily walking the winter streets
will long remember this day:
how they glanced up to see you
there in a storefront window, glorious,
strolling along on the outside of time.




A Map Of The World

One of the ancient maps of the world
is heart-shaped, carefully drawn
and once washed with bright colors,
though the colors have faded
as you might expect feelings to fade
from a fragile old heart, the brown map
of a life. But feeling is indelible,
and longing infinite, a starburst compass
pointing in all the directions
two lovers might go, a fresh breeze
swelling their sails, the future uncharted,
still far from the edge
where the sea pours into the stars.



Needless to say, my sensibilities have been duly corrected and expanded. This delightful volume from the University of Nebraska Press is marvelously illustrated by Robert Hanna. If you are a Kooser fan, it is a must. If not, check it out and you might soon be.

Once again congratulations, go out to Jay Leeming; this morning The Writer's Almanac featured a wonderful reading of one of Jay's poems, Man Writes Poem. As noted previously, Jay has had 3 poems published in past issues of Lilliput Review.

Seems there is lot of poetry info this week, so here's one last note. Well worth reading is Robert Pinsky's column in Slate entitled Why Don't Modern Poems Rhyme Etc., in which he tersely answers typical questions about poetry with poems by William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Edgar Guest, Allen Ginsberg and more: no clunky exegesis for Robert! This will definitely strike a chord with (and perhaps provide a few ideas for) anyone who has taught a poetry appreciation class.

On to our tour of back issues of Lilliput. I've been struggling all morning with Blogger to get this post done and, at the moment, I can't seem to upload images so I'll eschew posting the cover right now (ah, finally got it: covers may be seen below) and go right to the featured issue, #95. #96 is a broadside by Albert Huffstickler entitled Pre-Dawn Cycle and, as such, not excerpt-able, hence the need to skip back to #95. This issue was originally published in April 1998, ten years ago this month. Here's a little taste of what was happening then:

from Poems to Eat and Say (from Octavio Paz)

Glowing butterflies:
one dreaming, one awake; all
of us tossed by wind.

Leonard Cirino

when the treetop sways
a thousand butterflies
stampede in me

William Hart

Quatrain

This moth fluttering against
the window screen. I could go on
killing 'til the end of time
and never be satisfied.

Greg Watson

And this final note from the incomparable Albert Huffstickler:

from Interim Notes

Those beautiful moments
I've sculpted from the past,
chiseling away the rubble
of conflict and sorrow.




best till next Thursday,
Don