Category Archives: books poetry lit

Wish I Had a River

books poetry lit December 18, 2014 Leave a comment

I miss you the way I miss mooring docks and bright blue boats

and the fine frizzled fray of a slip knot; or a wooden bowl
worn smooth by the daily spoon and cloth,
all the ways we did and didn’t cotton.

It’s on the frozen Thames I sometimes dream you,
skating your way around apple carts, hand-presses,
coal-heaped sleds. Once I saw your beautiful bald head
as you handed your cap to an old woman, limping, fast, after her dog.

That day we flew over the Potomac, you said, here,
take this; and it wasn’t a matter of life or death
but the clamor of their conversation as I pulled
back or pushed forward on the yoke

like the honeysuckle branch you brought close to our faces
that night we climbed two fences to be alone. You said, here,
smell this; and when you let go,
I heard the sound loss makes—the way a thing going away slices

the air. Maybe it wasn’t a dog the old woman was chasing
but a fissure edged with ice;
and though she spent her whole life not knowing you,
she made, within her bony fist, your woolen cap her last soft thing.

-Annette Oxindine, Waccamaw

Vote for the Next Poet Laureate of the Upper Peninsula

books poetry lit December 16, 2014 Leave a comment

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You can vote now for the next Poet Laureate of the Upper Peninsula! Nominees were publicly chosen and are being publicly voted for on the Great Lakes of Commonwealth Letters website.

Nominees are (sample poems linked): Marty Achatz, Elinor Benedict, Eric Gadzinski, Kathleen Heideman, Jonathon Johnson, Beverly Matherne, Janeen Rastall, Ron Riekki, Jillena Rose, Andrea Scarpino, and my talented friend Saara Myrene Raapana.

You can vote for anyone, but for the record, you should vote for Saara.

Vote now!

IMPROVISATION ON THE TIMES DEC. 1, 2014

books poetry lit December 13, 2014 Leave a comment

The week’s first paper after Mark Strand died.
He wrote, To close one’s eyes is to see the giant
World that is born each time the eyes are closed.
The almost All that is there, without yourself.
The almost Nothing — the I — that strains to see it.
It’s not despair, it’s the comfort of the dark.

Here in the mortal paper, Hong Kong police
Have “thrust into” the pro-democracy camp.
An 18-year-old repairing a barricade says,
“I think the government will ignore us again.”
In the U.S. House the Speaker implies the same.
Getting to work: a variant of despair.

In Sports, before the Rams game, five black players
Stood with hands raised above their heads, a gesture
That “has become a symbol of this case” —
The case of 18-year-old Michael Brown,
Unarmed, shot dead by a white cop who resigned.
We close our eyes to remember, or reach a note.

Eyes closed to think open again on Business:
Here, in “The Media Equation,” the paper
Itself considers the offices going dark:
Cutbacks, layoffs, buyouts. At another paper,
Reporters asked to deliver the paper paper —
The fading pulp-gray iris I scorn and crave.

-Robert Pinsky, New York Times

Poetry: A Spokesperson Said Thoughts and Prayers Go Out

books poetry lit December 9, 2014 Leave a comment
Out like what? Whispers
in a tin can tied with yarn
a thousand miles long
to the can of a woman, her
ear desperately pressed
to its emptiness? Like a loon’s
song transmitted by Morse?
Can you fathom the miles
of murky ocean that whale
must sing through? Did you know
some people believe
all sounds ever made
are still present, hovering
like butterflies? Even, say, the whir
of a copy machine out there
in the ether, sent flying
when the first plane hit? Do you see
voices as monarch wings
wheeling through the sky?
If you shout from the window
of a thousand-foot tower
before you fall, where does
that scrap of voice go? Is it still
falling? You mean go out
like candles snuffed by the wind?
You mean out like empathy
in tiny increments marching
like ants made of sound
across the wires of the world?
Did she just hear an Our Father
whiz past? I’m sorry, I’m sorry,
she said. I think you’re
breaking up.
-Sonia Greenfield, Rattle

Ten Years After My Mom Dies I Dance

books poetry lit December 2, 2014 Leave a comment

This poem by Patrick Rosal absolutely knocked my socks off.

The second time I learned
I could take the pain
my six-year-old niece
—with five cavities
humming in her teeth—
led me by the finger
to the foyer and told her dad
to turn up the Pretenders
—Tattooed Love Boys—
so she could shimmy with me
to the same jam
eleven times in a row
in her princess pajamas.

When she’s old enough,
I’ll tell her how
I bargained once with God
because all I knew of grief
was to lean deep
into the gas pedal
to speed down a side road
not a quarter-mile long
after scouring my gut
and fogging my retinas
with half a bottle of cheap scotch.
To those dumb enough
to take the odds against
time, the infinite always says
You lose.

Read more at Four Way Review

Book Love: Library of Strahov

books poetry lit December 1, 2014 1 Comment

books bookshelves library prague

Library of Strahov, Prague, by Moyan Brenn

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

 

Poetry: Apocalypse

books poetry lit November 30, 2014 Leave a comment

At the end of the world
there are no roads,
only plateaus of blue ice
and glimmers of fireworks;
if you are lucky you will
gain a free ticket to the show
and maybe an immune
companion to chat with
during intermission.

-Karen Lewis, One Sentence Poems

The Day Lady Died

books poetry lit November 28, 2014 Leave a comment
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
                                                        I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
-Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems

Poetry: Crown for a Young Marriage

books poetry lit November 26, 2014 Leave a comment

This excerpt is from one of my favorite contemporary poems, which was just selected by Rattle for one of this year’s Pushcart Prize nominations. Extraordinary, illuminated.

If I was nothing else, but was a wife;
If I did nothing else, but could make meals
with scraps and pantry staples and a knife
I got when I was twenty-nine; if real
commitment (an abstract and noble word
before it tangles up with sacrifice)
turns out to mean a smaller life, less heard,
less heralded, less published, and less prized;
if after spending summer days indoors
for several years, and writing frightening verse
I’m eighty-odd and pale and little more
than what I am today, will I be worse
off than my single, roving poet friends?
I doubt it, but you’ll have to ask me then.
3
I doubt it, but you’ll have to ask me then.
I doubt that I’ll be doddering and hunched
and wishing I could do it all again
because I felt I’d missed out on a bunch
of fellowships. And Christ, I love you. Christ
do I remember loneliness, and what
I did for scraps of evenings, what sufficed
for kindness. Offer me a life, a glut
of love, of undeserved reserves of grace
and nice interpretations of my faults.
I’ll still find ways to be unhappy. Face
the facts, though—I’m at home filling the salt
shakers, cleaning the microwave, unknown.
But staunchly, resolutely unalone.
Read more
-Mary Block (view her website here)

Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan Experience a Night Thunderstorm while Stranded on Nikumaroro Island

books poetry lit November 23, 2014 Leave a comment

We hadn’t had water for days.
It must have hit
one hundred degrees
that afternoon.

Night lightning revealed land crabs
parrying
at the clearing’s edge,

betting on whether
me or Amelia
would die of thirst first.

As the storm broke,
we upturned cans
to catch the runnels of rain
funneling off our hammock.

We sprinted to the beach,
upturned our mouths
like tulips to the downpour.

The storm signaled its departure
in an hour,
its strobes diminishing,
deluge dying to a mist.

We laughed
as we returned
to the camp.

By then it was dawning.
We knew the fire
would be snuffed
as a candle,
crabs crowding the puddles for a drink.

I picked them up
one by one
and pinched their claws off.

Those detached V’s
flexing by the dozen
at my feet.

Amelia ripped
them from their turrets,
tossed the writhing meat
to shrieking terns.

She gathered the empty shells
in the folds of her skirt,

returned to the beach
to wade knee deep
in the waves,

then dumped them clattering
hollow amid the surf’s
persistent thunder.

-Paul David Atkins, Blue Lyra Review