JUST AN ORANGE

It’s National Poetry Month. Google that phrase and you’ll get a bevy of websites ready to provide you with a poem-a-day and such. They’ll even deliver it right to your email box if you like.

You’ll also likely run into Charles Bernstein’s article Against National Poetry Month , where he insists that NPM consists of poems that are really not worth reading, because they don’t challenge us. That the poetry marketed to the American Public just dumbs-down the understanding of the genre even more. I don’t know if Mr. Berstein is really against National Poetry Month. But he wants us to be willing to invest in poetry. Poetry may be hard to understand. Take the time to understand it. And he has a point. A nation that thinks poetry is found mostly in greeting cards isn’t really something to be proud of. All well-written poetry has something it will give up if we work to find it; some understanding inside the words; some reward.

That said, some of my favorite poems are probably understood easily by the populace and I’m not an elitist, so I say “Okay? Well, we need to start somewhere.” I have heard tell that there are those out there who belittle the compilation of poems by Garrison Keillor on similar merits. The book, Good Poems, is just that. They are good poems. And some great ones. But once they mingle together, heaven forbid, how shall we ever tell the difference? Pah! is what I say. In fact I heartily suggest picking up a copy of Good Poems because there is some really delightful stuff in there. Really fabulous. And as Keillor says himself, saying that a poem is good may be the only recommendation it needs.

And here: Obscurity Knocks by the Trashcan Sinatras. Good stuff.

if you were an alley violinist

and they threw you money

from three windows

and the first note contained

a nickel and said:

when you play, we dance and

sing, signed

a very poor family

and the second one contained

a dime and said:

i like your playing very much,

signed

a sick old lady

and the last one contained

a dollar and said:

beat it,

would you:

stand there and play?

beat it?

walk away playing your fiddle?

I want to be
        famous
so I can be
        humble
about being
        famous.

What good is my
        humility
when I am
        stuck
in this
        obscurity?

~ by David Budbill

I came across this little gem while browsing through the bookstore on my birthday. The Blizzard Voices is by former poet laureate of the United States, Ted Kooser. Like Out of the Dust, this is a narrative told through poems. Unlike Out of the Dust, these stories are true accounts of a blizzard that ripped through the Great Plains for a few days in January 1888.

In the introduction, Ted Kooser says “The poems that follow are isolated voices heard in that blinding snowstorm we know as the passage of time. When the Alberta Clipper, roaring out of the north, rips apart a straw stack, only the frozen center remains and each of these memories is like that center, stripped of digression, picked clean of equivocation. What is left are the core narratives, spare and cold. Each clings to a concrete and specific detail, for memory works like that.”

The poems are titled either A Woman’s Voice or A Man’s Voice depending on the narrator of the event. Simply told are the tragedies next to the miracles that took place during that winter storm. It’s haunting in it’s brevity, but also in the reality that these things really happened. If you are looking for poetry that is accessible, this book would be a good place to start. But be prepared. When you have finished, you will sit and think for awhile about the fragility of life.

These poems were performed as a play by the Lincoln, Nebraska, Community Playhouse.

I think that we would understand and remember more of the past if it could be presented in such eloquent but simple ways. The base of this history are the true experiences of men and women who lived this event and told about it. Ted Kooser has taken those stories and shaped them for us.

At the end of last summer I found myself overcome by the towering tidal wave of The Twilight series. Coming out of nowhere, suddenly everyone I knew had the books in hand. I read through the three books in a period of weeks, inundated by vampires, werewolves and Bella Swan. I was intrigued. I posted a little bit about them. And then had a nice little email exchange with Kathryn about their merits.

Entertaining narrative, interesting idea, a few issues with some things, was what we said. Ultimately, said Kathryn, not literature. I emailed back a lament. Does anybody write literature anymore?

It was about that time that my sister was passing a book around our family that had nothing to do with vampires and the like. So, I read Out of the Dust, and I had an answer. Yes, someone still writes literature. And this someone was Karen Hesse.

Out of Dust is the story of 14 year-old Billie Jo, growing up in the Oklahoma Dust bowl. The book is written in free verse, so every story inside the story is a poem. Billie Jo’s life is not easy. But I loved reading about it. My sister said she felt like she was covered in dust as she read through the pages.

Writing in free verse requires more succinctness and containment compared to regular prose. But free verse poetry also allows for great expression and it is a perfect fit for a story about a time that was sparse, often bleak and limited. And still, there is light that sometimes shines through the dry and dusty, cracked earth.

We stood on the rented patio
While the party went on inside.
You knew the groom from college.
I was a friend of the bride.

We hugged the brownstone wall behind us
To keep our dress clothes dry
And watched the sudden summer storm
Floodlit against the sky.

The rain was like a waterfall
Of brilliant beaded light,
Cool and silent as the stars
The storm hid from the night.

To my surprise, you took my arm–
A gesture you didn’t explain–
And we spoke in whispers, as if we two
Might imitate the rain.

Then suddenly the storm receded
As swiftly as it came.
The doors behind us opened up.
The hostess called your name.

I watched you merge into the group,
Aloof and yet polite.
We didn’t speak another word
Except to say goodnight.

Why does that evening’s memory
Return with this night’s storm–
A party twenty years ago,
Its disappointments warm?

There are so many might have beens,
What ifs that won’t stay buried,
Other cities, other jobs,
Strangers we might have married.

And memory insists on pining
For places it never went,
As if life would be happier
Just by being different.

Someone is playing a note on a cello. It’s a low note, and as the bow moves deliberately across the string, the vibrations move through the air and into your body, where it reaches your very core. And you feel it, inside. That note has literally resonated inside of you. It’s such a fascinating feeling. And so to continue on with the theme that has developed this week–words, arranged in such a way, can do the same thing: resonate inside of us.

A poem that resonates with us causes either an empathetic or sympathetic response that binds us to those words. And it may be the sympathetic reaction that is the most powerful, because it gives us insight into something that we have not experienced ourselves.

As Merwin suggests in The Unwritten maybe all we need is one word. We just need to find it out, somehow. And he has let us know that it will not be easy. Anything that cannot be tempted by such eternals as love or time are going to be tricky to get at. Not even the threat of fire will yield up that word to us. We are left to puzzle, then. How? The poem has such a tantalizing ending. You are guaranteed to look at each pencil a little more reverently.

So maybe we haven’t discovered that word or words yet. But maybe it’s a word we can work around, hint at. Maybe that’s all poetry is, hinting around at what we really need. You know when you read it, if a poem’s gotten close.

A good line in a poem can make me positively giddy; make me laugh out loud with delight, even if the subject matter may be serious. Often lines require the context of the other lines that surround it, the whole poem is created for a reason; but this line by the late Leslie Norris says just as much outside of the poem as it does inside the poem it resides in.

Read it:  There. Can you feel it? And now you know. That’s the way you want to go, isn’t it.

And Sally Taylor, her mother dying in the next room
heard women’s voices, young and laughing,
come into fetch the old lady. (from the poem Borders)
(FYI: This post taken and reworked a bit from an early post written for Bells on Their Toes.)