The real Boston Marathon

Hoarded Ordinaries:

The Boston Marathon is Massachusetts’ annual holiday of helping, and it’s that willingness to help, I’ve decided, that chokes me up every year. All of us, deep down, have the urge to help others: to feel like we have made a difference. Cheering on a marathon runner—especially the ordinary folks at the back of the pack who need encouragement—makes you feel like you’re somehow contributing. Maybe someone is beginning to tire or cramp; maybe someone’s inner enemy is saying “Quit” or “I can’t.” When you cheer on a marathon runner—when you hold out a cup of water, an orange slice, or a freezer pop, or when you wave your sign or hit your drum or hold out your hand for a high five—you’re holding out hope that we, collectively, can somehow help a stranger. Maybe at a particular moment of need, you can offer exactly what’s needed: the right words, or a heartfelt bit of encouragement.

Dear reader, this letter is like a house—

or is it the house that is like a letter?

Whichever it is, the mail has been delivered there
for decades. Drop the words into a rusty metal box

with a hinged flap, nailed to a wooden fence.
This is the way it is with poems, too: I voice

my salutations, compose toward a complimentary close.
Every now and then I’m seized by the urge to scour

everything from top to bottom, to gather the junk, bits
of hoarded, useless matter— and throw them into the street.

At the height of summer, I’ll even want to start
a fire in the grate, just because I know for sure

there are things that will need burning.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Oysters.

Oysters

erasure of a page from Samuel Pepys' diary

A boy is going to the king.
I enter his name in my book.

How many churches have
a barrel of pickled oysters?

Open the barber’s hands with
his own hands: a close business.

This letter is like a house—
a very well writ one.


Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Saturday 21 April 1660.

Erasing Shakespeare

The Rain in My Purse:

I don’t buy the oft-touted view that one must find something totally new in erasure poetry, that the found poem should be completely independent of the source text. If that’s the case then why do erasure at all? The source is going to offer possibilities and choices. The source is at the poet’s disposal, and will set limits. The source is not going to predetermine, but it is going to influence.

I love Bervin’s note at the end of the book: “When we write poems, the history of poetry is with us, pre-inscribed in the white of the page.”

Shoji

Beneath the topsoil, tangled synapses of roots. Who says what to each other across these lines, to make such intense blue-violet in the beds of verbena? Even unmoving, unruffled by wind, they are electric. The smell of soil clings to my fingers. A few dark grains lodge under a fingernail. In bed at night, I curl up and bring my hands to my nose. From under my tent of white sheets, the hallway light flickers like a train stop somewhere ahead, before it comes into view.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Cocooning.

Twelve Simple Songs now also available as an iBook

iBook screenshotThanks entirely to Rachel, for all you iPad, iPhone and iPod touch users, Twelve Simple Songs is now available as an iBook! I’ve only seen PDF versions of it, since I don’t own any iGadgets, but I’m told there are clickable audio players with my readings on each double-page spread, and the videopoem by Swoon with readings by Nic S. is included at the end.

Like the other versions, it’s free. But it did cost Rachel a certain amount of aggravation, including many hours of work, frustration at poor support docs, and a spilled beverage on her keyboard and adjacent electronic devices. So if you can, please check it out and give it a rating. Thanks.

UPDATE: Rachel has blogged about the making of the iBook.