Rachel talks about writing poetry vs. writing liturgy, studying with David Lehman, images of motherhood and divinity, wordless prayers, and the challenges of writing while caring for an infant. Two-month-old Drew adds a few wordless prayers of his own.
This entry is part 26 of 31 in the series Odes to Tools
A conversation with Beth Adams about books, publishing, and music
In which I am flabbergasted by Beth’s secret plot to rescue some of my poems from a purely digital existence and give them a better life in print north of the border. We talk about the pitfalls of self-plagiarism, what writers can learn from musicians, the ins and outs of small publishing, and what the hell is up with chalk-line reels that aren’t blue. I read a few of the odes, and manage a plausible-sounding explanation for what I was thinking when I came up with the series.
What I’ve been reading, what I’ve been writing, and what’s up with all the banjos
Topics include: Why a podcast and what I hope to accomplish with it; what a woodrat is; how to keep mandatory titles from messing up haikus; poems by Howie Good, John Haines, Sarah J. Sloat, Esther Jansma, and Vasko Popa; what I look for in poetry and why I write it; how I got started writing banjo poems; Jonah and the gourd vine; and New Year’s resolutions.
Porcupine,
do the sapless twigs of winter
taste any different on the tree
you’ve just girdled,
this waste of a pine?
Its whited branches light
the grove like candles,
like candelsticks.
But you with your poor eyesight
must favor the dark: hollows & cavities,
the undersides of things,
unchewed bark.
This pine was unwise to arm itself
with such soft & succulent spines.
It did nothing but hiss
like a gnawed-on road-salted tire.
Slow destroyer,
do you ever pass
those bleached roads in the air
& long for salt?
If I were to pray, I would start low
in the belly, among the slick viscera —
don’t call them tripe, those amulets,
that conjurer’s bag, the wine-dark
apotrope where I live, & a road
more convoluted than the tube of a tuba,
that’s where I’d start, there where medicine
(always the best laughter) bubbles up
like smoke through a hookah
into the vicinity of my underachieving heart
& the lungs’ bladderwrack, that’s
how I’d begin, letting the first note
climb of its own volition, gathering
strength in the chest before the voice box
warps it into sound & it joins the others,
which were also somehow there already
in the darkness just beyond the fire,
eyes aglint, our unfamiliar better natures,
so unlike the beast that once leapt for my throat
before its too-small owner — our neighbor–
could drag it away, & I walked into the house
holding my bloodied hand before me
like a waiter with a choice dish
(the zig-zag track of the stitches still marks
my ring-finger) but that was the savagery
of an untamed thing confined;
its muffled roars & strangled yelps
as it flung itself all night against the pen
were nothing like the call or response
of an untrammeled spirit, half-laugh, half-sob —
the way I would hope to sound
if ever I were to join the pack & pray.
Download the MP3
(N.B.: The audio is more important to this post than the text!)
For you shall be in league with the stones of the field
and the wild animals shall be at peace with you.
—Job 5:23
The hand emerges
from the pocket
on its own, its splodge
of low brown hills
a keloid map of how
I’d failed to heal.
Gnarled, tidal wind:
a leaf storm hassles the air.
Argumentative clouds.
This hand is strange to me.
I’d stretched it out
as makeshift landing gear,
like one reaching out
for help, or to bless,
and badged it instead
with dirt and blood,
red archipelago
from base of thumb to wrist.
The dog had stopped
and looked at me
with his mangy face,
and slowly turned away.
I left a part of myself there;
the road rehearsed itself in me.
“They can smell
your fear, you know.”
Yes, I’d thought of that.
This gift of theirs
was what I feared,
dull humanity unmoored
from the strangeness of a dog.
Cousin, I’ll go chasing trees,
wade ankle deep
in the soft coin they mint,
spend hours tailing memory,
a dog on scent,
a child in the creek
of full human being,
trampling prodigal bounty:
hand-sized leaves
—burlap, silk, damask—
weeping off the branch like sails,
blush-hued, wine-hued, gold:
healing scars that
protect the stones,
eyelids for their perfect eyes.
Let us agree to pray
for each other:
that the tidal wind
settle us into a rightness
and recreate from these faults
and fears, fitter selves,
as lean years follow fat.
Some people don’t “get” poetry because they’re exclusively visual thinkers. For many others of a more practical frame of mind, the seemingly arbitrary arrangement of words into lines, stanzas, and units of meaning constitutes the main stumbling-block. Debates about how to reach those kinds of folks are anything but academic if you’re on a committee charged with selecting and presenting poetry to an indifferent public.
Well, I’m here to help. I’ve taken the complete texts of the first ten poems in my Public Poems series and run them through Wordle (thanks, John) which discards the most common words (a, on, the, etc.) and puts all the others into a configurable word cloud, a variation on the tag clouds familiar to anyone who spends an appreciable amount of time online. I then made an audio recording of the cloud (here’s a download link for those who can’t see the Flash player above). This sort of thing could be broadcast over a public address system at regular intervals wherever the poetry clouds are displayed, with results perhaps comparable to the well-known consequences of backmasking on vinyl records of heavy metal music back in the 1980s, only without the sacrifices of family pets. From these dense clouds a kind of condensation would take place, poetry falling like rain on the parched soil of the imagination. Or not.
This entry is part 20 of 31 in the series Odes to Tools
Comma, apostrophe, back-
slash, cursive flourish —
an all-purpose divider
that only accidentally resembles
a question mark in search
of its dot-like perch.
No self-respecting crow, beak
clever at leverage, ever
departed from
the declarative mode.
Male & female
hand & handle,
heavy as Wednesday.
What iron tree might ramify
if you insinuated yourself
into some sidewalk crack?
I know that curl
from watching seeds sprout:
cotyledon at the point
of pulling apart.
The caterpillar tents start appearing
just as the leaves burst their buds,
as if someone with a white marker
were doodling in every crotch of limbs.
My dad goes into the hospital to have
a large, non-malignant tumor
removed from his lower spine,
& I picture a white knot swelling
with caterpillars of pain.
A day after the surgery he’s taking
his first steps without it, this thing
that has made almost every position
of repose impossible for weeks,
forcing him to stand or to walk
slowly for hours each day.
Now it has been thoroughly cast out
through the surgeon’s art,
excised, exposed: bulb that burned
but gave off no light.
Sexless flower. Empty tent.
Be gone. Be gone. Be gone.
Here in the woods where my father returns
in a couple days to resume his walking —
this time to heal rather than assuage —
flashes of scarlet as a tanager
snatches gnats & caterpillars from
the not quite fully opened leaves,
singing a line of his hoarse song
between each mouthful of wings,
each mouthful of spines.
I wasn’t terribly keen on yesterday’s poem, but then I listened to this reading of it and almost started to like it. The recording was completely unsolicited, and is by someone who wishes to be identified only as “a nameless friend.” In response to my grumpy comments about the poem, A.N.F. wrote:
No, it’s not a perfect poem — for one thing, I thought the penultimate lines were amazing, but not the final one. And you probably overdid the repetitions just a bit.
But I like it, and I liked it even more as I read it aloud. Praise Whomever for imperfect things.
