Little bytl, little mallet, hammer
steadying to bear down quick
upon the nail, the polished wood along
the length of the barre hardly belies
the place where, surely, your flat edge
bucked the rivet’s tail against the shaft.
And the dancers, you can almost see them
lay their palms for ballast as they hoist
their grand battements into the air, then
hold them there. And their arms, like brachia
of suspended trees, bend to ease sleek heads
toward the hardwood floor. What do you imagine
the afterlife to be? A brace will bind a sail
to make it taut against the wind. Outside,
the tarp of leaves disguises as its shadow;
a bird rigid in the cold clear air skims
between the currents, its sooty wings
outspread as if in annunciation.
Last April, I read and blogged about a book or chapbook of poetry every day (except for the two days I took off to produce poetry-related podcasts), and this year I’m planning to try and repeat the performance. A few people have already sent me review copies, but I’ll be happy to add more to the pile, which has 21 titles in it so far. Click on the foregoing link for examples of the kind of response-post I tend to write. My postal address is on the Contact page. (But email me first to make sure I don’t already have the book.)
Incidentally, in the comments to my summary post last year, I talked about possibly launching a site to promote the idea of an International Poetry Reading Month as an alterative or complement to NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), but I decided I just don’t have the time for one more project — especially if I’m hoping to do this myself. Besides, experience has shown that I am spectacularly bad at organizing and motivating other people. But if anyone wants to join in, I’d love the company. If you’re pressed for time, try just reading a chapbook a day. The point — for me at least — isn’t to see how much I can read, but to see whether I can bring my full attention to what I do have time to read (taking time off from looking at the news, catching up with Facebook and Twitter, etc.). I also don’t require myself to read only recently published books, or books I’ve never read before: any book of poetry is fair game, so long as I read or re-read it from cover to cover that day.
Another freedom I might allow myself this year is to listen to a collection of poems as an alternative to reading some mornings. For example, there are now five audio chapbooks from Whale Sound to choose from, and any one of them would be worth another close listen. For those who consider this a daunting project, by the way, note that the total listening time for these chapbooks seems to range between 9 and 21 minutes. Most people could fit that into their morning commute.
Yellow Violet by Jennifer Schlick (click to see larger)
Viola pubescens
Long after the yellow funfair tent
with its sudden shower of pollen
& its sweet prize has been packed away,
after the bees have gone
in search of other diversions
& the forest has grown dark & thick,
the violet hosts a quieter, stranger sideshow:
the cleistogamous flower, a tent
that never opens & admits nobody.
Like a Wall Street investment firm
writing I.O.U.s to itself, it has
all the magic it needs
within its green inviolate room.
We may infer the success of its transactions
only from its conversion
into a new instrument,
with contents set for future release—
a hedge against all the vagaries
of spring & commerce.
Weathered mountain laurel, green bush
under the trees. No tube of verdigris or beryl
could wash you drab. Nile green, emerald
and olive, scale of a fin disappearing in bottle-
blue water. Thumbnail of lime, salted kale,
rough my heart up in the pines. Bronzed
and bladed, apple-green, Prussian-sheened
and prismed, sometimes you hurt my eyes
but I can’t look away: set us all on fire.
Dear moisture, dear nearly soundless
rain that falls all night to turn the fields
into sheets of soggy Canson paper, the reeds
are soaking their feet in sepia. Some nights
I’ve roused from sleep to hear your sharp
artillery deflecting from roofs and windowpanes;
other times, almost unlikely, you’ve warmed
the glass to make trees loom and fade through fog
while in the distance, streams carol like frogs.
In monsoon months you’ve painted maps with mold,
new worlds of islands in swirly skirts, darkening
at the hems with salt water; you wrote to me
a daily script on the ceiling that I tried to read,
lying in bed at night. I’ve put away those letters,
pretending I didn’t know your other names
and how they all spell willfulness, swift change,
precipitous and unpredictable nature.
Tantalus wants just a bite of fruit from the bough,
washed down by a chaser; and the Danaids
only want to be done with that never-ending
business of filling and emptying those joke-store
jars pre-riddled with holes. When I was seventeen,
confused and green, my ex- took me hiking, then
at the summit leered “Don’t tell me you don’t know
what I want.” But the clouds shifted— I’m not
making this up— We were drenched, a thunderstorm
had saved me. You know the feeling, when every pore
is saturated with dampness and maybe a sliver
of wistfulness or longing; and there’s not
a towel in sight, not a hair-dryer, not a clean
dry sheet smelling simply of air and light.
Some trees are agoraphobic — it’s true. With every branch and twig they strain to block out the sky, and they never leave the forest. Winter is painful for them, but they escape as best they can by drawing down their sap and hiding underground. On warm days in late winter and early spring, when their sap starts to flow again, they are groggy as sleepwalkers that have just fallen down the stairs.
Waking up isn’t always a pleasant thing, especially if you are approaching middle age and your joints creak, your skin is suddenly no longer elastic, and any weird lump or lesion could be the beginning of something dire.
Better to stay asleep and dream of sprouting a thousand parasols or hiding like a bird beneath its feathers. Better just to stand by the stream and listen to the water, which has mastered the art of running from the sky.
The Awl: “Being Female”
I know I’m a little late with this, but the issue of discrimination against women in publishing and reviewing isn’t going anywhere, and Eileen Myles’ response to the troubling data released by VIDA last month really cuts to the chase.
So I wrote five pages of pussy wallpaper and gave it to the editors at VICE who did publish it but confided in me that the money people really had to be convinced that it was not entirely disgusting. With all the dirty and violent and racist things that VICE has done, this was um a little troubling. Do we really want to send that kind of message to our readers. What kind of message is that. I guess a wet hairy soft female one. I mean a big giant female hole you might fall into never to be heard from again.
A small, narrow or enclosed, usually wooded valley.
How can I have lived in a dingle for 40 years and not known it? “Plummer’s Dingle.” Hmm.
Plummer’s Hollow blog: “Fisher caught on video in Plummer’s Hollow”
More great trail cam footage from our neighbors, Paula and Troy Scott, this time of a fisher, which is a once-extirpated and still rare species of large mustelid, bigger than a pine marten but smaller than an otter.
O.K., I know some of you don’t want to click through and read my deathless prose, so here’s the video:
Maybe we’ll end up with roughly ten percent of the online population (Pew’s consistent finding) keeping a blog. As the online population becomes closer to universal, that is an extraordinary thing: One in ten people writing in public. Our civilization has never seen anything like it.
So you can keep your “waning” headlines, and I’ll keep my amazement and enthusiasm.
The New Yorker: “The Arrival of Enigmas: Teju Cole’s prismatic debut novel, ‘Open City’”
To say that James Wood loved Open City might be an understatement. “Teju Cole has made his novel as close to a diary as a novel can get, and his narrator is both spectator and flâneur.” (As close to a diary? Don’t you mean blog?) Also, if you’re a reader of the Sunday Times, I think you’ll find a glowing review of Open City there, too.
Yale Environment 360: “Alien Species Reconsidered: Finding a Value in Non-Natives”
Science writer Carl Zimmer examines some new studies suggesting that total eradition of invasive species might not always be the best idea: for example, “Introduced cats were eradicated from Maquarie Island off the coast of Australia, after having driven two of the island’s bird species extinct. But with the cats gone, an introduced population of rabbits exploded, devouring the native plants.” Read the comments too, though. (via Chris Clarke on Twitter)
Watch on Vimeo.
Hannah Stephenson did a screen-capture video of the composition process for one of the poems she blogged last week, then speeded it up by about ten times. Be sure to expand it to full screen by clicking the four-arrows icon on the lower right, so you can read the poem as it grows and mutates. This is more or less how I work, too, except that I can’t listen to music while I’m writing. In her blog post about it, Hannah says, “It feels a bit like I’m inviting you into my brain…welcome! Come on in.”
A gray feather floats down & lands on the snow as if from the angel of February. There’s a yellow spot in the otherwise gray sky that might be the sun. A sharp-shinned hawk appears from behind the house & alights in the lowest limb of the big maple. The small birds ignore it. It takes off through the trees, wings scissoring the air. A chickadee sings its spring song. Hawk, I say, thanks for being a hawk & not an angel. But we are not out of the woods yet. Invisible dead rest in neglected graves, reads the headline at CNN.com. Some of the graves were only marked by spoons, & the gray angels were busy tending, let’s say, the factories of grief. February is a hard month. If only the juncos were invisible, they too could rest.
Gray sky, gash of a gray breast feather
laid across the snow. It must have been
a dream— I walked up a flight of stairs
to a room where, with every step, a cloud of insects
rose from inside each plank of wood. Like wraiths,
they circled. They wound tissue ribbons and dogged
my heels. I cried out and a voice replied
with some kind of apology. Waking, I found
three plastic discs with electrodes still stuck
to my shoulder blades, to the small of
my back. A thin humming, slight as wings,
disappeared over the roof of my brain.
In the maple, shadow of a sharp-shinned
hawk; and somewhere, some small creature
flattening itself against the ground.
