Patching things up with poetry

It's been months since I've made a post. This indicates that:

a) I am too busy.
b) poetry has been drifting out of my life, or I've been drifting out of its life.

Tonight I tried to break up the incessant work (teaching = working 10-15 hours a day) and patch things up with poetry by going to a poetry meeting at the local library. We were discussing poems by Theodore Roethke, and while the discussion skimmed the surfaces of the poems and didn't crack things open as much as discussions in college and graduate school did, it was nice to simply read and talk about the poems.

It was also interesting to meet an eclectic group of people: the junior in high school with dangly silver earrings, black boots, and shy eyes; the man whose father worked on "The Jazz Singer" and who reminded me of my late grandfather; the elderly woman with the Irish lilt; the balding men with office jobs and wedding rings.

Meanwhile, I bought myself a copy of Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-box, the uncollected poems, drafts, and fragments of Elizabeth Bishop, and I've started jotting down the odd phrase or two again. It's a start.

"Linked Elegance": Students Respond to Basho

kareeda ni/ karasu no tomarikeri/ aki no kure

(on a leafless branch a crow comes to rest –autumn nightfall)

-Basho

Today I introduced my senior classes to communal Japanese poetry with a special activity. The activity was designed for them to:

1. explore the relationship between words and images in Japanese poetry

2. understand that in Japanese art, the painting and the poetry were often composed in a dialogic exchange

My students thus participated in a dialogic exchange of words and images. The class divided into groups of three students each. I gave each group one image, alternating between two different Japanese paintings created in response to haiku by Basho that appears above. First, they responded to to the images in words on chart paper. Then they swapped chart paper with another group and responded to the words with an image. Students kept swapping papers until the end of the period, alternating between words and images. Below are the resulting communal poems. [Note: they did not read the haiku until they finished their own.] The results actually made my day.

Class A: “Linked Elegance”
A Response to Basho

Gloomy, Dark, the bird silently sits
Rippling water beneath the darkness of the bird
The Branches flow in the evening wind
And the bird sits calmly through the night

In the silent night
The bird rests upon the branch
Gazing at the world

The twilight sky shines;
Birds a’flutter in the Air,
The night, cool & crisp.

The crescent moon shines
The stars twinkle in the night
The birds are flying home to sleep

The solo bird resting on a branch
Short, swift, distinct brush strokes.
Peaceful, calm, and serene

The white, smoky clouds
float past the perched penguin
basking in the sun’s rays

The black birds dance
across the autumn sky
seeking rest upon a branch

Even the blackbird
Alone on the distant branch
Knows not its glory.

Birds fly in the sky
Red flowers bloom on the branches
In an orange-brown sky

flying by swiftly
with the wind blowing gently
on an autumn night.

the birds roam freely
flying in the autumn sky
and perched on the tree

Birds drift nonchalantly
They wander about in the crisp autumn sky
Seeking a place to call home

As winter settles,
My lonely feet crunch the snow
My home is no more

The cold feeling through my mouth
And pink nose and fingers numb
Makes me love winter more

Class B: "Linked Elegance"

A Response to Basho

Black bird calmly rests
on his perch upon the sky…
steady as it sits.

Whoo whoo says the owl
Lonesome in the night
Bye bye says the monkey
as he closed his mouth tight.

the crisp autumn leaves
hung from the dreary branches
as the silence surrounded the
still of the dusk

Hid behind the tree
the sun sets upon the leaves
Giving it an amber glow

Bitter branches
Break beneath the
Sexy bird’s sad song

Watch the birds fly free
Others perched upon the tree
Calm wind leaves them be

Swirls of wind around the tree
Depict how free we could be
As autumn leaves fall from the tree.

Great broken branch
Your leaves carry a heavy burden
As you support the birds of old

Weak, injured branch,
Oh how you linger,
As you hold this ancient bird.

White Space Rivers

I recently read that the curves of white space that sometimes snake their way through the text in books and magazines are called rivers. Editors try to avoid this white space because the reader's eye is invariably drawn to the river. Rivers distract. Rivers split. Rivers take us somewhere else, and that is what the words should be doing. White space rivers steal purpose from text.

If those white spaces (which I have been distracted by - when I was younger I drew pencil lines in them) are rivers, then the letters that fall along the edges are the banks. Words and sentences climb away from the river into more stable land, into mountains. As I write, I realize that I have a clear picture in my mind of the Hudson River near the Catskill Mountains, a place in which I lived for one year (though this is hard to believe for some reason). Driving over the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge was always an exhilaration. The river and its banks changed each time. They hid under fog or froze, turned red, brown, & orange and fell into each other. Sometimes the land on the east side rose brilliantly green over the water and rolled back for miles.

Hmm. Like I said, rivers distract. I was going to compare the notion of white space as river and text as land to Italo Calvino's expression of language as shifting sand dunes, but the river took me somewhere else.

And because this is called the Poetry Forum, a poem:

Body and Soul II
by Charles Wright
(for Coleman Hawkins) The structure of landscape is infinitesimal, Like the structure of music, seamless, invisible. Even the rain has larger sutures. What holds the landscape together, and what holds music together, Is faith, it appears--faith of the eye, faith of the ear. Nothing like that in language, However, clouds chugging from west to east like blossoms Blown by the wind. April, and anything's possible. Here is the story of Hsuan Tsang. A Buddhist monk, he went from Xian to southern India And back--on horseback, on camel-back, on elephant-back, and on foot. Ten thousand miles it took him, from 29 to 645, Mountains and deserts, In search of the Truth, the heart of the heart of Reality, The Law that would help him escape it, And all its attendant and inescapable suffering. And he found it. These days, I look at things, not through them, And sit down low, as far away from the sky as I can get. The reef of the weeping cherry flourishes coral, The neighbor's back porch light bulbs glow like anemones. Squid-eyed Venus floats forth overhead. This is the half hour, half-light, half-dark, when everything starts to shine out, And aphorisms skulk in the trees, Their wings folded, their heads bowed. Every true poem is a spark, and aspires to the condition of the original fire Arising out of the emptiness. It is that same emptiness it wants to reignite. It is that same engendering it wants to be re-engendered by. Shooting stars. April's identical, celestial, wordless, burning down. Its light is the light we commune by. Its destination's our own, its hope is the hope we live with. Wang Wei, on the other hand, Before he was 30 years old bought his famous estate on the Wang River Just east of the east end of the Southern Mountains, and lived there, Off and on, for the rest of his life. He never travelled the landscape, but stayed inside it, A part of nature himself, he thought. And who would say no To someone so bound up in solitude, in failure, he thought, and suffering. Afternoon sky the color of Cream of Wheat, a small Dollop of butter hazily at the western edge. Getting too old and lazy to write poems, I watch the snowfall From the apple trees. Landscape, as Wang Wei says, softens the sharp edges of isolation.

Poetry Research + Coffee Shop =

Somehow, sitting in a coffee shop trying to write a classroom research paper on poetry resulted in a poem about what I was observing in the coffee shop. Gee, that was productive. I'm in the library now and have had only slightly better results with the paper.

No title yet and ripe for revision:

Late mornings, after small hands are clean and soft
wisps of hair brushed through bright barrettes or patted down,
and baby-powdered feet are snuggled in unscuffed Keds,
mothers crave the world and crowd the coffee shop.

Still new to existence (some were not here last year), the stroller set
hobnobs, accessorized by booster seats and bottles, they breathe
espresso air and straw-slurp juice from lidded plastic cups
while moms, who have waited all week for adult contact,
fall into plush plaid couches and conversation, discussing
conscientious tuna fishing over chai lattes and raspberry scones.

When only drops of juice swirl at the bottoms of the cups,
unreachable by straws even for the strongest slurpers,
and grilled cheese-greased fingers smudge glass tables,
the mothers call and respond: Who can put on their own shoes?
I can, I can. They desire their children's independence,
restrict it in the next breath: Don't you go out there by yourself, don't you go

out there by yourself. Which, of course, someday they will,
eschewing the world of Keds and barrettes
long after they've made a decision on today's vital question:
Do you like looking at the world through the purple glass or the pink?

[the "don't you go" of the third stanza is supposed to be together on that last line]

Frogs, Scarecrows, and Poems, Oh My!

I thought it might be cool to have students do a sort of pastiche of the Jericho Brown poem in the previous post, so I thought I'd try it out. The poem needs work, but I just wanted to make sure it would be a worthwhile assignment. I thought it was fun!

Letter to Dorothy from Oz

With the click of sequined feet
you left me in the lurch,
my intellect a trinket
around a neck of straw.
Theorems are no good for keeping away the crows.

Yes, I'm still in the cornfields.
Are you surprised? Did you really think
a man of hay could hold much sway
in solid emerald towers?

Oh, if I only had a body,
why didn't I wish for that?
Dorothy, a brain is invisible to men
who glance first at my hat's frayed brim
and the straw poking through my sleeves.

But enough about me. How's Kansas?
I hope you're happy there, with Auntie Em,
though it sounded sort of bleak to me.
But it's what you wished for, right? You can't

take it back. Your friend, the Scarecrow.

It ain't easy being green...

Letter to Kermit from the Swamp
Jericho Brown

Miss you something desperate, frog.
Gators going mad round here--
swallowed both the Ribbit twins whole
just last week. We fear
for the tadpoles, their future.

Hear you're doing well, though,
decked in sweet tuxedos and top hats,
all your warts removed. They say
the blonde's got you in tap shoes
singing the blues like show tunes
with her on stage next to you,

done up in sequins and tiaras,
a real pretty pink trophy. Never did see
why you ran off with her,
snooty as she is, not to mention
snouty, but I'm happy for you

long as you're happy. Still, it'd be nice
if you'd visit home sometime;
maybe we could sing together
the way we used to. Your crooning
always kept the gators calm. So don't forget us
on the lily pads, frog. It still ain't easy

being green. Your brother, Kermel.


Jericho Brown is a student in the PhD program in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Houston. He is originally from New Orelans, LA.

Drowning in my Thesis

Unfortunately I am not completely submerged and have taken to writing quick little poems on my subjects as a means of procrastination. The analogy for this post is not accurate, since this poem is about Juliet, not Ophelia. Maybe I'll write one for Ophelia, too, and submit the 6-line poems to my advisor in lieu of my thesis paper.

Juliet

She sleeps below the medlar
on her back as predicted,
softened by frost.

Time, the dagger's mark
a dark ellipse on flesh;
she wrinkles in her second grave.