poetry

The Fire This Time, by Jesmyn Ward

by

fire

This collection of essays and poems, subtitled A New Generation Speaks about Race, together provides a nuanced portrait of racism and race in the U.S. today. It is divided into three parts: Legacy, Reckoning and Jubilee—past, present and future.

Ward, who collected the pieces, supplies the introduction and a piece on what she learned from DNA testing, noting how hard it is for people to discover the genealogy of the black side of their family. Two pieces look at the legacy of black writers, Rachel Ghansah comparing her grandfather’s life to James Baldwin’s and Honorèe Jeffers questioning Phillis Wheatley’s history as it is presented to us.

The book’s title is a play on Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which in turn takes its title from an old spiritual: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, the fire next time.”

Some pieces convey personal experiences, such as Garnette Cadogan’s essay comparing his experiences walking in his native Kingston, Jamaica with walking the streets of New Orleans and later those of New York. Never having been given “The Talk,” he had to work out for himself how to camouflage himself—preppie clothes and his college sweatshirt; never a hoodie or jeans and tee shirt—and the rules to follow to keep white people from being afraid of him or police from stopping him.

Many of the pieces respond to the relentless killing of black people by police and armed vigilantes, such as Claudia Rankin’s “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning” and Isabel Wilkerson’s “Where Do We Go from Here?” Emily Raboteau describes going with her family to see the recently reopened High Bridge in New York City that connects Harlem and the Bronx. There she discovers a mural that leads her on a tour of discovery around the city to find all the murals that, combining love and activism, educate adults and children on how to protect themselves from police brutality and structural racism.

I was especially intrigued by Kevin Young’s funny and piercing “Blacker Than Thou” where he talks about white people wearing blackface or actually “passing” as black, such as Rachel Dolezal. “But if you are white but truly feel black, then why do you have to look like it?” Blackness, he says, is not about skin color but about culture. He says of black people, “Any solidarity with each other is about something shared, a secret joy, a song, not about some stereotypical qualities that may be reproducible, imitable, even marketable.”

Of Dolezal, he says, “She wears the mask not to hide but to gain authority over the very thing she claims she wants to be.” Her claim is of a piece with her other stories that paint her as a victim. And, as with blackface and other examples of passing, it says more about how those white people view blackness.

Poems by Jericho Brown, Kima Jones, Clint Smith add texture and imagery, always a more intense experience for me. And I loved seeing Natasha Tretheway’s familiar “Theories of Time and Space” opening the Jubilee section.

I learned a lot from this cornucopia of voices. I still have a lot to learn.

What have you read lately that made you cry and laugh and thunder with rage, and most of all made you think?

The Moment Before the Wilt: Poetry, by Michelle Rose Goodwin

by

wilt

This chapbook of poems by my friend Michelle Rose Goodwin documents a year, starting with “June” and ending with “May (3).” It was a terrible year, perhaps the most difficult year of the author’s life, and the raw vulnerability of the poems speaks to our deepest fears and sorrows.

The voice in these poems—steady, not looking away, sounding like your best friend whispering at night after the lights are out—draws us into her world. Even if I hadn’t already known the author, I would have been captivated by her first meeting with a man she thought “a cherry popsicle prince” and would have wanted to stay for her subsequent experiences.

It’s well-known that writing can be therapeutic. Often, though, what we write to help ourselves work through some trauma is either too private to share or not something that will interest others. The trick is what Stephen King recommends in his excellent book On Writing: write the first draft for yourself and then revise with the reader in mind. Clearly that is what Goodwin has done here.

These poems find the right balance of genuine emotions and engaging language. Goodwin transforms ordinary things into evocative imagery, as in this excerpt from “September:”

When it was over
He packed a suitcase with his dreams made of grit
And left her alone with her moment of cloud smoke
Rising up from the chimney and then gone

By not punctuating the ends of her lines, Goodwin creates an unsettled feeling in the reader, a sense that something more is coming, something just around the corner. A form where nothing is final contrasts with the content of the poems, creating tension and interest. At the same time it provides a kind of comfort.

In reading poetry, I love a startling image, something freshly imagined, such as this first stanza of “January:”

The juice drips down from every moment
And we fall to our knees in worship to lick it up

In the end, though, it is the emotional twists and turns of this journey that make these poems so real and this chapbook so satisfying.

Is there a poem you’ve read recently that drew you entirely into its world?

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a copy of this book free from the author. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Passing: Poems, by Eloise Klein Healy

by

passing

I’ve been meaning to read Healy’s poetry for some time and was happy to find this 2002 collection. Unlike Nella Larsen’s novel, passing here has no racial connotations. Instead, as indicated in the title poem, “These are the days that must happen / to you, Mr. Whitman says.”

The passing days embodied in these poems are ones that happen to many of us: the loss of a father, a friend’s breast cancer. And even if the experiences are unfamiliar—such as when she writes about the impact of her coming out: the end of her marriage, the changes in other relationships—the emotions are all too recognisable.

Her elegies for the friends who have died too soon of AIDS or other causes are particularly moving. She finds just the right balance of praise, grief, beauty, and occasionally humor. Sometimes it’s an image that surprises me into grief, such as in “Postcard” the sudden vision of “a room in which the chair of an artist / painted by another artist sits empty” reminding me of all the grief and loss around the relationship between Van Gogh and Gauguin. Sometimes it’s a particular memory, such as in “Louganis” the way people turned on the beautiful and celebrated diver when he contracted AIDS.

One of my friends gets wrought up about poems where, if you remove the line breaks, read like prose. Lovely prose, perhaps, but prose nonetheless. It’s a danger when you employ a conversational style. There are a few like that here, sometimes redeemed by a gorgeous or startling image at the end. Curiously, these are mostly ones about hackneyed or sentimental themes: a sunset on the beach, a spiritual experience. It makes sense to choose a more prosaic style for these to undercut any tendency toward grandiosity.

There are many more pieces that do work beautifully as poems, making me go back and forth trying to pinpoint why they work and not the others. What I found were the usual suspects: compression, fresh imagery, word choice, gaps we must leap over. Sometimes repetition. Sometimes the spacing lends a weight to the words that they would not have if run together like prose, making us stop and pay attention in a different way.

And I found one of the things I love best in a poem: a gradual unfolding, as though a flower opens petal by petal to reveal its heart. Such is the poem that is my favorite, partly because it speaks so intimately to me. The title is a line from Rilke’s “The Torso of Apollo”, one that has dominated much of my life. It sent me on a year-long journey during which I wrote the poems in my own first collection. And, well, trees. Here is the beginning of “You Must Change Your Life”:

The stories say your animal will tell you
what you must do.
The tale from Nicaragua adds this—
that life in the city is cleansed of the animal
and you must go to the trees
so your animal can tell you what to change.

When I write about trees
I know I’m talking about love.

My animal is a tree
and my trees are birds
and my birds are animals
who burst from there walking
into a sky waiting for this transformation
as if it had nothing else to do
but receive.

It goes on, opening more and more, as does this collection, rewarding closer study.

Is there a poem or perhaps an image from a book that has stayed with you? One that speaks to you and what your life is like right now?

I Am: The Selected Poetry of John Clare

by

Clare2

Born in 1793 in Helpston, Northamptonshire, Clare came from the rural working class. His parents were both illiterate, and he himself only went to a dame school until he was 12, even then often pulled out to help his father in the fields. Yet when he read a poem—James Thompson’s “Seasons”—he was inspired to write as well and went on to write over 3,500 poems.

Many of his best-known and best-loved poems are about nature. He wrote about the rural world he’d grown up in with nostalgia but not sentiment, and about wherever he was currently living, employing a keen eye and great appreciation for the colors, textures, and ecology of country life. In “The Wren” he lauds the humble pleasures he finds around him:

Why is the cuckoo’s melody preferred
And nightingale’s rich song so fondly praised
In poet’s rhymes? Is there no other bird
Of nature’s minstrelsy that oft hath raised
One’s heart to ecstasy and mirth as well?
I judge not how another’s taste is caught:
With mine, there’s other birds that bear the bell
Whose song hath crowds of happy memories brought,
Such the wood-robin singing in the dell
And little wren that many a time hath sought
Shelter from showers in huts where I did dwell
In early spring, the tenant of the plain
Tenting my sheep, and still they come to tell
The happy stories of the past again.

His poetry was influenced by the folk song culture in his family and village, as described in Georg Deacon’s John Clare and the Folk Tradition. Clare played the fiddle and collected folk songs, fiddle tunes, dance instructions and folk customs. As a folkie myself, I’ve been at many a pub sing and can appreciate the effect of Clare’s cultural environment on his work. I’m also grateful for the tunes and songs he collected and preserved.

His life was not all songs and flowers, though. Clare was shocked and shaken by the rapid changes brought by the nascent industrial revolution. Villages emptied as laborers sought better jobs in town. Worst of all, for Clare, was the enclosure of the commons, a severe financial loss to working class folks who used the land for pasture and agriculture, and an aesthetic loss for people like Clare who loved the moors and the wildlife that prospered there. We’re learning much now about the importance of green space for psychological health, but Clare was sounding the alarm long ago, as in this excerpt from “The Moors”.

Now this sweet vision of my boyish hours
Free as spring clouds & wild as summer flowers,
Is faded all—a hope that blossomed free,
And hath been once, no more shall ever be.
Enclosure came and trampled on the grave
Of labour’s rights and left the poor a slave,
And memory’s pride ere want to wealth did bow
Is both the shadow and the substance now.

Clare wrote many poems to his first love Mary Joyce, whom he met at the dame school, but whose father turned him away. He later also wrote poems to his wife Patty with whom he had seven children, but continued to write about Mary until the end of his life. This excerpt from “First Love” shows his unconventional yet powerful imagery.

I ne’er was struck before that hour
With love so sudden and so sweet,
Her face it bloomed like a sweet flower
And stole my heart away complete.
My face turned pale as deadly pale,
My legs refused to walk away,
And when she looked, what could I ail?
My life and all seemed turned to clay.
And then my blood rushed to my face
And took my eyesight quite away,

He suffered from mental illness in his later years, but continued to write even in the asylums where he was confined. While many of these poems are about nature and his lost love, he also wrote wrenching poems about his efforts to right himself, as in the title poem from this selection.

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

I come back to Clare’s poems often. I love the way he writes about nature and childhood, his yearning for his lost love and his indignation at the fencing of common land “In little parcels little minds to please”. Reading his work I can imagine myself tramping the moors, looking for jackdaws and starnels, and seeing “An oddling crow in idle motion swing / On the half-rotten ash-tree’s topmost twig”.

Have you read any of John Clare’s work? Do you have a favorite poem of his?

Harlem Renaissance Poets on Poetry Foundation, Part 2

by

HR2

This post is a continuation from last week, looking at the work of poets associated with the Harlem Renaissance, in particular those whose work I didn’t know well. There’s a great introduction to the Harlem Renaissance poets and a selection of their work at the Poetry Foundation website.

As you may know, the Harlem Renaissance is the name given to the emergence of a group of Black writers, artists, playwrights and musicians in the early 20th century when the Great Migration brought large numbers of Blacks, especially from the south, to work in northern cities. Clustered in Harlem, artists of all kinds came together, influencing and encouraging each other

Fenton Johnson began writing and publishing before the start of the Harlem Renaissance, and spent most of his life in Chicago, where he grew up in a well-off family. Still, he is claimed by Harlem Renaissance poets as a forerunner. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories, plays and essays. He worked as a college professor and journalist, as well as editor for several small magazines. Many of his poems take the form of spirituals, such as “How Long O Lord”:

How long, O Lord, nobody knows!
My honey’s resting near the brook.
How long, O Lord, nobody knows!
How long, O Lord, nobody knows!
I pray she’ll rise on Judgment Day.
How long, O Lord, nobody knows!

Other poems capture what it’s like to be a Black man in this society, such as “Tired” which starts “I am tired of work; I am tired of building up somebody else’s civilization” and builds to “It is better to die than it is to grow up and find out that you are colored.”

James Weldon Johnson (no relation) combined social activism with his writing activities. Head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) during the 1920s, he also found time to author studies of Black poetry, music, and theater. He’s known for his realism in his novels and for capturing the rhythms of Black life—schooled and unschooled, preachers and orators. For example, in A Poet to His Baby Son” he sees the beginnings of a poetic imagination, but cautions the child not to be a poet:

For poets no longer are makers of songs,
Chanters of the gold and purple harvest,
Sayers of the glories of earth and sky,
Of the sweet pain of love
And the keen joy of living;
No longer dreamers of the essential dreams,
And interpreters of the eternal truth,
Through the eternal beauty.
Poets these days are unfortunate fellows.
Baffled in trying to say old things in a new way
Or new things in an old language,
. . .

My son, this is no time nor place for a poet;
Grow up and join the big, busy crowd
That scrambles for what it thinks it wants
Out of this old world which is—as it is—
And, probably, always will be.

Countee Cullen went in a different direction, calling for Black poets to work within a traditional framework, naming Keats and Houseman as his poetic models. Yet he wanted to reclaim African arts (a movement called Négritude) and was politically active, becoming president of the Harlem NAACP chapter. He was married to Nina Yolande DuBois, daughter of W.E.B. DuBois. No surprisingly, anger at racism was one of his main themes, as in “Yet Do I Marvel”:

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing.

William Waring Cuney’s musical background, attending the New England Conservatory of Music, emerges in his poetry. Infused with the rhythms of jazz and blues, his poems bounce and swing. Here’s the beginning of his tribute “Charles Parker, 1925-1955”:

Listen,
This here
Is what
Charlie
Did
To the Blues.
Listen,
That there
Is what
Charlie
Did
To the Blues.
This here,
bid-dle-dee-dee
bid-dle-dee-dee . . .

It’s interesting to see the different approaches to working within or combining various traditions. I’ll certainly be looking to read more of their poetry.

If you write poetry, what traditions influence your work? If you read poetry, what traditions are you drawn to?

Harlem Renaissance Poets on Poetry Foundation, Part 1

by

HR poets 2

Books are my primary focus on this blog, with an occasional foray into magazines and music. Today it’s a website. While pretty familiar with the more well-known writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance, I wanted to delve into the work of other, less familiar poets. The Poetry Foundation website is a great place to start.

The Harlem Renaissance was a flowering of creative and cultural life in the early 20th century, loosely dated from 1916-1935. Partly a result of WWI, a huge wave of southern Blacks moved to northern cities to take advantage of job opportunities and a seemingly less oppressive society. Known as the Great Migration, this influx brought together a significant number of Black artists and writers as a group for the first time. Harlem alone saw over 175,00 new Black residents. This new sense of social and creative community was fertile ground where the arts could thrive.

Claude McKay, born in Jamaica and committed to social justice, is the author of “If We Must Die”, an enduring trumpet call for freedom which begins: “If we must die, let it not be like hogs / Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot”. But it is his poem “America” that moves me to tears and stays with me week after week as we ride the current wave of potential change. It begins:

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.

His love for this country despite its failures is front and center in this poem. Grateful for its gifts, he comes as a rebel but one without malice. Change is coming, he says. It may take time; it may take a lot of time, but it is inexorable.

Like a number of poets associated with the Harlem Renaissance, Anne Spencer never lived there, but was close to several key figures and worked with them to establish the Lynchburg, Virginia chapter of the NAACP. Her tribute to Paul Dunbar, a forerunner and model for the Harlem Renaissance poets, is brief but wrenching. And her poems such as “Lines to a Nasturtium” are a master class in how to use nature to explore the human heart.

Poet, playwright, and novelist Jean Toomer brings his background to his calls for racial unity. Of both White and Black heritage and having attended both all-White and all-Black schools, his poems combine elements of both cultures. In “Banking Coal” he uses the extended image of banking the coals of a fire with ashes overnight, working it first one way and then another before the shocking but perfect middle:

I’ve seen them set to work, each in his way,
Though all with shovels and with ashes,
Never resting till the fire seemed most dead;
Whereupon they’d crawl in hooded night-caps
Contentedly to bed. Sometimes the fire left alone
Would die, but like as not spiced tongues
Remaining by the hardest on till day would flicker up

He continues to add nuances and layers of meaning without leaving his image, until the stirring end.

Georgia Douglas Johnson lived in Washington, D.C., but her salon became an important meeting place for writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Her poems more than any others I read evoke the despair that comes from constantly having your dreams deferred, as Langston Hughes put it. Being a woman in a male-dominated society is hard enough, but is magnified exponentially by the intersection with race and class. Here is her poem “The Heart of a Woman”:

The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,
As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on,
Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roam
In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.

The heart of a woman falls back with the night,
And enters some alien cage in its plight,
And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars
While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.

The ambivalence introduced by the last two words—that bars not only confine but also shelter—harkens back to McKay’s difficult love for “this cultured hell”. They, along with my memories of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s (Civil Rights, Anti-War, Women’s), remind me that times of great change may involve destruction but are fueled and formed by love.

Go to the website and explore their work. More next time.

What poets of the Harlem Renaissance have you read?

The Complete Poems 1927-1979, by Elizabeth Bishop

by

bishop2

Although she won the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for her collection Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring, Bishop’s was not well-known during most of her life except among other poets, overshadowed by poets such as her friends Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, as well as the Beat poets, William Carlos Williams, Randall Jarrell and others.

When she began teaching during the last decade of her life, first at the University of Washington and then at Harvard, she did begin to achieve a wider fame, but it is only since her death that her reputation has risen into the stratosphere. Now she is considered one of the best poets of the 20th century.

I’m not entirely sure why that is. Partly it’s a reaction to the explosion of confessional poetry set off by Lowell’s Life Sentences, the rise of political and feminist poetry, and the general abandonment of formal poetry: all trends that she rejected.

Partly it is an appreciation of her attention to craft. A perfectionist, she labored for years over most of her poems, refusing to publish them until she was satisfied. While she often creates her own form, sometimes she uses forms such as sestina and villanelle. One of her most famous poems, “One Art”, is a villanelle beginning:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

What I like best about her poetry, and possibly the most significant reason for her popularity today, is her use of the things of this world. Her poems have precise descriptions of objects and animals, often insignificant things, such as an old French horn hung on a wall or leaves drifting in the Seine. In the best poems, these descriptions carry an emotional weight far beyond the thing itself.

As a writer, this use of subtext is what I’m always striving for. It’s far more powerful than explicit text because you are leaving space for the reader to have their own experience. You are creating the gaps that Robert Bly speaks of in Leaping Poetry, the kind of gaps that the reader must leap over, an opening for the unconscious or for buried memories to bubble up. This space is also what gives imagery its power.

In this excerpt from “The Fish”, we can see her use of imagery, choice of details, and surprising adjectives not only to bring the fish to life but to invest it with meaning.

He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
—the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly—
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers . . .

We learn that “five old pieces of fish-line” hang from his lip. Through this “battered and venerable” fish we are caught up in her themes of surviving trauma, of loneliness, of grief and loss. And note the resonances around those two adjectives: “battered” carrying also the image of a sizzling frying pan, “venerable” not just old but something to be honored.

There was controversy around the posthumous publication of this collection because it also includes juvenilia and unpublished poems, which seemed to many an insult to a poet so meticulous about what she allowed to be published. Still, it is interesting to see something of her development as a writer and what she still considered works in progress.

Do you have a favorite Elizabeth Bishop poem?

Elizabeth Bishop, by Brett C. Millier

by

Bishop

I’ve been tiptoeing around Bishop’s poetry for many years, intrigued but wanting to carve out a chunk of time to really concentrate on it. The last few weeks have been that time.

Subtitled Life and the Memory of It, a quote from one of Bishop’s poems, this is a critical biography, meaning that it not only tells the story of Bishop’s life, but also discusses her poems. Of course, there’s long been a kerfuffle in the literary community over the relevance of a writer’s life to her work, and in other arts communities as well. Shouldn’t a poem or film stand alone? Don’t we bring our own experiences and outlook to a book or painting?

Well, of course. Yet, many years back, when I finished school and started creating my own study programs, I found that in addition to hunkering down and reading all of a writer’s oeuvre, I wanted to know about their lives. I felt that I knew something about them through their work, but needed to know more, especially in those early years when I was figuring out what my own writing life might look like.

I’ve felt a curious tie to Bishop because I knew that she was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts, where I also lived for a few years, very close to her home in fact. From Millier’s book, I’ve learned that Bishop’s time there was brief. Her father died when she was eight months old and her mother was in and out of mental institutions for a few years, moving between Worcester and her family’s home in Nova Scotia, before being committed in 1917. At that point, Elizabeth’s father’s family brought her back to Worcester for a miserable few months before sending her to boarding school. Although her mother did not die until 1934, Elizabeth essentially had no family home for the rest of her childhood.

She made lifelong friends at school and later at Vassar and in the literary community at large. Two friendships in particular shaped her as a poet. While still in college she met Marianne Moore who became a mentor as well as a friend. Moore cheered on the young poet, initially critiquing her work and later suggesting places she could submit her work. Later, living in New York, Bishop became friends with Robert Lowell and the two continued to exchange poems, letters and visits until Lowell’s death.

Those of us who write stories are advised to constantly raise the stakes for our protagonist, or if we’re writing nonfiction—memoir or biography—to point out where the risks and rewards have increasing consequence, thus creating tension and suspense. Millier does this admirably for Bishop.

It’s hard enough to be a poet, let alone one without a home or family, a victim of early trauma. Let her be a lesbian in an era when homosexuals were closeted. Give her some chronic illnesses: debilitating asthma and alcoholism. Make her a perfectionist, and put her in New York’s very competitive atmosphere; then give her some early victories and very successful friends to add even more pressure.

Plenty of suspense, then, to keep this biography moving, interleaved with excerpts from letters to and from Bishop. It’s not all sad; Bishop traveled a lot, had strong relationships, created homes that she loved, and most of all wrote and revised and revised again, never letting a poem go until she was sure it was the very best she could make it.

Plus there are Millier’s insightful discussions of the poems. I was glad I had a copy of The Complete Poems 1927 – 1979 at hand to dip back into. I will discuss the poems themselves and Bishop’s thoughts about poetry in another post.

One of the things I enjoyed here was seeing the humorous side of this poet, as in this excerpt from a letter; Bishop was living in Brazil and had just won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry:

Lota went to market, to our regular vegetable man, and he asked her if it wasn’t my photograph he’d seen in the papers. She said yes, and he said it was simply amazing what good luck his customers had. Why, just the week before, one of his customers had bought a ticket in the lottery and won a bicycle.

If you haven’t read her poems, this biography will make you want to read them. If—like me—you feel that there are layers in her poems that you are missing, this book will help open them up for you. Most of all, if you are curious about the life of a poet, particularly one who stands alone, not part of a literary movement, or the life of a brilliant but challenged woman in the mid-twentieth century, this is the book for you.

Have you read a biography that you’d recommend?

View with a Grain of Sand, by Wisława Szymborska

by

WS

I’ve had this edition of Szymborska’s Selected Poems for some time but hadn’t gotten around to reading it. Luckily, my poetry discussion group chose her to be the poet we read this month. Unlike a book club where people read the book ahead of time, we meet and read the poems together and discuss. Here, though, I took advantage of the opportunity to read this collection by this Polish poet who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature.

I’m so glad I did! I love Szymborska’s understated wit skewering our preoccupations and assumptions. For example, in “Seen from Above”, she confronts a dead beetle in the road, unlamented because:

What’s important is valid supposedly for us.
For just our life, for just our death,
a death that enjoys an extorted primacy.

I love her ability to focus intently on the small things, the brief moments of life and celebrate them—something that poetry is especially appropriate for. Here is “Vermeer”, quoted in its entirety:

As long as the woman from Rijksmuseum
in painted silence and concentration
day after day pours milk
from the jug to the bowl,
the World does not deserve
the end of the world.

I love her humor. She writes of wildly inventive dreams or uses the images of clouds floating across the sky and ants trudging through a checkpoint to make fun of our human preoccupation with borders. She even creates neologisms worthy of e. e. cummings, as in “Allegro Ma Non Troppo” which begins:

Life, you’re beautiful (I say)
you just couldn’t get more fecund,
more befrogged or nightingaley,
more anthillful or sproutsprouting.

I love the way she is able to write about the horrors of war in ways that do not accuse but rather appeal to our common humanity, or sometimes to our place in the natural world. In “The End and the Beginning”, she drily points out what perhaps only a woman might notice:

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.

But she also notes that by cleaning everything up, we run the danger of the next generation forgetting what’s happened; sparing them the horror could lead them blithely into the next war.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In concentrating on themes and overall approaches, I haven’t mentioned her amazingly effective word choice, her use of repetition to add power, her sly allusions to a range of cultural artifacts from popular songs to the Bible. She often uses irony, something for which I have a bit of tin ear, so I’m grateful for others in the group pointing out possible ironic interpretations of some of the poems.

She also finds ways to celebrate life, as in “Miracle Fair”, where she applauds a variety of commonplace miracles, such as “cows will be cows” or “that the sun rose today and three fourteen a.m. / and will set tonight at one past eight”. As one member of the group exclaimed near the end of our discussion, I love this woman!

Have you read any of Szymborska’s poetry? Do you have a favorite among her poems?

Jimmy’s Blues, by James Baldwin

by

Jimmy's Blues

I’d read fiction and nonfiction by Baldwin but not his poetry, so I welcomed this chance to delve into it. This collection actually includes some of his later poems as well as the ones from the original Jimmy’s Blues.

Some of the poems have the fire that I expected, the anger held in check that powers his stories. In his long poem “Staggerlee wonders”, he doesn’t pull his punches, as in this timely excerpt.

Surely, they cannot be deluded
as to imagine that their crimes
are original?

There is nothing in the least original
about the fiery tongs to the eyeballs,
the sex torn from the socket,
the infant ripped from the womb,
the brains dashed out against rock,
nothing original about Judas,
or Peter, or you or me: nothing:
we are liars and cowards all,
or nearly all, or nearly all the time:
for we also ride the lightning,
answer the thunder, penetrate whirlwinds,
curl up on the floor of the sun,
and pick our teeth with thunderbolts.

Then, perhaps they imagine
that their crimes are not crimes?

Some are witty and sharp like “Guilt, Desire and Love” where he personifies the three as a nighttime encounter on a street corner that ends up causing “a mighty traffic problem”. Others prompt philosophical musings about time and change and memory, such as these lines from “The Giver”: “The giver is no less adrift / than those who are clamouring for the gift.”

His diction can move from high-brow to street slang and back without missing a beat. Many of the poems use repetition and rhythm to summon energy that drives the poems forward, some so jazz-infused they almost seem like scat singing.

Others speak of love, sometimes with humor, sometimes with pain, but also with tenderness, as in these lines from “Song For The Shepherd Boy”:

Hey. The rags of my life are few.
Abandoned priceless gems are scattered
here and there
I don’t know where—
never expected to have them,
much less need them,
but, now, an ache, like the beginning
of the rain,
makes me wonder where they are.

If I knew, I would go there,
traveling far and far
and find them
to give them to you.

His generous line breaks lend weight to even the simplest words, making us pause and recognise their significance. While almost never using a formal rhyme scheme, Baldwin deploys rhyme to spice up a subtle passage or to playfully undercut a solemn theme.

There’s outrage here, and bitter anger. There’s existential despair and heartbreak. But there’s also a recognition of what keeps a people going, as in this last stanza of “Munich, Winter 1973”:

Just as the birds above our heads
circling
are singing,
knowing
that, in what lies before them,
the always unknown passage,
wind, water, air,
the failing light
the failing night
the blinding sun
they must get the journey done.
Listen.
They have wings and voices
are making choices
are using what they have.
They are aware
that, on long journeys,
each bears the other,
whirring,
stirring
love occurring
in the middle of the terrifying air.

Have you read any of Baldwin’s work recently?