Poetry – Page 6

A Poem For Sunday

“Saint Francis and the Sow” by Galway Kinnell (1927-2014):

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing
beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

(From A New Selected Poems © 2000 by Galway Kinnell. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Photo by Sonny Abesamis)

A Poem For Sunday

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

I found this declaration on the website of the Poetry Foundation, where so many satisfying capsule biographies of poets can be found along with reference to relevant and available scholarship. “Modern readers looking for [Adelaide] Crapsey’s work are hard-pressed to find it in any anthology printed after 1950.” That’s why the recent publication of Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology, edited by Robert Hass and Paul Ebenkamp is so significant today.

In her preface to the book, C.D.Wright notes that Crapsey, who was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the brain lining in 1911 when she was thirty-three, “was not afforded a long lifeline. She went to college, studied in Rome and taught at Smith, but mostly she watched the world from her Brooklyn window and kept a bracing seasonal vigil over her own dying. She applied an economy of words uncommon for her time coupled with a stoic yet revealing level of restraint.” We’ll be featuring selections from Verse, a well-regarded collection of sixty-three poems, published shortly after her death in 1915.

Three short poems from Adelaide Crapsey:

“November Night”

Listen..
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees
And fall.

“The Guarded Wound”

It it
Were lighter touch
Than petal of flower resting
On grass, oh still too heavy it were,
Too heavy!

“The Warning”

Just now,
Out of the strange
Still dusk.. as strange, as still..
A white moth flew. Why am I grown
So cold?

(From Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology © 2014 by Robert Hass and Paul Ebenkamp. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press. Photo by Martin Fisch)

A Poem For Saturday

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

Counterpoint Press has just published an important anthology, Modernist Women Poets, edited by Robert Hass and Paul Ebenkamp, featuring the work of sixteen avant garde artists born near the close of the nineteenth century and forging their way in the transformative early years of the next. A number of them are famous still—Gertrude Stein. H.D., Marianne Moore, Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, and a little less so, Laura Riding. But many have slipped out of view in spite of the consistent or intermittent devotion of scholars.

In her preface to the book, C.D.Wright introduces the group, “Only one was born in the South and stayed rooted in her native state. Only three of them had children. Five of them preferred women to men. Most traveled extensively or relocated far from their origins. Many of them lived long and calamitously and struggled with poverty, disease, divorce, and, in one instance, rape and likely incest. Two died very prematurely, one of tuberculosis and one of scarlet fever ….Within a wide span of intensity and yield, they all felt compelled to write poetry.”

We’ll focus on three this weekend, starting with Angelina Weld Grimke, daughter of the second African American to graduate from Harvard Law School. With the exception of a few years separation, Grimke, born in 1880, lived with her father until he died in 1930. Her mother committed suicide when she was a child. It is said that her father insisted she renounce her love of women in favor of their bond, and the wistfulness of the delicate, deliberate poem below seems to speak of that unfulfilled longing.

“Grass Fingers” by Angelina Weld Grimke:

Touch me, touch me,
Little cool grass fingers,
Elusive, delicate grass fingers.
With your shy brushings,
Touch my face—
My naked arms—
My thighs—
My feet.
Is there nothing that is kind?
You need not fear me.
Soon I shall be too far beneath you,
For you to reach me, even,
With your tiny, timorous toes.

(From Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology © 2014 by Robert Hass and Paul Ebenkamp. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press. Photo by Kitty Terwolbeck)

A Poem For Sunday

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

James Laughlin, the founder and publisher of New Directions from 1936 until his death in 1997, was also a prolific poet, who established his style with some guidance from William Carlos Williams, one of his most distinguished authors. In Peter Glassgold’s introduction to The Collected Poems of James Laughlin, 1935-1997, the omnibus volume he has edited, I learned that Laughlin dubbed it “typewriter metrics.” Glassgold describes it thus: “The lines in any given stanza could not vary in length more than one typewriter character.” Laughlin said that he was after “an effect of tension from the war between the strictly artificial pattern and the strictly natural spoken rhythms.”

The poem below was written in the mid-30s, around the time he took a trip to Key West to try to talk Elizabeth Bishop into joining his list. She didn’t say yes, but there’s an enchanting picture of her on the steps of a brothel where they were treated to tea, and, as Laughlin recalled, “Oreo cookies, my favorites.”

“What My Head Did to Me” by James Laughlin:

I guess I like myself
pretty well anyway I
wanted a statue of my-
self so I had a woman

make one it was a head
and she modelled it in
clay then one night I
dreamed I’d killed my

very best friend and
there was my head right
there ready to tell on
me when the police came

I tried to destroy the
face so they wouldn’t
know it was me but my
hands stuck tight in

the clay I couldn’t
tear them loose and
there I was when the
police came held by my

own head with the body
of my friend multi-
plying itself like
endless mirrors down

the street that’s the
thing my head did to
me but of course it
was only a dream see.

(From The Collected Poems of James Laughlin, 1935-1997, edited with an introduction and notes by Peter Glassgold © 1995 by James Laughlin. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Photo by Lori Leaumont)

A Poem For Saturday

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

James Laughlin, the founder and publisher of New Directions, shepherded a list, from 1936 until his death in 1997, which Peter Glassgold describes in his introduction to The Collected Poems of James Laughlin, 1935-1997 as one that “steadily expanded to include an astonishing pantheon of contemporary authors, primarily of the Modernist avant-garde, and quite literally changed what educated Americans read and the way American writers wrote and the kinds of poetry and fiction that were taught in our schools.” Today, ND is just as vital a force in contemporary literary culture, and the backlist is, of course, astounding.

Laughlin considered himself primarily a love poet and was encouraged by a number of his treasured authors—among them William Carlos Williams, Thomas Merton, Kenneth Rexroth, and Guy Davenport, who has praised his poems as “witty, elegiac, sexy, satiric, naughty, poignant, wise.” But Ezra Pound whose “Ezuversity” in Rapallo, Italy proved foundationally crucial to Laughlin’s literary education “ruled them hopeless,” he recalled. When prodded as to what path he should take, Pound replied, “ Go back to Haavud to finish up your studies. If you’re a good boy, your parents will give you some money and you can bring out books.” And so they did, launching one of the great publishing houses of the century.

Glassgold tells us that more than three-quarters of the 1,250-odd poems in the new volume date from Laughlin’s last fifteen years. When I was at The New Yorker, we published a number of his poems, which I found so captivating and dear. I loved the one below, which we wanted to publish but couldn’t because I discovered it had already appeared in a book. When I called to give J (as he was called) the sad news, he replied, mischievously, “Poor Gramps—ejected on a technicality!”

“Grandfather” by James Laughlin:

Sits on a chair at the
Kitchen table shelling
Peas into a bowl. He
Looks contented, even
Happy, smiling as he
Works. If you ask him
A question he probably
Won’t answer. He has
No idea what my name is,
Or even, I guess, that
I’m his grandson. He’s
93 but he has to be kept
Busy or he’ll start to
Root around in closets
All over the house. What
Does he think is lost?
No matter, he has been
Asked to shell peas.
He’s happy doing it. And
We’ll have peas for lunch.

A Poem For Saturday

“Hunger for Something” by Chase Twichell:

Sometimes I long to be the woodpile,
cut-apart trees soon to be smoke,
or even the smoke itself,

sinewy ghost of ash and air, going
wherever I want to, at least for a while.

Neither inside nor out,
neither lost nor home, no longer
a shape or a name, I’d pass through

all the broken windows of the world.
It’s not a wish for consciousness to end.

It’s not the appetite an army has
for its own emptying heart,
but a hunger to stand now and then

alone on the death-grounds,
where the dogs of the self are feeding.

A Poem For Friday

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

This Saturday, October 4th, at 4 PM, the award-winning poet Chase Twichell will be at The New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, one of New York’s most magical places and, at 250 acres, America’s largest urban garden.

Twichell, a practicing Buddhist, will be celebrating the garden’s fall exhibition, Kiku: The Art of the Japanese Garden. She has curated a poetry walk featuring tanka and haiku by two of Japan’s renowned female poets whose work she explores on an acoustiguide tour to accompany the walk. The first is Rengetsu (known in English as Lotus Moon), who lived in the nineteenth century and was a Buddhist nun as well as a potter, expert calligrapher, and martial artist and the second Mitsu Suzuki, who was born in Japan in 1914 and moved to San Francisco in the 1960s to help her husband establish the San Francisco Zen Center.

Twichell will read their poems and poems of her own from Horses Where the Answers Should have Been: New and Selected Poems. I like thinking about how her spiritual practice is inflected in her poetry the way I long ago enjoyed pondering how Doris Lessing’s Sufism affected her fiction. We’ll post poems by Twichell this weekend.

“Paint” by Chase Twichell:

Lotions and scents, ripe figs,
raw silk, the cat’s striped pelt . . .
Fat marbles the universe.

I want to be a faint pencil line
under the important words,
the ones that tell the truth.

Delicious, the animal trace
of the brush in the paint,
crushed caviar of molecules.

A shadow comes to me and says,
When you go, please leave
the leafless branch unlocked.

I paint the goat’s yellow eye,
and the latch on truth’s door.
Open, eye and door.

(From Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been © 1998, 2010 by Chase Twichell. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press. Photo by Robert Benson of some of the thousands of meticulously trained chrysanthemums in both modern and ancient styles currently on display at The New York Botanical Garden)