Category: Poetry

In 1989, Killarney Clary published Who Whispered Near Me, her debut volume of poems with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the publishers of Bishop, Lowell, and Berryman. She was 33.  John Ashbery said at the time, “Hers is a stunning new voice in American poetry.” The San Francisco poet Tom Clark wrote a beautiful review of the book, declaring that these “startling, unsettling prose poems…vault Killarney Clary into some rarefied company. Baudelaire and Rimbaud come to mind…No writer in English has ever done more breathtaking things with the prose poem than this unheralded newcomer from Pasadena.”

The book was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize and a book that people talked about for years. Now it is being reissued by Tavern Books, a Portland, Oregon publishing house dedicated to reviving distinctive out-of-print books, printing them on Heidelberg printing presses, commissioning original art to ornament them, and promising the authors that they will remain in print.

Clary has published two other collections, Potential Stranger and By Common Salt, books that have kept her name aloft among those who buy books of poems for themselves and share them fervently with others. This passionate cohort will be happy to know that she has completed a new manuscript, Shadow of a Cloud but No Cloud.  After you discover her, you’ll know why. We will be running poems of hers from the just-reprinted book, Who Whispered Near Me, today, tomorrow, and Monday. It is available in bookstores and can also be accessed here.

Here’s our first selection of Clary’s poetry:

Every time I step into the bathtub, Theresa, I think of you;
I think of your foot that was burned when you lived in
Michigan. And Claire is on bridges like the Colorado where
her mother fell or jumped. I think of Kathy when I see
sprinklers turning in roses or I hear the name of her brother,
George, Sydne in dime stores. Helen in lavender. Anne
Marie with folded notes. Every time I am hit, Jeffrey, I
can help, Taka. I cross the border, Billy. When I sleep,
large, recent faces repeat what they’ve told me in the past
few days, then you come toward me with names I haven’t
said aloud in years, each one of you faint but completed,
carrying small stories—where you were once, what it was
that happened. And you say, “Here.” You see what I have,
what you might need to tell someone else.

(From Who Whispered Near Me © 2013 by Killarney Clary. Used by kind permission of Tavern Books, Portland, Oregon. Photo by Flickr user Florian)

– A.Q.

“Holy Baptisme” by George Herbert (1593-1633):

Since, Lord, to thee
A narrow way and little gate
Is all the passage, on my infancie
Thou didst lay hold, and antedate
My faith in me.

O let me still
Write thee great God, and me a childe;
Let me be soft and supple to thy will,
Small to my self, to others milde,
Behither ill.

Although by stealth
My flesh get on, yet let her sister
My soul bid nothing, but preserve her wealth:
The growth of flesh is but a blister;
Childhood is health.

(Photo by Flickr user auntjojo)

“In Oval Mirrors We Cruise Through Touch-Me-Nots” by Dara Wier:

How a plant’s leaves close in waves when I touch them causes me
To love them. Is this because their green reaction satisfies a desire
To move something or be moved by powers to change things?
An oxalis moves to face the sun. Without fail at sunset oxalis closes its
Leaves. It seems as if they are keeping secrets, secrets we need
To take with us if only they’d let us in on their deep purple missions.
And when bittersweet vines daily climb unlikely paths it’s to them I look
For guidance wherefore might I go as they thread like camels through a
Needle’s eye. What?  No. There are no camels on this page, there is no
Needle’s eye. I wonder whom I’m trying to fool. I wonder who’s listening.
Your voice turns my head in your direction. Your face closes behind your
Eyes’ sad shutters. Through their green slats vines fall to my feet. How
Carefully they begin to encircle my ankles, how tenderly they climb. By
Morning I’ll be hidden. You may or may not know me deep within them.

(From You Good Thing © 2013 by Dara Wier. Reprinted with permission of Wave Books and the author. Photo: “Oxalis debilis Kunth varietas corymbosa(DC.) Lourteig, 1981″ via Wikipedia)

“The Wish for Eyes” by Annie Finch:

On solid hills through liquid dusk,
the city turns to rise

with its purple touch, to enter me.
I touch it with my eyes.

Righted with wrongs, or even hard,
Let me be made of eyes.

Gray nature, make a dusk of me,
and let me keep my ties.

(From Spells: New and Selected Poems © 2013 by Annie Finch. Reprinted with permission from Wesleyan University Press. Photo by Flickr user Ross2085)

“Twenty-Year Marriage” by Ai:

You keep me waiting in a truck
with its one good wheel stuck in the ditch,
while you piss against the south side of a tree.
Hurry. I’ve got nothing on under my skirt tonight.
That still excites you, but this pickup has no windows
and the seat, one fake leather thigh,
pressed close to mine is cold.
I’m the same size, shape, make as twenty years ago,
but get inside me, start the engine;
you’ll have the strength, the will to move.
I’ll pull, you’ll push, we’ll tear each other in half.
Come on, baby, lay me down on my back.
Pretend you don’t owe me a thing
and maybe we’ll roll out of here,
leaving the past stacked up behind us;
old newspaper’s nobody’s ever got to read again.

(From The Collected Poems Of Ai © 1973 by Ai. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Photo by Flickr user Xiong)

“Poem” by Frank O’Hara, dated April 15, 1954:

Here we are again together
as the buds burst over the trees their
light cries, walking around a pond in yellow weather.
Fresh clouds, and further
oh I do not care to go!
not beyond this circling friendship,
damp new air and fluttering snow
remaining long enough to make the leaves
excessive in the quickness of their mild return,
not needing more than the earth and friends to see the winter so.

(From Poems Retrieved, edited by Don Allen and forthcoming from City Lights Books © Maureen O’Hara on behalf of the Estate of Frank O’Hara and used by permission of City Lights Books. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

“To Be Called a Bear” by Robert Graves:

Bears gash the forest trees
To mark the bounds
Of their own hunting grounds;
They follow the wild bees
Point by point home
For love of honeycomb;
They browse on blueberries.

Then should I stare
If I am called a bear,
And is it not the truth?
Unkept and surly with a sweet tooth
I tilt my muzzle toward the stary hub
Where Queen Callisto guards her cub,

But envy those that here
All winter breathing slow
Sleep warm under the snow,
That yawn awake when the skies clear,
And lank with longing grow
No more than one brief month a year.

(Used with the kind permission of The Robert Graves Copyright Trust. Photo by Flickr user Marshmallow)

“Friendship” by Dan Chelotti:

A friend gives a friend
a woodcut that defines
friendship and says that
sometimes the things
that don’t need to be said
are the things that need
to be said. It is true:
look at the woman who
climbs the mountain
with an ironing board
strapped to her back.
What is she after?
Should I bend
with the remover to remove
her hat? Interpret
her skull to reveal
the mystery? Reduce
the world to fact?
Or should I simply
Embrace the woodcut’s
trite smile, and grin
because her linen
is oh so crisp, her head
like a piano on a wire
four stories up.

(From x © 2013 by Dan Chelotti. Reprinted with kind permission of McSweeney’s Poetry Series, San Francisco. Photo by Flickr user Horia Varlan)

“An Inheritance” by Naomi Replansky, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2013 William Carlos Williams Award:

“Five dollars, four dollars, three dollars, two,
One, and none, and what do we do?”

This is the worry that never got said
But ran so often in my mother’s head

And showed so plain in my father’s frown
That to us kids it drifted down.

It drifted down like soot, like snow,
In the dream-tossed Bronx, in the long ago.

I shook it off with a shake of the head.
I bounced my ball. I ate warm bread,

I skated down the steepest hill.
But I must have listened, against my will:

When the world blows wrong, I can hear it today.
Then my mother’s worry stops all play

And, as if in its rightful place,
My father’s frown divides my face.

(Reprinted from Collected Poems © 2012 by Naomi Replansky. Used by kind permission of David R.Godine, Publisher. Photo of Grand Concourse and E 161 street in the Bronx, circa 1900, via Wikimedia Commons)

by Matthew Sitman

Here’s our third and final poem from Robert Bly, “His Nest”:

It’s all right if this suffering goes on for years.
It’s all right if the hawk never finds his own nest.
It’s all right if we never receive the love we want.

It’s all right if we listen to the sitar for hours.
It doesn’t matter how softly the musician plays.
Sooner or later the melody will say it all.

It doesn’t matter if we regret our crimes or not.
The mice will carry our defeats into Asia,
And the Tuva throat-singers will tell the whole story.

It’s all right if we can’t remain cheerful all day.
The task we have accepted is to go down
To renew our friendship with the ruined things.

It’s all right if people think we are idiots.
It’s all right if we lie face down on the earth.
It’s all right if we open the coffin and climb in.

It’s not our fault that things have gone wrong.
Let’s agree that it was Saturn and the other old men
Who have arranged this series of defeats for us.

(From Talking into the Ear of a Donkey © 2011 by Robert Bly. Reprinted with permission of W.W.Norton & Company. Photo by Flickr user Emily Carlin)