Category: Literature

Lucia Perillo

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

It’s always a shock to discover a poet you like has died–and because I always ask permission before posting poems here, I discovered that Lucia Perillo died six years ago. Luckily, we still have her poems. I think I saw this one in Poetry Daily:

To the Field of Scotch Broom That Will Be Buried by the New Wing of the Mall

Half costume jewel, half parasite, you stood
swaying to the music of cash registers in the distance
while a helicopter chewed the linings
of the clouds above the clear-cuts.
And I forgave the pollen count
while cabbage moths teased up my hair
before your flowers fell apart when they
turned into seeds. How resigned you were
to your oblivion, unlistening to the cumuli
as they swept past. And soon those gusts
will mill you, when the backhoe comes
to dredge your roots, but that is not
what most impends, as the chopper descends
to the hospital roof so that somebody’s heart
can be massaged back into its old habits.

Mine went a little haywire
at the crest of the road, on whose other side
you lay in blossom.
As if your purpose were to defibrillate me
with a thousand electrodes,
one volt each.

Lucia Perillo

The Prose Poem

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry
It’s been awhile since I posted one of these, but I find this one so moving, it had to go up today. What is a prose poem? Hard to define, but this is one. Or maybe it’s a poem and I saw a version without line breaks. I’ve seen it both ways and chose this one.

They Call This

A young mother on a motor scooter stopped at a traffic light, her little son perched on the ledge between her legs; she in a gleaming helmet, he in a replica of it, smaller, but the same color and just as shiny. His visor is swung shut, hers is open. As I pull up beside them on my bike, the mother is leaning over to embrace the child, whispering something in his ear, and I’m shaken, truly shaken, by the wish, the need, to have those slim strong arms contain me in their sanctuary of affection. Though they call this regression, though that implies a going back to some other state and this has never left me, this fundamental pang of being too soon torn from a bliss that promises more bliss, no matter that the scooter’s fenders are dented, nor that as it idles it pops, clears its throat, growls.
C.K. Williams

Monday, Monday

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

This weekend, I went to a reading and conversation with Brenda Hillman and Bob Hass, celebrating Brenda’s new book, In a Few Minutes Before Later. Most of the poems are too long and visually complex to include here, but she read this short gem that I love. How smartly this captures the strangeness of the period of quarantine:

The Child, Finishing
Fourth Grade Online,

 

.                     when his mother asked,

.                                 “how was that?”

.                               said,           “odd.”

 

Ben Dolnick: The Exemplary Sentence

Posted on by Meryl in Prose

For several months I had been reading Ben Dolnick’s posts on literature, which I enjoyed greatly, before discovering his fiction.  The Ghost Notebooks, a perfect read for this season, is what I’d call a literary thriller. Here are two excellent sentences from that book. As I was listening to it as an audio book, they were so good I had to stop driving to write them down:

“But morning always comes no matter what sort of a night you’ve had. This is an under appreciated fact.”

It’s that last observation that drives this home (not sure if there  should be a hyphen there). And,

“So this is how homelessness begins. Not with a momentous decision but with a gradual surrendering. A rest becomes a nap becomes a night.”

I love the way that last sentence has an almost nursery rhyme inevitability. Sadly, he’s stopped his posts for now, but hopefully that will lead to more of his fiction.

 

Coleridge

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

When I think of Coleridge, I immediately think of Xanadu, of the famous interruption of the poem by the “person from Porlock,” which seems to me to stand for every mundane thing that keeps one from writing. But the Writer’s Almanac featured this short poem I’d never seen before, and think is quite wonderful.

What if you slept…

What if you slept
And what if
In your sleep
You dreamed
And what if
In your dream
You went to heaven
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
And what if
When you awoke
You had that flower in your hand
Ah, what then?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Very modern, don’t you think, for something written more than 150 years ago?

 

Dorianne Laux

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

Dorianne is a poet who rarely disappoints–simple but profound.

Against Endings

On the street outside the window
someone is talking to someone else,

a baffling song, no words, only the music

of voices—low contralto of questions,
laughter’s plucked strings—voices in darkness

below stars where someone straddles a bike
up on the balls of his feet, and someone else

stands firm on a curb, her arms crossed, two

dogs nearby listening to the human duet,
stars falling through a summer night

a sudden car passing, rap song thumping,

but the voices, unhurried, return, obligatos afloat
on the humid air, tiny votives wavering

as porch lights go out—not wanting it to stop—

and Mars rising over the flower shop, up
through the telephone wires.

by Dorianne Laux

Merwin on Monday

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

I love the way Merwin can write in a way that seems simple and straightforward, but takes you somewhere else. There’s something magical about his work. Here’s one example:

Looking for Mushrooms at Sunrise

When it is not yet day
I am walking on centuries of dead chestnut leaves
In a place without grief
Though the oriole
Out of another life warns me
That I am awake
In the dark while the rain fell
The gold chanterelles pushed through a sleep that was not mine
Waking me
So that I came up the mountain to find them
Where they appear it seems I have been before
I recognize their haunts as though remembering
Another life
Where else am I walking even now
Looking for me

W.S. Merwin

The poetic gigans

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

For me, writing in form in poetry is a way to may things happen that wouldn’t otherwise. This form, the gigans, was created by Ruth Ellen Kocher, named after her favorite fictional monster. You can read about form and a little about her here. The basic rules are a poem made of couplet, tercet, couplet, couplet, couplet, tercet, couplet, in which the first line repeats as line 11 and the sixth line repeats as line 12. This one is my favorite of those of hers I’ve read, published in From the Fishouse:

the gigans: v.

i will not write you an elegy
big-mouthed woman whose breasts

hugged the microphone stand like some breadfruit dream
of nippled clouds, woman whose arms winged softly
into her armpits in a billowing flourish of skin’s bounty,

thighs and ass enveloping the world
with their musked satin, whose teeth

tunneled through the closets of angels
revealing their gilded garments,

whose eyes blinked back the salty spray of sea.
i will not write you an elegy,

though your voice encompassed the world
in a raspy under-song’s embrace, a diamond glare
of c-notes crowning you each time you walked on stage.

listen to the cardinal cutting a racket through my neighbor’s pine.
hear his salutation, his winged confirmation of music un-stilled.

Ruth Ellen Kocher

The broken refrigerator

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

Hasn’t everyone had refrigerator problems–the ice maker, the filtered water, or too much frost, or it’s just not working?  Here’s a sweet take on replacing one from The Writer’s Almanac.

In a Dream of Chivalry

My father is helping the Ledoux sisters
move their old refrigerator
into the basement when they buy the new one.
The dolly hasn’t been touched for years,
but it still has grease in the wheel bearings
and makes a mollifying squeak
as he bumps across the threshold
from the kitchen to the parlor.
He moves delicately to keep the balance,
avoiding the soft places in the floor,
and as he moves, those Ledouxs tsk
and fuss about what to fix for supper.
He thinks now on hot afternoons
as they cool off in the basement
they won’t have to climb the stairs
to freshen two glasses with iced tea.
He is happy they have patched things up
after decades of not speaking.
Nina Totenberg is talking on public radio.
Pea their green parakeet is singing.
At the stairs he loosens the straps,
takes the refrigerator off the dolly,
lays it on a quilt and edges it slowly.
It is a kind day, breezy and mildly warm.
My father is not jousting or scaling a battlement.
He is watching the Ledoux sisters
show off their new refrigerator, its four adjustable
trays, chill drawer, and ice-maker—
and sees himself handsome, a knight, a sir.
Under his overalls’ armor, his tie is still knotted.
A Sunday. How clean things are.
When Belle touches the button
on the little spigot on the door
clear water pours into a silver cup.

Rodney Jones

Two poems

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

Today, I am posting a poem form Poem-A-Day that I saved awhile ago, by Xan Phillips.  But it also reminds me of a wonderful short poem by Stephen Crane, so I’m including them both.

I Never Felt Comfortable in My Own Skin So I Made a New One

I was on a walk when I was struck by the precarity of the gender that wore me,
which moved my matter, wrote books, and fell in love. as a child, I scoured

the forest for brittle cicada skins abandoned on trees. husks present differently now
a pair of nylons caught in the thicket, a beak surviving its decomposing bird,

a mural of George Floyd with a purple cock spray-painted on his beryl cheek.
among these discreet mutilations, I pull a line of thought through flesh

where a misled margin slept. I was uninhabitable before I snared a man
for his hide. I was not unlike the skin of a drum thriving under a stamina

that made music of me before I split. you wouldn’t recognize me now
if you saw me in the trees, played out, scattered to the undergrowth. I took a life

and returned it to scale and membrane. I foraged a life coated in plastic
and mud from the highway overpass. it reeked of wheatpiss and it was mine.

Copyright © 2022 by Xan Phillips. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 14, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

And this one, by Stephen Crane, perhaps 100 years before Xan  Pillips:

In the Desert

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”

It seems to me Xan must have read this, but I haven’t found a way to contact them to ask.

Agatha Christie

Posted on by Meryl in Prose

I get The Writer’s Almanac from Garrison Keeler daily, and rarely read anything but the poem. But today there was this lovely photo of Agatha Christie, whose work has given me a lot of pleasure. She was born in 1890. From the detailed article about her, I selected this to share with you:

She set her first novel, Snow Upon the Desert, in Cairo and used the pen name “Monosyllaba.” The book was rejected by numerous publishers. She tried again with a book called The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), which featured an extravagantly mustached Belgian detective named Hercule Poirot. The book was a hit, and Christie was off and running. Hercule Poirot would be featured in more than 33 of Christie’s novels, though she admitted she found Poirot “insufferable and an egocentric creep.” She actually killed off Poirot in a novel titled Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case, in the early 1940s, and had it stored in a bank vault to safeguard it from Nazi destruction during World War II. When the book was published in 1975, the New York Times ran Hercule Poirot’s obituary on the front page.

Back from the ocean

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

I spent several weeks on Cape Cod with a rotating cast of friends and relatives, an ideal vacation Because the surf is still pounding in my head, I thought I’d start the fall offerings with a poem of my own for a change, one that captures some of that experience.

The Afternoon Before the Day of Atonement

I thought I would see seals asleep on the rocks,
but the cormorant was the real show,
wrestling a twisted length of eel,
persistently untwisting with its beak
to swallow it whole.
Then, as I watched, uncertain whether
I’d seen eel or kelp straighten and slide
down the long bird throat, it speared
its beak into the surf and did it again:
unmistakably eel, writhing
for its life, no match for the skilled,
beak-tossing cormorant.

And the whole time, and afterward,
waves rake the shore,
and I wonder how to ask forgiveness
for being myself: merciless
like the cormorant, frantic
like the eel, thoughtless
like both, though I am designed to think,
a mindful tool, whose eyes engage the ocean
to sense the curve and crash of the infinite.

I take off my shoes and run along the lace
of waves, border between two worlds
that is never fixed,
run as the tide drives landward
and the land lifts and resettles
a little with each pulse,
crystal and brine, wrack and sand fleas,
run because I can, because my heart drives
salt blood through its intricate networks,
because I am alive
though many I’ve loved are gone,
because I am here on this glittering September afternoon
legs pumping, heart pumping, mind wrestling
with this slippery existence.