NPM 2013 - D is for Doty

I have read couple books of poetry [1] by poet and memoirist, Mark Doty (that links to his blog; do bookmark it. Worth reading!) and a third one (The Source) is on the night-stand right now. But for me, he is forever associated with one lovely book of prose that I read some years back - Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy. I excerpted couple paragraphs from the book in a blog post but the book is worth buying and reading and re-reading and savoring all your life.

For today though, here are some of his poems:

A Green Crab's Shell
by Mark Doty

Not, exactly, green:
closer to bronze
preserved in kind brine,

something retrieved
from a Greco-Roman wreck,
patinated and oddly

muscular. We cannot
know what his fantastic
legs were like--

though evidence
suggests eight
complexly folded

scuttling works
of armament, crowned
by the foreclaws'

gesture of menace
and power. A gull's
gobbled the center,

leaving this chamber
--size of a demitasse--
open to reveal

a shocking, Giotto blue.
Though it smells
of seaweed and ruin,

this little traveling case
comes with such lavish lining!
Imagine breathing

surrounded by
the brilliant rinse
of summer's firmament.

What color is
the underside of skin?
Not so bad, to die,

if we could be opened
into this--
if the smallest chambers

of ourselves,
similarly,
revealed some sky. 

The Poetry Foundation profile for Mark Doty has this to say: "His syntactically complex and aesthetically profound free verse poems, odes to urban gay life, and quietly brutal elegies to his lover, Wally Roberts, have been hailed as some of the most original and arresting poetry written today."

Here is a poem he wrote, I gather, after the death of his partner, Wally. (As an aside, I remember reading some very poignant poems by him from when his partner was sick. Also, on a related note, do read his essay on whether poetry can console a grieving public.)

The Embrace
by Mark Doty

You weren't well or really ill yet either;
just a little tired, your handsomeness
tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought
to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace.

I didn't for a moment doubt you were dead.
I knew that to be true still, even in the dream.
You'd been out--at work maybe?--
having a good day, almost energetic.

We seemed to be moving from some old house
where we'd lived, boxes everywhere, things
in disarray: that was the story of my dream,
but even asleep I was shocked out of the narrative

by your face, the physical fact of your face:
inches from mine, smooth-shaven, loving, alert.
Why so difficult, remembering the actual look
of you? Without a photograph, without strain?

So when I saw your unguarded, reliable face,
your unmistakable gaze opening all the warmth
and clarity of you--warm brown tea--we held
each other for the time the dream allowed.

Bless you. You came back, so I could see you
once more, plainly, so I could rest against you
without thinking this happiness lessened anything,
without thinking you were alive again.

Such controlled emotions, edging on the sentimental but somehow succeeding in guarding against sentimentality despite the subject matter, I think. Mark Doty himself has this to say about the poem in an interview: "The Embrace .. is as plainspoken a poem as I will ever write; its mode of speech felt right for the gravity of its occasion. But I'd hate the idea that every poem ought to be that uncompromisingly plain." And here is a more detailed run-through of this simple but poignant poem: "Grief has blocked the narrator’s clear memory. It is too difficult to call the face of the dead to his conscious mind. But in dreams, that memory is possible. And the narrator is aware of this, while dreaming, and he is determined to make the best of it, to use the clarity his dream has allowed to hold the man he lost."

I was so sure I was going to post only two poems today, not only because I have not read much of Doty's poetry but also since I want these posts to be only an introduction to a poet and two poems should provide some semblance of an introduction to their oeuvre. But another poem literally begs to be shared - luminous and light but takes your breath away, just like the jellyfish!

Difference
by Mark Doty

The jellyfish
float in the bay shallows
like schools of clouds,

a dozen identical — is it right
to call them creatures,
these elaborate sacks

of nothing? All they seem
is shape, and shifting,
and though a whole troop

of undulant cousins
go about their business
within a single wave's span,

every one does something unlike:
this one a balloon
open on both ends

but swollen to its full expanse,
this one a breathing heart,
this a pulsing flower.

This one a rolled condom,
or a plastic purse swallowing itself,
that one a Tiffany shade,

this a troubled parasol.
This submarine opera's
all subterfuge and disguise,

its plot a fabulous tangle
of hiding and recognition:
nothing but trope,

nothing but something
forming itself into figures
then refiguring,

sheer ectoplasm
recognizable only as the stuff
of metaphor. What can words do

but link what we know
to what we don't,
and so form a shape?

Which shrinks or swells,
configures or collapses, blooms
even as it is described

into some unlikely
marine chiffon:
a gown for Isadora?

Nothing but style.
What binds
one shape to another

also sets them apart
— but what's lovelier
than the shapeshifting

transparence of like and as:
clear, undulant words?
We look at alien grace,

unfettered
by any determined form,
and we say: balloon, flower,

heart, condom, opera,
lampshade, parasol, ballet.
Hear how the mouth,

so full
of longing for the world,
changes its shape?

[1] Many years ago I read Atlantis and My Alexandria but do not remember what I thought of the poems. I may have revisited some of the poems from these books when I perused through his 2008 book, Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which collects poems from his first 7 books of poetry and has some new ones too.

Not, exactly, green: closer to bronze preserved in kind brine, something retrieved from a Greco-Roman wreck, patinated and oddly muscular. We cannot know what his fantastic legs were like-- though evidence suggests eight complexly folded scuttling works of armament, crowned by the foreclaws' gesture of menace and power. A gull's gobbled the center, leaving this chamber --size of a demitasse-- open to reveal a shocking, Giotto blue. Though it smells of seaweed and ruin, this little traveling case comes with such lavish lining! Imagine breathing surrounded by the brilliant rinse of summer's firmament. What color is the underside of skin? Not so bad, to die, if we could be opened into this-- if the smallest chambers of ourselves, similarly, revealed some sky. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15633#sthash.RD0VeQt1.dpuf

NPM 2013 - C is for Creeley

I briefly considered posting poems by Billy Collins today since his poems are known to be very "accessible". But to me, accessibility, while good, is not a keystone for good poetry. So, I'll post poems today by a poet whose poems are sometimes accessible, sometimes not... but they always make me want to read more. For the last many years now I have been bringing the local public library copy of Collected Poems (1945-1975) by Robert Creeley and peruse through it for a couple weeks before I have to return it. (There's another more recent book of Collected Poems (1975-2005) that I haven't even gotten to!) 

Robert Creeley

(Picture from UPenn's amazing PennSound website.)

Creeley is one of two poets whose short lines and line breaks are always intriguing; the other such poet being the recent US poet laureate, Kay Ryan. In his interview with Paris Review in 1968, Creeley talks about how "prose seems to offer more variety in ways of approaching experience. It's more leisurely. One can experiment while en route, so to speak. But still, for me, poetry gives a more immediate, a more concentrated articulation—a finer way of speaking." His poetry is concentrated articulation, indeed! Just see the magic he weaves with a few words; eliminating everything that is not essential - so much weight in such terseness.

Water Music
by Robert Creeley   

The words are a beautiful music.
The words bounce like in water.

Water music,
loud in the clearing

off the boats,
birds, leaves.

They look for a place
to sit and eat—

no meaning,
no point.

.

Here's another lovely poem by him about love. (More about this poem here.)

For Love
by Robert Creeley    

for Bobbie

Yesterday I wanted to

speak of it, that sense above   

the others to me

important because all

that I know derives

from what it teaches me.   

Today, what is it that   

is finally so helpless,

different, despairs of its own   

statement, wants to

turn away, endlessly

to turn away.

If the moon did not ...

no, if you did not

I wouldn’t either, but   

what would I not

do, what prevention, what   

thing so quickly stopped.   

That is love yesterday   

or tomorrow, not

now. Can I eat

what you give me. I

have not earned it. Must   

I think of everything

as earned. Now love also   

becomes a reward so

remote from me I have

only made it with my mind.

Here is tedium,

despair, a painful

sense of isolation and   

whimsical if pompous

self-regard. But that image   

is only of the mind’s

vague structure, vague to me   

because it is my own.

Love, what do I think

to say. I cannot say it.

What have you become to ask,   

what have I made you into,

companion, good company,   

crossed legs with skirt, or   

soft body under

the bones of the bed.

Nothing says anything   

but that which it wishes   

would come true, fears   

what else might happen in

some other place, some   

other time not this one.   

A voice in my place, an   

echo of that only in yours.

Let me stumble into

not the confession but   

the obsession I begin with   

now. For you

also (also)

some time beyond place, or   

place beyond time, no   

mind left to

say anything at all,

that face gone, now.

Into the company of love   

it all returns.

.

I had hoped to put just 2 poems by a poet every day but every now and then I'll make an exception. Today is one of those days. Here's one of my favorite Creeley poems.

The Rain
by Robert Creeley

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it,

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent --
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

If you are interested in reading more, there are a few other excerpts from Creeley's poems that I have compiled at my Tumblr blog, which I had maintained for about a year in 2010-2011.

Also, you can read my post on Creeley from 2011 when I was last celebrating National Poetry Month with a post each day.

NPM 2013 - B is for Bishop

B could have been for Baudelaire. B could have been Berryman. B could have been Bidart. B could have been the haiku master, Basho. B could also have been for Borges, who wrote both prose and poetry extensively. But two poems that delighted me many years ago spring to mind and so B is for Bishop, more specifically Elizabeth Bishop.

The first poem of hers is perhaps her most famous one, a villanelle. As Mutlu Konuk Blasing explains, the villanelle is a great choice because: "Writing and losing are one art because the formal repetition of loss, which promises mastery, simultaneously finalizes disaster: "(Write it!) like disaster." Repetition duplicates and divides, both masters and loses, and thus makes for "disaster." The division-by-duplication of the "aster" is the ill star that governs poets." There is a lot more about the poem at the link, if you are interested.... but moving on to the poem itself....

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

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.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

It is not clear to me if this is the poem she refers to in her interview with the Paris Review where in answering a question about poems that write themselves, she says: "I wanted to write a villanelle all my life but I never could. I’d start them but for some reason I never could finish them. And one day I couldn’t believe it—it was like writing a letter. There was one rhyme I couldn’t get that ended in e-n-t and a friend of mine, the poet Frank Bidart, came to see me and I said, “Frank, give me a rhyme.” He gave me a word offhand and I put it in. But neither he nor I can remember which word it was. But that kind of thing doesn’t happen very often. Maybe some poets always write that way. I don’t know."

Another poem by Bishop that I love is called Insomnia but before we get to it, here is a lovely painting painted by the poet herself!

Sleeping Figure, by Elizabeth Bishop. (The figure is almost certainly Louise Crane. Bishop traveled with her in Europe, and they lived together in Key West.)

 And now the poem; especially love the ending!

Insomnia
by Elizabeth Bishop

The moon in the bureau mirror
looks out a million miles
(and perhaps with pride, at herself,
but she never, never smiles)
far and away beyond sleep, or
perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.

By the Universe deserted,
she'd tell it to go to hell,
and she'd find a body of water,
or a mirror, on which to dwell.
So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well

into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.

Update: I just noted that during the 2011 NPM celebrations, I had a post that included 2 of her poems - One Art (again; I clearly love the poem!) along with Questions of Travel. 

NPM 2013 - A is for Ashbery

After a long hiatus, I have returned to this blog to celebrate National Poetry Month in 2013. I'll be posting a poem every day, going down alphabetically from A to Z, probably skipping Q and X and saving the last 6-7 days for some other variations and ideas about poetry. I will be posting poems that I find online already but in all cases the copyright remains with the poets and the publishers of the poem. The idea of reproducing a poem here is merely to help readers develop an interest and love in poetry. Also, the intention is not to explain or critique poetry; I am certainly not qualified to do this.

So, with that disclaimer out of the way, let me start today with John Ashbery, one of the greatest living poets writing in English today. I have read a lot of his poems over the years and I've still read less than 10% of his poems; that's how prolific he is, writing even today well into his 80s. And like others, I've sometimes struggled to understand his poems. But poetry, for me, need not be understood in all its complexity in one read. To go back to a poem and to read and re-read it and live its musicality is sufficient joy. And of all of the poets, John Ashbery and Wallace Stevens (more about him later this month) are the poets that keep drawing me back to them despite me not understanding them completely sometimes.

John Ashbery

One of my favorite Ashbery poems is his most famous long poem, Self Portrait in A Convex Mirror, but I will not be sharing that here today since it is full of so many quotable excerpts and how does one choose one over the other! It is too long to be shared here in its entirety; I always savor it piece-meal a few pages at a time. It really has to be read from the beginning to enjoy it and so excerpting it here is not a good idea.

Instead, here is are two poems that are shorter and can be savored in one quick read.

A Tone Poem
by John Ashbery

It is no longer night. But there is a sameness
Of intention, all the same, in the ways
We address it, rude
Color of what an amazing world,
As it goes flat, or rubs off, and this
Is a marvel, we think, and are careful not to go past it.

But it is the same thing we are all seeing,
Our world. Go after it,
Go get it boy, says the man holding the stick.
Eat, says the hunger, and we plunge blindly in again,
Into the chamber behind the thought.
We can hear it, even think it, but can't get disentangled
from our brains.
Here, I am holding the winning ticket. Over here.
But it is all the same color again, as though the climate
Dyed everything the same color. It's more practical,
Yet the landscape, these billboards, age as rapidly as before.

And the second one talks about poetry, whichever way you like it - plain or teasingly difficult, a tad obscure but alluring.... inveigling and capturing us with the beauty of the language and the resonances and musicality of the phrasing even before we understand it fully. Or as Erica Wright put it in the preface to an interview with Ashbery in Guernica Magazine, his poems can be "difficult, magnetic, rebellious." Magnetic, alright; there's something in most of Ashbery's poetry that draws me in  - like iron drawn to a magnet!

Paradoxes and Oxymorons
by John Ashbery

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don't have it.
You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot.
What's a plain level? It is that and other things,
Bringing a system of them into play. Play?
Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be

A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern,
As in the division of grace these long August days
Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know
It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters.

It has been played once more. I think you exist only
To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren't there
Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem
Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.

Note: My post on Ashbery when I was celebration National Poetry Month in 2011.

Joie de vivre

Though in her latest book of poetry, Evidence, Mary Oliver talks too much about God and the spiritual - too much that is for an atheist like me - it is still a treasure trove of lovely poems, each one celebrating the wonderful amazing world around us and like most of Mary Oliver's poems is a celebration of life - life at its most luminous, life at its most moving, life at its most brutal or to put it in the poet's own words - "the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything". Such a celebration of life through its various disappointments and its various mysteries "too marvelous to understand" makes Mary Oliver's poetry as enjoyable as anything else I have ever read.

Consider these lines:

Let me keep my distance, always, from those 
who think they have the answers. 

Let me keep company always with those who say 
"Look!" and laugh in astonishment, 
and bow their heads." - Mary Oliver (Mysteries, Yes)

Or these lines, which are actually truly enjoyed by reading the whole poem, which is about swans the poet sees- appearing "over the dunes...and hurried on to the sea or some lonely pond or wherever it is that swans go":

What we love, shapely and pure,
    is not to be held,
       but to be believed in.
          And then they vanished, into the unreachable distance.

Or the heart-break at the end of 'Thinking of Swirler', about a deer Mary Oliver enjoys quietly looking at during her walks through the woods

Or the lovely short poem, reproduced here in its entirety:

We Shake With Joy

We shake with joy, we shake with grief.
What a time they have, these two
housed as they are in the same body.

Or these lines from a poem called Imagine:

Will death allow such transportation of the eye?
   Will we see then into the breaking open
      of the kernel of corn,
the sprout plunging upward through damp clod
   and into the sun?

Well, we will all find out, each of us.
   And what would we be, beyond the yardstick,
beyond supper and dollars,
   if we were not filled with such wondering?

My favorite poem in the book was "To Begin with, the sweet grass"  but there are many other lovely poems in the book of course, as with any Mary Oliver book. I'll leave you though with two more poems from the book, reproduced here in its entirety. Hope you rush out and buy her book after you finish reading this post!

~*~

Schubert

He takes such small steps
to express our longings.
Thank you, Schubert.

How many hours
do I sit here
aching to do

what I do not do
when, suddenly,
he throws a single note

higher than the others
so that I feel
the green field of hope,

and then, descending,
all this world’s sorrow,
so deadly, so beautiful.

 ~*~

I want to write something so simply

I want to write something
so simply
about love
or about pain
that even
as you are reading
you feel it
and as you read
you keep feeling it
and though it be my story
it will be common,
though it be singular
it will be known to you
so that by the end
you will think—
no, you will realize—
that it was all the while
yourself arranging the words,
that it was all the time
words that you yourself,
out of your heart
had been saying.

Music Friday - King Sunny Ade

Starting a new series called "Music Friday" where I will post a few youtube videos of musicians I am enjoying at the current time. Let me start then with my find for April...juju music from the King of juju, King Sunny Ade!

 

It seems King Sunny Ade is sometimes also called the Minister of Enjoyment.. what a perfect nickname! ;-) I think I've heard of him peripherally before April but heard his 2010 album (his first in almost 10 years) on British Airways in April e...nroute to Norway and was hooked. Tracks from the album, Baba Mo Tunde, are not online but it is worth buying to give it a listen.:
The album has received rave reviews; excerpts from some of the reviews are below:

"His new two-disc set features as many grooves and six-string wizardry as any other song in his massive catalog, including his trademark classic, “Synchro System.” Seven songs stretch to nearly two hours, like the improvisational title track, which clocks in at 31 minutes....he ensemble remains focused on rhythmic guitar and percussion workouts, as well as Adé’s sweet, soulful vocals. A 15-minute remix by the steadfast producer King Britt adds a punchy edge to this already excellent album by one of Africa’s greats." - Source

"Juju juggernaut unspools euphoric Afro-minimalism: King Sunny Ade throws a sublime stylistic curveball on his first album in a decade, replacing the rapturous guitar army that once virtually defined his sound with an oceanic network of articulate drums and manly yet melodious harmonies. Immaculately produced by his manager, Andy Frankel (save an innocuous King Britt remix), these seven sprawling cuts range from an eight-minute reduction of Yoruba festival music to the 32-minute title track. Joe Doria's buttery Hammond organ adds yet another lithe layer, notably on the trippy, driving "Baba Loun Sohun Gbolgo."" - Source

" At the start of the 1970s, Ade had been part of juju's ruling triumvirate, along with Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey and Admiral Dele Abiodun. Ade's "synchro system" then sat between Obey's roots focused "miliki system" and Abiodun's pop and funk friendly "adawa system," deftly balancing tradition with futurism to the advantage of both (the African Beats' inclusion of a pedal steel guitarist was one of several strokes of genius). He surged ahead of his rivals internationally in the early 1980s, releasing three albums on Island Records including the masterpiece Synchro System (1983). Dropped by Island, who had hoped for a global juju breakthrough on a par with that of reggae in the previous decade, Ade continued to release albums at a rate on his Sunny Alade label. Since the late 1990s, Ade's recorded output has slowed considerably, and the double-disc Baba Mo Tunde is his first studio recording in ten years.... Ade's return to the recording studio is a landmark event. Let's hope he repeats it again soon. "- Source.

"...his first studio album in ten years, a pristine recording and double CD set that captures a vital musician in his prime with profound respect for the art of the juju jam." - Source

"Baba Mo Tunde seems to draw from aspects of King Sunny’s synchro-style records: the smooth and exhilarating interweave of lead and choral vocals; the insistent hammered-on guitar lines and chordal accents; the layered percussion; the little chunks of funk, pop and highlife dropped here and there into the flow. All this together forms a rich blend of proverbs, pleasure and prayer. The long title track is simply magnificent, its easy groove eventually deepening and intensifying, the call and response vocals and layered percussion reaching perfection, a colloquy of guitar lines finding an almost unbearably right-on entrainment. And King Sunny’s own thick-toned, blues-inflected, and conversational guitar solo is a stunner, carrying echoes of his vintage 1960s explorations with The Green Spots."- Source 

Note: You can hear a track of the song 'Emi Won N'ile yi O (Sa Jo Ma L'owo L'owo)' from the album at the last link above.

I'll end with one more video from King Sunny Ade from the 70s...

Enjoy!

The terrible and graphic loneliness of the great Americans

I was reading a NYT review of a recently published book - the journals of author, Alfred Kazin (comprising journal entries from 1933 to 1998!) and I found this excerpt which really spoke to me as being very representative of the American life.

"Yet the most extraordinary element in all this is something difficult, perhaps hazardous, to express; that is, the terrible and graphic loneliness of the great Americans. Thinking about them composes itself, sooner or later, into a gallery of extraordinary individuals; yet at bottom they have nothing in common but the almost shattering unassailability, the life-stricken I, in each. Each fought his way through life — and through his genius — as if no one had ever fought before. Each one, that is, began afresh - began on his own terms - began in a universe that remained, for all practical purposes, his own...” - from Alfred Kazin's Journals, edited by Richard M. Cook