NPM 2013 - F is for Frost

After T. S. Eliot yesterday, it is perhaps appropriate that I follow it up today with the other great giant of 20th century American poetry, Robert Frost. Poets rarely capture the imagination of an entire nation and from what I read (since I was not alive then), no one has done this better than Robert Frost did. He won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry four times, and was perhaps most in the public eye at the ripe old age of 86 when he read his poem, The Gift Outright, at JFK's inauguration. (I just learned that Robert Frost had written a new poem called "Dedication" for the inauguration but could not read it due to the sun's glare and so he recited 'The Gift Outright' from memory!)

And yet, despite all the fame, other than a few famous poems of his (for eg: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, The Road Not Taken, Fire and Ice, The Mending Wall (with its famous last line), and a few others), I have not read much of Frost's poetry. Somehow, it has never jumped out at me and grabbed me like some other poetry does. Hence, I thought I'd take the opportunity today to read a few of his other poems and post three here that I enjoyed. (The Library of Congress, where he was the Poetry Consultant (a post called "Poet Laureate" these days) in 1958-59, has lots of resources to study his poetry further.)

First up, a lovely sonnet; about which you can read a lot more here.

The Oven Bird
by Robert Frost

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

It is time for spring now but read this poem about October and fall; read it loudly as I did, and enjoy the musicality of it all!

October
by Robert Frost

O hushed October morning mild,

Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;

Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,

Should waste them all.

The crows above the forest call;

Tomorrow they may form and go.

O hushed October morning mild,

Begin the hours of this day slow.

Make the day seem to us less brief.

Hearts not averse to being beguiled,

Beguile us in the way you know.

Release one leaf at break of day;

At noon release another leaf;

One from our trees, one far away.

Retard the sun with gentle mist;

Enchant the land with amethyst.

Slow, slow!

For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,

Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,

Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—

For the grapes’ sake along the wall.

 And I'll leave you with a poem that I have read before and enjoyed a lot; the idea of being "acquainted with the night" somehow appeals to me. (Just read on wikipedia that this poem is written in "a terza rima rhyme scheme, which follows the complex pattern, aba bcb cdc dad aa. Terza rima ("third rhyme" in English) was invented by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri for his epic poem The Divine Comedy. Because Italian is a language in which many words have vowel endings, terza rima is much less difficult to write in Italian than it is in English. Because of its difficulty, very few writers in English have attempted the form. However, Frost was a master of many forms, and "Acquainted With The Night" is one of the most famous examples of an American poem written in terza rima."

"I had a lover's quarrel with the world." The epitaph engraved on his tomb is the last line from his poem "The Lesson for Today."

Acquainted with the Night
By Robert Frost

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

Like this page at the lovely website on Modern American Poetry, maintained by the English department at the Univ. of Illinois, writes about the poem:

 "Acquainted With the Night" speaks to the confrontation with nothingness, to what Wallace Stevens called the "experience of annihilation." It was God who died, Stevens wrote, and we share in that death because we are left feeling "dispossessed and alone in a solitude, like children without parents, in a home that seemed deserted, in which the amical rooms and halls had taken on a look of hardness and emptiness." The furthest range of Frost's poem merges with Stevens's meditation on the feeling of metaphysical homelessness. With all chances gone for a harmonized relation of self and nature, the only enclosure possible is the one which the self can make and impose on an inhospitable universe.

Or like Stevens wrote in his book Opus Posthumous, “After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption." Or, as he wrote in his poem, Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour:

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

In other words,  in poetry alone, perhaps, is our salvation, our guiding light.

NPM 2013 - E is for Eliot

If there was just one poem I could take with me to a desert island, it would be Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot. Over the years I have read it many times but never the whole thing in one sitting, as it is just too much for simple-me to wrap my heads around in one go. However, time and again, I find I can pick up reading it from mid-way and still take great pleasure in any random excerpt from the poem. The poem, it seems to me, encompasses all of life in it; how then can one excerpt just a few lines and share here? So, I had thought I will not share Eliot's poems today. I know of but have not read any of his other famous poems like The Waste Land ('April is a cruel month', 'Shantih Shantih Shantih', etc.) nor The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock and thought it doesn't behoove me to excerpt bits of those poems that I have not even read in their entirety. But frankly, though research led me to a few poets whose name starts with E, nothing drew me in. So, here I am... excerpting some lines from each of the four parts of the Four Quartets. And then I have a surprise bonus at the end.

Again, I hate to excerpt lines when every single line is quote-worthy. Please go read the full poem at this site to enjoy it fully. I have randomly chosen some lines to post here and will not get into any discussions about why these lines and why not these other. Onto the excerpts then...

From  Burnt Norton

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.

From East Coker

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
       You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstacy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
       You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
       You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
       You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

From The Dry Salvages

     Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing,
The silent withering of autumn flowers
Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;
Where is there and end to the drifting wreckage,
The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?
  There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable-
And therefore the fittest for renunciation.

From  Little Gidding

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

A long time ago, Slate.com had an article where they had a short mp3 of T. S. Eliot himself reading parts of Burnt Norton. But it was later taken down and though I've looked for it, I have never found it again. So, imagine my surprise when I ran into this just now! T. S. Eliot reading the ENTIRE poem! Today, I won't make the same mistake again and have downloaded this for my archives! I usually do not tune into spoken/read poetry easily but when the poet himself reads his poem, it adds to the poem thanks to the poet reading it with the stresses, pauses, etc that he had in mind. This may not always be true but in this case, it really works for me. For me, hearing Eliot's voice reading this poem is magical!

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.