Tasty Morsels

April 3, 2015

NPM 2015 - April 3 - Kevin Young

For April 3rd, a poem from Kevin Young, who has received many accolades and been much in the news (to the extents poets are in the news!) as a young upcoming poet... but first a short bio, this excerpt via wikipedia:

Kevin Young (born November 8, 1970) is an American poet and teacher of poetry. Young graduated from Harvard College in 1992, held a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University (1992–94), and received his Master of Fine Arts from Brown University. While in Boston and Providence, he was part of the African-American poetry group, the Dark Room Collective. He is heavily influenced by the poets Langston Hughes, John Berryman, and Emily Dickinson and by the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

And now to one of his poems..

Negative

by Kevin Young

Wake to find everything black

what was white, all the vice

versa—white maids on TV, black

sitcoms that star white dwarfs

cute as pearl buttons. Black Presidents,

Black Houses. White horse

candidates. All bleach burns

clothes black. Drive roads

white as you are, white songs

on the radio stolen by black bands

like secret pancake recipes, white back-up

singers, ball-players & boxers all

white as tar. Feathers on chickens

dark as everything, boiling in the pot

that called the kettle honky. Even

whites of the eye turn dark, pupils

clear & changing as a cat's.

Is this what we've wanted

& waited for? to see snow

covering everything black

as Christmas, dark pages written

white upon? All our eclipses bright,

dark stars shooting across pale

sky, glowing like ash in fire, shower

every skin. Only money keeps

green, still grows & burns like grass

under dark daylight.

---

I'll leave you with a more recent link from 2014 to an interview with Kevin Young with Terry Gross where he talks about blues, poetry, and 'laughing to keep from crying.'

April 2, 2015

NPM 2015 - April 2 - Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Today's poet is Aimee Nezhukumatathil (born in Chicago in 1974). Her bio says:

Born in 1974 in Chicago to a Filipina mother and Malayali Indian father, Aimee Nezhukumatathil is known for writing poems that sit at the intersection of three cultures: Filipino, Indian, and American. She received her BA in English and MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction from Ohio State University in Columbus.

...She teaches creative writing and environmental literature at State University of New York–Fredonia, where she was named the SUNY–Fredonia William T. Hagan Young Scholar.

And now to one of her poems. I first read this poem in 2007 or 2008 and was very amused because my friend and I, as 9-11 year olds, used to delight in spelling out and saying the word - pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis - no fear of long words for us! But I was also mildly amused by the fact that the poem is about a fear of long almost unpronounceable words, kinda like the poet's last name! ;-)

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia

—The fear of long words

by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

On the first day of classes, I secretly beg

my students Don’t be afraid of me. I know

my last name on your semester schedule

is chopped off or probably misspelled—

or both. I can’t help it. I know the panic

of too many consonants rubbed up

against each other, no room for vowels

to fan some air into the room of a box

marked Instructor. You want something

to startle you? Try tapping the ball

of roots of a potted tomato plant

into your cupped hand one spring, only

to find a small black toad who kicks

and blinks his cold eye at you,

the sun, a gnat. Be afraid of the x-rays

for your teeth or lung. Pray for no

dark spots. You may have

pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis:

coal lung. Be afraid of money spiders tiptoeing

across your face while you sleep on a sweet, fat couch.

But don’t be afraid of me, my last name, what language

I speak or what accent dulls itself on my molars.

I will tell jokes, help you see the gleam

of the beak of a mohawked cockatiel. I will

lecture on luminescent sweeps of ocean, full of tiny

dinoflagellates oozing green light when disturbed.

I promise dark gatherings of toadfish and comical shrimp

just when you think you are alone, hoping to stay somehow afloat.

You can read some more of her poems at her website here and an interview with her here.

April 1, 2015

NPM 2015 - April 1 - Sandra Beasley

For National Poetry Month this year, I've decided to post a poem each day this month by a poet born after 1965 ...so, in the last 50 years. The chances of having someone from 1995 onwards (i.e. a published poet less than 20 years old!) are low but regardless, 50 years sounds like a good round number. The reason to do this is that I've mostly read poetry by poets who were born before the end of World War II and a few from the 1950s and so I thought I'll focus on younger poets from the last 50 years and familiarize myself with some more contemporary poets.

So, for today then, is a poem by Sandra Beasley, an American poet and non-fiction writer, who, per wikipedia, was born in 1980. And yes - many contemporary poets have websites, blogs, and twitter accounts! ;-)

For a poem for today, here's a sestina* by her, via the Verse Daily website.

Sestina Inviting My Sister to Become a Pirate
by Sandra Beasley

We wake to breakfast in a burning house,
Mom cussing. Our eggs have embers in them.
Fly the black flag on this family again.
I'll wear the eye patch, you will thread a ring
through your ear. Now, let us head out to sea.
Let all the Atlantic try to douse us.

You have to remember that they love us.
Burying a hatchet's harder than razing a house,
and raising a child is hardest. The sea
can lift bottle, barrel, ship. But for them
to keep this marriage afloat will take ring
and pulley that could raise Atlantis again,

with God shouldering the rope. Once again,
pegleg life is better balanced for us.
Parents? We'll take parrots. Choose a skull ring
set with rubies, grog-soaked night-jigging, house
boys to swab the deck. Fellow mates. To them,
it's clear we were always meant for the sea.

Monsoons, I know. We could go down at sea.
Captains blue- and black-bearded, drunk again,
might mutter that we're just wenches to them,
prod us with swords. But I'd rather see us
walk a plank than back into this damn house.
So what if Dad has lost his wedding ring?

So what that his story has a familiar ring?
Oh, my darling buccaneer, don't you see?
Burying a hatchet's easier than burying a house,
burying a treasure easier again—
all the same day's worth of digging to us.
If their smiles glitter like doubloons, let them.

But then lock the chest tight. We can love them
in the leaving, as galleons love moorings
of harbors they may yet come home to. But for us,
for now, no X can compete with the sea,
cross-stitching white caps again and again.
I believe a dank cabin beats a house

ablaze. I believe we can beat them, that the sea
offers vows sacred as rings. I won't ask again.
Join us. I'll wait in a rowboat, by the lighthouse.

Copyright © 2005 Sandra Beasley All rights reserved
from Cimarron Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission

You can also read two great blog posts by her about sestinas here and here.

_____________________________________________________________________
* A sestina is "a fixed verse form consisting of six stanzas of six lines each, normally followed by a three-line envoi. The words that end each line of the first stanza are used as line endings in each of the following stanzas, rotated in a set pattern. The invention of the form is usually attributed to 12th-century troubadour Arnaut Daniel; after spreading to continental Europe, it first appeared in English in 1579, though sestinas were rarely written in Britain until the end of the 19th century. It remains a popular poetic form, and many continue to be written by contemporary poets."

November 29, 2014

RIP, Mark Strand

One of my favorite poets, Mark Strand, is no more.

I don't know where to start in terms of poems by his which I love but for now, I'm only going to put the many links stored in my Mark Strand Bookmarks folder here.

Poetry 365 - Snowfall, Mark Strand
YouTube - Mark Strand reads "The Couple"

Mark Strand « MCQESQ
VQR » I Am Not What I Am: The Poetry of Mark Strand
Reading as Poets Read: Following Mark Strand
In a Dark Time … The Eye Begins to See » Mark Strand
PBS interview - Strand Pulitzer for Poetr Apr 1999
Mark Strand's "Elegy for My Father"
Mark Strand poems on p 906
Mark Strand poem - p 170
Mark Strand | "The Story Of Our Lives" | poetry archive | plagiarist.com
Interview with Mark Strand - Oxonian Review
UI Pulitzer Prize Winners - Mark Strand
The Continuous Life by Mark Strand | The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor
Jean Nordhaus Interviews Mark Strand
Mark Strand (Bold Type Magazine) - Blizzard of One
Simic and Strand - The Presence & Absence - JSTOR
Edward Byrne: "Weather Watch: Mark Strand's 'The Weather of Words'"
The Oxonian Review » Mark Strand’s Words and Weather
YouTube - A Reading by Mark Strand: Mark Strand, a former U.S. poet laureate and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, gives this fall's Robert Lowell Memorial Lecture, reading poems spanning his 40...
Poetry in the World, Mark Strand
Mark Strand - Ullinois English
Mark Strand on Poetry and Poetics--from Essays and Interviews
Conversation: Mark Strand: Post Road #13
42 Years of Consistency: New Selected Poems by Mark Strand | Quarterly Conversation: New Selected Poems Mark Strand. Knopf. 267 pp, $21.00 When I heard Mark Strand read at Yale last spring from his New Selected (2007), I resolved to read a
The twilight zone of experience uncannily shared by Mark Strand and Edward Hopper.: Although Strand has written books about artists, his poetry never is compared with visual art. This essay compares Strand with Hopper and offers an...
Edward Byrne: Mark Strand on Measured Verse and Free Verse as Poetic Forms
Mark Strand - Dark Harbor Part 1-3
Strand - 2 poems
'A Devotion to the Vagaries of Desire' : DARK HARBOR, \o7 By Mark Strand (Alfred A. Knopf: $19; 51 pp.)\f7 - Los Angeles Times: The last 30 years have been good ones for American poetry. Never before have so many poets of true stature and lasting importance written so powerfully and beautifully, some addressing the urgent
Farewell no matter what « il mare a destra
YouTube - A Reading by Mark Strand: Mark Strand, a former U.S. poet laureate and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, gives this fall's Robert Lowell Memorial Lecture, reading poems spanning his 40...
Dark Harbor - Essay: Here, for the first time, David St John has selected from essays and reviews written over the course of his career -- about many of the major figures of our time: W S Merwin, Philip Levine, Mark Strand, Charles Wright, Donald Hall, Marvin Bell, Donald Justice, Jorie Graham, and dozens of others -- and brought them together with six uncompromising and refreshingly candid interviews about the craft of poetry and the state of poetry today.
Poet's Alphabet - OverTheRhine.COM -- Orchard
Mark Strand: Biography from Answers.com: Mark Strand (born April 11, 1934, Summerside, P.E.I., Can.) Canadian-born U.S. poet and writer of short fiction
"It is so much easier to think of our lives" Mark Strand - Google Search
In Celebration by Mark Strand : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.: You sit in a chair, touched by nothing, feeling / the old self become the older self, imagining / only the patience of water, the boredom of stone. / You think that silence is the extra page,
Paris Review Interview - Mark Strand: The Paris Review is a literary magazine featuring original writing, art, and in-depth interviews with famous writers.
Mark Strand - perpetuate the balance between the past and ...
mark strand | Tumblr
Jacket 19 - Mark Strand: The Seven Last Words
1981 Interview with Mark Strand - JSTOR http://www.jstor.org/stable/4638402
Blizzard of One - Mark Strand: Review by Ernie Hilbert
The Delirium Waltz .. by Mark Strand
Why Delirium Waltz? | Delirium Waltz
Mark Strand: Answers by Mark Strand
Mark Strand - Slate Magazine: Slate articles by Mark Strand
Poet: Mark Strand - All poems of Mark Strand: Poet: Mark Strand - All poems of Mark Strand. poetry
Keeping Things Whole by Mark Strand : The Poetry Foundation: In a field / I am the absence / of field. / This is
The Continuous Life by Mark Strand | The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor: 'The Continuous Life' by Mark Strand, and the literary and historical notes for Monday, August 11, 2008.
Mark Strand - Major Poets, ed & intro by Harold Bloom - Google Books
white | by mark strand
Tagged "Mark Strand" | Renovating Virtues
The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life - Harold Bloom - (excerpt from Dark Harbor by Mark Strand) Google Books
The Universe Stares Back
BU - Poet Mark Strand first Hamill lecturer Boundaries between poetry and painting doubly crossed
Bold Type: Conversation with Mark Strand
Eating poetry - lovely photo of Mark Strand
Ploughshares - Mark Strand
Mark Strand - by Harold Bloom
Mark Strand on Poetry and Poetics--from Essays and Interviews
Strand poems in Vendler's Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry - Google Books
Mark Strand - New Selected Poems: New Selected Poems - Read book online. From Sleeping with One Eye Open (1964) through the wonderful middle work that includes The Continuous Life (1990) and crowned by the Pulitzer Prize–winning Blizzard of One (1998) and his most recent new collection, Man and Camel (2006), this book gives us an essential selection of Mark Strand’s poetry from across the entire span of his remarkable career to date.
Inward Bound Poetry: 453. Villanelle - Two de Chiricos - Mark Strand
poems by Strand - The Poetry Center at Smith College
Next Time by Mark Strand
Poem of the day | The Untold Want
Poet Mark Strand Touches On Loss, Also Humor | Here & Now
Not Quite Invisible , Nathalie Handal Interviews Mark Strand - Guernica: Pultizer Prize-winner Mark Strand on falling in love, leaving the U.S., and the next chapter.
The Writer's Almanac: Mark Strand
THE Q&A: MARK STRAND, POET | More Intelligent Life
READING BETWEEN A and B: Mark Strand
Mark Strand, Blizzard of One: Blizzard of One is Mark Strand's most recent collection of poems, and won him the coveted Pulitzer Prize when it appeared in the United States. Waywiser publishes it here in an expanded form, with eleven new poems
Mark Strand, National Poet Laureate, talks about his work - YouTube: In this edition of HoCoPoLitSo's The Writing Life, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Henry Taylor hosts National Poet Laureate Mark Strand. Their conversation span...
Poets Mark Strand and Charles Wright Read From Their Latest Work - YouTube: Listen to two of America's greatest living poets read from their latest books. Mark Strand reads from his book of prose poems, Almost Invisible and Wright fr...
Interview with Mark Strand conducted by Karl Elder - YouTube
Mark Strand: "What We See and What We Know" - YouTube: Mark Strand, recipient of the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2009, discussed works in the permanent collection from a...
Mark Strand reads "The Couple" - YouTube: Mark Strand, a former poet laureate of the United States, reads "The Couple" at the Erotikon symposium held at the University of Chicago in March of 2001.
Mark Strand: intervista alla John Cabot University - giugno 2010 - YouTube: http://www.lacompagniadellibro.tv2000.it
Mark Strand, National Poet Laureate, talks about his work - YouTube: In this edition of HoCoPoLitSo's The Writing Life, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Henry Taylor hosts National Poet Laureate Mark Strand. Their conversation span...
Poets Mark Strand and Charles Wright Read From Their Latest Work - YouTube: Listen to two of America's greatest living poets read from their latest books. Mark Strand reads from his book of prose poems, Almost Invisible and Wright fr...
Mark Strand Interview with Karl Elder - YouTube: Karl Elder interviews poet Mark Strand, October 1991.
Interview with Mark Strand conducted by Karl Elder - YouTube
Mark Strand IPR Event December 3, 2008 - YouTube: Mark Strand reads from his poetry at the presentation of the new issue of "Italian Poetry Review" on December 3 at the Italian Academy in New York.
A Reading by Mark Strand - YouTube: Mark Strand, a former U.S. poet laureate and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, gives this fall's Robert Lowell Memorial Lecture, reading poems spanning his 40...
Mark Strand Poetry Reading | Sewanee Writers' Conference - YouTube: Poetry faculty Mark Strand reads at the 2010 Sewanee Writers' Conference.
A Poet Reflects, Is it you standing among the olive trees Beyond...
Conversation with Mark Strand: Ploughshares, 1975
Blizzard of One, by Mark Strand :: A Literature Break - YouTube: "The View," "The Next Time," & "A Piece of the Storm."

September 26, 2014

An image or its apparition

An image
Or the apparition
Just after.

(Apologies to Wallace Stevens.)

The word apparition reminds me of Impressionist paintings, which to me capture the image seen not exactly as they are but like it would be remembered by the mind of the eye if it took a quick glance (a glance is always quick, I suppose... pardon the tautology) and then looked away and tried to capture via paint that which was seen. But it isn't exactly what was seen. .how can it be. ..not the image itself but an apparition.a reflection of what was seen. In fact i have come to see many Impressionist paintings as that which you would see as a reflection in water...the clouds and trees in Monet or Renoir painting look like .they all look in reflections in a lake or river.

Claude Monet - La Grenouillere

Renoir - La Grenouillere

I recall that Ashbery's Self Portait in a Convex Mirror delves into the self and the image of the self but that is a whole other world of exploration that goes into philosophy also... but I will limit myself to the Imagists and the Impressionists for now. Both capture an image. .a moment. ..but it isn't the present. .it is a presence that lingers in the mind. Recollections of a past remembered. Proustian nostalgia for a moment passed.

Next week in ModPo, it time to meet Gertrude Stein and Picasso and view poetry through the Cubists mode of thinking (though we already kinda met the Cubists (Juan Gris) with Williams' The Rose is Obsolete and this insightful post about that poem.