Poetry on The Huffington Post

John Lundberg: A Poet's Christmas List

2009-12-06T07:00:00Z

For a time, if you were lucky enough to be on Robert Frost's Christmas list, you could count on a card in the mail each year. Each married a Frost poem with a simple but beautiful rendering of the natural world or the New England landscape (you can view a slide show of the cards here, or if you're in New York, go see them in person at the new Poets House), and I can think of no better gift for a poetry lover at Christmas.

But these days, unless you have hundreds of dollars to dole out on eBay--and you can find these cards on eBay--you'll have to settle for something a little less spectacular. I've done my best to collect a few ideas.

David Starkey of the Santa Barbara Independent listed ten poetry books he finds fit for giving this season. The new Wallace Stevens, Selected Poems from Knopf stands out for me. It sets the mood for enjoying one of the truly great poets of the 20th Century. Here's Stevens' famous lyric "The Snowman," in case you aren't familiar:

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

And speaking of great books, the online store at The Academy of American Poets is offering an autographed copy of our current Poet Laureate Kay Ryan's book The Niagra River from Grove Press for just $15. Here's an excerpt from her poem "Chinese Foot Chart":

Every part of us
alerts another part.
Press a spot in
the tender arch and
feel the scalp
twitch We are no
match for ourselves
but our own release.
Each touch
uncatches some
remote lock. Look,
boats of mercy
embark from
our heart at the
oddest knock

The Academy website has some other interesting gift ideas. There's a "Wallace Stevens Scansion T-shirt" for poetry geeks (and I mean that lovingly) and you could be the first woman on your block to wear an Emily Dickinson baby doll T. And while it might be a little heavy for Christmas, I also like this timely (and gorgeous) broadside of James Merrill's poem "Page from the Koran" overlaid on a replica page of the holy book. Here's the poem:

A small vellum environment
Overrun by black
Scorpions of Kufic script--their ranks
All trigger tail and gold vowel-sac--
At auction this mild winter morning went
For six hundred Swiss francs.

By noon, fire from the same blue heavens
Had half erased Beirut.
Allah be praised, it said on crude handbills,
For guns and Nazarenes to shoot.
"How gladly with proper words," said Wallace Stevens,
"The soldier dies." Or kills.
God's very word, then, stung the heart
To greed and rancor. Yet
Not where the last glow touches one spare man
Inked-in against his minaret
--Letters so handled they are life, and hurt,
Leaving the scribe immune?

For a limited time, you can even get if framed for free.

The Poetry Speaks collection always makes a great gift, offering audio recordings of poets from Walt Whitman to Sylvia Plath reading their work. It's one that I've happily received before. Now if someone would just pony up the $800 for my limited edition Robert Frost card, I would squeal like a twelve-year-old opening an Xbox.

Poe Rare First Book Sells for $662K At Auction

2009-12-04T12:41:58Z

NEW YORK — A rare copy of Edgar Allan Poe's first book has sold for $662,500, smashing the previous record price for American literature.

The copy of "Tamerlane and Other Poems" had been estimated to sell Friday for between $500,000 and $700,000 at Christie's auction house in New York City.

Travis Nichols: This is Your Brain on Poetry

2009-12-03T15:50:40Z

As you read this, Dr. Jacopo Annese is slicing up a brain. Not just any brain, but the brain of Henry Molaison, a man famous for his inability to form new memories after he underwent brain surgery in the early 1950s. Dr. Annese, a San Diego scientist, is digging into Molaison's gray matter with hopes of figuring out exactly how human memory works. The NYT reports that recordings of Molaison's brain slices will "produce a searchable Google Earth-like map of the brain with which scientists expect to clarify the mystery of how and where memories are created--and how they are retrieved."

So Dr. Annese and his compatriots are, in effect, plunging into the greatest poetic mystery of all time.

Memory--and the wonder and terror it inspires--has generated great poems from Simonides, famous for eulogizing ancient Greek nobility, to Coleridge, who longed for his faraway friends in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," to the contemporary poets writing an "experiment in collective autobiography," The Grand Piano. These poets--Ron Silliman, Rae Armantrout, Lyn Hejinian, and Carla Harryman among them--have spent their careers using poetry to prod the brain in other areas besides just the comfortable spot where (to paraphrase Wordsworth) emotion is recollected in tranquility.

Poetry in this tradition--one that is less interested in telling stories and more interested in exploring how story-language works--attempts to make the emotion present in the reading experience. Tranquility can come later. They're not re-telling memories in a poem (like the memory recounted in William Stafford's much-anthologized "Traveling Through the Dark"), but rather using word combinations, sound patterns, and different types of sentences to engage a reader's brain while he or she is reading (Bernadette Mayer's writing is a great example of this kind of thing). To varying degrees, these poets have delved into what literary critic Reuven Tsur has called Cognitive Poetics, a field of study that has taken "reader-response" theory to a whole other level.

Tsur makes the case that certain sound patterns have inherent properties that fire up the "poetic" parts of the brain, and that by paying attention to those patterns we can read poetry in an entirely new way. A wave of contemporary poets--the Grand Piano folks as well as Clark Coolidge, Bhanu Kapil, Renee Gladman, Eric Baus, Christian Bok, and, in his way, Tao Lin--have taken up Tsur's ideas about reading and used them in their writing. A "Cogntivie Poet" won't simply say "When I first made out with so-and-so, I did the happy dance!" Rather, she will use word combinations that cause the attentive reader to feel, to create a new experience, a memory, by the act of reading. It will make the reader's brain do the happy dance.

Here's how Bhanu Kapil handles a childhood memory in her poem "The House of Waters":

Mud walls whose surfaces belonged to the plantar surfaces of human hands. I could see
finger marks, whorls. Once, I was a living being, embellished with skin: fortunate and blighted
in turns. I turned. In circles. In the adventure playground, which was concrete. When I fell,
the nurse would daub me with yellow smears, that stang.

It's heady stuff, and it follows in Gertrude Stein's footsteps much more than Robert Frost's. It also can be full of messy failures that achieve nothing at all besides piles of linguistic gobbeldy-goo (it's experimental, after all). For these reasons, only the most adventurous poetry readers have so far taken it up . This kind of poetry isn't a comfort. Rather, it's a challenge. It's an experiment much like that of Dr. Annese, who, when he first sliced into H.M.'s brain uttered the quite expressive phrase, "Ah ha ha!"

James Heffernan: Exclusive: William Blake Rewrites "The Tyger"

2009-12-03T11:22:48Z

Just after reading the latest story about a famous golfer whose behind-the-wheel driving has turned out to be not quite up to par, I had a dream in which William Blake appeared to me and dictated the following:

Tiger, Tiger, taking flight
In thy Cadillac at night,
What immoral hand or thigh
Could make thee drive it so awry?

In what fetching garb or guise
Burnt the fire of her eyes?
With what cheek dare she aspire?
What the hand dare sieze thy fire?

And what shoulder, & what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when it reached a faster beat,
Whence came all its fevered heat?

Whence the frenzy? Whence the pain?
In what sandtrap plunged thy brain?
And what rough or water hole
Could ensnare thy noble soul?

When thy fans threw down their cheers,
And watered fairways with their tears,
Didst thou smile their looks to see,
As thou stepps't up to the tee?

Tiger, tiger, taking flight
In thy Cadillac at night,
What immoral hand or thigh
Dare make thee drive it so awry?

David Whyte: The Poetic Narrative Of Our Times

2009-12-03T11:22:30Z

Night mist hangs on the Conamara mountainside above Mameen, hiding the immensity of its sleeping, background bulk and at the same time magnifying its presence, bringing out its depth and making known to us its essential rough, unspeakable mountain-ness even as it veils and takes full sight of it away from us. Over stone precipices, the lazy movement and hanging drifts of fine-silvered water vapor outline and enhance what we call the beauty of the mountains, by enabling us to see them again and again, as if new and reborn through each shifting pattern. We are strangely delighted by our imagined fears of what it would be like to be abroad in the dark and the mist and the stones, out on their ridges and peaks, in that night where so much is hidden. Then, above the ridgelines, a full moon suddenly appears from between clouds, accentuating its own luminosity and the luminosity of the mountains by its swift appearance, seeming to demonstrate its very essence through a sheer, round, isolated contrast with what it looks down upon.

Looking up from the lit door of Keanes's Pub in the heart of Conamara, these clouds, landscapes, and even the Irishness of the night seem fuller and more essential through their disappearances as much as through their appearances. Human beings stand at the center of these sometimes swift, sometimes slow, always moving patterns of presence and absence, but rarely intuit their own essence might be revealed and magnified by what is veiled and hidden, or by what has been taken away. Yet this form of subtraction may be the very hallmark of our time. At the present time we are asked to live in companionship with patterns and dynamics that are either disappearing, have not fully emerged or can never be fully named; patterns perhaps already changing into forms for which we have yet no language.

It is tempting, in this limbo time between the traumas of a world once said to be in ceaseless war with terrorism and a not yet fully formed future ideal, to feel righteously lost. Everything seems to be paused and hanging in a mist- wrought, barely moving dance. The world's economic systems, the world's ecological systems, the relations between haves and have-nots, the sovereignty of nation states upon which many millions of individuals have based their identities, all these are taking forms which we cannot quite recognize, and in that movement through form seem to be on the verge of disappearing. Even the recent worldwide enthusiasm for the American presidential elections has waned, as the poetic narrative that put Obama so enthusiastically in the White House is dissipated by the cares of office and the sense that he is already half-captured by the very denizens of Wall Street that brought everything so dangerously to the brink. The problems seem immense; the forces at play absorbing and able to deflect the need for reform.

Little wonder then that if we prefer the appearance of stability or clear unobstructed vision we will manufacture fake narratives to replace the complexity, changeability and raw beauty of real ones, especially if the stories we always wanted to be true seem to shimmer and disappear. The flat earth vision of Thomas Friedman is well articulated, but ultimately based on a human identity parsed solely through economics, as if human life can be defined by whether one is more productive or educated than the next person. It is the task of poetry, and the poetic narrative, to bring our eyes to bear on the raw immensity of these patterns and the heart breaking nature of our disappearances, which are unavoidable no matter our economic standing or our education; what Yeats called the terrible beauty that is a consequence of being alive in this world, no matter how relentlessly positive we may be. It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life. A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain. A good poem brims with reflected beauty and even a bracing beautiful ugliness. At the center of our lives, in the midst of the busyness and the forgetting, is a story that makes sense when everything extraneous has been taken away. This is poetry's province; a form of deep memory; a place from which to witness the intangible, unspeakable thresholds of incarnation we misname an average life.

I think of a good friend, once robustly healthy, adventurous, hard working, inventive and entrepreneurial, now confined to a wheel chair and barely able to function intellectually after a terrible accident. His wife and children have lost many of the outer stories they had told themselves about their future but the central story, the one that lives under the busy surface of a family's life, the one that was always there, still remains clearly, luminously at the center. His wife has spoken many times of the essence of his spirit and the essence of her love for that spirit, which remains as a thing of beauty in and of itself, informing all the work that must be done to adjust and adapt to the new outer narrative.

It might be liberating to think of human life as informed by losses and disappearances as much as by gifted appearances, allowing a more present participation and witness to the difficulty of living. What is real can never be fully taken away; its essence always remains. It might set us a little freer to believe that there is no path in life - in the low valley, in the shelter of Keane's comfortable bar, snug by a turf fire or abroad in the mountain night, that does not lead to some form of heartbreak when the outer narrative disappears and then reappears in a different form. If we are sincere, every good marriage or relationship will break our hearts in order to enlarge our understanding of our self and that strange other with whom we have promised ourselves to the future. Being a good parent will necessarily break our hearts as we watch a child grow and eventually choose their own way, even through many of the same heartbreaks we have traversed. Following a vocation or an art form through decades of practice and understanding will break the idealistic heart that began the journey and replace it, if we sidestep the temptations of bitterness and self-pity, with something more malleable, compassionate and generous than the metaphysical organ with which we began the journey. We learn, grow and become compassionate and generous as much through exile as homecoming; as much through loss as gain, as much through giving things away as in receiving what we believe to be our due.

It may be that we live in a time of collective heartbreak, where for the first time in history we are being asked to witness the disappearance and reappearance on a global scale of what it means to be fully human; to give away our identity and see how it is returned to us through a sincere participation in the trials and necessities of the coming years. Part of that heartbreak is the sense that we might not be equal to the ecological, political and economic transitions that are necessary, that our own selfishness may be writ too deeply into our genes and that the future is therefore untenable and unreachable. We do not as yet know if this is true, but the old humanistic story around ourselves as a successful species, always on the up and up and appointed to some special destiny, is fading and silvering into the night air, and we are left, at this point in history, contemplating the unknown immensity of the night behind it.

MAMEEN

Be infinitesimal under that sky, a creature
even the sailing hawk misses, a wraith
among the rocks where the mist parts slowly.
Recall the way mere mortals are overwhelmed
by circumstance, how great reputations
dissolve with infirmity and how you,
in particular, live a hairsbreadth from losing
everyone you hold dear.

Then, look back down the path as if seeing
your past and then south over the hazy blue
coast as if present to a wide future,
recall the way you are all possibilities
you can see and how you live best
as an appreciator of horizons
whether you reach them or not,
admit that once you have got up
from your chair and opened the door,
once you have walked out into the clean air
toward that edge and taken the path up high
beyond the ordinary you have become
the privileged and the pilgrim
the one who will tell the story
and the one, coming back
from the mountain,
who helped to make it.

- David Whyte
from RIVER FLOW: New & Selected Poems 1984-2007
Copyright 2006 Many Rivers Press

Poetry Activism

2009-12-02T15:48:21Z

Vermin: A Notebook

John Kinsella
Poetry Magazine

Driving down to the city this morning, we saw five or six emus crossing the road in an area of national park where I hadn't seen emus before--not once in a lifetime of driving that way. It was a remarkable and invigorating sight as they plunged into the wandoo woodlands of Western Australia, negotiating their way through the spiky hakeas and parrot bush.

On a personal level, it came as a kind of foil for the weekend-that-was--a complex amalgamation of environmental affirmation and also witnessing of horrific environmental crime. The sort of experience that leaves you wondering if any form of environmental activism has any chance of succeeding, yet nonetheless also convinced that there is no choice about acts of resistance. Without them, the environment has no chance.

And writing a statement like this is part of a process of creating poems that hopefully resonate in different ways and in different contexts, and extend what is a particularly local debate into the wider dialogue of which, sadly, it is also part. The compulsion to witness in poetry, the desire to overcome a feeling of crushing failure, and the need to create a cautionary tale that is more than propaganda--all this goes hand-in-hand with a volatility and (maybe overly) emotional reaction to the situations as they happen.

I can see the poem forming in my head as I am raging against an act of destruction, not as a fetishized aesthetic "response," but in the struggle to formulate a language of reply that is not aggressive and thus self-defeating and hypocritical. I am being somewhat obtuse here. To begin at one possible beginning . . .

***

On Friday night at about 9:00 PM, Tracy asked me if I'd heard a rifle shot. I hadn't, but I did hear the one that came just after she spoke. A few minutes later: another, and much closer. I went outside and wandered into the dark, detecting torchlights up the bushed laneway, next to the small road reserve. Another shot--maybe two hundred meters away at most. It was the report of a high-powered rifle.

I yelled at the top of my voice to stop, the torches swung in my direction, and there was another gunshot. Inside, Tracy thought I had been hit; for a moment, so did I. Eventually, though we're a long way out of town, it took the police to resolve this situation. Never a desired intervention, but it has to be said that if they hadn't shown up, someone in our family mightn't be alive.

It turned out (we discovered this the next day), that there was a fox hunt being conducted in the area. Fascinating, how private land, which people around our way defend with such passion, should change into public land without boundaries when pursuing foxes--the great hunter-capitalist liminality!--and that reserve land, where shooting is illegal, should become part of the script. That's part one of the shire-as-killing-zone.

***

Part two. Saturday morning about 8:30 AM. A cascade of explosions in the distance. Sounds like firecrackers or a fireworks display. It can't be--no events on, and the wrong time of year . . . the whole district would erupt in flame, as everything is still tinder-dry and there's a full fire ban.

The sound diminishes, and one can detect the tone of individual shots being fired--shotgun rounds. I realize that it's happening in town, probably by the river. Corellas. They are culling corellas. Someone in the house says, yes, locals have been going on about it for weeks--the corellas have been eating the croquet lawn and making a noise. The usual complaints. I drive downtown and see corellas in the dead trees (dead from salinity, however, not from the corellas, as some claim) along the river. I cross the bridge and park next to the church, as I see utility vehicles parked outside. I jump out--round the old Holy Trinity Church where I attended services as a child and struggled between skepticism and soul, formulating my own spiritual anarchism--to see a guy with a shotgun and a boy on a two-way. A number of guys are walking around searching the trees and skies and firing.

The shotguns are no cheap pieces--they are what such shooters consider artworks. Sports shooters. I scream at one of the men and call him a murderer. If nothing else, can't they even respect a house of worship? I ask if they're professional shooters, which wouldn't make it any better from my point of view, but would indicate what the shire was up to. No. Go and see the ranger, they tell me.

I do--she's fifty feet away. I yell at her and say: This is not the way, this is not the way. You are wrong. I lose my cool. She sends me to the shire. I drive down there and have an angry exchange with one of the shire officers. If nothing else, having sports shooters in town on a Saturday morning, with families and their dogs walking around, is not acceptable. I can't make you see that the corellas matter, but surely the bloody people do? It then degenerates into what I think of the shire and its failure to protect the environment, now and on any other occasion, and I storm off. It is all very extreme. I probably achieve little, but coincidentally or not, I hear no more gunshots today.

***

These two incidents turned out to be unrelated, but they do convey a lot of notions about the "country." Though I live out in the wheatbelt, and though I have a lifelong connection with it, I am not "country." Nor am I "city." These are terms used to control discourses of place, movement, and especially the production of food (and mining).

I live where I live to help conserve the "nature" that's left. I write poems of resistance and protection. To fill in the rest of the picture of this weekend: I spent the time at Jam Tree Gully, a rocky hillside block abutting a nature reserve with acres of York gums and jam trees. Rehabilitating the land, very much denuded by horse and sheep grazing, is the aim of my coming years. Off-grid, off main water. Over the two days, I watched and photographed mistletoe birds, thornbills, willy wagtails, twenty-eight parrots, magpies, a kestrel, two eagles, a mulga snake, white-chinned honeyeaters, pardalotes, an orb weaver spider, bull-ants, and a family of kangaroos. I watched their movements--how local birds follow the nomadic birds as they pass through, the locals going to the edge of their own territory, then flying back; I watched how obvious edge-effects like roads and even fencelines with firebreaks work as imposition or are adapted into larger pictures of flight and crossover involving rocky ledges, gullies, and vegetation. In watching, I understand how better to write a poetry of resistance that will declare the necessity of preserving this region. Can it operate without me shouting out my poems against the shooters, the shires? Whatever the answer is, I do know that every act of resistance adds together, and remaining non-aggressive but resolute in response is what slows the assault against the environment. The assault is remorseless.

***

For me, poetry has no point in existing if it's not to be a prompt or aid to political and ethical change. This is not to say that a poem should be political or ethical instruction, but rather that it might engender a dialogue between the poem itself and the reader / listener, between itself and other poems and texts, and between all of these and a broader public (whatever that might be). I see myself as a poet activist--every time I write a poem, it is an act of resistance to the state, the myriad hierarchies of control, and the human urge to conquer our natural surroundings.

***

In using the language tools I have inherited (and, at times, neologistically sought to alter, even dismantle), I am inevitably part of what I critique. I am complicit. I try to lessen the ironies of my own life (by being vegan, giving up flying, resisting the logging of forests, and so on), but I am still participating in social discourse and "making a living," and that paints me into the same corner as most of us. The very act of using a computer contradicts the de-technologizing impulse that underpins what I do. Furthermore, I accept that what I see as core ethical issues are not perceived that way by many readers of poetry.

***

I come out of a science background and at an early age was working in labs and obsessed with the nomenclatures of science. In subscribing to "Neo-luddism," I am not opposing the accretion of knowledge, but the misuse of that knowledge. So much "science" is a desire to control and to profit. This I oppose. The language of poetry, even in its most lyrical modes, is a language of specific usage--poetry is about arrangement, selection, and presentation as much as what's said. That process of knowledge regarding expression is, to me, scientific.

Science per se is a process of investigation, observation, patterning through to hypothesis, and rests in the scrutinizable and systematic acquisition of knowledge. That's what a poem is to me too. This is why an activist poetics doesn't have to be subjective propaganda. The subjective has a part in it; indeed, some would say that without this a text can't be a poem. But if a poem doesn't utilize knowledge and the processes of obtaining knowledge, then it does less work than it might towards resisting damage (to people, to animals, to plants, to the land itself). I am interested in extensive digression, degrees of separation, even verbal tricks and diversions--in other words, a circuitous route to discussing or seeking to discover a "truth."

No poem really knows a truth, but it has knowledge and offers ways of approaching truth. The use of language is precise, even when it gives a semblance of the unconscious, even when it is automatic writing. In the Surrealist sense, the conducting of automatic writing exercises was experimental textually and scientifically, and was as much about the act of recording the data of process as it was about the subject connecting with the unconscious. It was, at least, quasi-scientific.

And the pseudo- and quasi- interest me. The games of dismantling and rearranging, of exquisite corpse and chance, are all part of the science of a poem for me: they are just different systems of knowledge. That's why an activist poetics can include the radically linguistically innovative, as well as the straight declaration ("logging the Tuart Forest is wrong"). Parataxis, conventional end-stopped lines and enjambment, narrative description, metaphor and metonymies, are all part of a process towards confronting hierarchies and imposed structures. We work from inside to open a view of the outside, but not one that destroys in the process.

***

A pacifist, which is what I am, can be the strongest resister, and pacifism the most defiant form of resistance. Same with language usage: I mix the old and the new to engage with a debate about protection, preservation, conservation, and respect of the "natural" world. I am aware of the problems these words carry in terms of implying complicity, because I am a poet rather than a speech writer. For me, because of this, poems can stop bulldozers. Not because they just say "stop bulldozer," but because the intricacies of language challenge, distract, and entangle the bulldozer. I am using a semantics not of analogy, but of opposition. My words are intended to halt the damage--to see what shouldn't be seen, to declare and challenge it.

***

I have not yet written the poems that go hand in hand with these actions, though I have seen them in my mind's eye, because they happen as I interact and respond physically and emotionally to the world around me, and also they appear between the lines in my notebook, attaching themselves to broader ideas and counterpointing received systems of thought. Really, though, the activist moment that becomes a poem is often away from the incident or the moment of witnessing. It becomes a moment where the figurative merges with a politics of response, forming what we might term the "para-figurative"--not didactic, but still informed by a genuine political-ethical idea / l. Last night, for example.

***

Once again, around 9:00 PM, a strange and confusing noise arose outside. I went out to investigate. As all in the house described it, it was like a mob of injured birds calling out. I thought of the corellas--maybe some had survived and were on the block calling in pain. Flashlight in hand, I raced up the hill; then suddenly the noise intensified and I heard a rush, and the sound of feet.

Moments later, the sound came from a different paddock. I walked over and the noise became a mixture of growls, squawks, and screams. I shone the torch in the direction of the sound and two pairs of eyes caught the light. One on top of the other.

It was foxes mating. Foxes who'd been missed by the hunt. I turned the light off and left them to it. If ever there was a sound of pleasure and pain rolled into one . . .

The poetic analogy is obvious and irresistible. And that's where the poet activist has to be careful--what I can take from this moment is no more or less than what I can take from the events that preceded it over the weekend. Foxes and corellas are both considered vermin. The corellas increase in number because of clearing and monoculture. Foxes were introduced in the nineteenth century as sport. Entertainment by way of killing them is sold as environmental, and yet the pleasure is all in the hands of the shooters and those who incite them. In this equation is the entire politics of what I write--in resisting through poetry the industry of pleasure and control that comes from hunting and exploitation of the environment, I am also, I believe, writing the survival and liberty of animals (including humans!).

Read more at The Poetry Foundation.

Tamsin Rothschild: The Creative Spark

2009-12-02T15:04:22Z

I recently met a young man, who was a poet, and even after much persuasion he would not allow me to read or hear his work.

I understand.

It took me months and years before I finally gathered enough courage to print off a bunch of my poems, and plonk them furtively on the table of a trusted friend. I almost whisked them onto the floor in my haste to scuttle away, in fear that I might actually be there when he read them.

I cringe a little when I think back to some of those poems that were coarser than the 'rough. ' And clearly no diamond was able to be gleaned. And yet, many of those little buds of poems have developed with his gentle and very kind input, and away from my tightly grasping hands. They have taken flight and now have a life of their own. Some living on YouTube, some strutting their stuff every now and again on Sydney stages, and some took up residence on the pages of my book. And to think I nearly kept them hidden.

So, for this young man, with his cloistered poems, I wrote this poem. For encouragement and inspiration.

perhaps i am not the poet
merely the catalyst for A Blake
the unassuming spark
for an artist
to arouse the sleepy talent
of our great master

that i
or my work
are not remembered
nor praised
but that my job has been done

and that he
in his greatness
redefines poetry as we know it

and i
just played my part

Stephen Gyllenhaal: Afghanistan Nightmare: the Only Light in this Dark Tunnel

2009-11-30T11:26:33Z

Frankly, I hate politics, but what does one do when he/she see a President who has turned out to be (as I had begun to fear a few months back) really just like most of the others that came before him.

Were we in some strange, reverse racist place during the elections to believe something different might happen because Obama was black? Not that Hilary would have handled things better, or McCain. But here we are with the Lyndon Johnson of the 21st century in a war that drains our treasury after Bush and friends (then Obama and pals) allowed Wall Street to take the bulk of it already.

Is this the way a Republic (finally) ends?

I would rather be writing poetry. I would rather be doing my little, strange videos or making a feature film or TV. I would rather be doing anything but this. But this, I believe is what has to be done. And soon what will have to be done is marching in the streets, I'm afraid -- which takes even more time (and is riskier) than writing this stuff. And after that probably bringing down this black president who lives in that White House, a house which seems to do the same thing to other good people who get too much -- too much fame, money, power, etc. "Too much" seems to hollow the heart, seems (to often, but not always) to make people forget about other people; forget about the people who just live lives (poetry in itself), who raise children and fix plumbing and camp out and cook small meals and (sometimes) starve and (sometimes) believe and hope and dream despite what unfolds all around them.

The dream of Obama is now dead. Someone has to be saying this -- the dream is dead -- as many people as possible now need to say this who aren't right wing maniacs -- the dream that was once Martin Luther King's (the dream that Obama traded on, got elected by) is now (I believe) about to turn into a nightmare.

So why write this? Why even try?

Because as the nightmare unfolds (in it's own nasty way) let it be clear that we saw it coming, that we can see where things can go (if we look carefully and allow ourselves not to rationalize our way into fantasy). That as the nightmare continues to descend on us we don't panic or get depressed or give up, but that we keep our eyes and minds clear so that we can clear up (slowly, slowly, because that's the only way it's done) the mess that lost people (like Obama and those around him) are in the process of creating.

For there will be a time after this President, there is always a time after any president...

Ian McEwan's New Fiction: The Use of Poetry

2009-11-30T10:40:26Z

It surprised no one to learn that Michael Beard had been an only child, and he would have been the first to concede that he'd never quite got the hang of brotherly feeling. His mother, Angela, was an angular beauty who doted on him, and the medium of her love was food. She bottle-fed him with passion, surplus to demand. Some four decades before he won the Nobel Prize in Physics, he came top in the Cold Norton and District Baby Competition, birth-to-six-months class.

John Lundberg: Meet Haiku Herman--Europe's New Poet President

2009-11-29T11:39:24Z

On November 19th, Herman Van Rompuy was elected the first permanent president of the European Council, the powerful body that provides direction to the European Union. The (soon to be former) Prime Minister of Belgium was reportedly the only candidate no one objected to, no doubt succeeding, in part, because he is a relative unknown on the international stage.

But Van Rompuy is quickly becoming known throughout the continent for his passion for writing poetry. Dubbed "Haiku Herman" by the British press, he is said to regularly compose haikus during his daily meetings, which he then publishes in a leading Belgian newspaper.

Van Rompuy's new appointment has brought a great deal more attention to his verse. Britain's former poet laureate Andrew Motion dedicated an entire column in the Guardian to reviewing Van Rompuy's haikus. After opining that "There is, I'm afraid, a touch of the Basil Fotherington-Thomas in some of his work"--Say it ain't so, Andrew!--he criticized it as grandiose and cliched.

Motion did like a poem called "Water,"

Puddles wait
for warmth to evaporate
Water becomes a cloud

Motion wrote that Van Rompuy "captures an idea of transience here, and of cyclical return - ideas which are central to the tradition of haikus. It is a scene of quietness, but there is threat in it." A threat in it? I dare say that comment has a touch of the Basil Fotherington-Thomas itself.

Motion's review did include a few more haikus in English (Van Rompuy usually writes in Flemish), offering us a glimpse of the Prime Minister's talents:

Light on the sea is
brighter than on land.
Heaven is breathing

Life is sailing
on the sea of time but
only the sea remains

A palace arises
on the mountain, full of light and green.
In full glory.

And while most of Van Rompuy's haikus celebrate nature and inner peace (true to the form's traditions), he occasionally shows off his keen sense of humor:

Hair blows in the wind
after years there is still wind
sadly no more hair

Whatever you think of his poetry (I happen to like it), Van Rompuy is widely admired in Belgium as an adroit politician, having pulled the country back from the brink of splitting in two a few years ago. And those close to Van Rompuy stress that the man often described as diminutive can surprise with a "furious intelligence." As an example, when a member of parliament saluted Van Rompuy's recent success with some Flemish verse, the Prime Minister completed the poem by memory. Basil Fotherington -Thomas couldn't have done that.

Travis Nichols: This Thanksgiving, Let's Not Keep Fighting the Trojan War

2009-11-26T10:00:00Z

It's no secret that Thanksgiving has a violent past. But the bloody history is often obscured by our celebration of the exceptionally peaceful 1621 feast. We forget that this meeting--between the chief Massasoit and the bedraggled William Bradford--was more of an uneasy truce than a gravy and gabfest (would you have felt comfortable during those shooting "competitions"? Not me.) That this meeting was so exceptional is surely all the more reason to celebrate it now, of course, as something to aspire to, but our uniquely American way of re-telling the stories of the past to re-enforce our ideas of the present can have dire consequences. One of poetry's jobs is to unravel these convenient narratives.

Writers from Mark Twain to Howard Zinn have noted that colonists often celebrated thanksgivings after clashes with the native population. Worth cheering were encounters in which more of "them" died than "us," or after one of the colonists' own returned safely from captivity. In Mary Rowlandson's hugely popular captivity narrative from 1676, she describes her colony's struggles with the natives and how, when such a struggle was won, the town leaders held days of public thanksgiving, praising the Lord for his help in vanquishing the enemy.

Rowlandson's story serves as inspiration for the 2003 poem "Captivity" from the Chippewa-American poet Louise Erdrich. In a style very much like the one employed in her novels--breathless but precise--Erdrich speaks in the voice of Rowlandson as her feelings change over the course of her imprisonment:

I told myself that I would starve
Before I took food from his hands
But I did not starve.
One night
He killed a deer with a young one in her
And gave me to eat of the fawn.
It was so tender,
The bones like the stems of flowers,
That I followed where he took me . . .

The poem leaves Rowlandson at home, rescued, but now curiously hyphenated (not unlike Erdrich herself), at once returned to the fold and forever outside of the colony's understanding. That was surely a much more complicated thanksgiving, a private mess with a public face. On the family scale, I'm sure a lot of us can relate.

Reading this poem I'm reminded of another famous captivity story, the Trojan War, and a play inspired by that founding myth by the poet Jack Spicer. In Spicer's Troilus, Zeus says, "The Trojan War has been going on for the last 3000 years, and it hasn't stopped yet."

What does this mean? As always, Spicer is tantalizingly oblique, but I take this quote to mean every conflict--Spartans vs. Romans, Colonists vs. Indians--springs from somebody's "precious" being stolen. Helen or Mary Rowlandson or . . .

Spicer had that idea in the 1960s, and now Ed Sanders, a great American, takes it up in 2010. The title of his selected poems: Let's Not Keep Fighting the Trojan War.

1250 BC. 1620. 1960. 2009.

It sounds so simple, but no one has been able to do it. Yet.

Thanksgiving Poems: The Cranberry Cantos

2009-11-26T10:00:00Z

The Poetry Foundation

Thanksgiving is America's harvest festival--a time to acknowledge the help of family and friends, and a reminder of what a gift it is to be alive. It's a day to overindulge in the here and now, even as we reflect on the past. In other words, it's the perfect holiday for poetry! While a barn full of winter stock and a home overrun with family and friends does not fit with our popular conception of the poet as solitary brooder, these poems show that the occasion has provided poets--from Harriet Maxwell Converse in the 19th century to Elizabeth Alexander in the 21st--with plenty of food for thought. Whether you're looking for a pre-meal toast, a scrap of American history, or a late night conversation starter, these poems should provide ample stuffing.

Toasts and Prayers

A Thanksgiving to God, for his House
By Robert Herrick

Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing
By James Weldon Johnson

The Thanksgivings
By Harriet Maxwell Converse

Thanksgiving
By Edgar Albert Guest

Family, Food, and Fellowship

Butter
By Elizabeth Alexander

Family Reunion
By Maxine W. Kumin

Perhaps the World Ends Here
By Joy Harjo

Stomackes
By Albert Goldbarth

Thanksgiving Magic
By Rowena Bastin Bennett

Yam
By Bruce Guernsey

Totem
By Eamon Grennan

The Season

My Triumph
By John Greenleaf Whittier

A Short History of the Shadow
By Charles Wright

Signs of the Times
By Paul Laurence Dunbar

Thanksgiving Day
By L. Maria Child

The Garden of Proserpine
By Algernon Charles Swinburne

The Pumpkin
By John Greenleaf Whittier

When the Frost is on the Punkin
By James Whitcomb Riley

Zebra
By C. K. Williams

The Gift Outright
By Robert Frost

To Autumn
By John Keats

Jamie Lee Curtis: Every Day Is Thanksgiving

2009-11-26T09:01:00Z

When I was on a double family RV trip to Big Sur this last Spring Break, when we arrived at our campground, a young man who was helping us set up the two large rigs dropped his campground manifesto on me, "There are two kinds of people. One who wakes up and says 'Good Morning, God' and the other who says 'Good God, Morning?'"

I wake up every day with the belief in the power of a new day and beginning, the belief that good can come from the efforts I put into the day.

For me, everyday is Thanksgiving, for as soon as I get my ego out of the way and honestly look at the gratitude I have in my heart for those who have made my life so full and meaningful...then my day is off to a great start... I know... sounds a bit "corny" after all I am now 51 but the trivial things do seem to pass me by now as I get older. Today, as I was driving my 13-year-old son home, we passed Wendell Brown, a homeless Veteran who sells poems on the street corner in Brentwood. I have read so many over the years and have always appreciated them and him, for telling his truth in a poem for making me think about who I am.

There was an Arrested Development song, "Mr. Wendell," that I always thought was about him, his dispensing wisdom on the street, while those around him searched for theirs in their cars, homes, clothes, choices. I hope that song was about him. I wish I could write a song for Mr. Wendell Brown this Thanksgiving day. On our way home, my son, Tom, read me the poem we had been handed, that we bought with our donation. I enclose it below. It is my Thanksgiving blog. It is written by Wendell Brown, a Vietnam Veteran whose story I've linked to. Happy Thanksgiving. Make Change. Wake Up!

A Day To Be Thankful

I'm thankful for Thanksgiving Day
Because it brings to mind
The gifts I've had along the way
And blessings, every kind.

I'm thankful that I live my life
In this great land of ours.
That I've not had to give my life,
And sleep beneath the flowers.

Much thanks must go to all who fought
To keep us safe and free.
Their sacrifice has dearly bought
Our peace and liberty.

We should remember all who came
Before us through the years
They kept our country much the same
By action, sweat and tears.

Not ever does a day go by
That I forget my folks.
My mother baking apple pie,
My sister with her jokes.

My dad was like a magistrate,
Who ruled on each dispute.
The claims must all be free from hate.
He'd grant or he'd refute.

I owe a debt of gratitude
To teachers that I've had.
They helped to shape my attitude
And spanked when I was bad.

The Bible says Our Father, God
Will give us daily bread,
But I would not believe it odd
If two days passed instead.

There are so very many things
We should be thankful for.
It's good we have a day which brings
God's harvest to our door.

. . . . . Turkey and Pumpkin Pie . . . . .
. . . . . . . . And Friendship . . . . . . . . .

By Wendell Brown

Read more HuffPost Thanksgiving coverage and commentary

Thanksgiving Poems By Billy Collins

2009-11-25T12:55:42Z

TWO THANKSGIVING POEMS

BY BILLY COLLINS

Reprinted with permission from "The Dreadest Feast: Writers on Enduring the Holidays" published by Stewart, Tabori & Chang edited by Taylor Plimpton and Michele Clarke.

1. Thanksgiving Morning

The crossed multiple blades of the blender
set out to dry on a counter.
The corkscrew unsheathed and ready
to enter whatever cannot resist its twisting.
The carving knife waiting alongside
the sharpener for its abrasive touch,

The blue box of matches, the white candles.
The branch of dry leaves brought in
Along with vines clustered with red and yellow berries,

All of which points to the anonymous turkey,
soon to be trussed with string
but now soaking on the cold porch
in a bucket of salted ice water,
in brine, as they like to say this time of year.

And we must not overlook the oven,
radiating in a corner of the kitchen
set at first at 500 degrees
then lowered almost mercifully to 350,

still hot enough to lift the bird
into the condition of sacrificial edibility,
yet short of what would incinerate a book,
the oven that swallowed the witch and Sylvia Plath
and now the oven of our pleasure,
our forks and glasses blindly raised.

2. The Gathering, a Thanksgiving Poem

Outside, the scene was right for the season,
heavy gray clouds and just enough wind
to blow down the last of the yellow leaves.

But the house was different that day,
so distant from the other houses,
like a planet inhabited by only a dozen people

with the same last name and the same nose
rotating slowly on its invisible axis.
Too bad you couldn't be there

but you were flying through space on your own asteroid
with your arm around an uncle.
You would have unwrapped your scarf

and thrown your coat on top of the pile
then lifted a glass of wine
as a tiny man ran across a screen with a ball.

You would have heard me
saying grace with my elbows on the tablecloth
as one of the twins threw a dinner roll across the room at the other.