Mistakes

"This Error is the Sign of Love," by Lewis Hyde (which my friend Barb Kobritz laid on me many years ago), is the first poem that made me think of mistakes as a "theme." Hyde’s poem is almost a thematic study of the concept, a catalog of discordant examples of mistakes, some deliberately silly. You wouldn’t want to read poem after poem written in this styel - it can start to feel didactic.

But I love this poem. It’s filled with lines and images that stick with me. It’s also a poem about contradictions - of "mistakes" sometimes resulting in the most beautiful events in one’s life. Not mistake as in happenstance, coincidence, serendipity, because those are obviously to be celebrated, god is obviously to be praised for those. But mistake in another sense, as flaw, or defeat or despair, yet somehow resulting in something better, if that’s the word. Hyde’s beautiful line (perhaps it’s "Bly-ian") - "the tear that saves a man from power" - resonates in our contemporary society that seems to worship power on many levels. And only the idiotic don’t fear the outcome of that worship.

Hyde’s line reminds me in turn of the Argentinian poet Antonio Porchia’s equally resonant epigram: "You don’t see the great river of tears because it lacks one tear of your own."
I also love Hyde’s line from the conclusion of his poem: "the one slack line in a poem where the listener relaxes and suddenly the poem is in your heart like a fruit wasp in an apple." Yes - and suddenly the poem is in your heart.

Not everything has to be finely wrought, perfect, logical, "successful."

It reminds me of a little epigram of my own, from a while back:

Maybe it doesn’t have to be perfect
to be perfect.

Not quite dawn.
Maybe it takes that long.

William Stafford has two magnificent poems on this theme: "The Sparkle Depends on Flaws in the Diamond," and "Dedications/Pledges/Commitments." Like Hyde’s poem, "The Sparkle" may be a tad dogmatic - it’s also written in an epigrammatic mode, in an almost archaic style. Blake and the Bible come to mind. In less honest hands, such a style could be pretentious and tiresome. The teaching mode is a ballsy technique. Not many poets could bring it off, but Stafford is on a different plane than most poets. (Blaga Dimitrova of Bulgaria, another of my favorite poets, can do this wonderfully too.)

Stafford’s almost diagramatic list of contradictions is an exploration of integrity.

THE SPARKLE DEPENDS ON FLAWS IN THE DIAMOND
William Stafford

Wood that can learn is no good for a bow.

The eye that can stand the sun can't
see in shadow.

Fish don't find the channel - the channel
finds them.

If the root doesn't trust, the plant
won't blossom.

A dog that knows jaguars is no longer
useful in hunting.

You can lie at a banquet, but you have to
be honest in the kitchen.

* * *
God I love the last line. One could easily put together a terrific anthology of kitchen poems, poems honoring the lack of pretense at the kitchen table. Joy Harjo’s famous "Perhaps the world ends here" is a magnificent example of the genre, but there are many others. Heaney has a gorgeous one ("Clearances").

Stafford’s "Dedications/Pledges/Commitments" reads more as an invocation, a quiet prayer of gratitude. It’s a beautiful poem to read to friends, at that kitchen table. Our "mistake" theme is at the pivot point of this little prayer: "For mistakes that worked so well."

DEDICATIONS/PLEDGES/COMMITMENTS
William Stafford

For the past.
For my own path.
For surprises.

For mistakes that worked so well.
For tomorrow if I'm there.
For the next real thing.

Then for carrying it all
through whatever is necessary.
For following the little god who speaks only to me.

* * *
It’s a good chore - looking back on your own life to see if there really have been mistakes that worked so well. It’s not an easy question, but one obvious answer for me is the unplanned birth of our beautiful son Gavin. A mistake that worked out so well.

Tomas Transtromer’s long meditation "The Golden Wasp" flows over this idea. Transtromer’s whole poem is so relevant to today’s world, studded as it is with bland, lethal religious certainties.

As Transtromer describes the true believers:

Those who can never exist anywhere except on their facades
those who are never absent-minded
those who never open the wrong door and catch a glimpse of the Unidentified One.

His warning: Walk past them.

Transtromer’s poem is also in the teaching mode. But I love it.

The best poem in this genre, though, is by the magnificent Wislawa Szymborksa. If you don’t know her poetry yet, please buy one her books. Even in translation her language is simple, hewn, self-deprecating, punctured with breathtaking images.

Her poem "A Day" is entirely and simply about the mistakes. You must read it slowly aloud (to yourself if you wish), slowly enough to experience each of the images and consider each of the thoughts. It takes a few tries before the phrases make sense coming off your tongue, but when that happens, and you put it all together, it’s a powerful poem.

A DAY
Wislawa Szymborksa

Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;
to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur;
to tell pain
from everything it's not;
to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes.
An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;
and if only once
to stumble upon a stone,
end up soaked in one downpour or another,
mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;
and to keep on not knowing
something important.

* * *
This poem reminds me of the haunting Lucinda Williams song, "Sweet Old World." Emmy Lou Harris’ version is special.

I suspect these poems about "mistakes" (and Lucinda’s song) are most meaningful when you’re deeply depressed - when the mistakes aren’t working so well. I don’t know any of these poets personally except through their work, but I hazard the suggestion that each of the poems we’ve looked at were probably written out of depression. Somewhere deep within the slightly didactic style, you can sense the poet trying not so much to teach us, but to remind themselves of some inner faith. They’re fighting despair. I can only thank them.

1-17-06: Threads

I like to read the following poems back to back. Each uses "thread" as a central metaphor.

The first poem, "The Thread," is by Denise Levertov. I have a soft spot in my heart for her - she had a big impact on me way back when. I got to see her read once, at Syracuse University probably in the early 1980s? I remember her being tiny and energetic and British and gracious. Today her language sometimes seems a little forced, or cloying, I guess is the word. But "The Thread" still takes my breath away. I’ve probably been reading it for 30 years. I love the way it celebrates the moments - rare and unpredictable, in her presentation - when we are called back to who we are.

It would be reductive to say the thread in her poem represents a sense of mission, but it’s something like that. It’s a contradictory image (the best kind). We are simultaneously constrained and energized by our calling.

I guess there’s a gentle irony in the image, too. How could a tiny thread restrict you? It wouldn’t take much to break it. But Levertov doesn’t want that - she’s not a fish fighting to break the line. You can feel her gratitude at being connected.

To Levertov, the thread is a benevolent force. It’s been there her whole life. Her thread is so unobtrusive she forgets about it most of the time. When she thinks of it at all, she immediately assumes it’s "loosened itself and gone." She is probably thinking, well, that was all in the past. But then "its tug" surprises her one day, and she is flooded with gratitude to be ridden by something that only needs thread for a bridle.

The slow, halting pace of the lines quietly evokes her hesitant recognition of the continued presence of the thread.

The one thing I don’t love about this poem is a slight sense of self-congratulation, which is, I regret to say about a poet I take sustenance from, somewhat characteristic of Levertov.

THE THREAD
Denise Levertov
Something is very gently,
invisibly, silently,
pulling at me - a thread
or net of threads
finer than cobweb and as
elastic. I haven’t tried
the strength of it. No barbed hook
pierced and tore me. Was it
not long ago this thread
began to draw me? Or
way back? Was I
born with its knot about my
neck, a bridle? Not fear
but a stirring
of wonder makes me
catch my breath when I feel
the tug of it when I thought
it had loosened itself and gone.

* * *
William Stafford uses the metaphor just a little differently in his haunting poem "The Way It Is." This is a poem Annie and I put on our wall. Like Levertov’s, it evokes a mid-life, or perhaps late-life, realization of who one is. But Stafford uses humor - characteristically self-deprecating: "People wonder what you are pursuing." Our inner goals and struggles, which consume us with their all-encompassing drama, are barely even understood, even by our closest friends. "You have to explain about the thread." These are really funny lines - almost laugh-out-loud, when you think about them. All through his magnificent body of poetry, egotism looks a little pathetic through Stafford’s eyes. And we all have it.

His plainspeaking style is a defense against the ego.

But the poem’s not just critiquing us, or teasing us. Our plight is serious. It turns out that our identity is no more substantial than a thread. The poem is a homage to our secret dreams. I can’t really describe in words how much I love this line: "While you hold it you can’t get lost."
"Lost" is the rich word here, carrying both the common connotation of the word - temporarily not knowing where you are - but also the deeper context of spiritual or perhaps social despair. As Stafford says famously elsewhere, "the darkness is deep around us." It’s a terrifying world we live in. At heart, this is what I call a warning poem. Break your fragile thread of connection, or let go of it, and you are lost.

But miraculously, the poem is not about weakness. The thread we feel in this poem is very strong. I feel a touch of stubbornness in the poem. The last line can be read in two ways: descriptive, or as a command, the warning: DON’T LET GO OF THE THREAD!

THE WAY IT IS
William Stafford
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
* * *
Levertov uses thread in other poems. The next one, "Beyond the End," has a different flow to it, and to be frank I like it less. But I’ve always loved her phrase "the will to respond." When you really observe human interactions, in whatever setting, it’s amazing how little we actually respond to each other, no? We have little idea who other people even are. We barely listen, barely look, barely feel. The full quotation she is meditating on - "the reason can give nothing at all like the response to desire" - is from Wallace Steven’s beautiful (and characteristically pagan) poem, "Dezembrium."

BEYOND THE END
Levertov
In ‘nature’ there’s no choice -
flowers
swing their heads in the wind, sun & moon
are as they are. But we seem
almost to have it (not just
available death)
Its energy: a spider’s thread: not to
‘go on living’ but to quicken, to activate: extend:
Some have it, they force it -
with work or laughter or even
the act of buying, if that’s
all they can lay hands on -
the girls crowding the stores, where light,
color, solid dreams are - what gay
desire! It’s their festival,
ring game, wassail, mystery.
It has no grace like that of
the grass, the humble rhythms, the
falling & arising of leaf and star;
it’s barely
a constant. Like salt:
take it or leave it
The ‘hewers of wood’ & so on; every damn
craftsman has it while he’s working
but it’s not
a question of work; some
shine with it, in repose. Maybe it is
response, the will to respond - (‘reason
can give nothing at all/like
the response to desire’) maybe
a gritting of the teeth, to go
just that much further, beyond the end
beyond whatever ends; to begin, to be, to defy.

* * *
(Today it struck me how Levertov works quotations of other people’s poetry into her own, as she does in that poem. It reminds me of Marianne Moore, or maybe it’s Poundian. It can get tiresome to me - I am not generally a fan of Charles Olsen or Robert Duncan or their followers, who take the technique to pretentious heights. But sometimes - as in "Beyond the End" - it can give poems a, well, "thread-like" feel.)

We shouldn’t conclude the thread metaphor fantasia without Blake’s once-famous (is that the right way to phrase it?) call at the conclusion of his long religious rant "Jerusalem" -

TO THE CHRISTIANS
William Blake
I give you the end of a golden thread,
Only wind it into a ball,
It will let you in at Heaven’s Gate
Built in Jerusalem’s Wall.

* * *
I love the way he was addressing us, and in fact, commanding us: "I give you the end of a golden thread - wind it into a ball." This is an example of what I term the "direct address to the reader" genre. (Whitman is probably the most famous employer of this to me spine-tingling genre, but there are many others.) Poets delierately reaching across the centuries: Hold on to this little tiny string, fellow human. Don’t ever let go of it. It’s 2006. The darkness is deep.

Christmas and New Year's Poems

It's been a rough year.

12-28-05 : Christmas and New Year poems

I invite you to read some poems I consider "holiday" poems. I use the term in its broad sense. I am not a religious person and many aspects of the Christmas season are disgusting.
I am famous among my few friends at hating commercialism and malls. But, irrational or not, I actually enjoy going to the big bad mall this time of year. I have to convince my wife to spend a few evenings there. Accompanied by our seven year old. It is pretty irrational. But having Gavin along makes it even better for me.

Maybe it's childish but I like to see people out and about, even if the world's screwed up. I like all the lights and colors in the stores. I like having a drink before dinner at Pizzeria Uno. We even buy a few things.

Maybe going to the mall this nutty time of year - something smart people don’t do - is just an unconscious excuse for getting out of the house. Working full time, with a seven year old, my wife and I really don’t get out much. Worse things can happen.

This is a very emotional time of year for me. More emotional every year, actually. Of course I think of my parents, six and seven years gone now. I think of family traditions, and I do my best to keep a couple alive. I am not very good at it. My life has taken me far from the large extended family I grew up with in California 50 years ago. My sister and I have drifted apart, I am ashamed to say. I wrote the following poem on these themes, between Christmas and New Year’s.

NOTE LEFT WITH A PLATE OF COOKIES
JE

New Year’s Eve. The world is hurting.

How fortunate to have friends coming over New Year’s Eve day, friends going back 30 years. Life is very thin without friends.

Emmett and Gavin, I made these cookies for you. Out of leftover pie dough like my mother made for me. I don’t know if my grandmother made them for my mother. I’m not so sure she was all that warm to my mother as a child. It was hard to get close to my grandmother. I think she loved the family as a group - she prided herself on her huge holiday feasts - but perhaps not so much as individuals. She had little patience. Which you can take, even as a child, when you’re only around her a few times a year. Besides, she gave each of us cousins a $10 bill for Christmas. I always wondered if I got the same as everyone else. She could be pretty snippy. I was a respectful but creative child.

I believe in evolving what we inherit, so unlike my mother I make my pie cookies in shapes:

Emmett, the beautiful brook trout.

Gavin, the dove of peace.

Annie, the dragonfly on our canoe paddle. I am a lucky man.

The pie-shaped piece is in honor of both your grandmothers’ pie-making skills - no frozen prepared crusts from Wegmans. Real pie, homemade pie, hot out of the oven. (But best of all the next morning with a cup of coffee.)

I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t get much better than sitting in the kitchen eating pie with family or friends at get-togethers for some reason or another. The house filled with the smells of food and coffee. Teasing and laughter. The joking themes don’t change much from year to year: someone seemingly graceful is actually clumsy and injury-prone; someone is perenially spaced out and gets lost a lot; someone’s short; someone’s a bad cook; someone’s cheap; someone’s an atrociously bad Hearts or cribbage player; someone’s always late. Even (when you felt daring or were trying to defuse some brewing dispute between family members): Someone’s moody. It didn’t always work.

Life would be thin without homemade pie. I predict you will both carry on this tradition.

* * *
But the emotions I felt this holiday season were about more than personal loss. Maybe, for a slew of complicated reasons, this is a time of year when we let ourselves worry about the future. We just let ourselves think about it a little bit.

We think of the millions of victims of the horrible natural disasters this past year. But the manmade tragedies are even uglier. So many cyclones of violence have been set forth upon the world. Only someone who consciously decides not to think about it can avoid feeling worried about 2006.

I called upon tender music to get me through the holidays this year - Van Morrison, Townes Van Zandt, Gillian Welch, Lucinda Williams. My wife loves Carlos Natal. Paul Horn’s Peace Album is an bonafide "Christmas album" and it played a lot this year in our house. You can feel the longing for peace in it. And I fell in love with John Prine’s "Lake Marie," a ebullient song about peaceful waters. I played it for my wife early one morning.

Jackson Browne’s great song about Christmas, "The Rebel Jesus." meant a great deal to me this year. It has tenderness, but it’s also an audacious poem. And in my opinion, he might be "just a songwriter" but his skill with words - look at the off rhymes - is equal to poets per se.

THE REBEL JESUS
Jackson Browne

All the streets are filled with laughter and light
and the music of the season
and the merchants’ windows are all bright
with the faces of the children
and the families hurry into their homes
as the sky darkens and freezes
they’ll be gathering around their hearths and tables
giving thanks for god’s graces
and the birth of the rebel jesus

They call him by the Prince of Peace
and they call him by the Savior
and they pray to him upon the seas
and in every bold endeavour
and they fill their churches with their pride and gold
as their faith in him increases
but they’ve turned the nature that I worship in him
from a temple to a robber’s den
in the words of the rebel Jesus

We guard our world with locks and guns
and we guard our fine possessions
and once a year when Christmas comes
we give to our relations
and perhaps we give a little to the poor
if the generosity should seize us
but if anyone of us should interfere
in the business of why there are poor
they get the same as the rebel Jesus

But pardon me if I have seemed
to take a tone of judgment
for I’ve no wish to come between
this day and your enjoyment
in a life of hardship and of earthly toil
there’s a need for anything that frees us
so I bid you pleasure and I bid you cheer
from a heathen and a pagan
on the side of the rebel Jesus

* * *
I am not a Christian either. (It is still legal to say so, isn’t it?) I am not anythingian. I am against ians. As a matter of fact, I think religous dogma is the cause of much of the hatred and psychological damage tearing our world apart. I think of the major religions as big blades ripping through humanity like a huge lawnmower. The personal experiences I’ve had with churches have been pretty universally troubling. Egotistical religious leaders drive me nuts. I’ve included one of my own poems on the topic - "Parents’ Weekend," below - as an antidote to any vestigial religiosity in this selection of poems.

PARENTS’ WEEKEND
JE

In his keenly anticipated guest sermon
the theologian told the story
of the famous incident
in which to his astonishment
a simple working person had taught him something about faith,
and he got an excited ovation
from the freshmen and their parents,
and if memory serves me correctly
he peppered the encore with self-deprecating jokes.

* * *
So I’m deeply suspicious of Christianity. But something about Jesus’s birth moves me profoundly, and more so this year than ever. I don’t really understand my feelings. It’s weird for a non-Christian to feel this, or perhaps it isn’t. Hope for the world is diminishing, isn’t it? I know there are some who think that’s a ridiculous view. I read an article the other day by a professed expert on the state of the world that times are basically pretty damned good, especially compared to the past. To this person, the environmental, political, and economic prospects for the planet as a whole are excellent.

To me, the trajectories are frightening.

To me, a non-Christian, the story of his birth has come to symbolize in some subterraneaon cultural level a surprisingly radical view of the dignity of every person, a critique of wealth and privilege and power, and, therefore, hope.

Anyway, my emotional state has driven me to poetry, specifically to a search for poems that somehow to me represent "the spirit of christmas." No matter if retailers for 150 years have used that phrase to drum up business, or if it’s been schmaltzed and Disneyfied to death. It’s still a good question: in 2005, what does christmas mean?

There are a couple that are well-known: Chesterton’s "The Donkey" and Hardy’s "The Oxen" are still beautiful poems, my friends. Great for reading aloud, especially after a couple of holiday beers.

THE OXEN
Thomas Hardy

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock,
"Now they are all on their knees,"
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve
"Come, see the oxen kneel,

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom
Hoping it might be so.

THE DONKEY
G.K. Chesterton

When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody
On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.
Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.

* * *
My wife and I lost a lovely friend this past year. Hazel was in her 90s. We got to know her over the past six years. Annie took her to the doctor several times and we dropped by a few times. She lived in the same huge farm house she’d lived in to raise several children. Spoke of her long-deceased husband with reverence. She’d been in the same monthly book discussion group for 40 years. Hazel still raised monarchs each year, as she had apparently done her whole life, picking the milkweed pods from her unmowed fields. She gave a pod to Gavin to raise, with careful instructions about how to do so. Gavin released his into our back yard.

The Hardy and Chesterton poems are for Hazel. She loved both of these poems, as do I.
No doubt Hazel was more Christian than I. Who isn’t? The Chesterton and the Hardy poems are about Christ. But to me they have meaning beyond religiousity. "The Oxen" is a magnificent poem whether you’re a Christian or not. It’s about hope. Those sublime last lines of "The Oxen," flow from the despair of World War 1. They resonate deeply for the present-day Bush years as well.

The tone of the Hardy is wistful, grieving, but I sense defiance in those last lines. Hardy cannot keep himself from visualizing the moment that brute force falls to its knees.

In all I collected 30 or 40 poems that somehow represent to me the, well, spirit of Christmas. (Contact me at elsink@adelphia.net and I’ll email you the whole sheaf.) Not all are Christmas poems per se. Many I selected have an elegiac tone, feelings most of us can relate to in one way or another during the holidays. In some ways Christmas is all about loss and loneliness. The following poem by Pentti Saarikoski (from Finland - died in 1983) captures this feeling for me.

THE NEW SUBURBS SURROUNDED BY WOODS
Pentti Saarikoski

the new suburbs surrounded by woods
beautiful pawmarks
of capitalism
the schools are closing today
soon it will be Christmas
they’re selling treats for that purpose
in the market
the Vicar is masticating the Message
there’s not enough silence these days
except in the churches
I lose myself in these corridors
never reaching the heart
when you have lost it all, everything to be said,
has been said
I put my ear against the wall
and listen to the slow
erosion of concrete
everybody is building shelters and vaults

* * *
Some of the sort-of Christmas poems I've been obsessed with this season are luminously compassionate - Mark Doty’s absolutely magnificent poem about homeless people in New York city. Read it slowly - the images are incredibly vivid. The scarlet leaves under snow,. And they’re not just visual images - there’s a kinesthetic feeling in some that takes my breath away. The homeless woman reaching across the car; the poet Ezekiel turning around in the subway car and thanking the men. And what a thank you. I have a very hard time reading this poem to friends without crying.

BROADWAY
Mark Doty

Under Grand Central’s tattered vault
- maybe half a dozen electric stars still lit -
one saxophone blew, and a sheer black scrim

billowed over some minor constellation
under repair. Then, on Broadway, red wings
in a storefront tableau, lustrous, the live macaws

preening, beaks opening and closing
like those animated knives that unfold all night
in jewelers’ windows. For sale,

glass eyes turned outward toward the rain,
the birds lined up like the endless flowers
and cheap gems, the makeshift tables

of secondhand magazines
and shoes the hawkers eye
while they shelter in the doorways of banks.

So many pockets and paper cups
and hands reeled over the weight
of that glittered pavement, and at 103rd

a woman reached to me across the wet roof
of a stranger’s car and said, I’m Carlotta,
I’m hungry. She was only asking for change,

so I don’t know why I took her hand.
The rooftops were glowing above us,
enormous, crystalline, a second city

lit from within. That night
a man on the downtown local stood up
and said, My name is Ezekiel,

I am a poet, and my poem this evening is called
fall. He stood up straight
to recite, a child reminded of his posture

by the gravity of his text, his hands
hidden in the pockets of his coat.
Love is protected, he said,

the way leaves are packed in snow,
the rubies of fall. God is protecting
the jewel of love for us.

He didn’t ask for anything, but I gave him
all the change left in my pocket,
and the man beside me, impulsive, moved,

gave Ezekiel his watch.
It wasn’t an expensive watch,
I don’t even know if it worked,

but the poet started, then walked away
as if so much good fortune
must be hurried away from,

before anyone realizes it’s a mistake.
Carlotta, her stocking cap glazed
like feathers in the rain,

under the radiant towers, the floodlit ramparts,
must have wondered at my impulse to touch her,
which was like touching myself,

the way your own hand feels when you hold it
because you want to feel contained.
She said, You get home safe now, you hear?

In the same way Ezekiel turned back
to the benevolent stranger.
I will write a poem for you tomorrow,

he said. The poem I will write will go like this:
Our ancestors are replenishing
the jewel of love for us.

* * *
I included the Alice Walker poem below in my sheaf of holiday poems. I’m probably the only person who would consider this a Christmas poem. One one level, it’s an angry cry at religious hypocrisy. But this poem is not just a warning. This poem not just defy the forces of domination - it is embraces the lost and frightened.

Us.

Merry Christmas.

LOVE IS NOT CONCERNED
Alice Walker

Love is not concerned
with whom you pray
or where you slept
the night you ran away
from home.
Love is concerned
that the beating of your heart
should kill no one.

The dreaded "state of contemporary poetry" question

I’ve always distrusted discussions about "the state of poetry." They’re often excuses to advocate a certain poetry style, or worse, "poetry school," a patently destructive concept.
The whole point of poetry is to resist and hopefully sometimes to explode generalizations. So generalizations about poetry itself should be treated with skepticism.

But even though we know the question is no doubt ultimately unanswerable, when we’re honest with ourselves we have to admit that we do find ourselves ruminating on a - well, a general level - about the current state of poetry. The question might be lampoonable, but it’s also inevitable.

I certainly don’t have a general answer to this general question. But it may be possible to pin down some distinctive characteristics of current poetry:

When you get right down to it, the most striking characteristic of poetry right now is that there’s a lot of it. An uncatchupable amount of it. Poetry had already exploded before the internet, and there appear to be thousands of internet poetry sites and literally thousands of poets writing today. Yipes.

Keats admitted to being intimidated by the "cliff of poesy" 200 years ago. What would he feel now? Those chalky cliffs have grown.

Of course, whether or not this explosion of poetry is entirely a good thing is open to discussion, although I don’t think we should lightly dismiss the fact that our society, doctrinaire and hypocritical and regressive in so many ways, also somehow produces so many artists.

How good are those thousands of poets? is the obvious question, but here’s where generalization becomes truly ridiculous. Who knows, is probably the only honest answer, unless he or she has actually read them all - read them all carefully? There’s a strong argument to be made for reserving judgment about the quality of current poetry, or which poets are going to last - smarter to let posterity sort it all out.

All I can say is that there’s enough interesting, piercing, thought-provoking, and inspiring poetry to keep me at it for four decades. Although lots of the poetry I encounter leaves no lasting impression, there are always enough pearls in the mud to keep me hungry.

Where did this abundance of poetry come from? I see two main sources of the poetry explosion of the past generation:

1. The spark of cultural creativity lit by the 60s (yes, I know the 60s’ origins were in the 50s, but you know what I mean). American society, for all its scary attributes, is host to an unparalleled blossoming of art of all types, not just poetry. I am convinced we’re much better for that blossoming, even if at times we wonder if the quantity is watering down the quality.

2. The university system. Many (or maybe, most - who really knows?) poets publishing today are also professors. I think most would consider themselves poets first, professors second, but. Many are probably as wild and antiestablishmently-oriented as Hayden Carruth, who taught here at Syracuse University. I love some of these poet-professors, Carruth being an example, but there are many examples. Howard Nelson, who teaches at the Community College here in Auburn NY, is a beautiful poet. And I was surprised to learn recently that one of the most unfenced poets I’ve read, Lucia Perillo, has been a professor for part of her career. Many radical poets have worked in the academic world for at least a portion of their careers.

So stereotypes are not in order. University poets aren’t just a bunch of Yvor Winters and Alan Tates, although I’m sure there are a few.

The second most striking aspect of contemporary poetry, after its sheer volume, is that people who read a lot of it share a remarkably common complaint: sometimes, a lot of the poetry begins to sound alike. Almost everyone who reads poetry has experienced that uncomfortable feeling.

I sometimes think, maybe it was always like that. Maybe people reading poetry in the 1860s were saying to themselves, "man, this all sounds and feels the same!" When you look at the poetry anthologies from the 1860s now - Dickinson-less, Whitman-less - you can see how consistently predictable most of the poetry was. Emerson was one of the few who felt that and called out for a new poetry.

Probably this sense of predictability is a natural result of so much poetry existing. Stylistic and tempermental norms inevitably emerge. Stylistic fads swell up periodically and then settle back into the ocean of verse.

But I sometimes wonder if the intimate relationship of poets with the academy over the past 30 years has had a stultifying effect on the poetry.

What happens to the collective poetic impulse when so many poets are at least partly isolated from (the frustrations and joys of) "real life" - i.e., life outside the academic community?

Full disclosure: I am an outsider, for the most part deliberately. I chose not to be part of the academic world, except at its margins when I’m in a masochistic or penitential mood. I loved college and recognize how lucky I was to have that experience, but I also found something about it deeply repugnant - the petty competitiveness, the smug arrogance, the disdain for non-academic ways of knowing and experiencing life.

I long for wild poetry, not farm-raised. Blake, Dickinson, Whitman, Williams, McGrath, Transtromer, Swir. Ultimately, I believe, a poet who lives the arc of his or her life within the academic world is denied something poetry must have to make a lasting impact on us.

No, it’s not a simple question, this state of poetry thing. We are too buried in the present to know who’s really speaking to us, on the deep level we most need, right now. There’s a lot of self-importance and self-promotion in the poetry world right now, as in many other areas of life. So the best approach is probably to keep reading, looking for pearls, hoping to come upon one of Dickinson’s 7 published poems.

Another distinguishing characteristic of the contemporary American poetic voice is "distance." The situation being described or experienced will vary greatly, and may be exotic or surreal, but in comtemporary American poetry there will often be a strangely remote and detached quality to the person describing or experiencing it.

That’s why the blunt and self-deprecating honesty of a Carruth or a Stafford, or the electrically-charged, almost hallucinatory personal voice of wonderful Jack Myers stand out so vividly above the crowd. (Or Perillo’s luminous poems which maybe connects those two strands?)

Oh, there’s always been a pecking order in poetry, as in all things. Just, watch out for poseurs. Make sure we are listening carefully to the poems themselves, not the blurbs.

The final characteristic I note in the current poetry scene is a weird deference in its presence. For instance: the funereal air during most poetry readings. In my opinion, poetry is damaged by the lack of down-to-earth discussion about it when people gather to experience it. During the silence that invariably follows each poem at most poetry readings, I can’t stop wondering what everyone else in the room is thinking. How many are feeling, "I really liked one line in that poem, but a lot of the rest of it lost me." It’s considered rude and hopelessly behind-the-times to ask a poet to explain something about the poem he’s/she’s just read. Poets as unapproachable rock stars. No - unapproachable professors, to pick up on my last point. It’s as though people, and poets, are afraid that poetry can’t stand up to discussion. If "explaining it ruins it" it must have been pretty weak in the first place.

I find it very energizing to read contemporary poets besides that created by Americans. Nothing against we Americans but I am often struck by how much more "authentic" - not the perfect word, but the best I can come up with - non-U.S. poetry sounds and feels. (Maybe it’s just that in the vast world of international poetry, only the very, very best examples find their way to us.)

Or maybe it’s at least partly because poets in the rest of the world don’t usually live in gated academic islands.

It’s not just that non-U.S. poets are often more socially conscious and politically-engaged, but that the language of their imaginations seems less tamed, more contradictory, more detailed. Look at Adelia Prado. She doesn’t write political poetry per se, but everyday life overflows through her imagery. The organic internal progress typical of Prado’s poems (see Ellen Watson’s beautiful translations in "The Alphabet in the Park," 1990 - I haven’t been able to find any other versions of Prado’s poetry, alas) reminds me of Jack Myers or Lucia Perillo’s internal structures, by the way.

Below are a couple poems that might help us better understand "the role of" poetry today, or at least think more deeply about what creativity is. (I hope to produce an anthology of ars poeticas by modern and contemporary poets, including some beautiful ones that aren’t well known - most poets write an ars poetica eventually.)

The first ars poetica is by Jack Myers, who I’ve touted throughout this post. This poem is a spectacular homage to the unpredictability of imagination. He’s saying, thank god I made mistakes when I was building my house (or, creating my ouevre?). Freed from conformity, he has found the real power - "alchemy’s hair-trigger" - within him. Contradictorily, he’s free to plant the wild beings - "desert dwarfs and sages" (note sage’s double meaning) that can "throw out such red and purple hallelujuahs."

BUILDER’S SOIL
When I built my dream-house
I didn't replace the builder's soil with loam,
so the roses did poorly and threw their wishes away.

That's when I planted desert dwarfs and sages
in honor of my burning through my prime.
They threw out such red and purple hallelujuahs

they looked like wildfire climbing gasoline rain.
That's when I loved the destructive streak in me again,
the rich glistening on alchemy's hair-trigger.

***
The next poem, by Croatian poet Hrvoje Pejakovic (1960-1996), is also a homage to inspiration. In marvelously vivid language, he’s both addressing and describing a poet in the act of creating: starting out with "you plunge into the air saturated in sentences" (ah - would it were so!) and then in descending order the completion of the act of creating, what he hilariously terms "sorting the sparks." Taking the raw inspiration and assembling that bird cage of shadows that is a work of art.

WRITING POETRY
A fragment of what mirror, with whose inscriptions on the palm?
Then:
you plunge into the air saturated in sentences
you make your shakedown from the noises of the night
you make your punches soft in absence
you assemble a bird-cage out of shadows
you sort the sparks
you give what you do not have

***
Finally, I love Adam Zagajewski’s startling poem about his poetic "masters." This poem is much more somber and humble than either Myers or Pejakovic. But the whispers at the end of this poem are just as thrilling and energizing to me as Myers’ alchemy or Pejakovic’s sparks.

MY MASTERS
My masters are not infallible.
They're neither Goethe,
who had a sleepless night
only when distant volcanoes moaned, nor Horace,
who wrote in the language of gods
and altar boys. My masters
seek my advice. In fleecy
overcoats hurriedly slipped on
over their dreams, at dawn, when
the cool wind interrogates the birds,
my masters talk in whispers,
I can hear their broken speech.

* * *
Like Whitman, Zagajewski tells us to read no one on your knees. None of our hero/heroine poets is "infallible." They’re just people, talking in whispers, uncertain, scared, "broken." In today’s world, that’s a poetic voice one might trust.

Holes in the walls

We’re so frustrated with ourselves. There’s not enough time to accomplish what we want. We fear, without admitting it to anyone, that we’re not only not moving forward, we’re actually slipping backwards - every little failure makes us wonder if maybe that sooner-or-later inevitable moment has already occurred in our lives - the point where the baseball player just isn’t going to hit .300 any more, the musician just isn’t going to compell, the poet who has nothing else to say, or the working family that’s up to its neck in worries and debt and knows that the next stumble will bring it face down into the dirt.

Not enough time, or so it seems to the unenlightened mind - i.e., mine. You gotta put bacon, or at least tofu, on the table. Making a living and living a life aren’t opposites, it’s much more complicated than that. But they are distinguishable. And there’s just not enough time to do it all; in my case probably a result of my earlier lassitude and experiment, and maybe even damned deference.

But spending life studying what you love (people, poets, rivers) wouldn’t be such a bad epitaph.
Anyway, here we are, alive, on a gorgeous spring morning, stars still out, cool wind going down our shirts. Totally unworthy but who isn’t.

For all the evil in the world - profoundly evil actions usually cloaked by pretty words and hypocritical manipulations - I feel the need to thank...something...for my time here.

Best poem I know on this, uh, "theme" (?) is Issa’s.

Thank god for the holes in the walls.

I’ll follow Issa’s magnificent opening poem (what a sound he’s describing - what a sweet, bitter sound - have you heard it?) with poems reflecting on the same experience (i.e., specific, exact experience of hearing wind through the walls) by other poets, widely separated by time or culture or style or language or temperment or fate. ("Feeling that we feel what others feel" - Gabriel Celaya. Now there’s a rare, rare gift!)

* * *
The holes in the wall
play the flute
this autumn evening.
- Issa (Japan, 1763-1827)

* * *
FALL WIND
Pods of summer crowd around the door;
I take them in the autumn of my hands.
Last night I heard the first cold wind outside;
the wind blew soft, and yet I shiver twice:
Once for thin walls, once for the sound of time.
- William Stafford (U.S., 1914-1993)

* * *
ISSA
Where the house
isn't windtight -
the bathroom
windowframe.

In fierce gusts
the world's soft lips
search for the cracks.

To be a hole in the wall
through which
the wind whispers...

Know yourself -
but not too well.
- JE

* * *
THE NEW HOUSE
Now first, as I shut the door,
I was alone
In the new house; and the wind
Began to moan.

Old at once was the house,
And I was old;
My ears were teased with the dread
Of what was foretold,

Nights of storm, days of mist, without end;
Sad days when the sun
Shone in vain: old griefs and griefs
Not yet begun.

All was foretold me; naught
Could I foresee;
But I learn'd how the wind would sound
After these things should be.
- Edward Thomas (Wales, 1878-1917)

* * *
A WINTER NIGHT
The storm puts its mouth to the house
and blows to produce a note.
I sleep uneasily, turn, with shut eyes
read the storm's text.

But the child's eyes are large in the dark
and for the child the storm howls.
Both are fond of lamps that swing.
Both are halfway toward speech.

The storm has childish hands and wings.
The Caravan bolts towards Lapland.
And the house feels its own constellation of nails
holding the walls together.

The night is calm over our floor
(where all expired footsteps
rest like sunk leaves in a pond)
but outside the night is wild.

Over the world goes a graver storm.
It sets its mouth to our soul
and blows to produce a note. We dread
that the storm will blow us empty.
- Tomas Transtromer (Sweden, 1930-)

Poems about class

I’ve been reading in the "Unlikely Stories" website (http://www.unlikelystories.org/ - check it out: it combines beauty, defiance, humor, and desire - makes you almost believe they aren’t inherently irreconcilable) and came across what to me is a very powerful poem, by a poet I didn’t know, Kurtis Kucheman. The poem an absolutely unvarnished, defiant, lively, contradictory yet empathetic portrait of a young woman in today’s unstable and screwed up America. (I love the line about not being able to buy pot "because she only worked full time" - that catches the flavor of our current economy pretty accurately.)

TERRY
im sorry i have to go to burger king now
walked across the street not using the cross walk
ate a hamburger at a bus stop
smoked cigarettes while running register
the customers made faces at her
in her spare time
smoked pot with her unemployed boyfriend
that would lay on her futon
and stare black eyed at the television
she had scars and tattoos
carving the word
whore
on her ass when she couldnt get pot
because she only worked full time
she would knock back huge bottles
of cheap wine
and listen to billie holiday
on her cd player while writing bad poetry
she wasnt going anywhere really
just living in her parents basement
almost thirty years old
with an unemployed man under her room
smoking her pot
here take a hit of this X
think we could rent a movie
so when she set her hair on fire
and walked up a street full of traffic
not too many were surprised
but when she went to work the next day
they were shocked
- Kurtis Kucheman

* * *
I love this next poem by Charles Reznikoff. One weird feature of some great poetry is that it makes you ask yourself, why didn’t I write that? Which is another way of saying, the poet has caught your feeling pretty marvelously. Poems about class.are sometimes overlooked, but there are some sharp ones. If you don’t know Reznikoff, get one of his books. He writes simply, honestly, with great respect for his ancestors, and very spiritually, too. What a poet.

THESE GENTLEMEN ARE GREAT
These gentlemen are great; they are paid
a dollar a minute. They will not answer
if you say, Good morning;
will neither smile nor nod -
if you are paid only a dollar or two
an hour. (Study
when to be silent, when to smile.)
The director who greets my employer loudly
and smiles broadly, reaching for his hand and back,
scowls and glares at my greeting. Now I understand
why he managed to give me only his fingers
when we were introduced. Why do you go to such trouble
to teach me that you are great?
I never doubted it until now.
- Charles Reznikoff (U.S., 1894-1976)

* * *
Well, you’ve got to be in the mood to read Walt Whitman, I guess. The flowerly biblical language can get almost pompous and tiresome. But he’s a great one and we can’t let a few differences between us keep us apart. What he says about class society in this poem is eloquent and strong: "I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquer'd and slain persons."

WITH STRONG MUSIC I COME
With music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums,
I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquer'd and slain persons.
Have you heard that it was good to gain the day?
I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.
I beat and pound for the dead,
I blow through my embourchures my loudest and gayest for them.
Vivas to those who have fail'd,
And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!
And to those themselves who sank in the sea!
And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!
And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!
- Walt Whitman (U.S., 1819-1892)

* * *
Look at this beautiful portrait of a working class family by Lewis Hyde. The silence in it makes me cry. Is it a sad moment in this family’s life? Or a memory the boy will treasure forever? Well, in my experience, it’s the latter.

SUNRISE AFTER WORK
Six a.m. and the body's hopeful fatigue as I come home from the nightshift.
Everything seems blessed with the coming sleep, forgiveness
thick in the air, like tufted, air-borne seeds.
I pass a family - a man and woman and their two children -
setting up their fruit stand for the day.
Every morning they park the truck on Somerville Ave. and sell fruit from the back.
The children are allowed to bargain and make change. At this hour
the younger son culls the soft ones from the Concord grapes,
then lays them gently in a box with waxy tissue paper.
The four of them work in absolute silence with the quiet swish of bus tires
and overhead the gulls going out to sea.
- Lewis Hyde (U.S., 1945-)

* * *
Gary Snyder’s justly famous "Hay for the Horses" reminds of Lewis Hyde’s poem. God, there's a gentleness and kindness in this poem, no?

HAY FOR THE HORSES
He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa,up the
Dangerous mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
- The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds -
"I'm sixty-eight," he said,
"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day that I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that's just what
I've gone and done."
- Gary Snyder (U.S., 1930-)

* * *

When I think of poets of class, I also think about musicians like Townes Van Zandt. Do you know his music? I’m listening to it as I write. It’s a rough balm, an antidote to slick overproduced money-worshipping commercial music. His homages to working people and the down and out.
Greg Brown is a little smoother around the edges than Townes Van Zandt, but he’s also got a nice sense of empathy with those who aren’t on the front pages.

* * *
This next poem (by the Irish poet Eavan Boland) starts out with a touch of rightous anger at us for forgetting our ancestors. We put them out back like old oil lamps we’re holding on to for some reason we’re not sure why. But by the end of the poem, we realize our situation today is not all that less desperate than theirs was when they first came to this country. By the end of the poem, we know how badly we need the old songs and the courage of our ancestors.

THE IMMIGRANT IRISH
Like oil lamps, we put them out the back -
of our houses, of our minds. We had lights
better than, newer than and then
a time came, this time and now
we need them. Their dread, makeshift example:
they would have thrived on our necessities.
What they survived we could not even live.
By their lights now it is time to
imagine how they stood there, what they stood with,
that their possessions may become our power:
Cardboard. Iron. Their hardships parceled in them.
Patience. Fortitude. Long-suffering
in the bruise-colored dusk of the New World.
And all the old songs. And nothing to lose.
- Eavan Boland (Ireland, 1944-)

* * *
I love this portrait of a young woman by David Budbill. What extraordinary understanding, observation, and especially, empathy, in this poem. (It reminds me a bit of the first poem we looked at in this posting, "Terry" by Kurtis Kucheman.) Maybe I love this poem especially because it reminds me of the community my wife is from - Camden, New York. Beautiful, hard-working, spirited women. Budbill’s entire website (http://www.davidbudbill.com/) is wonderful, even, like Unlikely Stories...hopeful! which is not a word I use a lot - I highly recommend a subscription to his email newsletter, the "Judevine Mountain Emailite." Budbill is a direct, simple, powerful, poet yet also also spiritual and humorous - an American zen, I guess. He’s a hard-to-characterize poet, a quality I really appreciate. Get to know him.

BOBBIE
For years Bobbie drove the pickup truck to Morrisville
every day to sew the flys in men's pajamas at a factory
down there. When you spoke to her about the job,
she'd blush and turn on her heel like a little girl.
She was good. The best one down there.
It was piecework and she was fast.
She quit the sewing when she and Doug went to farming.
Bobbie is beautiful, or could be.
Under thirty years of work and plainness you can see
her body, see her face,
those definite, delicate features
glowing.
She strides like a doe.
In spite of two brown teeth
her smile is warm and liquid.
Last summer she cut off a finger in the baler,
paid her farmer's dues.
Now she holds her missing finger behind her when she talks.
She's got something new to blush for.
- David Budbill

* * *
Maybe we should finish with a poem by Robert Creeley, who has just died. With its social observation, this is really not a typical poem of Creeley’s. But its sardonic, deadpan, blunt, bitter music is his. This is another poem that’s so good and so close to what you already felt, without quite realizing it, you say to yourself: thank you for writing it for us, Robert. See ya round the universe.

AFTER LORCA
for M. Marti

The church is a business, and the rich
are the business men.

When they pull on the bells, the
poor come piling in and when a poor man dies, he has a wooden
cross, and they rush through the ceremony.

But when a rich man dies, they
drag out the Sacrament
and a golden Cross, and go "doucement, doucement"
to the cemetary.

And the poor love it
and think its crazy.

More Spring Poems

More spring poems. (Hey, spring’s a really big deal to us in chilly, muddy upstate New York.)

Think of the energy flowing in the air in this first poem, by Buson. It’s just impossible to go to bed! (How many nights like that do we get to experience in our lives?)

* * *
Lighting one candle
with another candle -
spring evening.
- Buson (Japan, 1715-1783)

* * *
This next (wonderful) poem by Issa also celebrates spring’s energy - in it we experience the moment of spring’s release as a wonderful homage to the energy of children. Issa’s ability to evoke the senses in this poem is extraordinary: I can see the snow melt running in the street, can smell the dampness, feel the combined cool and warmth of such a day, and can hear the kids outside playing. And he accomplishes this without almost no real description per se. There's a tenderness in this poem's energy that is entirely characteristic of Issa. (You must get to know Issa!)

* * *
The snow is melting
and the village is flooded
with children.
- Issa (Japan, 1763-1827)

* * *
The poem that most reminds me of this Issa poem is by a contemporary American poet, David Axelrod (from the anthology Strings). In it you get a similar elation at the unharnessable energy of children. The kinetic energy in this poem saves it from being cute.

* * *
SMELL MY FINGERS
- for Jessica
Smell my fingers my daughter
says and thrusts them
at my nose. I back dive off
my chair as if the air were
poisoned. Where have they been
those sweaty things with six
years of sticky places
scenting their past? She laughs
and chases me around the room
with germicidal weapons,
insists on my surrender.
Caught, I find a pine cone
in her fist. She tells me
it is spring and that means perfume.

* * *
The next poem, by the great contemporary haiku poet George Swede (buy his book Almost Unseen from Brooks Books for a million great reads), also speaks to the transformational power of spring, but here it’s our own dark soul that is transformed. There’s an undercurrent of self-deprecating humor in this one:

* * *
first warm spring day
I take my shadow
for a walk
- George Swede (Canada/Latvia, 1940-)

* * *
In the next poem, by Kaya Shirao, spring’s energy is virtually orgiastic. This poem shares with Swede’s just a touch of self-deprecating humor: the clumsiness ("dropped") and chaos of sexual desire. But what a vivid visual image, and what kinesthetic energy just from the two little birds fluttering around in the flowers!

* * *
Sparrows, mating, have dropped into flowering poppies
- Kaya Shirao (Japan, 1738-1791)

* * *
The great modern Japanese Poet Yosano Akiko puts another spin on spring and desire in this one, which takes my breath away every time I read it. Here, spring’s power explodes reticence and fear. We’d better be alive. (Translation is mine.)

* * *
"Spring goes fast. I don't believe in heaven," I whispered, sliding his hands under my blouse.
- Yosano Akiko (Japan, 1878-1942)

* * *
A parallel take on Akiko’s constellation of spring, heaven, and love is by the startlingly modern Vietnamese poet Ho Xuan Huong, who died in 1825. She wrote many bluntly sexual poems, but sensuality is celebrated only in the background in this one ("Love’s vast sea cannot be emptied"). But in my reading her carpe diem is nearly as powerful as Akiko’s (this was translated by John Balabian - get the whole book of her poems he translated, Spring Essence):

* * *
SPRING WATCHING PAVILLION
A gentle spring evening arrives
airily, unclouded by worldly dust.
Three times the bell tolls echoes like a wave.
We see heaven upside-down in the sad puddles.
Love’s vast sea cannot be emptied.
And springs of grace flow easily everywhere.
Where is nirvana?
Nirvana is here, nine times out of ten.

* * *
I love this next poem by contemporary Japanese poet Yoshiki Yoshino. Spring is powerful in this poem too, but it's a different kind of power. In this poem spring's power is to measure us. This poem is a powerful example of what I call a "warning poem." In its persona of the flower, spring asks: is this strange being I’m looking into really alive, or just faking it? Which is a fair question to ask of ourselves.

* * *
my heart
being gazed into
by a spring orchid
- Yoshiki Yoshino

* * *
Another spring/warning poem, one of the greatest, this one by Buson. As in several spring poems we've looked at, there’s a touch of self-deprecating humor in this one, as in, "what a fool I was - again!" But there’s also a dead seriousness - almost an anger: how can I possibly not live life fully? If this warning poem doesn’t wake us up, we’re in trouble.

* * *
Short nap -
waking,
spring was gone.
- Buson

* * *
My favorite poet, Tomas Transtromer of Sweden, evokes the miraculous moment when spring returns - when "the raging sea of fire out in space/is transformed on earth to a caress"; when the sun "makes the statues (us) blink" and "the countdown has begun" - in many poems. Transtromer’s use of visual imagery feels almost hallucinatory, in this as well as many other of his poems. In just the first stanza here, spring morphs from a beast to a transparent dragon to an endless commuter train rushing past. (If you don’t know Transtromer...get to know him. Truth Barriers is my favorite book of his - Robert Bly’s translations are lively, vernacular, vivid - he catches Transtromer’s visual imagery with amazing clarity.)

* * *
THE LIGHT STREAMS IN
Outside the window is the long beast of spring
the transparent dragon of sunlight
flows past like an endless
commuter train - we never got a glimpse of its head.

The waterfront villas move sideways
they are proud like crabs.
The sun makes the statues blink.

The raging sea of fire out in space
is transformed on earth to a caress.
The countdown has begun.
- Tomas Transtromer (Sweden, 1930-)

* * *
Spring’s return is occasion for awe - or should be, says the orchid staring into our soul - and there’s no poem that says that so cleanly and powerfully, as Antonio Machado’s tiny two-liner, "Spring has come." This is an "end of argument" poem, so with it I wish you a chaotic and orgiastic April.

* * *
Spring has come.
No one knows how.
- Antonio Machado (Spain, 1875-1939)