Monday Required Reading. I have a collection of books that I circle back to when life punches me in the gut. Sylvia Plath's journals and poetry are part of this group. So, since life give me a pretty good kick in the head yesterday, I thought I would share one of my favourite Plath poems with you all today.

Black Rook in Rainy Weather

On the stiff twig up there
Hunches a wet black rook
Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.
I do not expect a miracle
Or an accident

To set the sight on fire
In my eye, nor seek
Any more in the desultory weather some design,
But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,
Without ceremony, or portent.

Although, I admit, I desire,
Occasionally, some backtalk
From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:
A certain minor light may still
Lean incandescent

Out of kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then --
Thus hallowing an interval
Otherwise inconsequent

By bestowing largesse, honor,
One might say love. At any rate, I now walk
Wary (for it could happen
Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); skeptical,
Yet politic; ignorant

Of whatever angel may choose to flare
Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant

A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality. With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content

Of sorts. Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent.

(56-57 Sylvia Plath: The Collected Poems)

A poem was a box for your soul. That was the point. It was the place where you could save bits of yourself, and shake out your darkest feelings, without worrying that people would think you were strange. While I was writing, I would forget myself and everyone else; poetry made me feel part of something noble and beautiful and bigger than me...I slid them under the carpe as soon as they were done, all the images and rhymes wrestled into place. By the time I had copied them out, I found I had memorized every line. Then they would surprise me by surging through me, like songs I knew by heart.

-- Andrea Ashworth, Once in a House on Fire

Poets are people who are not content to say only one thing at a time.

-- Billy Collins

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

-- Thomas Babington Macaulay

What makes a poem a poem, finally, is that it is unparaphrasable...I may try to explain it or represent it in other terms, but then some element of its life will always be missing.

-- Mark Doty

[Am I allowed to just quote this to my supervisor every time he asks me to summarize a poem?]

Monday Required Reading. While desperately searching the internet for something related to my thesis last night, I stumbled across this gem of a poem by Wendell Berry. Not helpful in the thesis-writing department, but a small respite in the wee hours of the morning. This is Wendell Berry's "How To Be a Poet."

How To Be a Poet

      (to remind myself)

i

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill - more of each
than you have - inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

This poem originally appeared in the January 2001 edition of Poetry magazine. You can find it online here.

Repetition

Say it.

Say it over and over and over again.

Say it like a mantra.
Say it like a magic spell.

Say it until you believe it.

Say it until it sounds wrong.
Say it until the words twist in on themselves.

Say it until it makes sense.

Say it until your voice runs out.
Say it until your throat is raw.
Say it until you're swallowing blood.

Say it until you can't breathe.

Say it until it's true.

Say it.

Say it.

Say it.

Say it until it stops being true.

Say it.

Say it.

Say it over and over and over again.

There are some poets whose body of work reads like a single poem: an ongoing, deepening dialogue with the self and the world that is divided into separate poems, as if only for convenience. Consistency of voice, consistency of form, will create this impression; so will a body of work that eschews narrative or embeds it in a looping, ranging, open-ended development. Mainly, however, it is the pervasiveness of a poet's obsessions, the regular recurrence of key images and ideas, which tends to meld many poems into one.

-- Carol Moldaw, review of Poems by Anne Michaels

Insomnia

1 a.m.
The coffee pot hisses.
You couldn't sleep anyway.


I am a lover of tinywords, so I've been giving micropoetry a try lately. It's challenging and delightful and wonderfully suited to my current mental state.

Tequila and Galoshes

The land mines went off.

I show up at her door
armed with rainboots
and tequila.
"Honey," I tell her,
"life is gonna give you lemons,
so break out the tequila and dance on the table."
And so we do.
And when we've finished one bottle,
maybe two,
when we've listened to very 90s album she owns
and broken the table in two,
we collapse on the couch,
laughing.
And I say, "Baby,
life is gonna give you rainstorms,
so break out the galoshes and dance in the puddles."
And so we do.
And when we've traipsed down the street,
around the neighbourhood,
when we've scared the children who live next door,
and scandalized the old man down the street,
we stumble back home,
laughing.

A quick poem for a friend who is having a rough go of it right now.

[IMAGE SOURCE]

Not Always Like This

Edgar Degas, Ballet Rehearsal, 1873, oil on canvas

It's not always like this.

I promise you, love,
it's not always like this.
It's not always a mess.
It's not always a disaster.
It's not always hard,
and exhausting,
and endless.
It's not always missed steps.
It's not always falling down.
It's not always feeling one step behind.

It's not always like this.

Eventually, my dear,
it gets better,
and some of the things,
the things that matter,
work out just fine.


Remember this poem? Well, it started me off on an ekphrastic project working with Degas' ballet paintings. So, here's another product of my attempts.

sub-zero

even the snow

slows down

-- Ann K. Schwader, published on TinyWords

I had a horror of much of the distinctly unpleasant "political" writing that I read in classrooms. These poems were taught from the perspective that writing that displayed a self-consciousness of language as an ideological apparatus, or that argued for certain kinds of cultural representation, was inherently worth reading. I am sympathetic to that stance. However, I often did not enjoy reading that work. Perhaps the claim for such writing was never beauty anyway. It was important even if it was not beautiful. But it is a challenge for a work of art to be effectively important if it is not pleasing, for the pleasing-but-unimportant is simply, well, more pleasing. I was about to write that I'd rather read the important stuff, even if it was unpleasant, but that's exactly it: I'm human; I wouldn't.

-- Sonnet L'Abbé, "On Beauty: Sonnet L'Abbé," Lemon Hound

The Blind Cartographers

We were both poets.
There was never any money to pay the bills.

We lay in the dark,
wrapped in blankets,
making maps for the blind.
The blind cartographers.
The blind leading the blind.

We told stories,
traced the topographies of who we were,
mapped the treeline that cut across your face like a scar,
the rocky seashore of my spine,
the mountain ranges of your skull,
the endless prairies of my wrists.
We whispered places into being
there in our tiny apartment
spoke ourselves into existence,
revealed paths to our hearts,
fought through thickets,
traversed deserts,
until we found the core of our selves,
until we each knew the other's soul
the way we knew the landscape of our childhood,
until we could navigate by instinct,
until it no longer mattered that we were blind.

Night Driving

Stars burn holes
in expansive darkness,
carpeting the sky
in fire.

The night is liquid,
and we fly.

This poem has been an exercise in minimalism for me. It started out this summer as a much longer piece, and I've been paring it back ever since. But I also feel like it is only part way through it's process; it had to be pruned back in order to grow into something new. I wanted to share this particular moment in it's development with you, because I feel good about it's current simplicity.

Monday Required Reading. I started reading Lorrie Moore's Birds of America a couple of days ago, but quickly ended up on a bit of a literary detour. The book opens with a couple of poetic excerpts, one of which comes from Charlie Smith's "The Meaning of Birds." This excerpt stopped me in my tracks and sent me on a frantic search for the full poem. I finally found it, and absolutely love it. So, today, I offer to you "The Meaning of Birds" by Charlie Smith.

Of the genesis of birds we know nothing,
save the legend they are descended
from reptiles: flying, snap-jawed lizards
that have somehow taken to air. Better the story
that they were crab-apple blossoms
or such, blown along by the wind; time after time
finding themselves tossed from perhaps a seaside tree,
floated or lifted over the thin blue lazarine waves
until something in the snatch of color
began to flutter and rise. But what does it matter
anyway how they got up high
in the trees or over the rusty shoulders
of some mountain? There they are,
little figments,
animated - soaring. And if occasionally a tern washes up
greased and stiff, and sometimes a cardinal
or a mockingbird slams against the windshield
and your soul goes oh God and shivers
at the quick and unexpected end
to beauty, it is not news that we live in a world
where beauty is unexplainable
and suddenly ruined
and has its own routines. We are often far
from home in a dark town, and our griefs
are difficult to translate into a language
understood by others. We sense the downswing of time
and learn, having come of age, that the reluctant
concessions made in youth
are not sufficient to heat the cold drawn breath
of age. Perhaps temperance
was not enough, foresight or even wisdom
fallacious, not only in conception
but in the thin acts
themselves. So our lives are difficult,
and perhaps unpardonable, and the fey gauds
of youth have, as the old men told us they would,
faded. But still, it is morning again, this day.
In the flowering trees
the birds take up their indifferent elegant cries.
Look around. Perhaps it isn't too late
to make a fool of yourself again. Perhaps it isn't too late
to flap your arms and cry out, to give
one more cracked rendition of your singular, aspirant song.

Found in Charlie Smith's collection, Indistinguishable from the Darkness.

I could write a poem about you

I could write a poem about you.

This is something no one has ever said to me before.

I imagine that if someone ever does
it will be whispered,
a confession that leaks out in the moments before sleep
when reality is suspended
and judgment impaired
so that in the morning we will both wonder if it actually happened
but be too embarrassed to ask
or too afraid of the answer.
I imagine that it will carry echoes of "I love you"
so loud that they will silence the constant stream of thoughts
that runs through my head like a television news crawl.
I imagine that it will be awful in the true sense of the word,
that is that it will be awe-full,
so much so that I will think it is a lie
because there are no words that could contain that emotion,
at least not properly, not completely.
I imagine that it will be a little bit frightening
because I know I am not a goddess to be worshipped
and no temples should be built in my name.
I imagine that it will really mean "I could never write a poem about you"
and "Every poem I write is about you."

I could write a poem about you.

This is something no one has ever said to me before.

If someone ever does,
I am afraid it will not be like I imagine,
that it will really mean "I want to have sex with you,"
or "You broke my heart, bitch,"
or "I pity you,"
or "You're too weak to speak for yourself, so I will speak for you,"
or "You're kind of funny looking, so maybe a poem about you will make a profound statement,"
or "I'm too scared to say this myself, so I am going to pretend you feel this way too,"
or "You aren't someone poems should be written about, so this will really impress my professor."
I am scared that it will come out of the wrong mouth,
in the wrong place,
at the wrong time.
I am scared it won't mean anything at all.
I am scared it will mean everything.

I could write a poem about you.

This is something no one has ever said to me before.

I hope that no one does.
Not unless he understands the weight that statement carries,
realizes that it is completely terrifying,
but also completely exhilarating,
wants to hear it as much as I do,
but will also run away from it as fast as I do.
Not unless it is more than just another pickup line,
but is whispered every morning, every night, every time we part.
Not unless it is used to replace "I love you."

I could write a poem about you.

This is something no one has ever said to me before.

One of my problems was that in spite of everything I'd tried - writing novels, political reporting, making movies, even starting The Rumpus - despite all those hats at 40 years old I was still a poet, and I was doomed to a poet's life. Which shows you can never escape your past, or your destiny. Best not to run too far from yourself, you'll only have to walk back.

--Stephen Elliott, November 6, 2012 daily Rumpus email

In POETRY WORD only anticipates: moments of silence are sometimes more significant than the lines themselves.

-- Grigori Kozintsus, "King Lear": The Space of Tragedy

This Life

It snuck up on me in a simple question,
"Is that home for you?"

I opened my mouth to respond
and



nothing.



Just silence,
a foolish look on my face,
and an awkward pause in the conversation.

When you live this life,
home is a difficult concept.
You end up with loved ones scattered
across countries and continents.
You fall in love with so many places,
put down roots,
dig up roots,
so many times
that you don't know whether you left your heart
in London, England,
or London, Ontario.

There are so many cities,
so many apartments,
so many coffee shops and grocery stores and parks.
So many graveyards.

Each place seeps into the next.
A face on the edge of vision,
confuses space and time.
Eyes light up,
a hand is raised in greeting,
a smile breaks open,
all for someone who is thousands of miles away,
who left or was left
in a time and place far removed from this one.
The past masquerades as the present,
whispering to you until every place seems like home,
or no place seems like home.
Until you find yourself in a conversation
with yet another new face
that looks so familiar:
"Is that home for you?"
And



nothing.



Just silence,
a foolish look on your face,
and an awkward pause in the conversation.