I’ve been writing these National Poetry Month emails/posts for the past 27 years and each year I think it’s going to be my last. Will anyone miss them if I stop? Does anyone really read them? But then I get such great messages in response to a post, and it keeps me going. Sometimes, I hear from someone I haven’t heard from in a long time, and it makes all the difference.
Today, I got a phone call from an old friend, Andrew Coulter, in Wyoming—we go back to our early days with The Nature Conservancy over 30 years ago. He called me after having read my Week Four post and explained he was going to send me an email to tell me how much he enjoyed getting the poems every year. But then he thought, “I’ll just pick up the phone and call him.”
We talked for about half an hour, got caught up on each other’s lives, and had a few laughs over some of our shared stories and history. I know we both hung up with smiles on our faces. It’s a good reminder to reach out to people we care about—we’re all so busy that it’s easy to lose touch, to let the years pass by without connecting with old friends.
Andrew’s call also reminded me that I usually post a Bonus Week poem, typically one of my own, at the end of every Poetry Month. “You can have a Bonus Poem in May,” Andrew said. So, why not? Here goes. (Thanks, Andrew.)
My poem “Doubting Finches” started, like many of my poems, from a simple observation made in 2009. A pair of house finches had set up a nest in the porch light of my old house in Philadelphia. I had the image of the nesting house finch couple and the intricacy of what I observed in the nest, but it didn’t amount to much more. I worked on the poem for quite a while before it came together—a few years, actually —and it finally went beyond the original inspiration.
The poem languished until I found there was more to the story. This was around two years later, at the tail end of a marriage, and I was about to embark on a new life where that house would no longer be mine. It was a time of turmoil, uncertainty, grief, and yet, also, a certain joy and anticipation. I wasn’t running away from something this time; I was running towards something.
The finished poem appeared in the UK online journal, Zoomorphic, in 2017, thanks to the wonderful Welsh poet, Susan Richardson. It also appears in my book, Wine-Dark Sea: New & Selected Poems & Translations, published by Shanti Arts in 2022.
Here is my poem, “Doubting Finches”:
The house finch nest in my porch light
has a curious architecture,
made entirely of found things:
dried seed heads from last year’s columbine,
dusky strands of my daughter’s hair,
small sticks, rose thorns, bits of string,
a gold thread from a cigarette pack wrapper.
Inside, wool-lined, cotton and fleece,
it holds three eggs, blue with tawny flecks.
The female finch sits on the nest
for an unusually long time; so long,
I fear she is mistaken or my messing
with the nest has disrupted gestation.
She picked her mate for the redness
of his head and chest, proxy for feeding prowess.
(I guess.)
In a few weeks all will be gone:
cherry blossoms drifting on air,
dogwoods blooming, oaks leafing out,
and the female finch finding another mate,
to start a second family this season.
Who was it that said, “Doubt is a privilege
of the faithful”? At least, I think someone
said it or should have. Then it was me,
me finding another mate, another home,
another reason. And I saw they swept out
the finch nest from that old porch light
as soon as I was gone.
–Scott Edward Anderson
I’d almost forgotten to write my post for Week Four of National Poetry Month when I realized it was the last night of April and poetry month would soon be over for another year. I had no idea what poem or poet to feature although, having recently returned from Fall River, MA, where I had been part of the first Poesia Festival there, I thought it might be one of the Portuguese poets featured at the event: Camões, Silveira, Amaral, Pessoa, or Medeiros. (I’d already featured Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen the previous week.)
“It can wait until tomorrow,” I told myself, turning on Game 5 of the Boston Bruins Stanley Cup playoff game against the Toronto Maple Leafs, which my team lost in overtime.
This morning, I woke to the news that Paul Auster had died at 77 years old after a long battle with lung cancer. I have a long, tenuous, and tangential relationship with Paul Auster dating back to the late 1980s, when I was part of a writing group called the “Decompositionalists” and worked in publishing. I texted one of the other members of that writing group who had been a big fan of the author of City of Glass. “I still treasure The New York Trilogy,” she texted back. “Something of a shock to learn of his passing, though every time I saw him he was smoking.”
When I was a young editor at Viking Penguin, Auster, in all his swarthy, 38-year-old handsomeness used to come into the office to meet with his editor. All the young women—or, rather, ALL the women would swoon, and many of the men, too! “He is smoking hot,” a colleague at the time explained to me when I asked what the attraction was. “There’s nothing like a smoking hot intellectual to make an editorial department swoon.”
While Auster was best known as a highly acclaimed novelist and writer of prose fiction, memoirs, and essays, he started as a poet and translator, living in Paris after graduating from Columbia in 1969. It wasn’t lost on me that Auster, who had partaken in the student protests at Columbia University in 1968, died the day the NYPD sent in its surge troops to evict students from Hamilton Hall, a building they were occupying as part of a pro-Palestinian protest.
The earlier protest, which police also cracked down upon on April 30th fifty-six years ago, ended in violence that resulted in more than 700 arrests and 148 reports of injuries as “officers trampled protesters, hit them with night sticks, punched and kicked them down stairs,” according to The New York Times.
While Auster’s poetry has been overshadowed by his prose, he published several volumes of poetry over his career, including Unearth (1974), Wall Writing (1976), and Facing the Music (1980). Two volumes of selected poems, Disappearances (1988) and Ground Work (1990) along with a volume of Collected Poems (2007), were also published.
His poetry tends to have an experimental, avant-garde style influenced by French writers and surrealists, wherein, as in much of his fiction, he explores themes of chance, games, language play, intertextuality, and the role of the author. While respected, his poetry has received less mainstream attention and acclaim compared to his novels like 4321 (2017), The New York Trilogy (1987), The Book of Illusions (2002), and The Brooklyn Follies (2005).
Auster rather famously wrote with a fountain pen. “If I could write directly on a computer or typewriter, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me,” he said in an interview with The Paris Review. “A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body, and then you dig the words into the page. Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.”
Auster explores the relationship between the body and language in his poem, “White Nights,” with a characteristic hint of surrealism. RIP Paul Auster (1947-2024). Here is Paul Auster’s poem:
WHITE NIGHTS
No one here,
and the body says: whatever is said
is not to be said. But no one
is a body as well, and what the body says
is heard by no one
but you.
Snowfall and night. The repetition
of a murder
among the trees. The pen
moves across the earth: it no longer knows
what will happen, and the hand that holds it
has disappeared.
Nevertheless, it writes.
It writes: in the beginning,
among the trees, a body came walking
from the night. It writes:
the body’s whiteness
is the color of earth. It is earth,
and the earth writes: everything
is the color of silence.
I am no longer here. I have never said
what you say
I have said. And yet, the body is a place
where nothing dies. And each night,
from the silence of the trees, you know
that my voice
comes walking toward you.
–Paul Auster, from Disappearances: Selected Poems, Overlook Press, 1988
Scott Edward Anderson
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