Rebecca Schumejda, her Dad, and a friend.
Her poems are about loss and longing, gardening and dishwashing, motherhood and marriage — and not a few of them are about the seedy side of life. (Rebecca once co-owned a pool hall.)
Rebecca Schumejda is the author of Falling Forward, a full-length collection of poems (2009); and several chapbooks, including The Map of Our Garden (2009); Dream Big Work Harder (2006); The Tear Duct of the Storm (2001); and the postcard poem “Logic.” She received her MA in Poetics and Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and her BA in English and Creative Writing from SUNY New Paltz.
You can read more about Rebecca’s poetry at http://www.rebeccaschumejda.com/
Schumejda’s poem “In This Picture” was written after she found a photograph of her father some time after he died and her own daughter was born. The photo of Rebecca and her father was taken at the end of a fishing trip. I like the simplicity of this poem and the short lines, which calls to mind the shortness of breath one gets when faced with loss.
It also made me think of a dear friend whose father passed away ten years ago today; so this is for her, and for Rebecca who wrote the poem, and for everyone who has lost a parent or loved one.
Here is Rebecca Schumejda’s poem
“In This Picture”
Never will you
bait the hook
for the child
floundering
inside me.
In this picture
we sandwich
a blue fish.
In this picture
we both wear
stubborn noses.
In this picture
you smell like
saltwater.
In this picture
is all I have
left of you.
I am seven
and in love
with you, forever.
In this picture
your heart
was not weak.
In this picture
no tombstones,
just fishhooks.
Someday, curious,
your grandchild
will ask
who you were
and I will say
in this picture
you were Neptune,
god of the sea.
–Rebecca Schumejda
On Sestinas and “Second Skin”
April 5, 2011
Image via Wikipedia
The poet John R. Keene was tweeting about sestinas on Saturday under the Poetry Foundation’s @harriet_poetry moniker and I sent him one that I tried back in 1994. It started from an actual scene I witnessed at the time in my garden in Garrison, NY.
According to The Academy of American Poets, “The sestina follows a strict pattern of the repetition of the initial six end-words of the first stanza through the remaining five six-line stanzas, culminating in a three-line envoi. The lines may be of any length, though in its initial incarnation, the sestina followed a syllabic restriction.”
The Academy description lists some tour de force sestinas, including Ezra Pound’s “Sestina: Altaforte” and John Ashbery’s “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” along with “Sestina” and “A Miracle for Breakfast” by Elizabeth Bishop, and “Paysage Moralise” by W.H. Auden.
Here is my sestina, which pales in comparison like the flaking sloughed-off skin of the snake it describes:
Second Skin
In the yard by the barn was a snake
resting on a leaf-pile in the garden,
nearby his old shod skin
limp and lifeless under a noon-day sun.
Abandoned on the blades of grass,
like an untangled filament of memory.
The sight of him fired my memory,
which cast a shadow on the snake
(who now slithered away in the grass).
He lent a curious aspect to the garden–
aspect being its relation to the sun
–not unlike his relation to the skin.
He seemed to remember the skin.
(Do snakes have that much memory?)
Or was it a trick of the sun
that he mistook for a female snake?
When he made his way out of the garden,
I crept along quietly in the grass.
As I followed him there in the grass,
he stretched ever closer to the skin;
his path leading out of the garden,
as if tracing the line of a memory.
How strange, I thought, this snake,
disregarding the late summer sun.
Later, over-heated in afternoon sun,
I lay down to rest on the grass.
I watched again as the snake
tried to resuscitate his discarded skin,
perhaps to revive its dead memory
and lure it back home to the garden.
Cutting the lawn by the garden,
I must have been dizzy with sun,
or dozing in the haze of a memory.
Translucent flakes feathered the grass:
it was then I remembered the skin;
it was then I remembered the snake.
I sat by the garden dropping fresh-cut grass
onto my arm and its sun-baked skin,
clippings of memory snaking through my mind.
–Scott Edward Anderson
Solitude & Sincerity: RIP John Haines, 1924–2011
March 4, 2011
John Haines Photo © Dorothy Alexander
In the spring of 1997, I was living in Anchorage, Alaska, and was invited by the University of Alaska Anchorage to put together a program for their annual Writing Rendezvous conference.
I thought about the fact that I was in Alaska and we were coming to the close of a century and that poetry seemed to be at a crossroads.
And then I thought about John Haines. Any panel on poetry in Alaska must feature John Haines, I thought. Haines was a kind of unofficial permanent poet laureate of Alaska.
Since moving there to homestead in 1947, Haines had crafted and composed poetry of great solitude and sincerity out of his Alaska experience.
Haines was pleased to join the panel, although he said something about being too old to be of interest to the audience. Then I told him the panel would be rounded out by a young spoken word poet and an Alaska Native woman poet. He got a spark and became more interested in the prospect.
I don’t remember much about the panel — and I confess I don’t have my notes at hand. It was called “Poetry at the Edge of the Millennium” or somesuch. I do remember the panelists were engaged with each other and engaging to the audience.
And I recall that Haines stirred up a bit of controversy on the panel talking about spoken word versus conventionally printed poetry. That was pretty typical for the poet.
“He was a cantankerous, insufferable, unbendable old bastard but he was a damn good writer,” longtime friend John Koolstra told the Fairbanks Daily News Miner. “He is Alaska’s best writer. He was a standout.”
So when I heard that John Haines died last night in Fairbanks at the age of 86, I thought about his poetry.
From his isolated cabin above the Tanana River in Alaska’s Interior, he learned “to make things for myself, to build shelters, to weave nets, to make sleds and harnesses, and to train animals for work. I learned to hunt, to watch, and to listen.”
And there he crafted poems out of a spiritual wilderness where his solitary imagination confronted existence without the comforting illusions of society (to paraphrase poet Dana Gioia).
Here is John Haines’ poem “Fairbanks Under the Solstice”
Slowly, without sun, the day sinks
toward the close of December.
It is minus sixty degrees.
Over the sleeping houses a dense
fog rises—smoke from banked fires,
and the snowy breath of an abyss
through which the cold town
is perceptibly falling.
As if Death were a voice made visible,
with the power of illumination…
Now, in the white shadow
of those streets, ghostly newsboys
make their rounds, delivering
to the homes of those
who have died of the frost
word of the resurrection of Silence.
–John Haines
Dead Bird Poems: “Dead Red Wing”
September 16, 2010
- Image via Wikipedia
Jim Behrle, who has to be one of the funniest most irascible poets on the Interwebz, had a recent post about Dead Bird Poems on his AmericanPoetry.biz blog:
“The Dead Bird Poem is one of the most honored of American forms. Take sappy pastoral, add a dead or dying bird and just watch the meaning drip from your canvas like grease off a slice of bacon. Someone had sent me a Facebook note about the 5 or 6 dead bird poems in whatever year’s that was Best American Poetry.”
I wrote a dead bird poem almost a decade ago, called “Dead Red Wing.”
At the time, I worked for The Nature Conservancy and gave a presentation to a birding group. The group meeting started with typical group meeting business, then segued into a Quaker-meeting-style sharing of bird sightings and notations. It was quite poetic.
Then they brought out the specimens.
The meeting turned into a kind of flea market or science fair. Dead birds, bird parts, wings, feet, beaks; heads, whole birds, birds with missing wings; gashed birds, smashed birds. It was quite a spectacle.
One woman removed a Ziploc bag from a portable cooler. She opened the bag and unwrapped a beautiful, complete (and quite frozen) red-winged blackbird. She handed it to me. That was all I needed.
Here is my poem “Dead Red Wing,” which didn’t make it into Best American Poetry in 1995 the year it was published in a small journal called Blueline out of SUNY Potsdam:
“Dead Red Wing”
Come spring, you’d be up
in the low trees,
on telephone wires,
bowing foxtail in the marsh,
your song become vain:–
“Look-at-meeee…Look-at-meeee…”
Flash of red on black wing
poised to singe the eyes
trained on you,
a life-bird,
through field glasses.
In my hand you are stiff,
unrecognizable.
The woman
who brought you
to the birding group
kept you
in a Ziploc bag
in the freezer,
next to the roast
and last week’s red beans.
Every evening,
when she finished her vigil
at the window,
she took you out,
rubbed your cold breast,
ruffled feathers,
sang your song.
–Scott Edward Anderson, Blueline, Volume XVI
Ground Zero: Trying to Write About 9/11
September 11, 2010
In the wake of tragedy on September 11, 2001 — in the face of it, in some ways — there were reports of poems appearing all over New York. On lampposts, bus stops, phone booths, taped over advertisements; poems to lost loved ones, the missing, the dead, to the world.
Poetry seemed to be a healing force for some, a way of calling out in remembrance for others. Poems then started to appear in print, as poets from Deborah Garrison to Wisława Szymborska tried to come to grips with what had happened that day.
I tried to write a poem to express what I felt about that day. I wasn’t there, I was 100 miles away in Philadelphia, but some people I love were there and their lives were forever changed by the tragedy. All of us were.
I started writing the poem that November and worked on it for a while before giving up. It wasn’t easy to write about. I took it out again six years later and found it wanting. I was reminded of the poem today — nine years after the tragedy — and decided to share it here.
Here is my poem, “Ground Zero”:
Neighbors worked in these buildings;
buildings no longer there, no longer here.
Their emptiness fills the space once occupied.
How tall is emptiness?
How empty is remembrance?
Memory flares, burns out.
Neighbors are strangers become familiars,
and neighborhoods are the places we meet
the stranger’s glance, acknowledge or turn away.
Only now, who can turn away?
Who can pretend innocence?
Decoy repelling and attracting.
The boy in Belfast on his way to school
who runs past the empty spaces
between houses, fearing snipers;
the girl who fears an ill-timed car bomb;
the mother awaiting children from the playground;
the father fearing policeman protecting and serving.
Neighbors may be those we’d least like
to live with, but they make our community.
The empty space left by buildings gone.
Our hearts wanting for lack of something,
connection, community, solace–
Who can fill the space gone empty, gone?
(for Barbara Einzig & Chloe Indigo Hannah Guss)
–Scott Edward Anderson
My Longshot Submission: “Imaginary Comeback”
September 10, 2010
Over 48 hours, from noon on August 27, 2010, through noon on August 29, 2010, “hundreds of writers, editors, artists, photographers, programmers, videographers, and other creatives from all around the world came together via the Internet — and in offices in Los Angeles, Portland, and San Francisco — to make a magazine from start to finish.” It was called Longshot.
The theme was “comeback.” My submission wasn’t published in the magazine, but will appear on their blog linked to this blog post. It’s a cool idea. Here is my longshot, a poem I wrote in a flash on Saturday, August 28th, called
“Imaginary Comeback”
He was big, really big.
In his mind, he was the only star
There ever was — the one true star.
A star of the stage, screen, and sport,
Legions of fans cheering his every move.
They bought all his records,
Sold out his shows, cheered every score.
No one could get enough of him,
Kept demanding more.
He fell in with the wrong crowd,
An adoring mass of one,
That took him down the wrong path.
He fell into bad habits: sex,
Drugs, deviant behavior – all by himself.
Only, when he fell, nobody knew
It was all in his mind. He disappeared
Further into obscurity; none missed him.
He stopped hearing the cheering
In the back of his mind,
The soundtrack no longer played,
Accolades and self-congratulation
Were no longer forthcoming.
But now, poised for a comeback,
He sits on the couch and stares,
Paralyzed with fear and self-loathing.
What if you were a star
Of your own mind
And you made a comeback
To which nobody came—
Would the fame taste as sweet?
Or bitter, bitter as bile piling up
In the pit of his stomach
Churning with anxiety.
Heck, even John Lennon used to
Throw up before The Beatles’ gigs,
He tells himself. Then he heaves,
Leaving his lunch on the living room
Floor: the only thing making
A comeback today
Is the sandwich he ate an hour ago.
–Scott Edward Anderson
On Saudade and Longing: Two Poems
August 26, 2010
Have you ever felt a deep longing for something or someone? Someone from your past, perhaps, or a place or time for which you feel an intense, nostalgic yearning.
There’s a wonderful word in Portuguese that describes this feeling: “Saudade,” which some define as a “feeling of incompleteness…due to the absence of someone or something…or the absence of a set of particular and desirable experiences and pleasures once lived.”
It can be very intense and somewhat hard to decipher. You know when you feel it, however — and when you got it bad. I’ve tried to describe it in two poems over the years; although one could argue it is a consistent theme in much of my poetry. (Perhaps it’s my Portuguese heritage?)
The first poem is called “Saudade,” and it was published in the literary journal Kimera in 2001:
Saudade
I feel beliefs that I do not hold.
I am ravished by passions I repudiate.
–Fernando Pessoa
We’re surrounded by people
who sentimentalize collegiate life,
swoon over first marriages,
would kill to return to Rome, or
wish for the restitution of days
gone by, or worse, days
they’ve never known.
(The Portuguese have a word for it,
saudade, a longing for lost things.)
For myself, I have fond memories
of houses in New England
(where my childhood
blossomed, disappeared);
of a life of the mind,
of places for a brief time mine.
But the only thing I long for
is the old cherry tree,
in front of our home
— we were newly wed —
how it dashed its branches
against our roof.
##
The second poem, “Longing,” is from my poetic sequence called “Dwelling,” which a poet friend of mine has described as “a phenomenology of how we live on the Earth.” This is the first time it has appeared anywhere (not for lack of trying!):
Longing
“Love is the distance
between you and what you love
what you love is your fate”
–Frank Bidart
Desire is a city street flush with longing;
losing is the darkness inhabiting that street.
Say that losing becomes a way of knowing,
words failing to capture its music–
Desire is to longing as longing is to losing.
If this is so, losing strengthens longing
as longing makes mystery of desire.
Concave mirrors cascading light in common focus
each reflecting and magnifying the other,
unformed or uninformed, but nevertheless–
Life’s little endings: the big unresolved, unrequited
unfolding of the world into what longing desires.
##
I’m not sure which poem is more successful at capturing that intensity of feeling and persistent yearning or desire. (Well, obviously, someone thought “Saudade” caught it better, for it found its way into print.)
Frankly, I’m not sure the word saudade can ever really be described in English; we just have to feel it to understand it.
What do you feel saudades about?
–Scott Edward Anderson
Two Poems of the Beach
August 1, 2010
My dog Calvin on the beach at Oak Island, NC
I’ve been on vacation this past week on the North Carolina Coast.
Oak Island is one of the south-facing islands that are not part of the more famous Outer Banks and neither as far south nor as celebrated as Myrtle Beach.
We like it there because it is quiet and sleepy in an old-fashioned way. It is a far drive from Philadelphia, but these days you need to go pretty far to get far away.
Being on the beach reminded me of two poems I wrote about other Atlantic Coastal vacations, back in the early 90s.
The first, “Gleanings,” was written in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, and appeared in an anthology called “Under a Gull’s Wing: Poems and Photographs of the Jersey Shore.” It was written for two old friends, Jim Supplee and Diane Stiglich:
“Gleanings”
Look at the two of them, bent
to the early morning tide.
They cull glass from the sandy surf.
Strange and wonderful alchemists,
who search for the elusive blue
of medicine bottles, caressing
emerald imitators from “Old Latrobe,”
or amber sea urchins
left there like whelks at low tide.
They discard broken bits of crockery,
forsaken like jetsam of the sands.
Beach glass is opaque
with a false clarity:
Polished by sand and sea,
the edges don’t cut
like our lives, lived elsewhere,
out beyond the last sandbar,
where plate tectonics rule the waves.
The second poem was written down the coast a bit in Chincoteague, Virginia. Chincoteague is famous for its wild horses and for its mosquitoes. But I chose a couple of other focal points in my poem “Spartina,” which later appeared in the magazine Philadelphia Stories:
“Spartina”
Herring gull dragged from the cordgrass by a bay cat,
who drops the sputtering gull under a tree.
The gull’s left wing and leg are broken — right wing thrashing,
body turning round a point, compass tracing a circle.
Wild chorus of gulls tracing the same circle in salt haze
only wider, concentric, thirty feet overhead.
The cat lying down in shade, making furtive stabs,
powerful paws slapping down motion.
The cat’s feral, calico-covered muscles ebb and shudder
in the bay breeze. She is Spartina, waving in wind or water.
Now she yawns indelicately, fur and feathers
lofting on the incoming tide.
The gull plants his beak in the sand,
tethered, like all of us, to fate.
–Scott Edward Anderson
##
I hope your vacation plans take you to a coast somewhere. “The sea is a cleanser,” as a good friend wrote to me recently.
Let’s hope that’s true, for the sake of the Gulf Coast.
The Knee and “Intelligent Design”
July 22, 2010
- Image via Wikipedia
I had knee surgery a couple of years ago; a minor clean-up of my medial meniscus.
When the doctor finished this fairly routine arthroscopic procedure, he said to me, “You’ll be back to playing a fool and not acting your age in a few weeks.”
He was right. I was traipsing all over India in a few weeks and back to playing basketball again within a couple of months.
One night during my recuperation, I started thinking about the knee.
It’s a very flawed design, full of serious structural problems. Almost I want to say the knee is a botched job.
Anyway, a poem started to form in my head and I did something uncharacteristic: I wrote it down. Usually, I work on poems in my head for a while before putting them down on paper.
Then I did something else that was atypical: I included it in a batch of poems sent to the American Poetry Review, one of the most prestigious poetry publications in the country, which happens to be published here in Philadelphia.
Ordinarily, I wait for several drafts before sending my new poems anywhere, a process that can take months or even years.
A few months later, however, the poem was accepted by APR and it was published in that summer (July/August 2008 issue). Perhaps I shouldn’t worry my poems so much and just let them be. Truth be told, this one just seemed right. (I did tinker with it in a minor way before it appeared in APR and again after it was published, mostly some grammatical stuff with which I wasn’t happy. I just can’t help myself…)
Here is my poem, “Intelligent Design”:
The knee is proof:
there’s no such thing
as “intelligent design.”
If there were, the knee
would be much improved,
rather than in need
of replacement.
The doctor tells me
they are doing
wonderful things
with technology these days,
have improved the joint
and bond—
Amazing, really, they
can take a sheep’s tendon
and attach it there and here
or remove ligaments
from one part of the body,
secure it by drilling holes
and plugging them up,
stretching until taut
with tension superior
to the original.
The new designs
are so much better
(“my better is better
than your better”)
it seems obvious
the Creator
took off the afternoon,
went to play a round
of golf with Beelzebub,
perhaps a foursome with
Methuselah and Lucifer,
left the joint between
thigh bone and shin
to an intern.
Isn’t it obvious?
I mean, 2 million years
of evolution haven’t
improved the knee one wit.
Nothing intelligent about it.
–Scott Edward Anderson, American Poetry Review, July/August 2008
Here is an Mp3 of my reading the poem at Kelly Writers House in September 2008: Scott Edward Anderson’s “Intelligent Design”
Sirens Rising, Capri and Norman Douglas’s “South Wind”
July 14, 2010
August 2, 1990. I’m on a boat heading from Naples to Capri. We’ve just learned that Iraq has invaded Kuwait and the United States will likely declare war on Iraq. The world will soon be changing.
I’ve just had an article published in the Naples daily newspaper, Il Mattino, and have been praised and regaled by all sorts of Napolitanos about it. (It seems everyone reads the papers here!) Similar treatment awaits me on Capri, the home island of my friend Francesco Durante (now editor of Corriere del Mezzogiorno).
On the trip, I’m reading SOUTH WIND, a 1917 novel set on Capri (Nepenthe in the book) by Norman Douglas. (The Bishop of Bampopo is a central character.)
Capri is an intoxicating place, I can see why writers flocked there or settled there over much of the last century: Shirley Hazzard, Graham Greene, Norman Douglas, among many others.
The heady combination of my local celebrity, limoncello, the scirocco (the south wind itself), and the island’s many delights, inspired me to write my poem “Siren’s Rising,” which was published in the journal SLANT nine years later, and then translated into the Italian by Francesco Durante for Almanacco Caprese. Here is the poem:
Sirens Rising
Isla Capri, Italia
“O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” Romans, 7:24
I.
Like Tiberius I’m torn
between the flesh & its blood.
Like him, too, I’m of this island’s
dark side facing the sea.
You can languish here, succumb
to the madness this island provokes,
or you can flee, denying
your venereal appetite.
Night after night, I give in
to the relentless lure of Pan.
The raucous Neapolitan song
calls to me, instructing my lust,
filling my ears with its chaos.
I am full of life, full of limoncello;
blood hurries through my veins,
as if it had some destination–
beyond circulation.
I chase the Roman beauties:
sloe-eyed enchantresses
with slate-black hair and aquiline noses
and arched brows of la seduttrice.
Their spry and conclusive limbs
stretch from capricious figures
–they are entanglers.
I may as well be on all fours,
as I creep from taverna to piazzetta.
Together, we fall to my bed,
oozing sweat: couple, come away,
con amorosa cura.
We are sargassum
drifting in a pelagic daze.
In the wretched heat,
the moon is as still and cold
as a marble floor.
II.
Sister Serafina,
the unassuming saint of this island,
once induced the prince of darkness
into an adoration of the Savior.
With me, her task is doubly difficult, I’m afraid.
She tries to inveigle me to the Grotta Azzurra
–that knife-wound across the ribs
of Capri’s beguiling torso–
for she knows the blue grotto yields up
not the bagno where Tiberius
cooled his erotic fires,
nor the relentless lust of legend,
but the Madonna’s bluest robes
–the color of sanctity.
It’s too late.
I’ve already gone over the edge,
like the Bishop of Bampopo,
I turn a chaste eye to murder
and drink the sweat of my lovers
in an evaporating recline.
“How shall that come out of man
which was never in him?” the Bishop proffered.
I defile the flowers of Capri,
and search for the power of wild beasts,
deep within the grottoes, dank with sea-wrack.
The dizzy swirl of heaving breath echoes
from every corner of the cyanic cavern.
“Sono io, sono io,” they claim.
“Sono io!”
The Sirens respond to the cry:
“We will succor your willfulness.”
“We will cater to your whim–”
Once again I go to them,
into the depths of an endless night.
They lure me with their dancing
as exquisite as their song
–daughters of Terpsichore!
III.
Within sight of Vesuvius,
I follow the trail of obscure desire,
rounding the mealy stone groin
of Arco Naturale. I grow fins,
am lost.
Atop the Salto di Tiberio
and his Villa Jovis,
Tiberius revels in my plight.
He is the dragon of Capri,
whose fiery breath still infects the island.
I see, as if for the first time,
the island’s bone-white prominence,
rising above the loam-dark sea.
Grey-pink tufa crags, white limestone,
tender mauve reflexes
upthrusted in pulpy stillness.
And I am born of salt
scorched from the sea’s clutch;
the scirocco dashes the island
with its dry spite.
Born of desire,
I return to desire–
The heat
renders my body viscous,
my skin a rubbery porpoise-armor.
I leap from the sea
to plunge to its depths;
the Sirens guide me down
like pilot fish.
I am blessed by their bodies’ charms,
their sea-feathers slicked back
by my expert tongue, their breasts
rouged the color of pomegranates
from my rough beard.
“Possess these shores,” they whisper.
It’s more likely they’ll possess me
the Sirens,
in their pagan trinity:
Persuader, Brightface, Bewitcher.
IV.
The piazza is a droning blur
at this hour.
The handsome waiters are busy trafficking
caponata and spaghettini alla puttanesca.
Women are smoothing their dresses and reapplying
lipstick and rouge, between sips
of dry gin with lemons.
The brackish aroma of homemade wines
and barrels of oil-cured olives,
mingles with the tourists’ perfume,
which trickles down their salty cleavage
–intoxicating mist!
I am seated, most nights,
at the table nearest the bar.
It’s the closest thing
I’ve had to home.
This place for a brief time mine.
Leviathan among the Siren victors
–my life, their spoil.
(For Francesco Durante & Alessandra Carolla)
–Scott Edward Anderson, SLANT, Spring 1999
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