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
Ekphrastic Poems: Can they stand alone?
February 26, 2011
Black Angus, Cooperstown by Paul Niemiec, Jr. (used by permission of the artist)
Caroline Mary Crew, writing about ekphrastic poetry in her always engaging blog, Flotsam, asks, “Can the poem stand apart from the painting?”
She cites some worthy examples of various approaches and “types” of ekphrastic poems, including famous examples by Auden, Keats, and O’Hara, as well as a poem that was completely unknown to me, Monica Youn’s “Stealing The Scream.”
I was intrigued by Caroline’s question and sent her an example of my own, “Fallow Field,” which was not quite an ekphrastic poem by strictest definition — that is, a poem that comments upon another artwork, because Joshua Sheldon’s photograph and my poem were created at the same moment.
It occurred to me that another of my poems, “Black Angus, Winter,” was also a kind of ekphrastic poem, of the type Caroline categorizes as narrative/monologue.
This poem, which was part of a group that won The Nebraska Review Award, was inspired in part by the landscape of central New York State, where I spent summers in the mid-1980s. There was much to inspire: rolling hills, dairy and cattle farms, cornfields, and old, often dilapidated farm buildings.
The poem also found inspiration and a launching-off point in a painting by a friend, Paul Niemiec, to whom the poem is dedicated. (Reproduced above.)
Here is my poem
“Black Angus, Winter”
I.
The angus rap their noses
on the ice–
fat, gentle fists
rooting water
from the trough.
They kick up clods of dirt
as a madrigal of shudders
ripples their hides.
II.
The barn needs painting,
it’s chipped like ice
from an ice-cutter’s axe.
The fence also needs work,
posts leaning, wire slack.
The Angus keep still–
they’re smarter than we think,
know all about electricity.
III.
I cross the barnyard
on my way back from the pond,
ice skates keeping time
against the small of my back.
The sting of the air
is tempered by the heat of manure.
Through the barn door:
Veal calf jabbing at her mother’s udder.
(For Paul Niemiec)
–Scott Edward Anderson
##
Elizabeth Bishop Under the Microscope
February 8, 2011
Elizabeth Bishop
(This is an essay I wrote for The Bloomsbury Review, which started as a review of One Art: Letters of Elizabeth Bishop, and originally published in their November/December 1996 issue.)
In the autumn of 1978, I heard Elizabeth Bishop read in Rochester, New York. I didn’t know much about her except that she was a friend of Robert Lowell’s and somewhat of a protégé of Marianne Moore–not bad credentials, in my mind.
She was small and puckish and reminded me of my surrogate “Aunt,” Gladys Taylor, who would have been her contemporary and with whom my family shared a house in Rhode Island during my formative years. Bishop’s similarity to this important personal figure, along with the poet’s own reading of her poems, put me into a holding pattern above the figure of Elizabeth Bishop. I have yet to touch ground.
In preparation for the reading, I had read the only books of hers I could find: Geography III (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976) and the Complete Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969). I reacted to Bishop’s poems with startled bemusement. Here was a poet unlike the other American poets I had been reading–the Beats and confessional poets like Lowell, and modernists like Pound and Williams.
Her work was delicate and refined, quiet and well-crafted–the antithesis of the bombast and pluck to which I then subscribed, exemplified by Kerouac and Ginsberg’s credo “first thought, best thought.” Here was a quiet refutation of that dictum, the significance of which, in relation to my own poetry, I could not then have fairly understood. (Now, nearly twenty years later, as I seem to write poems only for the joys of revision, Bishop’s example is ever more profound.)
So when my editor suggested I review Bishop’s One Art: Letters of Elizabeth Bishop (Selected & Edited, and with an introduction by Robert Giroux, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), I could not resist the temptation to get to know this poet more intimately than I ever imagined. Well over a year later, I have devoured nearly everything written by or about her, and still, when I open The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 (Noonday, 1983), I remain startled and bemused.
Such an intimate knowledge of Elizabeth Bishop and her life brings with it a certain responsibility; I’ve also discovered that the challenges posed by such an intense investigation have only deepened my feelings for her as both a poet and person. Having spent a year and a half with Elizabeth (I feel I know her well enough now to refer to her by her given name), I have rather fallen in love with the idea of Elizabeth Bishop, her work, and who she was.
This love affair is not without pitfalls. I have grown protective of her privacy and her gifts: How would she react to this exegesis of her life and work? What right do we have to pry so deeply into her private business? My Elizabeth Bishop, the one I have fashioned over all this time, is anything but reticent.
From the composite portrait offered by Brett Miller’s biography, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (University of California, 1993), and the uneven but engaging oral biography, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop (University of Massachusetts, 1994), compiled by Gary Fountain and the late Peter Brazeau, but chiefly from Elizabeth’s own writing, I’ve found a charmingly passionate guide to an alternative modernism.
(Add to these recent titles what I’ve gleaned from David Kalstone’s book on Bishop, Moore, and Lowell, Becoming a Poet [Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989]; Lorrie Goldensohn’s delightful Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry [Columbia University Press, 1991]; and Bonnie Costello’s critical study, Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery [Harvard University Press, 1991].)
What I’ve come to realize, beyond this, is that Bishop was an intensely personal writer; thus, our response to her work is equally personal. I know scores of people who respond to her sensibility; yet, each does so in a very distinct way. Bishop’s personal vision and precise expression touch her readers in ways that her contemporaries could not.
Lowell may have written more and with greater intensity, but the finesse and control with which Bishop observed her world is unmatched in our century. This is what makes her such an important poet to her expanding readership and to our age.
* * *
In an 1883 letter to his cousin (reprinted in The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson: Vol. II [Greenwood Press, 1969]), Stevenson wrote:
| There is but one art–to omit! O if I knew how to omit, I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knew how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper. |
Elizabeth Bishop’s creative work fills two small volumes–her Complete Poems weighing in at 276 pages and The Collected Prose (Noonday, 1984) at 274 pages. It is a wonder to have these letters, which bring her published writings, not counting the translation of The Diary of “Helena Morley” (1957, Noonday, 1995) or Brazil, the book she wrote for Life’s World Library in 1962, to just under 2,000 pages–but what pages!
Bishop was a private person, and I imagine she would be shocked at such a deep investigation of her private life and her public work. Her poetry has often been referred to, rather narrow-mindedly I feel, by a (largely male) community of critics as “dry,” “impersonal,” “distanced,” and “unemotional.”
For anyone who has spent any serious time with her work and who has been guided by the poet’s fine eye and ear for detail, her work is anything but dispassionate. She wrote slowly and with much deliberation and would not publish anything she felt was not absolutely ready.
Coming, as much of her work did, at a time when others were engaged in personal introspection and egotistical posturing, it is easy to see why her perfectionism was often mistaken for reserve. Very few of her poems–“The Shampoo” and “Armadillo” being exceptions–were overtly personal in reference. She possessed a highly tuned sense of good manners, what used to be known as decorum. Bishop maintained a modesty throughout her life that is ill-suited to our society’s passion for grisly details.
Bishop deplored what she saw as an inappropriate use of one’s personal life (and the lives of one’s acquaintances or friends) as fodder for poetry. When Robert Lowell published The Dolphin (OP) in 1973 and included therein many poems formed (and deformed) out of letters from his ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick, Bishop quotes to him a letter written by Thomas Hardy in 1911, which refers to
| an abuse which is said to have occurred–that of publishing details of a lately deceased man’s life under the guise of a novel, with assurances of truth scattered in the newspapers. |
She objected to the “mixing of fact and fiction in unknown proportions” throughout The Dolphin, and clearly felt uncomfortable with Lowell’s (and others’) mining of the darkest recesses of their own lives in their poetry. She concludes her quote from Hardy,
| the power of getting lies believed about people through that channel…by stirring in a few truths, is a horror to contemplate. |
* * *
Gerard Manley Hopkins once wrote in a letter date September 10, 1864 (Poems and Prose, Penguin 1971):
the letter-writer on principle does not make his letter only an answer; it is a work embodying perhaps answers to questions put by his correspondent but that is not its main motive. |
How easy it is to imagine that Hopkins would have found in Elizabeth Bishop the very kind of correspondent he demanded. Her letters anticipate questions and provide insight into her own life as well as the lives of her addressees. She wrote exquisitely about her daily existence, her work, reading, and the people with whom she came in contact.
Like Hopkins, whose letters Bishop had read in their published version, she never merely answered letters. In all her missives, of which a mere 500 or so are represented in One Art, Bishop entered into a dialogue with her correspondents. The dialogue begins in this book when Bishop was an innocent college senior, full of promise and just beginning to lay the groundwork for her life of letters.
Throughout this volume, Bishop’s correspondence grows progressively intuitive and is deepened by her awareness of life’s inner and outer turmoil. A poet of decorum and modesty, Bishop is a candid, but never immodest letter writer. When she admits that her companion and lover of 14 years, Lota de Macedo Soares, is battling mental illness and arteriosclerosis, she remains true to her conscience:
| She has had violent fights with all our friends except two–and it seems they all thought she was “mad” several years before I did. But of course I got it all the time and almost all the nights, poor dear. I do know my own faults, you know–but this is really not because of me, although now all her obsessions have fixed on me–first love; then hate, etc. |
Nearly all of Bishop’s letters to Lota were destroyed after the latter’s suicide in 1967, so our record of their relationship is rather one-dimensional. We do know, as Bishop tells one of her correspondents, that 10 or 12 of the years they spent together were the “happiest” the poet had known.
What we are left with, however incomplete, is as close to an autobiography as Bishop ever got (although a few of her stories, which appear in the The Complete Prose, deal with her early childhood in Nova Scotia and Massachusetts). Our feeling for the poet is deepened by the record of her life as represented in One Art; we come away thinking she was as much a genuine human being as a great artist.
These letters came from capable, if not always steady, hands. Bishop’s letters to Dr. Anny Baumann, who helped her overcome alcoholism and deal with asthma and psoriasis, reveal how her bouts of insecurity often led to depression, which aggravated both her asthma and her drinking. Yet, even here, our picture of the artist and person is not clouded by overt confession or melancholia. She could easily have dwelt on these problems, but in an early letter to Dr. Baumann, Bishop writes:
| The drinking seems to have dwindled to about one evening once or twice a month, and I stop before it gets really bad, I think. Of course that’s still once or twice too often, but what is best about it is that I don’t seem to think about it any more at all, or go through all that remorse. I get to worrying about the past ten years or so and I wish I could stop doing that, but aside from that the drinking and the working both seem to have improved miraculously. |
Bishop’s obeisance to decorum prompts a chaste response to Robert Lowell’s confession that “asking you [to marry him] is the might-have-been for me.” She took four months to write back to him, and even then barely mentions the incident, only to say,
| the whole phenomenon of your quick recovery and simultaneous productivity seems to me in looking back to be the real marvel of my summer. |
* * *
Elizabeth Bishop’s letters, even towards the end, kept her forthright, as she practiced a dying craft taken to the level of a personally revealing art. There are only two flaws with One Art: the twinned absence of the previously mentioned letters to Lota and the several thousand that Mr. Giroux had to forgo publishing in order to keep the volume manageable and affordable.
Her letters are obviously the most important of the three most recent books about Bishop mentioned in this essay. All three, however, should be read by anyone seriously interested in what informed the writing of one of our country’s finest poets. Finally, however, we are best left with Elizabeth’s own words on her life and work, from the poem “One Art”:
| Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. |
–Scott Edward Anderson, The Bloomsbury Review, November/December 1996
Elizabeth Bishop at 100
February 8, 2011
Elizabeth Bishop at Vassar
Elizabeth Bishop is my favorite poet. I am addicted, as John Ashbery suggested, to her poetry like that of no other poet I know.
Unfortunately, there is just so little of it; she published 88 poems in her lifetime, which is probably the yearly output of MFA types.
Yet, as Ashbery said, “like other addicting substances, this work creates a hunger for itself: the more one tastes it, the less of it there seems to be.”
Nearly all her poems were perfect, if a poem can be perfect.
There is something about the clarity of her language and the painstaking approach she took composing poems that makes almost all of her poems feel absolutely contemporary.
Bishop was born 100 years ago today and died on October 6, 1979.
Some years ago, a friend of mine, a fiction writer, to whom I sent Bishop’s poem, “The Fish,” said that reading this poem helped her finish a story she was writing about “shooting a halibut.”
If you’ve ever fished for halibut, you know that you have to shoot or club the enormous fish in order to land it. My friend was struggling with the ending, because she didn’t want to shoot the fish, but she knew she had to shoot the fish to finish the story.
Here is Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “The Fish”:
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn’t fight.
He hadn’t fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
–the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly–
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
–It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
–if you could call it a lip
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels–until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
–Elizabeth Bishop
You can read an essay I wrote about Elizabeth Bishop for The Bloomsbury Review in 1996: Elizabeth Bishop Under the Microscope
Happy Birthday, Elizabeth!
My Poem, “The Poet Gene,” Receives Honourable Mention
January 30, 2011
My poem, “The Poet Gene,” received honorable mention in the 2011 ESRC Genomics Forum Poetry Competition announced this weekend.
The competition was co-sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council’s Genomics Network and the Scottish Poetry Library of Edinburgh. The judges for the competition were Pippa Goldschmidt, Professor Steve Yearley, director of the ESRC Genomics Forum, Peggy Hughes, the communications officer at the Scottish Poetry Library, and poet Kona Macphee.
Writing about my poem, the judges said, “Understandably, most of the poems were serious, and so we particularly enjoyed the humour in one of the runners up, “Improving the Human: ‘The Poet Gene’,” a nicely self-referential poem which imagines the perhaps negative impact of genetic engineering upon poetry itself.”
Here is my poem
“The Poet Gene”
The gene for “poet” has likely been isolated,
somewhere in a lab in southern California.
And I wonder how close it is to the gene
that makes you crave potato chips
or the “coffee-drinker” gene, perhaps,
or the one that causes procrastination.
If they have the poet gene cornered
in a Petri dish, will they admonish it
for all the bad poems ever written,
however unwittingly?
Would it improve the human
to have the poet gene spliced
into fruit or beef – or even bacon?
Poetry-enhanced bacon. Now that’s
genetic modification one can get behind!
Perhaps it can be modified by the reader gene,
increasing the number of poetry readers.
Oh, but what if it went “aft agley”?
What if this innocent experiment turned wicked?
Think of it, more bad poems by more bad poets—
(Increased productivity isn’t always a good thing.)
Perhaps this poem is, in fact, one of them,
a mutated, altered, monster poem
waiting to grab you by the throat and…Ahem.
Think of the sheer volume of bad poetry
overtaking the world, smothering us;
entire forests decimated for paper
upon which these poems are printed
or hundreds of iPhone apps built
to accommodate a staggering number of poems
cranked out by “GMPs” (genetically modified poets)
careering and MFAing all over the place.
Undoubtedly, someone will decide to splice
the poet gene from one poet into another. Then what?
Talk about trouble: one side striving for simplicity;
the other deliberately obtuse and indirect.
No, best leave the poet gene out of even this poem;
rather, focus on how to make potato chip consumption
actually slimming to the human figure, especially
when consumed with large quantities of your favorite ale
and generous servings of bacon.
–Scott Edward Anderson
Related articles
- What do you get when you cross poets and geneticists? (newscientist.com)
Winning poem offers a new twist on “improving the human”
January 29, 2011
Crafted in the form of a double helix and addressing the issue of cloning, “Forward Deck” by Edinburgh writer, Sophie Cooke, was awarded first prize in the ESRC Genomics Forum Poetry Competition.
Kona Macphee (poet and competition judge) joined Sophie and fellow poets, Russell Jones (3rd Prize) and Katie Gooch (honourable mention), as they presented public readings of their work at the Scottish Poetry Library on Saturday 29 January 2011.
Hosted in partnership with the Scottish Poetry Library, the competition received over 200 entries from writers inspired to consider how work in the field of genomics, including DNA profiling, personalised medicine and stem cell research, is helping society by “improving the human”.
Congratulating all the winners Professor Steve Sturdy, Deputy Director of the ESRC Genomics Forum, said, “A decade since the first mapping of the human genome was hailed as the start of a new era, we are still coming to terms with the implications of these advances. Our winning poems highlight this sense of uncertainty surrounding genetic technologies and the role they might play in ‘improving the human’ and, we hope they will encourage others to explore their own views on these important issues.”
“Poetry can be a powerful communication form,” commented Pippa Goldschmidt, Genomics Forum Writer in Residence was the inspiration behind the competition. “Our winner, Sophie Cooke, used a compelling and disturbing visual metaphor to address the issue of cloning in ‘Forward Deck’. Many poems found inspiration in the idea that humanity is in our imperfections and the second placed poem, ‘Digital’, by Nina Boyd, illustrated this idea beautifully. In third place, ‘Chromosome Medley’ by Russell Jones offers readers an energetic imagining of the impact of genetic choice on the past, present and future.”
“We’re delighted that genomics provided such an exciting topic of inspiration,” said Peggy Hughes, Communications Officer at the Scottish Poetry Library and a judge for the competition. “The variety in subject matter, together with diverse poetic styles, and the global perspectives offered by writers from America, New Zealand, the Cook Islands, Uganda and India, combined to make judging difficult but hugely rewarding.”
For more information, including all of the winning poems and honourable mentions: ESRC Genomics Network
[From Press Release]
My poem “Crow’s Rosary”
December 28, 2010
The author in Hoboken, 1988
Keeping with the bird theme, a Tweet by Juliet Wilson reminded me of an old poem of mine written in 1987, when I was part of the Hoboken, NJ, poetry scene. It was published in the journal Chalk Circle in 1989, when I was one of a group of writers known as “The Decompositionalists.”
“Crow’s Rosary” was about the changes that were happening in Hoboken at the time, and the clash of cultures that continued thereafter as the mix of ethnicity and artists gave way to gentrification. No doubt it is a very different place today.
Here is my poem
Crow’s Rosary
Hoboken again after so long gone, yet the gregarious scent of coffee lingers;
the ka-chung, ka-choong of the old furnaces is replaced by the dolorous
buttoning of starched white collars–
Tinderbox matchbooks, this town harbors a legacy of fire–
a last-resort for some to stem the tide of condo-conversion.
The siren-scourge filling the air once filled by shipyard steam.
One crow equals one square mile in this mile-square-city and that lone crow
follows me from rooftop to steeple, from apartment to train depot,
end to end and back again–“Carrion waiting, carrion waiting!” he cawcries.
Somewhere on the cobblestone Court Street, he stops–
the garbage piled high in the alleyway.
Resuming flight, his feathers soiled by ashes, carrion of this
melting pot boiling over too high a flame–his rosary chanted-out above
the rooftops; church bells echo the litany of the displaced, “Carry on waiting.”
“I’ll die in your rosary,” sighs the Hoboken muse. “So carry on waiting.”
The Hoboken muse, the wife, dressed in black even in the heat of summer,
soothes the dusky sky.
The hammer’s hammer harkens: “Make way! Make way for the new tide that
rises above the din and dun! A new sleep is upon us!”
No morning comes without the hammer’s calling for work to be done;
another home displaced in Hoboken. They never cease except for
the obligatory coffee break taken 10 minutes after waking us all up.
A peregrine falcon rests on our laundry pole out back,
starling-eyed–showing us the underside of our breadwinning days,
challenging us to use those drear, found things.
The litany of lonesomeness leaves nothing left for the crow’s rosary
to be counted on. In the weepdusk, he cries in a deafening crowd,
“Carry on waiting, carrion. Carrion waiting!”
The curry-garlic-jalapeño-covered walls and streets now come
prepackaged, processed for microwaves and barbecues–
I see, in my eros-dreaminess, your suppliant flesh
resting on the tar beach; feel the embrace that comes
when our flesh conjugates a verb–
while the crow, soaring alone, surveys the tumult of our disheveled days.
This is a ghost of Hoboken–and I am to carry on with my waiting,
carry on as the crow with his lonesome rosary.
Who has the time to let the coffee steep, to savor the “last drop?”
And what does this new Hoboken mean to us, so unlike what it was to us?
Altar-clouds rise above us, an endless stream of
forgetting and rising, forgetting and rising,
linked by the crow’s rosary, the litany of lonesomeness.
There’s a gibbous moon out back, illuminating the night kitchen.
“Thee sees we love our garden,” says the Hoboken muse. “Let me assure you:
tho’ it may be only clapboards and clay pots now, its future is ardorous bounty…”
We live in shells cast aside by others, hollow bodies awaiting obsolescence.
Knowing this, the streets seem more calamitous.
Knowing this, we set-about preparing the earth’s redeeming.
Now you come to me with your chalice of hopelessness:
We are never so alone as when we long for lost things.
—Scott Edward Anderson, Chalk Circle 1989
My poem “Confusing Fall Warblers” as an Xtranormal Movie
December 22, 2010
For all my birding friends out there, who are preparing for the Christmas Bird Count, I thought I would share my poem, “Confusing Fall Warblers.”
The poem was inspired by Plate 52 in Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds, which bears the same title, and features all the bird names that appear in that plate in one poem.
I’ve also decided to try out Xtranormal — a fun text-to-movie application, which adds a curious dimension to the telling of the poem, which you can watch here:
Here is the poem as it appeared in the journal Isotope, Spring 2004:
Confusing Fall Warblers
(Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds, plate 52)
“You changed your name from Brown to Jones and mine from Brown to Blue” George Jones
Was it Hank Williams
she called the Nashville warbler,
or was it the black-throated blue?
Was it Wilson’s warbler
she heard in the bog up north
chattering chi chi chi chi chi chet chet?
Yellow-throat or orange-crowned,
from Tennessee, Connecticut, or
Canada, the prothonotary
clerks for the vireo from Philly,
who is neither lawyer nor warbler,
but is often mistaken–
Was it the hooded warbler
that startled her from the thicket,
or mourning warbler’s balancing notes
chirry chirry, chorry chorry,
that made her cock her head
to listen for its secret?
And tell me, tell me truly,
was it only
that sad country song
playing on the car radio
that made her cry?
–Scott Edward Anderson
Collap$e, or The Financial Suicides
December 11, 2010
The apparent suicide of Mark Madoff, son of Bernie Madoff, on the 2nd anniversary of his father’s arrest put me in mind of a poem I wrote about the financial crisis and the rising number of suicides among high-fliers.
At the time, there were reports that a growing number of individuals who “had it all” and lived extravagantly but couldn’t handle it when their house of cards fell.
The second line is a reference to W.B. Yeats’ poem, “The Scholars,” and there is an intentional pun in the first stanza, which was first noticed by my pal, Joe Donohue, who read an early version of the poem, and which wasn’t as poignant at the time.
Here is my poem,
Collap$e, or The Financial Suicides
Damned and damning are the fools,
Their bald heads forgetful of sins.
Believing greed and graft are virtues,
They made all the rules,
Spent lavishly on short-term views,
And made-off with the most wins.
Masters of the Universe,
They excel at immoderation, going all-out,
But never mastered failure or humility.
Faced with losing everything or worse –
Riches and status – they take the tidy,
Albeit cowardly way out.
In the end, they come to find out
Everything that man builds or begins
Endures only for a moment.
Their legacies, without a doubt,
Are consumed in the fires they foment
With their lies, deceit, and sins.
–Scott Edward Anderson
John Lennon at 70
December 8, 2010
- Image via Wikipedia
The Beatles Story, a Liverpool Museum devoted to the Fab Four and that British city’s favorite sons, held a poetry contest this fall in honor of John Lennon.
John would have been 70 years old on October 9, 2010, had he not been gunned down by a psychopath 30 years ago today.
The contest rules were simple: 40 lines on Lennon for his 40 years on Earth. I entered, but didn’t win the contest.
And although it may ruin my poem’s chances of being published in The New Yorker (to whom I’ve recently submitted it — forgive me, Paul Muldoon), I’ve decided that it’s important for me to share it with you on this day when so many of us are remembering John.
Here is my poem:
John Lennon at 70
“The streets are full of admirable craftsmen,
but so few practical dreamers.”–Man Ray
Lennon, the boy, practically an orphan;
Chip on his shoulder, mad at the world.
Lennon, the teenager, the rocker, the mocker,
Hard-driven, jealous, troublemaker, and bold.
Lennon, the young man, an edge to his attitude
And confident swagger; “To the top Johnny!”
Lennon, maturing, tightening up, melodic,
But still biting, sardonic, coming into his own.
Lennon, twenty-five, songsmith; honest, open, real.
A turning point: meeting drugs and Dylan.
Lennon, experimenting, laying down tricks
Rather than tracks; quirky, artistic, obscure.
Lennon, twenty-eight, life changed by a “Yes.”
Branching out, becoming an Artist.
Lennon, approaching thirty, back to his roots;
Raw, stripped-bare, primal screaming J.
Lennon, early 30s, getting political in the N-Y-C,
Under the influence; message trumping music.
Dr. Winston O’Boogie, mid-30s, recapturing
Some of the old magic, putting aside mind games.
Mr. Lennon, “retired,” house-husband, baking
Bread and raising a son; “just watching the wheels…”
Lennon, stretching out, almost forty,
Enjoying writing again, for himself and for Sean.
Lennon at 40, middle-age for most, a new record out.
He’s done more than many at this age or older, even.
Lennon, talking to his audience of survivors,
“We made it through the seventies, didn’t we?”
Lennon, walking in Central Park with Yoko.
“It’s John Lennon I can’t believe it…”
Lennon letting his guard down,
A new sense of purpose, renewal, direction—
Lennon, at 40, dead in his doorway.
“I read the news today, oh boy…”
Lennon’s life: meteoric, troubled, brilliant,
Full fathom flaming—
Lennon at 70: would he be a grumpy old man,
Still on the stage — or both? We’ll never know.
I read the news today and think: We need him;
Then hear John’s voice, singing “Love is all you need.”
–Scott Edward Anderson
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