Mary Karr’s “Poetry Fix”
July 7, 2010
Years ago, I had an idea for a “Poetry Channel”: an all-poetry cable network featuring poets and celebrities reading poems, poets being interviewed, and films about poets or based on poetry.
I didn’t pursue the idea because, well, because my idea for the “Disaster Channel” got shelved and that was how I was going to back my poetry idea.
But I recently stumbled upon Mary Karr’s “Poetry Fix,” which brings to life the kind of programming I had in mind.
Here’s Mary Karr and co-host Christopher Robinson reading and talking about Robert Hass’s “Old Dominion”:
You can check out more on Mary Karr’s YouTube channel. It’s a great series that’s just started and worth following as it develops.
Merwin Is the Right Choice for U.S. Poet Laureate
July 1, 2010
Some folks will say W. S. Merwin is too old, too establishment, too difficult to be Poet Laureate. They’ll be wrong. Merwin is the right choice at this moment in time.
Not only has he revitalized his own writing at such a late stage — 82 years young — but he continues to inspire younger poets and readers of poetry around the world.
What’s more, in the wake of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Merwin brings his considerable appreciation and concern for the planet to the post.
I applaud the choice of W.S. Merwin as the 17th U.S. Poet Laureate.
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My poem “Indwelling,” Animated
June 25, 2010
A few years ago, my friend the designer Jan Almquist, who was teaching a course at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, asked if one of his students could use a poem of mine for a video project.
Jeremy Collinson chose “Indwelling,” a poem that is part of my ecopoem sequence called “Dwelling.” The poem originally appeared in the University of Pennsylvania’s literary journal, CrossConnect. Here is the animated video, a filmpoem, if you will of my poem “Indwelling”:
A number of the poems from my Dwelling sequence have been published. You can find a sampling here.
And here is the text of the poem:
Indwelling
Shooting stars cross a city night sky. In the moment
before they fall, think about dwellings,
houses made of brick, stone, and wood—dwelling and indwelling—
miracle keeping matter together, from imploding or inverting.
How dwellings become a city, interdependent.
How stars become a night sky, suspended.
(Late fall, nearly winter, fog-caul warms night air through inversion.
The meteor version of life heads straight to the matter of our bed.)
What holds up the sky holds each one of us, too—
as we move against one another in this taut, elastic field,
warming with each movement, causing little inversions
all around us, and shooting stars—
there goes another.
–Scott Edward Anderson
Paul Muldoon Makes Me Laugh Yet Again
June 11, 2010
I gotta say, poet Paul Muldoon knows how to poke fun at poetic pretensions.
Last year I shared his appearance on The Colbert Report, now this interview posted on YouTube by theprincetontiger has come to my attention. Here is Paul Muldoon on Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok”:
Robert Hass and sharing poetry among generations
May 31, 2010
A curious thing happened to me yesterday in New York City. Robert Hass read at Poets House and gave a program for children in the morning. I took my six-year-old son, Walker, with me because he’s started writing poems (he’s got me beat by 3 years!) and we spent the day in the City alone together.
Bob Hass reading Walker's poem
When I told Walker we were going to see and hear one of my poetry teachers, he said, “That’s cool, because he taught you and now you’re teaching me and when I have children I’ll teach them…it’s like we’re keeping it going.”
Indeed, it felt like that when I introduced Bob to my son. Bob has grandchildren Walker’s age and it wasn’t lost on me that there was something transpiring between our three generations.
Walker brought one of his poems to share with Bob and handed it to him in an envelope. During the program, in which Bob was reading poems by children from his River of Words project, he pulled out Walker’s poem and asked if Walker wanted to read it. Walker shyly declined and Bob asked for permission to read it to the audience. Walker beamed. (So did I.)
Bob read Walker’s poem and declared, “This is a real poem.” We both smiled. It was a magical moment to have a mentor appreciate the work of your son. I was really feeling blessed that morning.
Bob and Walker
Later, after wandering around Tribeca and the wonderful riverside parks along the Hudson, Walker and I sat on the rocks behind Poets House in the newly opened South Teardrop Park and listened to Bob and his wife Brenda Hillman read their poems into the late afternoon. What a magical day.
Here is Walker’s poem, “The Snow I’ve Been Waiting For”:
The Snow that crunches beneath my feet.
Oh the wonderful snow, snow, snow.
The snow that tastes so wonderful.
The snow, the snow, the snow.
The snow I’ve been waiting for all along,
The snow I’ve been waiting for all year.
The snow, the snow, the snow.
The Snow I’ve been waiting for.
–Walker Anderson, 6
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For the past 13 years I’ve been sending out a poem-a-week email during National Poetry Month. Each week, I introduce a poem to readers on the list, which is now over 300 strong.
At month’s end, I’m always asked to extend it beyond the month of April. In lieu of that, I think I’ll publish poems from the series here from time to time, as long as I can get the poets’ permission.
(If you’d like to subscribe to the list for next year, send me an email at greenskeptic[at]gmail[dot]com.)
#
My friend Lee Kravitz — whose memoir, Unfinished Business: One Man’s Extraordinary Year of Trying to Do the Right Things, comes out next month — is a great reader of poetry.
So when he handed me a book of poems at Thanksgiving last year, I knew it would be worth reading.
He told me two things about the book: it was written by another good friend of his and she was an intensive care physician in Washington, DC.
The book was Night Shift by Serena J. Fox. And one thing you quickly learn from her poems is that Dr. Fox is no Dr. Williams making house calls in a small, northern New Jersey community. She started her career in the emergency room of Bellevue Hospital in New York City, one of the busiest ERs at the time – the early era of AIDS.
(I had an experience at Bellevue in the early 80s – probably while she was in residence there — involving an attempted suicide by a neighbor. It was not a fun place to be back then.)
As a poet, Fox has an uncanny ability to apply her poetic sensibility to the reality she witnesses through her work. I admire the way she seamlessly weaves medical terminology – a rare gift that perhaps only Jane Kenyon mastered before her – and the harshness of life as she sees it into a poetry that transcends reportage.
Fox tackles a variety of forms and styles from traditional lyrics to fragments and more experimental sequences. And she is equally adept at short and long forms — her long poems, including the title poem, “Northeast Coast Corridor,” “Blood Holies,” and “551,880,000 Breaths” are remarkably varied and sustained collages of images and information, stories and voices overheard.
How glad I am that Lee introduced me to her work and pleased that I can introduce a sample of it to you here.
Here is Serena Fox’s poem,
The Road to Çegrano, 1999
(with Patch Adams and Clowns, Skopje, Macedonia)
Pinpricks of poppies
Populations
Of them—
Supra-oxygenated
Arterial
Oblivious to
Camps and tents
Of no interest to
Scythes
Unregulated
Flaunting bright
Points in
Grass and fields—
The other side of
Fences.
In the camps
Children
With blackbird
Beak eyes
Scavenge trinkets
Touches
Kisses from
Strangers—
A busload of
Ferocious
Clown-doctor
Revolutionaries
Carrying
Medical
Supplies and
Angry
Armloads of
Peace.
One-on-one
With the villagers—
Six thousand here
Thirty-nine thousand
There—
Dust
Is the only
Accumulation—
Rust-colored
Covering the tents
And doctors
Without borders.
The clown-doctors
Come armed with
Red rubber
Noses
Electric-blue hair.
The kids riot for
Stickers
Attention.
They quiet for
Bubbles
Blown gently
Balloons
For the boy
Leg in a
Cast
Group photos
Promises to send
Pictures.
Thank G’d the
Fighting
Stopped.
What would they have
Done in winter
Summer?
But where to send
Them?
Back to the
Burning?
Over the fence
The fields?
Out toward the
Mountains—
Bubbles
Balloons
Boys, girls, bombs,
Poppies?
–Serena Fox, from Night Shift
(Copyright Serena Fox. Reprinted with permission of the author)
——————————————————–
Serena sent me this note about the poem: “In May of 1999 I joined Patch Adams for a one-week trip to Macedonia and the refugee camps holding thousands of people who had scaled snow-covered peaks to get out of Kosovo. We were an eclectic assortment of clown-doctors who had traveled with Patch before and others like me who hoped to contribute in some small way to soothing the chaos going on in the former Yugoslavia.
I thought I was going to deliver intravenous supplies and help set up a clinic outside the camps for women. I also ended up roving the camps with children of all ages and forgoing my usual reserve for my first red rubber nose and a blue wig. As usual the people I met gave me infinitely more than I could ever give back. I was impressed by the efficiency and cleanliness of the UN sponsored camp.
The most vivid sensory memory is that of the foothills covered with poppies, women in the fields wielding scythes, the slowing of time and the redness of the poppies which had the exact quality, for me, of arterial blood.” –SJF
5 Books of Contemporary Poetry I Can’t Live Without
March 23, 2010
Thanks to Peter Semmelhack, who asked for poetry recommendations via Twitter, I made a list of the 5 books of “contemporary” US poetry I can’t live without:
Elizabeth Bishop, Geography III
Donald Hall, Kicking the Leaves
What are the 5 books of poetry you can’t live without?
Valentine’s Day: A Frostian Dilemma
February 14, 2010
Last week the delightful Scottish poet Elspeth Murray posted some photographs of a trail intersection on Twitter. She referred to it as “a Robert Frost type dilemma.”
She reminded me of my poem “Reckoning,” which describes another Frostian dilemma. Written almost twenty years ago, “Reckoning” is a poem about the difficulties that visit a young couple when one of them is having doubts about their path forward.
Sometimes the choice we make is the wrong one. Sometimes, even when our choice extends the journey beyond what we anticipated, it turns out the right one.
(I should say here that the couple depicted in the poem recently celebrated their 18th wedding anniversary.)
Here is my poem, “Reckoning”:
RECKONING
Camel’s Hump, Vermont, 4083′
I.
Your abacus of worries,
me, counting my own pace, afraid
of the one real thing
I’ve known in years–
Negotiating our vertiginous October,
up through birch, maple, oak, cedar, white pine;
granite rising like barnacles on a humpback.
How do you stay calm?
Conceit hangs from my pack
like an extra water bottle.
I have trouble listening:
Do you want to push me over the summit,
or knock me out with a chunk of granite?
The mountain is not mine, I fool myself
when I play the king.
II.
We get turned around, tricked by language:
The ring of civilization in “Forest City,”
or the sylvan slur of “Forestry.”
The wrong trail is the one I’ve chosen–
And through the muddle, darkness comes,
and fourteen miles is the double of seven.
We switchback over the mountain’s bulge
and bushwhack round its base,
hours multiplied by circumference.
III.
At last back at camp,
we learn to count on each other.
From the stone house meadow:
Our prankster’s rising hump.
We curse and praise its witchery.
On that rock-ribbed blackberry hill
of Vermont’s quiet reckoning, we
calculate the chalk silhouette
in a moonlit night’s
heavy charcoal horizon.
–Scott Edward Anderson
(This poem appeared in Earth’s Daughters journal in 1997.)
Recession or Bust
December 29, 2009
“Taps” fills the foggy night air
From The Netherlands Carillion,
Overlooking Arlington
National Cemetery,
As Ben Bernanke tolls
the death knell
For the American economy.
“They know nothing,” shouts
The sound effect button
Pounded by Jim Cramer
on “Mad Money.” They do.
Know nothing, that is.
I hit the snooze button
Almost as often.
O, what sacrifices we make,
Neglecting the illusionary line
Between light and darkness,
Between loss and triumph.
#
I started this poem in the summer of 2008, just before the collapse of the US economy. Just ran across it as I was reviewing my poetry production over the past year.
Not sure it works, exactly, but in terms of subject matter and approach it foreshadowed some of the poetry I wrote this past year.
Happy New Year.
A poem for Indonesia and victims of terror everywhere
July 18, 2009
I’ve had a love affair with Indonesia for a long time now. Curiously, it started with its poetry long before I ever visited the country. But the people and the place are the real magic for me. Indonesia is a land (and waters) of stunning beauty, a people of peace and wonder, and a remarkable, storied culture.
I long to go back and when something like the bombings in Jakarta this week happens, my heart sinks that Indonesia and its people may suffer.
A few years ago, after the Bali bombings that killed 20 people and injured 129 and reports of other terrorist activities surfaced, I wrote a poem called “Sons of Abraham,” which has not yet been published. It may be too difficult a subject to be published. (Of course, it also may be that it is not yet finished or polished enough for publication!)
I want to share it here in the wake of the Jakarta bombings and in honor and memory of all victims of terrorism everywhere:
SONS OF ABRAHAM
We are all strung together
by thin filaments of air,
fragments of faith and our burning desire
to please God, to engender
a kind of blessing. Time
is the fragrance of one age
evoking another; essence
is our connection on earth.
I harbor neither empathy nor anger
for people who set off bombs in Bali,
only pity. I am sorry for them,
honoring their God in this way:
beheading Christian village leaders,
decapitating young girls
on their way to school or attacking
women because they wear a burqa
or pray to Mecca.
How sad to think God can be appeased
by such actions, that He wants
such a fate for you—
As for God, I forgive His negligence
or lack of supervision, all leaders are flawed.
We are all Sons of Abraham,
that model of faith, and we are all
struck down by hearts of stone,
leaden particles of dust
shattering between us
in the opaque calculation
of suicide bombs—
“Forgive them, Father,
for they know not what they’ve done.”
–Scott Edward Anderson
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(Note: There are families in eastern Indonesia who have married two faiths, Christian and Muslim. The first-born son or daughter is baptized; the next is raised in Islam. We are all connected. I love my Muslim brothers and sisters as well as my Christian, my Jewish, my Buddhist, and my Hindu families. There is only one God.)
Scott Edward Anderson's Poetry Blog 