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
Edwin Morgan’s “Strawberries”
August 31, 2010
- Image via Wikipedia
The great Scottish poet Edwin Morgan passed away nearly two weeks ago and the tributes and accolades have continued throughout the Edinburgh Book Festival that’s just ended.
I’ve been fortunate to follow much of it via Twitter, having connected with such wonderful poets and poetry lovers as @ByLeavesWeLive, @OneNightStanzas, and @craftygreenpoet among others, who have made me feel like I was there alongside them, paying my respects.
Morgan was a remarkably gifted poet, and gifted not only in the sort of conventional sense of the word. I mean he had an incomparable ear for the rich variety and breadth of poetry that one rarely sees in this day of specialization and of literary “camps.”
Morgan saw the magical in the ordinary and wasn’t about to limit himself by the constraints of either subject matter or style. He could be funny, such as “The First Men on Mercury,” but he was equally adept when he turned his hand at tender, more traditional love poems.
One of my favorites — probably my favorite Morgan poem — is “Strawberries,” which you can read in its entirety at the Edwin Morgan Archives at the Scottish Poetry Library.
For now, I’ll just quote the ending, which is stunning even without mention of the strawberries or the scene between two lovers:
let the sun beat
on our forgetfulness
one hour of all
the heat intense
and summer lightning
on the Kilpatrick hillslet the storm wash the plates
–Edwin Morgan
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- Poem of the week: A Trace of Wings by Edwin Morgan (guardian.co.uk)
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
The Ten-Legged Polar Bear
August 12, 2010
Qupquigiaq drawing by Scott Edward Anderson
When I lived in Alaska, I heard a story from an Inupiaq man about the Qupqugiaq, a legendary ten-legged polar bear who renounces violence and tries to create a love-based community.
He also told about a time when some hunters came across a Qupqugiaq that had fallen into an ice hole and was struggling to get out.
Rather than kill it, they decided to help the bear out of the hole. This seemingly impossible task took a lot of team work. The more they struggled, however, the harder became the task. Only when they stopped and stood still for a moment did they realize their frantic actions were useless. Once they calmed down and worked in concentrated harmony the task became easier and the bear could be freed.
How often do we let the tasks at hand get the best of us, when what we really need is to calm and slow down?
Here is my poem about the Qupqugiaq, which originally appeared in Terrain:
“The Ten-legged Polar Bear”
(Qupqugiaq: a legendary ten-footed polar bear described
by the Inupiaq of Alaska’s Arctic North Slope.)
Ten legs are better than two
only if they work together—
when all five legs on one side
and all five legs on the other side
move in concert like a sled runner,
the Qupqugiaq moves smoothly,
but if the legs get tangled up
and one leg trips up another,
then another trips another,
the whole bear comes crashing
down; it takes a lot to get
a ten-legged polar bear upright
and get it moving again—
Think of our enterprise in humanity;
when we work well together,
what union of harmony and grace—
–Scott Edward Anderson, Terrain 13
I thought of this poem after reading a blog post by Jerry Colonna that featured David Wagoner’s poem “Lost.”
On Poetry & Business Life
August 6, 2010
Years ago I developed a talk called “Poetry & Business Life,” which I delivered to Rotary Clubs and other gatherings of business people. I thought of it today after this exchange on Twitter:
I began my talk, which is unfortunately too long to publish here, with an often quoted line by William Carlos Williams (the Doctor-poet):
“It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”
The real news in my talk was about the importance of allowing poetry into our lives as business people — and yes, of opening our hearts and souls, too.
I also talked about how many poets take up other professions. Many are teachers, of course, but I was thinking about other professions: doctors, insurance salesman, vps of marketing, copywriters for ad agencies, bankers and publishers, to name a few famous examples.
It’s a product of our age that, with very few exceptions, poets can’t make a living from their craft. As poet Robert Graves said, “There is no money in poetry, but then/ there is no poetry in money either.”
Some, like Wallace Stevens, keep their poetry and business lives completely separate. But increasingly, as I wrote in my talk, “more and more poets are coming out of the board room and are more open about their corporate lives in their writing.”
I went on to observe
This is a good thing, both for poetry and for business. We need a greater understanding of the emotional ties and the spiritual side of the work we do. So much of our lives are spent among this certain group of people, who are not our family and not always our friends, but who nevertheless represent important relationships.
Together, we are a corpus, an enterprise of humanity, and there is much to be learned from our interactions.
Poetry can be a means to tap into the stories we share; for poetry, with its economical use of language, connects us with our compassionate selves as managers and as business people. Poetry can teach us how to find the balance within life and work, rather than between life and work.
We need poetry for exactly what can be found there and what it can bring to our lives in the office.
David Whyte, in his book The Heart Aroused, describes the need for poetry in what he calls “the fight to save the soul of corporate America.” Business people who bring poetry into their business lives and poets who bring their business lives into their poems are also saving poetry by making it more relevant to people’s lives.
This can only be a good thing for the future of poetry in America—and for business.
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.
Roots & Branches: From What Twig This Bright Leaf?
July 23, 2010
Poet Kiki Petrosino, who has been tweeting as @harriet_poetry for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Blog, tweeted a question this morning:
I’ve thought about this question over the years, but started to visualize it a bit in reaction to Kiki’s (or Harriet’s?) question.
My poetry is rooted in what Robert Hass called the “strong central tradition of free verse made out of both romanticism and modernism, split between the impulses of an inward and psychological writing and an outward and realist one, at its best fusing the two.” (Hass, Introduction to Best American Poetry 2001)
I studied with Hass and with Gary Snyder, along with the late Walter Pavlich, and have had some great guidance along the way from poets Alison Hawthorne Deming, Donald Hall, Colette Inez, and Karen Swenson, along with a cast of other friends, both poets and poetry readers.
If I look at poetic influences — teachers by example, rather than in person — Elizabeth Bishop, and by extension, her Hopkins, Herbert and even Moore, could be counted among mine.
But also Pound, Rimbaud (in the Varese translations), the two Kenneths, Rexroth and Patchen, at various times, especially in my early days; the Robert Lowell of Life Studies, and novelist and poet Michael Ondaatje.
I’d have to add to that list a trio of Irish voices (tenors?), including Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and Paul Muldoon. And while we’re on the British Isles, let’s not forget Geoffrey Hill, John Clare and, of course, “the Bard,” Robert Burns.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose “Mariner” was given to me by my Aunt Gladys, directly influenced my first “serious” poem (now lost, thankfully) about my great grandfather, a whaler who sailed out of New Bedford.
There’s also a curious group of more experimental influences from Anne Carson and Mina Loy to Lorine Niedecker and Jorie Graham. Walt Whitman, Fernando Pessoa, and Allen Ginsberg, all great experimenters themselves, were also part of my early poetry reading education.
It’s an eclectic, multi-branching tree, to say the least. I’m not sure one can see the influence of any one more than another in my work — someone once wrote that the influences of Bishop and Hall were most evident — but it would be a rather spectacular looking tree, should one chose to design it.
One could get easily lost in such a forest.
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”
Scott Edward Anderson's Poetry Blog 