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.)
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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)
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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.
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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.)
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Revise, revise, but when is too much?
June 25, 2009
Fallow Field by Joshua Sheldon
In fact, we were both inspired by the same image we saw, one summer driving south out of the Adirondack Mountains. A field, a car, a barn.
I wrote the poem in a quick burst of notes crawling around in the field as Joshua searched for the best angle to capture the scene on film. (See the result at left.)
Joshua’s photograph hangs on my wall and has adorned at least one book (not yet mine). My poem was published in Blueline, a journal published at SUNY Potsdam.
Some time over the years, after its publication, I revised the poem, excising what I thought were superfluous lines that made too fine a point in trying to draw a parallel between the subject’s experience — a woman who ended her marriage abruptly — and the landscape we found. The lines removed are underlined below:
Fallow Field
The old car is there,
where she left it,
out by the old shed,
breeding rust–obscured
from the roadway by the rye grass
that grows up all around.
Long triangular tentacles
blowing and bending
in the hot breeze, as
sunlight filters in
through gathering clouds.
By now the grass has worked
up into the engine block.
The car--an old
Chevrolet or Buick?–
no matter, it’s what
is planted now,
in this fallow field,
awaiting bulldozers.
They call this grass
“poverty grain,” and there’s
no small comfort in the fact
that it’s as tolerant
of poor soils
as she was of the poor soils
of her marriage.
On the day she left,
she packed her whole life
into an old grip: clothing,
framed photographs
of the children, her parents,
the salt cellar she’d bought
on her honeymoon in Rome.
While packing, she’d given
pause that her whole life
had become so
portable, where once there’d
been permanence. And now,
she blows and bends
like this rye grass
on a midsummer afternoon,
so far from home,
so far from the old shed
of her former self.
Joshua’s objections are outlined in the following email:
SEA: Ok, I’ve read and re-read the two versions of Fallow Field and again I want to express my support for the earlier version. There are three changes I’m aware of, two lines in the body and the ending. I don’t feel the two lines alter the poem much but the ending! The ending Scott! It flowed before, it let you down easy, it tied it all up like the well written present that it was.
I agree with Joshua that the old ending tied it all up neatly — just a little too neatly for my taste. I think the newer ending, with its abruptness, speaks more to the experience of the woman in the poem, and is more true to life.
Things don’t always end neatly. In fact, I suggest that most things don’t. Life is full of messy, sudden changes, especially in relationships.
Below is how the revised version of the poem reads today. What do you think?
Fallow Field
The old car is there,
where she left it,
out by the old shed,
breeding rust–obscured
from the roadway by the rye grass
that grows up all around.
Long triangular tentacles
blowing and bending
in the hot breeze, as
sunlight filters in
through gathering clouds.
By now the grass has worked
up into the engine block.
The car
is planted now,
in this fallow field,
awaiting bulldozers.
They call this grass
“poverty grain,” and there’s
no small comfort in the fact
that it’s as tolerant
of poor soils
as she was of her marriage.
On the day she left,
she packed her whole life
into an old grip: clothing,
framed photographs
of the children, her parents,
the salt cellar she’d bought
on her honeymoon in Rome.
While packing, she’d given
pause that her whole life
had become so
portable, where once there’d
been permanence. And now,
she blows and bends–
rye grass on a midsummer afternoon.
##
Paul Muldoon on The Colbert Report, Hilarious
June 23, 2009
If you missed poet Paul Muldoon on The Colbert Report, including the poet and Stephen Colbert reading Muldoon’s poem “Tea,” you must watch it now:
Paul Muldoon on The Colbert Report
Colbert is doing more for bringing poetry to a wider audience than just about anybody. Shall we compare Stephen Colbert to a Summer’s Day?
How to read poetry
May 26, 2009
Want to know how to read poetry? Treat it like you’re sampling perfume, says my friend Molly Cantrell-Kraig:
“It’s like an expensive fragrance: the high notes are what registers first, but as the fragrance adapts to the person’s chemistry and with time, the fragrance develops dimension and a fuller sense of itself.”
In other words, try first letting the poem envelope you with its sounds and its images. Sit with it. Come back to the poem and read it again, this time paying attention to how the poem makes you feel. Pay attention to the nuances in your reading, the patterns that emerge, the sense that emerges. And, finally, how does the poem change the way you look at the world?
In How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, Edward Hirsch writes, “We activate the poem inside us by engaging it as deeply as possible, by bringing our lives to it, our associational memories, our past histories, our vocabularies, by letting its verbal music infiltrate our bodies, its ideas seep into our minds, by discovering its pattern emerging, by entering the echo chamber which is the history of poetry, and most of all, by listening and paying attention. Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul.”
C.S. Lewis suggested that “the true reader reads every work seriously, in the sense that he reads it wholeheartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can.”
A poet dreams of such readers.
When a poet goes missing does anyone hear? Yes.
May 11, 2009
This weekend, the Los Angeles Times reported that award-winning poet Craig Arnold, who went missing in Japan in late April, is presumed to have died after a fall.
The American search team, established by his employer, the University of Wyoming after the official Japanese search was ended, tracked Arnold to the edge of “a high and dangerous cliff, and there is virtually no possibility he could have survived the fall,” according to a release quote in the Times.
According to the report, Arnold was fascinated with volcanoes and had traveled to Kuchinoerabu-jima, a tiny Japanese island, to visit the volcano there and was in Japan on a creative exchange fellowship and was blogging about his trip: Volcano Pilgrim.
Reports of his missing buzzed through Twitter a couple of weeks ago after he failed to report after his trip to the volcano.
Very sad news, indeed.
Here is a link to Craig Arnold’s page on the Poetry Foundation web site, which includes several of his poems.
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Who wants to be an Arab poetry millionaire?
May 5, 2009
Gulf poets compete in Millions' Poet competition
A couple of decades ago I had an idea for an all-poetry cable channel. We would have talk shows hosted by and featuring famous poets, films about poets, live readings and workshops, and possibly even feature length movies, dramas, and comedies. (Stephen Dobyns’ Saratoga Hexameter, would have made a good source for a mini-series.)
I shelved the idea after realizing the only way I could afford to develop The Poetry Channel was to develop my other idea — The Disaster Channel. “All disaster, all the time,” was the tag line; 24/7 of disaster coverage, disaster movies, and disaster reporting. My wife said she would divorce me if I went ahead with that idea. (The Weather Channel has since taken the best parts of the format to the bank and is planning to launch a separate channel this spring.)
I now see what my idea was missing: I needed a poetry contest reality show! In the most unlikely of places, Dubai television personality Nashwa Al Ruwaini has launched Millions’ Poet, sort of a Gulf version of American Idol, in which Arab poets battle it out for 5 million United Arab Emirates dirhams (more than $1.3 million). 70 million viewers tuned in to see the finale, according to news sources. Amazing.
Here is what Nashwa Al Ruwaini says about it in an editorial that appeared in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer:
Three years ago, when I devised the format of Millions’ Poet, it was with little more in mind than creating an entertaining, original, and youth-oriented television show. Now in its third season, with more than 15 million viewers each week, the show has become the Gulf countries’ most prestigious poetry competition and a platform for young male and female poets to voice their thoughts before a broad audience. Most unexpectedly, it has also helped spur some progress in the region’s attitudes toward women.
Read the full editorial here: Millions’ Poet
Here is an article about Saudi poetess Ayda Al-Jahani, who is featured in the editorial and who made it to the final four in this usually male-dominated competition: Ayda Al-Jahani
And a link to an NPR Morning Edition story on her: NPR
If anyone has links to English translations of Ayda Al-Jahani’s work, will you please comment below? Thanks.
Scott Edward Anderson
Scott Edward Anderson's Poetry Blog 