Don Share’s poetry resume reads like something from another era, when men and women of letters were perhaps more common.
Not the tenure-track kind of poet one finds in universities, but the sort that is actively engaged in poetry – as an editor, as a translator, a critic, and as a writer – on a daily basis. He was poetry editor of Harvard Review, the Partisan Review, and a senior editor of Poetry magazine.
He’s published three books of his own poems, translated Seneca and Miguel Hernandez, and compiled two books of verse by the great Basil Bunting, as well as co-editing The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of “Poetry” Magazine.
Share’s own poems are pithy, witty, and verbally gymnastic. Occasionally he takes a pun or a rhyme a little too far until it snaps back or more likely turns inside out. He’s fascinated by words and how they transform each other in the music of varying line length and tone.
And he is always aware, as poet Tom Sleigh writes in a blurb for Wishbone, Share’s latest collection, “of how daily life refuses to cohere into a consoling pattern is beautifully mirrored by his conviction that language itself signals a fall from grace and unity and emotional wholeness.”
The title poem, “Wishbone,” Share said in an interview, “is in the voice of a dying cat, and from his perspective, human beings are in charge, making godlike decisions in the face of which he feels powerless, though this is a tough cat and he suffers no loss of nobility or character even at the very end of it all. Needless to say, a cat can’t talk; I wanted to give one language for a short spell so he could speak his piece. A bit of tragicomic relief, you might say.”
Here is Don Share’s poem “Wishbone”:
I have a bone to pick
with whoever runs this joint.
I don’t much like
being stuck out in the rain
just to feed on the occasional
vole or baby rabbit
and these wet weed-salads
confound my intestines.
A cat can’t throw himself
into the Des Plaines River,
not even in the luscious fall.
I get yelled at in human
language every single day
for things I can’t begin
to comprehend, let alone change.
But I go on cleaning myself –
why shouldn’t I? –
and so I think I smell sweet,
even though I suspect otherwise.
I wouldn’t harm a fly normally,
but why doesn’t anybody
take care of me? How am I
supposed to know that it’s Easter,
that I’m not allowed to die
in my own bed, and that neither prong
of this wishbone is meant for me?
–Don Share
30 Poems for National Poetry Month: Day 20
April 20, 2013
Here is my poem for Day 20:
Nightmares end.
Last night’s surreal
Scenes stopped abruptly
Segued into pages
From “The Song of Songs,”
And my love sleeping
In my arms again.
Morning comes with the hush
Of a spring rain, a chill breeze,
And robins and starlings
Vying for attention.
I pull my love closer.
Her head on my chest,
Her dreams in my heart.
–Scott Edward Anderson
30 Poems for National Poetry Month: Day 19
April 19, 2013
Here is my poem for Day 19.
I wrote it in the midst of all the chaos and reports coming from Boston, trying to keep up my spirits and the challenge made to myself for National Poetry Month. And to prove terror can’t trump poetry.
I have no words.
I just stare, listening
To the news and don’t
Even know how to ask
Why?
Where is the poetry
In words like manhunt,
Lockdown, shelter-in-place order?
Where is the poetry
In controlled explosion,
on-going situation
person-of-interest?
Where is the poetry
In a world where terror
Takes hold and bites?
It’s in the eyes of my love
And our hands clasped,
Finally reunited and safe
Together, after too long apart
30 Poems for National Poetry Month: Day 18
April 18, 2013
Here is my poem for Day 18 of National Poetry Month, which is also “Poem in Your Pocket Day”:
Is that a poem in your pocket
Or are you just happy to be
Alive and kicking in the teeth
Of the cruel world just by
Your very existence?
The world needs poetry
If only to make sense
Of the senseless, put words
To what can’t be explained,
And say the unsayable.
Me? I carry my poem
Wherever I go and bring
It out to give it to you.
–Scott Edward Anderson
30 Poems for National Poetry Month: Day 17
April 17, 2013
Here is my poem for Day 17:
It is tough to be strong
In the face of another
Senseless act of violence,
The lives and limbs lost
To someone with evil
In their hearts–
Whether jihadist or jerk-off.
Yet we must, we have to be
In order for decency and love
To triumph.
We think our love
Is only between two people,
But in fact it’s a beacon
For humanity that shines,
“Love conquers all things…”
–Scott Edward Anderson
30 Poems for National Poetry Month: Day 16
April 16, 2013
Here is my poem for Day 16:
I never met your father,
But I feel his presence
In your life, on this day
Every year since we met
At Poets House, the tenth
Anniversary of his passing.
We sat by the river,
Two good friends watching
Our kids chase each other
In the playground.
Moments of silence,
Never awkward;
A few laughs.
I don’t know what you
Were thinking then,
Except I know it meant
A lot that I wanted to be
With you on that day,
To help you through it
With poetry and laughter,
The distraction of kids
Playing and eating lunch.
A man who cared
And understood what
This day means to you.
Who cared enough
To seize the day
And pay attention
To the meaning
Of your heart.
–Scott Edward Anderson
30 Poems for National Poetry Month: Day 15
April 15, 2013
Here is my poem for Day 15:
We are better together.
But you knew that,
Didn’t you?
Why do the miles
Seem so much longer,
The days much darker,
When we’re apart?
Nights, too, especially
The nights–interminable.
Turning both of us, strong,
Independent in so many ways,
Into lost souls who just want
To get back to our source.
Silly, really; it was just four days.
But it seemed ceaseless
And without end, until
I held you in my arms again.
Like an addict, I need
–no I crave–your touch,
your voice, the way
Your eyes connect with mine.
I need your physical presence
Next to me, around me,
Even if just out of reach
Across the apartment,
Like I’ve never needed anyone.
Absurd, I know, but if I’ve
“Got to have one vice,” as
My grandmother used to say,
I’m glad it is you. So very glad it’s you.
–Scott Edward Anderson
30 Poems for National Poetry Month: Day 14
April 14, 2013
Here is my poem for Day 14:
No Aurora in this night sky,
I go bed in the wee hours.
Listen to the sound of cars
Fast on Lincoln Drive below,
Almost a river sound,
If not for the roughness
Of the asphalt.
What chance has anyone
Got, with demons like those
In their rear view?
–Scott Edward Anderson
30 Poems for National Poetry Month: Day 13
April 13, 2013
Here is my poem for Day 13, written at 1:30 AM, proving I’m not always happy:
1:30 AM. Can’t sleep.
I don’t like when we fight,
Especially via text, and
Especially about being apart,
Which neither of us enjoys.
I distract myself with old movies
On TCM, and try to forget
There’s still two days to go.
Even Selznick’s “Since You
Went Away,” can’t take me away.
With its sentiment and sorrow,
And the hint of a sappy ending.
Jennifer Jones, whose affair
With Selznick led to husband
Robert Walker’s breakdown,
Playing a teen (at 25), having
To pretend she’s in love
With her ex-husband, not
Her director. (Ah, back story!)
Joseph Cotten’s Virginia
Gentleman not sinister at all,
Showing his range as well as
Limitations. My limitations
Stare me in the face
From the screen —
And from this empty bottle.
While you steam and fume
And try to sleep,
100 miles north.
–Scott Edward Anderson
The past few years I’ve found myself increasingly engaged with poetry from across the Pond, Scotland in particular.
In part, through my appearance in ANON magazine, the “honourable mention” I received in the ESRC Genomics Forum Poetry Competition, and connecting with the Scottish Poetry Library.
My paternal grandfather’s family hailed from the central lowlands textile burgh of Paisley, across the River Clyde from Glasgow, which may explain why I’m partial to Scottish poets. (My Burns’ Nights were famous in the 1990s.) Whatever the case, I’ve found some kindred spirits of my generation among them.
Once such is Kathleen Jamie. Jamie “resists being identified solely as a Scottish poet, a woman writer, or a nature poet,” reads her entry in the Poetry Foundation’s web site. “Instead, she aims for her poetry to ‘provide a sort of connective tissue,’ as she notes in a 2005 interview.”
Her influences include Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, John Clare, and Annie Dillard. Quite a foursome, that, and it shows or doesn’t show – rather, it is felt. She takes the powerful language of Heaney, the precise observation of Bishop, Clare’s perspective on landscape, and the natural history acumen of Dillard’s nonfiction.
Jamie’s poems are highly musical – meant to be read aloud, and “attend to the intersection of landscape, history, gender, and language.”
Her latest collection, The Overhaul, was published in the UK by Picador (where another Scottish-born poet of my generation, Don Patterson, is editor) and took home the prestigious Costa Prize.
Here is the title poem from this collection, “The Overhaul,” by Kathleen Jamie:
Look – it’s the Lively,
hauled out above the tideline
up on a trailer with two
flat tyres. What –
14 foot? Clinker-built
and chained by the stern
to a pile of granite blocks,
but with the bow
still pointed westward
down the long voe,
down toward the ocean,
where the business is.
Inland from the shore
a road runs, for the crofts
scattered on the hill
where washing flaps,
and the school bus calls
and once a week or so
the mobile library;
but see how this
duck-egg green keel’s
all salt-weathered,
how the stem, taller
— like a film star –
than you’d imagine,
is raked to hold steady
if a swell picks up
and everyone gets scared…
No, it can’t be easy,
when the only spray to touch
your boards all summer
is flowers of scentless mayweed;
when little wavelets leap
less than a stone’s throw
with your good name
written all over them –
but hey, Lively,
it’s a tme-of-life thing,
it’s a waiting game –
patience, patience.
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Scott Edward Anderson
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