30 Poems for National Poetry Month: Day 7
April 7, 2013
Here is my poem for Day 7:
When I saw your familiar face
In the picture I painted almost 30 years ago,
I understood Frost’s delight
And “surprise of remembering
Something I didn’t know I knew.”
Had I really been searching for you
In all my days and dreams?
It was the same feeling of recognition
I had twice when we met:
For the first time in that Philly train station,
And from across the room a year later,
As I was about to go on stage in New York.
I didn’t know what it was I recognized,
Or how it would change my life.
But “something I didn’t know I knew,”
Became something I didn’t know
I needed in my life, and then
Something I couldn’t live without
In every dream, and every night, and every day.
–Scott Edward Anderson
30 Poems for National Poetry Month: Day 6
April 6, 2013
Here is my poem for Day 6 (or morning six, as it were…):
“Freedom’s just another word
For nothing left to lose,”
As it goes in that old
Kris Kristofferson song.
But we lose something
Every day, free or chained–
Cells, skin, hair, memories.
Time goes too, the sparrows
Mark it outside our window,
The mourning doves coo
And whisper, their throats
Parted by the morning mist.
We rise slowly on mornings
We’re alone together; infrequent
As those days may be.
Our bed loosing its grip
Ever so reluctantly.
“I ache to be in your hold,”
You wrote in a dream.
My poetess of sleep.
–Scott Edward Anderson
30 Poems for National Poetry Month: Day 5
April 5, 2013
Here is my Day 5 poem for National Poetry Month:
Remember that Adrienne Rich poem
About falling in love at middle age?
The one where she talks about wanting
“To know even our limits.”
And where weeks stand in for years
Of not knowing one another.
Every day I’m convinced
That you are more beautiful
In your maturity, with your inner
Core more centered, than you
Could have been in your twenties.
(I am a better man now, too.)
And the time we do have can’t be
Wasted over what might have been,
Or how little of it there is.
We have what we have,
Which is a little like saying,
“It is what it is.”
Forget Manhattan
Or Berlin–
Let’s Take Brooklyn
And begin the beguine.
I didn’t really know Jack Gilbert’s poetry much before my partner, Samantha’s mother (and my friend), Lee Langbaum, gave me his Collected Poems for the holidays, shortly after the poet’s death. (Gilbert died last November, after a long battle with Alzheimer’s.)My life has been enriched reading Gilbert’s poetry — at times acerbic, quirky, and irascible — but I need to take him in small doses. There’s a risk in getting too close to fire.
Emily Dickinson famously wrote that “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
Jack Gilbert’s poetry approaches that more often than not.
“He takes himself away to a place more inward than is safe to go,” the poet and novelist James Dickey said of Gilbert. “From that awful silence and tightening, he returns to us poems of savage compassion.”
“The hard part for me is to find the poem—a poem that matters,” Gilbert told The Paris Review. “To find what the poem knows that’s special. I may think of writing about the same thing that everyone does, but I really like to write a poem that hasn’t been written. And I don’t mean its shape. I want to experience or discover ways of feeling that are fresh. I love it when I have perceived something fresh about being human and being happy.”
Here is Jack Gilbert’s poem, “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart”:
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
Get it wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not a language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.
-From THE GREAT FIRES: POEMS, 1982-1992 (Alfred A.Knopf, 1994)
Here is an audio recording of Gilbert reading this poem on April 12, 2005 at The New School in New York: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19351
30 Poems for National Poetry Month: Day 4
April 4, 2013
Here is my Day 4 poem:
“Happiness is a choice,”
Says my friend Jack.
Whether you choose
To focus on the love
Expressed or the flaws
Hinted at; that’s your choice.
(Okay, you snore.
Is that enough?)
I choose to focus
On thriving, after so long
Languishing. Now
That I have found
The jewel in the crescent
Moon that makes disappear
The flaws in the bezel of my being.
–Scott Edward Anderson
30 Poems for National Poetry Month: Day 3
April 3, 2013
Here’s my Day 3 poem for National Poetry Month, which I wrote during a bout with insomnia in the wee hours of the morning:
Love is never perfect
And neither are you and me.
You don’t walk on water;
I prefer to swim under.
And there is nothing
Over my eyes, neither
Gauzy nor hued.
I see your flaws
And raise them with mine.
And I love you,
Even in your imperfections,
Which I won’t enumerate here.
And even with all mine. (Ditto.)
That’s real love, baby.
Get used to it. It’s yours
If you want it–
–Scott Edward Anderson
30 Poems for National Poetry Month: Day One & Two
April 2, 2013
The challenge is to write a poem every day for National Poetry Month.
I’ve never cared for these daily, quick-writ challenges, preferring to let a poem mull and steep rather than be cast onto the page too quickly like a gambler shooting dice out of a cup.
But, yesterday, sitting in Bryant Park eating my lunch, I was inspired to give it a go. And then again this morning on the subway heading from Brooklyn into Manhattan.
So, here are my first two entries:
1
April Fools the fool that fools
With the sun on the first day
Of baseball season.
They’ve laid new grass down
On the lawn at Bryant Park.
Sign reading: “Lawn Closed”–
Where just a month ago
There was a skating rink.
“The new sod is establishing
Its roots.”
2
Our blended family whorled
Back from Disney World,
Dispersed to their other
Homes, to come together
Later in this month of poetry.
Our fantasy become reality.
–Scott Edward Anderson
Elijah icon by Fr. William Hart McNichols
Alfred Corn posted the phrase “still, small voice” on Facebook yesterday and it reminded me of a poem I wrote over 20 years ago, called “Spring Storm.”
The phrase comes from the story of Elijah’s encounter with God on Mt. Horeb (Sinai), which appears in 1 Kings.
Fleeing Jezebel and Ahab, Elijah travels on foot from Mt. Carmel to Be’er Sheva (about a 39 hour walk, as Google Maps would have it).
Along the way he is fed by ravens in the wilderness and, eventually, continues on to the same mountain where God spoke to another, earlier prophet.
He takes refuge in the cave until he is called to stand before God as He “passes by.”
God’s idea of passing by is, of course, in the form of wind, an earthquake, and fire.
After that, Elijah hears “a still, small voice” – actually, it was probably tinnitus from such a raucous display – which gave him further instruction from God about anointing his successor as prophet, Elisha.
So, was it the sound of the sudden silence or a whisper that Elijah heard? Or could it have been his own voice from within, full of the wisdom from his meditation in the cave?
Hard to say, but the idea of a still, small voice that speaks to us resonates with me.
Sometimes, it can be a frustrating voice, seeding jealousy, resentment, and loneliness.
More often than not, if we listen closely and in mindfulness, it is a voice full of goodwill, forbearance, and companionship.
I suggest in the poem that the still, small voice is nearly always an echo of something within us, imploring us to act, to be moved – to love.
Here is my poem, “Spring Storm”:
The rain comes with the familiar cadence
of an old friend chattering-on
about nothing in particular.
And the still, small voice
comes from out of nowhere
–an unlikely sound in a spring storm.
No thunder, no trumpet:
“So this is your house and how you keep it.”
The house, lived in for years,
perhaps recently swept clean
–I keep a house fit for spiders.
And the still, small voice that resonates
below thunder, comes with a calm,
moves like an undulance in a pine floor,
reaching under the rain
to take part in the holy chorus,
encircling in a pool of slow-moving glory.
We talk about redemption,
talk about the need for the personal,
and then go quietly about our work.
When the storm ends,
it’s with a murmur, “Peace be with you.”
Sing praises, now, for that stillness
and for the need to make out the sound;
sing praises, now, for the thunder,
which did not come with the rain,
but that filled our hearts
of a spring evening, in our repose.
It is our own voices calling to us,
and we must take heed.
–Scott Edward Anderson
This poem first appeared in A New Song
International Polar Bear Day and My Poem “Disappearance”
February 27, 2013
Photograph by Steven Kazlowski, Alaska Stock Images/National Geographic
Today is International Polar Bear Day, celebrating the world’s largest carnivore.
I’ve shared my poem the “Ten-legged Polar Bear” with readers in the past, but there’s another poem I wrote about the species, which is a kind of totem for me.
I wrote this poem for my oldest son, Jasper, several years ago, as he was distressing about the plight of the polar bear.
He was born in Alaska and has always had a special affinity with these bears. He had heard reports of a polar bear seen swimming in circles some 60 miles from the nearest shoreline.
International Polar Bear Day was started by Polar Bears International to raise awareness about the plight of these remarkable bears. You haven’t lived until you’ve felt the power and presence of this bear, which is a potent reminder that we are not at the top of the food chain. (If you want a sense of what a polar bear encounter is like, watch this video of a BBC reporter.)
Polar bears are found in only five countries in the circumpolar north, including the US, Canada, Russia, Greenland, and Norway. According to researchers there are only 19 wild populations of polar bears remaining — probably less that 25,000 individual bears.
The rapid loss of sea-ice in the Arctic is the major threat to polar bears, but they are also subject to pollution, industrial development, and even poaching.
Here is my poem, “Disappearance”
In the distance we see what appears to be floating sea-ice,
calved from ragged ice-edge, only it’s rounded, tensile, mammalian—
Hollow points of light emanating from softly echoing,
transparent follicles; then a broad back surfaces, inanimate—
“Oh my god, it’s a bear!” someone shouts, pointing
to a floating carcass now seen clearly: not sea-ice,
but sea-bear—Urus maritimus—dead-man’s floating
miles and miles from the nearest shore,
face staring deep beneath the surface, massive front paws
spent from stretching, from reaching for ice-edge,
exhausted from swimming panicky circles,
finding only heavy arctic seawater, viscous oil, adrenaline ooze.
Think of a fight-weary heavyweight, no longer at the top of his game,
up against a nimble, invisible opponent, now down for the count.
–Scott Edward Anderson
On Robert Frost, Electric Cars, and Poetry
January 30, 2013
Poet Robert Frost died 50 years ago yesterday, and Poets & Writers magazine offered the challenge of writing a poem using Frost’s “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” as a model.
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| Robert Frost |
Frost was born in 1874, some time after Robert Anderson (a suspected relation to this author) invented a crude electric carriage in Scotland, and some 39 years after Thomas Davenport of Brandon, Vermont, built his own small-scale electric car. Davenport also invented the first American-built DC electric motor.
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| Robert Anderson’s Electric Carriage, circa 1832 |
Perhaps because I was working on some electric vehicle materials in my day-job yesterday, I couldn’t resist penning this over lunch, with apologies to the poet:
“Stopping by the Roadside on a Snowy Evening”
Whose car this is I think I know;
No keys I need to make it go.
You may not hear me driving by
‘Cause electric cars are soft as snow.
My finger on the button here
Will make the engine start and gear
And waken not the woods and lake
–the quietest engine of the year.
I give the foot-pedal a tiny tap
And feel the seat belt on my lap.
The only other sound’s the hush
Of lofty wind and goosewing flap.
The road is lively, quick, and steep.
But I have batteries to keep,
And miles to drive before I sleep,
And miles to drive before I sleep.
–Scott Edward Anderson
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| Davenport’s Electric Car, 1835 |
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