THIS MORNING IN A MORNING VOICE

By Todd Boss

to beat the froggiest
of morning voices,
my son gets out of bed
and takes a lumpish song
along—a little lyric
learned in kindergarten,
something about a
boat. He’s found it in
the bog of his throat
before his feet have hit
the ground, follows
its wonky melody down
the hall and into the loo
as if it were the most
natural thing for a little
boy to do, and lets it
loose awhile in there
to a tinkling sound while
I lie still in bed, alive
like I’ve never been, in
love again with life,
afraid they’ll find me
drowned here, drowned
in more than my fair
share of joy.

FOR MY DAUGHTER

By Antonella Anedda

I love her fierceness when she fights me,
shouting “Not fair!” Her eyes slitting
like shutters in cities by the sea.
Her life is rife with bonfires—seen and unseen—
fires that burn through the turning years
bringing her to life again, and again, in a miracle of smoke.
This heat gives her a sense of forgiveness—or so I imagine—
she kisses my back, capriciously, when I scold her.
Maybe she recalls the scalpel by which she was born.
Easy, the mark of its slash in my skin.
She rose from my belly as I slept. We’re bound together
by peace, no shrieks of pain, and my modesty.
We’re a canvas by Giovanni Bellini: a virgin and a sweet rabbit.

— Translated by Sarah Arvio

VIII
The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.
The anchor dragged along behind so deep
It hooked itself into the altar rails
And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,
A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain.
‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’
The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

Seamus Heany – From Lightenings

As it happens, the audio poem of the day at poetryfoundation.org is by Tony Hoagland.

Romantic

Here’s one I clipped from the New Yorker and tacked to the studio wall a while ago.

BURNING STUBBLE

There are many ways to become
unexceptional. A field

a field a field a road a field a field
on fire. And you in a car

sightseeing where once you lived,
someone’s idea of hell, but isn’t

everywhere someone’s idea of hell,
also as the earth is

the kingdom of God. So Jesus says
in books they banished from

the bible. Because if this were heaven,
would the men come to

march a line of fire through it, across
the fields where you are still

the child who stood those men bringing
the flames close so you could

see the mice running out of them?
Then your father watching

closed his hand on you and said
They won’t burn our house

down. In the morning, the house was
white with blown ash,

in a circle outside of which everything
was black, brought down

and still smoldering. You were untouched,
and it must have been then,

careful not to step beyond the unfired
earth, that you decided

you would live your life this way.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKuA3iee4-c[/youtube]

sprig of lilac

—for Haines Eason

in a week you could watch me crumble to smut: spent hues
spent perfumes. dust upon the lapel where a moment I rested

yes, the moths have visited and deposited their velvet egg mass
the gnats were here: they smelled the wilt and blight. they salivated

in the folds of my garments: you could practically taste the rot

look at the pluck you’ve made of my heart: it broke open in your hands
oddments of ravished leaves: blossom blast and dieback: petals drooping

we kissed briefly in the deathless spring. the koi pond hummed with flies

unbutton me now from your grasp. no, hold tighter, let me disappear
into your nostrils, into your skin, a powdery smudge against your rough cheek

Human Beauty

If you write a poem about love …
the love is a bird,

the poem is an origami bird.
If you write a poem about death …

the death is a terrible fire,
the poem is an offering of paper cutout flames

you feed to the fire.
We can see, in these, the space between

our gestures and the power they address
—an insufficiency. And yet a kind of beauty,

a distinctly human beauty. When a winter storm
from out of nowhere hit New York one night

in 1892, the crew at a theater was caught
unloading props: a box

of paper snow for the Christmas scene got dropped
and broken open, and that flash of white

confetti was lost
inside what it was a praise of.

–Shotts

Spring and All

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast-a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines–

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches–

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind–

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined–
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance–Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken

Two poems for you this Saint Patrick’s Day weekend. The first from Seamus Heaney, his ars poetica. The second from Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, about her decision to write in the Irish language, followed by an English translation by Paul Muldoon.

Slainte!

–Shotts

Personal Helicon

for Michael Longley

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

–Seamus Heaney

Ceist na Teangan

Cuirim mo dhochas ar snamh
i mbaidin teangan
faoi mar a leagta naionan
i geliabhan
a bheadh fite fuaite
de dhuilleoga feileastraim
is bitiuman agus pic
bheith cuimilte lena thoin.

ansan e a leagadh sios
i measc na ngioicach
is coigeal na mban si
le taobh na habhann,
feachaint n’fheadarais
a dtabharfaidh an sruth e,
feachaint, dala Mhaoise,
an bhfoirfidh inion Phorain?

–Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill

The Language Issue

I place my hope on the water
in this little boat
of the language, the way a body might put
an infant
in a basket of intertwined
iris leaves,
its underside proofed
with bitumen and pitch,

then set the whole thing down amidst
the sedge
and the bulrushes by the edge
of a river
only to have it borne hither and thither,
not knowing where it might end up;
in the lap, perhaps,
of some Pharaoh’s daughter.

–English translation by Paul Muldoon

The Cruel Wheel Turns Twice

And tightens until language can’t bear this
Hollowing, crash cart, Please. In the silence,
A bus slithers by

A din. The aluminium morning moves like a train,
A metal rod
Exiting a tunnel, dropped in a gate groove.

Disappointment. And again The End gate
Opens and it’s, Please
Come back. Please Be. Then nothing. Only end-

Less night taking off from the tarmac black.
The potpie clock, its stock of twelve numbers,
A stew for the weak and the weary.

The small war of the heart made bigger
By far in the world.
And daylight a gift.

Small cog after cog slips into the hour
And razor thin minute slot without stop.
And daylight a gift tied with some tinsel.

Here’s to all of you and yours. –Shotts

Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda, translated by Stephen Mitchell

I don’t love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don’t know any other way of loving
but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

-Shotts

Custom

There is a difference it used to make,
seeing three swans in this versus four in that
quadrant of sky. I am not imagining. It was very large, as its
effects were. Declarations of war, the timing fixed upon for a sea-departure; or,
about love, a sudden decision not to, to pretend instead to a kind
of choice. It was dramatic, as it should be. Without drama,
what is ritual? I look for omens everywhere, because they are everywhere
to be found. They come to me like strays, like the damaged,
something that could know better, and should, therefore–but does not:
a form of faith, you’ve said. I call it sacrifice–an instinct for it, or a habit at first, that
becomes required, the way art can become, eventually, all we have
of what was true. You shouldn’t look at me like that. Like one of those saints
on whom the birds once settled freely.

Books of The Times
A Devoted Tour Guide to a Desert of a Soul

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: January 16, 2007

T. S. ELIOT
By Craig Raine
202 pages. Oxford University Press. $21.

In a culture that now seems long ago and far, far away, T. S. Eliot was a rock star. The poet made the cover of Time magazine in 1950, and several years later, 14,000 people turned out in Minneapolis to listen to him talk about “The Frontiers of Criticism.” Modernism was the ruling aesthetic inside and outside academe, Eliot was one of its high priests, and his most famous poem, “The Waste Land,” was hailed not only for its groundbreaking technique and glittering shards of language, but also for its difficulty — its density, its allusiveness, its recondite knowledge.

In his new book, “T. S. Eliot,” the British poet Craig Raine gives us a new, more accessible Eliot, an Eliot he describes as a virtuosic fox in terms of style, and a single-minded hedgehog when it came to themes. The one great animating idea of Eliot’s poetry, Mr. Raine persuasively argues in these pages, is the theme of the “Buried Life, the idea of a life not fully lived,” a life of missed opportunities, repressed passions, forsaken loves — the same theme, of course, that lies at the core of so much of Henry James’s work, from “The Beast in the Jungle” to “Washington Square.”

Eliot himself presented a buttoned-up banker’s mien to the world — Harold Nicolson described him as “a sacerdotal lawyer — dyspeptic, ascetic, eclectic,” while Virginia Woolf likened him to “a chapped office boy on a high stool, with a cold in his head” — and the theme of caution’s costs seems to have been deeply embedded in his own life, framed by a repressive family upbringing and a long, unhappy marriage to the unstable Vivien Haigh-Wood.

Unlike many academic critics who have expended huge amounts of energy on uncovering Eliot’s sources, pointing to obscure allusions that might unlock hidden meanings in the verse, Mr. Raine zeros in on the emotional core of the poems, using his own familiarity with Eliot’s work to give the lay reader a visceral understanding of how the poet came to articulate his ideas and how those ideas evolved over the years.

As a poet himself, Mr. Raine has a practitioner’s understanding of language and rhythm and sound, and he uses this knowledge to convey the beauty and power of Eliot’s verse, and the myriad, subtle ways it works its magic on the reader. He points out how the use of the pedantic word “therefrom” in “Gerontion” (“I that was near your heart was removed therefrom …”) functions as a “tiny cough in ink,” underscoring the narrator’s self-conscious, wallflower personality. And he points out the sexual urgency contained in the “two adjacent, cunningly unpunctuated, present participles” in these lines from “The Waste Land”: “the human engine waits/ Like a taxi throbbing waiting.”

Locating thematic links between masterworks like “The Waste Land” and lesser-known works like “Animula,” Mr. Raine does a dexterous job of showing how Eliot developed the idea of “the buried life.” The two most famous poems to address this theme directly are “The Hollow Men,” which depicts those gutless, empty souls who, as Mr. Raine puts it, have been rejected by both “heaven and hell because they have neither sinned nor been actively virtuous,” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which depicts a sensitive but timid man who has failed to seize the day, who, in Mr. Raine’s words, has resolved “to remain repressed,” to avoid “the element of risk that is part of truly living.”

“Animula,” Mr. Raine goes on, similarly depicts “a psychically damaged, confined soul corroded by its own caution,” while “Gerontion” is narrated by “a voluptuary of inaction with an extensive collection of alibis” for his circumscribed life.

As for “The Waste Land,” the title is itself a reference to the desert — a symbol of aridity, emptiness, the failure of feeling, as these lines from Eliot’s 1934 play “The Rock” make clear:

The desert is not remote in southern tropics,

The desert is not only around the corner,

The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you,

The desert is in the heart of your brother.

In “Ash-Wednesday” (which was completed a few years after Eliot was received into the Church of England and which is commonly read as a poem about religious faith), Eliot revisited the idea of the failure to live, but looked at it, Mr. Raine says, “through the other end of the telescope, not as a failure,” but as a choice — “the ascetic renunciation which chooses to turn its back on pleasure, on the temporal, on sensuous emotion, on the self itself, the better to embrace eternal verities.”

Incisive as Mr. Raine’s readings of these poems are, he unfortunately appends to the main narrative of this book an embarrassing, ill-judged essay (seemingly based on earlier pieces he wrote for British newspapers in the ’90s) that attempts to defend Eliot against charges of anti-Semitism. These charges have already been proved beyond a reasonable doubt, not only by books like Anthony Julius’s 1996 study “T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form,” but also by any common-sense reading of damning passages in “Gerontion,” “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein With a Cigar” and the 1933 lecture in which Eliot wrote that “reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable” and “a spirit of excessive tolerance is to be deprecated.”

Mr. Raine ties himself into knots in an effort to rationalize these passages, then asserts that “we do not have all the evidence” to reach a conclusion about Eliot’s anti-Semitism. In this final chapter Mr. Raine’s admiration for Eliot — which helped him write so eloquently about the poet’s work in the book’s earlier chapters — leads him into a state of numbed denial, afflicting him with an inability to recognize the plain fact that a great artist, one of the 20th century’s pre-eminent poets and arguably its premier modernist, was also a terrible bigot.

Correction: January 18, 2007
The Books of The Times review on Tuesday, about “T. S. Eliot,” by Craig Raine, included an erroneous reference in the book to the site where 14,000 people turned out in Minnesota to hear Eliot speak in 1956. It was Williams Arena at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, not a baseball stadium in that city.

But, this leads me to ask: any “tops” of 2006 you’d like to share and comment on here?

Here are a few, from me:

Top novel: Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson (actually out in the U.S. from Graywolf Press in 2007).

Top poetry collection: Averno by Louise Gluck

Top movie: The Prestige

Top documentary: An Inconvenient Truth

Top song: “Hamburg Song” by Keane

Top political event: Democrats regaining Congress in November elections. Rumsfeld “resigns” shortly thereafter.

Top global events: Lack of global resolve over Darfur, Sudan. Continued unavailability of clean water to millions.

Top Minnesota event: The state sends first Islamic member of Congress to Washington in November election.

Top celebrity: Bono

So, looking ahead now, here are a few thoughts and resolutions from me.

In 2007, I expect:

• to see Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain, and Rudy Guliani in the spotlight for the Presidential elections of 2008, as they all announce their candidacies. (I’m already surprised to see John Edwards announce his candidacy, and so early.)
• a withdrawl plan from Iraq.
• peacekeeping efforts deployed to Darfur, through a renewed United Nations.
• the biggest seller in books, by far, to be the new and final Harry Potter.
• the biggest movie, in terms of blockbuster status, to be the new Harry Potter movie.
• to be exhausted by Harry Potter by this time next year.
• additional evidence for global warming.
• one of us to announce a child on the way.

Some of my personal resolutions include:

• to eat vegetarian as much as possible, with only occasional fish when eating out.
• to eat less, eat more healthy foods, drink less alcohol, and drink more water daily.
• to exercise at the Y at least 12 times each month.
• to post and comment regularly on the Hollow Men site, including a weekly literary/poetry feature.
• to work to organize our house better.
• to begin more sustained writing.
• to be in better touch with family and friends.

–Shotts

I had this funny feeling of coordinated choas while watching them.  Take a look at the video below and you can see for yourself.  Everyone is sort of doing their own thing, but together it is tighly coordinated.  Hard to explain….  If you watched one person doing it, it wouldn’t necessarily be very impressive.  Together, it’s amazing. 

The African-American marching band is fairly famous…it’s made up of young and old, thin and heavyset, and men, women and children.  It was like watching something happen that is simultaneously old and tribal and yet novel and urban.  Did I mention it was spectacular?  Click on the link above to go to their home page.  If you click through the link to YouTube, you can see more videos of them.  Here’s a video to see (though dimly) what they’re like performing:

[youtube]LyS2z_QlE0Q[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyS2z_QlE0Q

On an additional note, I found this video a couple of days ago.  It’s been inspiring to me and I get chills every time I watch it (which is often, at least once a day since I’ve found it).  There’s a lot of hope I feel when I watch…sadness, too.  I wonder how long the locales Matt dances in will be there, and at the same time, I marvel in the wonder and diversity there is in the world.  We miss out when we think the American Experience is the cumulation of humanity.

This has opened up a deep longing, and at the same time, a deep satisfaction in me….

[youtube]Pkh5opBp6K4[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pkh5opBp6K4

In the meanwhile, enjoy this interview I heard today on NPR.  This artist folds well-known poems into her music.  I think it’s a great way to expose some people who may not otherwise think poetry is “their thing.”  Anyway, I think it dovetails into the conversation we’ve sort of been having about the importance getting poetry into the hands, hearts and minds of the populi.

Click on the cover to be taken to the album’s Amazon.com page, or here for the NPR page with Kris’ intervew with Melissa Block.  There’s some great stuff in the interview and I think Delmhorst articulates herself well.  I wish I would have said some of the things she said.  I can’t say that very often about things I hear in popular culture….

“They say not to anthropomorphize…”

It is the sin we all commit,
To make things in our image.
But how can I empathize
With you that have been shot,
Burned, poisoned, demonized,
Hunted, trapped, and hung for hides,
Born into this Manifest demise.

It is not human inclination
To leave things untouched;
But between us, I know,
There can be no suture.
For you are another nation,
Perfect in nature.

And maybe redemption will come
When it is enough
To love without sight
To love without touch
To succumb to the knowledge –
That freedom does not bend
For the hubris of men.

Summer Clearing

We pick locusts
sliding fresh from the dunes
like little Saint John the Baptists
wandering in our wildness.
Our little wilderness, sanctuaried
by a wheat truck and a chain,
arrives each time the metal-gray auger
slips under the patch of dust-
blue prairie sky.

We imagine the wide mouth
of the auger smiling at us
long and trembling. Comfortable
skin, tin-flecked and spotted,
reminds us of great grandma;
how the back of her hand
would turn over our faces
seeing with feeling,
expressions given two
generations away.
…how the back of her hand
shimmered with the thickness of opals,
deep and complex in buried years, but

signing her failing liver. Grandma goes,
the auger returns like a great benefactor
feeding us in her place,
warm in memory.
With a grin, the animal repeats
familial habit, pacing over
four rust-red walls that buckshot has
bored through, leaden weevils
tunneled by the Bowmans next door.
Spiral grates with dust and we hear
the steady slice of wheat coming
as grandpa kneads the metal
knob forth and back in the meat-
and-honeyed palm of his hand.
Golden in the summer
clearing, the Jordan comes to us.

We laugh until
the sandy slide of wheat
cuts our voices
out and we can only
grab as our mouths fill
with deserts; our lungs
split as the hot
chaff belches into them
a violent resuscitation,
Stream rolls us under
and bites
like tiny spring hailstones.

When father pulls my shoulders
loose and shakes the grain free
I don’t only feel it, again
I am born into the yeasty light.
Shallow scrape of machine-missed
chaff arches our back until
our heads are bleach-blonde
keystones to June.

Fingers dip, till, push, pluck
ripped bodies of grasshoppers still
throeing, newly cut.
We squeeze them tenderly and yell at the combines,
our fingers chalk green with mercy.

It’s not very good, but I just felt like posting something different…the following is true and I put it in a poem while I was in college.

V. The police called to tell me my car window was reported “found shattered.” I slip on my shoes and white T-shirt and break out of the front door, heavily squinting in the morning sun. I slowly twist my head through where-the-window-should-be to find glass seeding the front seat. I talk to the police officer; taken:

1 rental tape,

26 music discs.

The letter that came this morning:

“Your recent letter came. I have read it and reread it many times. You know you can count on us for prayers for your safety. It’s a problem I have understanding how God answers in so many unusual ways.

Your mother needs you so terribly much. Through her tears is sobbed, ‘I wish he could spend some time with Andrew this summer.’ I really don’t know what else to say.

Congratulations on your graduation.

Love,

Grandma C.”

I remember this event well, I was in the last days of college, desperate about what I was going to do with my life.  The policemen knocked at my door and woke me up in the early morning telling me that my car had been broken into.  It was a smash-and-grab, and it was the first time I had ever been deliberately robbed in such a way.  I really felt violated, which was surprising to me.

I had also sent out a bunch of letters for support for China, which is what my grandmother responded to in a letter I received the same morning.

The thing that I thought was worth putting in a poem when I was in college was the specific feeling I recieved of being alone in this place, at the cusp of graduating from college which was I was promised would be a pivotal moment in my life.  However, I mark this time as one of the most confusing lost times I have ever been in.  My relationship with Katie, whom I had just started dating a few months prior, was strained because neither of knew what we were going to do post-graduation.  I hoped I was going to China, a place I loved, to people I cared about. 

Then, this letter from my grandmother, that wasn’t really about me whatsoever.  I felt like a hollow husk when I got this, punctuated by the “congratulations on your graduation.”  I felt like the graduation card was just a vehicle for familial guilt to be conveyed to me…and in that specific time, with all the pressures and violation of the morning, I think I finally left my family. 

And I felt left by them.

Anyway, I stumbled across this the other day and it set me back in this specific moment strongly.  I thought I’d share.

To my Hollow Men,

Toby