The room is red, like ourselves
On the inside. We enter
And my heart ticks out its tune
Of soon, soon. I kneel
On the bed and wait. The silence
Behind me is you, shallow breaths
That rustle nothing. This will last.
I grip the sheets, telling time
To get lost. I close my eyes
So the red is darker now, deep,
A willed distance that backs away
The faster we approach.
I dream a little plot of land and six
Kid goats. Every night it rains.
Every morning sun breaks through
And the earth is firm again under our feet.
I am writing this so it will stay true.
Go for a while into your life,
But meet me come dusk
At a bar where music sweeps outs
From a jukebox choked with ragged bills.
We’ll wander back barefoot at night,
Carrying our shoes to save them
From the rain. We’ll laugh
To remember all the things
That slaughtered us a lifetime ago,
And at the silly goats, greedy for anything
Soft enough to crack between their teeth.
—Tracy K. Smith
I posted this poem from Life on Mars, which won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize, simply because I think it’s beautiful poem. R. and I started this blog because we love poetry and sometimes I just don’t have a whole lot to say about a poem I love. I almost posted Smith’s poem “The Good Life” because I thought I would have more to say about it, and I might post it later, but for now I want to let this poem marinate with you, especially the lines “I grip the sheets, telling time,” “To get lost. I close my eyes,” and “that slaughtered us a lifetime ago.” Gorgeous. And if you’re curious, you can read an interview with Smith featured on The Rumpus.
-S
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen
your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I
have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of
women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this
my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to
be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here
is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage
pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his
ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked,
sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.
—Carl Sandburg
I’ve been reading Fast Food Nation and reeling at the thought of old haunted, abandoned Chicago stockyards and thinking how much of the United States has changed in the last half-century, especially in regards to food production. And every time I think about Chicago, I think about this Carl Sandburg poem and its famous first lines: “Hog Butcher for the World,/Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,/Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;/Stormy, husky, brawling,/City of the Big Shoulders.” These lines almost roll off your tongue, don’t they? No one could characterize a city like Carl Sandburg; no one could characterize Chicago and its glory like Carl Sandburg.
There’s a vital pulse to the city, long after it has lost its title “Hog Butcher for the World,” for nearly 100 years later (this poem was published in Poetry magazine in March 1914), Sandburg’s words still characterize it: “Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to/be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.” It’s still a glorious city, isn’t it? These are still glorious words, aren’t they? I’d almost bet you money some of these words will stick in your head, too, every time you think of Chicago.
-R
Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
London has swept about you this score years
And bright ships left you this or that in fee:
Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,
Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.
Great minds have sought you — lacking someone else.
You have been second always. Tragical?
No. You preferred it to the usual thing:
One dull man, dulling and uxorious,
One average mind — with one thought less, each year.
Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit
Hours, where something might have floated up.
And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.
You are a person of some interest, one comes to you
And takes strange gain away:
Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion;
Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale for two,
Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else
That might prove useful and yet never proves,
That never fits a corner or shows use,
Or finds its hour upon the loom of days:
The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;
Idols and ambergris and rare inlays,
These are your riches, your great store; and yet
For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,
Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:
In the slow float of differing light and deep,
No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,
Nothing that’s quite your own.
Yet this is you.
—Ezra Pound
I love Modernism because all of the change—the Second Industrial Revolution, urbanization, World War I, and World War II, Prohibition, the Great Depression—seems so universal in the Western world, and so obviously reflected in the literary world. Prose writers are very transparent about the changes; Virginia Woolf wrote in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” that “on or about December 1910 human character changed” and Willa Cather wrote in the preface for Not Under Forty that “the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts.” But the poets are much more subtle.
I spend a lot of time reading and teaching T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which in some ways is the perfect portrait of the Modern man (“Portrait d’Homme”?): feckless, indecisive, insecure. But Ezra Pound’s “Portrait d’une Femme” is an interesting opposite, with the Modern woman “our Sargasso Sea”: shoreless. The woman is sought by “great minds” but she’s alone—and not unhappy: “You preferred it to the usual thing:/One dull man, dulling and uxorious,/One average mind — with one thought less, each year.” To be sure, the speaker of the poem concludes that the Modern woman—the “femme” of the poem—still has “Nothing that’s quite your own.” But she seems to have some choice to avoid the “one dull man” and “one average mind.” And that’s a big change from earlier years—and an even bigger change from what the Modern man becomes.
Anyway. Read this poem and then check out “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Eliot and Pound were two of the most influential poets in all of the twentieth century, and their poems are worth your time today or any day—even despite their personal biases.
-R
For years I chose the man to suit the instant,
from good guy to goat boy,
dreadlocked to crewcut. Not one could bridal me.
In place of lace veil,
I peered from bandage gauze. And if,
in rage, some suitor
tore that off, the red sun was a scald, and I felt
scalped and rocket-shot
onto the nearest flight. So everyone I kissed
left hurt. One man broke
the table I served him bread on. Another
claimed my heart
was arsenic at its core. When my last love came,
he slid a palm across
mine eyes, lent me his mouth
(a bitten plum)
lay his head in the middle of me, bent me
to that. Nights now,
my face rests on the meadow of his chest—
so I’m a loose-petaled poppy
blown open, a girl again, for the first time
hearing the earth’s heartbeat.
—Mary Karr
I can understand the first half of this poem, and I’ve sunk myself into it for most of my life. I’m especially haunted by the image of a “bandage gauze” where “a lace veil” should be, because in my mind, both seem so related. I’m glad Mary Karr, who I know more for her memoir than for her poetry, can give this hurt an image, especially because there are many of us who feel the same. But the last part feels so unfamiliar: “a loose-petaled poppy/blown open, a girl again, for the first time.” I hope I get there, too, past the heart that is “arsenic at its core.” Like the speaker. I hope I understand all of this poem one day. Until that day, I’m going to tuck this poem away in Structure and Style and come back to it often.
-R
“Gary Snyder lives in the country. He wakes up in the morning and listens to birds. We live in the city.” – Kathleen Wood
all I want to do is
make poetry famous
all I want to do is
burn my initials into the sun
all I want do do is
read poetry from the middle of a
burning building
standing in the fast lane of the
freeway
falling from the top of the
Empire State Building
the literary world
sucks dead dog dick
I’d rather be Richard Speck
than Gary Snyder
I’d rather ride a rocketship to hell
than a Volvo to Bolinas
I’d rather
sell arms to the Martians
than wait sullenly for a
letter from some diseased clown with a
three-piece mind
telling me that I’ve won a
bullet-proof pair of rose-colored glasses
for my poem “Autumn in the Spring”
I want to be
hated
by everyone who teaches for a living
I want people to hear my poetry and
get headaches
I want people to hear my poetry and
vomit
I want people to hear my poetry and
weep, scream, disappear, start bleeding,
eat their television sets, beat each other to death with
swords and
go out and get riotously drunk on
someone else’s money
this ain’t no party
this ain’t no disco
this ain’t no foolin a
grab-bag of
clever wordplay and sensitive thoughts and
gracious theories about
how many ambiguities can dance on the head of a
machine gun
this ain’t no
genteel evening over
cappuccino and bullshit
this ain’t no life-affirming
our days have meaning
as we watch the flowers breath through our souls and
fall desperately in love
this ain’t no letter-press, hand-me-down
wimpy beatnik festival of bitching about
the broken rainbow
it is a carnival of dread
it is a savage sideshow
about to move to the main arena
it is terror and wild beauty
walking hand in hand down a bombed-out road
as missiles scream, while a
sky the color of arterial blood
blinks on and off
like the lights on Broadway
after the last junkie’s dead of AIDS
I come not to bury poetry
but to blow it up
not to dandle it on my knee
like a retarded child with
beautiful eyes
but
throw it off a cliff into
icy seas and
see if the the motherfucker can swim for its life
because love is an excellent thing
surely we need it
but, my friends…
there is so much to hate These Days
that hatred is just love with a chip on its shoulder
a chip as big as the Ritz
and heavier than
all the bills I’ll never pay
because they’re after us
they’re selling radioactive charm bracelets
and breakfast cereals that
lower your IQ by 50 points per mouthful
we get politicians who think
starting World War III
would be a good career move
we got beautiful women
with eyes like wet stones
peering out at us from the pages of
glassy magazines promising that they’ll
fuck us till we shoot blood
if we’ll just buy one of these beautiful switchblade knives
I’ve got mine
—David Lerner
I read something about David Lerner a while back, so I googled him and eventually came across this poem. I wanted to post it today because today is a I’m-so-sick-of-the-world day and rather than rant and rave, I’m posting a poem that rants and raves. There are some good lines in here, though, like: “all I want to do is/burn my initials into the sun” (don’t we all?); “I want to be/hated/by everyone who teaches for a living” (interesting thought); “this ain’t no/genteel evening over/cappucino and bullshit/this ain’t no life-affirming/our days have meaning/as we watch the flowers breath through our souls/and fall desperately in love”; and “because love is an excellent thing/surely we need it.” Honestly, I posted this poem because I’m hurting and mad and it would be crappy of me to start screaming at everyone around me, which is what I really want to do. So, I let David Lerner scream for me.
-S
Between Wytheville, Virginia
and the North Carolina line,
he meets a wagon headed
where he’s been, seated beside
her parents a dark-eyed girl
who grips the reins in her fist,
no more than sixteen, he’d guess
as they come closer and she
doesn’t look away or blush
but allows his eyes to hold
hers that moment their lives pass.
He rides into Boone at dusk,
stops at an inn where he buys
his supper, a sleepless night
thinking of fallow fields still
miles away, the girl he might
not find the like of again.
When dawn breaks he mounts his roan,
then backtracks, searches three days
hamlets and farms, any smoke
rising above the tree line
before he heads south, toward home,
the French Broad’s valley where spring
unclinches the dogwood buds
as he plants the bottomland,
come night by candlelight builds
a butter churn and cradle,
cherry headboard for the bed,
forges a dougle-eagle
into a wedding ring and then
back to Virginia and spends
five weeks riding and asking
from Elk Creek to Damascas
before he finds the wagon
tethered to the hitching post
of a crossroads store, inside
the girl who smiles as if she’d
known all along his gray eyes
would search until they found her.
She asks one question, his name,
as her eyes study the gold
smoldering there between them,
the offered palm she lightens,
slips the ring on herself so
he knows right then the woma
she will be, bold enough match
for a man rash as his name.
—Ron Rash
Ron Rash is getting a lot of attention right now for his novel The Cove, but I’ve always been a fan of his poetry. You can find this poem on Poetry 180. In the poem, a man, younger I assume, falls in love with a girl and will stop at nothing until they’re married. What I like most about this poem is the intensity and the urgency. She’s the kind of girl who holds tight to things, to the reins and his stare. And he’s the kind of feller who doesn’t give up once he sets his sights on something. There are a lot of play on words and a lot of lyricism to this tale, but I really love the lines at the end where the poem reads, “so/ he knows right then the woman/ she will be, bold enough match/ for a man rash as his name.” In many ways, this poem is like stepping back to what we’d see now as a simpler time and after the chaos of this semester, I needed a poem like this.
-S
My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,
red, blue & hard yellow,
learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells.
I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.
A child is not a poem,
a poem is not a child.
there is no either/or.
However.
I return to the story
of the woman caught in the war
& in labour, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.
Ancestress: the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.
A word after a word
after a word is power.
At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow & the word
splits & doubles & speaks
the truth & the body
itself becomes a mouth.
This is a metaphor.
How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.
—Margaret Atwood
Lately I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a woman and a writer, both. Either is an exhausting job, and to be both seems impossible. And I keep thinking about Adrienne Rich, who supposedly argued in Of Woman Born that until a woman can walk away from a pregnancy like a man can, we should be allowed reproductive rights. (I haven’t read Of Woman Born yet.) Or Judith Ortiz Cofer, who writes in “The Woman Who Slept with One Eye Open” that she started “going to bed when [her] daughter did and rising at 5:00 a.m.” every morning to write. Motherhood seems so impossible, especially if you’re a writer.
But here is Atwood, writing ”A child is not a poem,/a poem is not a child./there is no either/or.” She says everything I suspect but cannot articulate, and she says it beautifully. I think for me, I’ll have to make a decision eventually, and I’ll have to make it work: “there is no either/or.”
Again, poetry says what I cannot.
-R
As if to annul
any suspicion
he was a saltine,
he danced
like a stick
thrown by some native
into a fiery
sunset. He went
on dancing
after the music
had stopped, which was
when the women
looked into their
drinks and saw
how beautiful
olives become
when you do not
ignore them.
—Laura Newbern
Admittedly, this is a poem by a poetry professor in my MFA program, but it’s also pretty damn good. (It appeared in The Atlantic.) My favorite stanzas are the first and the last. The first is absurd and beautiful, because who would suspect a novelist of being a saltine? And yet the ego problems and insecurities of all writers makes this line resonate. Of course a “lovely tall novelist” would need to “annul any suspicion.” Of course a “lovely tall novelist” would need attention. And the last stanza resonates, too, because that olive, despite the fact that its plumpness and its color are not described, seems suddenly so very real. I can picture it, too—and I want to, rather than thinking about that novelist.
-R
There will be no edges, but curves.
Clean lines pointing only forward.
History, with its hard spine & dog-eared
Corners, will be replaced with nuance,
Just like the dinosaurs gave way
To mounds and mounds of ice.
Women will still be women, but
The distinction will be empty. Sex,
Having outlived every threat, will gratify
Only the mind, which is where it will exist.
For kicks, we’ll dance for ourselves
Before mirrors studded with golden bulbs.
The oldest among us will recognize that glow—
But the word sun will have been re-assigned
To a Standard Uranium-Neutralizing device
Found in households and nursing homes.
And yes, we’ll live to be much older, thanks
To popular consensus. Weightless, unhinged,
Eons from even our own moon, we’ll drift
In the haze of space, which will be, once
And for all, scrutable and safe.
—Tracy K. Smith
Two days ago, the Pulitzer Prize committee named Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars their 2012 winner for poetry. I haven’t had much time to read many of her poems yet, but I appreciate the book description, which says these poems are set in a “sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers.” Go read them!
-R
Structure and Style is now on twitter (as StructurexStyle). We want to enter into the dialogue about literature, particularly about poetry, through tweets. Follow us, please!
