I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer
The waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourself
I have always wondered about the leftover
energy, water rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped
or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting there long after midnight
—Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich has died. This poem is from her collection Diving Into the Wreck. I studied Rich closely when I was in graduate school and for a young woman who was just realizing and using my full potential, her poetry greatly influenced my own writing and my own sense of independence. I am sad that she will not be writing any more words.
-S
Moonlight Striking upon a Chess-Board
I am so aching to write
That I could make a song out of a chess-board
And rhyme the intrigues of knights and bishops
And the hollow fate of a checkmated king.
I might have been a queen, but I lack the proper century;
I might have been a poet, but where is the adventure
to explode me into flame.
Cousin Moon, our kinship is curiously demonstrated,
For I, too, am a bright, cold corpse
Perpetually circling above a living world.
—Amy Lowell
I suppose you might need the epigraph to understand this poem, or you might take it for what it’s worth. I suppose you might, too, lock yourself up and write all day and all night long and not live your life. Not experience anything in search of your art. But as Amy Lowell asks, “…but where is the adventure to explode me into flame”? How can you have anything to produce, anything to say, without an interesting life? Live your life. Produce your art. But don’t focus on one at the expense of the other.
-R
The June breeze will tell you:
the middle of things is where the juices are;
where the years bulge best with desire
though nothing worth desire can be defined—
I have known this so long and wanted to tell you.
You are the servant of something about to happen.
You were never meant to be young—a dreadful mistake
on the verge of correction.
I am only your carpet, your coat, a soft pillow,
a good place to file—those things you miss only
in their absence, like teeth, like water.
When your heart has that afternoon hurt,
breathe deeply the comfort from those you have harmed.
We have all failed in all things that matter
and excuse ourselves even better than gods.
Think of clean nights under the stars,
the way light startles the water,
other beds and hair dark on the pillow,
of what I am like with another
his hand massaging my heart,
how dangerous I am loving you better
and rocks rinsed by waves
on shores where cranes wade at dawn.
—Mary Ellen Miller
This poem is from Mary Ellen Miller’s collection The Poet’s Wife Speaks. She is the wife of the late Jim Wayne Miller, an incredible poet. She is also one of my former professors and will always be one of my mentors. I always loved to write, but her words of encouragement are what pushed me to be serious about myself and my writing.
I think what I love best about this particular poem is how the line works as a unit. There are some fantastic lines in this poem: “the middle of things is where the juices are,” “You were never meant to be young—a dreadful mistake,” “a good place to file, those things you miss only,” “breathe deeply the comfort from those you have harmed,” and “how dangerous I am loving you better.” Those all work as a single line and pack such a punch, but them when you read them in context, with the stanza and poem as a whole, it’s like a double-whammy. I love it!
And I love the imagery in this poem, the years bulging with desire, the carpet, the clean nights, and the cranes, these are all hooks that draw me into the poem and make me feel the words. I think that’s part of why I love MEM’s collection so much: like her gentle prodding, her poems also ground me and bring me home to writing.
-S
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
—Elizabeth Bishop
I’ve been studying this poem for the past few weeks as a perfect example of a villanelle and its circularity. My god, look at this poem. Look at the beauty of these nineteen lines. The first and third lines are refrains, repeating at lines six, twelve, and eighteen (first refrain), and nine, fifteen, and nineteen (second refrain). The rhyme scheme is aba (except for the last line). The fact that this poem repeats its first and third line so many times means that every time the reader thinks she’s making progress, that we’re going to learn about the speaker’s loss, we circle back around to how losing “isn’t hard to master”—or, what’s more, the loss is no “disaster.” This poem, as in all villanelles, has lines that “circle around and around, refusing to go forward in any linear development” (according to Mark Strand and Eavan Boland in The Making of a Poem). It’s both incredibly frustrating and incredibly liberating to see that the speaker will admit she’s losing things increasingly more important (keys, “the hour badly spent,” her mother’s watch, three houses, two rivers, and even a continent), but she never says why she’s writing the poem, or what the biggest loss is. The reader suspects there’s a loss of a person, a loss so deep that the speaker can’t talk about it (she says, “(Write it!)” instead). The reader wants to know. But when the speaker finally addresses the “you,” she circles back around to the beginning refrains and the poem ends. We never know for sure. The writer never has to say it.
Sometimes you so badly want to talk about something, but you can’t. Sometimes—and I do this often—you write in second person. For Elizabeth Bishop, the thing she most badly wants to talk about is losing “things” and yet she can’t. (I’m giving myself license to equate the writer with the speaker. So what?) But Elizabeth Bishop doesn’t need to use second person because she has a villanelle. She doesn’t have to name the loss or deflect it by pointing the finger at “you” the reader, because any time she gets close to putting her finger on her problem, she circles back around to the beginning.
This poem is an interesting study in diversion, in being honest but keeping the biggest secret for yourself. I just wrote an essay in the shape of a villanelle, and I circled around and around the truth, but that’s the only way I could write. Sometimes it’s not true to say “No way out but through” (sorry, Jandy Nelson). Sometimes you can go around. Elizabeth Bishop did in “One Art,” and I’m doing it, too.
-R
Grandfather
advised me:
Learn a trade
I learned
to sit at desk
and condense
No layoffs
from this
condensery
—Lorine Niedecker
I laugh,
I smile
at the old poets,
and love all the
poetry they wrote,
all the dew,
moon, diamond, drops
of submerged silver
with which my elder brother
adorned the rose;
but
I smile;
they always say “I,”
at every turn
something happens,
it’s always “I,”
only they or
the dear heart they love
walk through the streets,
only they,
no fishermen pass by,
or booksellers,
no masons pass by,
no one falls
from a scaffolding,
no one suffers,
no one loves,
except my poor brother,
the poet,
everything happens
to him
and to his dear beloved,
no one lives
but him, him alone,
no one weeps from hunger
or from anger
in his poems no one suffers
because he can’t
pay the rent,
in poetry no one
is ever thrown into the street
with all his furniture,
and nothing happens
in the factories,
no, nothing,
umbrellas and goblets are manufactured,
weapons and locomotives,
ores are mined
by scraping hell,
there is a strike,
soldiers come
and fire,
they fire against the people,
which is to say,
against poetry,
but my brother
the poet
was in love,
or was suffering
because all his emotion
is for the sea,
he loves remote ports
for their names,
and he writes about oceans
he doesn’t know,
when life is as full
as an ear of corn with grain
he passes by, never knowing
how to harvest it,
he rides the waves
without ever touching land,
and, occasionally,
he is profoundly moved
and melancholy,
he is too big
to fit inside his skin,
he gets tangled and untangles himself,
he declares he is maudit,
with great difficulty he carries the cross
of darkness,
he believes that he is different from
anyone else in the world,
he eats bread every day
but he’s never seen a
baker
or gone to a meeting
of a baker’s union,
and so my poor brother
is deliberately dark,
he twists and writhes
and finds himself
interesting,
interesting,
that’s the word,
…
—Pablo Neruda
I’ve divided this poem up into at least two parts to post because it is so lengthy. The lines are short, but still, it’s long. This is the first poem in The Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda and I’ve been meditating on it for a few days now. There is some fantastic imagery in the poem, which I think is so important in terms of keeping a contemporary audience interested. I could walk the streets of this poem and that keeps me reading and wanting more. I also love the lines “he believes that he is different from/ anyone else in the world,/ he eats bread every day/ but he’s never seen a/ baker”.
The speaker is saying a lot here about poetry and probably writing in general. Many writers and artists do consider themselves “different” in some way, and whether that’s true or not, it doesn’t matter if you can’t connect with the world. We see this all the time in literature where people write about things and it just doesn’t seem genuine. There’s a lot of controversy surrounding Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help because many, many believe that her portrayal of the black maids in the South during the 1960s is inaccurate. Schools, community colleges, and even universities are pushing to increase literacy across the country because people just don’t read or, if they do read, they don’t read to challenge themselves or for enjoyment. So, as writers, what is our responsibility here?
The speaker in this poem is pointing out the importance of accuracy in our writing. One can write about sadness and loss all they want, but it’s hard to capture it just right unless we’ve truly felt it. I think the poem is doing two things: It’s pointing out the importance of actually living, of not getting caught up in our art and our creativity so much that we forget to actually experience life.
I also think the poem is saying something about how important it is for common, every day people to understand our art. I’m currently working on a book of poems and I try to write with the complete attitude that any person could pick up my book and find something in there to connect with. My goal is that any person could enjoy the entire collection of poems. My writing is my chance to have my say. I’d like to think that I’ve lived my life with enough compassion and understanding that, no matter how different I see myself or don’t see myself, my writing could impact any person’s life. Now, that doesn’t mean it will. But I at least want to be a poet who says more than “I,” who writes about the baker, the coach, the prostitute, and everyone in between.
Any thoughts?
-S
