How many of us would have the gumption to quit our day job for the silly reason that we hated it? How many of us would be able to stick it to The Man without immediately getting down on our knees and blaming it on a bad shrimp at lunch or a skipped pharmaceutical? The answer is, I think, not many. But Stephen Dunn is one of the proud few.

I first heard Dunn’s work in the voice of Garrison Keillor, that gentle satirist of NPR fame, in a Writer’s Almanac segment. I found myself clutching the steering wheel with something – joy, jealousy, an agony of recognition. Whatever it was, I still feel it when I read this poem, from his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Different Hours, which I rushed out to buy that very day.

I don’t why Stephen Dunn isn’t more famous. Maybe he avoids it. Maybe he’s shy and that’s why he hides out in New Jersey. I must admit, I secretly resent the fact that I’ve never had to opportunity to see him read.

But I forgive him, because of this poem. I forgive him, in fact, because of the whole wonderful book, as well as the terrific bits of criticism and essays on the making of poetry found in APR and other magazines. Yes, if Stephen Dunn has to camp out under his couch for months like a cat whose been threatened with a squirt gun in order to write these poems, so be it. So be it.






The Last Hours


There’s some innocence left,
and these are the last hours of an empty afternoon
at the office, and there’s the clock
on the wall, and my friend Frank
in the adjacent cubicle selling himself
on the phone.
I’m twenty-five, on the shaky
ladder up, my father’s son, corporate,
clean-shaven, and I know only what I don’t want,
which is almost everything I have.
A meeting ends.
Men in serious suits, intelligent men
who’ve been thinking hard about marketing snacks,
move back now to their window offices, worried
or proud. The big boss, Horace,
has called them in to approve this, reject that –
the big boss, a first-name, how’s-you-family
kind of assassin, who likes me.
It’s 1964.
The sixties haven’t begun yet. Cuba is a larger name
than Vietnam. The Soviets are behind
everything that could be wrong. Where I sit
it’s exactly nineteen minutes to five. My phone rings.
Horace would like me to stop in
before I leave. Stop in. Code words,
leisurely words, that mean now.
Would I be willing
to take this on? Would X’s office, who by the way
is no longer with us, be satisfactory?
About money, will this be enough?
I smile, I say yes and yes and yes,
but – I don’t know from what calm place
this comes – I’m translating
his beneficence into a lifetime, a life
of selling snacks, talking snack strategy,
thinking snack thoughts.
On the elevator down
it’s a small knot, I’d like to say, of joy.
That’s how I tell it now, here in the future,
the fear long gone.
By the time I reach the subway it’s grown,
it’s outsized, an attitude finally come round,
and I say it quietly to myself, I quit,
and keep saying it, knowing I will say it, sure
of nothing else but.


--Stephen Dunn, from Different Hours (2000)

Here is a disclaimer. I have lived in Ohio. I have spent many happy days in Ohio, and many of my family members still live there. In fact, I just enjoyed a wonderful Thanksgiving in Ohio. It’s a lovely state; I adore the people; etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Of the poets to come out of Ohio, I believe James Wright to be the greatest. Martins Ferry, where Wright grew up, with its steelworks and pollution, the dying of the industrial hegemony along the Ohio River (although much still exists), and all the resulting human suffering, was good to James Wright. Even as he traveled to Vienna on a Fulbright, and later taught in Minnesota and New York, Martins Ferry was present in his mind as a kind of hell. From that hell, he wrote some of the most brilliant poetry to come out of the Midwestern ethos. Wright understood what it was to be trapped in a town where the choice of vocation was either to work at the steel mill or to sell life insurance to the wives of steel mill workers. He understood the desperation, the animal sense of fear and desire to escape.

Not that I can relate to any of that. I like Ohio.

There are two poems I cannot get out of my head. Two poems that haunt me, and come back whenever I’m driving through Pennsylvania, knowing that soon the I90 will rumble over the border toward Cleveland. One of these poems would be enough to convince any sane person to run out and buy the Complete Poems of James Wright. Two of them should be enough to rip out your spleen.

I am going to give you three. Why? Because the first two are Wright’s true feeling about Ohio, and the third is a bit of an apology to the state, albeit a creepy apology. Oh, Mr. Wright, may you be in a heaven of your own making, far from these earthly hells you made beautiful with words.

And be sure to visit www.poets.org to hear a recording of James Wright read his own poetry.





Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio


In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.



--James Wright, from Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio (1963)







In Response to a Rumor that the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, Has Been Condemned


I will grieve alone,
As I strolled alone, years ago, down along
The Ohio shore.
I hid in the hobo jungle weeds
Upstream from the sewer main,
Pondering, gazing.

I saw, down river,
At Twenty-third and Water Streets
By the vinegar works,
The doors open in early evening.
Swinging their purses, the women
Poured down the long street to the river
And into the river.

I do not know how it was
They could drown every evening.
What time near dawn did they climb up the other shore,
Drying their wings?

For the river at Wheeling, West Virginia,
Has only two shores:
The one in hell, the other
In Bridgeport, Ohio.

And nobody would commit suicide, only
To find beyond death
Bridgeport, Ohio.



--James Wright, from Shall We Gather at the River (1969)






In Ohio


White mares lashed to the sulky carriages
Trot softly
Around the dismantled fairgrounds
Near Buckeye Lake.

The sandstone blocks of a wellspring
Cool dark green moss.

The sun floats down, a small golden lemon dissolves
In the water.
I dream, as I lean over the edge, of a crawdad’s mouth.

The cellars of haunted houses are like ancient cities,
Fallen behind a big heap of apples.

A widow on a front porch puckers her lips
And whispers.



--James Wright, from The Branch Will Not Break (1963)

Seamus Heaney.

Must I say more?

I suppose I must, for those who have never had the pleasure of seeing this great man and great poet read. To the uninitiated, one must first say that Heaney was born in Northern Ireland, and he is an Irishman through and through. For me, this means he has a shock of puffy white hair, a warmhearted manner, and a gift for gab. I mean, the man can really talk. He’s funny, erudite, and full of stories about this and that, that and this, and that other thing. I’ve seen him read several times now (every time he’s within a hundred miles, I make the trip, like those crazy Phishheads, except with a lot less drug abuse) and each time he manages to tell a tale that gets the audience giggling. Anyone who’s ever been to an "important literary event" will recognize this as a feat.

But let me get to the point. Heaney has unreasonable skill with language. The man can turn a phrase, turn it back again, flip it over and slap you in the face with it like a wet mackerel. (Please, gentle readers, it’s just a metaphor. Don’t abuse fish.) Heaney is a genius with alliteration, creating music from the barest of tools. I believe he is better at this than anyone since Hopkins. You can argue with me. Please do. Send me an email. Then go back to the poem, read it a hundred times, and feel embarrassed about disputing the point.





Postscript


And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.


Seamus Heaney, from The Spirit Level (1996)

I have encountered moose twice in my life. Both occasions were terrifying and awe-inspiring and ultimately beyond words. How does one express the feeling of being in nature where a human is (or should be) reduced down to his animal parts, and suddenly knowing, intensely knowing, that one is not alone? How does one describe how large a moose is, how imposing, how majestic, how intimidating?

Leave it to Elizabeth Bishop, a poet who left an indelible mark on modern poetry with her carefully constructed work. As a woman who refused to be known as a ‘woman poet’, a lesbian before lesbianism was cool, an orphan at a young age, a non-academic who nevertheless found herself teaching at Harvard, she must have lived an interesting life. But her life isn’t the point. Who cares that Lowell was in love with her, that she lived on a paradisiacal property in Brazil with her longtime female lover who later killed herself, that she wrote expansive beautiful letters while keeping her poetic output quite limited? What matters is this poem. What matters is Bishop’s language, and the fact that no one writes more cleanly or vividly about the Atlantic, or about the cold, stark landscapes of the northern New England and Canadian coastline. What matters is the way she moves with startling fluidity between the human world and the natural realm, that place of intensity and mystery and beauty. A place that will outlast us despite our best attempts to destroy it.

Read the poem, please, yes, all of it. It is long but skinny. It will take three minutes to read. Then read it again, slower, because you will not be able to resist Bishop’s force of thought and word.



The Moose

for Grace Bulmer Bowers


From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,

where if the river
enters or retreats
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home;

where, silted red,
sometimes the sun sets
facing a red sea,
and others, veins the flats’
lavender, rich mud
in burning rivulets;

on red, gravelly roads,
down rows of sugar maples,
past clapboard farmhouses
and neat, clapboard churches,
bleached, ridged as clamshells,
past twin silver birches,

through late afternoon
a bus journeys west,
the windshield flashing pink,
pink glancing off of metal,
brushing the dented flank
of blue, beat-up enamel;

down hollows, up rises,
and waits, patient, while
a lone traveller gives
kisses and embraces
to seven relatives
and a collie supervises.

Goodbye to the elms,
to the farm, to the dog.
The bus starts. The light
grows richer; the fog,
shifting, salty, thin,
comes closing in.

Its cold, round crystals
form and slide and settle
in the white hens’ feathers,
in gray glazed cabbages,
on the cabbage roses
and lupins like apostles;

the sweet peas cling
to their wet white string
on the whitewashed fences;
bumblebees creep
inside the foxgloves,
and evening commences.

One stop at Bass River.
Then the Economies –
Lower, Middle, Upper;
Five Islands, Five Houses,
where a woman shakes a tablecloth
out after supper.

A pale flickering. Gone.
The Tantramar marches
and the smell of salt hay.
An iron bridge trembles
and a loose plank rattles
but doesn’t give way.

On the left, a red light
swims through the dark:
a ship’s port lantern.
Two rubber boots show,
illuminated, solemn.
A dog gives one bark.

A woman climbs in
with two market bags,
brisk, freckled, elderly.
“A grand night. Yes, sir,
all the way to Boston.”
She regards us amicably.

Moonlight as we enter
the New Brunswick woods,
hairy, scratchy, splintery;
moonlight and mist
caught in them like lamb’s wool
on bushes in a pasture.

The passengers lie back.
Snores. Some long sighs.
A dreamy divagation
begins in the night,
a gentle, auditory,
slow hallucination...

In the creakings and noises,
an old conversation
– not concerning us,
but recognizable, somewhere,
back in the bus:
Grandparents’ voices

uninterruptedly
talking, in Eternity:
names being mentioned,
things cleared up finally;
what he said, what she said,
who got pensioned;

deaths, deaths and sicknesses;
the year he remarried;
the year (something) happened.
She died in childbirth.
That was the son lost
when the schooner foundered.

He took to drink. Yes.
She went to the bad.
When Amos began to pray
even in the store and
finally the family had
to put him away.

“Yes...” that peculiar
affirmative. “Yes...”
A sharp, indrawn breath,
half groan, half acceptance,
that means “Life’s like that.
We know it (also death).”

Talking the way they talked
in the old featherbed,
peacefully, on and on,
dim lamplight in the hall,
down in the kitchen, the dog
tucked in her shawl.

Now, it’s all right now
even to fall asleep
just as on all those nights.
– Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.

A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus’s hot hood.

Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man’s voice assures us
“Perfectly harmless....”

Some of the passengers
exclaim in whispers,
childishly, softly,
“Sure are big creatures.”
“It’s awful plain.”
“Look! It’s a she!”

Taking her time,
she looks the bus over,
grand, otherworldly.
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?

“Curious creatures,”
says our quiet driver,
rolling his r’s.
“Look at that, would you.”
Then he shifts gears.
For a moment longer,

by craning backward,
the moose can be seen
on the moonlit macadam;
then there’s a dim
smell of moose, an acrid
smell of gasoline.

--Elizabeth Bishop, from Geography III (1976)

For some reason the best love poetry is the most depressing stuff out there.

Why is this? Well, because happy love poetry annoys us. We don’t like to hear about how content you are, how fulfilling your sex life is, how gloriously well-suited you and your spouse are. It makes us feel bad about ourselves and our own lackluster relationships. No, we want to hear about how miserable you are, and how much your soul aches from the abuse of the only one you’ve ever loved and ever will love and how now that this affair is over you will never love again because it’s too painful and it all makes you want to find someone to gouge out your eyes like Lear’s poor old Gloucester.

Enter Billy Collins.

Collins is known for his gentle humor and quirkiness. Who else could incorporate eleven nursery school names in a single poem (“Snow Day”) without causing a worldwide poetry revolt? No one else. Billy Collins is acutely aware of the darker side of every adorable occasion. He knows that the girls with bouncy blonde hair and faultless blue eyes on the playground are actually little despots plotting to ruin each other. This is the kind of truth that rescues Collins’ poetry from the maudlin.

So although Collins is a master of the gentle lyric, every so often he lets himself fall into a dark place, and the results are always admirable. I love the poems that do not make it into his readings on NPR, do not get anthologized and praised, do not become beloved of fifth grade teachers, those wonderful bastions of good taste and mildness. Here is one such poem. After reading it, the word ‘armadillo’ will always give me shivers. Now that’s a successful simile.





Night Sand


When you injure me, as you must one day,
I will move off like the slow armadillo over night sand,
ambulating secretly inside his armor,

ready to burrow deep or curl himself into a ball
which will shelter his soft head, soft feet
and tail from the heavy, rhythmic blows.

Now can you see the silhouettes of ranchers’ hats
and sticks raised against the pink desert sky?


--Billy Collins, from Questions About Angels (1991)

Children are wonderful.

I don’t have any, thank god, but I have spent many terrific, terrifically hair-raising afternoons hanging out with those too young to engage in any of a number of adult vices. Of course, children are hair-raising for the same reason they are wonderful – they don’t follow the same rules adults do. The youngest don’t even know that such rules exist, and so are able to apprehend the world with a degree of bliss that few adults can access. Ted Hughes realized this, because he was fortunate enough, or foolish enough, depending on your mood and stage in life, to have had a daughter. Why do we care that he had a daughter? We don’t, but we do care that he wrote this poem, which goes to the center of why poets do ridiculous things like giving up their lives to those little tyrants known as the next generation. If any person managed to inspire a poem as good as this one from me, I would promise to feed them and pay their college tuition too.

Here is a bit of advice. On the evening of the next full moon, go out to the darkest place you can find, preferably in the middle of a farmfield with nothing around but cornstalks and killdeers, where you can’t hear traffic noise or the chitchat of neighbors, where your breath is the loudest sound. Put down your things. Untie your sneakers. Ignore the bite of frost. Close your eyes and tilt your chin up to the sky. Slowly, slowly open your eyes. Soak in the sky. Shake yourself. Feel humbled. Remember this poem while you’re on your way back home, aware again that you’re human, and so small that you may waver and disappear.




Full Moon and Little Frieda


A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket –

And you listening.
A spider’s web, tense for the dew’s touch.
A pail lifted, still and brimming – mirror
To tempt a first star to a tremor.

Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm wreaths of breath –
A dark river of blood, many boulders,
Balancing unspilled milk.

“Moon!” you cry suddenly, “Moon! Moon!”

The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work
That points at him amazed.


--Ted Hughes, from Wodwo (1967)

I don’t know Adam Zagajewski. I’ve never heard him read. But I would like to meet him, if only to kiss his feet in thanks for writing this poem. Someday I’ll have the chance, and man, will he be surprised. Or perhaps not. Perhaps he gets it all the time. He should.

Like Elizabeth Bishop, we have all lost realms that we once owned. But how does one express the sense of homelessness we all feel, regardless of how landed we are? How does one speak to the pain of a lost city? How does one capture the horror of genocide, banishment, cultural annihilation? How do we stay human in the face of what human does to human? How do we deal with the news (all bad), the current war (insane), the knowledge that we will always have violence (even worse), and the fact that humans are flawed and ever-suffering (the kicker to it all)?

Accept this as a gift to help you cope with it all. Take a moment before you read to open yourself with a long quiet breath. Let Adam Zagajewski rock you, lull you, build you up, and then carefully destroy you, all within 80 lines. And quick kudos to Clare Cavanaugh for this sensitive translation.



To Go to Lvov


To go to Lvov. Which station
for Lvov, if not in a dream, at dawn, when dew
gleams on a suitcase, when express
trains and bullet trains are being born. To leave
in haste for Lvov, night or day, in September
or in March. But only if Lvov exists,
if it is to be found within the frontiers and not just
in my new passport, if lances of trees
—of poplar and ash—still breathe aloud
like Indians, and if streams mumble
their dark Esperanto, and grass snakes like soft signs
in the Russian language disappear
into thickets. To pack and set off, to leave
without a trace, at noon, to vanish
like fainting maidens. And burdocks, green
armies of burdocks, and below, under the canvas
of a Venetian café, the snails converse
about eternity. But the cathedral rises,
you remember, so straight, as straight
as Sunday and white napkins and a bucket
full of raspberries standing on the floor, and
my desire which wasn’t born yet,
only gardens and weeds and the amber
of Queen Anne cherries, and indecent Fredro.
There was always too much of Lvov, no one could
comprehend its boroughs, hear
the murmur of each stone scorched
by the sun, at night the Orthodox church’s silence was unlike
that of the cathedral, the Jesuits
baptized plants, leaf by leaf, but they grew,
grew so mindlessly, and joy hovered
everywhere, in hallways and in coffee mills
revolving by themselves, in blue
teapots, in starch, which was the first
formalist, in drops of rain and in the thorns
of roses. Frozen forsythia yellowed by the window.
The bells pealed and the air vibrated, the cornets
of nuns sailed like schooners near
the theater, there was so much of the world that
it had to do encores over and over,
the audience was in frenzy and didn’t want
to leave the house. My aunts couldn’t have known
yet that I’d resurrect them,
and lived so trustfully; so singly;
servants, clean and ironed, ran for
fresh cream, inside the houses
a bit of anger and great expectation, Brzozowski
came as a visiting lecturer, one of my
uncles kept writing a poem entitled Why,
dedicated to the Almighty, and there was too much
of Lvov, it brimmed the container,
it burst glasses, overflowed
each pond, lake, smoked through every
chimney, turned into fire, storm,
laughed with lightning, grew meek,
returned home, read the New Testament,
slept on a sofa beside the Carpathian rug,
there was too much of Lvov, and now
there isn’t any, it grew relentlessly
and the scissors cut it, chilly gardeners
as always in May, without mercy,
without love, ah, wait till warm June
comes with soft ferns, boundless
fields of summer, i.e., the reality.
But scissors cut it, along the line and through
the fiber, tailors, gardeners, censors
cut the body and the wreaths, pruning shears worked
diligently, as in a child’s cutout
along the dotted line of a roe deer or a swan.
Scissors, penknives, and razor blades scratched,
cut, and shortened the voluptuous dresses
of prelates, of squares and houses, and trees
fell soundlessly, as in a jungle,
and the cathedral trembled, people bade goodbye
without handkerchiefs, no tears, such a dry
mouth, I won’t see you anymore, so much death
awaits you, why must every city
become Jerusalem and every man a Jew,
and now in a hurry just
pack, always, each day,
and go breathless, go to Lvov, after all
it exists, quiet and pure as
a peach. It is everywhere.

--Adam Zagajewski, from Without End: New and Selected Poems (2002)
trans. Clare Cavanagh

Who better to inaugurate this page than the incomparable Derek Walcott? Sure, he's won a Nobel Prize. Sure, his poems speak to the depth of the soul. Sure, he's written and directed plays, collaborated with Paul Simon, painted gorgeous island landscapes, written criticism for the New York Review of Books, influenced many, many students (among them Glyn Maxwell, Ronan Noone, Elizabeth Alexander, and yours truly) over many years. But these are minor things. What is not minor is his ability to destroy the reader with a single well-placed word. To rip a human heart out of its cavity with a phrase. To wreck the veneer of ordinariness over the world. This Derek Walcott does as well as, and sometimes better than, any other poet alive.

You've broken up with someone. Or been broken up with. You've felt the cold hand of loneliness slide over your nape. Yes, you've tried to convince yourself the world isn't ending, that you'll get back on your feet and start over, start better – and you've failed. Derek Walcott has done this also (he is but a man, after all, and probably leaves his towels on the floor after showering too), but he has done better. He has done immeasurably more. He has made art out of suffering.

Witness.

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.


--Derek Walcott, from Sea Grapes (1976)

This blog is meant to offer a few thoughts about known and unknown poets. It is meant to produce joy (what better than a poem to do that?) and to spread the influence of poetry like sunlight over a starved garden.

Please. I beg you.

Read the poems aloud. Read them to your self, to your lover, to the cat. Read them in bed, late at night. Read them when you’re hungry, when you’d rather be sleeping but can’t, read them the moment you first wake up. Read them when you’re so happy you think your life can’t be any fuller, and feel your capacity for happiness widen. Read them when you’re desperate for contact, for the touch of something other than your own voice. Take them into your body and make them part of you. Do any of this, even one of these things, and you will be a better person. Wiser, more whole.

And please check back here often for the best of the best. Old and young, published and unpublished, dead and alive.