day 7: II, III (from 21 Love Poems), by Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich is a poet I found through theology; most of the memories I have of her words circle around a professor I had at EMU who taught in the Bible and Religion department.

Her biography on the Poetry Foundation website says, "Rich's prose collections are widely-acclaimed for their erudite, lucid, and poetic treatment of politics, feminism, history, racism and many other topics." Honestly, I think I actually prefer her prose to her poetry - one of my favorite essays I ever read at EMU was an excerpt from "On Lies, Secrets and Silence":

"An honorable human relationship – that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love" – is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other. 

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. 

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity. 

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

...It isn't that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you.

It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us.

The possibilities of life between us."

 -Adrienne Rich, "On Lies, Secrets, and Silence"

"I began as an American optimist," she commented in Credo of a Passionate Skeptic, "albeit a critical one, formed by our racial legacy and by the Vietnam War...I became an American Skeptic, not as to the long search for justice and dignity, which is part of all human history, but in the light of my nation's leading role in demoralizing and destabilizing that search, here at home and around the world. Perhaps just such a passionate skepticism, neither cynical nor nihilistic, is the ground for continuing."

A friend of mine said once in a letter to Thia that Rich's poetry seems too bitter to really enjoy; I suppose that is a matter of opinion, and a matter, also, of where you are standing when you look at her words. She is interesting, anyway, even if her work isn't always "enjoyable," whatever that word means. I guess you could say that she is interesting, even if she isn't pleasant.

day 6: Qua Qua Qua, by Heather McHugh

This book of poems (The Father of the Predicaments) was a gift from my poetry professor. In class we had an assignment to "steal syntax" from a poem, which meant - take the sentence structure of a published poem, the order of nouns and verbs, the punctuation, and craft your own poem around that structure. We had four poems we could choose from, and this poem "Qua Qua Qua" was one of the options.

It was no accident that a Heather McHugh poem was an option for that assignment: her biography on the Poetry Foundation website explains that "McHugh's work is noted for its rhetorical gestures, sharp puns and interest in the materials of language itself—her self-described determination is 'to follow every surge of language, every scrap and flotsam.'” The biography continues on to quote a New York Times Book Review that said McHugh “loves the thingness of words—their heft, their shimmy, their slickness and burn..."

That is to say that her poetry is full of really interesting language, and sort of crazily (and really intelligently) twisted, syntactically.


Qua Qua Qua

Philosophical duck, it takes
some fine conjunctive paste to put
this nothing back together, gluing glue to glue –

a fine conjunction, and a weakness too
inside the nature of the noun. O duck, it doesn’t
bother you. You live in a dive, you daub the lawn,

you dabble bodily aloft: more wakes
awake, where sheerness shares
its force. The hot air moves

you up, and then
the cool removes. There’s no

such thing as things and as for as:

it’s just an alias, a form of time,
a self of other, something between thinking

and a thought (one minds his mom,

one brains his brother). You seem
so calm, o Cain of the corpus callosum,
o fondler of pondlife’s fallopian gore,

knowing nowheres the way we don’t
dare to, your web-message
subjectless (nothing a person could

pray or pry predicates from). From a log
to a logos and back, you go flinging
the thing that you are – and you sing

as you dare – on a current of

nerve. On a wing

and a wing.

My riff off this poem begins like this:


Gray lady, you need
some jumping active verbs to breathe
your bones to life; right now they’re skulking skull to skull -

yes, a leaping verb, or at least a
stifled interjection. Sh--! Lady, skulking shouldn’t
define you. You run through ditches, you lie in bed,

you struggle heavily higher...



but anyway, this is about "Qua Qua Qua," not my own work. ;)


Here it is:

day 5: to see the beloved, by Gregory Orr

"Are all poems melancholy?" my parents asked me as we drove through the dark towards Massanutten.

rats, I thought, I knew I should have started with Gregory Orr.



No, not all poems are melancholy. Some poems fairly jump off the page with joy:

To be alive: not just the carcass
But the spark.
That's crudely put, but…
If we're not supposed to dance,
Why all this music?

                                  -"To be Alive," Gregory Orr

Gregory Orr is interesting to me for many reasons; for example, the fact that he requested to be part of the Mennonite Writing Conference at EMU in 2012, despite the fact that he is not religious.

Also that he was wearing jeans and workman style leather boots at the reading he gave, and at the meet-and-greet later that day; he didn't "look" like a poet.

Also that he let me sit at a table with him in the open space on the second floor of the University Commons, and, after signing the book I bought, asked me about what I love about writing.

Also that when he was 12 years old, he accidentally killed his brother in a hunting accident, and still somehow seems to be a healthy and well-functioning human being.

He seemed like a really lovely human, actually, and his poems are full of hope. Full of hope that everything can be said, that there's nothing that is unsayable, that terrible things can find some sort of redemption, that the heart of life is good.


thus, I present:

to see the beloved, by Gregory Orr.

day 4: Praying, by Mary Oliver

what I mean when I say, "poetry can be prayer."

...this isn’t
a contest but the doorway 

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

Mary Oliver: snatches of brilliance, pages of repetition, nothing anyone could call "sophisticated" ... more than anything a writer with a tangible love for the created world. I like this last bit very much; I like how she can help a person pay attention to things like grasshoppers, daisies, the wind in the grass.

day 3: The Warrior, by Nathalie Handal

I missed meeting Nathalie Handal because I was on cross-cultural the semester she visited EMU. She is a Palestinian poet, part of her country's diaspora, having lived for a time in Central America, Europe, and now in the U.S. Thia bought me a book of hers three years ago called Love and Strange Horses, which I will read from later this month; the book I am reading from today is The Lives of Rain, which was a more recent gift.

Nathalie signed my copy of Love and Strange Horses with the phrase: Emily - may we meet in Palestine and on the page. 

We both may well never return to Palestine, but I'd like to think that the second of those meetings has already happened.

Day 2: Flammable Skirts Recalled, by Julia Kasdorf

well, I think my new microphone + related software might be a bit more complicated than I expected. I just spent ~ 1.5 hours trying to figure out the software, and I'm not actually that far into it...it's surprisingly sophisticated, like (beginner) podcast quality, and I've been wikipedia-ing terms like "MIDI-file" and "64-bit" and "output level" and I feel a bit overwhelmed.

but then I remembered that - duh - I can just keep using Soundcloud; all I had to do was set the Go Mic as the default microphone and I was good to go. #facepalm, right there.

aaaaannyway. here's "Flammable Skirts Recalled," by Julia Kasdorf. No commentary today, I'm done with my laptop for the night. x_x

Day 1: Conversation With The Soul, by Robert Bly

I begin National Poetry Month by saying that my laptop has terrible recording quality, due to the fact that the microphone picks up the sound of the internal fan. But! An external microphone is en route to my apartment as I type this, so hopefully by day three or four the recording quality will be better.

I'm beginning with a poem by Robert Bly, mostly because in my practice runs over the past few days this one turned out the best. By rights I should probably start with something by Wendell Berry, who is the first poet I took seriously as an artist, I think; I cut a poem of his out of a handout in eighth grade and taped it above my bed, for example, and nine years later I am more familiar with his body of work as a whole than I am with any other poet, but. "Conversations With the Soul" isn't such a terrible choice - it gets at how I feel about poems, anyway.

"This field is getting too small," she said.
"Don't you know anyone else
To fall in love with?"

It reminds me of Ray Bradbury talking about writing: "I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories ... Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."


Talking about poetry from middle school has sent me down a whole rabbit trail of memories - I wrote a letter to Wendell Berry a few weeks ago (to which I received a response!!) in which I said that his poem "Woods" was the first poem I consciously memorized, but that actually isn't true. The first poem I remember memorizing is "Just Me" by Margaret Hillert - a children's poem I memorized in third grade, which I remembered well enough to just find online. And I also clearly remember the poem I Have to Write by April Halprin Wayland, which was from my 7th grade English class.

...My poetry prof & mentor from EMU asked me what I will memorize this April; the problem is that nearly all the poems I love I have at least partially in my head, and so picking them doesn't feel like a challenge, but I don't want to just randomly pick something I don't love.

Ummmm. It would probably be the depressing sort of irony to memorize a poem called "The Failure of Language" during National Poetry Month, right? Maybe the blackberry poem by Seamus Heaney, instead. Or "Touch Me" by Stanley Kunitz.


This weekend some out-of-town friends visited me & the Housemate and the five of us went downtown on Saturday to catch the afternoon readings from the Split this Rock poetry festival. "Poems of Provocation and Witness" was the tagline, and the readings were held in the National Geographic Grosvenor Auditorium - which is currently displaying images and quotes from the tv series Cosmos, and it was like all my favorite things in the world smushed together at once. I felt shivery with excitement while we were waiting, and was not disappointed.

Eating dinner at the apartment afterwards, my friends were asking me things about poetry and my thoughts about Split This Rock, and I talked for a bit about spoken word poetry (which is what was happening that Saturday). It can be lazy sometimes, I told them. Because you can draw people in by how passionate your voice sounds, by how loud you can yell, and the language will suffer. I care too much about the language to enjoy it very much when the poet gets lazy, even if their message is good. This is why I find myself occasionally annoyed by Sarah Kay. (I talked about this with Ken J at EMU once, about social justice hymns and the ways they can lack the beauty of a less pointed lyric.)

Anyway.

These poets weren't lazy; they were brilliant. There was one poet there (Myra Sklarew) who was both biologist and poet, which was awesome. But my favorite was Gayle Danley, who kept her audience on pins and needles, working us like a magician - laughing one moment, silent the next. In her poem "Just like you," which I linked to, she finishes by saying that she "hopes that boy will finish his sentence," meaning both a line of words and a prison term, and the double meaning reverberated in my head for a long time.


Robert Bly can be lazy sometimes, too, I think, undercutting his ideas with words that are very hard to picture. Words like "soul," for that matter. But "Conversations With the Soul" has enough solidity to it that I forgive him for that.