Cry Again

Sorry for the radio silence, blogosphere. Lots of things have been happening, for which I'm very thankful. It's been a veritable whirlwind. Boone (pictured above, loving life) has made his triumphant return the the dog park, I published an article on the writing life over at the Wall Street Journal (strange days), I've celebrated my 26th birthday, and, perhaps most importantly, my flag football team remains undefeated through week 3. The sun is slowly returning itself to the PNW and, boy, are we ready for it.

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Killer first line of the moment:

"2000 years and he's still rising."

from "Jesus, the Perfect Lover" by Catie Rosemurgy
(My Favorite Apocalypse, Graywolf Press, 2001)

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“I don’t know that there is a bigger story in human history than the improvements in health, which include height, weight, disability and longevity,” said Samuel H. Preston, one of the world’s leading demographers and a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Without the 20th century’s improvements in nutrition, sanitation and medicine, only half of the current American population would be alive today, he said.

-via NYT

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Harper Lee, the tight-lipped author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel “To Kill A Mockingbird,” issued a short statement through her sister’s law firm on Wednesday saying that she had nothing to do with a forthcoming book written about her by a former Chicago Tribune reporter.

-via NYT

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When people ask me what being a young poet is like, I give them that tired bit we’ve all probably heard of academia in general — it’s like Hollywood without the money. Every time I send a poem or manuscript out for publication, I enter into a huge lottery. The slush pile is like an open call: I study, write, practice a craft, and stand before a group of anonymous folk who dependent not only the quality of my work but hundreds of other unaccountable variables — how their day was, who they’re currently reading, whether or not they react to this certain style, whether or not they’re facebooking while going through the electronic submission manager, or whatever – decide on whether or not to publish a piece. But unlike nailing the audition of a lifetime, my payout is next to nil. The poem gets picked up by a journal I respect that has maybe circulation of 2,000, and sometimes, very rarely, I get a check for $15. With that check I buy a bottle and cry again about not going to law school.

-via Michigan Quarterly Review

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"In View of the Fact" by A.R. Ammons

In View of the Fact

The people of my time are passing away: my
wife is baking for a funeral, A 60-year-old who

died suddenly, when the phone rings, and it's
Ruth we care so much about in intensive care:

it was once weddings that came so thick and
fast, and then, babies, such a hullabaloo:

now, it's this that and the other and somebody
else gone or on the brink: well, we never

thought we would live forever (although we did)
and now it looks like we won't: some of us

are losing a leg to diabetes, some don't know
what they went downstairs for, some know that

a hired watchful person is around, some like
to touch the cane tip into something steady,

so nice: we have already lost so many,
brushed the loss of ourselves ourselves: our

address books for so long a slow scramble now
are palimpests, scribbble and scratches: our

index cards for Christmases, birthdays,
halloweens drop clean away into sympathies:

at the same time we are getting used to so
many leaving, we are hanging on with a grip

to the ones left: we are not giving up on the
congestive heart failures or brain tumors, on

the nice old men left in empty houses or on
the widows who decide to travel a lot: we

think the sun may shine someday when we'll
drink wine together and think of what used to

be: until we die we will remember every
single thing, recall every word, love every

loss: then we will, as we must, leave it to
others to love, love that can grow brighter

and deeper till the very end, gaining strength
and getting more precious all the way ....

-A.R. Ammons
found in Till I End My Song; A Gathering Of Last Poems, Ed. Harold Bloom (Harper, 2010)

"V" by Adrienne Rich (from "Twenty-One Love Poems")

V

This apartment full of books could crack open
to the thick jaws, the bulging eyes
of monsters, easily: Once open the books, you have to face
the underside of everything you’ve loved—
the rack and pincers held in readiness, the gag
even the best voices have to mumble through,
the silence burying unwanted children—
women, deviants, witnesses—in desert sand.
Kenneth tells me he’s been arranging his books
so he can look at Blake and Kafka while he types;
yes; and we still have to reckon with Swift
loathing the woman’s flesh while praising her mind,
Goethe’s dread of the Mothers, Claudel vilifying Gide,
and the ghosts—their hands, clasped for centuries—
of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred at the stake,
centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves;
and we still have to stare into the absence
of men who would not, women who could not, speak
to our life—this still unexcavated hole
called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world.

-from The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich (W.W. Norton, 1978)

"That Saturday Without a Car" by Stephen Dunn

That Saturday Without a Car

for Ellen Dunn (1910-1969)

Five miles to my mother’s house,
a distance I’d never run.
“I think she’s dead”
my brother said, and hung up

as if with death
language should be mercifully approximate,
should keep the fact
that would forever be fact

at bay. I understood,
and as I ran wondered what words
I might say, and to whom.
I saw myself opening the door—

my brother, both of us, embarrassed
by the sudden intimacy we’d feel.
We had expected it
but we’d expected it every year

for ten: her heart was the best
and worst of her—every kindness
fought its way through damage,
her breasts disappeared

as if the heart itself, for comfort,
had sucked them in.
And I was running better
than I ever had. How different it was

from driving, the way I’d gone
to other deaths—
my body fighting it all off, my heart,
this adequate heart, getting me there.

-from New and Selected Poems 1974-1994 by Stephen Dunn (W.W. Norton, 1994)

Dog-Eared Pages, Underlined Sentences (#2)

“There are of course additional reasons to read poems, and reasons to learn to read them well even if they may seem at times to be written in a baffling or unnecessary code. One is, you will feel less lonely. In the company of the world’s poems a reader discovers that the terrain of a life, its core griefs and core exhilarations, are not traversed entirely alone. Others have cut paths through the same thickets, found passes through the same mountains. This evidence of companionship may sometimes bring practical assistance along the way, at other times it may only help the walking feel less hard. At still other times, though, a poem can become the single point of light in a vast darkness—a small, infinitely distant, and yet still-sufficient star to steer by.”
-Jane Hirshfield, from “Telescope, Well Bucket, Furnace: Poetry Beyond the Classroom”

“We will discover that God made not only the parts of Creation that we humans understand and approve but all of it: “All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.” And so we must credit God with the making of biting and stinging insects, poisonous serpents, weeds, poisonous weeds, dangerous beasts, and disease-causing microorganisms. That we may disapprove of these things does not mean that God is in error or that He ceded some of the work of Creation to Satan; it means that we are deficient in wholeness, harmony, and understanding—that is, we are “fallen.””
-Wendell Berry, from “Christianity and the Survival of Creation”

“As if to say that all boundaries are necessary evils and that the truly desirable condition is the feeling of being unbounded, of being king of infinite space. And it is that double capacity that we possess as human beings—the capacity to be attracted at one and the same time to the security of what is intimately known and to the challenges and entrancements of what is beyond us—it is this double capacity that poetry springs from and addresses. A good poem allows you to have your feet on the ground and your head in the air simultaneously.”
-Seamus Heaney, from “Something to Write Home About”

“But writing itself is one of the great, free human activities. There is scope for individuality, and elation, and discovery, in writing. For the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment, with the combined vividness of an actuality and flexibility of a dream. Working back and forth between experience and thought, writers have more than space and time can offer. They have the whole unexplored realm of human vision.”
-William Stafford, from “A Way of Writing”

“People do want to, and I include myself in this, hide behind some kind of comforting illusion and it’s not because they’re stupid, it’s not because they’re less fully alive, it’s just that they’re terrified and need reassurance that they have some control over what’s happening to them, or that there’s some kind of, oh I don’t know, some kind of purpose to things that often feel as if they have no purpose. That all suffering can be redeemed. And so I have respect for people’s resistances to the truth [laughs]. Because I feel it in myself, but the job of poetry is partly to resist that resistance, and look at the world, the best and worst it has to offer, as unflinchingly as possible. And if poetry transforms experience into beauty, it has to be the kind of beauty that doesn’t falsify the reality that it’s pretending to represent.”
-Alan Shapiro, in an interview with RATTLE

"April" by Louise Gluck

April

No one’s despair is like my despair—

You have no place in this garden
thinking such things, producing
the tiresome outward signs; the man
pointedly weeding an entire forest,
the woman limping, refusing to change clothes
or wash her hair.

Do you suppose I care
if you speak to one another?
But I mean you to know
I expected better of two creatures
who were given minds: if not
that you would actually care for each other
at least that you would understand
grief is distributed
between you, among all of your kind, for me
to know you, as deep blue
marks the wild scilla, white
the wood violet.

-from The Wild Iris by Louise Glück (Ecco Press, 1992)

Apologies and Insect Wings

Two poems accepted by the most-excellent folks at Phoebe. Recommended five most-excellent poetry collections at 32 Poems Blog. Ate a most-excellent venison stew. Seattle blooms, most-excellently.

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Killer first line of the moment:

"You crawl into bed, apologies and insect wings"

from Traci Brimhall's "Aubade with a Fox and a Birthmark"

(Rookery, Southern Illinois University Press, 2010)

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Average faculty salaries rose 1.4 percent from 2009-10 to 2010-11, even though average pay decreased at 30 percent of colleges and universities, according to the annual pay report being released Monday by the American Association of University Professors.

-via NYTimes

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For literary journals, the arrival of the Internet has not caused nearly the same kind of consternation as it has in book publishing or mainstream magazines — mainly because the profit motive has never really driven these boutique publishers.

-via NYTimes

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