Emily Dickinson was the first poet I actively read. I was in high school, and had stumbled upon a collection of her poetry in the discard pile at the library. I didn’t know anything about her writing; I just knew that she was important and so I took her book home. As unfamiliar as I was with poetry, reading her was a study in intuition—I didn’t know how or why the poems worked, or what the dashes meant, but I didn’t care. The poems seemed so simply composed but so full of meaning I found myself hovering over one or two of them for hours trying to figure out how they worked.

I recently went back and reread her work, and stumbled across this great poem. Just savor the opening line:

1128.

These are the Nights that Beetles love–

From Eminence remote

Drives ponderous perpendicular

His figure intimate

The terror of the Children

The merriment of men

Depositing his Thunder

He hoists abroad again–

A Bomb upon the Ceiling

Is an improving thing–

It keeps the nerves progressive

Conjecture flourishing–

Too dear the Summer Evening

Without discreet alarm–

Supplied by Entomology

With its remaining charm–

Emily Dickinson has captured the American imagination with her mystery. Trying to figure out how she spent her time and what she read and who inspired her has become a riddle. The Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts is full of pithy facts about her life; if you can’t get out there to visit it, their website is fun to explore. Learn a little bit more about America’s Sweetheart Poet.

Matthew Dickman is cool. He has shaggy hair, round square glasses, and isn’t shy to do a poetry reading in his Converse All-Stars (with his pants cuffed, of course). His most recent book, Mayakovsky’s Revolver is a foray into a poetic modern world. The long poems carry you with them; they aren’t so much about one or two good lines as much as they are about image after image slamming into you.

…And then I think

the world is like a crowded staircase

full of midtown commuters all pushing and pulling, each dropping

something important that they will not remember

until it’s too late. And then I think I’m an idiot for thinking

the world could be a story I tell myself

to make myself better.

-from “Blue Sky”

The Poetry Foundation has a video of Matthew reading his poem, Slow Dance. It’s worth a look.

But that’s not what make Matthew really cool. He also has a twin brother, Michael Dickman. And guess what? He’s a poet too.

If Matthew’s poems are densely packed punches, Michael’s are stretched out like taffy. Each image is given plenty of space on the page, stretching across stanza and line breaks.

Here is an excerpt from “My Autopsy,” originally published in The New Yorker.

There is a way

if we want

into everything

 

I’ll eat the chicken carbonara and you eat the veal, the olives, the

small and glowing loaves of bread

 

I’ll eat the waiter, the waitress

floating through the candled dark in shiny black slacks

like water at night

 

The napkins, folded into paper boats, contain invisible Japanese

poems

 

You eat the forks,

all the knives, asleep and waiting

on the white tables

 

What do you love?

 

I love the way our teeth stay long after we’re gone, hanging on

despite worms or fire

 

I love our stomachs

turning over

the earth

Read the rest here.

Bee Donley at Murrah High School

Join us Tuesday, April 16th at 5:00 for an event with Ms. Bee Donley in honor of her new poetry book Mostly Ghosts. The event will be held in our Dot Com building adjacent to Banner Hall.

This December, I was given a surprise from my 12th grade English teacher, Bee Donley. (She was also my daughter, Saramel’s, high school English teacher.) Bee had given me a copy of her book of poetry: Mostly Ghosts. A perfect gift since Christmas time is about sharing joy and reflecting on our shared memories.

I’ve slowly worked through her little book and have enjoyed reading of her past and of her inner self.

Mostly Ghosts is divided into three sections, titled: Ghosts, Delta Poems, and Through the Mists. The poems reflect Bee’s past as she shares memories of her father, WWII, and a young lady’s romantic memories.

“Women listen; men only think they do.

Maybe that’s not fair.

But only women hear an inflection

Go suddenly flat

Catch a turn of head that speaks disinterest

Sense a turning out, the murmured response.

 

And all good Southern girls know

To turn the conversation”

-from “Generally Speaking”

Bee (Ms. Donley) is one of the loveliest ladies I’ve ever known. Her wise beauty is so well reflected in her poetry.

Perhaps my favorite poem, “Quail Hunting with my Father,” reflects Bee’s core and her ability to relate to her high school students.

“my father got a cup of hot coffee

That he spooned Jack Daniels into.

We settled down as we watched

sparks from the fireplace

And always the unspoken words kept

my life together.”

In her poem, “Litany on an Eighty-fifth Birthday,” I believe Bee is at her best. Those who know her know she is an example of a well lived life:

“What happened to that girl, the dancer, the flirt,

the wife, the mother?

I don’ recognize this stranger.

What happened to all the yesterdays?

Get out the rose chiffon and let’s dance.”

It’s odd how our paths cross; figuring out why is another story. Bee was kind to me, she passed me even though I was a terrible student, allowing me to graduate from high school. My 12th grade term paper on Ian Fleming’s James Bond, reflected my youthful love of reading mysteries. She gave me an “A” and I skated out of Murrah by a sliver. Little did we both know that in later years she would become a loyal follower of Lemuria. All these years our lives have stayed connected through reading. She is my teacher, and I her bookseller.

Bee is a dear friend and a fine poet. Let me conclude with the final lines of her poem, “Precedence”:

“I have no problem believing that

Dogs and trees and right paths go together”

The best Valentine’s day presents are always handmade (Just ask your mom, she still has that red construction paper heart with the doily glued to it that you made her in first grade). In honor of the holiday that we all love to love (and love to hate) I thought I’d provide a step by step guide on how to write your own, one-of-a-kind valentine for that special someone (or your favorite Lemuria bookseller).

1. Get some supplies.

Don’t be scared to branch out from the red paper, white lace theme. There’s nothing wrong with good, old lined paper. It might just bring back memories of illicit notes passed in high school.

A Perfect Heart

 

To make a perfect heart you take a sheet

of red construction paper of the type

that’s rough as a cat’s tongue, fold it once,

and crease it really hard, so it feels

as if your thumb might light up like a match,

 

then choose your scissors from the box. I like

those safety scissors with the sticky blades

and the rubber grips that pinch a little ski

as you snip along. They make you careful,

just as you should be, cutting out a heart

 

for someone you love. Don’t worry that your curve

won’t make a valentine; it will. Rely

on chewing on your lip and symmetry

to guide your hand along with special art.

And there it is at last: a heart, a heart!

-Ted Kooser, from Valentines

2. Don’t try to plan out what you are going to write. Follow where the poem leads you.

A little obscure? Think about it this way: If you are going to go for a walk, you know where you are starting, and at some point, you’ll need to return to where you began. But you don’t know what route you will take or what you will see along the way. Don’t be scared to make a wrong turn; you can always retrace your steps.

In Time

The night the world was going to end

when we heard those explosions not far away

and the loudspeakers telling us

about the vast fires on the backwater

consuming undisclosed remnants

and warning us over and over

to stay indoors and make no signals

you stood at the open window

the light of one candle back in the room

we put on high boots to be ready

for wherever we might have to go

and we got out the oysters and sat

at the small table feeding them

to each other first with the fork

then from our mouths to each other

until there were none and we stood up

and started to dance without music

slowly we danced around and around

in circles and after a while we hummed

when the world was about to end

all those years all those nights ago

-W.S. Merwin

3. It’s a love poem, don’t be scared to be sentimental.

Keep in mind, though, you want to be specific. Don’t say what everyone else says. Say something special about the person or how you feel. You love them more than Oreo cookies? Say that. But what is your favorite part about Oreo cookies? The cream or the cookie? Are the 2 of you an Oreo cookie? etc.

Love Song for Alex, 1979

My monkey-wrench man is my sweet patootie;

the lover of my life, my youth and age.

My heart belongs to him and to him only;

the children of my flesh are his and bear his rage

Now grown to years advancing through the dozens

the honeyed kiss, the lips of wine and fire

fade blissfully into the distant years of yonder

but all my days of Happiness and wonder

are cradled in his arms and eyes entire.

They carry us under the waters of the world

out past the starposts of a distant planet

And creeping through the seaweed of the ocean

they tangle us with ropes and yarn of memories

where we have been together, you and I.

-Margaret Walker, from This is My Century

4. It doesn’t have to be happy. But if it is happy, that’s okay too.

Some of the best love poems are a little bit bitter, a little bit melancholy, a little bit sarcastic.

5. Not in love? Well, write a love poem about not being in love.

I feel horrible. She doesn’t

love me and I wander around

the house like a sewing machine

that’s just finished sewing

a turd to a garbage can lid.

-Richard Brautigan

We would love to read your poems, so feel free to post them on our blog or Facebook!

The nice thing about poets, is that although they are good at writing about love, they are equally bad at maintaining it.Much like the rest of us I suppose, except they make it sound better. We may linger over the poems describing the romance we long for, but in reality, sometimes it is nice to know that you aren’t the only bitter, single person in the world.

Sandra Beasley’s i was the jukebox is full of witty and spunky poems that could easily pass for conversations in Sex in the City. I say that in the best possible way. She is spunky. If you ever have the opportunity to hear her read, take it; she makes her poems come to life. She is a master at marrying the poetic tradition with real life. Reading her work is like reading a well-written screenplay. It’s Always Sunny in Philadephia meets Robert Frost.

Another Failed Poem About the Greeks

 

His sword dripped blood. His helmet gleamed.

He dragged a Gorgon’s head behind him.

 

As first dates go, this was problematic.

He itched and fidgeted. He said Could I

 

save something for you? But I was all out

of maidens bound to rocks. So I took him

 

on a roller coaster, wedging in next to

his preastplated body in the little car.

 

He put his arm around me, as the Greeks do.

On the first dip he laughed. ON the first drop

 

he clutched my shoulder and screamed like

a catamite. When we ratched to a full stop

 

he said Again. We went on the Scrambler,

the Apple Turnover, the Log Flume.

 

We went on the Pirate Ship three times,

swooshing forard, back, upside down,

 

and he cried Aera! waving his sword,

until the operator asked him to please keep

 

all swords inside the car. He was a good sport,

letting the drachmas fall out of his pockets;

 

sparing the girl who spilled punch on his shield;

waving as I rode the carousel’s hippogriff

 

though it was a slow ride, and I made him

hold my purse. On the way home

 

he said We should do this again sometime,

though we both knew it would never happen

 

since he was Greek, of course, and dead,

and somewhere a maiden rattled in her chains.

I would be remiss to not mention Anne Sexton. Her Love Poems are, as the title suggests, written on love. But she writes of a complex love, filled with longing, unrequited love, illicit (and maybe, she would say, not so illicit) affairs, and temporary and fleeting love. Her voice is the voice of the modern woman, trapped in ourselves and fighting to be heard. Anne Sexton is fearless; she tackles everything with a blunt honesty that can’t be anything but true.

from For My Lover, Returning to His Wife

 

She has always been there, my darling.

She is, in fact, exquisite.

Fireworks in the dull middle of February

and as real as a cast-iron pot.

 

Let’s face it, I have been momentary.

A luxury. A bright red sloop in the harbor.

My hair rising like smoke from the car window,

Littleneck clams out of season.

She is more than that. She is your have to have,

has grown you your practical your tropical growth.

This is not an experiment. She is all harmony.

She sees to oars and oarlocks for the dinghy,

 

has placed wild flowers at the window at breakfast,

sat by the potter’s wheel at midday,

set forth three children under the moon…

I’ve blogged about Claudia Emerson’s Late Wife before, but I’m going to do it again. This collection of poetry won her the Pulitzer Prize in 2005. She is not as saucy as Sexton or Beasley, rather her poems are quiet but resonant. They build momentum line by line, until the silence is filled with the narrator’s voice. The poems recordof  falling in and out of love; the aftermath of her divorce and her remarriage. The poems are built on the objects of a marriage–the house, the dishes, the shoes left by the door. She steers clear of bitterness, yet her writing is an elegy to the loss of love.

Frame

 

Most of the things you made for me–armless

rocker, blanket chest, lap desk–I gave away

to friends who could use them and not be reminded

of the hours lost there, the tedious finishes.

 

But I did keep the mirror, perhaps because

like all mirrors, most of these years it has been

invisible, part of the wall, or defined

by reflection–safe–because reflection,

 

after all, does change. I hung it here

in the front dark hallway of this house you will

never see, so that it might magnify

the meager light, become a lesser, backward

 

window. No one pauses long before it.

This morning, though, as I put on my coat,

straightened my hair, I saw outside my face

its frame you made for me, admiring for the first

 

time the way the cherry you cut and planed

yourself had darkened, just as you said it would.

Love and Poetry have been going steady for awhile now. Shakespeare’s Love Sonnets are a classic stand-by, but as Elizabeth Bennet advised so wisely: “I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve [love] entirely away”, so if you are planning to give your Valentine a good poem, make sure it is a good one. And maybe steer clear of sonnets.

The Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Ted Kooser, began sending Valentine poems to his lady friends in 1986 and a tradition was born. All of these poems are collected in Valentines, along with illustrations by Robert Hanna. These poems are not overly sentimental (a sign of a good poet) rather he writes of the holiday we all love (and loathe) with candor. All kinds of love make appearances in this collection: unrequited, worn and tattered, lingering, passionate, and impartial. But Ted Kooser’s modern interpretation of an age-old subject is fresh and full of vitality.

For You, Friend

this Valentine’s Day, I intend to stand

for as long as I can on a kitchen stool

and hold back the hands of the clock,

so that wherever you are, you may walk

even more lightly in your loveliness;

so that the weak, mid-February sun

(whose chill I willl feel from the face

of the clock) cannot in any way

lessen the lights in your hair, and the wind

(whose subtle insistence I will feel

in the minute hand) cannot tighten

the corners of your smile. People

drearily walking the winter streets

will long remember this day:

how they glanced up to see you

there in a storefront window, glorious,

strolling along on the outside of time.

Pablo Neruda wrote the Captain’s Verses to Matilde, his lover and companion in exile. The poems are full of passion and energy. Plus, what says passionate love more than poetry in Spanish. Neruda writes of the highs and lows of love (yes, sometimes he gets angry) but the translucency gives his poems more power.

Night on the Island

 

All night I have slept with you

next to the sea, on the island.

Wild and sweet you were between pleasure and sleep,

between fire and water.

 

Perhaps very late

our dreams joined

at the top or at the bottom,

up above like branches moved by a common wind,

down below like red roots that touch.

 

Perhaps your dream

drifted from mine

and through the dark sea

was seeking me

as before,

when you did not yet exist,

when without sighting you

I sailed by your side,

and your eyes sought

what now–

bread, wine, love, anger–

I heap upon you because you are the cup

that was waiting for the gifts of my life.

 

I have slept with you

all night long while the dark earth spins

with the living and the dead,

and on waking suddenly

in the midst of the shadow

my arm encircled your wrist.

 

La Noche un la Isla

Toda la noche he dormido contigo

junto al mar, en le isla.

Salvaje y dulce era s entre el placer y el sueno,

entre el fuego y el agua.

 

Tal vez tu sueno

se separo del mio

y por el mar oscuro

me buscaba

com antes,

cuando aun no existias,

cuando sin dicaisarte

navague por tu lado,

y tus ojos buscaban

lo que ahora

–pan, vino, amor y colera–

te doy a manos llenas

porque tu eres la copa

que esperaba los doned de mi vida.

 

He dormido contifo

toda la noche mientras

la oscura tierra gira

con vivos y con muertos,

y al despertar de pronto

en medio de la sombra

mi brazo rodeaba tu cintura.

What would romantic poetry be without E.E. Cummings Erotic Poems? The words are stark on the page, tightly edited and cropped and exposed. Cummings seeming stream-of-consciousness work lends itself easily to the subject of physical love. The poems are sensuously rough and gritty. When you read them, you can’t help but imagine him typing furiously away on his typewriter, to passionate to bother with capitalization except for emphasis. A woman has just left and the floor is striped with the shadows cast from his blinds. I may not know what he means, but I have felt what he has feels.

ii.

when i have thought of you somewhat too

much and am become perfectly and

simply Lustful….sense of gradual stir

of beginning muscle, and what it will do

to me before shutting….understand

i love you….feel your suddenly body reach

for me with a speed of white speech

 

(the simple instant of perfect hunger

Yes)

how beautifully swims

the fooling world in my huge blood,

cracking brains A swiftlyenormous light

–and furiously puzzling through,prismatic,whims,

the chattering self perceives with hysterical fright

 

a comic tadpole wriggling in delicious mud.

  I’m usually not one to willingly read lectures, even if they are about poetry, but Madness, Rack, and Honey is so much more than that. Mary Ruefle takes poetry out of the classroom and into the world with her profound insights about the written word.

Madness, Rack, and Honeyis a compilation of Mary Ruefle’s graduate school lectures on poetry and the writing life. She discusses beginnings and endings, the moon, fear and writing, and the power of secrets.

“The poem is the consequence of its origins. Give me the fruit and I will take from it a seed and plant it and watch grow the tree from which it fell.”

Mary Ruefle, originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is concise in her prose and poetry. It is so easy to read. I highly recommend that you leave it for your Sunday afternoon. Something pleasant and insightful to peruse.

Bavaria

The mountain skies were clear

except for the umlaut of a cloud

over the village.

The little girl wore yellow gloves.

She looked in the peephole and saw

a stack of unused marionettes.

Yet, she wondered.

Brandon Shimoda’s new collection of poetry, Portuguese is a welcome addition to the poetic canon. A reimagining of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself for the modern age, with a little bit of the Beats thrown in, Shimoda’s collection a continuation of the American poetic tradition. But America has changed. Shimoda brushes up against all the hot topics, without standing on a soap-box–the Middle East, sexual identity, etc.

I have a shirt made of paper–I wear it to the Lebanese wedding

I do not know the bride or groom–I take refuge ini

A paper existence, within

My body–weak–I roll

My body up my arms

Paper starving the distribution

—from “The Cedars of Lebanon”

The result of collaboration between 2 small publishing houses (Tin House and Octopus Books), Portuguese represents an evolution of the publishing industry. When a lot of publishing houses are cutting back their poetry interests, Tin House and Octopus Books are uniting to keep poetry alive.

Poetry makes the best gift. I promise. Here are some of my favorite gifts for the reader in your life that has probably read everything.

The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry, edited by Rita Dove

This cloth-bound book looks great on the shelf, and is a great compilation of the last 100 years of poetry.

“Here are the poems I see emblazoned on pennants along the road we have just traversed, my selection from the poetry that accompanied America through the last century, interpolated with the times in which they were forged and upon which they exerted their spirit. This is the proper moment to look back–after the first decade of the twenty-first century has given us the illusion of distance, after we have rocnciled ourselves to owning this scary new millennium by looking forward we’ve begun to forget. The past is never more truly the past than now.” –Rita Dove in the introduction

She Walks in Beauty: A Woman’s Journey Through Poems, selected by Caroline Kennedy

This book is a great gift for Moms, Daughters, and Daughters that are going to be Moms. The poems are divided into categories (Falling in Love, Marriage, Growing up and Growing Old, etc.) so you can read them as you go.

Pablo Neruda: Absence and Presence, Luis Poirot

Published after Pablo Neruda’s death, this book combines black and white photographs of Pablo and Matilde’s home in Isla Negra, as well as remembrances from his friends and fellow writers.

Love Poems, Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda’s love poems are uniquely tender and give a vibrant and complex love explanation in verse.

In the night we shall go in

to steal

a flowering branch.

We shall climb over the wall

in the darkness of a private garden,

two shadows in the shadow.

–from The Stolen Branch

 Birds, Beasts, and Seas: Nature Poems from New Directions, Edited by Jeffrey Yang

If you like Mary Oliver, (she has a new book out this year, by the way. You can read about it here.) then you will love this collection. Spanning centuries of poetry, these poems are easy to pick up and read in any order. A great addition to the stack of books beside your favorite reading chair.