FATHER'S DAY POEMS

Happy Father’s Day: June 16!

Here are three poems on the ordinary/extraordinary care fathers, often without a word, bestow:

THOSE WINTER DAYS
by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze.  No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices? 
(from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, Liveright Publishing Corp., 1966)

THE GIFT
by Li-Young Lee

To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.

I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when given something to keep.
I kissed my father.
(from Rose by Li-Young Lee, published by BOA Editions, Ltd., 1986)

THE YEARS WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING
by Bruce Weigl

My father did not read to me,
he would not quote anything or anyone,
he never alluded
as we are wont to say in my world
to poems or stories
to make a point or to teach me
some lesson about the life
beyond the slag heaps of our steel city
dying upon our dying lake.

And what you teach someone
with a belt across his back
is belts,
or I missed the point of those beatings
which were not so bad—
the loud voice in the hallway, then the belt
flashing
then the kisses on his lap.
If I could bring the words to you
as though from him,
clear as the air off this bay
you would see—

he is home from the foundry,
younger than I am now, the black
dust from the mill like a mask
and he is bending down to me
in the dusk where I waited
on the steps of the bar
for his bus
and the cathedral
he makes with his fingers
opens to a silver dime
he twists before me
and lays down into my hands
for being good he says.
(from What Saves Us by Bruce Weigl, published by TriQuaterly Books/Northwestern University, 1992)

WRITERS ON WRITING

David Letterman isn’t the only one with a top-10 list.  I’ve looked at writers speaking about writing and here are my ten favorite quotes:

“It’s silly to suggest the writing of poetry as something ethereal, as a sort of soul-crashing emotional experience that wrings you.  I have no fancy ideas about poetry.  It doesn’t come to you on the wings of a dove.  It’s something you work hard at.”
Louise Bogan

“Poets are like baseball pitchers.  Both have their moments.  The intervals are the tough things.”
Robert Frost

“Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.”
Marianne Moore

“Writers, if they are worthy of that jealous designation, do not write for other writers.  They write to give reality to experience.”
Archibald Macleish

“Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.”
Stephen Spender

“The difference between the right word and the nearly right word is the same as that between lightning and the lightning bug.”
Mark Twain

“Not gods, nor men, nor even booksellers have put up with poets being second-rate.”
Horace

“A good title should be like a good metaphor: It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.” 
Walker Percy

“You don’t have to suffer to be a poet.  Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.”
John Ciardi

“I’ve had it with those cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.”
Kenneth Rexroth

Do you have a favorite quote from a writer on the subject of writing?

MOTHERS DAY POEMS

Happy Mother’s Day!

Here are three poems on motherhood — at different times and from different perspectives:

NOTES FROM THE DELIVERY ROOM
by Linda Pastan

Strapped down,
victim in an old comic book,
I have been here before,
this place where pain winces
off the walls
like too bright light.
Bear down a doctor says,
foreman to sweating laborer,
but this work, this forcing
of one life from another
is something that I signed for
at a moment when I would have signed anything.
Babies should grow in fields;
common as beets or turnips
they should be picked and held
root end up, soil spilling
from between their toes—
and how much easier it would be later,
returning them to earth.
Bear up … bear down … the audience
grows restive, and I’m a new magician
who can’t produce the rabbit
from my swollen hat.
She’s crowning, someone says,
but there is no royal here,
just me, quite barefoot,
greeting my barefoot child.
from A Perfect Circle of Sun, 1971.


HISTORY OF MEDICINE
by Sharon Olds

Finally I fondly remember even Benylin,
Robitussin, Actifed, 
Tedral, erythromycin,
penicillin, E.E.S., I can
see the tidy open mouth
and the spoon’s regular journey toward it,
the bowl almost convex with its shuddering
load of blackish maroon.
Time slowed down as the spoon went in, I can
still feel the thrum, in the handle,
that little tug like nursing, and then
the pulling of the spoon out of the mouth,
ampicillin, ipecac, St.
Joseph’s, tetracycline, my body
tuned to the four-hour intervals—we made
one being, the bottle and the child and I,
I remember with longing.  Even the ear-drops,
lice-shampoo, wart-glaze,
even the time our son would not take
his Tedral, he was standing in his crib
and spat it out and I gently jammed another
dose through his teeth and he spat it out
until the bars and cruising rail
were splattered with dots of heavy syrup and he
understood I cared about the matter
even more than he.
As I cleaned him up with a damp cloth
I told him the germs were strong, we had to
staunchly fight them—I can hear my voice,
calm and cheerful.  I can see myself,
a young woman with an orderly array of
bottles behind her, she is struggling to be good, to be healed. 
from The Wellspring, 1996.


WHAT I LEARNED FROM MY MOTHER
by Julia Kasdorf

I learned from my mother how to love
the living, to have plenty of vases on hand
in case you have to rush to the hospital
with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants
still stuck to the buds.  I learned to save jars
large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole
grieving household, to cube home-canned pears
and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins
and flick out the sexual seed with a knife point.
I learned to attend viewings even if I didn’t know
the deceased, to press moist hands
of the living, to look in their eyes and offer
sympathy, as though I understood loss even then.
I learned that whatever we say means nothing,
what anyone will remember is that we came.
I learned to believe I had the power to ease
awful pains materially like an angel.
Like a doctor, I learned to create
from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once
you know how to do this, you can never refuse.
To every house you enter, you must offer
healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself,
the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.
from Sleeping Preacher, 1992.

Oriana Ivy

Oriana Ivy is the winner of the New Women’s Voices Prize in Poetry 2011 from Finishing Line Press, which published her winning chapbook manuscript, April Snow, last year.

Oriana, born in Poland and who came to the U. S. when she was 17, is a well-known poet and frequent reader in the San Diego, California area (where I recently heard her read poems from April Snow and other poems).  In addition to being published in The Best American Poetry 1992 (her poem chosen by Charles Simic, guest editor, with David Lehman, series editor), her poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod and many other journals and anthologies.  Oriana leads the San Diego Poetry Salon, teaches poetry workshops and writes an outstanding poetry-and-culture blog (http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com).

Oriana writes deeply absorbing poems, rich in images that startle with their steely exactness.  In her new chapbook, April Snow, poems mainly inhabit the Central Europe of her memory, the post-war Poland of her girlhood.  Here are keenly observed moments rendered with abiding warmth (toward family, loves and nature) and honesty (about history and her own past).  Her language, at once elegant and nimble, amplifies the craftsmanship of these poems.

Here are my two favorite poems from April Snow:

GRANDMOTHER’S LAUGHTER

One day in the street my grandmother
stops before another grandmother.
Both stammer: "It’s you –
you – in Auschwitz – "

Turning to me: "She and I shared
the same blanket.  Every night she said,
'You’ve got more than I'
and pulled, and I pulled back,

and so we’d tug across the bunk – "
And the two grandmothers laugh.
In the middle of a crowded
sidewalk, in old women’s dusk,

widows’ browns and grays,
they are laughing like two schoolgirls –
tears rain down the cracked
winter of their cheeks.

On Piotrkowska Avenue,
on the busiest street,
they are tugging that thin blanket.
They are pulling back.



CATERPILLAR OF SMOKE
Sudety Mountains, Silesia

Mornings glittered like panes of ice.
Near a villa that legend whispered
Hitler gave to Eva Braun,
I found, abandoned in the dormitory,
a book of poems that didn’t rhyme.

Sun flamed the long candelabras
of icicles about to crash.  I copied
phrases: a caterpillar of smoke.
My cousin Ewa astonished everyone,
solving math problems for fun.

Arms locked, slipping on the ice-glazed road,
we walked past the villa of Eva Braun,
high-school virgins secretly wondering
what it was like to be Hitler’s mistress.
I had another secret:

alone in the white forest I knew
the poem of winter had no words
unless they were crows,
stitching the mountains with crooked seams.
I was fourteen.  The future flashed

as though a careless angel
opened the wrong door in time.
Later, thousands of miles of clouds 
away from Warsaw, I found it
again – poetry after Auschwitz.

With a murderer’s hands
I caressed a woman’s breasts –
One could say anything, then:
beauty didn’t have to be beautiful –
news to me who grew up with

rhyme of silence and meter of lies.
When does the future begin –
a caterpillar of smoke
slanting white winter sky –
the spruce lost in stars of frost,
snow deeper and deeper snow.

previously published in Quarterly West

Click to see book on Amazon.

April: not the cruelest month but a poetry-filled month

April is National Poetry Month.  This celebration of poetry began in 1996.  (In Great Britain, since 2000, National Poetry Month is observed in October.)

It’s a month-long celebration of poetry readings, podcasts and just plain reading poems on your own each day.

One of our past feature readers, Gail Dendy from South Africa, shares two of her poems online, as an audio recording.


Click to hear Gail Dendy's poems

Also of note is Poem in Your Pocket Day, April 18, 2013.  The Academy of American Poets suggests that, on Poem in Your Pocket Day, you select a poem you love, carry it with you and share it with others throughout the day.

Here are some easy ways to celebrate:
— Hand out poems in your school or workplace.
— Start a street team to pass out poems in your community.
— Add a poem to your email footer.
— Mail a poem to a friend.
— Post a poem on your blog or social networking page.

Here is one of the poems I love and one of the candidates for the poem in my pocket this year:

THE SUITOR

We lie back to back. Curtains
lift and fall,
like the chest of someone sleeping.
Wind moves the leaves of the box elder;
they show their light undersides,
turning all at once
like a school of fish.
Suddenly I understand that I am happy.
For months this feeling
has been coming closer, stopping
for short visits, like a timid suitor.

Jane Kenyon

A WONDERFUL REVIEW

      I normally don't do rah-rah posts for my books but I received such a wonderful review for The ABCs of Memory that I want to share it with readers.  Scott Whitaker, a poet himself, nailed what I was trying to do in the book.  I am very pleased with this review. 

       Lenny Lianne’s newest volume of poetry, The ABCs of Memory, from ScriptWorks Press, mashes two books of poetry, with opposing ideals, together, a tradition that harkens back to Blake: An Alphabet from An Ample Nation and An Alphabet of Modest Means.  Memory strikes a contemporary chord, cherishing the past while tightening the belt on the future, a theme most Americans could identify with in these recent years of economic recovery.
      Lianne’s ABCs are broad in depth and range, and touch on cultural milestones such as Elvis, Nancy Drew, Wonder Bread, 9 – 11, and Ty Cobb, as well as personal memories of her family.  These poems are celebrations, elegies, and like the titles of the books, or parts, suggest, hint at a plethora of riches, or a plethora of troubles, big and small.
Lianne speaks with authority about young men drafted into war in “Basic Training” and young boys peeking at their Centerfold cousin in “Finding the Playmate of the Month.  Lianne doesn’t just recount these memories, invented or real, but often questions them, mourns for them without evoking false pride or anger.
The ABCs of Memory could easily fall into sentimentality: we are talking about memories.  We are talking about cultural heroes.  Lost wonders of the good old days, but Lianne does not allow the poems to do so.  She steers them towards a unified bridge, another great American tradition — unifying the country through poetic voice, where all emotional landscapes butt up against each other, like so many state lines running parallel and perpendicular.  One of the finer poems, “Velocity and Other Variables”, begins as a memory of boys throwing olives but ends as a meditation on war, as if all the world’s violence is seeded in the youthful volley of spitballs, baseballs, and olives.
This volume manages to be both grand and humble; her form is crafted, though not too formal for non-academics, but her language is direct and frank, allowing images and emotions to breath, puffing up, or shrinking up as they will.  Mostly the perspectives are from the white middle class, a shrinking population as America trudges forth in the 21st century.  That’s not a criticism, mind you, but rather a reminder that what made the country great in the 20th century was the ordinary people in the middle who built, loved, sang, drank, died, and fought for something we used to call the American Dream.  Something that perhaps belongs in America’s euro-white-centric past.  And in that sense Lianne’s book is an elegy for the American Dream, as it once was, for that ideal is changing with globalization and a leaner economy.  The ABCs of Memory is a reminder that the voice of America has gotten broader and deeper, and more complex.
— Scott Whitaker
    for The Broadkill Review

Irish Women Poets I: Moya Cannon and Leontia Flynn

St. Patrick’s Day is almost here.  Let’s celebrate with the poetry from Irish women poets.

Crannóg
by Moya Cannon

Where an ash bush grows in the lake
a ring of stones has broken cover
in this summer’s drought.
Not high enough to be an island,
it holds a disc of stiller water
in the riffled lake.

Trees have reclaimed the railway line behind us;
behind that, the road goes east —
as two lines parallel in space and time run away with us
this discovered circle draws us in.
In drowned towns
bells toll only for sailors and for the credulous
but this necklace of wet stones,
remnant of a wattle Atlantis,
catches us all by the throat.

We don’t know what beads or blades
are held in the bog lake’s wet amber
but much of us longs to live in water
and we recognise this surfacing
of old homes of love and hurt.

A troubled bit of us is kin
to people who drew a circle in water,
loaded boats with stone,
and raised a dry island and a fort
with a whole lake for a moat.

[The title is Irish and refers to a prehistoric dwelling, an artificially created island in a lake.  These were used for defensive residence during the Iron Age.]

MOYA CANNON, born in Dunfanaghy, County Donegal, now lives in Galway.  She studied history and politics at University College, Dublin and international relations at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.  

Her first collection, Oar, won the inaugural Brendan Behan Award and, in 2011, she was the recipient of the Laurence O Shaughnessy Award (University of St. Thomas, Minnesota).  Her other books include The Parchment Boat (1998); Carrying the Songs: New and Selected Poems (2008) and Hands (2011).

A number of her poems have been set to music and she’s worked with traditional Irish musicians, amongst them Kathleen Loughnane and Maighread and Triona Ni Dhomhnaill, both in the context of performance and of translating Gaelic songs.  Moya Cannon has edited Poetry Ireland Review and, in 2004, was elected to Aosdana, the Irish affiliation of creative artists.  In 2011 she was the holder of the Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University, PA.

Viola D’Amore
by Moya Cannon

Sometimes, love does die, 
but sometimes, a stream on porous rock,
it slips down into the inner dark of a hill,
joins with other hidden streams
to travel blind as the white fish that live in it.
It forsakes one underground streambed
for the cave that runs under it.
Unseen, it informs the hill
and, like the hidden streams of the viola d’amore,
makes the hill reverberate,
so that people who wander there
wonder why they find wells.

Click here for an interview with Moya Cannon.

With a different poetic voice from Moya Cannon, our second poet, Leontia Flynn, is also a poet from Northern Ireland.  She’s been “celebrated as an original poet — nervy, refreshing, deceptively simple.”  Here are two poems.

THE VIBRATOR
by Leontia Flynn

When you had packed up all your books and clothes
and taken the last crap poster down, and walked
like a mournful ghost through the blank, familiar rooms,
a thought struck — clang — loud as a two-pence piece
in a metal bucket: where was the vibrator?

Oh cruel Gods!  Oh vulgar implement
that was stowed discreetly on some shelf or cupboard
but has almost certainly not been boxed away …
Oh dirty gift of doubtful provenance.
Oh gift — surprise! — for the next week’s settling tenants.

Oh nice surprise for next week’s settling tenants,
four Polish men paid peanuts by the hour
—for in Belfast too The Market holds its sway —
to find in some nook or niche-hole the vibrator
still beats, in the dark, its battery-powered heart.
© 2011, Leontia Flynn

Leontia Flynn won an Eric Gregory Award in 2001.  Her first book of poems These Days (2004) won the Forward Poetry Prize for best First Collection.  It also was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize.  Drives, her second poetry collection, was published in 2008.  That same year she won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a major Individual Artists Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.  Drives also was shortlisted for the 2009 Poetry Now Award.  Her third collection, Profit and Loss,published in 2011, was the Poetry Book Society Choice for Autumn as well as being shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Leontia Flynn has written a Ph.D. thesis on the Irish woman poet Medbh McGuckian.  She’s been Research Fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen’s University Belfast since 2005 and currently edits the journal The Yellow Nib with Frank Ormsby. 


CASABLANCA, BACKWARDS
by Leontia Flynn

Rick (to Ilse): Who are you really and what were you before?  What did you do, and what did you think?

A plane is taking off in a bank of fog.
It leaves the grainy sky, the mapped Moroccan sand.
It is four months since I’ve seen you.  In my hand
the video’s controls point in the air.
“Who were we really and what were we before?”
These things are turning over in my mind

as the plane starts banking down.  It comes to land
on a grainy fog bank on a concrete plain.
Casablanca backwards; in this version
Rick Blaine sticks his neck out — really — for no one.
As time does not go by.  As history gives way to love —
all the rain of Morocco is raining back to the source!
the rain-soaked note resolving into words.
One tear streams back up Ingrid Bergman’s face.
© 2006, Leontia Flynn

Here are two links to hear (sound only) Leontia Flynn read two more poems:

Click to hear Flynn read Dorothy Parker.

Click to hear Flynn read Drive.