Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
I buy tomatoes, I buy onions, I buy tea.
The pantry is stocked with sweets but my tongue
needs savory. Here is my troublesome past
come back— it coasts across the interstate
without brakes, slaps down the bill, rearranges
all the furniture. Out there, a white haze smudges
the bank above the road. A brown thrasher in the yard
mouths everything twice: Consider, consider.
What I imagine he says is good advice.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Ship of fool: poemsWorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder
This is the last of four books that Kristin Berkey-Abbott and I are encouraging others to also read and blog about this month. Send me the link to your blog post and I’ll update to include it.
It was really just happenstance that I found myself reading Ship of Fool on Easter. But inevitably I started thinking: is Fool a Christ figure? God certainly sacrifices him more than once. And the next-to-last poem in the book, “Foolproof,” contains a pretty broad hint:
“Moron!” God thunders, watching a snot-green cloud
pour out of His perfect wand for hard-to-reach places.
“They’re going to crucify Me in the broadsides.” Could be worse,
thinks Fool, backdraft whistling through his hands and feet.
In another poem, Fool beats God in a game of miniature golf and as a reward inherits the CEO-ship of the cosmos, and “when Fool’s sworn in,/ the meek finally do inherit the earth.” So far, so Christ-like! In one of his incarnations, he is even “The Perfect Fool”:
Every month his house makes the cover
of Before magazine. His Yugo’s the envy
of the trendier scrap yards. Thanks to him,
the common step-ladder now boasts thirty
caution stickers. The ABA would name him
Plaintiff of the Year, if he’d only sue.
But he’s too foolish, grief’s warm-up bag,
unhygenically pure, who might love anyone.
Then again, is Wile E. Coyote a Christ figure? I think the ability to shape-shift and come back from the dead again and again is a basic attribute of any trickster, especially the foolish kind. In “Fool Electric,”
The late news asks if Fool could be Jesus,
back to give every Christian family
their own Lazarus. Polls show 97 per centof Americans now believe in a loving God,
the remaining three percent intent on
fleeing the country.
Something tells me that believing any hypothesis advanced on the late news is probably foolish. Also, as Trowbridge goes on to suggest, too many Lazaruses would be indistinguishable from the zombie apocalypse. Fool is always taking things to extremes. Something must be done:
After he dies
for us in this and several other wide shots
at guardian-angelship, Fool’s put in charge
of the Small Consolations detail that plants
dimes and quarters under sofa cushions.
Each one you find contains his blessing.
(“Fool and His Money”)
I don’t mean to be rude, but a lot of poetry these days is essentially autobiographical, so we should certainly entertain the possibility that Fool might actually be an alter ego for the author. But contradicting that theory is the fact that the book does also have a middle section of more straight-forward, first-person poems from a 1950s childhood. Who is this fast-car-driving delinquent smack in the middle of a Fool sandwich? It’s as if Everyman becomes This One Guy for a little bit. And not only he but his friends, his parents, the coach — they all manage to act the fool. Suddenly we’re dealing less with an archetype than an epiphenomenon.
Like his fellow Midwesterner Matt Mason, Trowbridge takes humor seriously. Often after reading a book of poems I’ll realize I have very little idea what it was about — and then I’ll go on to write about it anyway. I would like to think that most reviewers of poetry are like this, and that I am one of a company of fools. With Ship of Fool, though, I have the feeling I understood it all too well — which reminds me of a series of standardized achievement tests I took in the 9th grade. I remember how easy I thought the sections on mechanical ability and spatial perceptions were: I understood all the questions, and filled in the little circles with complete confidence. You can imagine how crushed I was to discover that I got most of the answers wrong in those sections, testing in the bottom 20 percent. My buddy across the table (we took the tests in art class, for some damn reason) aced those sections of the test, but did poorly in the verbal/communicative sections, at which I excelled. “Does this mean I’m stupid?” he asked me. Using my now-certifiably exceptional communication skills, I told him, “I think we’re all stupid in our own way.” Which I persist in finding a deeply comforting thought. I suspect Trowbridge might, too.
And after winter, the plants I thought
had surely perished in hardscrabble
soil, now signal their return: once dry,
the arms of the hydrangea now push
tight-woven clusters of veined green;
along the ground, runners roll aside
the stones and begin to edge the walk.
Everywhere, aspect of light that hid before
behind curtains of fog or sheets of snow
or blinding rain. Vivid gash of peonies,
new swelling throats— lilies speckling
with pollen dust: as though a season
wracked turns now from a long fast.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
This Is Not a Place to Sing: poemsWorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder
Polish-American poet Christina Pacosz traveled to the homeland of her father’s family in the mid-1980s, and the moving poems in this brief but powerful collection were the result. Published by West End Press in 1987, it’s long out of print, but last fall Christina announced that she had discovered a box of copies in her attic and I asked her to send me one. I’m glad I did. In just 26 poems, she makes the grand sweep of Polish history and many details of its contemporary landscape come alive for me, and I guess it’s the latter that make the former seem bearable, though she doesn’t go out of her way to suggest avenues for redemption.
The title, we learn from the acknowledgements, was something said by a woman in the Auschwitz Museum coffee shop, admonishing some overly boisterous schoolchildren. Pacosz wrestles with this idea throughout the book: how to sing in the face of so much needless suffering and death? “If I open/ my mouth/ I could/ drown,” says Baba Yaga, briefly imagining the life of a pious peasant woman (“Baba Yaga Speculates”). In “The Trumpeter of Krakow,” Pacosz translates the message of the trumpeter’s broken-note song:
Each of us
is invaded
daily, hourly,
minute by minute
by time
and its deadly
arrows.How to sing
from the highest steeple
and warn the city
with the sounds
that live
in us
and the world?
“Rafting the Dunajec” begins with accordion-playing gypsies and the speaker so grateful they’ve survived the holocaust, she gladly tips them before stepping on the boat. Then:
We come to the gorge
and the wind off the high peaks
washes us with the odor
of spruce, rosemary, pepper.I say to myself: If
I knew a song
I would sing
and then I hear
a raft of childrensinging across the water,
and I am happy,
just like I am happy
when I hear
the water
as it meets
the rocks.
“The Jewish Cemetery, Warsaw” begins with an epigram from Psalm 137: “For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormenters, mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!'” and begins: “Only the trees sing now…” In “Krakow Monument: Another View,” Pacosz notes: “There are always those/ who would kill/ the singer.” And the emotional climax of the book comes in a brief poem for the director of the Jewish Orphanage in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation:
For Dr. Janusz Korczak Who Was Not Afraid to Sing
At the end
of the line
he knew
what
to do.Walking
from the boxcar
to the gas chamber
he led the childrensinging.
Instead of songs and their inevitably inadequate words, Pacosz finds, there are often flowers — ubiquitous offerings, bouquets for every occasion. “Auschwitz: Oswiecim” begins,
We are leaving
flowers like messages
in this awful place:what else to do
except fall down
with weeping
into a grieving
that will never
be done.And how to live
in the world then?So it is calendula
for memory, here
with the children’s
clothing they never
outgrew.
On the feast day for “The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, August 15,” bouquets are gathered to be blessed in church. Flowers partake of the Virgin’s own dual nature, Pacosz implies, but the blessed bouquets serve a practical purpose, too:
And when the next cow calves,
the dried bloom
will sweeten her
first drinking water,
and Mary’s blessing
flow from her udders.
The book ends with a visit to the speaker’s ancestral homeplace, suggesting the only way out is further in. It is, however, as tough and unsentimental a poem as any in the book. I am left with the music for Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs running through my head. Though the poems in this collection aren’t quite so uniformly mournful, Pacosz understands as well as Gorecki did the power of simplicity and an unflinching gaze.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Thanks to Kathleen Kirk for this very warm, light-hearted review of Odes to Tools. I must admit I’m a little abashed: she did my chapbook way more justice than I did hers. It seems she’s able to hold her alcohol better than me. In any case, it’s very gratifying to see one’s work receive such a close and sympathetic reading. Kathleen says:
I admire the precision of language and observation in this book, how the setting unfolds around the focus on the tool at hand, and how each poem, moving quickly and lightly, can also, if it wants, take on a large philosophical idea.
I love how there’s a life here, a personal history, work, a childhood.
Read the whole post here.
Ruth Ellen Kocher makes being lost sound not only attractive but essential, occasionally with a hint of blues—
If he asks, tell him I am gone.
I am the movement you’re just now forgetting.
Tell him the waves have taken my form.
That I am his past and I am lost also.
(“The White Camel”)
—but most often in language so consistently unpredictable I read with mouth agape. I reach the end of a poem and am not sure how I got there, but it feels right. The paper is thick, almost card stock, so you can’t see through from one page to the next. Each poem feels like another tooth forward on a ratchet. I am just awake enough to appreciate this poetry, but not enough to really do it justice.
What do you say with memory—
that the continents long for each other
just as children who are bundled ghosts
leave their voices as trails in the woods,
the lakes are burdened with notions of ice
and heaviness, just like us.
The things we trust are less
and less true in winter.
(“February Leaving”)
All I can say is I like the way these poems make my mind feel. They satisfy better than most Mina Loy’s definition of poetry — “prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea.” Listen:
The shadow slant of your own body
somehow takes the ground in,
desperately wanting the surface of grass,
rock of the familiar in the moon’s eye:
light that blues your midnight form.
How many years have you been gone?
And who drove you away—not a man or a stone
seeming to mark some path you run towards,
but a wind that rose in the pink depth of your lung
like first breath, the exaltation in knowingyou are lost. Say your own name backwards to prove
you exist, an ancient tongue that steels the simple evening air on which
you rely like Pharaoh building the tomb for years.
(“When the Moon Knows You’re Wandering”)
I enjoy finding references to local and regional landscapes scattered through the book. Kocher lived in this area for a while some 20 years ago, and even then was one of the most accomplished poets in the State College poetry reading scene, though I lost touch with her after she went out to Arizona to pursue advanced degrees in creative writing and literature. So you can imagine my pleasure when a mutual friend gifted me with this volume last Christmas, and I read a few pages and realized that Ruth has risen more or less into the stratosphere. If we lived in the sort of society that honored its poets, you can bet I’d be bragging up a storm about our old connection.
Appalachians continue
to wear soft layers of moss
down to the rock teeth inside. The river
cuts deeper. Sky descends
to Atlantic storm.This is where the people sing,
far from me, where winters seem coldest
and the deep call of wilderness
screams through trees into the sore
landscape of quarry cliffs,
where woods turn suddenly into a city
of narrow roads…
(“At Home the People Sing”)
The earth is doing very interesting things in these poems, and I want to know more about that: I will have to re-read soon. In “Herself, in the Window,” for example,
The ground is a black cloth
the white birch climb from. The real woods
died years ago. No matter how hard she looks
there isn’t a song here.
“Lay Down Lilies” made me look at burial in a new light — and how often does that happen? Here’s how it starts:
The sun burned no harder than the moon
the evening we walked a mile to bury the blue fish
that had lived in the freshwater tank we’d bought for it.
The air split when it met our lungs,
swallowed and spewed in half seconds,
a visible breath that went its own way
as the smoke from burning houses departs
from the lives inside them.
These poems are haunted, not only by literal ghosts but by the still-living who are dreaming of elsewhere, fantasizing about war, masturbating in a field. As the title poem puts it: “The moon knows you’re wandering,/ even though the road thinks you’re home.” Take this blog post: it seems nearly complete by any reasonable standard, and yet I’ve barely begun to articulate what I admire about the book. I have not even quoted from my favorite poem, “Sleepwalker on the Mountain” — which is what I’ll become here if I don’t hit Publish soon.
Malleable heart, mouth open to the sky and rain,
my discipline is to learn your one singing note—
to fish it out of the depths of a fountain like a penny
someone tossed there long ago, or like the sun
in hiding. Not so easy to twirl the simple
wooden mallet, learn how the wrist must circle
lightly around the rim; or when it comes, how to loft
its brassy bangle, let it eddy across the grass.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Last April when I blogged about the similarly titled book of poetry We Don’t Know We Don’t Know, by Nick Lantz, I mentioned that Lantz wasn’t the first poet to use that Donald Rumsfeld quote for a title, and lamented that I hadn’t read Matt Mason’s 2006 book. A few months later, Mason saw my post and promptly sent me a copy, complete with a friendly inscription, which of course endeared me to the book right away. On second reading today, I still find much to admire. I don’t usually pay much attention to publishers’ descriptions, but this one happens to be spot-on: “More entertaining than you’d think a book of poetry should be and more poetic than you’d think an entertaining book can be.”
I gather Mason is a regular on the poetry slam circuit. Many of the poems in this volume must be very effective for live audiences, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t work on the page as well. I was pretty sleep-deprived today, and moreover short on time to read since I was also shopping, and Things We Don’t Know We Don’t Know proved to be a good companion. It’s much more of a miscellany than the Lantz book, and we don’t even get to the aftermath of 9/11 until page 59, but by that point we’ve been well prepared by poems about Stonewall Jackson, the ghost dancers, the Strategic Air Command Museum, and the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, built by the heir of the Winchester repeating rifle fortune to try to fend off the malicious spirits of those killed by the rifle:
With Dad off work for the weekend, families pay
and tour the stairways to nowhere,
doors to brick walls, the thirteen bathrooms,
ghost-driven sprawl
cracking and spiraling for fear
of all those killed by her husband’s creation,
“the gun that won
the west” fattening the skies with those angry dead…
“Ghost-driven sprawl” is a nice example of Mason’s gift for succinct phrases which are at once humorous and accurate, with a dash of pathos. I must say that, much as I enjoy good light verse, it’s also nice to see free-verse poetry that takes humor a bit more seriously. A poem called “Navigation,” for example, ponders the poet’s approach to his art in tongue-in-cheek fashion, and pines for “moonlight that shows everything/ more mystically, slower.” And then the closing stanza leaves us with a quite indelible image:
But the best I can find tonight is refrigerator light,
that shows everything
too bright, giving the illusion of cold
calm, as if nothing is slowly molding or souring,
as if everything stays okay if
observed in the right wattage.
Mason’s love poems are hit or miss with me, but the subject he seems to know and love the best is driving — not surprising for a poet from Nebraska, I suppose. One poem is titled “I May Not Know Where I’m Going, But I’m Making Damn Good Time,” which is kind of the U.S.A. in a nutshell, I think.
Why do I keep shoving
fries in my mouth, trying
to find the one bit of deep-
fried potato shrapnel that finally satisfies?
Another poem, “The Thin Line of What I Know,” not only anticipates the Rumsfeld meme later in the book, but really captures the experience of interstate driving and the shallow sort of familiarity with the landscape it imparts:
I never go farther off the interstate
than the Have a Nice Day water tower smiling from Adair,
never go past the gas stations,
never put my fingers
in the skin of the East
or West Nishnatoba Rivers,
never slow at mile 71,
where that pond, always flat and still no matter how windy,
stretches two drowning elms like bony arms
clinging onto the sky.
Though Mason is a humorist and not a comedian, he has that essential streak of self-deprecation common to both on display in poems such as “The Funny Poet Renounces Funny Poetry and Concentrates On Making the World a Better, More Beautiful Place (In Which He Has Sex More Often)” and “How I Love You (the John Ashcroft Remix)”:
My job
is just to keep you laughing, keep you listening
to the funny poem
so you won’t stray too much,
pay more attention to that stream-of-consciousness ramble some
other poet’s reading: that
sloppy poem, that overuses-the-word-“revolution”-too-much poem, that
heartfelt poem, cast-your-vote-with-a-stone poem,
that register-your-sad-ass-to-actually-vote poem,
that get-out-of-bed-on-election-day, put-down-the-gordita-and-actually-go-to-a-polling-place-and-vote poem,
because
I
have accepted John Ashcroft
as my personal
savior.
But don’t let him fool you. He’s also capable of writing lines like these, pondering the age-old connection between food and love in “More”:
I’ve spent years
casing menus for your touch,
searching under grocery store fluorescents;I’ve shrunk so thin,
I can only hold a measured shock,
the lemon water of small kissesbuilding me back
from bones to flesh,
smoke to mountain to sky.
In the prose-poem “Wood,” Mason’s lament for the gradual dwindling of things made from trees in our domestic surroundings struck a chord:
It is in us somewhere, if only in the chipped ringlets of a fingernail: the maple, the eucalyptus, those crooked little bushes that lead us to forsake that damned formica paneling and lay down solid, processed oak on our counters as the primeval brain within us screeches and tries to recall the feel of branches in paws, winds and leaves stroking and scratching fur as we pull ourselves upward, inward and bare yellowed teeth at the dirt. So we bend ourselves onto the counter, open the cabinet and push aside the soup, the flour, the paprika, and climb inside: baring our teeth at the linoleum below, not minding the maple syrup bottle pushing into spine, close the dark, brown door and feel like Jesus, so much pain to finally be rejoined with wood.
I totally didn’t see that crucifixion reference coming! And you know, in poetry, surprise is surprise: it doesn’t matter how solemn or humorous the delivery system might be. There are enough surprises in this book to keep me coming back for more.
Oh, and Rumsfeld? Mason nails his ass in a five-word apothegm in the poem “Code Orange”:
Sometimes the wolf
cries wolf.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.