Category: Today’s Pillar of Poetry (Page 7 of 7)

I don't know whose idea it was to go see Jim Carroll read in Manhattan in the last 1990s. My friends Julie and Christopher from Sarah Lawrence were usually on top of the trendy readings in the city and I would tag along, very much a newbie about famous and trendy writers.

I do remember we were near St. Marks and we also saw Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson read that night. I was hooked by Jim Carroll's poems right off. I bought his selected anthology, Fear of Dreaming, and later the book Void of Course.

Jim was already famous for The Basketball Diaries, probably this is what tempted my friends to want to see him read if Lou Reed wasn't a big enough draw. I didn't like Lou Reed's work at all. Maybe Carroll benefited in comparison. However, I still feel Carroll is the best poet at describing Manhattan, the tone of the city as I experienced in the late 1990s.

From "Heroin"

so beside me
a light bulb is revolving
wall to wall,
a reminder of the great sun
which had otherwise completely collapsed
down to the sore toe of the white universe.

From "Poem"

We are very much a part of the boredom
of early Spring of planning the days shopping
of riding down Fifth on a bus terrified by easter.

From "Chelsea May"

I conceal so much
moving in and out poetry
I could have simply left a note

There are many prose poems from The Book of Nods that I loved, including "Trained Monkey," "Homage to Gerald Manly Hopkins," "Zero's Final Paradox," "Silent Monkey" and "The Buddha Reveals Himself." And I love this poem, "Post-Modernism"

I gather up the giant holes.
Why should I bother with the rock
and sand which fills them?

Why should I bother with distracting weights.
Without elegance, or allow myself to be taken
hostage, leaving only through back doors,
a gun raised to the pulse of my lucid shadow?

Read his obituary in the New York Times.

I missed blog posts this week due to adopting our second dog  Saturday morning. Our fur-kid Franz Alanzo now has a sister-mate, Bianca Jean, a shelter dog who had been seriously neglected, the result of which she has had two litters of puppies (one litter a few months ago) and a severe shoulder injury.

Meanwhile, our lives have been close to chaos since the weekend while we've all been sorting out the new arrangements. Like my husband's classmate warned him, with two dogs the house gets very doggie.

But I want to talk about one of my favorite poems ever, one by Pasadena poet Ron Koertge. Getting a degree from Sarah Lawrence College, most of my exposure to living poets were to East Coast writers popular in the 1990s like Mark Doty, Stanley Kunitz and Molly Peacock. 

Moving to Los Angeles in 2002, I was pleased to encounter West Coast voices.  Now I have Koertge's selected works, Making Love to Roget's Wife. With similarities and connections to Billy Collins, the titles are always meandering, compelling and his poems are humorous, irreverent, and often about pop culture subjects like "On the Anniversary of His Death, the Men of the Village Meet to Talk about Frankenstein;" and yet he can be just as ecstatic and reverent with "What a Varied Place the World Is So Trusting and Strange So Deserving of Praise" or a poem called "Lazarus" that ends, "God's name in vain on his cracked and loamy lips."

He has wonderful short poems like this one, "Diary Cows" (and you know I love me some poems about cows!)

Got up early, waited for the farmer.
Hooked us all up to the machines as usual.
Typical trip to the pasture, typical
afternoon grazing and ruminating.
About 5:00 back to the barn. What
a relief! Listened to the radio during
dinner. Lights out at 7:00.
More tomorrow.

I found the favorite poem one day while working at The Prostate Cancer
Foundation, Mike Milken's cancer charity in a Santa Monica building I used to dub The Castle. I was sitting at my desk hating my boss at the time (an incompetent blowhard who issued insults office-wide to hide his mistakes) and I was depressed about the situation when I found this poem online, "A Guide to Refreshing Sleep"

 It is best to remember those nights

when grown-ups were singing and breaking

glass and someone who smelled good

carried you up hushed stairs toward strange

cold bedrooms to be launched on a dark

lake of coats.

If Memory does not suffice, you may

summon the obvious mascots of sleep,

but forego counting. It is miserly. They

will come and stand by your bed, nodding

their graceful Egyptian heads, inviting you

across the crooked stile to one of those

hamlets nestled between blue hills

where the curious are curious about sleep,

the enthralled are enthralled with sleep,

and the great conclusion is always,

Its time for bed.

Look–a cottage door stands open. On the night

table is a single candle, yellow sheets are turned

back, and in the garden are marshaled

the best dreams in the world. Lie down.

The horrible opera of the day is over.

Close your eyes, so the world which loves you

can go to sleep, too.

More about Ron Koertge

Who?

Yes, Marylu Terral Jeans published two books of poetry in her lifetime, Statue in the Stone  (1966) and Moonset (1971) and she's my only related (out-of-the-closet) poet.  Terral is the name of my great-great-grandfather, a circuit Methodist preacher who moved around Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico founding Methodist churches back in the mid-to-late 1800s. He founded the town of Terral, Oklahoma, and the Methodist church in Roy, New Mexico, my family seat. He is buried all by his lonesome in the old cemetery in Las Vegas, New Mexico.

Marylu was my grandmother's first cousin. My Aunt Jane recently explained to me Marylu's place on the family tree. Aunt Jane said when she first married and moved to Walnut Creek, California, in 1944, Marylu's father, Ernest Terral, invited her to come visit them nearby. 

Personally, I always pictured Marylu to look like a dotty old lady because that's what I think of when I imagine women poets who are related to me from somewhere back in time. However, Aunt Jane tells me Marylu lived in a trailer park and made herself up like Zsa Zsa Gabor every day and wrote poetry "sitting amidst the dirtiest house I had ever been in."   

But remarkably, her poems were published in Better Homes and Gardens, California Farmer, Ladies' Home Journal, McCall's, New York Herald Tribune and Saturday Evening Post reminding us of a day when poems were actually published in these magazines. Aunt Jane gave her copy of Statue in the Stone  to my mother
who a few years ago gave it to me. It was published by The Golden Quill
Press and her book jacket oozes over the power of her sonnet-making. The book is divided into somewhat staid but funny sections like Death of a Dream, Mute Testament, Valley of Stars, Love Match and Love-Armored. She uses words like "threnody."

I expected to hate the book's old-style rhyming verses but I didn't. I was intrigued by lines like this from her poem "Ghost:"

So love's sweet ghost, with undiminished art,
Remains to haunt each hall-way of my heart.

In fact, there's a melodramatic 18th-century novel reader in me who loves stanzas like this from "Dark Fire:"

Not that I love you in a smaller measure,
Not that I seek to hide my love from view,
But I no longer have a dream to treasure,
And lacking dreams, what could I offer you?

Although most of the poems have the rhythm and musicality of Dr. Seuss, some transcend the singsong, as in this little gem, "Hepzibah Higby:"

Hepzibah Higby fought the devil,
Fought his image, fought his ways;
Railed at sin, denounced all evil,
Had no time for words of praise.

Hepzibah saw a world in darkness,
Lost to light from up above;
Wept about the foolish sinners,
Never spoke a word of love.

Hepzibah Higby died, bemoaning
Man, the weakling and the dunce;
Gave her life to fight the devil,
Never saw an angel once.

I read Aunt Jane's story and some of her poems to my husband tonight.

He says he accepts living with a lazy poet.
He could even accept my dressing like Zsa Zsa Gabor.
But he refuses to live in a low-rent dirty trailer,
No matter how good my sonnets are.

When I was at Sarah Lawrence in the mid-90s, Mark Doty came to teach for one semester. All the second-year graduate students fought tooth and nail to get in his class. First-years had to sell off their first born to get a shot. At the time, I was probably heard to ask, "Who is Mark Doty?"

That's because before Sarah Lawrence, the only living published poets I knew where Howard Schwartz and Steve Schreiner (my teachers from the University of Missouri), Tom Lux and Alice Fulton  (because Steve Schreiner introduced me to them) and Philip Levine (and I don't know how I heard about him).

When Philip Levine finally came to read at Sarah Lawrence, he walked right by me, I felt like I had just experienced a celebrity sighting. What a silly thought: a celebrity poet.

Anyway, after moving to LA and diligently attending each Los Angeles Times Festival of Books every spring, (literally, the Cochella of books….if you want to see a million people in one place buying books, this is the biggest book festival in the universe), I got to know Mark Doty who was there year after year reading in the poetry nook. I grew to be quite a fan of his very funny, comforting and touching reading-style. On the Festival of Books panels, (real head-food, those free panels), his comments were also embracing and brilliant. I loved him! I could then see why the poetry students at Sarah Lawrence drew blood over the chance to get into his class. I wish I had been more savvy and aggressive back then too.

And then I read Dog Years. What can I say about Dog Years. It is indescribable. If you have a dog and love literary memoirs…walk, don't run to this book.

I have his book of poems Atlantis, much of which is about his lover's death from AIDS. I think what I love about Doty's poems are the way his brain gravitates toward particularity. From "Grosse Fuge" talking about his dying lover:

Mostly he looks away, mouth open,
as if studying something slightly above
and to the right of the world.

…or the end of the poem "Breakwater," his ability to be obliquely specific:

now that we have come to rest,
as mysteriously as ever,
as nearly perfect a shape
as ever we'll discern.

or from "Atlantis," his heartbreaking and arresting similes:

and I swear sometimes
when I put my head to his chest
I can hear the virus humming
like a refrigerator.

If I could be the Dead-head-esque groupie of a poet, I would drive from town to town to be the obsessed fan of Mark Doty. But I have no time for this because I am committed to tracking the never-ending farewell tours of Cher.

Further reading:

• New York Times artile on Philip Levine when he ws to become the U.S. Poet Laureate
• A New Yorker piece on Alice Fulton
• Interview with Thomas Lux
• Mark Doty reading at the Dodge Poetry Festival in 2008