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Category Archives: Poetry
NaPoWriMo (Day 11): Morning flight
Hostile crows
Shred thin peace
flap black wings
like steel batons
smack hard
against the burlap sacks
toss dust against the sky.
Passengers in trains glide by—
watch
the morning flight.
NaPoWriMo (Day 10): Shattered
I feel like a glass that’s been shattered,
nudged from life’s table by a careless elbow.
In the middle of my kitchen
jags the edge that loves Russia.
Under the table
shine my dreams of the moon.
My inner child kneels among the sparkles,
frantically mopping.
NaPoWriMo (Day 9): Butterflies
If my ideas are like butterflies,
then I am a lazy butterfly catcher,
sitting dazed on the banks of a river,
without pencil or paper,
I gawk at the canyon,
at the waves,
at the sky.
No, I’m not even looking for butterflies.
Instead, I’m watching,
waiting.
It’s dreaming
that saves.
Fallen Swan
Like an apple on toothpicks,
the elderly ballerina
tiptoes across the yard.
Finding the pond,
she asks
the dark waters
for their old reflections.
Like a duck,
she submerges her head,
draining away
the makeup
and the years.
Emerging as swan,
she swims the shadows—
Echappe, pas ballonne, glissade.
Remembering
across the years,
across the algean floor,
freeing dreams
of Barishnikov.
NaPoWriMo (Day 7): Potato
My grandmother,
now dead,
walks around
in my mother’s dreams.
Only twice
has she come to me.
The first was to ask me a question
—I hesitated—
The next time I saw her
she was sitting at the dining room table,
pealing a potato
like nothing had happened.
NaPoWriMo Day 6 (Lanturnes)
Moon
waxes,
shows the man
she often hides,
wanes.
***
Men
escape,
climb the walls,
reach for Heaven,
fly.
***
Life
struggles,
resists change,
destroys others,
dies.
***
Leaf
shivers,
drops the snow,
sways back and forth,
springs.
NaPoWriMo Day 5 (Villanelle): Running for the Train
I think I see you running for the train
The shock of recognition stops me still
Our love’s been lost for years, so I refrain.
Your form remains a blur in all this rain
I start to lift my hand and yet I’m still
I think I see you running for the train.
I see your happy eyes and I’m all pain
Sensations long forsaken prompt me still
Our love’s been lost for years, so I refrain.
You’re soaring with a girl down this wide lane
You’re thinner and your clothes are different, still
I think I see you running for the train.
I’m wrong, it isn’t you, my eyes complain
The need to know consumes me ’till I’m ill
Our love’s been lost for years, so I refrain.
It’s too late now, I know it’s all in vain,
I shut my eyes but see your image still
I think I see you running for the train
Our love’s been lost for years, so I remain.
NaPoWriMo Day 3 (Palindrome): It stopped with you
It stopped
amazingly
one day
when there was biology everywhere
air became love
alive again
bees buzzing
birds singing
clouds flowing
rain falling
finally there was
electricity with
—You—
with electricity finally
was there
falling rain
flowing clouds
singing birds
buzzing bees
again alive
beating hearts
love became air
everywhere biology was there when
day one
amazingly
stopped
it.
NaPoWriMo Day 2 (Brevette): Epiphanies
Epiphanies
R A T T L E
Bedrock
NaPoWriMo Day 1 (Acrostic): Razor
Razors cross my heart—when I remember you
Anchors split my soul—when I think of you
Zero is how I feel—when I talk to you
Only you—can annihilate me
Reveal—every part of me
April Poetry Forums
Visit Kirsten Uninterrupted for just about every type of poetry form you can imagine. Very cool!
http://kirstenuninterrupted.wordpress.com/april-poetry-forms/
I’m feeling pretty lazy these days, but this just might change all that.
And here’s more:
http://shadowpoetry.com/resources/wip/types.html
Howl by Allen Ginsberg
So a friend of mine at work says: Word Wabbit, you gotta read “Howl.” And I’m all like: I have a million books—I can’t afford to buy another!
He says, No it’s really short. You can read it in an evening. But you might be depressed after.
So I go online, there it is for free at Poetry Foundation.org—simply a great resource.
So for anyone who’s interested, here’s Howl: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179381
Early morning
In early morning
the city’s breath is fresh
Inhaling is like
breathing hope
the rushing breeze
soothes my eyes
brushes the pain away
rekindles my imagination
reminds me of my soul
Rush hour at Wallowa Lake
Deer line up for dinner.
Fog mingles with exhaust.
Tourists snap their shots—
prove their lives were more
than flipping channels,
eating fries.
Wallowa Breezes
Chinooks blast mountain peaks
Breathe warmth
Into the valley
Bring snow.
Sewing Factory
Rev engine
Avert eyes
Watch fingers
Drone songs
Carried on
Threaded needles
Under pressure
Fix machines
Screaming out “Roberta!”
Stops cost
Peppermint pains
Shoulders and backs
Bundle the day
Flipping
Turning
Tossing
Ripping
Working
Faster
Minutes catch the hours.
The day
at last
is sold.
Like children freed
Grin. Stampede.
Sew sheets to pillow
Wake confused
Listen
Cows are headed for slaughter.
The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems
By William Stafford (1914–1993); Graywolf Press; @ 1998; 254 pages.
All the poets I know have said they like William Stafford. The book everyone knows is Writing the Australian Crawl. It’s the inspirational how-to book for poets and writers. Stafford is from the Midwest. He was a conscientious objector during World War II. He moved to the Northwest and taught and wrote and traveled. Some might say he was a workaholic, and certainly he was prolific, rising every morning around 4 a.m. to write. He wrote more than 50 books and more than 3,000 poems. He won the National Book Award for Traveling Through the Dark.
I like William Stafford too, but after a full book of poems, he remains an enigma. After I read Mary Oliver’s poems, I felt I knew Mary Oliver; the same was true for Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, and even Tomas Transtormer. But William Stafford, for me, is just out of reach. Maybe the complicated simplicity of Collins has me spoiled. All the same, when I read Stafford, I remember cicadas, open fields of diverse species (not monocultures), and why I once thought of Oregon as a magical paradise. I become wistful and want to hit the road.
Poems I especially liked included:
- Easter Morning
American poet William Stafford (1914-1993) (Photo credit: Wikipedia) - You and Art
- One Evening
- Afterwards
- Sayings of the Blind
- The Way It Is
- Big Bang
- Wovoka’s Witness (3)
- Things in the Wild Need Salt
- Accountability !!!
- At the Playground
- The Little Girl by the Fence at School
- At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border!
- As Me
- One Home
- (Plain black hats rode the thoughts that made our code.)
- Ceremony
- Circle of Breath
- At the Bomb Testing Site
- Outside
- In the Oregon Country
- In Response to a Question
- Lit Instructor
- Glances
- Some Shadows
- Back Home
- Fifteen
- Recoil
- The Animal That Drank Up Sound
- Bess
- Holcomb Kansas
- A Sound from the Earth
- Things That Happen
- So Long
- Freedom
- The Coyote in the Zoo
- Meditation
- West of Here
- Coyote
- That Year
- Dropout
- Some Remarks When Richard Hugo Came
- A Wind From a Wing
- Old Prof
- Poetry
- Men
- In the All Verbs Navaho World
- Malheur before Dawn
- Freedom of Expression
- Is This Feeling About the West Real?
- Through the Junipers
- It Still Happens Now
- Objector
- How It Is
- My Life
- A Course in Creative Writing
- Things I Learned Last Week
- Incident
- Our Kind
- We Interrupt to Bring You
- Pegleg Lookout
- Burning a Book
- Thinking About Being Called Simple by a Critic
- Waiting in Line
- An Oregon Message
- Why I Am Happy
- The Sparkle Depends on Flaws in the Diamond
- How It Is with Family
- Run Before Dawn
- Remarks on My Character
- How These Words Happened
Flying at Night: Poems 1965-1985
By Ted Kooser; @1980, 1985 University of Pittsburgh Press, 142 pages.
This is the one. This is my favorite book of poems by Ted Kooser. Ted has tremendous talent for evoking vivid scenes with simple, unassuming language. My favorite poems include:
Selecting a Reader
Christmas Eve
Sitting All Evening Alone in the Kitchen
The Man with the Hearing Aid
How to Make Rubarb Wine
A Widow
So This Is Nebraska
After the Funeral
Shooting a Farmhouse
Late September
Looking for You, Barbara
Abandoned Farmhouse
A Goldfish Floats to the Top of His Life
They Had Torn Off My Face at the Office
Year’s End
Flying at Night
Just Now
A Birthday Card
A Room in the Past
Decoration Day
Laundry
At Nightfall
The Voyager II Satellite
Sailing Alone Around the Room
By Billy Collins; @ 2001 Random House; 172 pages.
Sailing Alone Around the Room is one of the books I bought when I was on my Billy Collins kick. I’m not sure if Collins is my favorite poet in the whole wide world, but there is no doubt that he is talented. Reading him always gets me in the mood to write, and I envy those who were/are so lucky to have him as a professor. Lucky, lucky, lucky.
Sailing Alone Around the Room includes new poems as well as selected poems from The Apple That Astonished Paris (1988), Questions About Angels (1991), The Art of Drowning (1995), and Picnic, Lightning (1998).
The poems out of this book I most responded to were:
- Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House
- The Lesson
- Winter Syntax
- Advice to Writers
- Introduction to Poetry
- Schoolsville
- Questions About Angels
- Candle Hat
- The Dead
- Vade Mecum
- Purity
- Days
- Workshop
- Piano Lessons
- Some Final Words
- Aristotle
The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems
By Tomas Tranströmer; Translated by Robin Fulton; @ 2006 by New Directions Publishing Corporation, 257 pages.
Tomas Tranströmer was the recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize for literature “because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.”
Born April 15, 1931, in Stockholm, Sweden, Tomas Tranströmer has been translated into 50 languages. The Great Enigma is the complete collection of Tranströmer’s published poetry, a compilation of his 12 poetry books. Tranströmer’s subject matter often focuses on the Swedish natural landscape and on the poet’s observations from daily life. One gets a sense of the cold, salty sea air when reading his poems.
I came to Tranströmer’s poetry, having never visited Sweden and knowing very little about life there. I found his poems very difficult to penetrate. Often they seemed to be talking about one thing, only to stray completely from the topic at hand. Tomas Tranströmer has a lot to offer. His poems need to be read and digested slowly. They deserve many reads. There are many wonderful lyrical phrases, but taken as units, I found them hard to decipher.
Poems from this book that I plan to come back to are as follows:
- Ostinato
- Agitated Meditation
- Elegy
- Epilogue
- Weather Picture
- The Four Temperaments
- Secrets on the Way
- After an Attack
- The Couple
- The Tree and the Sky
- Espresso
- The Palace
- The Half-Finished Heaven
- A Winter Night
- From an African Diary
- Winter’s Formulae
- Morning Birds
- Alone
- Downpour over the Interior
- In the Open
- By the River
- Preludes
- Sketch in October
- Along the Radius
- Baltics
- Schubertiana
- The Gallery
- A Place in the Forest
- Icelandic Hurricane
- Dream Seminar
- Early May Stanzas
- Leaflet
- The Indoors Is Endless
- Madrigal
- Golden Wasp
- April and Silence
Lines I especially liked:
“Waking up is a parachute jump from dreams.”
“A dog’s barking is a hieroglyph painted in the air above the garden”
“I stood in a room that contained every moment—a butterfly museum.”
“There’s a tree walking around in the rain, it rushes past us in the pouring grey.”
“It helps perhaps with handshakes like a flight of migratory birds.”
“The lake is a window into the earth.”
“In the daylight a dot of beneficent black that quickly flows into a pale customer.”
I looked at the sky and at the earth and straight ahead
and since then I’ve been writing a long letter to the dead
on a typewriter with no ribbon just a horizon line
so the words knock in vain and nothing sticks.”
Word Wabbit 