Eating Poetry

Spenser's Ireland

I've been remiss, obviously, about this poetry thing we do.  Blame in on my job--I always do.  Here's something from Marianne Moore.  As is probably obvious, Ireland is terribly important to me, and like all things that are terribly important to me, my relationship with the country and its culture and my tiny spot in it is tangled and messy and a bit sore in spots--particularly those spots where the missing, broken, Irish part of my family should be, had they not vanished on the toddler I was at the time.  So is Ms. Moore's--and she conveniently talks about fiber arts as a filter for what she actually means.  Nuff said.

Spenser's Ireland

has not altered;--
a place as kind as it is green,
the greenest place I've never seen.
Every name is a tune.
Denunciations do not affect
the culprit; nor blows, but it
is torture to him to not be spoken to.
They're natural,--
the coat, like Venus'
mantle lined with stars,
buttoned close at the neck,-the sleeves new from disuse.

If in Ireland
they play the harp backward at need,
and gather at midday the seed
of the fern, eluding
their "giants all covered with iron," might
there be fern seed for unlearn-
ing obduracy and for reinstating
the enchantment?
Hindered characters
seldom have mothers
in Irish stories, but they all have grandmothers.

It was Irish;
a match not a marriage was made
when my great great grandmother'd said
with native genius for
disunion, "Although your suitor be
perfection, one objection
is enough; he is not
Irish."  Outwitting
the fairies, befriending the furies,
whoever again
and again says, "I'll never give in," never sees

that you're not free
until you've been made captive by
supreme belief,--credulity
you say?  When large dainty
fingers tremblingly divide the wings
of the fly for mid-July
with a needle and wrap it with peacock-tail,
or tie wool and
buzzard's wing, their pride,
like the enchanter's
is in care, not madness.  Concurring hands divide

flax for damask
that when bleached by Irish weather
has the silvered chamois-leather
water-tightness of a
skin.  Twisted torcs and gold new-moon-shaped
lunulae aren't jewelry
like the purple-coral fuchsia-tree's.  Eire--
the guillemot
so neat and the hen
of the heath and the
linnet spinet-sweet-bespeak relentlessness?  Then

they are to me
like enchanted Earl Gerald who
changed himself into a stag, to
a great green-eyed cat of
the mountain.  Discommodity makes
them invisible; they've dis-
appeared.  The Irish say your trouble is their
trouble and your
joy their joy?  I wish
I could believe it;
I am troubled, I'm dissatisfied, I'm Irish.

Peddler

by Sandra McPherson

The man vending needles at our door
Was lucky to greet you.
He looked poor but you acted needle-poor
Where I’d have said, I don’t need ...

He sells needles to prick your heart
And they’ll take small bites
Out of my finger in a layer of skin
Where my feelings are thin.

The old thread knitting together his many wools
Might last another trudge
To our porch: he came last year but I
Refused and barely looked him in the eye.

I’ve lost how many needles since then?
Besides he is mute
And would see how dumb we are to buy
Three hundred needles for relief.

But he supplied us to the end of life.
I’ll give away some.
And you might never use these points
That push through cloth, cut to be made one.

National poetry month, and wool poems

Wow, we excel at slack these days.

April is national poetry month.  I've been spending so much time hiding from my writing that I haven't been much of a poetry reader lately.  But let's forget about that for a moment and think about words.

Lots of people quote the opening of The Wasteland  right about now.  Or, you know, a couple of weeks ago when National Poetry/Cruelest Month actually began.  Me, I'm going with a poet, and I'm quoting some of her prose, and I don't care who knows it.  Go read some Janet Frame.  I purposely saved a novel of hers for April.  I'm reading Owls Do Cry, which is rich in wool imagery and thus a wool poem. 

And Francie's father would pick at something else, the way someone who is knitting will pull at the threads to make  a hole, but their father tried to pick and unpick something inside himself that every year of being alive had knitted, with the pattern, the purl and plain of time gone muddled and different from the dream neatness.

Damn that's good.  I love Janet Frame. So yeah, I'm focusing on prose that's poetic. Got any?

It's the end of the world (so let's read poetry)

So I'm a bookseller for a living. Generally I love it--it's one of those jobs you fall into to pay the rent as a starving English major and for some people, like me, it becomes an obsession. Er, career, I think they call it. But sometimes bookselling makes you feel dirty.

This week is one of those weeks. And it's because of two books. One good book, one bad book. And it's all making me feel ugly.

The good book? The Higher Power of Lucky, by Susan Patron just won the Newberry Award. Yay for it. So what's the problem? Well, there is no problem, as far as I'm concerned. But to some people, the fact that it uses the word "scrotum" on the first page disqualifies it as a kid's book altogether.

Sigh.

Yes, evidently, parents (or god forbid, teachers) cannot possibly explain to their 9-12 year old children what a scrotum is. Evidently scrotums are evil. Dog scrotums included, since the scrotum in question does in fact belong to a dog. A DOG, people! A dog. Dogs are not even required by law to cover their scrotums in public. Yet. Check with me again in a few years on that one. I have a feeling some new legislation just might be in works.

The bad book? Well, I'm sure there have been worse. In my stint at a self-help bookstore, I sold some doozies. But this one went on Oprah, and now everybody must have one, and it's, well, dumb. Let me quote liberally from Dwight Garner of the New York Times, who I think put it best:

There are good self-help books and bad self-help books. But once in a while one comes along that's so comically and so brazenly cynical and manipulative that it produces a kind of inverse sonic boom -- you can practically hear the sound of shattered bookstore windows rippling up and down the coasts. Picking it up, you know you're in the presence of demented genius. And you know, somehow, it's going to sell. Such a book is ''The Secret,'' by Rhonda Byrne -- No. 3 on the hardcover advice list. ''The Secret'' has a faux-antiquated ''Da Vinci Code'' look and comes on like a Great Books seminar for the feeble-minded (''Fragments of a Great Secret,'' the jacket copy intones, ''have been found in the oral traditions, in literature, in religions and philosophies'') or a Bill Moyers PBS special produced by superstitious elves. Byrne's book promises, as many do, to help you zero in on ''the hidden, untapped power'' that's somewhere inside you. But to get at this ''secret'' to success and well-being, you need to flip through so many pages of world-class inanities (''You are the most powerful transmission tower in the Universe,'' ''Visualize checks in the mail,'' ''Food cannot cause you to put on weight, unless you think it can'') that you begin to think the author is in on the joke and that you're finally reading the self-help version of ''This Is Spinal Tap.'' No such luck. And the ''secret,'' it turns out, isn't much more than ''The Power of Positive Thinking'' breaded with hokum and deep-fried. Visualize checks in the mail? I'm going to visualize people doing better things -- buying the new Jim Harrison novel? going to the zoo? -- with their $23.95.

So, to sum up, while people are actively censoring what seems like a great kid's book, quite possibly the most condescending book ever written is being treated like the solution to world hunger. I hate everybody.

A random poem, because it makes me feel better:

Untitled, by Kate Knapp Johnson

It is not white. Cannot
float. It doesn't think there are so many
flowers in this garden.
It is the iron darkness
from inside. Honest, but liable
to snag in the enemy's fat hand.
It's the goat, shivering dog, bad
girl. The unwanted,
Different. It is anything
different.

What is the soul? Shame,
they said. You should be ashamed.

Silent Poetry Reading

It would be pretty lame if a poetry blog couldn't get its act together to participate in the Blogger's Silent Poetry Reading, huh?

I'm going to cheat, because I'm like that. At first I was going to post my favorite Lauterbach, but I already have an excuse to do that, so then my brain started exploding with possibilities. So then I narrowed it down to my two favorite Ashbery poems, which appear consecutively in The Double Dream of Spring. The first Ashbery is really long, and I don't want to type it, but I really want you to read it, so here. Yeah, go ahead, go read it.

That's the cheating part. Below is my Official Bloggers Silent Poetry Reading Poem.

The Chateau Hardware

It was always November there. The farms
Were a kind of precinct; a certain control
Had been exercised. The little birds
Used to collect along the fence.
It was the great "as though," the how the day went,
The excursions of the police
As I pursue my bodily functions, wanting
Neither fire nor water,
Vibrating to the distant pinch
And turning out the way I am, turning out to greet you.

A Blogger's (silent) Poetry Reading

Here I go, using any excuse to evangelize about a poet I like.  Medbh McGuckian is fantastic, and she has a great sense of compression.  I posted a lovely poem of hers over on the quasi-knitting side of my interweb presence.  Both are about love, of course, but in very different ways.

Blood-Words
Medbh McGuckian

Your silk-dry
mate cry
is a name I would cord
to my tongue,
eye-locked
in an eyelet
where the abrupt knot
of your bloodline
touches the bed-edge shore.

The greenest journey
is a torrent
of oxygen,
acres of water
eagle your arms
from scuffing the slim
room of death
to the self-told
faces from two lifetimes.

Why you should love Ann Lauterbach (whether you like her poetry or not)

The best-ever rebuttal of the "Blooming" of American literary criticism.  More to follow.

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Well, I can't make Lanea find all of the wool poems all by herself, can I? A sentimental old favorite, this one, by Christopher Marlowe.

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields
Woods or steepy mountain yields

And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flower, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair lined slippers for the cold
With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs;
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my love.

The shepherds' swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.

And speaking of, if you haven't done so, we at Eating Poetry are in complete agreement that everyone reading this must must must run out and rent the 1995 movie version of Richard III starring Ian McKellan, in which Shakespeare's story (Elizabethan dialogue and all) is supplanted into a Nazi Germany setting. It's stunning, not least of which the opening 10 minutes of the movie, which may be my favorite opening scene of all time: A beautiful ballroom, filled with party-goers in 1940s costume. A female jazz singer is singing a rendition of the Marlowe poem. Camera finds Ian McKellan, who delivers a devastating opening monologue as the camera follows him down the hallway to the bathroom. Yes, part of the monologue is delivered at a urinal. Trust me, Shakespeare would've loved it. So brilliant.

The Fleece

John Dyer's The Fleece is one of those works that few people read but everyone should.  Well, everyone should read it but it's really hard to get copies.  Dyer was Welsh, and his family, being Welsh, knew a lot about sheep.   The Fleece is an epic--four volumes of blank verse--about sheep, published in 1757.   It's shockingly modern, despite its age.  But, well, maybe I think that because it's all about sheep.  Here's a little piece of it.

To mend thy mounds, to trench, to clear, to soil
Thy grateful fields, to medicate thy sheep,
Hurdles to weave, and cheerly shelters raise,
Thy vacant hours require: and ever learn
Quick æther's motions: oft the scene is turn'd;
Now the blue vault, and now the murky cloud,
Hail, rain, or radiance; these the moon will tell,
Each bird and beast, and these thy fleecy tribe:
When high the sapphire cope, supine they couch,
And chew the cud delighted; but, ere rain,
Eager, and at unwonted hour, they feed:
Slight not the warning; soon the tempest rolls,
Scattering them wide, close rushing at the heels
Of th' hurrying o'ertaken swains: forbear
Such nights to fold; such nights be theirs to shift
On ridge or hillock; or in homesteads soft,
Or softer cotes, detain them. Is thy lot
A chill penurious turf, to all thy toils
Untractable? Before harsh winter drowns
The noisy dykes, and starves the rushy glebe,
Shift the frail breed to sandy hamlets warm:
There let them sojourn, till gay Procne skims
The thickening verdure, and the rising flowers.
And while departing autumn all embrowns
The frequent-bitten fields.

Pattern for Death

by James Still(1937)

The spider puzzles his legs and rests his web
On aftergrass. No winds stir here to break
The quiet design, nothing protests the weaving
Of taut threads in a ladder of silk:
He is clever, he is fastidious, and intricate;
He is skilled with his cords of hate.

Who can escape through the grass: The crane-fly
Quivers its body in paralytic sleep;
The giant moths shed their golden dust
From fettered wings, and the spider speeds his lust.

Who reads the language of direction? Where may we pass
Through the immense pattern sheer as glass?

Another bit of spidery goodness.  Expect more on this theme. Oh, and promise to love James Still, or I will give you such a noogie.