David Orr is my hero

Beth Parker Is My New Favorite Living Poet!

i'm not ready for a new hero yet. you will have to do for now.

I'm not entirely sure how loving it is to show that someone's poetics might as well be a New York Times book review chopped up into verse, that all it consists of is segmenting your prose flow into semantic breaths that are two to four (metric) feet long, and that otherwise your poetry is bland and genial at best.

(I am all for genial poems but genial often runs the risk of being stultifying.)

By A Swimming Pool Outside Syracusa

All afternoon I have been struggling
to communicate in Italian
with Roberto and Giuseppe, who have begun
to resemble the two male characters
in my Italian for Beginners,
the ones who are always shopping
or inquiring about the times of trains,
and now I can hardly speak or write English.

I have made important pronouncements
in this remote limestone valley
with its trickle of a river,
stating that it seems hotter
today even than it was yesterday
and that swimming is very good for you,
very beneficial, you might say.
I also posed burning questions
about the hours of the archaeological museum
and the location of the local necropolis.

But now I am alone in the evening light
which has softened the white cliffs,
and I have had a little gin in a glass with ice
which has softened my mood or—
how would you say in English—
has allowed my thoughts to traverse my brain
with greater gentleness, shall we say,

or, to put it less literally,
this drink has extended permission
to my mind to feel—what's the word?—
a friendship with the vast sky
which is very—give me a minute—very blue
but with much great paleness
at this special time of day, or as we say in America, now.

I was pissed off at "The Trouble with Poetry." I only read 5 or 6 poems, but they were all blah, nothing that caught me. I never found those 2 that Orr liked.

But the idea of struggling with common English words could be witty, but it's presented here terribly -- he mentions it early on while still dropping poetic English phrases such as "remote limestone valley", but he doesn't actually suffer from it until later in the poem. Which I guess he tries to explain by suggesting that alcohol has loosened him up, but then that becomes "my language is slipping away because of drink", which is very different from the (wittier, more original) "my language is slipping away because I have been thinking in Italian all day".

Either he didn't think of that "English demostrably slipping away" idea until after he had already written half the poem, or he didn't feel comfortable doing something so "non-normal" until after he had fully explained what he was going to do; either way, it's pure suck.

It would be approximately one billion times better if it ended after the first stanza. Which is what Mr Orr seems to suggest in his essay as well. I'd also probably get rid of the line breaks, which don't seem to be doing anything other than saying "hi, this is a poem!!!"

All afternoon I have been struggling to communicate in Italian with Roberto and Giuseppe, who have begun to resemble the two male characters in my Italian for Beginners, the ones who are always shopping or inquiring about the times of trains, and now I can hardly speak or write English.

Beth: I'll see you in court!

I'd also probably get rid of the line breaks, which don't seem to be doing anything other than saying "hi, this is a poem!!!"

Surely it's more like "hi, this is a poem..." - isn't the poeminess actually kinda backgrounded by that kind of break, in the same way that a 2x3 rectangular panel layout is what you use in comics when you want the medium to be as vague a warm blur as you can make it? Taking them out creates a debt in the poem towards its unusual form that it's totally unequipped to pay off, and unreasonable to expect it to.

(this isn't because of any innate merit in unnecessary line breaks obv, just that that's the way things seemed to roll)

Also, I'd argue that poetry is specifically the art of saying things through [language-based] artifice that you can't say through just saying them.

Also also, I dare you to read that poem aloud while taking a breath at the end of each line. (Who was it who used to do that to strange effect? I want to say Creeley but I don't think it was him...)

Also also also, part of my point is that I think most of the poems you've posted to the commission-a-poem thread are far better than this, Beth.

(I read this set of poems at my reading last night, and they have line breaks in them but only because I wanted the "script" to remind me where I placed the mini-breaths, even though they're in totally predictable places; I am tempted to run them all together as paragraphs if any "final product" comes out of the series, but at this point the line breaks feel like part of the poems. So I don't know yet what to do about that.)

Since you mention it, I was taught to write speeches that a speaker would be reading aloud off a page, so that each natural phrase was on its own line and every line was double-spaced. Thusly:

My fellow Kiwanians,

I'm very happy to be here tonight

to introduce tonight's featured speaker.

She is a woman you all know

from her outstanding work with children...

This allows for a smoother, more natural delivery by the speaker, but that didn't make it into poetry - to my way of thinking. Although, it rather looks the same at first sight.

On the charity-ball stages of America

Which has brought grown men to tears

Begging for the return of their lost...

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Billy Collins

There's a name given
after your death
and a name you must answer to while you're alive.

Like flowers, my friends — nodding, nodding. My
enemies, like space, drifting
away. They

praised my face, my enunciation, and the power
I freely relinquished, and the fires
burning in the basements

of my churches,
and the pendulums swinging
above my towers.
And my

heart (which was a Boy Scout

lost for years in a forest). And my

soul (although the judges said
it weighed almost nothing
for goodness had devoured it).

They praised my feet, the shoes
on my feet, my feet
on the floor, the floor —
and then

the sense of despair
I evoked with my smile, the song

I sang. The speech
I gave
about peace, in praise of the war. O,

they could not grant me the title I wanted

so they gave me the title I bore,

and stubbornly refused
to believe I was dead
long after my bloody mattress

had washed up on the shore.

Laura Kasischke

Beth, while I have read up a bit on physics, even if I hadn't that would seem a bit odd to me. "Like width, drifting away." "Like angularity, drifting away." Space just isn't the kind of noun, for me, that drifts. Which, you know, might be what she's going for? Even if it's meant to be, like, outer space, as a region akin to France, it still seems like, oh, the idea that the ocean drifts away from the coast -- well, no, even when the coast moves it is still right next to the ocean, by definition.

Then again it's a fairly weird poem, now that I look at it again, and I can't really make heads nor tails of it. The fires burning in the basements of my churches? I like how difficult to parse the "Like flowers, my friends -- nodding, nodding" like is. If the poem were built out of such ambiguities -- and it almost seems to at first, with the weird space metaphor and then the churches and then the pendulums that swing above the (church?) towers, which seems totally surreal. But then the boy scout heart comes in and the pageant contestant goes anti-war and that half of the poem is crushingly obvious and heavy-handed. Oh god, and then she kills herself. Seriously.

Miss Congeniality

There's a name given after your death and a name you must answer to while you're alive.

Like flowers, my friends — nodding, nodding. My enemies, like space, drifting away. They

praised my face, my enunciation, the power I relinquished, the fires burning in the basements

of my churches, and the pendulums swinging above my towers.

They praised my feet, the shoes on my feet, my feet on the floor, the floor —

BNL: Could you talk a little bit about comedy?
EC: Well, if you do comedy it makes you a certain type of musician. There are musicians who are totally serious, and some of them are great. I don’t think you’ll find anything humorous on a John Coltrane record. There are other jazz musicians whose music is full of humor—Roland Kirk, Fats Waller, Ellington.
BNL: Mingus.
EC: Mingus has got tons of humor in his music. Yeah. Mingus is an example of someone who’s got it all. I think he’s really influenced by Ellington, who’s got all these different emotions in his music. I like the comedy not only because I like making people laugh, but because comedy makes the serious parts even more serious. And I really like it when people aren’t sure if it’s a serious or a comic part. I love getting to that little thing.
BNL: There was a little bit of that the other night when you were playing the Byrds song, and it wasn’t really clear—is this sort of a mock-version?
EC: This girl came up to me once and asked me “Do you have any CDs with your ironic, bittersweet but somehow funny love songs?”
EC: The one thing—if you’re funny you just don’t get taken as seriously, in whatever art-form. That really gets to some people.
BNL: But it doesn’t bother you.
EC: Well, I’ve already achieved so much more than I ever thought I would, or that anybody ever thought I would. If I’d listened to the people who told me I’d have copies of my first album in my bedroom the rest of my life, you know, or that nobody would ever pay me to play a gig—whatever. I’m amazed that probably in any town in the United States there’s at least a few people that have heard of me. I get mail from all over the world. It doesn’t bother me because I’m kind of a music historian. I know about a lot of aspects of the history of music, and this is one of them, that if you’re funny people don’t take you as seriously. It isn’t just music—when did Charlie Chaplin get an Oscar? When he was old and gray. That’s just typical. Some people would be happy if I suppressed that side of my personality. A lot of people aren’t comfortable with humor in music.
BNL: You remember what Uncle Dave Macon said about Earl Scruggs?
EC: What?
BNL: “He’s good, but he’s not a damn bit funny!”

See if you can see how far out it goes; see? You can't see the end!
I'd take you out there
but it's a six hour walk
and the work redundant: one board laid down after another.
When the sun is high
the boards are hot.
Splinters always pose a problem walking any other way but straight.
What keeps me working on it, driving piles,
hauling timber, what's kept my hand
on the hammer, the barnacle scraper,
what keeps me working through the thirst,
the nights when the waves' tops pound
the pier from beneath, what keeps me glad
for the work, the theory is, despite the ridicule
at the lumberyard, the treks with pails
of nails (my arms
2cm longer each trip), the theory
is this: it's my body's habit,
hand over foot, pay check to pay check,
it's in the grain of my bones,
lunch box to lunch bucket.
It's good to wear an X
on my back, to bend my back to the sky, it's right
to use the hammer and the saw,
it's good to sleep
out there — attached at one distant end
and tomorrow adding to that distance.
The theory
is: It will be a bridge.

Thomas Lux