Damn pronouns! (12 30.19)

I've begun editing the poems of a book-length manuscript in the past week or so and one of the editing choices I'm faced with is the use of pronouns.  As I establish voice and persona in a poem, I must decide whether to write in the first person singular or plural, or second person or third.  I must decide whether to deploy pronouns at all, or just name the thing.  The pronoun(s) I choose or decline determine the tone of the poem I'm trying to write, in a big way.

Third person pronouns tend to push poems toward narrative.  In search of third-person narrative material, I pulled poems from my book shelf at random and came up with "The Second Sleep," the first poem in a sequence by James Dickey titled "Fathers and Sons":

Curled, too much curled, he was sleeping

In a chair too small for him, a restless chair
That held no place for his arms;

In his sleep he grew legs to replace them

As his father liftingly strained
And carried him into the next room.

All the time he settled away

A gentle man looked upon him
And then walked out of the house

And started his evergreen car.

Terrific impact, none his,
Killed him three blocks to the north.

In his second sleep the boy heard

The reared-up tearing of metal
Where a glassed-in face leapt and broke,

But to him it was something else,

An animal clash, a shock of resolving antlers,
And slept on, deeper and deeper

Into the mating season.


The next room filled with women; his nostrils
Flared, his eyes grew wide


And shot with blood under eyelids.


Brow lowered in strife, he stamped
In the laurel thicket, a herd of does


Trembling around him.  Into the rhododendron


His rival faded like rain.
He stared around wildly, head down.


In the undying green, they woke him.


Well, this choice wasn't totally random.  James Dickey always supplies, if it's narrative verse you're after.  The thing about the poem's third person narration is how completely it wipes out any hint of authorial voice or possible autobiography.  (This is not to say there's no authorial voice in this poem; stories must have storytellers, after all.)  It's possible--I don't know Dickey's biography--the story is deeply personal, that the poet recalls his own experience and feeling in the poem.  But the effect of the repeated use of "he," "him" and "his" is to bury the authorial and the personal.

There's another abiding effect from the drumbeat of third person singular pronouns in this poem: reinforcement of the poem's title and theme, "Fathers and Sons."  This narrative could be about any father and son.  The details may vary, but the sense of a fragile closeness lost so readily to chance events (chance in this sense standing in for fate) applies to any father-son relationship.  The idea that the father-son bond is broken while the boy sleeps invites Freud, not to mention one of the more universal storytelling themes: bad things happen in absence.  The third person singular not only keeps Dickey out of it, but lets you and me into the experience at some safe distance.

Writing in the second person you, either plural or singular, can render a poem intimate or public.  The singular you lets me address a lover, a friend, a parent, a sibling, a co-worker, an enemy, a mentor, a mentee, a boss, a pet, a car, even my own left hand.  It permits me to address you, the reader, as if I know you.  You, that is, lets me personify and explore an intimate connection.  You deployed as a plural lets me get on a soap box and preach or harangue to entire communities.  It makes it possible for me to point fingers (j'accuse!) at Boomers and Gen-Xers and the banking class and car salesmen.  Mainly, this plural you sets me apart from the audience of the poem I am writing, or at least from the dramatis personae of the poem.  I don't have to feel what you feel(s) or think what you think(s) or experience what you experience(s).  I can stand in my pulpit and address you en masse.

Then of course there is the generalized you, stand-in for the equally impersonal "one."  This you enables me to pontificate, moralize, share an insight, speak wisely and even ironically in the same way that we does, without my having to soil myself with "us-ness."  This you also lets you dissociate yourself in the same way, if you don't care for the particular wisdom being dispensed through my poem.  The sentence you just read deploys you in exactly the way it describes the strategy.  It lets you say, but I am me, singular me, and so not a part of this you.  Added benefit: you is thoroughly modern and American.  Only a Brit or somebody still living in the 19th Century would seriously say (or write) "one does this or that."

We and I, on the other hand, are minefields of tonality, authenticity, and credibility.  Not that many writers of poems think so.  In fact, any casual survey of what's on the internet or your local bookstore's poetry shelves suggests the opposite.  The triumphal I and all-inclusive we are more than de rigeur in contemporary poetry writing; they verge on law.  This is so, I suppose, because so many writers of all ages are taught that poetry is self-expression in the sense that its content concerns the person writing it.  Every poem I write is about me, what I had for breakfast this morning.

In this I/we universe, poems are personal statements.  They "come from the heart."  They are "authentic" because they are "true," that is, the sentiments they express are "true."  Give me a dollar for every poet who justifies his or her poem with "It's true!  It really happened that way!" and you'll make me a rich man.  In the special case of we, the voice of we poems assumes for you, the reader, a thought, an opinion, a feeling.  It's a sneaky way of projecting my way of feeling onto you, for making you part of my team, for better or worse.

You may be wondering, if you haven't given up reading this entry yet, where I'm going with this besides an end-of-decade rant about the status of contemporary poetry writing.  Here is where.  Your choice of pronouns when you write a poem says a lot about your literary and emotional agenda.  Or it should.  If you are one of those poetry writers who shy away from the authorial I, that says something about what you think poetry is, how it functions, its role in society (or at least your community), your own emotional and psychic relation to what you're writing.  Repressed, maybe?  If you are a writer who uses the first person singular pronoun exclusively, that says something about you as a writer and a person.  If you deploy we frequently in your writing, perhaps this means you understand poetry to be a wisdom-dispensing medium, that you have issues with not being listened to in your daily interactions with others, that you're alienated.

Reviewing the 65+ poems in my new manuscript, I find a pretty liberal usage of all these pronouns (except the more antique one).  More importantly, I am reminded in every instance of the decision point where one poem came to be dominated by one pronoun form or another.  Every instance was just that--a decision about the poem's ultimate point of view, voicing, tone.  This tells me that I have tried throughout this manuscript to assemble works of art, not just statements "from the heart," though every one of these poems comes exactly from there, no matter whether my personal voice--The Voice of Clark--is foregrounded or buried.  What "from the heart" means in this context is, if you're asking, a desire to make art.

Have I succeeded?  One never really knows.

Voice and discovery (12.11.19)

For writers of poetry, there is danger in using voice.

Let me put that into a lower register: voice can be risky in a poem. Voice conveys emotion; not only does it ferry the emotions of the writer to the poem, but it arouses, potentially, emotions or at least reactions and judgments in the reader and listener. Writers can't always, maybe can't ever fully, control the emotive effects of their poems in others. You go for irony or satire in your poem; your readers hear cynicism, or worse, artlessness. You intend a cry from the heart, your heart, but your reader hears peevishness. For you, the voice in your poem is one of experience and wisdom, but your readers hear Polonius or Foghorn Leghorn.

Sometimes, you can adopt a voice in a poem that others might see as appropriative and offensive, as in this story reported in the New York Times last year.

What are you up to when creating a voice or voices in a poem, and what kinds of voices do you create? (These are not rhetorical questions . . . I mean for you to ponder them in your own writing.)

Are you, like a dramatist, creating the voices of characters when writing a poem? And if you are, do you consider the motives that drive them and that make them speak as they do in your poem?

Are you, like an actor, speaking in a voice that is not your real voice? Are you using the poem to "try on" another voice, to disappear into some other person's "sound" and "sense," and if you are, why?

And if you are creating and/or inhabiting these other fictitious voices, what is your relation to them as the author? Do you, Mr./Mrs./Ms Author, have a voice in such a poem? If so, how does that voice operate--omnisciently? as a co-equal? a saboteur? an egger-on? a judge?

Here's another way of looking at voice in a poem . . . When you say "I," whom do you mean?

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Lots of questions to think about!  But back on the subject of voice and discovery, when you write a poem, you create opportunities (or problems) involving voice that can be exciting, rewarding, and highly satisfying, or sometimes off-putting, offensive, even dangerous.  

For one thing, you can create characters with voices you don't or wouldn't ordinarily attempt in other circumstances.  The example reported by the NYT I reference above is instructive: I believe that writer (a young, white male) is trying on the voice of someone he isn't and can never be (a homeless person of color).  Is he right to do that?  Does he have the right?  Many people in the twittersphere didn't think so at the time and probably don't think so today (see Roxanne Gay, quoted in the Times story).  He was accused, basically, of wearing black face.  But might he also have been trying to walk in somebody else's shoes and using one of the only tools available to him for that purpose--his art?  Was he adopting voice strategically, as a means to self-discovery?  Hmmmm . . . more questions.

For another, you can create voice modulations you may not often adopt otherwise.  What is it like to beg, to lash out, to express undying love or gratitude, to bemoan, to ridicule?  Modulating a voice in a poem can take you there.  What's it like to switch personalities or tones mid-statement or in quick succession?  To undercut one voice with another?  You can try that in a poem.

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The most important things about voice, for me, are simply knowing that it is there, always, and that I can deploy voice(s) for artistic purposes.  

Voice, tone, movement and meaning (12.7.19)

Voice is the most intimate tool in your poetry writing (and reading) kit.  It makes nuance possible, and the more adept you become in using this tool, the more attuned your ear becomes to its possibilities, the greater depth AND INTEREST your poems will achieve.

We've talked about voice in poetry often, but usually obliquely, as we did with the project "Reading poems aloud" (11.21.18), and possibly even with the project on "Parody" (9.5.18).  And when we talk about irony in a poem during our Wednesday salon, we in some fashion talk about voice, that is, how the voice of the poem cannot be taken necessarily as the writer's own, or that the writer intentionally and more or less obviously dons a mask, a certain tone.

In the blog entry for October 20, 2019 ("Resisting the authorial voice in a poem"), I started thinking about voice and how it is deployed, whether it is used consciously and artistically.  This entry continues that idea.  (I am also expanding on the relationship between voice and intention in a new blog entry, not yet posted.

In the meantime, here is the project for this coming week's salon:

Write, research or dig from your sewing basket of old threads and poems one or two examples of voice in the high, medium, or low register.  The examples I gave at this past week's Wednesdays@One salon suggested the differences among these three registers:

• Voice in a lower register: "I learned street lingo from my old man."
• Voice in a middle register: "My father taught me slang."
• Voice in a high register: "It was my sire who educated me in the ways of colloquial English."

Granted, that last example is a pretty exaggerated piece of voicing, but you get the idea.  The late poet, Tony Hoagland, co-wrote a book on voice that was published posthumously (The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice.  With Kay Cosgrove.  Norton 2019), and just in time for our project.  He describes these three registers this way:

• We had lunch at the 4th Street Diner.               (Middle)
• We took our midday repast at Chez Panisse.   (High)
• We pigged out at Burger King.                        (Low)

                                                                                                    (P. 55)

On the face of it, the categories are arbitrary, and Hoagland acknowledges this.  Not every segment of inflected language (Hoagland's more hifalutin voicing for "register") fits neatly into one or the other of them.  Consider the following . . .

• We dined twelvish at the 4th Street Diner.
• We had lunch at Chez Panisse.
• We had our midday repast at Burger King.

Low to Middle to High represents a continuum of voice registers.  We can say that in many poems, the voice trends high, low, or middle.  Voice in the middle register appears uninflected (read: no agenda), informational only, and is therefore the voice of choice for the front page of many newspapers.  Voice in the high register is meant to sound authoritative.  Much academic writing, especially in the humanities, is delivered in the higher registers, as is much business writing, pronouncements from the Federal Reserve Chair; and you can be sure the soon-to-be published Articles of Impeachment will be couched in the highest register of voice possible.  Voice in the lower register wants to be familiar, friendly, current, common.

But we all know (I hope), that there is no such thing as the uninflected, uninvolved voice.  We know that the mere sound of authority is not authority.  And we know that familiar, friendly, current and common can be anything but.  That is to say, we know from wide experience that voice is put on--sometimes "a put-on"--for the occasion.  The trick in poetry is to put on a voice or voices meaningfully, strategically, with the agenda demanded by the poem.  The more aware you become of voice, its varieties and uses, the better you'll be at developing voice in your own writing.

But what is voice, exactly?  Hoagland calls it "the distinctive linguistic presentation of an individual speaker." (3)  He goes on to say that voice can be "the mysterious atmosphere that makes [a poem] memorable." (3)  For me, voice is pure intimacy.  It is the sounds that virtually sit in my ear as I read or listen, that penetrate my being through the ear in ways that the eye can't accommodate.  Voice binds me to a poem in ways that a poem's page real estate or visual imagery or theme or content cannot.  Hoagland explains . . .

"Voice can be more primary than any story or idea the poem contains, and voice carries the cargo forward to delivery.  When we hear a distinctive voice in a poem, our full attention is aroused and engaged, because we suspect that here, now, at last, we may learn how someone else does it--that is, how they live, breathe, think, feel, and talk." (3)

Here . . . now . . . at last.  Hoagland has in mind the immediacy of voice.  It's fair to note, along with Hoagland, that voices in the higher and lower registers tend to call attention to themselves, to the materiality of words, whereas voices in the middle register tend to stay in the background, uninvolved and apparently uninflected.  But to the attentive reader of poetry, all voices are inflected and all have an immediacy; all are chosen.

In a poem, voice is performance.  Even when I think that I, Clark, am speaking in one of my poems, I am giving a performance.  Whether it's a command virtuoso performance or a bit of schtick or slapstick, whether I am speaking directly of some fact, or whether I am sharing some personal experience or conclusion, I am on a stage, as it were, the stage of the work of art.  If I am not doing so, then I am not writing a poem, or a not very good poem.  Language is a medium and its meaning is always mediated in a poem; even a cri de Coeur is performative, a matter of register.

We often confuse the voice in a middle register with directness, "honesty" and "authenticity."  Here's an example.

Cattle out in rain, their knowledgeable

Solid standing and readiness to wait,

These I learned from.

                                          -- Seamus Heaney, District and Circle

The read is so easy in these lines (yes, and through the entire poem which they begin) that you're left to believe that the MAN is speaking, not the poet.  But do you think Heaney spoke this way at the grocery checkout line?  No, this is performative Heaney, Heaney the Poet.  He broke the first line at the word "knowledgeable" and neglected the comma you'd think would be correct between it and "Solid" in the next line.  He didn't describe the cattle as simply standing and waiting, but as having a "readiness to wait," in a kind of internal self-contradiction (usually, we are ready to act) that should remind you of Milton's famous highbrow assertion: "They also serve who only stand and wait."  Not to mention the grammatically faulty run-on of "These I learned from," which might have been delivered in a more middle voice, "I learned from these."  These were all choices made during the construction of this poem, choices of voice and tonality.  They are meant to draw you in, to get you to identify.

So there is a good deal more complexity, layered-ness, and modulation to what at first seems a very "clear" and unencumbered voice in the middle register.  Choices have been made.  And if you are wondering at this point whether there is such a thing as a "normal" voice in a middle register, from which all other voices depart in some way, you'd be correct to acknowledge that, no, there is not.  It's all modulation.  

For contrast to the Heaney lines, look at these lines from another contemporary Irish poet, Paul Muldoon . . .

Not Sato's sword, not Sato's "consecrated blade"

that for all its years in the oubliette

of Thoor Ballylee, is unsullied, keen,

lapped yet in the lap of a geisha's gown.

This is the opening stanza to a sonnet titled "The Point" (in Muldoon's 1998 Hay).  (The lines from Heaney open a sonnet, too.)  You don't need the side-by-side comparison to see the difference in voice register.  These lines are in a modern voice's highest register, approaching what Modernist scholars used to call a poem's "difficulty."  The first stanza is one sentence, that is, encompassing a single thought.  The sentence structure is periodic; in other words, the main thought is withheld until the latter portion of the statement.  The sentence opens on a classical negative not hard to find in English-language poetry: "Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck"; "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments"; "Not at the first sight, nor with a dribbed shot"; "Not thee, O never thee, in all time's changes."  (Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Sidney, and Swinburne.)  The periodic structure is in itself an indicator of a formal voicing.  The allusions are semi-classical and mythical, and certainly literary (Yeats--Sato's sword; Yeats owned and lived in Ballylee Castle).  All of which is to say, this is heightened language delivered in the highest of high registers, for which Muldoon is well-known.

You can mix voices in a poem, just as you mix voices in conversation.  In fact, as Hoagland argues, this mixing is one of the characteristics of contemporary American poetry.  It is poetry in the vernacular, where a poem's speaker modulates from one register to another without warning and, apparently, without plan or purpose.  I argue that in a well-crafted poem, there is always a plan and a purpose.  These may emerge through the writing process and subsequent drafting.  It may become apparent to you as you draft a poem that you are working in a particular voice register or set of registers.

With practice (writing and reading attentively), you may even learn to recognize nuances beyond (inside?) the grosser inflections of irony, anger, sarcasm, shrillness, joy, earnestness, resolve, hope, and so on.  Doing so will only broaden your palette of voices with which to paint the mood and movement of a poem.

You may also learn how to deploy various voices to various effects, such as the voice of an unself-reflective speaker.  You might learn how to put the voice of love into the words of a liar, or an earnest tone into the words of a grifter, irony into the voice of a believer, etc.

These will be challenging but rewarding problems to solve when you're writing a poem.

Some conclusions about voice:

• Voice in a poem is performative, and both the writer and the reader are implicated in the performance.
• Voice is a tool, part of the writer's general kit for creating emotion, mood, movement in a poem.
• Voice establishes a relationship between the poem and the reading of it; its possibilities are anything from colloquial to formal, rough to ornate, rude to gracious, soothing to shrill, local to universal, intimate to ironic, loving to accusatory, etc., etc.
• Voice is never neutral, even when it seems to be reportorial or "merely" descriptive.  It is (or should be) there by design, and it is meant to move the reader toward meaning or feeling.
• Voice occupies a register ranging from the familiar and colloquial to the high-minded and hifalutin.  Categories like "familiar," "neutral," and "high-toned" are not arbitrary but neither are they absolute; these voice registers are defined by the community within which the poet writes.  (The poet might write against the grain of that community.)

See you on Wednesday!

Who Knew You Could Write About That? (11.12.19)

Greetings all.

I know this is an awfully late post for tomorrow's project, but it's meant only to encourage you to finish what I hope you've already started.  If not, or if you're stuck, here's a reminder of our project and some discussion of what it could entail.

First, the project: to write a poem that uses content you wouldn't ordinarily associate with poetry.

Some of you might be thinking right now, THERE IS NOTHING OUT OF BOUNDS FOR POETRY!!  And you'd be right.  Take a look at all the variants of poems we include in the poetic art:

Poems about life, death, loss, love, birth, marriage, divorce
Poems about the struggle of the artist in an indifferent society
Poems about politics and war, fear and hope, desperation and triumph
Poems about places familiar and foreign, known and imagined
Poems about art (paintings, other poems, music, dance)

Poems that use old words in old ways and in new ways
Poems that borrow terms/ideas from other categories (law, science, religion, commerce, technology)
Poems that twist or challenge the rules of grammar and usage, etiquette, style

You can write about or "with" just about anything in a poem and poets are celebrated especially for doing so.  Or can you?  That's the objective of this little project, to test that theory . . . because it is a theory.  The list above is off the top of my head and probably could be extended.  But I doubt that as a writer of poetry I produce much work whose content falls outside this really very narrow set of subjects and treatments.

What I mean to say is that we may believe THERE IS NOTHING OUT OF BOUNDS FOR POETRY, and we might be right, technically.  However, for most of us--who write within a culture, a timeframe, a community--there are some seriously limiting factors that determine FOR US what a poem is, what its content must be, how it must unfold across the page.  It's hard for us to imagine writing poems outside of the context(s) in which we write.

I've spent several days this past week struggling to come up with something for a poem that I wouldn't ordinarily think of writing about (subject) or using (image) or developing (line of argument, style of presentation, etc.) . . . and I mean struggling! The project has sent me back to some very old poems, like Robert Herrick's "Upon Julia's Clothes," which uses the high-tech term (for his time), liquifaction. I remember feeling grabbed by that word the first time I read the poem in a lit survey course, because it just didn't seem to belong in a steamy poem of 17th Century England. It puzzled me until I had to teach the poem in a lit survey of my own. That's when I was forced to really think about what Herrick was up to with it. And it was this: he was being a poet. He was creating a poetic work of art whose first purpose, like all art, is to draw attention to itself, to its materiality. And in the case of poetry, that materiality is language. What better way to do that than to jam a term of high-tech science (alchemy) into the middle of a sexy love poem? 

This is why I often encourage you to engage with poetry that comes from some other set of rules or experiences or understanding about the art and what it can be.  That might be non-Western, non-European poetry.  It might be ancient or extremely current/cutting edge poetry.  It might be poetry in a language other than your own.  

When you engage with such art--and who knows where YOU will stumble across it?--chances are you'll run across some odd image or weird topic or head-scratching turn of phrase.  You'll stop reading for a moment and say to yourself, I didn't know you could put something like that into a poem! * And your poetry horizon will be ever so slightly expanded.

Tonight, I'm still struggling with my poem of newness, as you might call this project.  I'm looking for that bar of soap that Bennett found in my poem of last week, a little piece of content that I didn't set out to make "new" or innovative but that, for one reader at least, came across that way.  

Can't wait to hear what you come up with for tomorrow!
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* Or your first response might be, "That's a mistake!" or "Huh?"

Resisting the authorial voice in a poem (10.20.19)

Recently I listened as a poet read her work at a poetry reading.  The setting was a book store, and specifically, it was near the one narrow set of shelves set aside for the store's poetry collection (mostly themed anthologies, heavy on Mary Oliver and Billy Collins, with a few volumes by people of color).  The hush was a little like church.

One of the poems the poet read to us was what you might call a "true life" poem.  It was lyrical, packed with emotion, deeply personal, relatively unadorned and direct.  It was determinedly unironic.  It was a poem about suffering survived and adversity overcome, about being true to oneself.

And I didn't believe a word of it.  

Before we go further, let me clarify something.  I am not a complete cynic.  That is, I am no more or less cynical than the next person about life or people or the role of government or religion or the value of literature or ideas of community, fairness, integrity, etc.  I get as misty eyed as the next moviegoer when the lovers finally admit their love and the villain acknowledges his humanity at last, even when it's obvious the screenwriter, music director, film director, editor and actor have conspired to bring that tear to my eye.  

When I say I didn't believe a word of it, "it" is not the poet who wrote the poem and who read to our little coterie of book store poetry devotees.  Nor is "it" the event described in the poem or the feeling that description was meant to express and evoke. 

What she read certainly sounded like a poem, or at least the reading of it sounded poetic, flowing, full of a heightened use of language.  And she read it well, with ample eye contact, sonority where sonority sounded right, rhythm, meaningful pauses, stresses, etc.

So what was it about the poem (or maybe the experience) that I didn't find credible?  It was the poem itself.  Or, to be more precise, it was the authorial voice of the poem--not the reader's voice or the reading of the moment, mind you--but the voice built into the poem as literary effect.

This got me to thinking about voice in poetry, what it is, how it works, why it is important.  Actually, thinking about it has only raised more questions . . .

• What is voice; what do we mean by it in relation to poetry?
• Do writers of poems actually "write in their own authentic voices"?
• What is authenticity of voice?
• Is voice "style" or vice versa?
• When we write, do we / should we write with one voice?  Is it wrong to mix voices?
• If we write using more than one voice, which one is "real" and "authentic" and to be believed?
• Is there an "American voice"?  A "Southern voice"?  A "Yankee voice"?  A voice of color?  

I could go on with the questions, but the first one above, I think, is the one most worth beginning with, though maybe a little further reflection and reading would be a good idea before taking up the question.  So, later, then.

Letter poems (10.14.19)

Let's try writing a verse epistle. Make your letter poem Horatian or Ovidian, whatever sparks your imagination. See below for what this means, for background, history, and my own thoughts about letter poems.

But write it to someone, some group or coterie. Your recipient can be very personal or remote, concrete (flesh and blood) or abstract.

Your subject can be anything--love, sex, death, art, poetry, politics, technology, work, daily living, conscience, belief, loss of faith--anything.

Your treatment of the subject can be how you feel about it, how you think your recipient feels, what you believe to be true and/or false, or an exploration of what the subject means.

For convenience's sake, and to get your motor running, I suggest you open with "Dear . . ."

Before you start making a poem, I also suggest that you take some time to think about your recipient. Analyze your audience. If it's a person, make some notes about the person, your relationship, what you know about him or her and how this person thinks, what she believes, etc. Consider why you are writing to this person, just as if you'd sat down to jot a normal letter--what news do you have to share? why do you want to share it? what are you asking the recipient to do, if anything, besides read your letter? This process will help you determine how intimate your verse letter is going to be, or how communal (for example: W.C. Williams' note to Flossie about eating the plums vs. Walt Whitman's letter to the generations of Americans to come after he is gone and is grass under our feet).

Some Background on Verse Epistle

The website of The Academy of American Poets defines "verse epistle" as "poems that read as letters." The Academy goes on . . .

"The appeal of epistolary poems is in their freedom. The audience can be internal or external. The poet may be speaking to an unnamed recipient or to the world at large, to bodiless entities or to abstract concepts."

For the Academy's discussion, plus examples, click here, verse epistle.

Historically, there are two kinds of verse epistle: the Horatian and the Ovidian. Read these names as placeholders for "moral and philosophical subjects" and "sentimental subjects," respectively. The implication is that there are two reasons to write a letter poem. The first is to explore a subject deeply, in a kind of thinking out loud to a correspondent. The second is to write a love letter. Ovid's approach was popular in the Middle Ages and Renaissance; think courtly love poetry, the troubadours, the great love sonnet sequences. Horace's innovation had traction in the Renaissance and Neoclassical periods. Pope, for instance, wrote his Moral Essays in the form of verse letters, as well as Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.

The letter poem can be lengthy and developed into an extended argument--see Pope, and Sydney's Astrophel and Stella--and it can be shorter, more lyrical, as in individual sonnets within a sequence (see especially the first 18 of Shakespeare's group).  To be clear, though, the Sonnets are not voiced as letters, though they are messages/entreaties to a specific person.  Like letters, they imply an expectation that the recipient will take some kind of action--read the message, do as the message directs . . .

You'll recall that we touched on similar forms of direct address, like apostrophe (see my blog entry for 1.31.18), and poems written "in conversation with" or in reply to other poems (see entries for 6.13.18 and 1.20.19). But though these forms are similar, they are not identical, and for one very good reason. A letter not only points to a recipient, a specific reader, but to an action--a private reading--and possibly to another action--a reply. When you've written letters before, were they intended for a specific recipient and not to be shared? Paul's letters to the Corinthians were intended only for them. Love letters are troved away, then discovered decades into a marriage that did not create them, and we are injured (or entertained) on both sides.

Certainly, you have written a letter in anticipation of a reply? Common closings to a letter--"I await your reply . . ." "Please let me know . . ." "If I don't hear back from you . . ." "Write back and let me know how all are doing."

And even if no reply is expected, letters aren't one way communications (Dear John letters and letters to the editor aside). They may bring news, but they assume the recipient will be interested to know the news, will likewise find it informative, fascinating, funny, infuriating, odd, uplifting, tragic, etc. The writer will understand, or believe she understands, that her reader will react, and even imagine how the reader will react to what is put into the letter. These assumptions insure the two-way communication even if the recipient doesn't or isn't intended to reply.

But letter poems are not just personal letters with news to share. They are works of art and, as such, ask for an audience, not merely a recipient. An audience of a letter poem--even an audience of one--will read beyond the content to the form in which it is written, to its emotional affect, to its engagement with language. As works of art, letter poems are as much about themselves as made things as they are "about" their content, like any other poem. Speaking of emotional affect, a letter poem, because it's a poem, will express and try to communicate an emotion via all the tools and techniques we've studied at Wednesdays@One: image, metaphor, rhythm and meter, syntax, line, rhyme or its absence, allusion, point of view, voice, etc.

When I read a letter poem, I like the feeling that I'm listening in or that I am the one being written to: the lover, the cohort, the enemy, the friend . . . Reading a letter poem puts me into a unique position with regard to the poet, the persona represented in the poem, and to myself.

So, before you begin writing your letter poem, read through the examples below. Put yourself in the role of the person or concept to whom the letter poem is addressed (I am Flossie; I am America). Consider the subject, of course, but also give thought to how it is presented, the techniques, figures, cadences, stresses, etc. that are employed, and what tone of voice and emotion are elicited through these devices.

----------

The poems that follow are "letters" in their several ways.  One or two aren't actually offered as letters, like the section from Song of Myself.  Some are formally so, opening with the standard salutation of "Dear . . .," and are equipped with a closing.  Others are simply messages, notes, postcards, like the Williams poem, which you'd imagine finding taped to the refrigerator door.  But they read "as letters" in that each is aimed at or addressed to someone or some group in an implied correspondence.  The Williams poem is simple, unironic, almost unadorned, as you'd expect from him.  The Bishop poem is deliciously nuanced and full of implication and sub-text.

This Is Just to Say 

--William Carlos Williams

I have eaten

the plums 

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably 

saving 

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

from Song of Myself (section 52)

--Walt Whitman

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place, search another,

I stop somewhere waiting for you.

A Letter to William Carlos Williams

--Kenneth Rexroth

Dear Bill,

When I search the past for you,

Sometimes I think you are like

St. Francis, whose flesh went out

Like a happy cloud from him,

And merged with every lover--

Donkeys, flowers, lepers, suns--

But I think you are more like

Brother Juniper, who suffered

All indignities and glories

Laughing like a gentle fool.

You're in the Fioretti

Somewhere, for you're a fool, Bill,

Like the Fool in Yeats, the term

Of all wisdom and beauty.

It's you, stands over against

Helen in all her wisdom,

Solomon in all his glory.

Remember years ago, when 

I told you you were the first

Great Franciscan poet since

The Middle Ages? I disturbed

The even tenor of dinner.

Your wife thought I was crazy.

It's true, though. And you're "pure," too,

A real classic, though not loud

About it--a whole lot like

The girls of the Anthology.

Not like strident Sappho, who

For all her grandeur, must have

Had endemetriosis,

But like Anyte, who says

Just enough, softly, for all

The thousands of years to remember.

It's a wonderful quiet 

You have, a way of keeping

Still about the world, and its

Dirty rivers, and garbage cans,

Red wheelbarrows glazed with rain,

Cold plums stolen from the icebox,

And Queen Anne's Lace, and day's eyes,

And leaf buds bursting over

Muddy roads, and splotched bellies

With babies in them, and Cortes

And Malinche on the bloody

Causeway, the death of the flower world.

Nowadays, when the press reels

With chatterboxes, you keep still,

Each year a sheaf of stillness,

Poems that have nothing to say,

Like the stillness of George Fox,

Sitting still under the cloud

Of all the world's temptation,

By the fire, in the kitchen,

In the Vale of Beavor. And

The archetype, the silence

Of Christ, when he paused a long

Time and then said, "Thou sayest it."

Now in a recent poem you say,

"I who am about to die."

Maybe this is just a tag

From the classics, but it sends

A shudder over me. Where 

Do you get that stuff, Williams?

Look at here. The day will come

When a young woman will walk

By the lucid Williams River,

Where it flows through an idyllic

News from Nowhere sort of landscape,

And she will way to her children,

"Isn't it beautiful? It

Is named after a man who

Walked here once when it was called

The Passaic, and was filthy

With the poisonous excrements

Of sick men and factories.

He was a great man. He knew

It was beautiful then, although

Nobody else did, back there

In the Dark Ages. And the

Beautiful river he saw

Still flows in his veins, as it

Does in ours, and flows in our eyes,

And flows in time, and makes us

Part of it, and part of him.

That, children, is what is called

A sacramental relationship.

And that is what a poet

Is, children, one who creates

Sacramental relationships

That last always."

    With love and admiration,

    Kenneth Rexroth.

A Poem to Galway Kinnell

--Etheridge Knight

Sat., Apr. 26, 1973

Jefferson City, Mo. 65101

(500 yards, as the crow flies,

from where I am writing you 

this letter, lies the Missouri

State Prison--it lies, the prison,

like an overfed bear alongside 

the raging Missouri river--

the pale prison, out of which,

sonny liston, with clenched fist,

fought his way, out of which,

james earl ray ripped his way

into the hearts of us all . . .)

dear galway,

   it is flooding here, in Missouri,

the lowlands are all under water and at night

the lights dance on the dark water,

our president, of late of Watergate,

is spozed to fly above the flooded areas

and estimate how much damage has been done

to THE PEOPLES . . . .

dear galway,

    it is lonely here, and sometimes,

THE PEOPLES can be a bitch

dear galway,

    i hear poems in my head

as the wind blows in your hair

and the young brown girl

with the toothpaste smile

who flows freely because she has heard OUR SOUNDS . . . .

dear galway,

    OUR SONGS OF LOVE are still

murmurs among these melodies of madness . . . .

dear Galway, and what the fuck are the irish doing/

and when the IRA sends JUST ONE, just one soldier

to fight with say the American Indians, then i'll believe them . . . .

dear galway,

    the river is rising here, and i am

scared and lonely . . . . . . 

Mary and the children send their love

to you and yours

                          always

                          Imamu Etheridge Knight Soa

Letter to N.Y.
--Elizabeth Bishop

In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you're pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road goes round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,

and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you're in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,

and most of the jokes you just can't catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so terribly late,

and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.

--Wheat, not oats, dear.  I'm afraid
if it's wheat it's none of your sowing,
nevertheless I'd like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.

Letter to Bell from Missoula

--Richard Hugo

Dear Marvin: Months since I left broke down and sobbing

in the parking lot, grateful for the depth

of your understanding and since then I've been treated

in Seattle and I'm in control like Ghengas Khan.

That was a hairy one, the drive west, my nerves so strung

I couldn't sign a recognizable name on credit slips.

And those station attendants' looks. Until Sheridan 

I took the most degenerate motels I saw because they seemed

to be where I belonged. I found my way by instinct

to bad restaurants and managed to degrade myself

in front of waitresses so dumb I damn near offered them

lessons in expressions of disdain. Now, it's all a blur.

Iowa. South Dakota. Wyoming. Lots of troublesome deja vu

in towns I'd seen or never seen before. It's snowing

in Missoula, has been off and on for days but no fierce winds

and no regrets. I'm living alone in a house I bought,

last payment due 2001. Yesterday, a religious nut

came to the door and offered me unqualified salvation

if I took a year's subscription to Essential Sun Beam.

I told him I was Taoist and he went away. Today,

a funny dog, half dachshund, waddles through my yard.

A neighbor boy, Bud, poor, shovels my walk for a dollar

and on the radio a break is predicted. A voice is saying,

periods of sun tomorrow, a high front from the coast.

For no reason, I keep remembering my first woman

and how I said afterward happy, so that's what you do.

I think of you and Dorothy. Stay healthy. Love. Dick.

The Letter

--W.H. Auden

From the very first coming down

Into a new valley with a frown

Because of the sun and a lost way,

You certainly remain: to-day

I, crouching behind a sheep-pen, heard

Travel across a sudden bird,

Cry out against the storm, and found

The year's arc a completed round

And love's worn circuit re-begun,

Endless with no dissenting turn.

Shall see, shall pass, as we have seen

The swallow on the tile, spring's green

Preliminary shiver, passed 

A solitary truck, the last

Of shunting in the Autumn. But now,

To interrupt the homely brow,

Thought warmed to evening through and through

Your letter comes, speaking as you,

Speaking of much but not to come.

Nor speech is close nor fingers numb,

If love not seldom has received

An unjust answer, was deceived.

I, decent with the seasons, move

Different or with a different love,

Nor question overmuch the nod,

The stone smile of this country god

That never was more reticent,

Always afraid to say more than it meant.

Letter from an Institution

--Michael Ryan

I have a garden here, shaped

like Marienbad, remember?,

I lose myself

in, it seems. They only look for me

sometimes. I don't like my dreams.

The nurses quarrel over where I am

hiding. I hear from inside

a bush. One is crisp

& cuts; one pinches. I'd like to push

them each somewhere.

They both think it's funny

here. The laughter sounds like diesels.

I won't move because I'm lazy.

You start to like the needles.

You start to want to crazy.

A Letter from Tegucigalpa

--Mark Strand

Dear Henrietta, since you were kind enough to ask why I no longer write, I shall do my best to answer you. In the old days, my thoughts like tiny sparks would flare up in the almost dark consciousness and I would transcribe them, and page after page shone with a light that I called my own. I would sit at my desk amazed by what had just happened. And even as I watched the lights fade and my thoughts become small, meaningless memorials in the afterglow of so much promise, I was still amazed. And when they disappeared, as they inevitably did, I was ready to begin again, ready to sit in the dark for hours and wait for even a single spark, though I knew it would shed almost no light at all. What I had not realized then, but now know only too well, is that sparks carry within them the wish to be relieved of the burden of brightness. And that is why I no longer write, and why the dark is my freedom and my happiness.

Farewell, John Giorno, So Long, Good-bye

In the New York Times' obits today: John Giorno, free poet, friend of the Beats, lover of Robert Maplethorpe and Andy Warhol, husband of Ugo Rondinone, dead at 82. Check it out here: John Giorno obituary

And here's a piece of a poem he wrote in 2006, titled "Thanx4Nothing," quoted in the obit:

May every drug I ever took
come back and get you high
may every glass of vodka and wine I ever drank
come back and make you feel really good,
numbing your nerve ends
allowing the natural clarity of your mind to flow free,
may all the suicides be songs of aspiration,
thanks that bad news is always true,
may all the chocolate I’ve ever eaten
come back rushing through your bloodstream
and make you feel happy,
thanks for allowing me to be a poet
a noble effort, doomed, but the only choice.

The habits of poetry - regular practice (10.1.19)

This is the fourth in a series titled "The Habits of Poetry . . ."  For reference, take another look at the entries for July 23, 2019 (honesty), March 28, 2019 (revising), and January 23, 2019 (practical observation).

This habit has to do with practice; I don't mean just the general activity of writing poems, as in "the practice of poetry," but rather and more pointedly, practicing writing.  And what does this mean?  Emulation.  It means mimicking other writers' styles, tones, line construction, rhyme schemes, diction, themes, and so on.  Or at least trying to write similarly to the styles, forms, terms, vocabularies, etc. that you encounter in your reading.

Why mimic?  For one thing, poetry has a long history of mimicry or emulation.  So called "schools" of poetry involve at least some emulative writing.  Think of the Metaphysical School with its emphasis on conceit.  Somebody wrote a poem that developed a difficult metaphor that was logical, balanced, subtle, extended, tightly controlled, rhetorically pure, and clever--a conceit.  Somebody else tried his hand at it and, with practice, produced another nice conceit.  Others followed suit, practicing, practicing, practicing.  Sooner or later, a School!

There is the Surrealist/Dadaist School where poets to this day write apparent "nonsense" (or so it seems to the Classically minded of us).  They are emulating what Baudelaire and Apollinaire did originally, who had practiced with the poems of Poe in mind.  But even the nonsense takes practice--an accomplished and practiced writer of the surreal knows how to use the unconscious to get to the poem.  The un- or under-practiced still tend to produce . . . nonsense.

The New York "school" of poets emulated one another through "action writing," that is, capturing the instant while still in the instant (think Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch) or through "meta" writing--that is, poems that are all about themselves as works of art made without revision or second thoughts (think John Ashbery, Barbara Guest).

Nearly every generation of poets produces a clique that emulates the poetry of Walt Whitman--messianic voice, extended line, blocky paragraph structure, repetitive diction.

For another reason, though, mimicking the work of other poets, periods, schools and so on helps you to (eventually) develop your own peculiar style.  Some writers might object at this point that no one needs to mimic other kinds of poetry writing; all you need to do is to "look in thy heart and write"--as Philip Sidney advised.  Maybe.  But even he didn't really do that.  Sidney knew the old forms because he was trained (practiced) in them, and so used them.  One of these was the Petrarchan sonnet sequence that he used (emulated) in Astrophyl and Stella.  Where he innovated, that is, didn't emulate so much, was in how he sourced his work: "look in they heart and write" is the same admonition as write about what you know.

Let's say you want to write a sonnet.  Okay, you can put SOMETHING on paper that has 14 lines.  Sonnet?  Probably not.  Probably, you've written 14 lines.  Let's say you advance your thinking and your experimentation a little by organizing those 14 lines into two sections: one containing eight lines followed by one having six.  Sonnet?  Maybe, maybe not.  You practice some more, stepping farther into the form: the eight line section establishes a problem or a theme or a question of some sort, and the six line section resolves the problem, comments on the theme, or answers the question.  Now you are in the zip code at least of "sonnet" in braces.  Then let's say you really warm to the emulation experiment and add rhyme: two quatrains for the eight-line section and two tercets for the six-line section.  And from there you practice with different types of rhyme: masculine, feminine, off, internal, rising, falling.  As you go, you're getting better at the plasticity of a supposedly strict form.

Are we there yet?  Maybe so.  Maybe you've arrived at a good approximation of a Petrarchan sonnet. But not unless the poem's theme is love--distant, unrequited, soul-killing, tear-jerking love.  Now we're talking Petrarch!  But then there is the Shakespearean/English sonnet, which takes on all kinds of subjects, including love, and which is built out of three quatrains of rolling rhyme followed by a couplet which delivers a kind of stinger, as country songs do.  Master that through practice, and then move on to the Spenserian sonnet, which also is built out of quatrains and an ending couplet, but the quatrains interweave the rhyme from stanza to stanza.  Next, try on Milton for a change in theme and topic, like the individual's role in the state.  Then move on to Shelley, Keats, and across the Atlantic to Poe (who mimicked the British, especially Spenser, in an early sonnet) and flash forward in time to Robert Lowell for a radical change in theme (himself and family history), form (unrhymed or near-rhymed) and line (sometimes metered, sometimes interrupted).

AND THAT'S JUST PRACTICE WITH A SONNET.

I can guarantee this much: if you practice writing all these kinds of sonnet, when you're done you'll be a sonneteer with your own unique understanding of what makes the form work, and have developed your own style and voice for sonneteering.

The point is practice, practice, practice.

If you want to become a better poetry writer overall, you'll commit to this kind of practice regularly if not often.  Plus, you'll practice working in other forms, including so called "free verse."  You'll practice adjusting lines and line length to rhythms and cadences by trying to write like Whitman, then Emily Dickinson, then Horace, then maybe Coleridge.  And you'll wind up knowing what emulative practice must have been like for Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, C. K. Williams, Albert Goldbarth, maybe others.

You can even practice tone, style, theme.  Try reading a half dozen or so poems by W. H. Auden, then emulating these.  You'll find yourself commenting politically and philosophically and emotionally on famous people, current events, and using personal local events (a marriage, a birth, a death, a retirement, a commencement, etc.) as springboards into deeper, grander social and civilizational topics and themes.  You might even begin to write ruminatively, as Auden often did.

All of this mindful practice will make you a better writer of poetry.  I guarantee it or your money back.

Two prose poems in The Dark Horse

Here's a bit of good news: the Fall/Winter issue of The Dark Horse just came out with two of my prose poems in its pages.  The Dark Horse is a classically high quality print publication, with very good design features and serious editing, so I'm proud to be represented there.  Here's the link to the new issue in electronic form . . . http://www.thedarkhorsemagazine.com/newissue.html.  

Writing the elegy (9.25.19)

Elegy is as much mood as mode for the practicing poet.  It is feeling first, as E.E. Cummings said, and it is feeling last.  

The name comes from the Greek word elegeia, for "lament."  My Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics defines the term as a "lyric, usually formal in tone and diction, suggested either by the death of an actual person or by the poet's contemplation of the tragic aspects of life."  In other words, an emotion is prompted by an external event (someone's passing) or by introspection (the tragedy of life).  Whichever source, the Encyclopedia goes on to describe, the emotion "finds consolation in the contemplation of some permanent principle."

The first thing to note about elegy, in the Encyclopedia's terms, is that it is a lyric form, that is, not dramatic, epic, or narrative, but song.  We can extend that distinction: the elegy is never merely ironic or satirical.  Where irony's indirectness suggests cynicism, or a kind of fatalism, elegy's lament is often more direct and unfeigned.  Where satire points to a wrong in society that must be righted, elegy points to a truth, a "fact of life."

Typically, elegies don't develop plot or characters (as plays and novels do); they don't unfold over vast spans of space and time (The Iliad, The Aeneid); they are not symphonic (Song of Myself).  Like love poems, elegies sing intense emotions and address intimate topics.  Reading them, you should feel not like you're at a performance of King Lear or watching Apocalypse Now on the big screen, but listening in to an anguished soul in private, one on one.  You are experiencing a moment (with someone).

The second thing to note is that the death or "sad but true fact of life" that occasions an elegy is not the subject of the elegy.  It is the departure point where the real subject is the poet's feeling about these things.  Someone important to you dies--say a relative, a mentor, a friend, a beloved public figure.  Your elegy explores the meaning of that loss, to you and/or to your coterie or fellow citizens, etc.  If you write a poem that merely celebrates the deceased's life, you have created a eulogy, not an elegy.  Or you come upon a robin dead in your front yard.  Your elegy explores the life cut short, the vanity of human endeavor, the provisional nature of life, etc.  If you write a poem that merely describes the dead bird, you have created possibly a deep and abiding image, but not an elegy.

And the third thing to note in the Encyclopedia's definition is that it leads somewhere; it finds consolation.  So the best way to understand elegy as a writer of poetry is that you set out to make yourself feel better about some incontrovertible fact of life: someone's died, something's died, the center cannot hold, life is loss, etc.  That is to say, elegy seeks and elegy finds.  Or attempts to find.  

But is that all, just feeling?  Is there craft to elegy?  If you set out to write an elegy (spoiler alert!), where do you go after feeling?  How do you know that what you're writing isn't really something else?  And what does "lament" look like in poetic practice?

I have no answers to these questions.  Which is what makes me think this is a great project for us at Wednesdays@One--to try to discover the form by trying to write one.  Below are a few very basic guidelines (they're not rules, really) and some examples to get you started.  Have fun!

Guidelines

1.  Keep your poem short, to a single page or less, if you can, and make it meditative.
2.  Choose a subject: that person whose passing made you (still makes you?) stop and think about what was lost or what that death meant to you or your community.  Remember, try not to write an encomium or eulogy--your poem isn't really about that person, but what that person's death means.  Alternatively, choose something like that dead bird in your garden, or the abandoned house down the road, or the polar bear (whose extinction seems more and more likely), or Earth (whose extinction seems more and more likely), or Troy or democracy . . .  But remember this: you want to write an elegy, a lyric, not a political or religious diatribe, not a satire on Man's Folly, etc.  You want to use the subject to explore not just how you feel, but how to feel appropriately about the subject.
3.  Find consolation, if consolation is to be found.  (Such as, this is how I ought to feel about this loss, death, fact of life, etc.)  That is, seek wisdom in the elegy, even if it's the most mundane kind of wisdom. That is, direct your poem to somewhere, make it move.

For W_____, Who Commanded Well, by Howard Nemerov

You try to fix your mind upon his death,
Which seemed it might, somehow, be relevant
To something you once thought, or did, or might
Imagine yourself thinking, doing. When?

It was, once, the most possible of dreams:
The hero acted it, philosophers
Could safely recommend it to the young;
It was acceptable, a theme for a song.

And it was wrong? Daily the press commends
A rationed greed, the radio denies
That war is right, or wrong, or serious:
And money is being made, and the wheels go round,
And death is paying for itself: and so
It does not seem that anything was lost.

Elegy for Jane, by Theodore Roethke

(My student, thrown by a horse)

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;

And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;

And how, once started into talk, the light syllables leaped for her.

And she balanced the delight of her thought,

A wren, happy, tail into the wind,

Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.

The shade sang with her;

The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,

And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,

Even a father could not find her:

Scraping her cheek against straw,

Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here, 

Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.

The sides of wet stones cannot console me,

Nor the moss, would with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,

My mained darling, my skittery pigeon.

Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:

I, with no rights in this matter,

Neither father nor lover.

For a Coming Extinction, by W. S. Merwin

Gray whale

Now that we are sending you to The End

That great god

Tell him

That we who follow you invented forgiveness

And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand

And I could say it

One must always pretend something

Among the dying

When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks

Empty of you 

Tell him that we were made

On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echo

Winding along your inner mountains

unheard by us

And find its way out

Leaving behind it the future

Dead

And ours

When you will not see again

The whale calves trying the light

Consider what you will find in the black garden

And its court

The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas

The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless

And fore-ordaining as stars

Our sacrifices

Join your word to theirs

Tell him

That it is we who are important


In Memory of Senator Mitch McConnell, by Clark Holtzman

His obituary will read like a victory lap in Lexington,
garlanded with uncontested primaries, steady electoral landslides,
the squeaker after he had to take a tough stand on principle.

His children will wipe tears away as the Reverend,
in full battle dress, recounts the life of noble animosities,
harrowing retrenchments, and they will know

that, but for him, the country might have gone to hell.
That year, the Derby will be raced with him in mind
and the Senate Chaplain, choking back tears of his own,

will eulogize a lion, a pillar, a bulwark, a standard
before a packed chamber and respectful media, silent for once.
That silence will be death's, profound and dumbstruck.

So be it, that a man will see the world in a mirror,
and as only he can see it, as he can only see it:
each of us loves an invention that can only love us back.

So we'll push on into our still new, still strange century,
adjusting our admirations and expectations to the novelty,
and, whatever yesterday was, hope for tomorrow's better day.