Happy poetry day!

I have had a terrifc poetry month and I hope that you have too.

Poetry is the expression of those ephemeral feelings that we all have. The taste of red. The sound of mushrooms. The smell of the rain on the roof.

For me, poetry and the arts are a reflection of all of the excitement and fun and mystery and frustration that we all feel everyday. Each of us is involved in the creative by merely living our daily lives. Self transformation is the manifestation of that urge to create. Careful observation deepens our experience.

I wish I had a better offering for the end of poetry month, but here is a poem I wrote for my mother's birthday several years ago...

Evening Prayer

going to sleep
finding myself
again returning
to look for you
in the room
of my thoughts.

My mother, lying down,
we sleepers, our heads,
on soft, sinking pillows,
darkness folded double over us,
the day being over,
we both sleep.

When I sleep
I will try
to dream of my mother.

(Can you still hear them,
those crickets of Summer?
They have all flown away from here.)

Under the cobwebs
of haze blown
by a thousand
other sleepers,

or under stars,

the same ceiling
will will turn
and span over both of us.

I wonder Will you dream of me?

We sleepers are
such willing travelers.

May one who is never sleeping,
watch over that vast track
which lies between us.
And may that path
become shorter and shorter…
Until it is but to reach across it
and touch hands.

End of poetry month poems

Chris was memorizing his "end of poetry month" poem today and recited it for me. We will be having a poetry party this Friday. What is a poetry party? I don't know, but Chris told me that all parties require refreshments -- and that includes poetry parties.

Here is his poem "A witch was in a hardware store" by Jack Prelutsky

A witch was in a hardware store,
she radiated gloom.
A clerk asked "may I help you?"
She replied, "I've lost me broom!
I've had that broom for ages,"
she continued through her tears.
"I must replace it right away,
for midnight quickly nears!"

The clerk said sympathetically,
"I'm sorry for your plight
However, we sell splendid brooms,
youll have one by tonight."
He added, "Let me show you some,"
and led her through the store.
"Our newest brooms sweep cleaner
than the brooms we've had before."

"No, no!" the witch protested,
"I prefer a broom thats old,
like the one in the corner
with the noticeable mold."
"We were about to throw it out,"
the clerk replied, nonplussed.
"A broom like that will never do
to sweep up all your dust."

"Yes, yes!" she shrieked, and snatched it.
"Its mine at any cost
Its practically the double
of the broom I said I'd lost."
The clerk said, "We deliver,
and can send it out today."
"No need!" she cackled, grinning,
and she flew that broom away.

Homework

So I am posting my "Poetry Class" homework. Most poets say that a poem is never really finished, you just decide to leave it alone. That is true especially in the case of poems that are written in all of fifteen minutes. I am still hopeful that some of you have had inspiration of your own and will also want to post your "assignment" on the blog. I am posting my poem so that no one will feel self concious if their poem is not first rate :)

A sleep and a forgetting
a day's lost chance:

where you could have been the one
who sat down at dinner parties
and played the piano so well;

where you could have been the one
who taught all of the children
at the birthday party a new dance
so they forgot all about presents;

where you could have been the one
who built a log cabin out in the woods
with just an axe and a pencil
and never cared about being alone;

where you could have been the one
who spoke with a foreign accent
and had all the maps of the city;

where you could have been the one
to make a paint and plaster of paris world
and not bother about who liked it.

Instead you were asleep and forgetting,
a days lost chance,
the missing car keys,
or the loose change that falls from
someone's pocket into the black crack
between the sofa cushions

I think we need one of those dogs
that when you throw something away
always brings it back for you
to try and throw it away again.

I think we need to train a bird
that flies to the dry land
of lost dreams
and comes back
the dream in its beak
to let you know its safe
to start all over.

Poetry Class

A common assignment in university writing classes is to take a first line from someone else's poem (or any line from someone else's poem, for that matter) and use it as your own first line. The Collins poem that I posted earlier this week utilized a pretty similiar device. Creating this springboard is a terrific way to make a commentary on the other poem or just to get an easy start on your own ideas. It might seem like cheating, but it pays homage to the pieces of poetry and language that are part of the spiritus mundi or collective conciousness or whatever you want to call it. Your safe as long as the other poet is given their due (and is dead).

Try it for yourself with one or all of these lines or one of your own:

My love is like a red, red rose (Robert Burns 1794)

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting (William Wordsworth)

Do not go gentle into that good night (Dylan Thomas)

Through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

I was of three minds, like a tree, in which there are three blackbirds (Wallace Stevens)

Time does not bring relief, you all have lied (Edna St Vincent Millay)

Something there is that doesn't love a wall (Robert Frost)

She walks in beauty, like the night (Byron)


We can post the results throughout the week, if you like. At least, I will post my attempts, and hopefully you will feel inspired to submit yours as well.

Why is the Dunbar House closed?

Salman Rushdie has said, "A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep." I don't know if Oscar Wilde would have agreed, but it is true that poetry can address rights and wrongs, joys and injustices in a way that prose cannot. The language of poetry can conjure up feelings that surprise us. It can be the knife which cuts right to the heart.

Here is a poem written almost one hundred years ago which does just that, by Dayton's own Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Dunbar was the first African American poet to be widely known and published. He died of tuberculosis in 1906 at the age of 34. The poem, I think, is best out loud.

We Wear the Mask

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be overwise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

poetry out loud.

I have been short on time of late -- which is much less incriminating than saying you are short on ideas...

I wanted to revisit a previous web recommendation for the NEA website Poetry Out Loud. You can link to performances from the nationwide Poetry Out Loud competitions over the last several years at http://www.poetryoutloud.org/about/

Today's poem for the day is from the website www.poetryoutloud.org

Litany

By Billy Collins

You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine . . .
Jacques Crickillon


You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley,
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I am not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.

Spring Cleaning

Tommorow, at our house, we will be engaging in the age old practice of spring cleaning -- I noticed that coincidentally, I have written a poem with that name -- a work in progress, I guess -- but pomme frites allows the cravenly amateur. Feel free to help with my eventual improvement :)

Spring Cleaning

There is a reason why the spring flowers
seem to us so bright;

Its that we see them against a background
still mostly greys and whites.

Their vibrant cries are breaking Winter's
weary mantra of same same same

They sweep away the sepia tones with a besom
until the world seems light again

They wipe with a pink cloth, the dust
and cobwebs from our eyes;

And tempt to us to live out the
rest of time as birds and butterflies.

Its a palliative art
this coming on of spring;

I am waking and forgetting
that all must sleep again.

Haiku: At the Symphony

Cellos are swelling,
Plaintive violins soaring;
My heart sheds a tear.

Sapere ex libris

I got out my Norton's Anthology of Poetry today. It is heavy. When put it on the bathroom scale, the dial moves three tick marks. The pages are thin like tissue paper, and there are lots of them. It has poems from the Beowulf of long ago all the way to Leslie Marmon Silko and Yusef Komunyakaa, both poets I saw read when I was in college.

Here is a poem from somewhere in the middle of that anthology, from the great, gloomy Emily Dickinson -- a poem about descending into madness. It is so sunny a day here, one can read a melancholy poem with little more than a shudder -- I hope it is not overcast where you are --

You will notice that her poems lack titles -- they are most often designated by number in a chronological order assigned to them after her death, or else by their first line.

280

I felt a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.

And when they all were seated,
A service like a drum
Kept beating, beating, till I thought
My mind was going numb.

And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul
With those same boots of lead,
Then space began to toll

As all the heavens were a bell,
And Being but an ear,And I
and silence some strange race,
Wrecked, solitary, here.

And then a plank in reason, broke,
And I dropped down and down--
And hit a world at every plunge,
And finished knowing--then--

Hound - dog haiku from Jocelyn

I guess anyone who has had a dog has felt this way before -- it definitely does reduce the situation to its essence!

Don't look innocent
You had a warm bath, then went
Straight back to the mud.

by Jocelyn