True Poems

If you are writing (or are thinking about writing) narrative poetry, particularly in the first person (i.e. the persona poem), the Poetry Foundation has a good article by Kathleen Rooney on poetry that appears to be autobiographical, but isn't. While defending the right of poets to be completely imaginative and fictional in what they write, Rooney recognizes that sometimes readers of poems or collections that appear to be autobiographical and yet aren't can feel cheated when they discover the 'truth'. Whereas a reader comes to a novel expecting to read an invented story, poetry readers sometimes are lulled by the emotional responses they have to poetry into forgetting that a similar contract exists between writer and reader in poetry. In short, they can feel emotionally manipulated when they discover an experience they had assumed to be true isn't.

Though I also defend the poet's right to be inventive, just last week when reading Frances McCue's The Bled (Factory Hollow Press, 2010), about the death of  McCue's husband, I became overly concerned with how her husband had died, which is not made clear in the collection of poetry. It is understood that her husband had been young and healthy and the death thus unexpected, and that there was some trauma to the head that partially or perhaps fully resulted in his passing, but it wasn't until I tracked down a newspaper interview with McCue that I realized that her husband had collapsed while playing basketball and hit his head when falling, and died. Perhaps I should have picked this up from the poetry--there was a poem about her husband on the basketball court--but somehow I didn't. And when I did learn it, I wondered if it helped me understand the work more than I had previously, and wondered why it had mattered to me. And I couldn't say that having the knowledge was helpful on the level of understanding the art, but it gave me some sense of reality that apparently I had wanted, even while I agree with Rooney that the poet doesn't owe that to the reader, and the reader shouldn't assume it. The vagueness of the cause of death had made me wary of McCue's 'truth', but why should it have? She didn't own me a true story, and even if presenting a true story, she didn't owe me all the details. This is poetry after all, not reporting. But still, I had been disconcerted enough to try and find the details on my own.

Rooney's article covers both her assessment that it is the reader's failure of imagination that results in their own disappointment as well as an opposing viewpoint of critic David Ulin, who says “the tension between the confessional voice and our knowledge that what it is describing didn’t really happen, is too substantial, and the poem collapses under its own narrative weight.”

While I agree with Rooney fundamentally, I can see the need to be sensitive to what Ulin says, to the reader's experience. Hmmmmmmm. Food for thought, particularly regarding what I'm writing currently.

Happy [M]other's Day

Last year I posted some of my favorite poems about mothers,

but this year I'd like to post a poem about a mother/son relationship. I've got two sons, and my 12-year-old (older) son has suddenly become a teenager. I told him in the past few weeks to stand up straight, and when he did, it turns out he is now taller than me. He's started junior high (in April, due to Japanese school year calendars) and really come into his own. So I want to share this poem by Sharon Olds, which was featured here on Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry blog.

My Son the Man    by Sharon Olds

Suddenly his shoulders get a lot wider,

the way Houdini would expand his body

while people were putting him in chains. It seems

no time since I would help him to put on his sleeper,

guide his calves into the gold interior,

zip him up and toss him up and

catch his weight. I cannot imagine him

no longer a child, and I know I must get ready,

get over my fear of men now my son

is going to be one. This was not

what I had in mind when he pressed up through me like a

sealed trunk through the ice of the Hudson,

snapped the padlock, unsnaked the chains,

and appeared in my arms. Now he looks at me

the way Houdini studied a box

to learn the way out, then smiled and let himself be manacled.

 

 

The otherness of mothering sons has been on mind for a few years, as has another otherness that situates itself between me and my sons, as it does between the sons of the poets Erika Meitner and Joy Katz and their mothers, as discussed this week on the Poetry Foundation's podcast Poetry Off the Shelf, and that is when the racial composition of mother and son (or child) are different.

While my sons and I talk easily about the difference between me as a woman and them as burgeoning men, talking about our races is more complicated. I ask them all the time if my whiteness is an issue for them, and they insist it is not, but I cannot ever know if this is the truth or if this is what they tell me because they love me. I tell them that it would be perfectly normal for them to be uncomfortable with my race at certain transitional times in their lives, but they insist that they are not. And I don't entirely believe them.

At the elementary school, their white mother was a constant fixture from the start, and while we had to do a little bit of educating of classmates, it all became old hat for everyone quite quickly. And our elementary school has children with family members from 72 different countries, so we are by no means unique (which is why we moved into this school district).

However, at the junior high, which my son has only been attending for six weeks, we have yet to see another Caucasian parent (what I mean to say is that there are reportedly other Asian parents who blend in with the crowd, but as far as parents who stand out as racially different, so far there's me....). At the entrance ceremony, you can bet every eye was on me as parents reunited with their kids afterwards; everybody was dying to know which boy had the white mother. I asked my son if it bothered him and he said no. But when I ask if, despite having to take beginner's English with his entire class, he has mentioned the fact that he's already fluent in English, he says no. When a brand new friend of his (from another grade, as yet unaware of the Caucasian mother) told him that he had published a book, my son did not mention that he has a mother who has published two books in English. He doesn't mention his family in America. Is this about race? Is this about 12-year-old boys not talking about their mothers and family members to peers in general? I can't know. I don't know if I will ever know.

On the other hand, last year I colored my red hair back to its natural brown, thinking to make life easier on me (timewise) and on them (culturally), but my sons vetoed the move and wanted it back red. Because my overall coloring and its ostentatious difference from the norm doesn't matter to them? Or because they've only known me with red hair and blue eyes and are comfortable with it? Or because they don't really care and were trying to tell me what they thought I wanted to hear?

When my twelve-year-old son was in the first grade, his teacher asked me to identify which of the 35 fish pictures hanging on the wall was my son's. I scanned them as quickly as I could, but as they were all modelled on the same storybook fish, I was having a hard time finding any that stood out as my son's. "It's that one," the teacher beamed at me,"the only one with blue eyes. Your son said he made the eyes blue because his mother has blue eyes." And both she and I wept as we contemplated the wall of black-eyed fish and solitary blue-eyed one.

I am definitely these days feeling the otherness of motherhood. Of mothering sons. Of mothering (almost) teenagers. Of mother biracial bicultural children in an environment which favors the race and culture I am not part of.

Here's a poem from my book The Insomniac's Weather Report. This poem is about the otherness of mothering sons; I wrote it some years ago when it was the biggest other in my mind. But these days my [m]otherness seems even more vast.


What You Dampen If You Use Water as a Boomerang

Between mother and son
the body as fact comes
sooner than between
mother and daughter.

I had not counted on this:
the polygon of bearing
sons, I did not know you
would hold it against me,

the body, for its lack
of edges, its fluidity.
I did not know you
could not move beyond a thing

without calling it [m]other. The sea
is not a boomerang, returning
unchanged--who boldly inked this
edge of continent on map? As if

blue roofs of ocean
shift and slap in maneuvers--
familiar and chaotic--the body
and its households recognize.

Record-a-Poem

The Poetry Foundation is celebrating Poetry Month with the Record-a-Poem Project. Join them by recording a favorite poem and uploading it to the SoundCloud, where others can listen and enjoy your reading. Plus you can listen to others read poems of their choice. (This project will remain open after Poetry Month has finished).

Once you've listened to a few poems in the cloud, if you feel inspired to record one yourself, here are the instructions.

Christmas Tree Sonnet (Starbuck)

It's Christmas Eve Day in Japan, and I got up early to do some of the baking and cooking for tomorrow's dinner, and for tonight's special dinner too. The wind is howling here. And I've borrowed the following poem by George Starbuck from the Poetry Foundation website. Enjoy.

 

 

Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree 

By George Starbuck 1931–1996

O

fury-

bedecked!

O glitter-torn!

Let the wild wind erect

bonbonbonanzas; junipers affect

frostyfreeze turbans; iciclestuff adorn

all cuckolded creation in a madcap crown of horn!

It’s a new day; no scapegrace of a sect

tidying up the ashtrays playing Daughter-in-Law Elect;

bells! bibelots! popsicle cigars! shatter the glassware! a son born

now

now

while ox and ass and infant lie

together as poor creatures will

and tears of her exertion still

cling in the spent girl’s eye

and a great firework in the sky

drifts to the western hill.

Recalling Bishop

The Poetry Foundation has a revealing and charming podcast about Elizabeth Bishop, called "Oral History Initiative: On Elizabeth Bishop." In the podcast, friends and students of Bishop recall her youthful escapades, her life and her writing, her teaching, her frustrations, and her opinions and perceptions. This roundtable discussion includes Rosanna Warren (whose mother was Bishop's roommate at Vassar), Frank Bidart, and Gail Mazur, among others.

You can also enjoy this podcast through iTunes in the Poetry Foundation's Poetry Lecture series.

First Book for >39 Crowd

The Emily Dickenson First Book Award, offered by the Poetry Foundation to a poet OVER 40 years of age (or 40 years of age) who has not yet published a first book of poetry (and is a US citizen), has a deadline of 2/17/12 (but submissions can be postmarked as early as 1/16/12). And guess what, no entrance fee! There are so many awards available for younger poets, so this as a contrast is refreshing to learn about! See full guidelines at the link above.

The Paperweight

For Christmas, here's the audio to Gjertrud Schnackenberg's "The Paperweight," courtesy of the Poetry Foundation. Enjoy the poem, your family and friends, and your holidays. May you be at peace.

Happy Thanksgiving

The Poetry Foundation has put together a list of Thanksgiving-related poems (both those with Thanksgiving as a direct topic, and those about family and fellowship and Thanksgiving-like emotions), including this one by Albert Goldbarth:

Stomackes

By Albert Goldbarth b. 1948 Albert Goldbarth

We know far more about the philosophical underpinnings of Puritanism than we do about what its practitioners consumed at countless meals.
—James Deetz

1

Yes. So we must reconnect

ideas of God, and the definitions of “liberty,”

and the psychology of our earliest models of governance, with

oyster peeces in barley beer & wheet,

chopt cod & venyson seethed in a blood broth,

hominy pottage, also squirell.

Their heads might well have brimmed with heaven

and its airborne personnel, but still their mouths were a mash

of white meat [cheese] and a motley collation

of eel leavings, a fine samp, and a roast Fowl.

Worshipp first, then after—butter Biskuits!

David Ignatow:

“seeking transcendence

but loving bread”

    

2

And it is too easy to get lost in abstraction,
as if smoke, and dream, and quantum ersatz-states
are our proper environment... it’s easy to conceptualize in “politics”
and not in the clack of the black or white dried bean we drop in the voting bowl. In some tribes, there’s a designated   “reminderer,” and when the shaman novitiate—or sometimes
simply a mournful family member—follows the star trail
into the country of ghosts, and lingers there, this person tugs
the wanderer back home: perhaps a light thwack
with a broom-shock, or the rising steam of a broth that one
can hungrily shinny down to Earth like a rope.
In the Mesopotamian Inanna myth, it’s water and bread
that resurrect the goddess and allow her
to begin the long ascent out from the craters of Hell.

We can spend all day, and many days, and years, in theorizing.
“A Computer Recreation of Proto-Hominid Dietary Intake:
An Analysis”
... we’ll float off, through these foggy lands of argot,
in the way that someone else might dissolve in the blue cloud
of an opium den... no wonder there’s such pleasure in uncovering
the solid fossil record of those appetites, and in emptying out
its evidence grain by grain, a stone piñata. How often
the stories bring us back to that grounding! In 1620,
a first exploratory party from the Mayflower went ashore
on the northern Cape Cod coast. The weather was bad
and disorienting: a half a foot of snow, in air
so thick as to be directionless. But we sense they recouped
their spirits that night, from three fat Geese
and six Ducks whitch we ate with Soldiers stomackes.

3

And it is too easy to lose ourselves in cyberthink,
untethered from the touchable, from even the cohesive force
suffusing through one atom. “What we keep,”
reports an archivist at the New York Times, “is the information,
not the paper”... everything e-storaged now.
A thousand years of pages, pffft: dismissiveness
as obliterative as a bonfire, in the long run. Oh, yes,
easy to cease to exist as an actual shape, inside the huge,
occluding mists of legalese: we say “repatriation
of native archeological remains,” and we mean
human bones, that’s what we mean: hard and dear
and contested. We say “ritual signifier of threat,” but
what the Narragansetts sent to the colonists at Plymouth
was a bundl of thair Arrows tyed about in a mightie Snake skin.

I died. And I was stolen
into a land of strangers—of not-the-People.
I floated all day, many days. And here
the ribs of my cage were empty: always
I was hungry, for the things that People need.
But this was not the sun, and this was not the soil,
of the People; and I was restless, I had no one
for between my legs, and no drum in my chest.
There was much war from this: the People
desired me back, they said “this one
is part of many-ones,” and after words and words,
their word was so. One day the breezes sent the fishes
and savory beaver parts, and I knew at last
that I was home: my mouth of my skull watered.

4

“When hegemonic identity-structures systemize cognition—” whoa.
There are times I think my friends might flimmer away in that
high-minded mush... and I concentrate, then, on the names
of those people from 1621, names that are true, specific
labor and specific, beautiful common things. Cooper.
Fletcher. Glover. Miller. Glazer. Mason. Carpenter.
Cheerfull Winter.
Oceanus Hopkins.
 Lydia Fish, Nathaniel Fish and Steadfast Fish, of Sandwich.
Zachariah Field, father, and daughter Dutiful Field.
Pandora Sparrow.
Who wouldn’t care to meet Peregrine Soule?
And who could wish to let go of this life
when faced by Countenance Bountie?



Happy Thanksgiving, all.

Poems on 9/11

Here is what you will read if you visit the Poetry Daily Website today, 9/11/11 (with visual imagery of the New York skyline in light gray, the missing towers in shadow gray).

*******************

SEPTEMBER 11

Poetry Daily is dark today
as we join our friends around
the world in remembering those
who died as a result of the
events of September 11, 2001.

*******************

I understand this impulse to silence. But I also understand why so many people turned to poety right after the devastation, and still do today. After all, poetry is  heightened language, and sometimes it is the best that we can do. Sometimes it is the only thing we can do.

The Poetry Foundation discusses some of the poems that address that horrific day or have comforted us in its aftermath in these two podcasts:

Two 9/11 Poems
The Mutilated World (after the poem title containing that phrase by Adam Zagajewski)

Interestingly, many of the poems cited in the second (and longer podcast) are from Polish poets, and they capture the mood and contemplation of post-9/11, even though they were written prior to the event in response to something else entirely.

If you want to reference the Jenny Holzer project mentioned in the first podcast, click here for an article by Shelley Jackson. Holzer's project is based on the idea that all of us with our fragmented impressions together make up the whole that not one of us alone can ever embody.

It ends with these haunting lines:

but

but whose

but whose full

but whose full meaning

but whose full meaning will

but whose full meaning will always

but whose full meaning will always remain

but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.

A Poet on Stories

Yesterday I listened to a recording of poet Marilyn Nelson reading her poem "Lonely Eagles" on The Poetry Foundation podcast. The poem is about the Tuskegee Airmen, African-American pilots trained to fight in the Second World War.

Nelson's father was a Tuskegee Airman, but since he has already died, she has gathered the memories of others pilots. In setting up the poem, Nelson used a phrase which startled and pleased me. She said, "This story was given to me by Bert Wilson..."

"This story was given to me by...." NOT "This story was told to me by...."

How perfect is that phrasing? What we do when we tell stories to one another is give them. We give stories and the receiver can do with them what she wants: remember, forget, misremember, rewrite, give it to someone else, squelch it...... And what do we mean when we say, "Tell me a story"? Don't we mean "Give me a story, one of yours." And the giving doesn't decrease the story for the giver either, but rather strengthens it.

You can listen to Marilyn Nelson reading the poem based on the story given to her by Bert Nelson at the link above.

Poetry Garage

Have you ever parked in one of Disneyland's vast parking lots and had to remember where your car was by the name of an animated character whose visage was nearest your parking spot? How about remembering which floor of a garage you are parked on? Do you refer to numbers, or color codes?

One parking garage in Chicago has helped its patrons remember the floors where they left their cars through poetry. How do they do that, you might wonder, and is it effective?

Check out the whole story of the Poetry Garage in this Poetry Foundation audio feature.