Poems for Mother's Day

It's Mother's Day tomorrow (or the day after, depending on what time zone you live in). I'm posting this now lest any of you have forgotten; this should give you time to remedy that.

In the meantime, The Poetry Foundation has put together a list of poems about mothers (almost all written by women, go figure). And what I like even better is their interviews with two poet-moms, Marilyn Nelson and Adrian Blevins. And they have a video of Daisy Zamora reading a poem about mothers.

Now I offer two poems about mothers that are some of my favorites:

from coolfreeimages.net

Bridge, Mother  by  Terese Svoboda

Mother burns on the other side of the bridge.
Mother burns the bridge and is safe on the other side.
Mother is not on the bridge when it burns.
When Mother says Burn, the bridge burns.
We can’t get to the other side—
the bridge is burning.

Mother is the bridge that we burn.
She is how we get to the other side.
We can’t burn the bridge without her.
Mother burns and we burn, bridge or no bridge.
She is the other side.
Nothing burns the bridge, and then it burns.

The Dome  by CHAD SWEENEY

When we were the poorest,

mom paid my weekly allowance
in birds. That one is yours, she whispered

 so as not to disturb it.

If you clean the oven
I’ll give you that red one.

In a few months

I owned all the birds on the street,

blue jays, finches, a lame owl

cowled in the clock tower.  

We had to walk farther each Saturday
to find a new fountain or thicket

so mother could pay me what she owed.

We stood on a bridge.
Our soldiers were marching away,

singing

and trying to sound brave.
Their numbers were staggering.

I invented a mathematics

to understand them.
I subtracted them from summer

 and it was winter. Most of our houses

were gone, and the birds too.
The university had been bombed

with my father inside, attending a reading

by some Polish poets.
The poems were so sturdy, he said,

 they held up the dome of the ceiling.

And for mothers of sons, I also want to recommend Sharon Olds's "My Son the Man."

NYT's Two Cents on the Cento

The New York Times blog has published a cento by David Lehman, plus an explanation of what a cento is (in their words, "A cento is a collage-poem composed of lines lifted from other sources -- often, though not always, from great poets of the past. In Latin the word cento means ''patchwork,'' and the verse form resembles a quilt of discrete lines stitched together to make a whole. The word cento is also Italian for ''one hundred,'' and some mosaic poems consist of exactly 100 lines culled by one poet from the work of another to pay tribute to him or her").

In this age of the sampling crazy, the cento suddenly seems new again. A poem that samples from other people's words (though not from poems) that I particularly love is Richard Kenney's  astonishing "A Colloquy of Ancient Men" from his book The Invention of the Zero. In this long poem pieces of quotations from Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Charles Darwin, Joseph Conrad, Isaac Newton, Max Planck, Herman Melville, Neils Bohr, Fred Hoyle, Mark Twain, and a few others are juxtaposed to great effect. (Here I am recommending yet another intertextalization of poetry and science. At least I know what I like!)

So, anybody up for a cento or another collage-like piece of writing? It's a different creative muscle to stretch.

Publication Conundrum

So I heard from my publisher that he is closing down his press. I had heard rumblings but I guess now it's official. He says I can do whatever I want with my book, including e-publishing, which I guess means I have his permission to try and publish it elsewhere. This is not likely though, is it? Nobody wants to re-issue a book of someone without any reputation, like me, do they? I guess I should look into e-publishing, but I have no idea where to begin.

My other thought is to just let this book die a natural death. I spent years writing it, and when this press awarded it their prize and I withdrew from other publishers I had submitted it, I was told by three presses that I had made it to the finalist stage in their competitions, and one even encouraged me not to withdraw but to think about my choice. So I think my book is overall a pretty strong piece of work. But there are new manuscripts coming out daily from talented poets, so maybe mine should just gracefully disappear.

I don't know.

Ruefle's New Erasure Online

Gwarlingo has published Mary Ruefle's new erasure, Melody: The Story of a Child, online here. In full. Don't miss it. Hauting and droll as ever, her erasures are.


Read about Mary Ruefle in particular and erasure in general at Gwarlingo here.

Aliases of the Super Moon

Did you see the super moon last night? If you want to know more about the full moons, here's an article at Space.com about the unusually named moons this year, including the Full Worm Moon, the Full Buck Moon, and the Full Hunter's Moon. There's also an explanation of each name, plus a brief recounting of who came up with these names (largely the Algonquin tribes plus some European settlers to the US).

These names will get a poet thinking, that's for sure.