San Francisco poetry - Kim Addonizio

Finally, Maddie and I made it to San Francisco! I never thought it would actually happen, but here we are in this amazing city for a week. And what do I keep thinking about? Yup, you guessed it - poetry. We visited the famous City Lights Bookstore for a little while yesterday (we plan to go back), and it just blew my mind. The store is so small and tucked away in a small corner building near Chinatown, but the charm and intimacy I felt upon entering was unmistakable. Without a doubt, this will be one of my favorite places visited when I reflect on this trip. While I was there, on the second floor (the poetry floor!), I made it about halfway through the A's before we decided to head back to the hotel. I found a poet from the bay area named Kim Addonizio. She also had a fiction book on the shelves. She is on poets.org, so check her out. I thought her poetry was beautiful. Here is a selection from her book What is This Thing Called Love: Poems.

Stolen Moments


What happened, happened once. So now it’s best
in memory—an orange he sliced: the skin
unbroken, then the knife, the chilled wedge
lifted to my mouth, his mouth, the thin
membrane between us, the exquisite orange,
tongue, orange, my nakedness and his,
the way he pushed me up against the fridge—
Now I get to feel his hands again, the kiss
that didn’t last, but sent some neural twin
flashing wildly through the cortex. Love’s
merciless, the way it travels in
and keeps emitting light. Beside the stove
we ate an orange. And there were purple flowers
on the table. And we still had hours.

An Old Mini-Essay I Wrote...

I found this essay the other day, and some of the things I wrote are coming back to me, almost cyclically, in the way I'm trying to live my life. It's called Life As Seen Through the Eyes of Poetry. Very lame, but I'm always terrible with titles. Enjoy! Much love :)

A poem can come from any thing, any place and any person; maybe that's what I love so much about poetry. A verse can be confined to an aesthetic scene in nature as much as consciousness can be confined to a series of black and white snapshots indicating one's identity. Poetry is ingrained into our senses. It doesn't matter if you know how to put it on paper or understand the difference between a cinquain and a haiku. We all see, hear, smell, taste and touch poems every day. In fact, our consciousness itself sometimes seems to be one mesmerizing, intricate series of poetry.

Think about the way you look at a loved one, whether this person is a sibling, parent, lover or friend (or even a random person you happen to pass on the street, if you see such a person as a loved one). Does something about this person strike a chord within you each time you cross his or her path? Although I am presenting only one example, it is an example of poetry. Love, happiness, anger, art, peace, hatred, sex, money, hunger, drugs, religion, politics, sports, pain, music, freedom, oppression, history, earth, the unknown: ALL of it is poetry being written in one form or another. We walk, talk and breathe through intertwined landscapes of it every moment.

There are no rules concerning the autonomy of one's consciousness. That being said, my developing understanding of the boundless horizons of poetry (which could simply be referred to as art, as well) continues to lead me back to recurring ideas about the nature and evolution of humanity. These repeated notions can be explained by starting on a local and even personal level.

I love my family. There is simply no doubt about it. I almost selfishly want them all to defy the cycle of life and live to see progress and the changes that will eventually be made to make the world a more healthy and peaceful one. I have recently come to understand what this love means to me, as well as to the rest of my family. It means kindness, support, happiness, compassion, intellectual stimulation, etc. My family is the primary source of all these wonderful things in my life.

Simply put, I want ALL people to sense (in the most broad interpretation of the word) the beautiful poetry of this symbiotic relationship. I want ALL people to experience the love and peace that I feel when I'm with my own family. Some people would like our relations with other people, groups, nations, etc. to be more complicated than this simple notion of complete compassion. I don't believe we have to make our inherently positive social relationships into complex webs leading to deceitful self-interest that detracts from our true connections with one another.

Conversely, I have experienced limited amounts of hate. I have used hateful words toward people whom I believed to be wrong, and I have experienced the same from others. What I am beginning to realize is how much such hatred hurts on a personal level and breeds separation on a communal level. I want nobody to experience hate. I would much rather see and hear about all people feeling love and acceptance instead of hate and intolerance. I want people to feel the power of this type of poetry for the stinging indictment it brings upon such negative parts of humanity that we must overcome.

I, like any other person, struggle with emotions. But one thing I do understand about emotions is how powerful and meaningful they are to me. Consequently, I also understand that EACH individual's emotions add powerful and substantial meaning to that person's life. I have no desire to ever diminish a person's feeling of emotional, physical, psychological or spiritual self-worth. We do this so often as a species by claiming superiority and professing absolute righteousness (among other things).

I feel like many of my notes are redundant. I have exhausted my repertoire of unpolished writing skills, trying desperately to connect on some level with even one person who happens to stumble upon my unofficial collection of work. Simply put, compassion and open-mindedness are the two keys to a revolution of the mind, heart and soul. If we could remove our unquenchable desire for something better and just BE those two things, then human beings are still capable of some pretty amazing accomplishments in the future.

“Let us enjoy breathing together.”
~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Mary Oliver...Again

I know, I know...not fair to the vast numbers of other poets out there. But Mary Oliver is speaking to me lately. It might be that humble Zen thing she has going on in her poetry, or it might be that she is just that good. So one more Mary Oliver Poem, and then I'll find something else! Much love :)

Hum

What is this dark hum among the roses?
The bees have gone simple, sipping,
that's all. What did you expect? Sophistication?
They're small creatures and they are
filling their bodies with sweetness, how could they not
moan in happiness? The little
worker bee lives, I have read, about three weeks.
Is that long? Long enough, I suppose, to understand
that life is a blessing. I have found them-haven't you?—
stopped in the very cups of the flowers, their wings
a little tattered-so much flying about, to the hive,
then out into the world, then back, and perhaps dancing,
should the task be to be a scout-sweet, dancing bee.
I think there isn't anything in this world I don't
admire. If there is, I don't know what it is. I
haven't met it yet. Nor expect to. The bee is small,
and since I wear glasses, so I can see the traffic and
read books, I have to
take them off and bend close to study and
understand what is happening. It's not hard, it's in fact
as instructive as anything I have ever studied. Plus, too,
it's love almost too fierce to endure, the bee
nuzzling like that into the blouse
of the rose. And the fragrance, and the honey, and of course
the sun, the purely pure sun, shining, all the while, over
all of us.

Mary Oliver & Happy Birthday to Rainer Maria Rilke

A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver is an excellent tool for poets, young and old, new and experienced. I flip through it every now and then to remind myself of some of the basic techniques and fundamental principles of writing and reading poetry. Mary Oliver is also an excellent poet, as I am continuing to learn, and this one I found is a wonderful probing into the nature of the self. However, the investigation bears no pretension, as Oliver does not attempt to come up with any answers. She allows her questions to stand on their own, and she does this simply and beautifully. Enjoy!

Some Questions You Might Ask

Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of an owl?
Who has it, and who doesn't?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is as sad
as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly.
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?
Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the anteater
who loves her children?
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
Come to think of it, what about maple trees?
What about the blue iris?
What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?
What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?

What about the grass?

And today, I'm going to post another poem. It's December 4th, Rainer Maria Rilke's 134th birthday - if he were still alive. Check out his profile on poets.org here.

I'm Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone

(Translated by Annemarie S. Kidder)

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone
enough
to truly consecrate the hour.
I am much too small in this world, yet not small
enough
to be to you just object and thing,
dark and smart.
I want my free will and want it accompanying
the path which leads to action;
and want during times that beg questions,
where something is up,
to be among those in the know,
or else be alone.

I want to mirror your image to its fullest perfection,
never be blind or too old
to uphold your weighty wavering reflection.
I want to unfold.
Nowhere I wish to stay crooked, bent;
for there I would be dishonest, untrue.
I want my conscience to be
true before you;
want to describe myself like a picture I observed
for a long time, one close up,
like a new word I learned and embraced,
like the everyday jug,
like my mother's face,
like a ship that carried me along
through the deadliest storm.

Andrew Greig - Orkney/This Life

Andrew Greig is a Scottish writer who has published eight collections of poetry, six novels and several nonfiction books on subjects such as climbing and golf. This poem has an amazing way of relating the charm of a small, simple life, while still portraying the significance and power that each person, animal, boat, piece of earth, etc. can have on our lives.

Orkney/This Life

It is big sky and its changes,

the sea all round and the waters within.

It is the way sea and sky

work off each other constantly,

like people meeting in Alfred Street,

each face coming away with a hint

of the other's face pressed in it.

It is the way a week-long gale

ends and folk emerge to hear

a single bird cry way high up.

It is the way you lean to me
and the way I lean to you, as if
we are each other's prevailing;
how we connect along our shores,
the way we are tidal islands
joined for hours then inaccessible,
I'll go for that, and smile when I
pick sand off myself in the shower.
The way I am an inland loch to you
when a clatter of white whoops and rises...

It is the way Scotland looks to the South,
the way we enter friends' houses
to leave what we came with, or flick
the kettle's switch and wait.
This is where I want to live,
close to where the heart gives out,
ruined, perfected, an empty arch against the sky
where birds fly through instead of prayers
while in Hoy Sound the fern's engines thrum
this life this life this life.

Dorianne Laux - "What We Carry"

What We Carry is an inspiring book of poems that Dorianne Laux wrote in 1994. I wrote a review o of the book for my poetry writing class, so I figured I'd share that with everyone today:

A Review: What We Carry

In all artistic mediums, we oftentimes look for honest expressions of the joy and suffering of the human condition that transcend their subject matter. In her second book of poems, What We Carry, Dorianne Laux does this, and manages to capture the underlying essence of seemingly mundane suburbia, fading memory and innocuous moments in time, among others. Her work is not complex. In fact, her use of language is beautifully simple, allowing novice readers as well as seasoned veterans to delve into the meat of her poetry and enjoy it without having to put forth an amount of effort that would distract from the work. Laux does a lot of the work for us in this wonderfully artistic collection of poems.

A pervasive motif of What We Carry is an overwhelming tone of vulnerability. Laux is not afraid to thrust herself onto the page, bearing all, for everyone to see. The first poem, “Late October,” sets a stunningly honest tone for the rest of the collection with its revealing epiphany:

forty-one years old, standing on a slab

of cold concrete, a broom handle slipping

from my hands, my breasts bare, my hair

on end, afraid of what I might do next.

The diction in this excerpt is exemplary of Laux’s instinctive connection to the subject matter. In addition to “Late October,” this connection works effectively in “After Twelve Days of Rain,” “What I Wouldn’t Do,” “Finding What’s Lost” and “2 AM.” In these poems, Laux freezes herself in moments of vulnerability and forces honest self-reflection onto the page. In doing this, she allows readers to identify with the subject matter and prods us to consider the implications of what she is saying. As one might expect, these self-reflections are often dark and almost too troubling to impose on one’s own life, but Laux is relentless, addressing some of the most striking existential dilemmas that infiltrate the human condition with simple lines, like these from “After Twelve Days of Rain”: “I finally believed I was alone, felt it/in my actual, visceral heart, heard it echo/like a thin bell.”

This brutally honest confession is not uncommon in What We Carry, as Laux explores not only her surroundings but also herself and her place in the grand scheme of the world. The uncertainty that this exploration uncovers is heightened by Laux’s brilliant use of contrast. She commonly contrasts ugliness with beauty and primal instinct with elevated consciousness. On many occasions, this divergence of theme, accompanied by contrasting diction, weaves seamlessly in and out of concrete description, figuration and grandiose abstraction. This lyrical movement in the diction, figuration and subject matter all create tension while pitting dominant themes against one another – loss, anxiety and monotony against transcendence, control and imagination. Nowhere is this contrast more evident than in “If This Is Paradise,” where Laux presents a presupposed vision of subconscious paradise, and then poses a series of questions that flip the assumption on its head:

...If this is paradise

and all we have to do is be born and live

and die, why pick up the stick at all?

Why see the wheel in the rock?

Why bring back from the burning fields

a bowl full of fire and pretend that it’s magic?

Laux does not answer these questions. In fact, she refuses to, claiming that “Maybe it’s what we don’t say/that saves us.” (“Enough Music”), but the fact that she questions assumptions is indicative of her attitude throughout entire collection. Laux challenges her own perceptions, and in turn, seems to prod us to question the status quo of our own lives.

The aforementioned lyrical movement results in numerous, poignant epiphanies that connected and lingered with me long after setting the book aside. The poems that accomplish this most effectively (“Dust,” “For My Daughter Who Loves Animals,” “After Twelve Days of Rain,” “Finding What’s Lost,” “Graffiti” and “Landrum’s Diner, Reno”) are certainly the most memorable in the collection and are shining examples of Laux’s artistic vision. A few poems (“Singing Back the World,” “The Ebony Chickering” and “Sunday Radio” ) fall short of the remarkable standards she sets, as they seem to float endlessly in abstraction and non-relatable description and never find their way back down to the firm roots of her best work. But forgiving these minor and hardly debilitating setbacks, Laux has assembled a brilliant collection of poetry that reminds and sometimes enlightens us about What We Carry.

Discovering Jack Gilbert

My intro poetry professor told me I should check out Jack Gilbert's The Great Fires. I happened to find it among my mother's stash of poetry books, and I'm so glad I did. Here is a beautiful sample of Gilbert's work from the collection:

Married

I came back from the funeral and crawled

around the apartment, crying hard,

searching for my wife's hair.

For two months got them from the drain,

from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,

and off the clothes in the closet.

But after another Japanese woman came,

there was no way to be sure which were

hers, and I stopped. A year later,

repotting Michiko's avocado, I find

a long black hair tangled in the dirt.

Jack Gilbert's profile on Poets.org

Welcome! - and Naomi Shihab Nye

Welcome to my attempt at a blog! Through this medium, I hope to provide a taste of how poetry has given me the world, and how I hope to give the world back.

For my first post, I feel as though I should provide some brief background about myself. I was born in Plattsburgh, New York, in 1989. It's a small town about an hour away from the Canadian border...you probably have not been there, but if you have, let me know! Our family moved to west Texas when I was about 8-years-old and to Knoxville (where I currently live) when I was 12-years-old.

I currently attend the University of Tennessee-Knoxville where I am an undergraduate in the creative writing program. It has been a long journey to get into this program, as I tried journalism, political science and even thought about law for a while. But here I am, going to school to write and read - and I love it!

I should say a bit about how I became interested and eventually fascinated with poetry. When I was younger, I had always kind of enjoyed writing, but my head was never on straight enough to be serious about it. That is, until I woke up one day and fell in love with life and the world. And it really happened like that. It was as if the proverbial light switch had been flipped on, and my understanding of myself had increased exponentially.

My mother (who is a spectacular writer - and WILL have a book of poetry eventually) showed me a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye - in one of her poetry fits where she piles books in front of me with a child-like gleam in her eyes - called "For Mohammed Zeid of Gaza, Age 15." This is the beginning for me. I knew that I would always write and read poetry after experiencing this poem. The way Nye uses simple, concise diction to weave in and out of figuration is brilliant, and the message is as honest as any poem I have ever encountered. So here it is, the poem to end all poems (in my life, at least). Enjoy!

For Mohammed Zeid of Gaza, Age 15

There is no stray bullet, sirs.
No bullet like a worried cat
crouching under a bush,
no half-hairless puppy bullet
dodging midnight streets.
The bullet could not be a pecan
plunking the tin roof,
not hardly, no fluff of pollen
on October's breath,
no humble pebble in the street.

So don't gentle it, please.

We live among stray thoughts,
tasks abandoned midstream.
Our fickle hearts are fat
with stray devotions, we feel at home
among bits and pieces,
all the wandering ways of words.

But this bullet had no innocence, did not
wish anyone well, you can't tell us otherwise
by naming it mildly, this bullet was never the friend
of life, should not be granted immunity
by soft saying - friendly fire, straying death-eye
why have we given the wrong weight to what we do?

Mohammed, Mohammed deserves the truth.
this bullet had no secret happy hopes,
it was not singing to itself with eyes closed
under the bridge.