If You Forget Me, a poem by Pablo Neruda.

Post 645 - If You Forget Me by Pablo Neruda.

I want you to know
one thing.
You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

Thanksgiving, a poem by Edgar Albert Guest.

Post 644 - Eddie Guest (1881– 1959) was a prolific English-born American poet who was popular in the first half of the 20th century and became known as the People's Poet. In 1891, Guest came with his family to the United States from England. After he began at the Detroit Free Press as a copy boy and then a reporter, his first poem appeared on December 11, 1898. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1902. For 40 years, Guest was widely read throughout North America, and his sentimental, optimistic poems were in the same vein as the light verse of Nick Kenny, who also wrote syndicated columns during the same decades.

From his first published work in the Detroit Free Press until his death in 1959, Guest penned some 11,000 poems which were syndicated in some 300 newspapers and collected in more than 20 books, including A Heap o' Livin' (1916) and Just Folks (1917). Guest was made Poet Laurate of Michigan, the only poet to have been awarded the title.

Thanksgiving by Edgar Albert Guest.

Gettin' together to smile an' rejoice,
An' eatin' an' laughin' with folks of your choice;
An' kissin' the girls an' declarin' that they
Are growin' more beautiful day after day;
Chattin' an' braggin' a bit with the men,
Buildin' the old family circle again;
Livin' the wholesome an' old-fashioned cheer,
Just for awhile at the end of the year.
Greetings fly fast as we crowd through the door
And under the old roof we gather once more
Just as we did when the youngsters were small;
Mother's a little bit grayer, that's all.
Father's a little bit older, but still
Ready to romp an' to laugh with a will.
Here we are back at the table again
Tellin' our stories as women an' men.

Bowed are our heads for a moment in prayer;
Oh, but we're grateful an' glad to be there.
Home from the east land an' home from the west,
Home with the folks that are dearest an' best.
Out of the sham of the cities afar
We've come for a time to be just what we are.
Here we can talk of ourselves an' be frank,
Forgettin' position an' station an' rank.

Give me the end of the year an' its fun
When most of the plannin' an' toilin' is done;
Bring all the wanderers home to the nest,
Let me sit down with the ones I love best,
Hear the old voices still ringin' with song,
See the old faces unblemished by wrong,
See the old table with all of its chairs
An' I'll put soul in my Thanksgivin' prayers.

That Sure is My Little Dog, a poem by Eleanor Lerman.

Post 643 - Eleanor Lerman (1952 - ) is an American poet and author and a lifelong New Yorker, born in the Bronx.  Lerman was the recipient of the inaugural Juniper Prize, the 2002 Joy Bale Boone Award for Poetry, the 2006 Milton Dorfman Poetry Prize, and a fiction grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2007, she received a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2011, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She currently lives on Long Island, in Nassau County.

That Sure is My Little Dog by Eleanor Lerman.
Yes, indeed, that is my house that I am carrying around on my back like a bullet-proof shell and yes, that sure is my little dog walking a hard road in hard boots. And just wait until you see my girl, chomping on the chains of fate with her mouth full of jagged steel. She’s damn ready and so am I. What else did you expect from the brainiacs of my generation? The survivors, the nonbelievers, the oddball-outs with the Cuban Missile Crisis still sizzling in our blood? Don’t tell me that you bought our act, just because our worried parents (and believe me, we’re nothing like them) taught us how to dress for work and to speak as if we cared about our education. And I guess the music fooled you: you thought we’d keep the party going even to the edge of the abyss. Well, too bad. It’s all yours now. Good luck on the ramparts. What you want to watch for is when the sky shakes itself free of kites and flies away. Have a nice day.

Nearly A Valediction, a poem by Marilyn Hacker.

Post 642 - Marilyn Hacker (born 1942) is an American poet, translator and critic. She is Professor of English at the City College of New York. Her books of poetry include Going Back to the River (1990), Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986), and Presentation Piece (1974), which won the National Book Award and was also a Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Winter Numbers (1996), details the loss of many of her friends to AIDS and her own struggle with breast cancer, garnered a Lambda Literary Award and The Nation's Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. In 2009, Hacker won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Étienne, which also garnered the first Robert Fagles Translation Prize from the National Poetry Series. In 2010, she received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry.

 Nearly A Valediction by Marilyn Hacker.

 You happened to me. I was happened to
like an abandoned building by a bull-
dozer, like the van that missed my skull
happened a two-inch gash across my chin.
You were as deep down as I've ever been.
You were inside me like my pulse. A new-
born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through
the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone,
swaddled in strange air I was that alone again,
inventing life left after you.

 I don't want to remember you as
that four o'clock in the morning eight months long
after you happened to me like a wrong
number at midnight that blew up the phone
bill to an astronomical unknown
quantity in a foreign currency.
The U.S. dollar dived since you happened to me.
You've grown into your skin since then; you've grown
into the space you measure with someone
you can love back without a caveat.

 While I love somebody I learn to live
with through the downpulled winter days' routine
wakings and sleepings, half-and-half caffeine-
assisted mornings, laundry, stock-pots, dust-
balls in the hallway, lists instead of longing, trust
that what comes next comes after what came first.
She'll never be a story I make up.
You were the one I didn't know where to stop.
If I had blamed you, now I could forgive
you, but what made my cold hand, back in prox-
imity to your hair, your mouth, your mind,
want where it no way ought to be, defined
by where it was, and was and was until
the whole globed swelling liquefied and spilled
through one cheek's nap, a syllable, a tear,
was never blame, whatever I wished it were.
You were the weather in my neighborhood.
You were the epic in the episode.
You were the year poised on the equinox.

The Ball, a poem by Wislawa Szymborska.

Post 641 - Here's a poem by the Polish Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska. which was published in the New Yorker in 2003. From Monologue of a Dog: New Poems, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.

 THE BALL.

As long as nothing can be known for sure (no signals have been picked up yet), as long as Earth is still unlike the nearer and more distant planets, as long as there’s neither hide nor hair of other grasses graced by other winds, of other treetops bearing other crowns, other animals as well-grounded as our own, as long as only the local echo has been known to speak in syllables, as long as we still haven’t heard the word of better or worse mozarts, platos, edisons, elsewhere, as long as our inhuman crimes are still committed only between humans, as long as our kindness is still incomparable, peerless even in its imperfection, as long as our heads packed with illusions still pass for the only heads so packed, as long as the roofs of our mouths alone still raise voices to high heavens – let’s act like very special guests of honour at the district firemen’s ball, dance to the beat of the local oompah band and pretend that it’s the ball to end all balls. I can’t speak for other – for me this is misery and happiness enough: just this sleepy backwater where even the stars have time to burn while winking at us unintentionally.

We Are Always Too Late, a poem by Eavan Boland.

Post 640 - Eavan Boland was born in Dublin in 1944. Her father was a diplomat and her mother was an expressionist painter. At the age of six, Boland and her family relocated to London. She later returned to Dublin for university and received her B.A. from Trinity College in 1966. She was also educated in London and New York.
Her awards include a Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry, an American Ireland Fund Literary Award, a Jacob's Award for her involvement in The Arts Programme broadcast on RTÉ Radio, and an honorary degree from Trinity. She's taught at Trinity College, University College, Bowdoin College, and was a member of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She's also a regular reviewer for the Irish Times.
Boland and her husband, the author Kevin Casey, have two daughters. She's currently a professor of English at Stanford University where she directs the creative writing program.

We Are Always Too Late by Eavan Boland.

Memory
Is in two parts.

First the re-visiting:

the way even now I can see
those lovers at the café table. She is weeping.

It is New England, breakfast time, winter. Behind her,
outside the picture window, is
a stand of white pines.

New snow falls and the old,
losing its balance in the branches,
showers down,
adding fractions to it. Then

The re-enactment. Always that.
I am getting up, pushing away
coffee. Always I am going towards her.

The flush and scald is
to her forehead now, and back down to her neck.

I raise one hand. I am pointing to
those trees, I am showing her our need for these
beautiful upstagings of
what we suffer by
what survives. And she never even sees me.

RAIN, a poem by Don Paterson.

post 639 - for Alysia.

RAIN by Don Paterson

I love all films that start with rain:
rain, braiding a windowpane
or darkening a hung-out dress
or streaming down her upturned face;

one long thundering downpour
right through the empty script and score
before the act, before the blame,
before the lens pulls through the frame

to where the woman sits alone
beside a silent telephone
or the dress lies ruined on the grass
or the girl walks off the overpass,

and all things flow out from that source
along their fatal watercourse.
However bad or overlong
such a film can do no wrong,

so when his native twang shows through
or when the boom dips into view
or when her speech starts to betray
its adaptation from the play,

I think to when we opened cold
on a rain-dark gutter, running gold
with the neon of a drugstore sign,
and I’d read into its blazing line:

forget the ink, the milk, the blood—
all was washed clean with the flood
we rose up from the falling waters
the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters

and none of this, none of this matters.

Is it a month? a poem by J. M. Synge.

Post 638 - Is it a month? by J. M. Synge


Is it a month since I and you

In the starlight of Glen Dubh

Stretched beneath a hazel bough

Kissed from ear to throat to brow,

Since your fingers, neck and chin

Made the bars that fenced me in,

Till Paradise seemed but a wreck

Near your bosom, brow and neck

And stars grew wilder, growing wise

In the splendor of your eyes!


Since the weasel wandered near

Whilst we kissed from ear to ear

And the wet and withered leaves

Blew about your cap and sleeves,

Till the moon sank tired through the edge

Of the wet and windy hedge?

And we took the starry lane

Back to Dublin town again.

Curtains, a poem by Ruth Stone.

Post 637 - Ruth Stone was born in 1915 in Roanoke, Virginia and today lives in Vermont. In 1959, after her husband, professor Walter Stone, committed suicide, she was forced to raise three daughters alone. As she once pointed out, her poems are all “love poems, written to a dead man” who forced her to “reside in limbo” with her daughters. She's the author of thirteen books of poetry and the recipient of many awards and honors, including the 2002 National Book Award (for her collection In the Next Galaxy), the 2002 Wallace Stevens Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Eric Mathieu King Award from The Academy of American Poets, a Whiting Writers' Award (with which she bought plumbing for her house), two Guggenheim Fellowships (one of which roofed her house), the Delmore Schwartz Award, the Cerf Lifetime Achievement Award from the state of Vermont, and the Shelley Memorial Award. In July 2007, she was named poet laureate of Vermont.

Elizabeth Gilbert tells this story about Stone's writing style and inspiration, which the poet shared with her: "As she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out, working in the fields and she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. It was like a thunderous train of air and it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And when she felt it coming ... cause it would shake the earth under her feet, she knew she had only one thing to do at that point. That was to, in her words, 'run like hell' to the house as she would be chased by this poem. The whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. Other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she would be running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house, and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it, and it would 'continue on across the landscape looking for another poet.'"


Curtains by Ruth Stone.

Putting up new curtains,
other windows intrude.
As though it is that first winter in Cambridge
when you and I had just moved in.
Now cold borscht alone in a bare kitchen.

What does it mean if I say this years later?

Listen, last night
I am on a crying jag
with my landlord, Mr. Tempesta.
I sneaked in two cats.
He screams, "No pets! No pets!"
I become my Aunt Virginia,
proud but weak in the head.
I remember Anna Magnani.
I throw a few books. I shout.
He wipes his eyes and opens his hands.
OK OK keep the dirty animals
but no nails in the walls.
We cry together.
I am so nervous, he says.

I want to dig you up and say, look,
it's like the time, remember,
when I ran into our living room naked
to get rid of that fire inspector.

See what you miss by being dead?

A Short History of the Apple, a poem by Dorianne Laux.

Post 636 - Dorianne Laux was born in Augusta, Maine in 1952. She worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, a maid, and a donut holer before receiving a BA in English from Mills College in 1988. She’s the author of Facts About the Moon (W. W. Norton, 2005), which was the recipient of the Oregon Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among her other collections, What We Carry (1994), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Awake (1990), was nominated for the San Francisco Bay Area Book Critics Award for Poetry. Among her other awards are a Pushcart Prize, an Editor's Choice III Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Laux has taught at the University of Oregon's Program in Creative Writing. She now lives, with her husband, poet Joseph Millar, in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she serves on the faculty of North Carolina State University's MFA Program. Dorianne Laux’s fifth collection,The Book of Men, is now available from W.W. Norton & Company.

A Short History of the Apple by Dorianne Laux

Teeth at the skin. Anticipation.
Then flesh. Grain on the tongue.
Eve's knees ground in the dirt
of paradise. Newton watching
gravity happen. The history
of apples in each starry core,
every papery chamber's bright
bitter seed. Woody stem
an infant tree. William Tell
and his lucky arrow. Orchards
of the Fertile Crescent. Bushels.
Fire blight. Scab and powdery mildew.
Cedar apple rust. The apple endures.
Born of the wild rose, of crab ancestors.
The first pip raised in Kazakhstan.
Snow White with poison on her lips.
The buried blades of Halloween.
Budding and grafting. John Chapman
in his tin pot hat. Oh Westward
Expansion. Apple pie. American
as. Hard cider. Winter banana.
Melt-in-the-mouth made sweet
by hives of Britain's honeybees:
white man's flies. O eat. O eat.

See and hear her read her wonderful poetry at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIlX8f2TtJE&feature=related

What Work Is, a poem by Philip Levine.

Post 635 - Philip Levine, known for his detailed and personal verse about the working class, has been appointed the US's new poet laureate. The Library of Congress announced on Wednesday that the 83-year-old Levine will succeed fellow Pulitzer winner WS Merwin this autumn. The laureate, who receives $35,000 and is known officially as the poet laureate consultant in poetry, serves from October through May. Richard Wilbur, Joseph Brodsky and Robert Pinsky are among the previous appointees.
Levine has received virtually every literary honor, but he is the least rarefied of poets. A Detroit native who as a young man worked in automobile plants, he has for decades chronicled, celebrated and worried about blue-collar life. Levine's awards include the Pulitzer in 1995 for The Simple Truth and the National Book award in 1991 for What Work Is.
The laureate has few official duties and poets have used the job to pursue a range of personal projects, from Billy Collins's Poetry 180, which encourages the reading of verse in high school, to Robert Hass's Watershed conference on nature writing. Levine says, "There's a great deal of American poetry that's hardly known and that should be known. As a poet who didn't get published for a long time, I know what it's like not to be read. The other thing I'd like to do is reach out to readers. I would like to bring attention to the kind of people I've written about."


What Work Is by Philip Levine.

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is--if you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it's someone else's brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, "No,
we're not hiring today," for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who's not beside you or behind or
ahead because he's home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you're too young or too dumb,
not because you're jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don't know what work is.

High Flight, a poem by John Gillespie Magee.

Post 634 - John Gillespie Magee, Jr. (1922 – 1941) was an American aviator and poet who died at the age of 19 as a result of a mid-air collision over Lincolnshire during World War II. He was serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force, which he joined before the United States officially entered the war. I came across this poem last night while watching a lovely Canadian film, The Snow Walker, where it was recited in its entirety by James Cromwell.
It put me in mind of those 30 brave young Americans who lost their lives fighting on our behalf when their helicopter was shot down last week in Afghanistan. May they rest in peace.

High Flight by Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee Jr.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.

Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high unsurpassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

In Millstreet Hospital, a poem by Bernard O'Donoghue.

Post 633 - Bernard O'Donoghue was born in Cullen, County Cork, in 1945, later moving to Manchester. He studied Medieval English at Oxford University, where he's a teacher and Fellow in English at Wadham College. He's the author of Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (1995). His poetry collections are Poaching Rights (1987); The Weakness (1991); Gunpowder (1995), winner of the 1995 Whitbread Poetry Award; Here Nor There (1999); and Outliving (2003). His work of verse translation, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, was published in 2006 and a Selected Poems in 2008.
Bernard O'Donoghue received a Cholmondeley Award in 2009. His most recent poetry collection is Farmers Cross (2011).


In Millstreet Hospital by Bernard O'Donoghue.

My cousin, they tell me, doesn't wake up much,
nor does she seem to see the green mountain

framed in the window of this chapel of ease
for travellers booked in for their long pilgrimage.
When I leave at the end of visiting-hours
a small, tidy man is sitting by the door:
stick, well-knotted tie, watch-chain, tweed jacket.
He gets to his feet, raises his hat and enquires:
'Excuse my troubling you, but would you be
going anywhere near a railway station?'
The young smiling nurse bends over him,
and takes him by the elbow, saying:
'Maybe tomorrow, James. Maybe tomorrow
we'll take you to the station.'

What to Remember When Waking, a poem by David Whyte.

Post 632 - The celebrated writer and teacher David Whyte explores the cyclical, conversational nature of reality and the disciplines that allow us to create an identity robust enough to meet its gifts and demands. An inspiring poem.....

What to Remember When Waking by David Whyte.

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other,
more secret, movable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.

What you can live wholeheartedly
will make plans enough for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden
as a gift to others.

To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a trouble guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents.
You were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now looking through
the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence
of everything that can be,
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely
white page on the waiting desk?

The Mad Cow Talks Back, a poem by Jo Shapcott.

Post 622 - Jo Shapcott FRSL, (born March 1953, London) is an English poet, editor and lecturer who’s won the National Poetry Competition, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Costa Book of the Year Award, a Forward Poetry Prize and the Cholmondeley Award. She’s Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London, and is the current President of The Poetry Society.
But if it hadn't been for "the intervention of really important teachers" in her life, she might well have ended up not in poetry, but in synchronized swimming. She started writing stories and poems as a child, at a time when "playing with the language" is "almost like Plasticene or mud or clay." When her focus shifted, first to synchronized swimming and then to boys and dancing, good teachers kept bringing her back to poetry and "chance and luck" kept her on track. She read English at Trinity College, Dublin and at Oxford, came to America to do a PhD on Elizabeth Bishop and started attending writing workshops. One of these was taught by Seamus Heaney. Shapcott was hooked and "poetry won, the PhD lost." She’s highly engaging as a poet, luminously intelligent as a critic, anthologist and broadcaster, and a widely admired and influential figure in British poetry today.

The following poem first appeared as the concluding sequence of Phrase Book (1992), a brilliantly imaginative response to the-then crisis over Mad Cow Disease.

The Mad Cow Talks Back by Jo Shapcott.

I'm not mad. It just seems that way
because I stagger and get a bit irritable.
There are wonderful holes in my brain
through which ideas from outside can travel
at top speed and through which voices,
sometimes whole people, speak to me
about the universe. Most brains are too
compressed. You need this spongy
generosity to let the others in.

I love the staggers. Suddenly the surface
of the world is ice and I'm a magnificent
skater turning and spinning across whole hard
Pacifics and Atlantics. It's risky when
you're good, so of course the legs go before,
behind, and to the side of the body from time
to time, and then there's the general embarrassing
collapse, but when that happens it's glorious
because it's always when you're travelling
most furiously in your mind. My brain's like
the hive: constant little murmurs from its cells
saying this is the way, this is the way to go.

Some Kiss We Want, a poem by Rumi.

Post 621 - Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī, also known as Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, but known to the English-speaking world simply as Rumi, was a 13th-century Persian Muslim poet, jurist, theologian, and Sufi mystic (September 1207 – December 1273). Rūmī is a descriptive name meaning "the Roman" since he lived most of his life in an area called Rūm (then under the control of Seljuq dynasty) because it was once ruled by the Eastern Roman Empire. He was actually born in Afghanistan. Following his death, his followers founded the Mawlawīyah Sufi Order, also known as the Order of the Whirling Dervishes, famous for its Sufi dance known as the samāʿ ceremony.
Although a number of major Islamic poets easily rival the likes of Dante, Shakespeare and Milton in importance and output, they still enjoy only a marginal literary fame in the West because the works of Arabic and Persian thinkers, writers and poets are considered as mere sideshows beside the grand narrative of Western literature. Rumi's poems have been widely translated into many of the world's languages and transposed into various formats. In 2007, he was described as the "most popular poet in America."

Some Kiss We Want by Rumi.

There is some kiss we want with
our whole lives, the touch of

spirit on the body. Seawater
begs the pearl to break its shell.

And the lily, how passionately
it needs some wild darling! At

night, I open the window and ask
the moon to come and press its

face against mine. Breathe into
me. Close the language-door and

open the love window. The moon
won't use the door, only the window.

Advice to a Poet, a poem by Patrick Galvin.

Post 620 - Patrick Galvin, one of the leading Irish poets and dramatists of his generation, was born in Cork City in 1927 and died recently in May 2011. He was the son of Patrick Galvin, a docker and a leading local boxer, a colorful character who had fought Jack Dempsey. Paddy was one of 12 children who grew up in a tough, militant environment, and he left school at 12 to become a delivery boy. After he ran away to join the Foreign Legion, he joined the RAF in 1942 and fought in Libya and Palestine. He worked for the Irish Times as a war correspondent in Korea, and then became part of the group around Brendan Behan who were to do so much to revitalize Irish, then English drama. He disliked the new suburban middle class in Ireland and in his poetry and his plays, he held an uncomfortable mirror up to his fellow countrymen. He loved the public role of the disorderly poet, but played it creatively, without falling into the self-destructive booziness of Brendan Behan and Dylan Thomas. He renewed himself by periodic disappearances into the Munster countryside, the most productive of which was a sojourn with the tinkers wandering around Waterford and Kerry. In his last years, he spent much of his time in Belfast as resident dramatist at the Lyric Theatre.

Advice to a Poet by Patrick Galvin.

Be a chauffeur, my father said
And never mind the poetry.
That’s all very well for the rich
They can afford it.
What you need is money in your belt
Free uniform and plenty of travel.
Besides that, there’s nothing in verse.
And all poets are raging homosexuals.

I’d still like to be a poet

Another thing: don’t ever marry
And if you do, then marry for cash.
Love, after all, is easily come by
And any old whore will dance for a pound.
Take my advice and be a chauffeur
The uniform will suit you a treat
Marriage and poems will blind you surely
And poets and lovers are doomed to hell.

I’d still like to be a poet

But where’s the sense in writing poetry?
Did any poet ever make good?
I never met one who wasn’t a pauper
A prey to bailiffs, lawyers and priests.
Take my advice and be a chauffeur
With your appearance you’re bound to do well
You might even meet some rich old widow
Who’ll leave you a fortune the moment she dies.

I’d still like to be a poet

Well, blast you then, your days are darkened
Poverty, misery, carnage and sin.
The poems you’ll write won’t be worth a penny.
And the women you marry will bleed you to death.
Take my advice and buy a revolver
Shoot yourself now in the back of the head.
The Government then might raise a subscription
To keep your poor father from breeding again.

“El Siete Mares,” a poem by Bradley Paul.

Post 619 - Bradley Paul was born in Baltimore in 1972. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Pleiades, Smartish Pace, Boston Review, and other journals. His first book of poetry, The Obvious, was selected by Brenda Hillman for the 2004 New Issues Poetry Prize, and his second book of poetry, The Animals All Are Gathering, won the 2009 AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the painter and writer Karri Paul, and their dog, Violet.

“El Siete Mares” by Bradley Paul.

Not Los Siete Mares.
Though there are seven seas
there is only one restaurant.
Octopus with Veracruz sauce.
Pulpo.
Like pulp? Like from a tree?
Beaten and bleached into paper?
But what comes is not pulpo.
Nor is it takonigiri,
white ellipse with a purple edge
and wrapped with a green-black band,
pretty shapes and colors.
Nor meunière nor paillard nor confit.
They grabbed an octopus from the tank
and chopped it up and got it hot
and here in a mound on a plate
is a hot chopped up octopus.
There is saltwater still in its flesh.
My wife meanwhile
orders fried catfish,
which is a catfish thrown whole into oil
and brought out to stare at her.
Which is not how they do it
in Tennessee.
Can’t pretend now, friend.
You know you’re eating me.

Bradley Paul explains, "One day, I ate at El Siete Mares, a family-owned place down on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, and the scene described above took place. My wife grew up in Tennessee, and fried catfish there means a filet of catfish, breaded and fried in oil. The final product doesn’t even look like a fish. But the fried catfish at El Siete Mares is quite literally a catfish thrown whole into oil. When it’s brought out, it has a horrifying look on its face. The abstraction is gone; there’s no illusion that you’re eating something other than an animal that was alive a few minutes earlier and was then fried to death. It’s not a totally new experience — I grew up in Baltimore, so I’ve watched my fair share of live blue crabs go into a pot and come out a few minutes later with their eyes still in place, only red and covered in Old Bay (hell for them; heaven for me). In this instance, however, I think I was expecting one thing, while another, more scary thing arrived on my plate. Out of that jarring experience came this poem. Maybe that’s where all poems come from."

Träumerei, a poem by Philip Larkin.

Post 618 - Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL, was born in Coventry, England in 1922. He attended St. John's College, Oxford and his first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945. After college, he served as university librarian at the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull for 30 years. During that time, he was the recipient of many honors, including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He was offered, but declined, the position of poet laureate in 1984, following the death of John Betjeman. Larkin was chosen in a 2003 Poetry Book Society survey, almost two decades after his death, as Britain's best-loved poet of the previous 50 years, and in 2008 The Times named him Britain's greatest post-war writer.
Deeply anti-social and a great lover and published critic of American jazz, Larkin never married and lived out his days in the provincial city of Hull, where he died from cancer in 1985.

He once said that deprivation for him was what daffodils were for Wordsworth!


Philip Larkin - Träumerei.

In this dream that dogs me I am part
Of a silent crowd walking under a wall,
Leaving a football match, perhaps, or a pit,
All moving the same way. After a while
A second wall closes on our right,
Pressing us tighter. We are now shut in
Like pigs down a concrete passage. When I lift
My head, I see the walls have killed the sun,
And light is cold. Now a giant whitewashed D
Comes on the second wall, but much too high
For them to recognize: I await the E,
Watch it approach and pass. By now
We have ceased walking and travel
Like water through sewers, steeply, despite
The tread that goes on ringing like an anvil
Under the striding A. I crook
My arm to shield my face, for we must pass
Beneath the huge, decapitated cross,
White on the wall, the T, and I cannot halt
The tread, the beat of it, it is my own heart,
The walls of my room rise, it is still night,
I have woken again before the word was spelt.

Of Politics, & Art, a poem by Norman Dubie.

Post 617 - After finishing high school, Norman Dubie (1945 -) had hoped to play football for West Point, but instead, following his father's wishes, he enrolled at the University of New Hampshire at Durham. There he failed every subject except English and Geology and was then rejected by the draft due to high blood pressure. After taking some time off, he enrolled at Goddard College in Vermont where he received his BA in 1965. He subsequently received a fellowship from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he earned his MFA in 1968, as well as an invitation to stay on as a member of the program's regular faculty. In 1975 he was invited to establish an MFA program at Arizona State University in Tempe and accepted a position there as consultant in the arts. He currently lives and teaches in Arizona. Dubie's poetry has received the Bess Hokin Award from the Modern Poetry Association, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
I love this poem - it reminds me of when I attended a one-room country schoolhouse some sixty years ago in Killesk and first learned to love poetry.


Of Politics, & Art by Norman Dubie.

Here, on the farthest point of the peninsula
The winter storm
Off the Atlantic shook the schoolhouse.
Mrs. Whitimore, dying
Of tuberculosis, said it would be after dark
Before the snowplow and bus would reach us.

She read to us from Melville.

How in an almost calamitous moment
Of sea hunting
Some men in an open boat suddenly found themselves
At the still and protected center
Of a great herd of whales
Where all the females floated on their sides
While their young nursed there. The cold frightened whalers
Just stared into what they allowed
Was the ecstatic lapidary pond of a nursing cow's
One visible eyeball.
And they were at peace with themselves.

Today I listened to a woman say
That Melville might
Be taught in the next decade. Another woman asked, "And why not?"
The first responded, "Because there are
No women in his one novel."

And Mrs. Whitimore was now reading from the Psalms.
Coughing into her handkerchief. Snow above the windows.
There was a blue light on her face, breasts and arms.
Sometimes a whole civilization can be dying
Peacefully in one young woman, in a small heated room
With thirty children
Rapt, confident and listening to the pure
God rendering voice of a storm.