Next up: a large plate. This is no empanada: it’s a calzone. I take a bite as Walt Whitman looks at me from the pass-thru, smiling expectantly, wiping his hands on an apron. I stall, "h-h-hot." A few bites in, I’m enjoying this. Before long, I’m stuffed and the plate is still half full. No matter how good this dish is, it’s more than I want at one sitting. And if it’s an off day, I wouldn’t give the leftovers to my dog.

My metaphor is as tart as a lemon (and my similes juicy). You take my point and yet I go on and on, testing your resolve. Let me be brief: be brief. I do not offer advice, especially to poets, whom I have nothing to teach. I’ll just say what I like: a tasty morsel. If I can’t stop my eye from wandering ahead — just how long is this? — I probably won’t get to the end. (Haven’t you already scanned ahead? Would your patience increase if these lines didn’t reach the edge of the page?) There’s a difference between rhetoric and poetry. Get a blog. Keep a journal. Pour your heart out in detail — that could produce great writing and surely produces cheap therapy. But if you have 10 things to say or 10 ways to say one thing, consider which is "best" (don’t ask me) or write 10 poems to figure it out.

That said, please yourself first. If you also please someone else, that’s gravy. Not that everything is better with gravy.

Raven’s Rule: If your poem is longer than The Raven, it should be better. Good luck with that.

Size matters … in poems is a post from: mjh's blog. Thank you for subscribing. Let me know what you think. peace, mjh

Poetry Daily: Buddha in Sunlight, by Red Hawk

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“As thought shapes the shaper” — Now I Become Myself, by May Sarton is a post from: mjh's blog. Thank you for subscribing. Let me know what you think. peace, mjh

Happy Birthday, Robert Frost! is a post from: mjh's blog. Thank you for subscribing. Let me know what you think. peace, mjh

http://www.edgewiseblog.com/mjh/category/poems/

The End of National Poetry Month is a post from: mjh's blog. Thank you for subscribing. Let me know what you think. peace, mjh

Dana Gioia Online – Kay Ryan

Here is “Paired Things” from Flamingo Watching in which image and abstraction dance so consummate a pas de deux that one wonders why modern poetics ever considered the two imaginative impulses at odds:

Paired Things

    Who, who had only seen wings,
    could extrapolate the
    skinny sticks of things
    birds use for land,
    the backward way they bend,
    the silly way they stand?
    And who, only studying
    birdtracks in the sand,
    could think those little forks
    had decamped on the wind?
    So many paired things seem odd.
    Who ever would have dreamed
    the broad winged raven of despair
    would quit the air and go
    bandylegged upon the ground,
    a common crow?

“Paired Things” displays Ryans characteristic style: dense figurative language, varied diction, internal rhyme, the interrogative mode, and playful vers libre, which elusively alternates between iambic and unmetered lines. One of Ryans signature devices is the counterpoint of sight and sound in the placement of her poetic language. Her hidden rhymes and metrical passages only became fully apparent when the poem is spoken aloud. “Paired Things” also hovers, as so many Ryan poems do, on the edge of allegory.

Dana Gioia Online – Kay Ryan

PS: In farewell, thanks to her predecessor, Ted Kooser.

After Years

Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
fell in the Cumberlands, holding only
a handful of leaves, and an old woman
scattering corn to her chickens looked up
for an instant. At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer’s retina
as he stood on the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell.

Our New US Poet Laureate is a post from: mjh's blog. Thank you for subscribing. Let me know what you think. peace, mjh

I found the following article thought-provoking (hat tip to Dangerousmeta):

Why Poetry Matters – ChronicleReview.com
By JAY PARINI

Poetry doesn’t matter to most people. They go about their business as usual, rarely consulting their Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Frost. One has to wonder if poetry has any place in the 21st century, when music videos and satellite television offer daunting competition for poems, which demand a good deal of attention and considerable analytic skills, as well as some knowledge of the traditions of poetry.

In the 19th century, poets like Scott, Byron, and Longfellow had huge audiences around the world. Their works were best sellers, and they were cultural heroes as well. But readers had few choices in those days. One imagines, perhaps falsely, that people actually liked poetry. …

I question much that Parini writes in his entire piece. I live in the 21st Century among poets and appreciators. I see poetry in many, diverse publications, including the infinite Web. Parini completely ignores “spoken word,” slams and rap. Our country, which pours money into violence and destruction, has crowned great poets laureate, though many people cannot name one.

Strangely, Parini goes on to blame poets for making poetry hard by demanding a level of literacy the populace once had (not really) but now lacks (also not true). He blames the poets, instead of society and education. In fact, he congratulates the Academical Village for “domesticating” poets. (Those same “hard” poets?) I can’t cogently respond to this portion of Parini’s essay because it scarcely makes sense to me.

To their credit, the domesticated poets grazing in English Departments surely have helped their students appreciate the deeper meanings in poetry. “Publish or perish” and conferences and competition do not necessarily produce popularly-known poets, but it’s a living, which is hard for a poet to come by — at least, as a poet. (Ironically, I am a poet who works for a university, but in a field not-often associated with poetry: I teach computer classes.)

Still, any academic worth his or her salt can toss off an essay replete with informed references worth pursuing. I enjoyed Parini’s compellation of ‘beware of poets’ references — those alone are worth reading. A Defence of Poetry, by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Robert Frost’s “Education by Poetry” warrant more consideration.

In the end, thinking about poetry is a far better use of one’s mind than so many alternatives. I agree with Parini’s assertion that “poetry can make a difference in the lives of readers.” If only we gave a fraction more of our time to poetry — reading and writing — than we do to everything that is so ugly, cruel and mean. That’s a wish you won’t hear the self-serving bloviators bray to the numb mobs that hang on their invective. peace, mjh

Blow Up Your TV is a post from: mjh's blog. Thank you for subscribing. Let me know what you think. peace, mjh

Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

PS: After the link, You, Andrew Marvell, by Archibald MacLeish follows, as it should.

To His Coy Mistress
by Andrew Marvell

Had we, but world enough, and time,
this coyness, Lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, Lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honor turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now, therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

You, Andrew Marvell
by Archibald MacLeish

And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth’s noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:
To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow
And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change
And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward pass
And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on
And deepen on Palmyra’s street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown
And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls
And Spain go under and the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land
Nor now the long light on the sea:
And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift, how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on.

Stand Still is a post from: mjh's blog. Thank you for subscribing. Let me know what you think. peace, mjh

Poem: “Crusoe” by George Bilgere, from The Good Kiss. © The University of Akron Press.

Crusoe

When you’ve been away from it long enough,
You begin to forget the country
Of couples, with all its strange customs
And mysterious ways. Those two
Over there, for instance: late thirties,
Attractive and well-dressed, reading
At the table, drinking some complicated
Coffee drink. They haven’t spoken
Or even looked at each other in thirty minutes,

But the big toe of her right foot, naked
In its sandal, sometimes grazes
The naked ankle bone of his left foot,

The faintest signal, a line thrown

Between two vessels as they cruise
Through this hour, this vacation, this life,
Through the thick novels they’re reading,
Her toe saying to his ankle,

Here’s to the whole improbable story
Of our meeting, of our life together
And the oceanic richness
Of our mingled narrative
With its complex past, with its hurts
And secret jokes, its dark closets
And delightful sexual quirks,
Its occasional doldrums, its vast
Future we have already peopled
With children. How safe we are

Compared to that man sitting across the room,
Marooned with his drink
And yellow notebook, trying to write
A way off his little island.

Crusoe, by George Bilgere is a post from: mjh's blog. Thank you for subscribing. Let me know what you think. peace, mjh

I think April is National Poetry Month, so my first blog entry of the month is poetry related (no fooling). Follow the link to find out which states don’t have a position of State Poet Laureate. mjh

Current State Poets Laureate (Main Reading Room, Library of Congress)

Current State Poets Laureate (Library of Congress) is a post from: mjh's blog. Thank you for subscribing. Let me know what you think. peace, mjh