How globe-trotting poetries may not beat scrawls in a cave.

By C.K. Williams
Poetry Media Service

All over the world, if not every day then in every age, beautiful paintings and poems and pieces of music and buildings are generated: one can almost imagine little flaring lights on the surface of the earth, like those seen in photos from space, though they are much more sparse and scattered than the illuminating devices that bespeckle our globe. And then over time these embodiments of the beautiful are harvested, amassed, collected in books, in museums, in concert halls, to be distributed into the lives of individual human beings, to become crucial elements of their existence. Often, our experience of beauty will be the first hint of what each of us at some point will dare call our soul. For don’t those first stirrings of that eternally uncertain, barely grasped notion of something more than mere mind, mere thought, mere emotion, usually first come to us in the line of a poem, a passage of music, the unreal yet more-than-real image in a painting?

And isn’t it also the case after all that beauty is the one true thing we can count on in a world of insufferable uncertainty, of constant moral conflicts? I’ve wondered sometimes if humans invented gods to have something appropriately sensitive, grand, and wise enough to appreciate these miraculous modes of beauty that are so different in material and quality from anything else in the world. Might gods have first been devised not to assuage our fears and hear our complaints and entreaties, but for there to be identities sufficiently sublime to understand what those first painters and sculptors—and surely, though the words and tunes have been lost, those poets and singers—had wrought?

Perhaps this is why those first great artworks were executed deep in caves, so as to be certain the divinities who were their audience wouldn’t be distracted by the wonder of the natural world, and so lose the concentration necessary to glory in, and be glorified by, these singular human creations that equaled and even surpassed what had been given by nature for meditation. And perhaps that’s why poets, who may half-remember such matters, go off into what can look to others like solitary caverns, shadowed with loneliness, but which surely aren’t.

C.K. Williams’s new book of poems, Wait, will be published in spring 2010. He will also publish a prose study, On Whitman, around the same time. He teaches in the creative writing program at Princeton University. Excerpted from “All Around the World the Same Song,” originally published in the March 2009 issue of Poetry magazine and available at www.poetryfoundation.org. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation.

© 2009 by C.K. Williams. All rights reserved

A Notebook.

By Ange Mlinko
Poetry Media Service

“In the light of the moon, a little egg lay on a leaf.” The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a great favorite at the moment; my two-year-old son, Gray, seems to have it memorized. He gets very concerned when he reaches the end of the long list of foods the caterpillar has eaten, for there he is, the little creature, sad-faced in the illustration. “That night he had a stomachache!” “Oh no!” Gray exclaims, bending over very close, wearing a pained look. “He’s sad! The caterpillar is sad!”

“Since that first morning when I crawled / into the world, a naked grubby thing, / and found the world unkind.” A few months ago, I happened on Stanley Kunitz’s “Hornworm: Autumn Lamentation.” By coincidence, I had seen my first hornworm around the same time—it was my first foray into growing tomatoes—and the thing, thick as a man’s finger and green as goo, almost turned me to stone then and there. It was covered with white—what looked like eggs. I looked it up on the Internet and learned that they were parasitic wasp pupae eating their host alive. The caterpillar was en route to being a splendid sphinx moth when its future was usurped by the hymenoptera, but I wasn’t supposed to pity it; gardeners hate these tomatovores. Gardeners rejoice at the wasps. The distinction of Kunitz’s poem, of course, lies in its taking the hornworm’s side, telling the story of creation’s injustice in the hornworm’s own voice.

You can’t judge a work’s value by whether it moves you to tears. When Gray bursts into tears at renditions of Brahms’s Lullaby and tells me, “The song is so sad,” I know that weak vehicles can stand for a tenor so vague and tremulous it is unknowable. My tears spring unbidden at the third verse of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” as well, the vision of a holistic, animate, feeling world: “All thy works with joy surround thee.” I realize that the very word “creation” moves me deeply. It touches the feeling I’ve always had that making things was what I was for (the root of poetry is simply making), and the vision of the world as made, and continually being made, and endowed with consciousness of its making—all this was an early glimpse into the power that unifies the subterranean ground between making poems and making new human beings.

The flip side is a sort of naked terror I never felt before I had sons to feel terrified for. There’s something marvelously true to experience in Laura Kasischke’s work—I’m thinking of her book Lilies Without —which locates this terror beneath the surface of suburban motherhood: poems such as “May,” where a cherry tree planted outside a school in memory of a dead kindergartener “shrieked into blossom.” In “New Dress (3),” a suburban mother and a mall security guard eerily end up in the same nightmare, “screaming” during a friendly exchange over a trapped pigeon. While gothic suburbia was captured—practically trademarked!—by David Lynch a couple of decades ago, Kasischke gives it a fuller treatment from the point of view of the mother who stands between her child’s innocence and death, negotiating the narrow space between them. It is a tonic to the notorious visions of suburbia as wasteland or graveyard of sexuality, as in the famous Larkin poem “Afternoons,” where “Young mothers assemble / At swing and sandpit” and

Their beauty has thickened.
Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives.

While suburbia is—to put it mildly—unlibidinal, there’s something trite at this point in Larkin’s poem, something that feels too much like a man playing to others’ prejudices. There’s an appearance of sympathy toward the women, but the melancholia is misplaced. Women with young children still have a lifetime ahead of them.

Ange Mlinko is the author of two books, Matinees (Zoland Books, 1999) and Starred Wire (Coffee House Press, 2005). The latter was a National Poetry Series winner in 2004 and a finalist for the James Laughlin Award. Excerpted from “As if Nature Talked Back to Me,” originally published in the September 2009 issue of Poetry magazine and available at www.poetryfoundation.org. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation.

© 2009 by Ange Mlinko. All rights reserved.

How to make a cocktail beautiful, humanizing, and good.

By Rosie Schaap
Poetry Media Service

So strong is W.H. Auden’s association with the martini that his home city of York, England, marked the 2007 centenary of his birth with tributes not only in words but also in booze.

It’s tricky to confirm exactly what Auden’s martini preferences were. We know that the martini was sufficiently present in Auden’s consciousness to inspire him to write, in taut haiku, this passage of his poem “Symmetries and Asymmetries”:

Could any tiger

Drink martinis, smoke cigars,

And last as we do?

Never mind war, disease, poverty, or the passion that could reduce Auden himself to despair. Here, the measures of our toughness and endurance as a species are the cigar and the martini.

Wystan Hugh Auden took the martini seriously. Richard Wilbur, in a 1993 interview conducted by Lorraine Pearsall, recounts one of his few conversations with the elder poet. “Auden had ordered a martini and I had ordered a martini, and we talked about martinis, and we discussed the fact that if you are devoted to martinis, it’s very hard to get a good one away from home,” Wilbur recalled. “I think that was the essence of our deep conversation, but it was heartfelt.”

I can envision Wilbur and Auden commiserating over the matter, though I puzzle over Wilbur’s sarcasm. Why should such a discussion not have been deep and heartfelt? It’s true that even in the most venerable venues, it’s not easy to get a good martini.

But what sort of martini did Auden prepare at home? If Tarquin Winot, the epicurean protagonist of John Lanchester’s novel The Debt to Pleasure, is to be believed, he made them like so: “I borrowed W.H. Auden’s technique of mixing the vermouth and gin at lunchtime (though the great poet himself used vodka) and leaving the mixture in the freezer to attain that wonderful jellified texture of alcohol chilled to below the point at which water freezes. The absence of ice means that the Auden martini is not diluted in any way, and thus truly earns the drink its sobriquet ‘the silver bullet.’”

It’s charming—sort of—to imagine W.H. Auden, with his lined, noble countenance, inventing the progenitor of the Jell-O shot, but Winot, a perverse and unreliable narrator, is not to be believed, and it seems questionable that an Englishman of Auden’s generation would abide, much less favor, a martini made with vodka instead of gin.

Maybe what I’m trying to say is: I don’t want to believe it. I don’t want to lump Auden in with the cocktail consumers I’ve seen belly up to bars at innumerable happy hours, lean their elbows on the polished wood or marble or zinc, and, with an air of sophisticated authority, order an extra-dry vodka martini with extra olives. I want to pry away their drinks and replace them with real martinis—made with gin and considerably more than a rumor of vermouth, and garnished, if garnished they must be, with clean, curly twists of lemon peel. It’s much the way I feel when, riding the subway some evenings, I catch sight of someone reading Atlas Shrugged, and want to tear the book from his or her hands and replace it with Paradise Lost or The Prelude. Life is too short for Ayn Rand, when one’s time could be spent with Milton or Wordsworth—that is, with something beautiful and humanizing and good. And life is too short for a 10-ounce glass of chilled vodka masquerading as a cocktail, too short to forgo the pleasure of the real martini, a drink that at its best, too, is beautiful, and humanizing, and very, very good.

The notion of Auden’s preferred martini being made with vodka and nearly frozen may have come from an essay by one of his brothers. But John Auden, distinguished geologist and explorer, is ambiguous with respect to his brother Wystan’s martinis. “Although strictly disciplined in regard to work every morning, and with only a beer or a plain martini at lunch, the evenings brought stiff vodkas and martinis from the freezer, which we would drink measure for measure.” By “plain martini” does John mean one made with gin? Were the martinis Wystan withdrew from the freezer along with the “stiff vodkas” based on the same spirit? I was recently told a story about a young magazine writer and editor in New York in the 1950s, who was invited to a party chez Auden. He got so “sick-drunk on Auden’s martinis,” it was said, “that he swore off gin from then until the day he died.” Anecdotal, sure, but it suggests that Auden could go both ways with the martini, sometimes deploying gin, sometimes vodka.

I asked Michael Andre, poet and publisher of the little magazine Unmuzzled Ox, who interviewed Auden as the great Modernist was packing to leave New York City for the final time, if he knew of an “Auden martini” made with vodka and popped in the freezer. Andre had never heard of it, but helpfully added: “The Andre cocktail consists of Valium, Thorazine, Jack Daniels, and a Bud. Works every time.” I don’t doubt it. But I suspect that Andre had forgotten Auden’s aphoristic late poem “Contra Blake”:

The Road of Excess

leads, more often than not, to

The Slough of Despond

Rosie Schaap’s work has aired on This American Life, and her book Drinking with Men, a collection of true stories set in bars she’s known and loved, will be published next year by Riverhead. This article was originally published at www.poetryfoundation.org. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation.

© 2009 by Rosie Schaap. All rights reserved.

I got the bad news last week that the 20-plus year poetry mag Free Lunch is ceasing publication. Editor Ron Offen has had serious health problems that are forcing him to end the magazine.

Offen has offered free subscriptions to who he deems as serious poets, based on their submitted work. He has made a point of commenting on nearly every poem submitted to him, whether he chooses to publish it or not. I’ve found his feedback to be as valuable as having my poems appear in his magazine.

It’s a big loss for poetry. But good luck and get well to you, Mr. Offen.

A more detailed story from Chicago Poetry can be found here.

Much thanks to The Post, an online alternative newspaper based in Sioux Falls, for naming After Long Busyness its Blog of the Week. Check out the story, and the gigantic photo of me, here.

I got the new issue of Pasque Petals–the South Dakota State Poetry Society’s journal–last week. I hadn’t seen an issue in over 10 years and recalled it as a publish-anything publication for poetry society members.

But the new issue shows some signs of renewed life. It’s still a publication that caters to its members, which I guess is not  a big deal–they are the ones paying to keep the journal going. However, I was happily surprised to find quality poems by Andy Thorstenson of Hot Springs and Linda Hasselstrom of Hermosa. Both are excellent poets who deserve recognition.

Pasque Petals’ new editor, Francie Davis, has been attending readings in the area, encouraging poets to subscribe and submit to the journal so she has an abundance of work to choose from. She figures it can only get better if she has more poets sending their work. It appears that her efforts have been successful already. It’s good to see someone trying to find the best poetry the state has to offer.

What did we learn from Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg?

By Aram Saroyan
Poetry Media Service

It’s been more than a decade since the death of Allen Ginsberg, but in the interim I’ve found that he’s stayed with me as an informing, tempering, guardian-like presence of a stature equaled only by my late father. He looked me up and down and looked me in the face, taking my measure for good or ill, and then informed me, on several critical occasions, where I had gotten it right or wrong.

As a teenager in Manhattan, I turned to poetry because I couldn’t understand what life was about and thought I might uncover some clues in such writing. Howl, which I found during high school, was like an encyclopedia of the emotional and psychic life that had been driven under in me, with the result that I felt restless and bored a lot of the time. Life is big, it said. It has a lot of colors. It’s serious. It’s funny. It’s full of suffering that is also like bread, nurture, on a journey of the soul.

Allen called me from Naropa one year, trying to track down a photograph of Kerouac that I’d used in Genesis Angels: The Saga of Lew Welch and the Beat Generation. My father had died recently, and Allen told me a story about his father, the late poet Louis Ginsberg, who had been a high school teacher in New Jersey. When he’d visited his father in the hospital during his last illness, Allen said Louis told him that as a little boy he’d lived near a magnificent building, a great tower with chimneys from which, at certain hours of the day, huge plumes of smoke billowed. Louis had dreamed of this building and wondered what went on inside it.

“Do you know what it was, Allen? That great tower that set me dreaming?”

“What, Pop?”

“It was a glue factory.”

During the same call Allen lightened my spirits by telling me how much he liked Genesis Angels, which had received mixed reviews.

During the ’60s, in my minimalist phase as a poet, I ran into Allen one afternoon on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street in New York. I’d just purchased some bell-bottoms and a hippie shirt, thinking I’d take the plunge into my generation’s attire, and Allen looked me over seriously.

“What’s going on?” he said.

“Well, I think the clothes are beautiful, so why not wear them?”

He nodded and made no further comment about it, and we got to discussing my one-word poems.

“Are you lazy, or what?” It was the sort of comment that could have come only from Allen or from my father.

“No,” I said.

Ten years later, Allen attended a reading I gave. Afterward, he commented to me that a poem I’d read took an “us-and-them” stance that he considered incorrect. This was priceless information, not about the quality of the poem so much as about how it is one continues to write. It was, as I see it today, part of the higher literary physics that he and Kerouac reinstated, so to speak. The moral example of literature wasn’t judgment, that is, but empathy, which is why Shakespeare is our greatest exemplar. Allen was telling me, in his way, that I had turned down a cul-de-sac.

* * *

The Paris Review interview with Jack Kerouac was the brainchild of Ted Berrigan at a time when, hard as it is to believe, Kerouac was an almost forgotten man. It was a few months before the fabled Summer of Love, 1967, and Ted invited me to accompany him up to Lowell to interview Kerouac. I accepted the invitation on impulse—at that moment of the ’60s I’d very nearly forgotten Kerouac myself.

Ted’s impromptu choreography: Jack had loved my dad’s work, Ted knew, and he also knew I’d be reluctant to come as the ambassador of William Saroyan, as it were, and made his invitation spontaneously casual—and off we went.

During the interview Jack, perhaps intrigued that the son of one of his first literary influences was now looking to him, asked me to repeat after him, line by line, the words of a poem of his from Mexico City Blues:

KEROUAC: Delicate conceptions of kneecaps. Say that, Saroyan.

SAROYAN: Delicate conceptions of kneecaps.

Concluding:

KEROUAC: Like kissing my kitten in the belly

SAROYAN: Like kissing my kitten in the belly

KEROUAC: The softness of our reward

SAROYAN: The softness of our reward

I stumbled once or twice—there were some complicated lines—but a thick-skinned, hardheaded 23-year-old writer was getting some basic training, not in literature per se, but in repeating the words of a master. That is the correct existential posture in the lineage of mystery—surrendering to it—that the Beats revived. So, my young friend, it was as if Kerouac was saying, Let’s appreciate it together; even though I wrote it, it’s both of ours now. When I’d completed this exercise, Jack rewarded me with a modest encomium that has traveled with me down the years and that I’ve tried my best to be worthy of. “You’ll do, Saroyan,” he said.

Aram Saroyan’s Door to the River: Essays and Reviews from the 1960s into the Digital Age will be published in March 2010 by Black Sparrow/Godine. This article first appeared at www.poetryfoundation.org. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation.

© 2009 by Aram Saroyan. All rights reserved.

Remembering Craig Arnold.

By Christian Wiman
Poetry Media Service

It is now seven months since Craig Arnold died—or vanished, as most notices have termed it. We have delayed running an obituary for him partly because of the circumstances of his death. As most people in the poetry world now know, he disappeared while exploring a volcano on a Japanese island, and all indications are that he suffered a fatal fall in such a remote and dense location that his body may never be found. Another part of the delay, though, perhaps the better part of it, is this: I knew Craig, and knew him to be a person in whom life burned so intensely and immediately that not only is his death at 41 a shock, but in some part of my brain it simply will not register.

I first met Craig about 10 years ago at a little college in Virginia, where he was part of a symposium of young poets I had organized. Tall, lean, and with his head shaved, clad in black leather pants and tight white T-shirt, he didn’t “read” his poems: he performed them, strutting elastically about as if he were on stage, whipsawing lines and limbs in precise, rehearsed ways, electrifying that quaint little lecture hall as if it were the Moulin Rouge. I tend to be allergic to this kind of self-dramatization in poetry, but I loved it. All of it: the flair that seemed to arise naturally out of his character rather than being appliquéd on; the mercurial and protean nature of his subjects (and, I would learn, his own life); the hell-bent hungers and raptures kept in check—or at least kept intact, intelligible—by the tough-minded conscience and craft that ran through the poems like a spine.

Those were the poems of Shells, Craig’s first book, which had been selected by W.S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1998 (published in 1999). The poems hold up, to say the least. In fact, what strikes me when reading them now is how little they need any embellishment of drama or gesture, how absolute their integrity is on the page. “Hot,” a long, tightly wrought narrative that is emblematic of the book as a whole, is about—besides life and death and art, I mean—two friends who share a passion, of a sort, for ever-hotter peppers:

I called in sick
next morning, said I’d like to take

time off. She thinks I’ve hit the bottle.
The high those peppers gave me is more subtle—

I’m lucid, I remember my full name,
my parents’ birthdays, how to win a game

of chess in seven moves, why which and that
mean different things. But what we eat,

why, what it means, it’s all been explained
—Take this curry, this fine-tuned

balance of humors, coconut liquor thinned
by broth, sour pulp of tamarind

cut through by salt, set off by fragrant
galangal, ginger, basil, cilantro, mint,

the warp and woof of texture, aubergines
that barely hold their shape, snap beans

heaped on jasmine, basmati rice
—it’s a lie, all of it—pretext—artifice

—ornament—sugar-coating—for . . .

For what? Well, that’s the whole heart of “Hot,” the whole heart of Craig, really, who seems to me as powerfully present in these poems as when I first heard him perform them all those years ago—and as teasingly elusive.

Nine years would pass between the publication of Shells and the appearance of Craig’s next book, Made Flesh, nine years in which Craig lived in Rome and Bogotá and Wyoming and Utah and I don’t know where else. It was in some ways the typical 21st-century up-and-coming American poet’s life—the pickup jobs and the scramble for publishers, the fellowships and relationships (for the past six years of his life, Craig was very happily partnered with another poet, Rebecca Lindenberg), the constant effort to find a way of staying alive without allowing one’s lifeblood to congeal into a career.

And yet it wasn’t so typical, too: Craig was perhaps the only poet I have known personally—the only good poet, I should say—who seemed completely at ease with being a poet. Don’t get me wrong: Craig had all of the existential friction and psychic disquiet we’ve come to expect from post-Romantic poets—an excess of it, actually. You don’t have to read his poems autobiographically—and they’re too cunningly, winningly imagined to do that—to get a hint of the tempest that was their source. But he also had, right down to his soul (I guess it was his soul), a calm and clarifying equanimity about his purpose on this earth, and always over the years when I would encounter him—a few days in Virginia again, a dinner in San Francisco, a breakfast in Chicago—I would discover my own bristling insecurities melting away in his presence, and would feel my own relationship with poetry renewed. This wasn’t because Craig had achieved some sort of monkish calm with regard to ambition (ha!), and it certainly wasn’t because he was placidly and brainlessly open to everything he encountered (in fact, he could be quite sudden and sharp in his opinions). No, what Craig had, besides his endless and endlessly inclusive charisma, was a capacity to be at once absolutely grounded in the physical world, and in his own body, and yet utterly, mysteriously permeable. I’m not sure how this played out in his daily life, but I know it affected mine, and for the better. I also know that this quality gives the concrete things of his poetry, and especially his later poetry, a powerful sense of being more themselves by being more than themselves:

Here is a small café
opening for breakfast
a zinc counter catching the light
at every angle in bright rings of glitter
A cup of black coffee is placed before you
brimming with rainbow-colored foam
a packet of sugar   a pat of butter
a split roll of bread
scored and toasted and still warm
The butter is just soft enough to spread
the coffee hot and sugared to perfect sweetness
the bread grilled to the palest brown
crisp but not quite dry
You tear it neatly into pieces
eat them slowly    when you finish
you are exactly full

Here are bread butter and coffee
Here you are     your own body
eating and drinking what you are given
as one day you in turn will be devoured
and that is all     You were never the lord
of a lightless kingdom     any more
than she has ever been its queen
and the world you talked into a prison
suddenly seems to be made of glass
and your eyes see clear to the horizon
and you feel the molecules of air
part like a curtain     as if to let you pass
—From “Couple From Hell”

This is from Made Flesh, which is a different sort of book from Shells. Shells is often about the immediacy of experience, but there is just as often a detachment to the poems, a very palpable (and altogether successful) sense of artifice, of talent that is in some way distancing a world even as it brings that world wildly alive. In Made Flesh that distance is gone. The language is sparer, all irony is obliterated, the poems are less obviously “formal,” and their raptures are at once quieter and more complete. There is something both precise and encompassing about these poems, something at the same time piercing and liberating. Time abrades talent. Some poets don’t seem to notice this and continue to make the same ever-thinning sound right on into oblivion. Others lapse into embittered silence. In some, though, the abrasions bloom:

On the fire escape of your rented room
we sat and felt the empty city
sweat and fret     we passed a cigarette
back and forth     as once we passed
words like these between us      without
hope of keeping
Now I write
without hope of answer     to say
that what we gave each other nakedly
was too much and not enough
To say that since we last touched
I am not empty     I hear you named
and my heart starts     the pieces of your voice
you left     are interleaved with mine

and to this quick spark in the emptiness
to say Yes     I miss how love
may make us otherwise
—From “Asunder”

The bracing, rule-breaking (show, then tell), completely convincing move from detail to abstraction, from sensation to realization; the space-ghosted form of the lines so apt for their subject; the careful, graceful assurance of the poem as it charts an entirely new route through a minefield of emotional and poetic clichés: it takes an enormous amount of skill to speak one’s pain in this way, and it takes a rare, clear heart.

I last saw Craig back in February, when he came into town for the AWP conference. He showed up at the Poetry offices one afternoon and practically lifted me off the floor in a hug. As always, the twitchy intelligence, the solar flares of his energy, surprised me—and, as always, surprised a happiness in me I hadn’t known was there. We locked him in an office all afternoon in hopes that he would write the long-overdue prose note to the translation he had done for our April issue, and for hours he sat there (weird: how suddenly still he could become, how creaturely focused), finally emerging near dusk with a single brilliant and self-revealing page on a poet he had recently met while living in Colombia (“to hit upon such an image requires an intimate acquaintance with all the flavors of pain and persistence and hopelessness—here, I thought, was a conscience to reckon with”). The next day he led—with great kindness, and much to my surprise—a reading he’d shaped as a celebration of the magazine. He’d given up the extravagant reading style of years before because, he said, he began to think it was actually deflecting people’s attention and detracting from the work. Still, even understated (as if that word could ever be used for Craig!), he was searing, mesmerizing, unforgettable.

Craig stayed with my wife and me that week, and somehow in between the dozens of friends he was seeing, or tending to, or shuttling to and from the airport, we found time to talk. I remember most clearly his last morning here, when he made us migas for breakfast, and the conversation turned to something he and I had talked of many times over the years: the necessary but destabilizing intensities of poetry, and the life that one risks by cultivating those intensities, and the life that—in some cases, our cases, we both felt—poetry also rescues. Out in the front yard he gave me another of his no-holds-barred hugs and promised to be back in August. Only as he drove off did I realize I’d forgotten to get him to sign our copy of Made Flesh, which is a shame, since the inscription he wrote for me on Shells all those years ago is a gem. Filling the entire page, and linking quotations from Fight Club and Baudelaire with a self-consciously absurd smiley face, it’s Craig all over. “I hope this stays with you,” he scrawled on the very last bit of space at the end of the page. “I certainly will.”

Christian Wiman is the author of three books, most recently Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet. A new book of poetry, Every Riven Thing, is forthcoming in 2011. He has edited Poetry magazine since 2003. This essay originally appeared in the October 2009 issue of Poetry magazine. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2009 by Christian Wiman. All rights reserved.

Brenda Starr makes way for Rumi, Neruda, and Merwin.

By Mary Schmich
Poetry Media Service

I write a news column at the Chicago Tribune, and at the beginning of baseball season this year one of my editors phoned with a tough assignment, something, he said, that called for special skills.

Was I being asked to investigate a doping scandal? conduct an exclusive interview? throw out the first pitch?

“Can you write us a poem about opening day?” he asked.

He and I both knew that by “poem” he meant doggerel—silly verse written with a wink—and I obliged:

Yes, baseball’s back, at last, at last
To bat away the blues
The games arrive like sunshine
In the bleepin’ gloomy news.

Blagojevich indicted!
The economy’s a mess!
Plus parking, potholes, crooks and crimes!
We need some anti-stress!
—From An Ode to Opening Day

It ran on the front page, embroidered with old-fashioned bunting that signaled that rhyming verse, like baseball itself, was a relic of a quainter time.

I’ve always felt slightly sheepish about the pleasure I get from my occasional forays into doggerel. The enjoyment some columnists get from their political fulminations, I get from rhyming “spinach” and “Kucinich.”

I feel only slightly less sheepish about how often I exploit the poems of real poets to make a serious point. Poetry and journalism are like peanut butter and baloney: coupling them is not to everyone’s taste.

But I can’t help myself. Poetry isn’t just a way of writing, it’s a way of thinking, and I’ve been thinking that way since at least sixth grade.

At Alexander School IV in Macon, Georgia, Miss Lois Birch, who seemed as old as God, made us memorize poems. The two I remember spring to mind as often as the faces of old friends. I keep them in my head the way you might keep worry beads in your pocket, reaching reflexively in times of stress for their meaning, rhythm, sound.

One is by John Masefield: “I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, / And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.” The other is by William Wordsworth:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils.

Whenever I can, I sneak poems into my newspaper column.

After terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center, I instinctively flipped through my most dog-eared book of poems, Wislawa Szymborska’s View with a Grain of Sand, and plucked a few verses from “Hatred”:

See how efficient it still is,
how it keeps itself in shape—
our century’s hatred.
How easily it vaults the tallest obstacles.
How rapidly it pounces, tracks us down.

Her poem gave my prose a power it wouldn’t otherwise have had.

When W.S. Merwin won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, I used the occasion as an excuse to quote from “Rain Light,” about a mother’s death. I put a link to the entire poem in my column, and hundreds of readers sought it out.

I’ve bolstered my own summer musings with Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day,” whose last line electrocutes me every time I read it: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”

In autumn, I’ve quoted from Pablo Neruda’s “October Fullness,” though it’s about October as a time of life more than a time of year:

Little by little, and also in great leaps,
life happened to me,
and how insignificant this business is.

The response to the columns in which I quote good poems is always strong, which is another reason to feel sheepish: even with full attribution, I’m reaping credit for someone else’s genius.

Poetry also creeps into Brenda Starr, the soap-opera comic strip I’ve written for 24 years. Our heroine, Brenda, quotes poetry and muses on it. Heroes and villains alike use it to woo her.

Recently, a mysterious, dashing man named Ringo, from the fictitious country of Kazookistan, dazzled her with verse:

Ringo didn’t conquer Brenda, but he did seduce many comics readers who were grateful to discover Rumi and Hafiz.

Newspaper columns, comic strips, and poems may not seem like related literary forms, but they’re less different than they look. In their own ways, each of them seeks the same thing: to make meaning in a space whose power lies in always being just a little too short.

Mary Schmich is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune and writes the Brenda Starr comic strip. This essay first appeared in the September 2009 issue of Poetry magazine and is available at www.poetryfoundation.org. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation.

© 2009 by Mary Schmich. All rights reserved.

Poet Lucia Perillo talks about her poetry, her disability, and her changing relationship with nature.

By Maria McLeod
Poetry Media Service

Maria McLeod: Lucia, your background and early training doesn’t include writing. I wonder, as someone who has taken a more nontraditional route, how did you enter the field?

Lucia Perrillo: In 1980, I had just gotten a job at the Denver Wildlife Research Center. I believe that place is closed now, but it was an animal damage control facility, meaning that it researched ways to kill animals to keep them from destroying livestock or agricultural crops.

We killed coyotes; we killed birds. I killed lots of things. So I graduated with this degree in wildlife biology to go off and study wildlife, and I end up killing wildlife. So it was really a weird time, a troubling year in my life.

But how I got into writing was this way: I was a single woman living in this strange city, and I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t want to go to a bar alone, but I discovered that I could go to plays alone, and it wasn’t weird, or I could go to poetry readings alone. So, it was just a way to have places to go at night that would be safe. And that’s how I came to poetry, too, by going to open mics, and just kind of stumbling into them, because it was something you could do.

Also, when I lived in Denver, I saw Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg read in Boulder. Ginsberg played with the band, and Gregory Corso’s wife was drunk and got bounced from the bar. The whole thing was very surreal. I remember that Gregory Corso’s wife stood up on a chair and then started screaming, “Where’s mah man?  Where’s mah man?” [laughter] And I remember that he said something about her. “My wife just got bounced!”

MM: When you left Denver, what did you do after that?

LP: I went to California in 1981. I got a job at the San Francisco Bay Wildlife Refuge. I did a variety of things, but I led a lot of nature walks around southern San Francisco Bay.

Again, I didn’t know very many people. I lived in Palo Alto, and I was writing a lot, and one day I pedaled my bike over to this writing workshop at the local community college. I saw this man give a talk, and I don’t even remember what the talk was about, but he had a captivating presence. I learned that he was giving a class at San Jose State, a night class, a poetry-writing workshop. That was Bob Hass. So I went and enrolled in his workshop.

MM: When I read Dangerous Life [Perillo's first book, published in 1989] again in preparation for this interview, I looked for repeated themes. In the end, I decided it was a book about victimization, about calling attention to the victimizers and the victim. What was that book about for you?

LP: I don’t know why I was so interested in victimization, or I felt that I had been victimized as a woman. Certainly I was a person of privilege. I’ve never been a victim of a violent crime. I’ve never been raped, never had an abortion. I mean, I’ve lived sort of in a bubble. Maybe I felt like I had to create that myth for myself, or these violent events, because I hadn’t had one. . . . But I will say that I became less interested in women’s issues when my identity as a woman was subsumed by my identity as a person who was sick. It was in ‘88 that I was diagnosed with MS [multiple sclerosis]. Then that identity overtook these earlier concerns because they paled. My earlier feminist concerns, my feelings of discrimination, were small potatoes compared to what I was up against subsequent to that. I acquired a new identity. Now, you know, I don’t even feel like a woman anymore. I don’t feel that’s my primary identity. It stopped being my concern. I felt that: Oh, I’m this other thing now.

MM: So in 1988, was Dangerous Life completed as a manuscript at the time you were diagnosed?

LP: It was already complete, and it was already in [with the publisher].  The funny thing is that it has an epigraph from Nietzsche at the beginning of the book, “I sometimes think that I lead a highly dangerous life since I’m one of those machines that can burst apart!” But when the book came out, Tess Gallagher pointed it out to me. She said, “Oh, you’ve got this epigraph. Were you already diagnosed with MS?” But no, the book was already created before that. So it was a little prophecy from Nietzsche.

MM: Your book of essays, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature, was published by Trinity University Press in 2007. It seems that your work as a researcher is especially evident in that book. In fact, you mention conducting research in the essay “Knowledge Game: Gulls.” You call a person from Audubon and you ask what kind of gulls you are seeing. But you also really study them, read about them. Can you tell me what brought this book of essays about for you?

LP: A friend of mine, a nonfiction writer and journalist, said, “Well, you should write about your life,” prose about my life. So I wrote some prose about my life. There was not too much to say about having a terrible disease. I hadn’t really figured out what I would say about it except it sucks, you know. But that’s not a very profound statement. So I decided that I would write about the kind of interactions you can still have with nature as a disabled person. It’s hard because you don’t have the ability to go on unpaved terrain anymore. I lost that thing that I really loved, and what could I still do? It was a way of making little projects for myself. I had to write the essays, so I had to go look at the gull so I could write the essay.

Maria McLeod is a Bellingham, Washington-based poet, freelance writer and documentarian. She authored a history of the Washington state Department of Ecology, which was published in 2005. This article first appeared on www.poetryfoundation.org. Learn more about Lucia Perillo, and her poetry, at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2009 by Maria McLeod. All rights reserved.