Monday, January 11, 2010
Friday, January 8, 2010
As part of her talk on Frost and contemporary poetry, we asked poet Jarita Davis to read several poems from her new manuscript. One of these poems, Davis's "Harvesting a Return," homes in on its cranberry harvest subject in a way very comparable to Frost's "After Apple Picking."
Here is Davis reading her poem, "Harvesting A Return."
Here is Davis reading her poem, "Harvesting A Return."
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
"Processional" by Joan Larkin
In Tamilnadu
where it’s still morning,
where the mixed scent of
burning rubber, incense
and excrement hasn’t yet
heated to a thing you sweat
through your feet and tongue,
where day is beginning to burn
through the neem leaves,
a long string of men
snakes along a dirt route, chanting
and in their center like a gold bead
lofted on their shoulders
a man sits in a painted box
its canopy dyed bright yellow
and he, too, is clothed yellow
and his face upturned to the sun
is smeared with turmeric:
a man the color of saffron grain.
He’s leaning back in his high seat
and you see from your safe distance
his stiff posture and open mouth.
You stare as if you’ve never seen the dead:
Francis in his smeared bedding,
your father a waxwork
freakish in mortuary rouge,
all the young men in varnished coffins.
Each death its own strangeness,
a gold face tilted to the light.
Yet common to all. You’re
in this moving line. And he is,
the one you carry, the one you praise
and want to spare.
The line jolts forward
Jaya, jaya, Shiva Shambho
toward the wood and fire,
and you breathe the scent
of everything alive.
Joan Larkin is the author of My Body: New and Selected Poems, which received the Publishing Triangle’s 2008 Audre Lorde Award. Her website, www.joanlarkin.com has more information about her previous books including Cold River, A Long Sound, Housework, and Sor Juana’s Love Poems (translated with Jaime Manrique). She has edited four anthologies of poetry and prose and co-edits the University of Wisconsin Press memoir series Living Out. Now in her fourth decade of teaching, Joan teaches in Drew University’s Low-Residency MFA Program in Poetry Writing.
where it’s still morning,
where the mixed scent of
burning rubber, incense
and excrement hasn’t yet
heated to a thing you sweat
through your feet and tongue,
where day is beginning to burn
through the neem leaves,
a long string of men
snakes along a dirt route, chanting
and in their center like a gold bead
lofted on their shoulders
a man sits in a painted box
its canopy dyed bright yellow
and he, too, is clothed yellow
and his face upturned to the sun
is smeared with turmeric:
a man the color of saffron grain.
He’s leaning back in his high seat
and you see from your safe distance
his stiff posture and open mouth.
You stare as if you’ve never seen the dead:
Francis in his smeared bedding,
your father a waxwork
freakish in mortuary rouge,
all the young men in varnished coffins.
Each death its own strangeness,
a gold face tilted to the light.
Yet common to all. You’re
in this moving line. And he is,
the one you carry, the one you praise
and want to spare.
The line jolts forward
Jaya, jaya, Shiva Shambho
toward the wood and fire,
and you breathe the scent
of everything alive.
Joan Larkin is the author of My Body: New and Selected Poems, which received the Publishing Triangle’s 2008 Audre Lorde Award. Her website, www.joanlarkin.com has more information about her previous books including Cold River, A Long Sound, Housework, and Sor Juana’s Love Poems (translated with Jaime Manrique). She has edited four anthologies of poetry and prose and co-edits the University of Wisconsin Press memoir series Living Out. Now in her fourth decade of teaching, Joan teaches in Drew University’s Low-Residency MFA Program in Poetry Writing.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Background on "Processional" by Joan Larkin
1. How did your poem come into being?
I traveled through South India in late 2000 and 2001. The unexpected sight of a decorated corpse being carried upright in a chair startled me and stayed with me long afterward. It came back to me years later, when I was sitting at a desk in New Hampshire. I didn't know where the image would take me, but it naturally connected to thoughts of loved friends, and the poem began to spill down the page like the long narrow movement of the funeral procession through trees.
2. Do you have a favorite line or phrase or word in your poem?
The phrase "of everything alive" -- the last line of the poem -- captures for me the way death and life are inextricably joined; I wanted to end the poem with the sense of aliveness in every moment, to express joy about every detail of experience.
3. Do you have a line that gave you particular difficulties?
This may seem a small thing, but poems are made of details –– every word and syllable is a choice: I struggled before choosing to say "clothed yellow," instead of what would have been the more familiar phrasing: "clothed in yellow." I wanted the stronger beat and closer connection between the two words without the unstressed extra syllable "in," but for a while I worried that the phrasing might seem strange and stop the reader. Now, the economical choice seems to me the right one.
4. How long have you been working on poetry?
I wrote silly comic verse at about age 8 or 9, got serious in high school with a ponderous sonnet about Julius Caesar, and in college listened to a teacher who advised me to choose poetry over fiction and focus on becoming a stronger poet. I liked telling stories, and the desire to write fiction kept resurfacing, but I've finally realized that my deepest impulse is more lyrical than narrative.
5. To read the poem out loud to an audience, how would you introduce it?
I'd probably say very little! I might say that "Tamil Nadu" is in South India, or mention the details in my answer to question #1, above, or say something about how fascinated I was in India to see faces painted with bright vegetable dyes to show loyalty to particular gods. Or I might mention the connection I found myself making to the many deaths of friends in the AIDS epidemic. These two threads fused, in the poem, with what I hope is a sense of life's vividness and mystery.
6. What poet's work has taught you the most?
It's hard to name just one, but Emily Dickinson keeps surprising me; reading her always feels like a fresh encounter, not a second-hand experience. I'm still learning from her immediacy and thrift, and the combination of wildness and aptness of her metaphors for interior life.
7. Do you have a favorite Frost poem? If so, what is it.
I grew up in Massachusetts, and Frost's distinctive voice was one of the first that spoke to me. Vividness of sensory details, economy, strong rhythms, and the way darkness and light live together in his poems still move me with their power. Among many memorable Frost poems, I think I'd choose "Desert Places" as one favorite––but on a different day it might be "After Apple-Picking"!
I traveled through South India in late 2000 and 2001. The unexpected sight of a decorated corpse being carried upright in a chair startled me and stayed with me long afterward. It came back to me years later, when I was sitting at a desk in New Hampshire. I didn't know where the image would take me, but it naturally connected to thoughts of loved friends, and the poem began to spill down the page like the long narrow movement of the funeral procession through trees.
2. Do you have a favorite line or phrase or word in your poem?
The phrase "of everything alive" -- the last line of the poem -- captures for me the way death and life are inextricably joined; I wanted to end the poem with the sense of aliveness in every moment, to express joy about every detail of experience.
3. Do you have a line that gave you particular difficulties?
This may seem a small thing, but poems are made of details –– every word and syllable is a choice: I struggled before choosing to say "clothed yellow," instead of what would have been the more familiar phrasing: "clothed in yellow." I wanted the stronger beat and closer connection between the two words without the unstressed extra syllable "in," but for a while I worried that the phrasing might seem strange and stop the reader. Now, the economical choice seems to me the right one.
4. How long have you been working on poetry?
I wrote silly comic verse at about age 8 or 9, got serious in high school with a ponderous sonnet about Julius Caesar, and in college listened to a teacher who advised me to choose poetry over fiction and focus on becoming a stronger poet. I liked telling stories, and the desire to write fiction kept resurfacing, but I've finally realized that my deepest impulse is more lyrical than narrative.
5. To read the poem out loud to an audience, how would you introduce it?
I'd probably say very little! I might say that "Tamil Nadu" is in South India, or mention the details in my answer to question #1, above, or say something about how fascinated I was in India to see faces painted with bright vegetable dyes to show loyalty to particular gods. Or I might mention the connection I found myself making to the many deaths of friends in the AIDS epidemic. These two threads fused, in the poem, with what I hope is a sense of life's vividness and mystery.
6. What poet's work has taught you the most?
It's hard to name just one, but Emily Dickinson keeps surprising me; reading her always feels like a fresh encounter, not a second-hand experience. I'm still learning from her immediacy and thrift, and the combination of wildness and aptness of her metaphors for interior life.
7. Do you have a favorite Frost poem? If so, what is it.
I grew up in Massachusetts, and Frost's distinctive voice was one of the first that spoke to me. Vividness of sensory details, economy, strong rhythms, and the way darkness and light live together in his poems still move me with their power. Among many memorable Frost poems, I think I'd choose "Desert Places" as one favorite––but on a different day it might be "After Apple-Picking"!
Background on "Journey withMan and Crows" by Raphael Kosek
1. How did your poem come into being?
In a very ecstatic moment—contrary to many others which are generated in a dark moment; my interest here was with sound and emotion. This was one of those poems that telescopes outward first, then inward—kind of an “aerial view” so to speak. And those crows seem to be at the periphery of everything . . .
2. Do you have a favorite line or phrase or word in your poem?
“their noteless unwritten music/piercing old timber, deepening distance”
3 Do you have a line that gave you particular difficulties?
Yes: getting from “cutting color like stained glass” to “riotous rising of the pheasant”; I cast about shamelessly until I came up with “until”! The problem was how to smoothly connect the two images. The poem is all one sentence, so you have to be careful that everything fits, rolls along smoothly.
4. How long have you been working on poetry?
Since age 12 and continuing up through college, then a long hiatus in between until my forties when I realized I’d die a very bitter old woman if I didn’t write. I still remember my first line of poetry: “With great relief and lightness comes the rain.” And I suppose I have always looked to poetry for “relief” and as a way to deal with this life.
5. To read the poem out loud to an audience, how would you introduce it?
This is one of those VERY FEW poems that nearly wrote itself; I didn’t know where it was going, but I liked the feel of this “ride” and just gave the horses the reins as they say . . . and of course, it is the journey. And crows, they are always around, at the periphery of everything. Also, I have recently taken up canoeing and am quite in love with it—so that certainly explains that part of the ride.
6. What poets' work has taught you the most.
I would have to say that the late Jane Kenyon’s work taught me the most: that the best poetry makes the ordinary extraordinary; that you can successfully combine dangerous abstracts (like “heart” and “joy” and “grief” ) if you use very concrete imagery to get you there. Her sometimes seemingly simple poems are anything but. Also, Jane Hirshfield has taught me to be spare when it’s important; the right word or image takes the place of many sentences. Again, she is another poet who mixes the concrete with the abstract judiciously and effectively. Billy Collins has shown me that poetry is really serious play, and that you can disarm the reader with humor, and that you must orient the reader in the beginning of a poem before you carry her “off.” The Eastern European poets, Czeslaw Milosc, Wislawa Szymborska, and Adam Zagajewski have also taught me to “telescope” outward in order to arrive inward. And vice versa.
7. Do you have a favorite Frost poem? If so, what is it.
“Desert Places” because it rings so true for me; also “Out, Out” because it’s a tour de force.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
"Route 1 North, Woolich, Maine" by Tess Taylor
"Route 1 North, Woolich, Maine" has already appeared in the journal Memorious, and in 2008 as Best of the Web.
TESS TAYLOR, 2010-2011 Amy Clampitt Resident, has received writing fellowships from Amherst College, the American Antiquarian Society, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. Her chapbook, The Misremembered World, was published by the Poetry Society of America. Her work appears widely.
TESS TAYLOR, 2010-2011 Amy Clampitt Resident, has received writing fellowships from Amherst College, the American Antiquarian Society, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. Her chapbook, The Misremembered World, was published by the Poetry Society of America. Her work appears widely.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Background on "Route 1 North, Woolich, Maine" by Tess Taylor
RFrostED: How did your poem come into being?
TT:I was listening to a lot of bluegrass that summer I wrote my poem, driving around in a car I'd bought from a Swedish helicopter pilot and thriller novelist I'd met at a writing residency. I didn't know where my next lilly-pad was. I was between things. My car didn't work too well. The Swedish helicopter pilot was back in Sweden. I was listening to the Hackensaw Boys' Keep it Simple on the CD player.
My roaming had brought me to Maine, which is kind of a home base for me. Woolwich is the town before the town where my grandmother has a house. The junk stand I wrote about really does exist, or did exist before it got torn down. It's on an ugly part of rural freeway, along a poorer underbelly in a pretty part of the world. New England is a thrifty place, and Mainers are the thriftiest. Even so, I was fascinated that anyone wanted to sell such things. Cracked stuff lay strewn all over the lawn. I parked next to the cockamamie junk stand to wait while my dad was buying wiper fluid.
The poem started on the back of an envelope or loose scrap of paper. Most of my poems do-- I can't seem to stop jotting little bits of stuff down. This jotting was just an act of observing, of cataloging odds and ends, and feeling, I think as I wrote them down, my sense of the objects' wild impracticality, improbable beauty, and balance of apparent valuelessness and seeming value.
I think sometimes we feel a paradox or pleasurable conundrum in a vista or vibration, even if we can't explain how or why we want to use it. I feel an urge to write before I know what I want or what that wanting should mean, and then some details and scraps tumble out of me in so many apparently useless parts. Then somehow, something else-- some gesture to assemble-- becomes the act of making sense of the vibratory desire. I write down the jumble of details, and then perhaps salvage something within them. Anyway, in that first moment, it was just a note about a junkshop I scrawled on the back of an envelope in a broken down car while bluegrass was playing.
A side note: I like that CD, Keep it Simple, and I'd recommend it to anyone. It's a kind of modern reinvented bluegrass from Charlottesville- a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll. It's remade out of a history of a place and time and voice and way of looking. It's an inheritance of sorts, but one that's been re-chosen, grappled with, remade-- one worn or played or carried at a jaunty angle. There's someone in the band who plays the washboard, someone else who plays the spoons. I listened to a song called Ruby Pearl: "she might fuss and she might fight, but it ain't like that all the time...."
RFrostED: Do you have a favorite line or phrase or word in your poem?
TT: I suppose I like the phrase May anyone who likes to mend, come mend. In a time when we think about poetry or aesthetics as embodying rupture or divorce, and in a world where we are conscious of quite a lot of fissures, I am interested also in the way that acts of attention-- especially ones embodied in poetry-- can serve to mend what is essentially broken.
RFrostED: Do you have a line that gave you particular difficulties?
TT:Actually, this poem-- when I finally did get it off the back of an envelope-- came quickly.
But I'd like to say that at the time I wrote it, I was also translating a lot of Latin poetry; and that phrase "May anyone who likes to mend" is a special verb tense that came out of being in close dialog with some classic poems. The gesture of ending a poem with a subjunctive wish came out of being in dialog with old poems. I was reading a lot of Ovid, but it happens all over the place, of course. Ending a poem with a wish (may you live for all time in my song)-- is actually an old and familiar kind of poetic trope. I was able to stitch it in here, making a prayer that a mythical someone-out-there could use all these relics and half broken things.
So the grammar was actually a kind of reuse or borrowing, too.
RFrostED: How long have you been working on poetry?
TT: I've been writing on the backs of envelopes for as long as I can remember, but I began my arts training as a classical singer. I thought I'd go to conservatory. Nevertheless, at a crucial moment, I felt somehow called to be a writer, instead. Perhaps it was a sense that I wanted to make as well as just memorize and perform, and I didn't have much chops as a composer. I had a desire to collect and synthesize as well. And I felt very keenly that I wanted to add my voice to some kind of literary conversation- to be part of a conversation that mattered and matters. There was a feeling of wanting to speak, as well as to sing. So I ended up going to a school where I could focus on that. As a writer, I realized that I don't really like imagining big plots. Small ones, small turns of action or phrase, can be enough.
I felt that if language was a site where the conversation mattered, poetry was the place where language was most dense, and where the conversation about language and using language was richest. Soon enough, I came to lyric poetry- which, I think, fit my sense of music. I had always loved and wanted to be part of poetry but around the age of 19 I became more obsessive and galvanized, and began to feel as if I had to try to live with the art. Some of the poems I've kept come from that part of my life.
RFrostED: To read the poem out loud to an audience, how would you introduce it?
TT;I'd tell them where Woolich Maine was, and that my family has a house near there. I might tell them that I love thrift shops and flea markets. Probably not much else. Though just above I wrote about the bluegrass, so you know I might mention that too. And what the heck? maybe even my broken down car, which got so banged up it had to be donated to the blind.
RFrostED: What poets' work has taught you the most.
TT: Ovid. Elizabeth Bishop. Frost, of course. Dickinson. Whitman. Robert Pinsky. Rosanna Warren. AE Housman. Gary Snyder. Herrick. John Donne. Shakespeare. Paul Muldoon. James Wright. Robert Hass. Chaucer. AR Ammons. Gwendolyn Brooks. Walcott. Thomas Wyatt.
RFrostED: Do you have a favorite Frost poem? If so, what is it?
TT: I'm a Californian who moved east, and so was Frost. He made up that New England vernacular, but he was from Mill Valley, land of redwoods.
So I love this poem by him, geographically speaking. That's a shortcut, because there are so many to love by Frost, and I suppose this is the one I'm thinking of this moment:
The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God's last 'Put out the Light' was spoken.
TT:I was listening to a lot of bluegrass that summer I wrote my poem, driving around in a car I'd bought from a Swedish helicopter pilot and thriller novelist I'd met at a writing residency. I didn't know where my next lilly-pad was. I was between things. My car didn't work too well. The Swedish helicopter pilot was back in Sweden. I was listening to the Hackensaw Boys' Keep it Simple on the CD player.
My roaming had brought me to Maine, which is kind of a home base for me. Woolwich is the town before the town where my grandmother has a house. The junk stand I wrote about really does exist, or did exist before it got torn down. It's on an ugly part of rural freeway, along a poorer underbelly in a pretty part of the world. New England is a thrifty place, and Mainers are the thriftiest. Even so, I was fascinated that anyone wanted to sell such things. Cracked stuff lay strewn all over the lawn. I parked next to the cockamamie junk stand to wait while my dad was buying wiper fluid.
The poem started on the back of an envelope or loose scrap of paper. Most of my poems do-- I can't seem to stop jotting little bits of stuff down. This jotting was just an act of observing, of cataloging odds and ends, and feeling, I think as I wrote them down, my sense of the objects' wild impracticality, improbable beauty, and balance of apparent valuelessness and seeming value.
I think sometimes we feel a paradox or pleasurable conundrum in a vista or vibration, even if we can't explain how or why we want to use it. I feel an urge to write before I know what I want or what that wanting should mean, and then some details and scraps tumble out of me in so many apparently useless parts. Then somehow, something else-- some gesture to assemble-- becomes the act of making sense of the vibratory desire. I write down the jumble of details, and then perhaps salvage something within them. Anyway, in that first moment, it was just a note about a junkshop I scrawled on the back of an envelope in a broken down car while bluegrass was playing.
A side note: I like that CD, Keep it Simple, and I'd recommend it to anyone. It's a kind of modern reinvented bluegrass from Charlottesville- a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll. It's remade out of a history of a place and time and voice and way of looking. It's an inheritance of sorts, but one that's been re-chosen, grappled with, remade-- one worn or played or carried at a jaunty angle. There's someone in the band who plays the washboard, someone else who plays the spoons. I listened to a song called Ruby Pearl: "she might fuss and she might fight, but it ain't like that all the time...."
RFrostED: Do you have a favorite line or phrase or word in your poem?
TT: I suppose I like the phrase May anyone who likes to mend, come mend. In a time when we think about poetry or aesthetics as embodying rupture or divorce, and in a world where we are conscious of quite a lot of fissures, I am interested also in the way that acts of attention-- especially ones embodied in poetry-- can serve to mend what is essentially broken.
RFrostED: Do you have a line that gave you particular difficulties?
TT:Actually, this poem-- when I finally did get it off the back of an envelope-- came quickly.
But I'd like to say that at the time I wrote it, I was also translating a lot of Latin poetry; and that phrase "May anyone who likes to mend" is a special verb tense that came out of being in close dialog with some classic poems. The gesture of ending a poem with a subjunctive wish came out of being in dialog with old poems. I was reading a lot of Ovid, but it happens all over the place, of course. Ending a poem with a wish (may you live for all time in my song)-- is actually an old and familiar kind of poetic trope. I was able to stitch it in here, making a prayer that a mythical someone-out-there could use all these relics and half broken things.
So the grammar was actually a kind of reuse or borrowing, too.
RFrostED: How long have you been working on poetry?
TT: I've been writing on the backs of envelopes for as long as I can remember, but I began my arts training as a classical singer. I thought I'd go to conservatory. Nevertheless, at a crucial moment, I felt somehow called to be a writer, instead. Perhaps it was a sense that I wanted to make as well as just memorize and perform, and I didn't have much chops as a composer. I had a desire to collect and synthesize as well. And I felt very keenly that I wanted to add my voice to some kind of literary conversation- to be part of a conversation that mattered and matters. There was a feeling of wanting to speak, as well as to sing. So I ended up going to a school where I could focus on that. As a writer, I realized that I don't really like imagining big plots. Small ones, small turns of action or phrase, can be enough.
I felt that if language was a site where the conversation mattered, poetry was the place where language was most dense, and where the conversation about language and using language was richest. Soon enough, I came to lyric poetry- which, I think, fit my sense of music. I had always loved and wanted to be part of poetry but around the age of 19 I became more obsessive and galvanized, and began to feel as if I had to try to live with the art. Some of the poems I've kept come from that part of my life.
RFrostED: To read the poem out loud to an audience, how would you introduce it?
TT;I'd tell them where Woolich Maine was, and that my family has a house near there. I might tell them that I love thrift shops and flea markets. Probably not much else. Though just above I wrote about the bluegrass, so you know I might mention that too. And what the heck? maybe even my broken down car, which got so banged up it had to be donated to the blind.
RFrostED: What poets' work has taught you the most.
TT: Ovid. Elizabeth Bishop. Frost, of course. Dickinson. Whitman. Robert Pinsky. Rosanna Warren. AE Housman. Gary Snyder. Herrick. John Donne. Shakespeare. Paul Muldoon. James Wright. Robert Hass. Chaucer. AR Ammons. Gwendolyn Brooks. Walcott. Thomas Wyatt.
RFrostED: Do you have a favorite Frost poem? If so, what is it?
TT: I'm a Californian who moved east, and so was Frost. He made up that New England vernacular, but he was from Mill Valley, land of redwoods.
So I love this poem by him, geographically speaking. That's a shortcut, because there are so many to love by Frost, and I suppose this is the one I'm thinking of this moment:
The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God's last 'Put out the Light' was spoken.
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