November Poetry: Kay Ryan

So I was sitting here trying to decide what to post & I thought I'd post a poem. Then I came up with a very clever idea: I'll do a different poet each month and share their poems and information about them! Clever isn't it? Ok, maybe I need to get out more. Anyway I decided November would be Kay Ryan.

Kay Ryan is a California poet, born in San Jose and currently living in Marin County. In 2008 she became the 16th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress and held the post until May of this year. I like her poetry a lot. It's funny, serious and witty. She packs a lot into mostly short poems. They are easy to remember but often require multiple reading to get the point. This is one of my favorites. Mellifera (the most beautiful cat in the world) was sitting on my lap so I read it to her. I'm sorry to say she was unimpressed although it mentions cats.

A Cat/A Future

A cat can draw
the blinds
behind her eyes
whenever she
decides. Nothing
alters in the stare
itself but she's
not there. Likewise
a future can occlude:
still sitting there,
doing nothing rude.

A Poem for Friday

It's October already! I thought I'd start the month with a poem by one of my favorite poets, Louise Gluck.

Odysseus’ Decision

The great man turns his back on the island.
Now he will not die in paradise
nor hear again
the lutes of paradise among the olive trees,
by the clear pools under the cypresses. Time

begins now, in which he hears again
that pulse which is the narrative
sea, at dawn when its pull is strongest.
What has brought us here
will lead us away; our ship
sways in the tinted harbor water.

Now the spell is ended.
Give him back his life,
sea that can only move forward.

Louise Gluck

A Poem for Today

The Seven Of Pentacles

Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

Marge Piercy

Poems, poems, poems

This is the first poem by Ellen Bass that I've read and I really liked it. Check her web site to read a couple more if you'd like. They are very good.

Gate C22

At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he'd just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she'd been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching--
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses. We couldn't look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after--if she beat you or left you or
you're lonely now--you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that woman's middle-aged body,
her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.

Another poem

Don't forget April is National Poetry Month. Read a poem. Read two poems. You can start here. Today's poem is by Tony Hoagland. I particularly like these lines: you’ll hit someone with a Ph.D./in sensitivity.

When I was working in Berkeley a number of years ago, I used Merry Christmas in something I wrote for employee distribution. My boss said to me, "This is Berkeley darling, we say Happy Holidays." Indeed.


Here In Berkeley

the jogger with the Rastafarian sweats
runs past the mechanic reading Marx on lunch break
with a sprout sandwich for a bookmark
as the sunlight through a bottle of Perrier
wobbles little rainbows on his knee.

On the corner, someone wearing I Ching earrings
is talking about personal space,
how she just can’t take it anymore,
the way that Marcia’s codependency
defeats her own empowerment.
“The whole seminar is out of whack,” she says,
slapping a bouquet of daisies on her knee.

Close your eyes,
swing a baguette horizontally,
you’ll hit someone with a Ph.D.
in sensitivity,
someone who,
if not a therapist himself,
will offer you the number of his therapist,

which—it may take you years
to figure out—is a hostile act on his part
designed to send you on a wild-goose chase
through the orchard of your childhood
to fetch the tarnished apple of your mother’s love.

And if you don’t like it,
there might be something
wrong with you. You might be so
reincarnationally headed
in the wrong direction,
that you can’t hear the music hovering
above this zone of crystal vendors
and karmic mountaineers.

Now the traffic lights harmonically converge:
the traffic flows
past the bakeries and bookstores,
past the cappuccino depot and the acupuncture center.

No matter how you feel, you have to act
like you are very popular with yourself;
very relaxed and purposeful,
very unconfused
and not
like you are walking through the sunshine
singing
in chains.

Wordle from Emily Dickinson Poem

Inaugural Poet

President-elect Obama has chosen the poet Elizabeth Alexander to compose a poem to be read at his inauguration. Obama is only the third president to have done this. (The other two were Clinton & Kennedy.) Alexander is the author of four books of poetry and a professor of African-American studies at Yale. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2005 for her book, American Sublime. Here is one of her poems:

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”)
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

Poetry

As you'll have noted in the side-bar, April is National Poetry Month. I thought I'd share a poem with you and then, this is how it works folks, you'll all share a poem! Not in a comment, please do a separate post and indicate who you are. Thank you!!!

This has been one of my favorite poems for years & is still one that I remember. Quite a feat actually - I used to memorize poems but I'm getting old & senile and have forgotten quite a lot that I used to know. This is short though & easily remembered.

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Robert Frost

Robin