Poem for Today

Courtesy of Academy of American Poets:

Bright Star

by John Keats

Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

 

Poem for Today

I like the poetry of Wallace Stevens about as much as any I have read. Especially poetry written in the last century, on into this one. I had never encountered the poem below until yesterday, discussed on Mary Karr’s Facebook page (yes, there is literature on FB.) I have enjoyed Ms. Karr’s poetry and memoirs, the latest of which is Lit, the third installment of memoirs of her childhood, adolescence and adulthood (so far.)  Wonderful writing.

Anyway, after posting a video discussion of this poem of Steven’s, Karr commented on critics who narrowly interpret poems according to their school of criticism; “…they pimp out the most obscure poems, so they’re required to stand between a good poem and the average reader.”

Yes, oh yes, and yes again, Ms. Karr.

I have spent years reading, for example, “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” which moves me each time, but still I find in that poem puzzles and mysteries defying definitive explanation. Poems that can do that will never die for me. I can see that the poem below will follow the same course.

Thanks to Ms. Karr for the heads up on the Rabbit King of the Ghosts.

- From Poetry Magazine

A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts

by Wallace Stevens

The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur—

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten in the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

Wallace Stevens, “A Rabbit as the King of Ghosts” from Collected Poems.
Copyright 1923, 1951, 1954 by Wallace Stevens.

Poem for Today

I like the sound of this poem and the feeling of disorientation of the woman named Thucydides, although what connection the poem has with the historian of the Peloponnesian Wars I cannot imagine.

A Woman Named Thucydides
by Sherod Santos

Having slept in a turnout in the backseat
of her car, she awoke before dawn, shivering,
hungover, unsure of where she was.
To her surprise, the sodium lights on the billboard
she had parked beside were no longer on.
Wind gusts, the smell of rain, the raw, unbroken
landscape like a field of ice. If this had been a movie,
someone would’ve been sitting up front,
someone who held her fate in his hands.
Though she couldn’t see them, she could hear
birds passing overhead. Why do they even bother
to cross so vast and empty a space?
At the moment, none of the usual explanations
made sense. Her head ached, her feet were cold,
she couldn’t find the words. And the man up front,
what did he think? What would he do?
Must something still happen before the end?

From The Intricated Soul: New and Selected Poems by Sherod Santos.
Copyright © 2010 by Sherod Santos.

Poem for Today

Ruth Bavetta is a visual artist and poet who lives in California. I have known her for fifteen years or so, primarily through an online group of readers and writers known as “Constant Reader,” which began on the old Prodigy service and now is on a hosting site known as Goodreads, which hosts a variety of reading groups, “Constant Reader” being one of them. I found the poem below on an online journal titled Zone, linked below the poem. Ruth has also published several chapbooks and appeared in anthologies such as Twelve Los Angeles Poets.

This poem celebrates memory, which random sights and experiences can ignite into associative flights both nostalgic, and suggestive of memories still to create.

Imagine

- Ruth Bavetta

walking up forty-two stairs,
the smell of a rubber ball, your arm
brushing against a stucco wall,
the prick of a pin in the tip
of your right index finger.

There was a clock you once knew,
draw its tick inside your body.
There was a bicycle on a dirt road
the summer you fell in love,
balance on its handlebars.

Enter a room you have forgotten.
Walk through midnight
carrying a make-believe lantern.
Stretch out your hand,
touch the horizon.

From Zone:International Journal of Poems and Prose

Poem for Today

Anecdote of the Jar
Wallace Stevens

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

From Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

Word of the Day

… courtesy of Merriam Webster, with slight modifications by me:

The Word of the Day for May 02, 2010 is:
artifice • \AHR-tuh-fus\ • noun

1 *a : clever or artful skill : ingenuity
b : an ingenious device or expedient

2 a : an artful stratagem : trick
b : false or insincere behavior

Felix’s Example Sentence:

Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
from “Sailing to Byzantium” by W.B. Yeats

Did you know?

Do great actors display artifice or art? Sometimes a bit of both. “Artifice” stresses creative skill or intelligence, but also implies a sense of falseness and trickery. “Art” generally rises above such falseness, suggesting instead an unanalyzable creative force. Actors may rely on some of each, but the personae they display in their roles are usually artificial creations. Therein lies a lexical connection between “art” and “artifice.” “Artifice” derives from “artificium,” Latin for “artifice” (that root also gave English “artificial”). “Artificium” in turn developed from “ars,” the Latin root underlying the word “art” (and related terms such as “artist” and “artisan”).

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

Poem for the Day

Anecdote of the Jar
by Wallace Stevens

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

From Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens.
Copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens.

Christmas Eve

We went to the late afternoon service at St. Paul’s in Chattanooga today, the “family” service where children were welcome, adult and children’s choirs made music and the church was festively decked about with poinsettas and floral arrangements.  The hymns were Christmas carols, familiar and easy to sing. We enjoyed the service.

Thinking about the ornate and splendid spectacle, meant to celebrate a birth in a stable, the incongruity was inescapable. I kept thinking about a poem by an agnostic, full of yearning to believe and framed in images of the stable in Bethlehem. So here it is:

The Oxen
Thomas Hardy

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come; see the oxen kneel

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

Sometimes “hoping it might be so” fits, even when belief is usually your mode.

Word of the Day

… courtesy of Merriam Webster, with slight modifications by me:

The Word of the Day for October 22, 2009 is:
rugose • \ROO-gohss\ • adjective

*1 : full of wrinkles

2 : having the veinlets sunken and the spaces between elevated

Felix’s Example Sentence:

Photographs of W.H. Auden late in life show an exuberantly rugose face, each gully scored no doubt by forces of poetic inspiration – or perhaps many too many pints.

Did you know?

“Rugose” was borrowed into English in the late 17th century from the Latin adjective “rugosus” (“wrinkled”), which itself derives from “ruga” (“wrinkle”). One descendant of “ruga” that you’ll probably recognize is “corrugate,” which initially meant “to form or shape into wrinkles or folds.” Another, which might be more familiar to scientists, is “rugulose,” meaning “finely wrinkled.” In addition, there is the noun “rugosity,” which can refer to either the quality or state of being full of wrinkles or an individual wrinkled place.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

So Evenings Die

The body dies; the body’s beauty lives,
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of Winter, done repenting.
So maidens die, to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden’s choral.

Poetry makes puzzles out of words,  puzzles I have spent many happy hours trying to unravel, sometimes to my satisfaction, many times not, but the process, always pleasure, absorbs interest and makes distractions distant. The above six lines are from a poem by Wallace Stevens titled “Peter Quince at the Clavier“. I have been reading this poem at irregular intervals over thirty years. It still delights me, and confuses in fitful measures. The words flow like the wind, like the scarves of Susanna, the young woman bathing in the evening in a garden pool. Susanna’s story is in the apocryphal books of the Bible, attached to the Book of Daniel. A rousing story in itself, in Williams’s hands it acquires a sensuous music always rewarding to me.