april is: a poem a day for national poetry month

April 30, 2009: from The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot

from The Waste Land
T.S. Eliot

I. The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruellest month, breeding 
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing 
Memory and desire, stirring 
Dull roots with spring rain. 
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding 
A little life with dried tubers. 
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee 
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, 
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. 
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. 
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s, 
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, 
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. 
In the mountains, there you feel free. 
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. 

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow 
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only 
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, 
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, 
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only 
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock), 
And I will show you something different from either 
Your shadow at morning striding behind you 
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; 
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu.
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?

‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’ 
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, 
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not 
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither 
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence. 
Od’ und leer das Meer.


[The online annotated The Waste Land.

The full text of The Waste Land.

At last, I can’t resist posting an excerpt from my one and only love, and the origin of this mailing list’s name, The Waste Land.  This is the beginning of the first of five parts of the poem, and right away you get so much of what it’s known for: a welter of different voices and languages and allusions: an aristocratic woman remembering her childhood, lines from Tristan and Isolde about longing, and water and death and life all tangled together, which comes up over and over and over again.

If you’d like to try to take this apart, this online annotated text is great for explaining and cross-referencing things.  Or you can just appreciate it as it is, the sound and flow of it, Eliot being awesome.  It’s a fantastic poem to read lots of times: new patterns and connections keep appearing.

And today is the last day of National Poetry Month! Thanks so much for sticking around, and I hope you’ll still be here next year.  In the meantime, if you’d like to keep poetry-ing, I recommend checking out The Poetry Foundation’s website or NPR’s Writer’s Almanac, both of which do daily poems.

And of course the whole April Is archive is online here!

xo,
Martha]

A year ago today: from Five-Finger Exercises, T.S. Eliot
Two years ago: Journey of the Magi, T.S. Eliot
Two years ago: Preludes, T.S. Eliot
Three years ago: A Song for Simeon, T.S. Eliot

April 29, 2009: There Are Many Theories About What Happened, John Gallagher

There Are Many Theories About What Happened
John Gallagher

The bright yellow newspaper stand is selling papers 
where the president is waving. It’s April. 

We stood a little off to one side. “We’re
watching the president for a hundred days” we said. 

The president on a plane. The president 
playing basketball. 

“Was there enough about the drapes? The puppy?” 
we asked all winter. 

“At different times of the day, 
the president appears older or more luminous,” 
we said. However old we got. However old 
we started. 

It’s day 87, and our trees are looking like real trees 
in bright green, almost yellow, 
so that the still town looks like a real town. 

Maybe the body really is you. Maybe a picture 
is a fact. 

And our river is looking like a real river, with a dock, 
and a boy and his father fishing. 

There’s a picture of the president with a dog. 

We want so many things. 

[This is from the Poems for the First 100 Days project, which let a hundred poets respond to the first hundred days of the Obama presidency: one per day through today, the hundredth.  It’s an interesting snapshot of very different styles and levels of politicization, and really contemporary events.  Some of my favorites:

Praise for The Inaugural Poet, January, 2009, Cornelius Eady (which I like more than Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural day poem itself); In Oxford Mississippi, Anne Fisher-Worth; Welcome to Hard Times, Ian Harris; The First Easter, 2009, cin salach; and Dear Steve, Craig Arnold.]

A year ago today: bon bon il est un pays, Samuel Beckett
Two years ago:  Root root root for the home team, Bob Hicok
Three years ago: Fever 103°, Sylvia Plath
Four years ago: King Lear Considers What He’s Wrought, Melissa Kirsch

April 28, 2009: from Tag, Anne Carson

from Tag
Anne Carson

THIS

Insatiable April, trees in place,
in their scraped-out place,
their standing,
Standing way.
Their red branch areas,
green shoot areas (shock),
river, that one.
I surprised a goose and she hissed.
I walk and walk with cold hands.
Back at the house it is filled with longing,
nothing to carry longing away.
I look back over my life.
I try to find analogies.
There are none.
I have longed for people before, I have loved people before.
Not like this.
It was not this.

Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.

[Full poem.]

A year ago today: The Leaving, Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Two years ago: Theories of Time and Space, Natasha Trethewey
Three years ago: Dream Song 145, John Berryman
Four years ago: Having It Out With Melancholy, Jane Kenyon

April 27, 2009: To This May, W.S. Merwin

To This May
W.S. Merwin
They know so much more now about
the heart we are told but the world
still seems to come one at a time
one day one year one season and here
it is spring once more with its birds
nesting in the holes in the walls
its morning finding the first time
its light pretending not to move
always beginning as it goes 


[My favorite Merwin poem is still A Birthday, but everything he writes is wonderful. How had I overlooked him for so long?]

A year ago today: Father, Ted Kooser
Two years ago: from Little Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight, Galway Kinnell
Three years ago: Crusoe in England, Elizabeth Bishop
Fouryears ago: Dream Song 1, John Berryman

April 26, 2009: In Me as the Swans, Leslie Williams

In Me as the Swans
Leslie Williams

Not embittered
even while freezing
to the ice of their own lakes.
The night I was leaving for Madrid
into the noisy party a dazzling
friend-of-a-friend walked in: I want so much
(as a couple of kids on the dance floor want)
to slow the tempo, hold there longer,
to feel that seedly longing
to be pressed into the soil,
or that little lift the mothers get
when stocking larders, even now,
vestige of the primitive urge
to be provided for and to provide.

         I went alone to see that balcony
in Verona, after the Roman dramas and luxuries
above the Spanish Steps, when an elegant
footman brought a pack of Reds on a silver
tray and all but smoked them for you;
after your towels had warmed in London’s best
hotel, whose name I can’t remember and am kind of glad,
glad now for the rest of empty August and
the convent hostel’s eleven o’clock curfew,
glad now when I go to the distinguished dinners
that I have stood alone
wondering at illuminated books,
looking at Woolf’s spectacles under glass
or standing under Bourgeois’s giant spider
at the Tate—at times the best kept universe
was my own, no interceding docents
or guided tours, but a riverine serendipitous
wandering—waif, naïf.

                  I liked the light enormously so why
did I obey the bell that called me in?

[I really like this as a paean to aloneness — traveling alone, being single — and that last couplet is such a wonderfully subtleway to express how life shifts.  Plus the title is from a Plato quote which gives the whole thing interesting new dimensions.

This was published in the March issue of Poetry, which is an excellent way to get awesome poems in your face year-round.]

A year ago today: Gnosticism V, Anne Carson
Two years ago: American Names, Stephen Vincent Benet
Three years ago: since feeling is first, e.e. cummings
Four years ago: The Second Coming, W.B. Yeats

April 25, 2009: We become new, Marge Piercy

We become new
Marge Piercy

How it feels to be touching
you: an Io moth, orange
and yellow as pollen,
wings through the night
miles to mate,
could crumble in the hand.

Yet our meaning together
is hardy as an onion
and layered.
Goes into the blood like garlic.
Sour as rose hips.
Gritty as whole grain.

Fragrant as thyme honey.
When I am turning slowly
in the woven hammocks of our talk,
when I am chocolate melting into you,
I taste everything new
in your mouth.

You are not my old friend.
How did I used to sit
and look at you? Now
though I seem to be standing still
I am flying flying flying
in the trees of your eyes.


A year ago today: The Only Animal, Franz Wright
Two years ago: Dream Song 385, John Berryman
Three years ago: The Quiet World, Jeffrey McDaniel
Four years ago: Man and Wife, Robert Lowell

April 24, 2009: Goodnight, Li-Young Lee

Goodnight
Li-Young Lee

You’ve stopped whispering
and are asleep.  I go on listening

to apples drop in the grass
beyond the window.  Earlier we tried to guess

each fall’s moment, but neither kept up
that little game of hope

or fear for long.  Now your weight
against me is like … I was about to say

like no other, unmistakably
human, my son’s.  But, truth is, you’re simply

heft.  Burden like, say, grain,
your body brings my body pain,

your shoulders, knees, elbows, hands,
lumpy like sacked fruit, and

whatever concord is
actual between us is

not easily meant,
but is so only by our diligence.

I recall a far
season of flowers

when, for love, I crept to the edge of a roof to reach
a petal-decked branch.

It snapped, I
dropped, screaming down sky

and flowering.  My father yelled
my name, ran out to find me sprawled,

dazed, gripping his crushed gift, thrust
at him in my bloody fist.

He plunges below us now, as we
fall soundless toward him, our bodies

crowded on your narrow bed,
my arm and leg gone numb, your torso wedged

between the wall and me.
You sleep uncomfortably,

though comforted by my
presence, for which you cry

some nights, and which you, such nights, endure.
Where did you, so young, learn

such sacrifice?  Now
I no longer hear the apples fall.  But how

they go!  Incessantly, though
with no noise, no

blunt announcements of their gravity.
See!

There is no bottom to the night, no end
to our descent.

We suffer each other to have each other a while.

A year ago today: Bearhug, Michael Ondaatje
Two years ago: Meditation at Lagunitas, Robert Hass
Three years ago: Autumn, Rainer Maria Rilke
Four years ago: On Turning Ten, Billy Collins

April 23, 2009: A Step Away From Them, Frank O'Hara

A Step Away From Them
Frank O’Hara
It’s my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust.

On
to Times Square, where the sign
blows smoke over my head, and higher
the waterfall pours lightly. A
Negro stands in a doorway with a
toothpick, languorously agitating
A blonde chorus girl clicks: he
smiles and rubs his chin. Everything
suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of
a Thursday.

Neon in daylight is a
great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would
write, as are light bulbs in daylight.
I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET’S
CORNER. Giulietta Maina, wife of
Federico Fellini, é bell’ attrice.
And chocolate malted. A lady in
foxes on such a day puts her poodle
in a cab.

There are several Puerto
Ricans on the avenue today, which
makes it beautiful and warm. First
Bunny died, then John Latouche,
then Jackson Pollock. But is the
earth as full of life was full, of them?
And one has eaten and one walks,
past the magazines with nudes
and the posters for BULLFIGHT and
the Manhattan Storage Warehouse,
which they’ll soon tear down. I
used to think they had the Armory
Show there.

A glass of papaya juice
and back to work. My heart is in my
pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.


[I love the cacophanous jumble of this kind of O’Hara poem: how the specifics of time and place and pop culture make it feel so immediate, and the sense of movement, things appearing as O’Hara walks, kind of like Leopold Bloom walking through Dublin in Ulysses. It just feels so alive. More talk about this poem here.

Read Frank, live better: Animals, Steps, Gamin, For Grace, After A Party]

A year ago today: Entry, Lisa Sewell
Two years ago: Meanwhile, Richard Siken
Three years ago: Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, Amiri Baraka
Four years ago: Holy Sonnet XIV, John Donne

April 22, 2009: Alone, Jack Gilbert

Alone
Jack Gilbert

I never thought Michiko would come back
after she died. But if she did, I knew
it would be as a lady in a long white dress.
It is strange that she has returned
as somebody’s dalmatian. I meet
the man walking her on a leash
almost every week. He says good morning
and I stoop down to calm her. He said
once that she was never like that with
other people. Sometimes she is tethered
on the lawn when I go by. If nobody
is around, I sit on the grass. When she
finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap
and we watch each other’s eyes as I whisper
in her soft ears. She cares nothing about
the mystery. She likes it best when
I touch her head and tell her small
things about my days and our friends.
That makes her happy the way it always did.


[The Dance Most of All, Jack Gilbert’s latest — and probably last — book came out earlier this month. Like all his writing, it’s spare and intense, thick with memory.]

A year ago today: From Blossoms, Li-Young Lee
Two years ago: For Grace, After A Party, Frank O’Hara
Three years ago: Wild Geese, Mary Oliver
Four years ago: A Brief for the Defense, Jack Gilbert

April 21, 2009: A Primer, Bob Hicok

A Primer
Bob Hicok

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”
can sincerely use the word “sincere.”
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we’re not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.
It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother,
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn’t ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. “What did we do?”
is the state motto. There’s a day in May
when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.

[Bob Hicok is not only fantastically good, he’s particularly great for recessionary times; the fact that he worked for years in the Michigan auto industry, in the kind of jobs most modern poets never get near, gives his poems a sense of groundedness and awareness of class issues that can be hard to find.  See Calling him back from layoff.  
Some more of his work: Switching to deer time, An old story, Root root root for the home team, Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem.  I highly recommend his latest book, This Clumsy Living.]

A year ago today: Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry, Howard Nemerov
Two years ago: Open Letter to the Muse, Kristy Bowen
Three years ago: A Sad Child, Margaret Atwood
Four years ago: The Crunch, Charles Bukowski