two villanelles for national Poetry Month

When I was a librarian, I was the one who made certain that the library's poetry section was kept modestly current, and that the collection included enough of the classics to ... well, to keep it from being embarrassing. Did the books circulate a lot? No. Did I care? Not really. 


How many times, after all, have I sat in a library or bookstore and its poetry there, but have not brought it home? Sometimes, you need a dip, not a full immersion. 


Were I still a librarian, I would purchase this book for the library. 

What is a villanelle? Poets.org gives this daunting definition:
The highly structured villanelle is a nineteen-line poem with two repeating rhymes and two refrains. The form is made up of five tercets followed by a quatrain. The first and third lines of the opening tercet are repeated alternately in the last lines of the succeeding stanzas; then in the final stanza, the refrain serves as the poem's two concluding lines. Using capitals for the refrains and lowercase letters for the rhymes, the form could be expressed as: A1 b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 A2.


Yikes. 


But... allow me to share two examples and point you to a third. I assure you: you all have read villanelles without knowing it; their repetitive, almost soothing structure can ease the most stark and necessary conclusion. "Do not go gentle into that good night," says Dylan Thomas, in a villanelle studied by every school child -  "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." 


And now, the poems. 


From Elizabeth Bishop, One Art.

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. --Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

And, from Theodore Roethke, The Waking.


I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

• Read "Spread it like a roll of nickels" for more information, and a wonderful discussion with one of the editors (and a contributor).

Song of Two Worlds - Alan Lightman

Welcome, visitors! Today's offering on the National Poetry Month blog tour, hosted by Serena of Savvy Verse and Wit, is a review of a new book of poetry, Song of Two Worlds by Alan Lightman.

Lightman, a novelist, scientist, and poet, has used all of his creative skills and insights to tell the story of a poet who has begun to awaken from a long, dark night of the soul, the aftermath (perhaps) of a personal disaster that slammed him into a senseless stupor. When the story begins and he awakens, he is hungry for food, light, sensation, and proof that he is not still dreaming.

I dreamed of my uncle Zafir/weighing the sand on the beach.

He rises and picks up his dry pen.

Awake- What are these quick shots of warmth, Fractals of forests That wind through my limbs? . . .
Now I grow large, now I grow small, as the waves of sensation break over my shore.

The reader learns that the poet is living with one companion, old Abbas, in a deserted home on the poet's ancestral lands in Islamic north Africa. His musings are interrupted by the earthy Abbas, who eats, belches, prays, and says "your mind is as tight as a sheep's ass." True, that : the old man knows how much control the poet will have to relinquish to face the trauma that shut him down.

The poet's thoughts meander as he tries to understand how his world, presumably unchanged and in control before - before what? - has broken down.

He embarks on an inner pilgrimage, guided by figures who broke through the ignorance of their times by testing the physical world. (Newton: You kept a notebook of questions, / The dip of your quill in an ink of oak galls. )

He reflects on the times when he disappeared into his own studies without sleep, without food, / In a feast of ideas, books, conversation... Singing my verses, the test tubes and flames... intent on being chemist or poet.

As he muses, other thoughts begin to float by as galaxies of ghost ships / adrift on an infinite sea, changing the medium of his immersion from poetry and theory to memories of people he once knew.

He thinks of his dead mother, who sang, smelled of jasmine, and forgave money I squandered, / my fidgeting poetry ... Wedding a foreigner, / Children she never knew.

I am the sea that rolls over you, she sings. I am the green and your comfort, Say yes, then say yes, then say yes.

The muse of mutable life, Darwin, inspires another step, another stroke through the newly-loving sea. You grasped the role of survival and change .. you showed that / order can grow from disorder, / and purpose from aimlessness.

Even Einstein appears and fastens the poet on the truth of flow and change. Were you stunned / when you found that the hardness of time / was illusion? ... What is the nature of movement? / I'm answered: you return to the center.

The reader is given the facts piecemeal, almost grudgingly, until his prayers (let my psyche be thy temple) are unanswered. This is not a world of action reaction / But each action questioned forever / where lust defeats virtue. Married to a French woman with turquoise eyes, he once had two children, once had uprooted himself to live in her world, and then had abandoned his family and her world to return to his own, alone.

Would his marriage have survived had he stayed? Much as he believes that he had been too much the alien, the outsider, he is forced to release the illusory narrative that had shielded him from his transgression until it no longer could hold.

Can I give up myself
To this desert of night?
Witness again what I've done
And not done?

Does he have a choice? No. He has to give it up.

Always the need to wear strangling shoes, Wedged in a house without gardens, Cold river, my blessed two children and wife/ Could it have been?
The land that despised me...
Longing for orange groves and sand,
For the primorse and aloe, for saffron tajine...
Then my escape, flagrant abandonment.
Shame. It's all here, I can certify.

When Abbas dies, the poet truly is lone, completely alone, with nothing left to him but a wasteland of questions, and the oud player's wife, returned, calling for her husband in the empty night.

Whom can I love who will not pass for nothing, When all pass to nothing, along with this song?

The poet knows his fate.


As I read this poem, I copied pages of Lightman's phrases into my notebook. (This probably is obvious, from the number of them that I used in this review! See below - ) The narrator enacts, as we do, patterns as ancient as the stars, counterpoints between cold space and warm flesh.

Read this book for its story, its questions, the exhilarating parallels between the vast and the minute, or the glory of Lightman's language. But do read it.

Be sure to follow the blog tour. Next up: Monniblog will highlight British Columbia, Canada poets and poetry, and Ernie Wormwood will talk about driving Lucille Clifton, who did not drive.




Here is a sampling of the phrases I copied --





-- journey of questions, I paddle my oar in the stars --
iambic geometer
-- plays like the moan of a sad jazzing horn
-- this thimble the earth --
folded gray clog of a brain --
I pour tea in the dry drum of a mouth

as we leave National Poetry Month - a poem, and a treat

Let's end National Poetry Month with beauty from Shakespeare.

Fear no more the heat o` the sun,
Nor the furious winter`s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta`en thy wages.
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Fear no more the frown o` the great;
Thou art past the tyrants stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as theoak.
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.

Fear no more the lightning flash,
Nor th` all-dreaded thunder stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finished joy and moan.
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.

No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renowned be thy grave!

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)

One final treat: Loreena McKennitt 's lovely, lovely version. She, too, leaves the final word to Shakespeare. Enjoy.

Elizabeth Bishop - One Art

Elizabeth Bishop's poetry was not in the curriculum when I was taking my undergraduate degree. Except for her friendship with Robert Lowell, I remained ignorant of her until I read Breathless, by Louise DeSalvo, a memoir of her own struggles with asthma, and an examination of how asthma affected herself and several literary figures.

I was fascinated, in a purely selfish way, since I am asthmatic, and I know how enervating the disease can be. What I had not thought about, until I read DeSalvo's book, was how the disease can affect the rhythms of one's creativity and art. If writing is like breathing, an asthmatic's phrases may be as acute and self-absorbed as one's precarious breath.

One of the ways DeSalvo began to cope with her extreme sensitivity to her asthma triggers was to rethink the pleasures she was forced to curtail. Eating in a restaurant, for example, became difficult when she never knew when someone's perfume, or a whiff of smoke would cause a fit of coughing and breathlessness. She and her husband learned to cook wonderful meals at home - creamy risottos, for example - and to enjoy the small actions of preparing a meal: chopping, rinsing, seasoning. She learned to focus on details that can enabled joy, and strengthened the close observation of her life -- and the subjects of her writing, her art.

So, too with Elizabeth Bishop, whose writing now enables my own joy, and my own sense of proportion.

One Art
Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied.  It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master.
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Peter Quince at the Clavier - Wallace Stevens

Beverly at PoMo Golightly asks about a favorite poem. Here's one of mine.

Peter Quince at the Clavier - by Wallace Stevens.

I

Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the self-same sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.
Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,

Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna;

Of a green evening, clear and warm,
She bathed in her still garden, while
The red-eyed elders, watching, felt

The basses of their beings throb
In witching chords, and their thin blood
Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.

II

In the green water, clear and warm,
Susanna lay.
She searched
The touch of springs,
And found
Concealed imaginings.
She sighed,
For so much melody.

Upon the bank, she stood
In the cool
Of spent emotions.
She felt, among the leaves,
The dew
Of old devotions.

She walked upon the grass,
Still quavering.
The winds were like her maids,
On timid feet,
Fetching her woven scarves,
Yet wavering.

A breath upon her hand
Muted the night.
She turned --
A cymbal crashed,
Amid roaring horns.

III

Soon, with a noise like tambourines,
Came her attendant Byzantines.

They wondered why Susanna cried
Against the elders by her side;

And as they whispered, the refrain
Was like a willow swept by rain.

Anon, their lamps' uplifted flame
Revealed Susanna and her shame.

And then, the simpering Byzantines
Fled, with a noise like tambourines.

IV

Beauty is momentary in the mind --
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.

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.

Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death's ironic scraping.
Now, in its immortality, it plays
On the clear viol of her memory,
And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

National Poetry Month - sweet and cold

This is just to say
by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Found Poetry

From poets.org

• Found poems take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems.

Mornings Like This, by Annie Dillard, introduced me to found poetry. (And who better to learn from?) Here's one of hers:

Mayakovsky In New York: A Found Poem by Annie Dillard

New York: You take a train that rips through versts.
It feels as if the trains were running over your ears.

For many hours the train flies along the banks
of the Hudson about two feet from the water. At the stops,
passengers run out, buy up bunches of celery,
and run back in, chewing the stalks as they go.

Bridges leap over the train with increasing frequency.

At each stop an additional story grows
onto the roofs. Finally houses with squares
and dots of windows rise up. No matter how far
you throw back your head, there are no tops.

Time and again, the telegraph poles are made
of wood. Maybe it only seems that way.

In the narrow canyons between the buildings, a sort
of adventurer-wind howls and runs away
along the versts of the ten avenues. Below
flows a solid human mass. Only their yellow
waterproof slickers hiss like samovars and blaze.
The construction rises and with it the crane, as if
the building were being lifted up off the ground
by its pigtail. It is hard to take it seriously.

The buildings are glowing with electricity; their evenly
cut-out windows are like a stencil. Under awnings
the papers lie in heaps, delivered by trucks.
It is impossible to tear oneself away from this spectacle.

At midnight those leaving the theaters drink a last soda.
Puddles of rain stand cooling. Poor people scavenge
bones. In all directions is a labyrinth of trains
suffocated by vaults. There is no hope, your eyes
are not accustomed to seeing such things.

They are starting to evolve an American gait out
of the cautious steps of the Indians on the paths of empty
Manhattan. Maybe it only seems that way.

If you click over to Amazon, "look inside" will let you read two more.

Wednesday with words

For the first day of National Poetry Month, I offer a poem by one of my favorite poets, Jane Hirshfield. This poem is from her collection Given Sugar, Given Salt.




This was once a love poem

-- by Jane Hirshfield

This was once a love poem,
before its haunches thickened, its breath grew short,
before it found itself sitting,
perplexed and a little embarrassed,
on the fender of a parked car,
while many people passed by without turning their heads.

It remembers itself dressing as if for a great engagement.
It remembers choosing these shoes,
this scarf or tie.

Once, it drank beer for breakfast,
drifted its feet
in a river side by side with the feet of another.

Once it pretended shyness, then grew truly shy,
dropping its head so the hair would fall forward,
so the eyes would not be seen.

IT spoke with passion of history, of art.
It was lovely then, this poem.
Under its chin, no fold of skin softened.
Behind the knees, no pad of yellow fat.
What it knew in the morning it still believed at nightfall.
An unconjured confidence lifted its eyebrows, its cheeks.

The longing has not diminished.
Still it understands. It is time to consider a cat,
the cultivation of African violets or flowering cactus.

Yes, it decides:
Many miniature cacti, in blue and red painted pots.
When it finds itself disquieted
by the pure and unfamiliar silence of its new life,
it will touch them—one, then another—
with a single finger outstretched like a tiny flame.