Poem of the Week, by Andrew Marvell

Posted on by alisonmcghee

This past week, while working on a new novel, the line “Had we but world enough and time” kept appearing in my head, like subtitles across the bottom of a movie in another language. Because I wasn’t 1) an English major and b) am a dunce (take your choice; #1 is true but #2 is probably more true), I had to look up the line. Then I sat here reading and re-reading the beautiful poem from which it comes. Familiar lines like “But at my back I always hear/Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near,” are now weaving themselves throughout the new novel. Thank you, Mr. lived-and-died-so-long-ago Marvell.

To His Coy Mistress
– Andrew Marvell

Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust;
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

For more information on Andrew Marvell, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Jim Daniels

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Sometimes, in the kitchen putting together dinner for a bunch of people, it feels like a carefully choreographed dance – stir this time that preheat the oven lay out the ingredients bring this to room temperature put that in the freezer move this pot to the back burner remember the left front doesn’t work scrub the table get out the plates. On and on. You’re moving within a three-foot radius and every movement is tight and controlled. We are all, every one of us, so good at so many things, and we do those things over and over and over. Why are there not more poems by plumbers and welders and daycaregivers and quilters and tree trimmers? So much applause goes to the public and famous and not the short-order cook, when I know that what I’ll remember, and love, and miss when the time comes, is this: the beautiful ordinariness of days.

Short-order Cook
– Jim Daniels

An average joe comes in
and orders thirty cheeseburgers and thirty fries.

I wait for him to pay before I start cooking.
He pays.
He ain’t no average joe.

The grill is just big enough for ten rows of three.
I slap the burgers down
throw two buckets of fries in the deep frier
and they pop pop spit spit…
psss…
The counter girls laugh.
I concentrate.
It is the crucial point-
They are ready for the cheese:
my fingers shake as I tear off slices
toss them on the burgers/fries done/dump/
refill buckets/burgers ready/flip into buns/
beat that melting cheese/wrap burgers in plastic/
into paper bags/fries done/dump/fill thirty bags/
bring them to the counter/wipe sweat on sleeve
and smile at the counter girls.
I puff my chest out and bellow:
“Thirty cheeseburgers, thirty fries!”
They look at me funny.
I grab a handful of ice, toss it in my mouth
do a little dance and walk back to the grill.
Pressure, responsibility, success,
thirty cheeseburgers, thirty fries.

—
For more information on Jim Daniels, please click here: here.

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Poem of the Week, by Tom Sleigh

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This past week I was at a lake with parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts and children, the grownups piloting boats around for hours on end so the kids could fish or waterski or tube behind it. Endless making of lunches, endless baiting of hooks. Endless how to wakeboard, how to waterski, how to play poker. Endless patience. Thirty years from now, these same future grownups will be hauling a new batch of kids around behind a different boat. I thought about the adults in my own childhood who taught me how to cook, how to sew, how to stack wood, how to tell a story, how to grow a garden. One day your father’s hauling you up the sledding hill on the toboggan, the next your eyes are glazing over as you teach your kids how to play Candyland, the next you’re sitting in a bar with them drinking Guinness. This small-but-huge poem by Tom Sleigh chokes me up when I read it, for so many reasons.

Boomerang

The sidelong whiplash of his arm sent the boomerang
soaring, pushing the sky to the horizon
until the blade just hung there, a black slash on the sun

so far away it seemed not to move at all
before it came whirling back larger and larger:
would it hit him, would he die — and you ducked down,

terrified, clinging to his thigh, its deathspin
slowing as it coptered softly down and he snatched it
from the air. How you loved that rush of fear,

both wanting and not wanting him to feel how hard
you clung, just the same as when he’d float you
weightless across the pond while waves slapped

and shushed and bickered, his breath loud in your ear …
and after he dried you off, he’d lift you onto his shoulders
and help you shove your head through a hole in the sky.

 

For more information on Tom Sleigh,  please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by Galway Kinnell

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The other day in my poetry hut, where people sometimes leave little poems as well as taking them away, I found this tiny poem penned out on a piece of scrap paper. Galway Kinnell, who died last year, was one of my favorite poets; I always sort of had a crush on him, based solely on his photo and a few of his poems. The poem below fits my definition of a prayer. Also, how often do you get to say the word “is” three times in a row?

Prayer

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

—
For more information on Galway Kinnell, please click here: here.
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Poem of the Week, by Ellery Akers

Posted on by alisonmcghee

I love that the Times has started publishing a poem every week in the magazine. This one floated up off the page at me last week. It makes me think of what writer Anne Lamott calls the three essential prayers: Help, Wow, Thanks. That feels about right to me.

The Word That Is a Prayer
– Ellery Akers

One thing you know when you say it:
all over the earth people are saying it with you:
a child blurting it out as the seizures take her,
a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital.
What if you take a cab through the Tenderloin:
at a street light, a man in a wool cap,
yarn unraveling across his face, knocks at the window;
he says, Please.
By the time you hear what he’s saying,
the light changes, the cab pulls away,
and you don’t go back, though you know
someone just prayed to you the way you pray.
Please: a word so short
it could get lost in the air
as it floats up to God like the feather it is,
knocking and knocking, and finally
falling back to earth as rain,
as pellets of ice, soaking a black branch,
collecting in drains, leaching into the ground,
and you walk in that weather every day.

​

For more information on Ellery Akers, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Todd Boss

Posted on by alisonmcghee

These days I spend a fair amount of time walking the beach and watching surfers. I don’t know how they do it, how they paddle out there and then hang out, waiting and watching for oncoming waves that are big enough to skim underneath, along, in front of. I don’t know they can see that wave coming and not want to duck right under it or paddle frantically back to the shore, the way I would do because big waves terrify me. The black-wetsuited surfers are maybe like the whales in this poem below, fearless without thinking about fear, because water is their home. A world without hem.

Whales Wear the Patterns of the Surface of the Water

– Todd Boss

all over their bodies whenever they rise for breath,
forever slipping in and out of sheaths of silk and sheer,
the sun’s hookless fishnets gliding over and over them,
over and over again. The surface is their coutourière,
and her daring glitz and glamour is what all the girls are
wearing this summer. How beautiful they are in their azure
negligees, their silver-spangled zigzag rags aglimmer!
Later, when the day’s bead curtains shift away and they drift
into the dreamless deep, they’ll leave their lovely lingerie
behind and find themselves unashamed between seamless
sheets of black satin—a world without hem—where nothing,
not even the moon’s thin strings of pretty under-things,
can come between their lovers and them.

For more information on Todd Boss, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by Langston Hughes

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I don’t usually like or want to match poems with whatever’s going on in this country of ours. Too neat and easy, too matchy-matchy. But this past week? Hello. I turned many poems over in my mind but none felt exactly right. Then, near midnight tonight, I stood in a crowded room in San Francisco and watched the tremendous storyteller and artist Ashley Bryan, 92 shining years of age, climb to a podium and lead us all in a recitation of the below poem. Is there anything that man hasn’t lived through? So here you go, my friends.

My People

The night is beautiful,
So the faces of my people.

The stars are beautiful,
So the eyes of my people.

Beautiful, also, is the sun.
Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.

—
For more information on Langston Hughes, please click here.
For more information on Ashley Bryan, please click here.
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Poem of the Week, by William Stafford

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Mom and Dad and me in DundasThis one goes out to my dad, who taught me how to make scrambled eggs, how to drive stick (kind of, anyway – after a few too many times of me stalling out the little red truck he got out of the cab so as not to yell anymore and told me I could figure it out on my own there in the cornfield, which I totally did), how to build a fire in the woodstove, how to ride a bike, how to love the open road and wheels beneath me, how not to suffer fools, how to read the funnies on Sunday morning, how to be loyal, how to be stoic, how to work hard, and how to tell a good story. Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers and father-types out there.

Father’s Voice
– William Stafford

“No need to get home early;
the car can see in the dark.”
He wanted me to be rich
the only way we could,
easy with what we had.

And always that was his gift,
given for me ever since,
easy gift, a wind
that keeps on blowing for flowers
or birds wherever I look.

World, I am your slow guest,
one of the common things
that move in the sun and have
close, reliable friends
in the earth, in the air, in the rock.

 

For more information on William Stafford, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Patricia Fargnoli

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On December 4, 2010, I sent out the Patricia Fargnoli poem below. One of my writer friends, K, wrote back that it knocked her socks off. I wrote back that I agreed, and that in my ongoing efforts to become one with winter I had memorized it. I also wrote that I missed K and maybe we should collaborate on a book together.

K: A book together! My heart sings! Can it have a fox in it?
Me: I do believe we should have a fox in our book! A small orange flame streaking his way through the snow.
K: Maybe this poem should be the epigraph to our book!
Me: Yeah!

That was four and a half years ago, and we have been working on our novel –Maybe a Fox– all this time. At one point, about six months ago, K and I happened to be in the same city at the same time and we went out for drinks and dinner.

K, after one hefty margarita: You know what? This book nearly killed me.
Me, after the same hefty margarita: That makes two of us, sister.
K: If our friendship can survive the monumental struggle of writing this book together, it can survive anything.
Me: Agreed! A toast to us!

Then we ordered another round and toasted the fact that we both still love this poem, we both still love our monumental effort of a book, and we both still love each other. No small feats, any of  them.

Should the Fox Come Again to My Cabin in the Snow
– Patricia Fargnoli

Then, the winter will have fallen all in white
and the hill will be rising to the north,
the night also rising and leaving,
dawn light just coming in, the fire out.

Down the hill running will come that flame
among the dancing skeletons of the ash trees.
I will leave the door open for him.

 

For more information on Patricia Fargnoli, please click here.

 

Poem of the Week, by Jehanne Dubrow

Posted on by alisonmcghee

When I was a kid I used to make my own clothes: skirts and pants and shirts and prom dresses. I was/am not a perfectionist and didn’t care about things like cutting straight and matching stripes to stripes and thread color to fabric color (which explains why my elephant bell green and pink striped pants looked the way they did). What I loved instead of perfection was going to thrift stores and spending pennies on old dresses and shirts and cutting them up and turning them into new shirts and skirts and quilts. Making something new out of something old. I still love doing this. One of the quilts on my bed right now contains parts of a dress my grandmother used to wear, parts of an old tablecloth, and embroidered scraps from a skirt I wore to shreds in college. Making a quilt and writing a book feel the same to me. Bits and pieces of old clothes, flickers of images and ideas, put them all together over a long time and one day you wake up and you’ve made a whole new something-out-of-nothing.

Garment Industry
– Jehanne Dubrow

Q: What’s the difference between a tailor and a poet?
        A: One generation.
                                        —Yiddish joke

My mother lifts a seam ripper, its miniature
hook made for a world of tiny violence.

Not only for ripping seams, she says.

There is a thread between us: we work at a
humming machine.

We are shirtwaist and sonnet.

She splits body from sleeve, neck from yoke.

I sift through rag paper, write down the
sound of tearing fabric.

Look. Look at the dress we sew from the shreds
of other things.

 

For more information about Jehanne Dubrow, please click here.