Author: alisonmcghee

Poem of the Week, by Mark Strand

Posted on by alisonmcghee

I just returned from the Red Balloon Bookshop, where I sat at a table for a couple of hours signing books and talking to any of the customers who felt like talking. One of them was an older woman wearing a big poofy winter jacket. She was in town for a few days from Kentucky, where she lives, and buying up bunches of picture books to give to her grandchildren. She admired my pigtails; I admired her smile. “Well, I certainly am happy,” she said (and she was, she gave off a kind of lightness of being), and I told her that the older I got the happier I got. “Just wait till you’re 70!” she said. “You’re not going to BELIEVE how happy you’ll be!”
* * *
The Coming of Light
     – Mark Strand

Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.


—

​For  more information on Mark Strand, please click here.


Poem of the Week, by Suzanne Cleary

Posted on by alisonmcghee

We’re born with backups, twinned in so many ways: two hands, two ears, two eyes, two kidneys. Lose one and the other steps right up and does the job of both. But not with the heart. We each have only one of them.

Echocardiogram
– Suzanne Cleary

How does, how does, how does it work
so, little valve stretching messily open, as wide as possible,
all directions at once, sucking air, sucking blood, sucking air-in-blood,
how? On the screen I see the part of me that always loves my life, never tires
of what it takes, this in-and-out, this open-and-shut in the dark chest of me,
tireless, without muscle or bone, all flex and flux and blind
will, little mouth widening, opening and opening and, then, snapping
shut, shuddering anemone entirely of darkness, sea creature
of the spangled and sparkling sea, down, down where light cannot reach.
When the technician stoops, flips a switch, the most unpopular kid in the class
stands off-stage with a metal sheet, shaking it while Lear raves.
So this is the house where love lives, a tin shed in a windstorm,
tin shed at the sea’s edge, the land’s edge,
waters wild and steady, wild and steady, wild.

—

​For more information on Suzanne Cleary, please click here.

—
My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

My Facebook page.

Poem of the Week, by Antonio Machado

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Thursday I had some minor heart surgery to fix a lifelong glitch. There was a moment of pure fear before they went to work –it’s my heart, you know?– and I asked them all please to take good care of me. Later I didn’t think I remembered anything, but then, the next day, I had a memory of my heart burning inside my chest. Because it had literally been burned, lasered in four places. And I thought of this poem, which is one of the five I would bring to a desert island if I hadn’t already memorized it. Golden bees making sweet honey out of past bitterness.

Last Night I Had a Dream
– Antonio Machado (translated by Alan Trueblood)

Last night I had a dream–
a blessed illusion it was–
I dreamt of a fountain flowing
deep down in my heart.
Water, by what hidden channels
have you come, tell me, to me,
welling up with new life
I never tasted before?

Last night I had a dream–
a blessed illusion it was–
I dreamt of a hive at work
deep down in my heart.
Within were the golden bees
straining out the bitter past
to make sweet-tasting honey,
and white honeycomb.

Last night I had a dream–
a blessed illusion it was–
I dreamt of a hot sun shining
deep down in my heart.
The heat was in the scorching
as from a fiery hearth;
the sun in the light it shed
and the tears it brought to the eyes.

Last night I had a dream–
a blessed illusion it was–
I dreamed it was God I’d found
deep down in my heart.

 

For more information on Antonio Machado, please click here.

My Facebook page.

Poem of the Week, by lucille clifton

Posted on by alisonmcghee

The ongoing focus of my fabulous church for the non-churchy is racial justice, and the service this morning was particularly fabulous. We started out dancing in the pews to Pharrell Williams, we listened to the words of two of my favorite Nina Simone songs, we read a little Thoreau and Frederick Douglass and we all left laughing and full of energy. Halfway through the last song, some of my favorite lines from lucille clifton came ghosting into my head, including the last lines of this particular poem, so here you go.

The Lost Baby Poem
– lucille clifton

the time i dropped your almost body down
down to meet the waters under the city
and run one with the sewage to the sea
what did i know about waters rushing back
what did i know about drowning
or being drowned

you would have been born into winter
in the year of the disconnected gas
and no car     we would have made the thin
walk over genesee hill into the canada wind
to watch you slip like ice into strangers’ hands
you would have fallen naked as snow into winter
if you were here i could tell you these
and some other things

if i am ever less than a mountain
for your definite brothers and sisters
let the rivers pour over my head
let the sea take me for a spiller
of seas    let black men call me a stranger
always     for your never named sake

– for more information on lucille clifton (she spelled her name lower case), please click here.

– ​My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

My Facebook page. 

Poem of the Week, by Janee H. Baugher

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Every time I read this poem, the last line brings a lump to my throat. Not sure why. Maybe thinking about all the times in my life I’ve been afraid, but all those times there was something next to me, made by me, that was “never afraid”?

Light’s Effect on the Body
–  Janée J. Baugher

You’re not alone.
Your shadow’s your perfect fit.

It has no specificities
just imperial black — sum of all colors

all possibilities
to cast the pure, generalized you.

You are the body
that makes shadow possible.

Your body
is light’s filter on shadow.

When you run
from light, shadow’s the one sure thing before you.

Upon your death
shadow becomes a shadow of itself.

It began small
as you did. And through all that happened

your shadow was never afraid.

—
For more information on Janee H. Baugher, please click here.
—
My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Poem of the Week, by Tracy K. Smith

Posted on by alisonmcghee

“Poems infatuated with their own smarts and detached from any emotional grounding can leave the reader feeling lonely, empty and ashamed for having expected more.” YES. That line is excerpted from a tiny but fierce essay that the poet Tracy K. Smith wrote this past summer. Don’t try to be smart, don’t try to hide. Just put your heart on the line.

Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?
– Tracy K. Smith

1.

After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span
Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like
Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being—a Starman
Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see.
And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure

That someone was there squinting through the dust,
Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only
To be wanted back badly enough? Would you go then,
Even for a few nights, into that other life where you
And that first she loved, blind to the future once, and happy?

Would I put on my coat and return to the kitchen where my
Mother and father sit waiting, dinner keeping warm on the stove?
Bowie will never die. Nothing will come for him in his sleep
Or charging through his veins. And he’ll never grow old,
Just like the woman you lost, who will always be dark-haired

And flush-faced, running toward an electronic screen
That clocks the minutes, the miles left to go. Just like the life
In which I’m forever a child looking out my window at the night sky
Thinking one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands
Even if it burns.

—
For more information on Tracy K. Smith, please click here: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/07/18/does-poetry-matter/wipe-that-smirk-off-your-poem

—
My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Poem of the Week, by William Butler Yeats

Posted on by alisonmcghee

I went to a literary festival last week and took part in a flash fiction workshop, in which you had to write a story under 250 words. My story was titled “The Pilgrim Soul in Her,” and I was feeling pretty smuggish-proud of myself, having come up with that clever title, because it’s a line lifted from the below poem by Mr. Yeats and I thought that most in the room (writers all) would recognize it. But nope. Nary a one did. This raised a silent hue and cry inside me, along the lines of Bring Back Yeats, so here you go.

 

When You Are Old
– William Butler Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

—

​For more information on Yeats, please click here.

My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Poem of the Week, by Catalina Ferro

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Everyone in my creative writing workshop memorized a poem and recited it last week in class. The only rule was that the poem had to be a minimum of three lines long (think haiku). “Anxiety Group” was one of the many poems, and even though she was nervous and worried that she’d forget some of the lines, the writer who performed it did a great job. The power of the poem, there in the classroom, was such that I went and looked it up to see the original slam poet perform it. Give it a look (link at bottom). “Here we are, all in the lifeboat together.”

Anxiety Group
– Catalina Ferro

There is a German satellite falling to Earth.

She says,
‘What if it hits me?’

Welcome to Anxiety Group.

The kingdom of the sweaty palm and the jiggling leg,
Where the women wrap themselves up tight.
Where the men bite nails till blood.

We are the magnifiers of molehills.
We are the princes of panic,
The ambassadors of anguish.
There is no pride here.

We lack the discipline of the eating disorder group
Lack the self-riotousness of bereavement group
And we’re not as fun as procrastinators anonymous.

Nobody wants to be here.
Me? I don’t sleep.
Can’t sleep.
I make insomnia look professional,
Make your tossing and turning look like afternoon hiccups.
The longest I’ve gone is nine days,
Went literally insane.
Sleep deprivation is a form of torture, you know,
And I do this to myself.

Melatonin makes me sad,
Benadryl is for amateurs,
Hypnotics turn off the lights too quickly,
And weed makes me crazy.

Diazepam, Lorazepam, Bromazepram, Alprazolam,
Klonopin is the only thing that works.
And they’re weaning me off it,
So, like a baby forced to remove breast from mouth, take bottle instead,
I got sent to anxiety group.
And apparently, we’re all going to die,
Because while the girl to my left worries that the satellite will hit her,
The woman to my right worries that it will hit a nuclear power plant,
And then,
We’re all fucked.

My father says only rich people go to therapy,
Poor people got shit to do.
And yet, here I am,
In this lifeboat
Surrounded by eight of the most beautiful, crazy ass motherfuckers the word has ever seen.

‘What if it’s not just a mole?’
‘What if it’s a flesh-eating virus?’
‘What if I fail at life?’
‘But what if it really is the rapture this time?’
‘What if they hit us again?
‘What if I wake one morning to see planes scraping skies again?’
‘What if it’s me this time?’

And I think ‘Wow.
It must be exhausting to want to live this much.’
Fuck the depressives,
Fuck the body-image meditation group,
Fuck sex addicts anonymous.

Give me your tired,
Your poor,
Your anxious,
Your huddles masses yearning to breathe deeply and count to ten.
Give me this collection of blurted confessions,
Of psychosomatic itch,
Of twitch and tick,
Of stutter and sweat,
Give me these weak kneed,
Jumpy-ass, too much saliva, break out in hives, awkward stomach, hair falling out,
Chewing lips, restless leg, pounding heart bastards
Any day of the week

These people who fight through every day
Like fucking gladiators,
Who fight demons worse than you and I could dream of,
Just because they want so badly to live
To hold on
To love
Because you can’t be this afraid of losing everything
If you don’t love everything first
Because you have to have
a soul-crushing hope
That things will get better
To be this afraid of missing it.

—
To watch Catalina Ferro perform “Anxiety Group,” please click here.

—
My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Poem of the Week, by Lianne Spidel

Posted on by alisonmcghee

The workshops I teach, at my non-traditional, designed-for-working-adults university, are filled with all kinds of characters, with characters meaning people: tattoo artists, auto mechanics, journalists, pearl-wearing grandmothers, cops, military vets, hairdressers, graphic designers and you name it, you get the picture. Within the first class, friendships and alliances are formed. I can’t even call them unlikely alliances, because they aren’t. People are people, first and always. “A gentle affinity.”
Summer School
           – Liann Spidel
Because I needed to know for a poem,
I asked the science teacher sitting
next to me (the one they teased
about his massive chest) to explain
to me the composition of a cloud.
He had already told me he was there
only for the credit, a step up
on the salary scale. His wife
wanted a bigger house, the kids
were growing, he was overwhelmed

with bills and coaching.
I said, “When you’re my age
it will empty out.
There’s too much, then all
at once there’s almost nothing.”

When he answered me about the cloud,
his voice went soft:
“Moisture on dust,” and when
I asked him “in” or “on,”
he said it didn’t matter

either way. We never shared
a coffee and spoke only
of casual things, a still viable
jock and a graying grandmother
pretending to concentrate on the course

content, side by side through indolent
hours, easy in the peaceful co
existence a couple of prepositions
had provided–a gentle affinity,
pleasure like moisture on dust.

—

​For more information on Lianne Spidel, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/lianne-spidel​

—
My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Poem of the Week, by Bob Hicok

Posted on by alisonmcghee

I’ve been stuck on long poems the past few weeks, poems that tell stories from beginning to end. This one makes me wince and laugh and wince and laugh. Why does it take so long for parents and children to see each other as people, unstuck from the If only you’d done this or that. I have taught for a long time now at an under-the-radar state university created for working adults. Many of my students, when asked to write about a workplace they know intimately, scratch out intense, short, powerful pieces set in restaurants or loading docks or auto body shops or telephone call centers or daycares. I can’t imagine my dad ever, by choice, sitting down to read or write a poem, but he could tell you anything you want to know about any Yankees player from the last sixty years. Or how to get a chainsaw unstuck from a tree trunk. Or that a splash of Clorox will do as a disinfectant for a cut in a pinch. He could also tell you what it’s like to watch one of his children in pain, and not know how to help, or what to say. He might not put that feeling in words like “we’d turned into a door full of sun,” but I am picturing him right now, easing himself into the car, ready to drive us both up to the diner, and reaching over to turn on the passenger seat warmer because he knows I’m always cold.
O my pa-pa
– Bob Hicok
Our fathers have formed a poetry workshop.
They sit in a circle of disappointment over our fastballs
and wives. We thought they didn’t read our stuff,
whole anthologies of poems that begin, My father never,
or those that end, and he was silent as a carp,
or those with middles which, if you think
of the right side as a sketch, look like a paunch
of beer and worry, but secretly, with flashlights
in the woods, they’ve read every word and noticed
that our nine happy poems have balloons and sex
and giraffes inside, but not one dad waving hello
from the top of a hill at dusk. Theirs
is the revenge school of poetry, with titles like
“My Yellow Sheet Lad” and “Given Your Mother’s Taste
for Vodka, I’m Pretty Sure You’re Not Mine.”
They’re not trying to make the poems better
so much as sharper or louder, more like a fishhook
or electrocution, as a group
they overcome their individual senilities,
their complete distaste for language, how cloying
it is, how like tears it can be, and remember
every mention of their long hours at the office
or how tired they were when they came home,
when they were dragged through the door
by their shadows. I don’t know why it’s so hard
to write a simple and kind poem to my father, who worked,
not like a dog, dogs sleep most of the day in a ball
of wanting to chase something, but like a man, a man
with seven kids and a house to feed, whose absence
was his presence, his present, the Cheerios,
the PF Flyers, who taught me things about trees,
that they’re the most intricate version of standing up,
who built a grandfather clock with me so I would know
that time is a constructed thing, a passing, ticking fancy.
A bomb. A bomb that’ll go off soon for him, for me,
and I notice in our fathers’ poems a reciprocal dwelling
on absence, that they wonder why we disappeared
as soon as we got our licenses, why we wanted
the rocket cars, as if running away from them
to kiss girls who looked like mirrors of our mothers
wasn’t fast enough, and it turns out they did
start to say something, to form the words hey
or stay, but we’d turned into a door full of sun,
into the burning leave, and were gone
before it came to them that it was all right
to shout, that they should have knocked us down
with a hand on our shoulders, that they too are mystified
by the distance men need in their love.

—

​For more information on Bob Hicok, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/bob-hicok​

—
My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts