Alison McGhee’s blog

Poem of the Week, by Piyassili

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pigs-eye-2014Hey there, elected employees, thanks for an especially sickening week. Proud of yourselves and your ongoing attempts to destroy our democracy? It sure takes a ton of energy to stay steadfast and determined in the face of your continuing refusal to stand up for what’s right. I turn to the poets for solace and strength. And solidarity.

Thank you, Piyassili of Assyria, for writing this poem. How I wish it weren’t as meaningful today as it was more than three thousand years ago.

 

Injustice, by Piyassili, Assyria, 1218 BC

The people who are made to feel ashamed every day
are not the people who should feel ashamed.
The people who should feel ashamed
are the people unable to feel ashamed
yet heap shame by the bundle every day
on the troubled, the poor and despised.

 

For more information on Piyassili, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Alberto Rios

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Photos 223This semester I taught a class about creative writers, identity and race. Forty students of wildly different backgrounds, ethnicities, religions and race sat in a huge square in an underground room in a building next to the train tracks midway between Minneapolis and St. Paul. We were strangers to each other. On the first day of class, I gave them a writing-from-life prompt. They wrote quickly and in silence, then some of them read their pieces aloud. The class is over now, and in their final paper, one student wrote of that first day, back in August, 

I had no idea that we would all be so comfortable with each other so quickly, especially since it was such a big class. There was a woman who talked about how she missed home and she started crying. To me, that was when the wall sort of came down for everyone and everyone was much more willing to share. I remember that in just one day, there was one man who talked about how his roommate had committed suicide on 9/11 and there was another man that talked about how his father killed his mother. These are major life events that they were sharing to basically complete strangers. That was the most open conversation I’d ever had with other students. These are things that we suppress and don’t want to admit to ourselves, so for people to tell a room full of people that, was amazing.

The instant connection that follows writing and sharing stories has been my experience all the years I’ve been teaching, and it humbles me. Listening to others’ stories always humbles me. Alberto Rios’s beautiful lines in the poem below about how We give because giving has changed us make me think about my life as a teacher and a writer, and about my students, and about all the classrooms I’ve had the honor to sit in, and it’s all I can do not to cry. Stories humble, stories hurt, stories heal. 

 

 

When Giving Is All We Have
               – Alberto Rios

 One river gives
its journey to the next.
We give because someone gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.
We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.
We have been better for it,
we have been wounded by it—
Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,
big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.
Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,
but we read this book, anyway, over and again:
Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,
mine to yours, yours to mine.
You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.
Together we are simple green. You gave me
what you did not have, and I gave you
what I had to give—together, we made
something greater from the difference.

For more information on Alberto Rios, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by Wendell Berry

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Photos 851When my children were tiny they went to a neighborhood preschool two or three mornings a week. It was a gentle place, taught by lovely teachers who never got upset if a glass of milk was toppled or if someone broke a crayon. There was a dress-up corner, a story-time corner, a Lego corner. In nice weather the kids went outside and worked and played in a flower garden the school had created along a biking and walking path.

If it was too cold, there was a big empty room with hardwood floors and lots of tricycles and scooters to zip around on. The one trike that every child craved was known as The Double Bike, because that’s exactly what it was, an elongated trike with two seats, kind of a primitive version of a tandem bicycle. It was a great day when someone got to ride The Double Bike first. 

Once I arrived very early to pick up my youngest. Recess was just about to begin. I stood in the doorway and watched as she –not knowing I was there– bent down in a sprinter’s crouch, a giant grin on her face. “Are you ready?” she said to her buddies. “Get ready!” As the door to the trike room opened, she and her friends zoomed toward The Double Bike. When I think of joy, I picture my daughter’s face on that day, how her black hair flew behind her, the echo of her wild laughter.

This past week some of my closest friends and I, quiet activists all, talked briefly about the effects of this past year on our health. Messed-up sleep. Apocalyptic nightmares. Stomach ailments. Weight gain. Weight loss. Heart problems. After the conversation I felt, weirdly, better. What’s that old saying, trouble shared is trouble halved? Solidarity soothes. 

But fighting against the forces of darkness is only part of this equation. Doing something for the pure joy of it, like my little girl at the gym, and like the kingfisher in this beautiful poem below, is another kind of activism. 

 

Before Dark
     – Wendell Berry

From the porch at dusk I watched
a kingfisher wild in flight
he could only have made for joy.

He came down the river, splashing
against the water’s dimming face
like a skipped rock, passing

on down out of sight. And still
I could hear the splashes
farther and farther away

as it grew darker. He came back
the same way, dusky as his shadow,
sudden beyond the willows.

The splashes went on out of hearing.
It was dark then. Somewhere
the night had accommodated him

—at the place he was headed for
or where, led by his delight,
he came.

 

For more information on Wendell Berry, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

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Luke and me, photo boothWhen my son was a year and a half he came down with a stomach flu. After a couple of days the vomiting and diarrhea had calmed down, but he was quiet and listless. I wasn’t terribly worried but something told me to take him to the clinic, so I did. His doctor examined him in the little bright-lit room the same way I had grown used to, with calm and gentleness. I trusted this doctor completely and instinctively the minute I met him. He was older, small and lean, with wise eyes. 

“I feel kind of dumb bringing him in,” I said, “but I just wanted to make sure.”

The doctor nodded. “It’s good you did bring him in,” he said. 

Then he went to the phone on the wall and called the hospital and asked them to reserve a room, that my son and I would be there shortly. I looked at him in bewilderment.

“The hospital?” I said, and he nodded. “Well, okay. I’ll go home and pack some clothes and”–but he shook his head. “Go now,” he said, gently. “Dehydration.”

So I went. And waited while the nurses and doctors sought to find a vein in my little boy’s small body, and then sat beside him for a couple of days while the i.v. dripped life-giving liquid into him. It was like watching a half-dead green plant revive. It took me a little while to realize that my baby had not been far from losing his life. I remembered how the doctor had pinched up the skin of his tiny belly, and how it had just stayed pinched up. I remembered how the doctor had gone immediately to the phone on the wall.

This doctor retired from active practice when my children were still small. Last week, for no known reason, the image of him flashed into my mind and I wondered where and how he was. It had been 20 years. Then, not two days later, I walked into my neighborhood bookstore to give a reading from my new novel, Never Coming Back, and just inside the door, there he was. He was older, still lean and small, still with those calm, observant eyes. He had seen that I was giving a reading, and he wanted to come. There was a lump in my throat as I hugged him.

That man is the kind of person that makes me think of this beautiful poem, one of my favorites, by Naomi Shihab Nye.

 

Famous
     – Naomi Shihab Nye

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

 

For more information on Naomi Shihab Nye, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by Maggie Smith

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IMG_4760After a reading from my new novel Never Coming Back the other night, I spoke with a woman in the audience about synesthesia, that syndrome whereby senses cross and fuse with each other. “So as someone is talking, you don’t simultaneously see the words they’re saying inside your head?” I asked the woman, and she shook her head.

 “Then how do you understand them?” I asked her. “Is it just. . . sound? Sound that makes sense in your ears and translates itself into meaning?” She nodded. 

Everything I say, and everything others say to me, transcribes itself instantly into words that run across the bottom of the movie screen in my mind. I can’t imagine how I would ever understand language otherwise, and the woman I was talking with couldn’t imagine how this happens for me. Our conversation reminded me of this poem by Maggie Smith, a poem that stays with me for many reasons: because I love flowers and their names, because I also love my children who can’t ever remember the names of the flowers I’ve grown in our garden their whole lives long, and because, in the end, I guess it’s the sight of them both that matters, and not the names we give them.

 

Goldenrod, by Maggie Smith 
        

I’m no botanist. If you’re the color of sulfur
and growing at the roadside, you’re goldenrod.

You don’t care what I call you, whatever
you were born as. You don’t know your own name.

But driving near Peoria, the sky pink-orange,
the sun bobbing at the horizon, I see everything

is what it is, exactly, in spite of the words I use:
black cows, barns falling in on themselves, you.

Dear flowers born with a highway view,
forgive me if I’ve mistaken you. Goldenrod,

whatever your name is, you are with your own kind.
Look—the meadow is a mirror, full of you,

your reflection repeating. Whatever you are,
I see you, wild yellow, and I would let you name me.

 

​For more information on Maggie Smith, please click here​.

Poem of the Week, by Derek Walcott

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img_5354This fall I’m teaching a class on identity and race and creative writers. Last week’s assignment was to choose an author from the wonderful anthology A Good Time for the Truth, someone influential to you personally, and write about why. One of my African students, in a short, beautiful paper, wrote of the importance of reminding her black American-born nephews that “. . . they are not what the media or the world portrays them to be. They are what those who love them see in them.” And what they see in themselves. Which reminds me of this poem by the wondrous Derek Walcott, a poem I don’t often live out myself, but which I love and aspire to anyway.

 

Love After Love, by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

For more information on Derek Walcott, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Bob Hicok

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img_0560

This one goes out to all those who keep the world humming. To the servers and mechanics and plumbers and caterers and farmers and housecleaners and personal care attendants and orderlies and shift workers and convenience store clerks and landscapers and migrant workers and everyone else publicly championed and secretly scorned by those in power. We need more plumber poems, I always say to my students, we need more veteran poems and housecleaner poems and migrant worker poems. Write them. The world needs them. 

 

By Their Works

     – Bob Hicok

Who cleaned up the Last Supper? 
These would be my people. 
Maybe hung over, wanting 
desperately a better job,
standing with rags
in hand as the window
beckons with hills
of yellow grass. In Da Vinci,
the blue robed apostle
gesturing at Christ
is saying, give Him the check.
What a mess they’ve made
of their faith. My God
would put a busboy
on earth to roam
among the waiters
and remind them to share
their tips. The woman
who finished one
half eaten olive
and scooped the rest
into her pockets,
walked her tiny pride home
to children who looked
at her smile and saw
the salvation of a meal.
All that week
at work she ignored
customers who talked
of Rome and silk
and crucifixions,
though she couldn’t stop
thinking of this man
who said thank you
each time she filled
His glass.

 
 
​For more information on Bob Hicok, please click here.​
 

 

 

 

Poem of the Week, by Albert Goldbarth

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21034365_1822136601133837_3288638729780497471_nHurricanes and earthquakes and floods and the ongoing human cruelty inflicted by our elected employees against their fellow human beings. Jeez. It’s enough to make me understand (a tiny bit, anyway) why religious people start tossing around terms like “the end times.” Screw that, though. Enough good people determined to make the world better will do just that. Let us be like the whales in this strange and unforgettable poem by Albert Goldbarth, and sing to each other.

 

Forces, by Albert Goldbarth

It’s different for the spiderweb: 
the only architecture 
in a five-block radius not 
undone by yesterday’s tornado. 

Out at the More-4-Less, strands 
of uncooked spaghetti were driven, 
unbroken, like nails, through concrete. 
Different levels: different forces. 

I remember when Anna told me 
about the deep-sea dive that almost 
killed her, hammered and disoriented 
and tossed like debris in the middle 

of two converging vectors of power. 
That’s what she said. The whales 
only knew they were singing 
to each other. 

 

 

​For more information on Albert Goldbarth, please ​click here.

Poem of the Week, by Kay Ryan

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IMG_0447People look at me with confusion when I tell them I’m deeply wary of charismatic people, with charisma defined in the broad sense as “a personal magic of leadership arousing special popular loyalty or enthusiasm for a public figure (such as a political leader).” But wait, isn’t charisma charming, magnetic, powerful? Sometimes. And sometimes it’s a mask for manipulation, a bottomless need for adulation, attention, look at me look at me look at me, take care of me and do as I say because I am more important than you. Charismatic people so often go unchecked, no matter their behavior, because a) people are drawn to them by that magnetic personality and b) charismatic people often snap at anyone who calls them out on their behavior, in a vicious, malevolent and wildly cruel way. 

Which means that the only thing to do is exactly that: call them on their behavior. Not after seventy years of uncontrolled power-grabbing, but the first time it happens. When I began (only a few years ago, sadly) to call people on their awful, manipulative behavior –sometimes only in my own mind and sometimes with a fake-it-till-you-make-it calm in public– the relief was immediate and enormous. We’re all in this world together, friends. Don’t stand for bad behavior. Call it when you see it, and tell your elected employees to call it when they see it. Otherwise we end up exactly where we are in this country, right now, with unchecked petty tyrants trying to take down our democracy. I turn to this poem below, by the strange and wondrous poet Kay Ryan, for strength.

 

Relief, by Kay Ryan

We know it is close
to something lofty.
Simply getting over being sick
or finding lost property
has in it the leap,
the purse, the quick humility
of witnessing a birth–
how love seeps up
and retakes the earth.
There is a dreamy
wading feeling to your walk
inside the current
of restored riches,
clocks set back,
disasters averted.

 

​Fo​r more information on Kay Ryan, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by Mary Jo Salter

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IMG_7772The other day a new friend walked into my house and stopped to look at some photos perched on a bookcase. “Is that you?” he said, pointing to one of a girl on a windsurfer. “No, that’s my daughter,” I said, admiring her, how the wind was blowing her long hair back. Then time did one of its weird pivots and I startled and sort of laugh/winced, because why had I said the girl on the windsurfer was my daughter? She wasn’t. She was me, long ago, when I was the age that my daughter is now. Do we, at some point, evolve into the mothers of our own selves? What a beautiful and sorrowful thought, a thought which keeps me re-reading Mary Jo Salter’s haunting poem below. 

 

Here I Am, by Mary Jo Salter

Here I am, making my grand tour
the summer after graduation.
What is this? Must be the Rome train station.
We never noticed we were poor.
Backpacks and low-rise jeans—
we never lived beyond our means.
(Back then there were no ATMs.)
Here we are,
my friends and me.
We’re napping on a bank of the Thames,
when love was free.

Here I am with that girl I met
on the trip to Brussels or Bruges.
(My God, her duffel bag is huge!)
What was her name? Yvonne? Yvette?
She ditched me; I’m forgetting why.
Oh yeah—when I slept with that Swedish guy.
His sleeping bag was full of fleas.
Here we are,
with our bread and cheese,
on a park bench in the Tuileries,
when love was free.

    Here I am,
    a woman in the middle
    of her life,
    and her life
    is an endless riddle.
    In all of Europe
    I couldn’t stir up
    a memory more un-
    likely and foreign
    than me at twenty-two.
    I can’t help gazing
    at her bright young eyes,
    at her nice firm thighs.
    Was I ever twenty-two?
    Look at her skin, it’s amazing.
    Can you be me? Am I you?

Here I am at the Berlin Wall.
They tore it down, but it’s still there
in this picture, like my long dark hair.
But there’s a wall between her and me
that, like me, won’t be getting thinner.
Here we are,
myself and me,
thinking, Ich bin ein Berliner,
but who is free?

    Here I am,
    looking at this kernel
    of myself,
    and I feel
    so strangely maternal.
    Do I have a choice?
    I can’t believe I’m hearing
    my own mother’s voice
    giving me advice:

Did you pack your passport?
Sign your traveler’s checks?
Don’t talk to men,
they only want sex;
keep a ladylike appearance
and when was the last time you sent
a postcard to your parents?

Here it is.
Here’s my postcard to me.
I’ve become my own mother;
never thought I’d be.
But here I am …
here I am.

 

For more information on Mary Jo Salter, please click here.

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