Alison McGhee’s Poem of the Week

Poem of the Week, by Jason Allen-Paisant

Posted on by alisonmcghee

A few years ago my dog and I were in the alley a block from home when a dog came racing out of an unlocked gate barking the way dogs do when they’re going to attack. I scooped my dog up in my arms and turned my back while the other dog’s human came screaming after her dog, then swore at me. Why the f— do you have to walk this way? It had already been a tough, tough day, and whatever relief the long walk had brought was poof, gone. The incident haunted me.

Years later, that same woman came out in the alley as I was walking by, and I steeled myself. But she was crying. I want to tell you how sorry I am for the way I screamed at you that day. We talked. Her husband had been in the middle of a horrifying round of cancer treatment. I hugged her. Despite the sad understanding of our later conversation, I can still feel that huge wave of loneliness from our first encounter.

And You…, by Jason Allen-Paisant

walk in a midwinter ochre wood
to get some england sun
as it steals away—
a little poodle runs to show you love;
you like the feel of the animal’s body
on your leg; it’s something
of an acceptance so you smile
and are not the least bothered; you even hope
it’ll jump, though the lady yells
no jumping Sam! no jumping!
and when she adds ‘you know he
just loves EVERYbody!’ why should you
suddenly feel tears coming?—
it’s just that EVERYbody; how do you
explain this? there’s nobody to explain
it to: why she needed to take away
from you this one feeling of special?
how could she know it was the most
human moment of your day—
the most human moment in weeks?

Click here for more information about Jason Allen-Paisant. 

My apologies in advance if I don’t reply immediately. Thank you.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Martín Espada

Posted on by alisonmcghee

At sixteen I would get up at dawn, pick bag after bag of sweet corn, load it into the back of the pickup, drive it up to Route 12 and sit there with a Sweet Corn for Sale sign. Lots of people headed to the Adirondacks would pull over. Most were nice, but a few viewed me with what now feels like disdain.

“Is it fresh?”

“I just picked it.”

They’d grab a few ears and yank down the top, inspecting for…what? Those people never bought the ears they stripped. All these years later I think of them when I contemplate our country’s vast political divide. I grew up in a deeply rural place where liberals are often ridiculed, and now I live in a place where liberals often ridicule the people I came from. Either way, it’s wrong.

Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper, by Martin Espada

At sixteen, I worked after high school hours
at a printing plant
that manufactured legal pads:
Yellow paper
stacked seven feet high
and leaning
as I slipped cardboard
between the pages,
then brushed red glue
up and down the stack.
No gloves: fingertips required
for the perfection of paper,
smoothing the exact rectangle.
Sluggish by 9 PM, the hands
would slide along suddenly sharp paper,
and gather slits thinner than the crevices
of the skin, hidden.
The glue would sting,
hands oozing
till both palms burned
at the punch clock.

Ten years later, in law school,
I knew that every legal pad
was glued with the sting of hidden cuts,
that every open law book
was a pair of hands
upturned and burning. 

Click here to learn more about Martín Espada. “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper” is from City of Coughing and Dead Radiators, W. W. Norton, 1993

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Richard Jones*

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Three spots still available in our January 8-13, 2024, Write Together session, which begins on Monday. I’d love to see you in this one hour, twice-daily workshop in which we all quietly write together from a guided prompt. $200, payable however you want. 

Whatever brain function places memory within the context of time is lacking in me, which means that something that happened twenty years ago could have happened last year. That is why every Saturday, when I find the right poem to send out, I check my Sent files to make sure I didn’t send it out just a few weeks ago. When I came to this one, which I’ve loved for many years because it feels like a tiny prayer of redemption, I was sure I’d sent it recently. But the only Richard Jones reference in any of my 200K+ emails was a note from my poetry-loving son in 2012, telling me about one of his professors in Chicago, a guy named Richard Jones, who was a poet whose work he thought I would like. Which goes to prove that the world is small, my son is awesome, and a beautiful poem transcends time.

After Work, by Richard Jones

Coming up from the subway
into the cool Manhattan evening,
I feel rough hands on my heart –
women in the market yelling
over rows of tomatoes and peppers,
old men sitting on a stoop playing cards,
cabbies cursing each other with fists
while the music of church bells
sails over the street,
and the father, angry and tired
after working all day,
embracing his little girl,
kissing her,
mi vida, mi corazon,
brushing the hair out of her eyes
so she can see.

Click here for more information about poet Richard Jones. After Work is from his collection The Blessing, from Copper Canyon Press. 

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

*Note: this post is adapted from one that originally appeared in 2015.

Poem of the Week, by Maggie Smith

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Are you looking for an “experience” gift for yourself or someone you love? Spots still available in our January 8-13, 2024, Write Together session. I’d love to see you in this one hour, twice-daily workshop in which we all quietly write together from a guided prompt. It’s a beautiful way to usher in the new year. $200, with one $100 no-questions-asked scholarship available. 

People keep telling me I have to pick a side, pick a side. Here’s the side I pick: The world is a mess, and the world is beautiful, and people are awful, and people are wonderful. Let me love the world, and its humans, like a mother.

Rain, New Year’s Eve, by Maggie Smith 

The rain is a broken piano,
playing the same note over and over.

My five-year-old said that.
Already she knows loving the world

means loving the wobbles
you can’t shim, the creaks you can’t

oil silent—the jerry-rigged parts,
MacGyvered with twine and chewing gum.

Let me love the cold rain’s plinking.
Let me love the world the way I love

my young son, not only when
he cups my face in his sticky hands,

but when, roughhousing,
he accidentally splits my lip.

Let me love the world like a mother.
Let me be tender when it lets me down.

Let me listen to the rain’s one note
and hear a beginner’s song.

Click here for more information about writer Maggie Smith.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Are you looking for an “experience” gift for someone you love? Registration for our January 8-13, 2024, Write Together session is open. I’d love to see you or your loved one in this one hour, twice-daily workshop in which we all quietly write together from a guided prompt. It’s a beautiful way to usher in the new year. Fee: $200, with two $100 no-questions-asked scholarships available. 

This poem, lettered on handmade paper and framed, hangs on a wall in my house, a collective gift from friends a few years ago. Sometimes, when I feel hopeless in the face of it all, I recite lines from it to help un-paralyze myself. A small act of goodness is still a way to help the world.

Famous, by 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.

Click here for more information about the wondrous Naomi Shihab Nye. Famous is included in Words Under the Words: Selected Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Joyce Sutphen

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Registration for our January 8-13 2024 Write Together session is in full swing. I’d love to see you in this one hour, twice-daily workshop in which we all quietly write together from a guided prompt. It’s a beautiful way to usher in the new year. 

For many years I taught creative writing at a non-traditional university for working adults, many the first in their family to go to college, many returning to college after a decades-long break. In the beginning we gave no grades. Instead, we hand-wrote long narrative evaluations of our students’ work. These narratives took forever to compose–like, forever–but when done right they were profoundly reflective documents.

I used to sit late at night with a pen in my hand, picturing this student and that, re-reading their stories and poems and memoirs. If you’re going to be an artist you have to push yourself in ways you’re scared to. You have to experiment, challenge and challenge and challenge yourself. You have to be fearless, and how can you be fearless if you’re afraid you won’t get an A? To this day I refuse to grade my students’ creative writing.

Things You Didn’t Put On Your Resumé, by Joyce Sutphen

How often you got up in the middle of the night
when one of your children had a bad dream,

and sometimes you woke because you thought
you heard a cry but they were all sleeping,

so you stood in the moonlight just listening
to their breathing, and you didn’t mention

that you were an expert at putting toothpaste
on tiny toothbrushes and bending down to wiggle

the toothbrush ten times on each tooth while
you sang the words to songs from Annie, and

who would suspect that you know the fingerings
to the songs in the first four books of the Suzuki

Violin Method and that you can do the voices
of Pooh and Piglet especially well, though

your absolute favorite thing to read out loud is
Bedtime for Frances and that you picked

up your way of reading it from Glynnis Johns,
and it is, now that you think of it, rather impressive

that you read all of Narnia and all of the Ring Trilogy
(and others too many to mention here) to them

before they went to bed and on the way out to
Yellowstone, which is another thing you don’t put

on the resumé: how you took them to the ocean
and the mountains and brought them safely home.


Click here for more information about poet Joyce Sutphen. Things You Didn’t Put On Your Resumé is from her book Carrying Water to the Field, University of Nebraska Press, 2019.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Jane Hirshfield

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Registration for our January 8-13, 2024 Write Together session is in full swing. I’d love to see you in this one hour, twice-daily workshop in which we all quietly write together from a guided prompt. It’s a beautiful way to usher in the new year. 

I want all of it to stop. All the slaughter and blame and clamors to choose a side, choose a side, choose a side, as if choosing a side can somehow justify the slaughter of children. On our long walk today, my dog and I passed a baby tree that passersby have turned into a repository of lost mittens and gloves and scarves. They look so lonely without the people they belong to, hanging on the slender limbs as if they still hold out hope.

A Chair in Snow, by Jane Hirshfield

A chair in snow
should be
like any other object whited
& rounded

and yet a chair in snow is always sad

more than a bed
more than a hat or house
a chair is shaped for just one thing

to hold
a soul its quick and few bendable
hours

perhaps a king

not to hold snow
not to hold flowers

Click here for more information about Jane Hirshfield.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Keith Leonard

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Registration for our January 8-13 2024 Write Together session is in full swing. I’d love to see you in this one hour, twice-daily workshop in which we all quietly write together from a guided prompt. It’s a beautiful way to usher in the new year. 

I love going to weddings and I love dancing at weddings. I love how every wedding band plays the exact same songs and I love them all. I love how even when you’ve been dancing for hours and you could use a break and a drink so you step off the dance floor but then you hear the first few bars of Shut Up and Dance or Uptown Funk or Dancing Queen or Proud Mary and you look around at your friends and everyone’s got the Oh my God we can’t stop now! look on their faces and back out onto the dance floor you go. I love how there’s no skill or art to my dancing but who cares? Balterers of the world, unite!

Balter, by Keith Leonard

There is a word in middle English
to describe the way you dance—
with delight but without a hint
of art or skill. Al Green licks the walls
of our tiny apartment, and you balter
across the living room nursing the plants.
You balter to the sink
and sing to a toothbrush
with a mouth full of foam.
If we’re doing this right,
the ruling god of embarrassment
has no place in our home.
He can orbit the building.
He can scratch the brick
with nails as sharp as checkmarks,
but we do not need to invite him in.
I have never understood elegance.
Below the song dampening dirt,
the dead all practice a statued grace.
But here you can clap a half-step
behind the beat. You can announce
an extra note with the body abundant.
Here, you can place your hands
on my shoulders. I can lift my hands
to your waist.

Balter was first published in The Journal. Click here for more information about poet Keith Leonard.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Jessica Tanck

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Registration for our January 8-13, 2024, Write Together session is in full swing. I’d love to see you in this one hour, twice-daily workshop in which we all quietly write together from a guided prompt. It’s a beautiful way to usher in the new year. 

Last month, at a Moth Grand Slam, I watched the evening’s musician-composer silently practicing on stage as the audience filed in. Electric violin tucked under their cheek, eyes closed, they ran through music heard only in their head, fingers flying, grimacing in the beautiful way musicians grimace when lost in their music.

Sometimes what we most love and crave doing is obvious on the outside: the daily splotches of paint on my partner’s hands (and head), the rowing calluses on my friend’s hands, the beat-up laptop –extension of my hands and mind–that’s never more than a few feet away from me.

Samson et Dalila, Op. 47, by Jessica Tanck
       
I would wonder over it often: the welt
on my teacher’s throat. My hand cupped
round the neck of my cello, hollow

I hugged to me. So thin the music
stand, so thin what kept the din of strings
from the electric weather

of my blood. In profile my teacher’s
tucked hair, frown, perpetual bruise.
Horsehair on metal, purr torn from a gate

thrown open—and to what?
Only when she lifted her violin to play
would I understand the mark—

how close she held the carved thing
to tear its music out.

Click here for more information about Jessica Tanck. Thanks to the Cincinnati Review, where I first found her poetry.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Robert Louis Stevenson

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Registration for our January 8-13, 2024 Write Together session is in full swing. I’d love to see you in this one hour, twice-daily workshop in which we all quietly write together from a guided prompt. It’s a beautiful way to usher in the new year. 

It’s all just too much sometimes, this daily horror show of news. Hard to hang on to what’s left of sanity. This is when I go back in time, in my mind, to my gentle, soft spoken grandfather, who left school after the eighth grade to farm but who carried so much memorized poetry in his mind and heart. I don’t know if Where Go the Boats is one he used to recite to me, but it could have been.

Where Go the Boats, by Robert Louis Stevenson

Dark brown is the river,
golden is the sand.
It flows along for ever,
with trees on either hand.

Green leaves a-floating,
castles of the foam,
boats of mine a-boating—
where will all come home?

On goes the river
and out past the mill,
away down the valley,
a way down the hill.

Away down the river,
a hundred miles or more,
other little children
shall bring my boats ashore.

Click here for more information about Robert Louis Stevenson. 
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter