poem of the week

Poem of the Week, by Patricia Fargnoli

Posted on by alisonmcghee

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.

Poem of the Week, by Mark Kraushaar

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A friend of mine had a husband –lost to cancer now– who saw no reason to stint on the bubbly. Any occasion, he’d pop the cork and fill the flutes. My daughters and I were in the kitchen enjoying a glass of wine the other night, and I was telling them about this guy, and right away we decided to go out to dinner, because we could, so we should. Right? Then I decided that from here on out there’ll be a celebration every day. Go for a run, celebrate! Make a loaf of bread, celebrate! Teach a class, celebrate! Call a friend, celebrate! Wake up still alive? Hell yes.

What If the Hokey Pokey Really Is What It’s All About?
– Mark Kraushaar

You put your right foot in,
            You put your right foot out … ,
            That’s what it’s all about.

            —The Hokey Pokey, Larry LaPrise, 1948

Of an evening filled with wide-set
bright stars I think of my friends, Ray, Sara,
Father Hay, and Phil and Joe.
I think of them together and I think of them alone:
Friends, what better than to put your right foot in,
and what better than to take it out again?

What better than to leave your jacket
and your drink and join
the circled strangers on the floor?
What better than to put your left foot in
and then to take it out since
who’ll explain this strange life anyway,
the problems with love, the trouble with money?
It must be what is meant, this must be what’s intended.
What better than to leave your silent trying behind
and put your right foot in once more
then shake it all about?
What better than having said too little
or too much you join the farmer with his wife
and daughter, the couple with their
squeaky walkers, the FedEx man,
the florist and the LPN?
It must be what is meant,
this must be what it’s all about:
what better than to join the high-heeled,
high-haired waitress first pausing and laughing,
then leaning to her friend the grinning busboy
who, putting his elbow in then out again,
now shakes it all about.

 

For more information on Mark Kraushaar, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by Brian Turner

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Someone once told me to think up a safe place where I could magically be transported when I needed to, when I had no reserves left to deal with whatever was going on around me. This place took about half a second to conjure itself up: a stream, flowers, grass, a sunny field beyond, and invisible me inside some kind of invisible hollow tree. Warm. I can see out but no one can see me. The sound of children playing nearby comes faintly through the invisible bark. There is nothing wrong, no tension and no anger in this place. I still go there sometimes, and the sense of it came rippling over me when I read this poem by Brian Turner.

​
R&R
     – Brian Turner
The curve of her hip where I’d lay my head,
that’s what I’m thinking of now, her fingers
gone slow through my hair on a blue day
ten thousand miles off in the future somewhere,
where the beer is so cold it sweats in your hand,
cool as her kissing you with crushed ice,
her tongue wet with blackberry and melon.
That’s what I’m thinking of now.
Because I’m all out of adrenaline,
all out of smoking incendiaries.
Somewhere deep in the landscape of the brain,
under the skull’s blue curving dome—
that’s where I am now, swaying
in a hammock by the water’s edge
as soldiers laugh and play volleyball
just down the beach, while others tan
and talk with the nurses who bring pills
to help them sleep. And if this is crazy,
then let this be my sanatorium,
let the doctors walk among us here
marking their charts as they will.
I have a lover with hair that falls
like autumn leaves on my skin.
Water that rolls in smooth and cool
as anesthesia. Birds that carry
all my bullets into the barrel of the sun.

—

​For more information on Brian Turner, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/brian-turner​
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Prose Poem of the Week, by Tomas Transtromer

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Right now I’m on a road trip, driving from California to Minnesota. Yesterday I hiked in Zion National Park and then drove for many hours through unfamiliar Utah mountains. These were mountains that seemed to demand silence, so I turned off the music and contemplated them, listening to what they had to say to me, which was something along the lines of why don’t you live here, where you could be silent most of the time and no one would care, no one would notice, because all there are here are mountains and desert and vastness. I was 18 the first time the west drew me to itself, and I wish I had a whole other lifetime to see what life would be like in this unearthly land. This poem –that line Our life has a sister vessel which plies another route– is what the west feels like to me.

 

The Blue House, a prose poem by Tomas Transtromer, trans. Goran Malmqvist

It is night with glaring sunshine. I stand and look towards my house with its misty blue walls. As though I were recently dead and saw the house from a new angle.

It has stood for more than eighty summers. Its timber has been impregnated, four times with joy and three times with sorrow. When someone who has lived in the house dies it is repainted. The dead person paints it himself, without a brush,  from the inside.

On the other side is open terrain. Formerly a garden, now wilderness. A still surf of weed, pagodas of weed, an unfurling body of text, Upanishades of weed, a Viking fleet of weed, dragon heads, lances, an empire of weed.

Above the overgrown garden flutters the shadow of a boomerang, thrown again and again. It is related to someone who lived in the house long before my time. Almost a child. An impulse issues from him, a thought, a thought of will: “create. . .draw. ..” In order to escape his destiny in time.

The house resembles a child’s drawing. A deputizing childishness which grew forth because someone prematurely renounced the charge of being a child. Open the doors, enter! Inside unrest dwells in the ceiling and peace in the walls. Above the bed there hangs an amateur painting representing a ship with seventeen sails, rough sea and a wind which the gilded frame cannot subdue.

It is always so early in here, it is before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. I am grateful for this life! And yet I miss the alternatives. All sketches wish to be real.

A motor far out on the water extends the horizon of the summer night. Both joy and sorrow swell in the magnifying glass of the dew. We do not actually know it, but we sense it: our life has a sister vessel which plies an entirely different route. While the sun burns behind the islands.

 

For more information on Tomas Transtromer, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by Denise Levertov

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1) Once, a long time ago, I stood at a pay phone in southern Florida, trying desperately to make the person on the other end of the line stay on the line. As I talked, an albino frog jumped from a hiding place onto my clenched hand and stayed there like a blob of putty. 2) Another long time ago, I decided to spend the day at my toddler’s pace. It was one of the longest days of my life –no Hurry up, come on, let’s go— and one of the sweetest. 3) The other day, I started to wash dishes and saw a brown shape in the drain sink. A small lizard, motionless. We scooped him up in a tall glass and released him onto a patch of weedy grass. What these three memories have to do with this poem, I don’t really know –maybe something about each minute the last minute— but they all came into my head when I read it.

Living
– Denise Levertov

The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.

The wind blowing, the leaves
shivering in the sun,
each day the last day.

A red salamander
so cold and so
easy to catch, dreamily

moves his delicate feet
and long tail. I hold
my hand open for him to go.

Each minute the last minute.

 

For more information on Denise Levertov, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by Tina Kelley

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Sometimes I lie in the hammock at my shack in Vermont and look up –way up– at the two white pines it’s roped between. One of those white pines is so huge that it scares my friend. She thinks it holds too much power, like a keeper of the gates, but that’s what I like about it. Trees, trees, trees and me go way back. All the mountains I’ve hiked up, where the trees get shorter and spindlier until they disappear, and there’s nothing but the sky and rock and you. Once, I beheld a gray owl on a tree limb. I tilted my head left, the better to take him in, and so did he. I tilted right, and  so did he. We stood that way for a long time, regarding each other. There could be worse things than being descended from trees.

Having Evolved From Trees
– Tina Kelley
We are hazel-eyed.
Some things we are certain of:
Sun in the forest adds extra rooms.

We hide inner twisting under our skin.
A beehive within is a blessing.
Never play with matches. Ever.

We teach: to bloom, to fruit, to peel,
to heal in a swirling burl,
to suffer pruning silently.

We remember the itch of chickadees,
blue air of twilight like a shawl,
the liquor it resembles. We taste with whole selves.

Our women are never too stocky, don’t diet.
Our day — dressing, bedding down — is a year.
At weddings we wear wrensong tatting in our hair.

We converse in the pulses of rained-on leaves.
Our god is wind. We need no heartbeat.
We worship by swaying, masts in a marina.

Our low song, too low, withers and flaps.
We sanctify the privilege of embrace,
of running, the afterlife of dance.

The sun pulls life through us,
up and flaring, a yellow scarf
from a magic tube, higher, wider.

We die with loved ones, rot in their presence,
nourish their offspring and watch
the continuance, ever, exulting.

—

​For more information on Tina Kelley, please click ​here.

—
My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

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Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

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A couple of years ago I read that Naomi Shihab Nye was going to be speaking at a local school that night, free, everyone welcome to attend. I zipped over and sat right in the front row of a small room and drank in everything she said and everything she read. If my favorite foods are what people call comfort food – things like potstickers, peanut butter cookies with the crisscross fork mark on top, soups simmered in a big cast iron pot – then Naomi Shihab Nye is the poetry equivalent of comfort food, but never in an anodyne or predictable way. She is a poet who begins with a thing, a real, tangible thing (and I am a writer who loves the thingness of things) and from that thing she somehow spirals a kite of words up into the air and stitches it to feelings and experience in a fearlessly human way that makes me feel more connected to the world.

The Rider
– Naomi Shihab Nye
A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn’t catch up to him,
the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.
What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.
A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.

—

​For more information on , please click here​: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/naomi-shihab-nye

—
My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

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Poem of the Week, by Richard Jones

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Whatever brain function places memory within the context of time is lacking in me, which means that something that happened 20 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 already send it a few weeks ago. When I came to this one, which I’ve loved for twelve 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 64,428 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 1) the world is small, 2) a beautiful poem transcends time, and 3) my son is so awesome.

After Work

– 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.



—

​For more information on Richard Jones, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Chard deNiord

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My favorite phrase in Mandarin is “Changjiang shangyou hen feiwo,” which translates to “The upper reaches of the Yangtze River valley are very rich and fertile,”a fact that has nothing to do with why I love it. If you could hear it spoken you might understand, because the way the chang rises up to meet the jiang (Chinese is a tonal language) and then swoops from the abrupt shang waaaay down to the you, the curving sonority of which is matched by the hen, the whole sentence ending with a slight curve of fei to the command of the WO! is entrancing. That whole rhythm=hypnotic thing is why I love this poem.

Anchorite* in Autumn
– Chard deNiord

She rose from bed and coughed
for an hour. Entered her niche
that was also her shower. Shaved
her legs with Ockham’s razor.
Rinsed her hair with holy
water. Opened the curtain
that was double-layered. Slipped
on her robe in the widening
gyre. Gazed in the mirror
with gorgeous terror. Took out
a cigarette and held it
like a flower. Lit it devoutly
like the wick of a pyre. Smoked
like a thurible in the grip of a friar.
Stared out the window
at the leaves on fire, fire, fire…

—

*If you, like me, aren’t entirely sure what anchorite means, it means “religious recluse.”

​For more info on Chard deNiord, please click here.

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