The theme announced for this month's poetry session was Women Poets. As it turned out Louise Glück (the surname rhymes with click) was announced on Oct 8, 2020 as the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. She is only the third woman poet to get the prize, the first being Gabriela Mistral in 1945, and the second, Wisława Szymborska in 1996.
Isolated by necessity since the Covid-19 virus struck, we have been forced for six months to have our gatherings on the Web, with only occasional glimpses of each other. We are longing to meet surrounded by birds and trees. Shoba has invited us to her little piece of forest in the heart of the metro as soon as the virus is defeated:
A poem is a kind of experiment run under precise conditions, in which the reader (and the first reader, the writer) is both one of the elements and also the glass beaker in which the elements are mixed.
The poem uses Greek mythology in order to depict the troubled relationship between mother and daughter. In the context of the poem, it is about a modern Demeter (the mother) who in her search discovers a modern Persephone (the daughter) in the underworld of modern Paris, abducted by the Hades of modern civilisation.
The poet describes the skewering of the roast beef:
Man has not yet tasted the friendship and company of a liberated woman as an equal partner. Men and women have not yet met as two independent human beings. If men and women are not economically independent, how can they love? Generally women love out of a sense of insecurity. Love is admiration and companionship of the other person. Economic enslavement obstructs the experience of love.
The Life and Achievements of Louise Glück
Glück's parents were was of Russian and Hungarian Jewish descent. Louise Glück, was born in 1943, and started writing poems in her young teens. Her Nobel citation this year reads: ‘for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.’
She has won almost every major award in poetry. She resides in Cambridge, Mass., and teaches at Yale.
She knew from an early age she wanted to be a writer, an artist and would submit pieces to magazines. Her parents encouraged her and she got her love of mythology, amply displayed in her poetry, from her mother. An eating disorder called anorexia nervosa affected her badly at a young age; it took her seven years of psychotherapy to get over it. She took a poetry class at Sarah Lawrence College and, from 1963 to 1966, she enrolled in poetry workshops at Columbia University's School of General Studies, which offered a degree program for non-traditional students. She met the poet Stanley Kunitz at Columbia whom she acknowledges for helping her ‘find her own voice.’
While attending poetry workshops, Glück began to publish her poems. After leaving Columbia without a degree, Glück supported herself with secretarial work. She married Charles Hertz Jr. in 1967 but the marriage ended in divorce In 1968,
Her first collection of poems, appropriately called Firstborn, was published in 1968, which received some positive critical attention. There are a variety of first-person voices, mostly angry or alienated. Their harshness turned off many, but critics recognised her originality and skill. It won the Academy of American Poets’ Prize and brought her offers of teaching which she refused, thinking it would distract from her vocation of artist. She preferred to do the undemanding work of a secretary and continue writing poetry.
Her entry into academics occurred when she was invited to a writer’s gathering in Vermont, where she knew that one of her idols, John Berryman, would be present. Amid convivial friends she was asked to remain in Vermont and find a job. She found Vermont instantly attractive and soon got a temporary position at Goddard College in 1971. From all accounts she was deeply attached to her students and provided them helpful critique to nourish their ambitions.
In 1973, Glück gave birth to a son, Noah, with her partner John Dranow, an author who had started the summer writing program at Goddard College and whom she married in 1977. The marriage ended in divorce in 1996.
Her second book, The House on Marshland, appeared in 1975. She assumed a number of voices, including that of Joan of Arc. Use of mythical and historical figures continued as a feature of her work throughout. She never wrote poems piecemeal. Her successive books of poems were all produced as single tomes constructed as an organic whole. Sometimes a year or two would pass with her being unable to write a single poem, but perhaps carrying some persistent lines in her head. Then it would all erupt on the page and in two months she could complete a fresh volume of poems. She saw to it she did not repeat herself, but covered new ground, by taking a new perspective or immersing herself in a completely different world.
Her third book, The Garden, followed within a year of Marshland, but her next book, Descending Figure, came out only in 1980. In 1983, she began a 20-year teaching career at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She taught for one semester a year, but continued staying at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a 3-hour drive away.
In 1980 a fire destroyed Glück's house in Vermont, resulting in the loss of all of her possessions. In the wake of that tragedy, Glück began to write the poems that would later be collected in her award-winning work, The Triumph of Achilles which was brought out in 1985. This collection continued her use of mythological themes and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. A favourite Glück poem, Mock Orange is in this collection; there’s also Metamorphosis about her father dying.
Her language has been described as spare, and her subjects tend to be dissections of human frailties and miscarriages of family relations, along with a perennial occupation of poets: suffering and death.
An older sister died before Glück was born and this left a scar on her and her mother, which is difficult to place. Glück says somewhere, “Her death let me be born.” Her father became a successful entrepreneur. A younger sister, Tereze appears in Glück’s poems, but they do not seem to connect affectionately. Cousins do not get along either as she describes in a poem called Cousins; her son Noah (by husband John Dranow, whom she divorced somewhat bitterly) and Tereze’s daughter are at odds. With her father she seems to have had very few conversations and in one her poems (New World from Ararat her fifth collection in 1990) she blames him squarely for keeping her mother down.
Ararat (1990) takes on an autobiographical tone – raising children, women taking leave of father and husband, sibling rivalry and such things. The language can be brutal at times. It won the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress and stands out among her admired books. The 1990s were the most productive decades of Glück’s career.
In 1992 The Wild Iris came out. The 54 poems in the book were written in only ten weeks and follow the seasons in a garden in new England. It is set in a garden and written in three voices: flowers speaking to the gardener-poet, the gardener-poet, and a god figure. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, as well as the award of the Poetry Society of America. The Wild Iris was followed within a year by Mock Orange. In 1994 she also published her first prose collection, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry. The success of The Wild Iris increased demand for Glück’s earlier works, and in 1995 an edition of The First Four Books of Poems appeared.
Her 1997 book, Meadowlands, juxtaposes the Homeric tale of Odysseus, Penelope, and their son Telemachus with a modern tale of marriage and divorce. Many readers saw this book as a response to the end of Glück’s second divorce, and its effect on her and her son (John Drannow is now a sommelier in California).
Vita Nova (1999) takes it title from Dante and links the poet’s experience of loss and recovery to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. But it has nothing to do with Dante and Beatrice meeting on the bridge in Florence, and Dante’s eternal devotion thereafter, and subsequent attempt to sublimate his carnal love into a spiritual longing for the divine. Rather, this collection has to do with Orpheus losing Eurydice, and Dido’s longing for Aeneas to return to Carthage, and Penelope left behind in Ithaca; women forsaken is the theme, and how to make a new life.
In 2000 Louise Glück received the most coveted prize for poetry in America, the Bollingen Prize. She began a three-year term as a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress for its bicentennial. The Seven Ages, a new volume of poetry, was published in 2001.
In 2003 after 20 years at Williams College, she became the Rosenkranz Writer-in-Residence at Yale University. Later she served a one-year term as United States Poet Laureate. A poem in six parts, October, arrived later in the year.
Glück’s tenth book of verse, Averno (2006), takes its name from a lake in southern Italy, believed in Roman times to be the entrance to the underworld. It is a long lament and explores the myth of Persephone – the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, who became the queen of the underworld through her abduction by Hades, the god of the underworld. (Persephone also figures in the poem The Bistro Styx above by Rita Dove, read by Arundhaty). The poems concern how to take care of a dying body that wants to descend into the cold earth; and is yet renewable. The despairing world the poet conjures up for the soul is devoid of comfort or hope.
Her 2009 book, A Village Life, is situated in a traditional society, probably Italian, tied to the rhythms of nature, as it gradually transforms to frantic modern life. A Village Life won great reviews for Glück and confirmed her as a major poet of America.
Five decades of her work were gathered in Poems 1962-2012 which weighs a kilo and has 656 pages. It has all her poems except the collection she made in in 2014, Faithful and Virtuous Night.
President Barack Obama presented her with the National Humanities Medal in 2016. The following year, Glück published her second book of essayts, American Originality: Essays on Poetry.
Louise Glück died on Oct 13, 2023 aged eighty, three years after this KRG reading. An obituary of hers published in the New York Times is linked here.
Personal Observations
A few personal observations on the poetry of Louise Glück. Like every poet the experiences of living are captured in her poems. The hope that poets entertain is that though what is described has the particularity of a unique life, what is presented to the reader as a distillate will evoke a sympathetic response – and failing that, it will at least reveal a new vision.
Glück’s life experiences have been trials for her. Her relations with her own family growing up seem to have been cold, and she had a bad attack of anorexia that crippled her for many years. Even her poetry writing gave her trouble, often leaving her blank for years at a stretch. She would despair. Her own two marriages ended in divorce and the first one was bitter. Her solace seems to have been teaching and nurturing younger poets, which she did generously for decades.
I found her poetry hard to take in any large dose. I bought her 676 page collection as an e-book, hoping I could read a lot of the poems. I gave up, because her voice is by turns lamenting and cynical, and holds out little hope for humans. I don’t go looking for God in poetry, or hope to find eternal verities there. I know how despairing life can be for many. That death seals an end is something we grow up and accept, whether or not we believe in anything that endures beyond. Having read Camus in my teens I knew the voice of one who expressed that life was profoundly absurd. But there was hope still, he maintained.
I have not met a poet as grim as Louise Glück who holds out no hope at all. Forget hope – what about a a little humour in the poems? And please can I have have a real love poem? Just one in those hundreds, not a poem that masquerades with the title Love Poem, and hits a brick wall in the last line, and starts out pretentiously – There is always something to be made of pain.
A word her admirers often use is ‘spare;’ what they mean is there is no elevation of language we have come to associate with poetry. Another term is ‘austere’ and I conclude that evocative metaphors are missing. They also use the word ‘colloquial’ as though that would somehow commend poetry; but the colloquial is not memorable unless it is tinged with other qualities such as wit. If you listen to any of her poetry readings on Youtube, the voice is lugubrious, and lacks utterly in animation.
KumKum
I was astounded. I didn't know her name, said KumKum. My God, she has achieved so much. KumKum selected two poems by Alice Oswald: A Story of the Falling Rain and Full Moon. She read a year-old article on her in The Telegraph of London that she was elected to the prestigious position of Oxford Professor of Poetry in June 2019.
The election of Alice Oswald will also see the tenure of the first female Professor of Poetry at Oxford. After going through many of her poems, and reading several articles on her in The Guardian, The New Yorker and The Telegraph, KumKum felt ashamed, that she had not heard about this poet or her poems before.
She was therefore pleased to introduce this remarkable modern English poet to KRG at our session on Women Poets.
Alice Priscilla Lyle Oswald was born in 1966 in Reading, Berkshire. Now she lives in Devon with her husband and children. She read Classics at New College, Oxford. She also learned to design a garden, and worked as a garden designer for a while. Her mother was a well known garden designer. Alice inherited the passion from her mother. Her own garden at Devon is described as “a study in horticultural insouciance.”
Her love of gardens and garden designing was yet another factor that attracted KumKum to her work.
She is hailed as a nature poet, but her poems are not a litany of appreciation of nature and its beauty; nor even does it highlight any natural wonders. She has her own twists as she writes about Nature, which. are definitely not the usual paeans to Nature. “Her nature poems tend to be revisions of earlier poems on the same subjects ... This isn’t simply influence or homage, though Oswald is generous about crediting her forebears.”
She wished rather “to collaborate with the dead” in an effort to make their poems contemporary with her own ideas and imagination.
At present she lives by the river Dart. Dart is also a book-length poem which won her the T.S. Eliot prize in 2020. The poem follows the course of this river from its source to where it enters the sea. It is full of the life of the people living by its banks.
Memorial, is another of her unique books of poems. Memorial comes with a subtitle, “An excavation of the Iliad.” The poems of this book are truly based on an action of excavation. She sets aside the important characters and the heroes of the classic Iliad, and instead, invests her poetic imagination to highlight the minor characters, whose names are difficult to pronounce. She deals with these characters and alludes to their insignificant actions in Homer’s classic.
Alice Oswald has published many books of poems, and she has received many awards for her works.
This article is based on:
1. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/12/alice-oswalds-falling-awake
2. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/22/alice-oswald-interview-falling-awake
3. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/is-alice-oswald-our-greatest-living-poet/
KumKum cautioned that Alice Oswald is a difficult poet, not easy to understand, and there's not much help on the Web. The first poem The Story of Falling Rain, ponders the action of sunlight and falling rain, in turning the tiny seed into a leaf. But the water is not trapped – it issues forth again as it rises to the cloud and comes down again,
which is the story of the falling rain
that rises to the light and falls again
It is the well-known cycle of vegetation attracting rain-drenched clouds, and then the water being trapped in the roots and keeping the the earth moist to nourish even more vegetation which gives off water-vapour during respiration. KumKum liked these lines:
then I might know like water how to balance
the weight of hope against the light of patience
In the second poem, Full Moon, the poet makes out of moonlight a substance that can form, reform and dissolve into creatures like deer. And yet pass through peepholes. She describes this as follows:
Something needs to be said to describe my moonlight.
Almost frost but softer, almost ash but wholer.
Made almost of water, which has strictly speaking
No feature, but a kind of counter-light, call it insight.
It is all imagination, but what a soft, elusive, invention moonlight has become in her mind! It is fit to make into moon-beings in the next stanza that are ‘visible invisible visible invisible’, climbing and clinging to her bones until she is startled:
Good God! Who have I been last night?
Priya's comment was the poem was abstract, and Arundhaty said she liked it. Geetha liked the second one. But both Zakia and KumKum took to a fancy to the the first one on falling rain, but there’s nothing straightforward to the description. In the bio KumKum gives an idea of her writing style.
Pamela
Denise Levertov was born on 24 Oct 1923 and died on 20 Dec 1997. She went through the Great Depression, WWII, and the Vietnam War – all of which affected her. At the age of five she declared she would be a writer. When she was twelve she sent several of her poems directly to T.S. Eliot. “She received a two-page typewritten letter from him, offering her ‘excellent advice.’ … His letter gave her renewed impetus for making poems and sending them out,” says Jean Gould the anthologist.
In 1940 at the age of seventeen she published her first poem. She was a nurse in London during WWII. She moved from England to America and the American influence helped her identify with the the Black Mountain poets Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley. She had a part-time appointment at the University of Washington. For eleven years she held a full professorship at Stanford University. She underwent a conversion to Christianity in 1984. She spent the last two years in Seattle, Washington. Her themes were politics and war, focusing on the injustice of the war inflicted by America on Vietnam. The book Freeing of the Dust spells out her resistance. She joined the War Resisters League. Toward the end of her life she came to the conclusion that beauty, poetry and politics can't go together. She turned to religious themes.
She has used a lot of metaphors. A collection called Evening Train, shows Levertov to be moving and meditative, as she confronts the natural world in serious danger from human mistreatment.
Pamela chose two short poems. The first, Aware, is an example of the metaphors she used. Very nice said, Priya. The poem reminded Pamela of a spooky story KumKum wrote about the Dutch Cemetery and the dancing soldiers. A lot of the words like hushed, whisper, abundant ... sounded like the atmosphere of her story. KumKum said she has written another story in which she decided to have a character murdered.
KumKum said the many empty houses around Fort Kochi makes her dream of all kinds of stories that might have taken place in them.
The next poem was Prisoners. Common ordinary food runs as a powerful theme. We seem to feed today on rotten “knowledge-apples” during our journeys, the poet says. The apple itself may not be bad but it's been tainted by “poisoned soil”, probably from the use of pesticides. The apples we used to eat were organic, harder in texture, but they were delicious. The poet says “plain bread” used to be satisfying, but we lack even this common hearty food.
KumKum had not heard of Denise Levertov, but she is a well-known poet, as Priya said. Our late Tom Duddy knew her personally. A lecturer from Stella Maris College, Chennai, suggested this poem to Pamela.
Priya
Priya chose the poem Love at First Sight by the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska (pronounced vees-WAH-vah shim-BOR-ska), the second woman poet to receive the Nobel award for Literature her poetry, in 1996. Priya supplied the following biography of the poet, culled from various sources.
Poet Bio
Maria Wisława Anna Szymborska (2 July 1923 – 1 February 2012) was a Polish poet, essayist, translator and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Prowent, now a part of Kórnik, she later resided in Kraków until the end of her life. Szymborska was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature “for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.” She became better known internationally as a result. Her work has been translated into English and many European languages, as well as into Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Persian and Chinese.
In a poem she wrote, Some Like Poetry ("Niektórzy lubią poezję"), she estimated that perhaps two out of a thousand people like poetry.
Education and Early years
When World War II broke out in 1939, she continued her education in underground classes. Starting 1943 she worked as a railroad employee and managed to avoid being deported to Germany for forced labour. During this time her career as an artist began, with illustrations for an English-language textbook. She also began writing stories and occasional poems. In 1945, she studied Polish literature before switching to sociology at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. A sidebar on this university: The Jagiellonian University is the oldest higher education institution in Poland and one of the oldest in Europe. It was founded on 12 May, 1364 by the Polish king Casimir the Great.
At the university she became involved in the local literary scene, and met Czesław Miłosz (CHES-wahf MEE-wawsh) who influenced her. In March 1945, she published her first poem, Szukam słowa (“Looking for words”), in the daily newspaper Dziennik Polski. Her poems continued to be published in various newspapers and periodicals for a number of years. In 1948, she quit her studies without a degree, for lack of finances; the same year, she married poet Adam Włodek, whom she divorced in 1954. They remained close until Włodek's death in 1986. Their union was childless.
Her first book was to be published in 1949, but did not pass censorship as it “did not meet socialist requirements.”
Political Views
Szymborska adhered to the official ideology of the People's Republic of Poland (PRL) early in her career, signing an infamous 1953 political petition condemning Polish priests who were accused of treason in a show trial. Her early work supported socialist themes, as seen in her debut collection Dlatego żyjemy (“That is what we are living for”), containing the poems Lenin and Młodzieży budującej Nową Hutę (“For the Youth who are building Nowa Huta”), about the construction of a Stalinist industrial town near Kraków. She became a member of the ruling Polish United Workers' Party.
Although she initially hewed close to the official party line, Szymborska grew estranged from socialist ideology and renounced her earlier political work as the Polish Communist Party shifted from Stalinist communism to “national” communism. She did not officially leave the Communist party until 1966, but began to establish contacts with dissidents. As early as 1957, she befriended Jerzy Giedroyc, the editor of the influential Paris-based emigre journal Kultura, to which she contributed. In 1964, she opposed a Communist-backed protest to The Times against independent intellectuals; she demanded freedom of speech.
Literary Life
In 1953, Szymborska joined the staff of the literary review magazine Życie Literackie (Literary Life), where she continued to work until 1981. From 1968 onward she had a book review column, Lektury Nadobowiązkowe. From 1981 to 1983, she was an editor of the Kraków-based monthly periodical NaGlos (OutLoud). In the 1980s, she intensified her oppositional activities, contributing to the samizdat periodical Arka under the pseudonym “Stańczykówna”, as well as to Kultura. The last collection published while Szymborska was still alive, Dwukropek, was chosen as the best book of 2006 by readers of Poland's Gazeta Wyborcza.
She also translated French literature into Polish, in particular Baroque poetry and the works of Agrippa d'Aubigné. In Germany, Szymborska was associated with her translator Karl Dedecius, who did much to popularise her works there.
Death and last works
Surrounded by friends and relatives, Szymborska died peacefully in her sleep at home in Kraków in 2012, aged 88; she was suffering from lung cancer. Her last poems were published after her death in 2012. In 2013, the Wisława Szymborska Award was established in honour of her legacy.
Themes
Szymborska frequently employed literary devices such as ironic precision, paradox, contradiction, and understatement to illuminate philosophical themes and obsessions. Many of her poems feature war and terrorism. She wrote from unusual points of view, such as a cat in the newly empty apartment of its dead owner. Her reputation rests on a relatively small body of work, fewer than 350 poems. When asked why she had published so few poems, she said, “I have a trash can in my home.” This echoes other writers who have thought of the waste paper basket as the writer’s best friend. Or as Hemingway confided to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934: “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”
Pop culture
In 1999 the acclaimed Taiwanese illustrator Jimmy Liao created the picture story A Chance of Sunshine which is also known as Turn Left, Turn Right. It was inspired by Szymborska’s poem Love at First Sight.
Krzysztof Kieślowski's film Three Colors: Red was also inspired by the same poem.
Szymborska's poem Nothing Twice was set to music by Andrzej Munkowski and performed by Łucja Prus in 1965. Rock singer Kora's cover of the poem was a hit in 1994.
In her last years Szymborska collaborated with the Polish jazz trumpeter Tomasz Stańko, who dedicated his record Wisława (ECM, 2013) to her memory, taking inspiration from their collaboration and her poetry.
Szymborska's poem People on the Bridge was made into a film by Beata Pozniak.
Love at First Sight by Wisława Szymborska was translated by Walter Whipple.
This poem was translated into 10 languages and enjoyed by millions of readers around the world. Priya likes this poem which talks of two people who cross each other's path, not knowing that ultimately they will fall in love and become lovers. Whether they will meet or not remains in doubt.
They’re both convinced
that a sudden passion joined them.
Such certainty is beautiful,
but uncertainty is more beautiful still.
Why is uncertainty more beautiful – is it because the torment of not knowing whether the love will ever be fulfilled lends moments of trepidation in which the attraction becomes sweeter? Several of the readers (Saras, KumKum, Pamela) loved the ending and termed it very beautiful ––
Every beginning
is only a sequel, after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.
Priya said it reminded her of the incident in An Equal Music by Vikram Seth where the two lovers cross each other going in opposite directions in a double-decker bus on Oxford Street. Michael Holme and Julia McNichol, lovers from music school days in Vienna who lose each other, remarkably reunite ten years later in London.
Noting Priya's difficulty in pronouncing Polish names Thommo narrated a joke about a guy who went to the optician for an eye test and when asked to read what was on the eye chart, said, “Why read it, I know the person very well.” The laughter rang. Saras said there are so many Polish people who've got Nobel awards. KumKum mentioned Maria Skłodowska (Madame Curie) who won two Nobel prizes, one for Chemistry (1911) and one for Physics (1903), and in the Curie family they won four awards altogether.
Joe commented about Priya's remark on the paucity of output by Szymborska (350 poems). Copiousness of output is only one measure; more important is whether after a hundred years even one or two poems of the poet will be remembered. Priya countered that according to Szymborska only one in two thousand reads poetry. Not true, said Joe, not true of India, and not true of Russia, another poetry-loving country, where they not only read poems but memorise them. That was how the poems of the Stalinist days were remembered, in the minds of poets and their immediate listeners who memorised them. They feared to write them down for they could be raided by the secret police, the NKVD, and locked up and sent to the Gulag.
KumKum told about a reading group in Philadelphia to whom she confessed KRG read poetry in addition to novels. They were maha impressed, “You are educated,” they said, hearing which KumKum was tickled.
Saras
Carol Ann Duffy is a British poet and playwright born in 1965. She has been recited several times before at KRG. She is the Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. She was the Poet Laureate from 2009 till 2019. As a Poet Laureate she made many firsts: first woman, first Scottish born person, and first LGBT person to hold the post. Many poems of hers address gender, oppression, violence, in a language which common people can relate to. Quite a few poems of hers are included in the high school Literature and English syllabus in UK.
This poem The Little Red Cap , is the first poem in the collection The World's Wife; it talks of her relationship to a British poet with whom she had an affair when she was fifteen years old. She was in school with him and she credits him with teaching her about poetry. “He gave me confidence, he was great. It was all poetry, very heady, and he was never faithful. He thought poets had a duty to be unfaithful.” He was unfaithful because in his thinking poets have a duty to be unfaithful in love. (Laughter!) Later she found her true self (sexuality?) and had an affair with another poet, a woman called Jackie Kay, with whom she had a 15-year relationship. During her relationship with Kay, Duffy gave birth to a daughter, Ella (born 1995), whose biological father is fellow poet Peter Benson. She is now openly lesbian.
The poem is about sexual awakening and artistic coming of age. She talks of a wolf and the wolf is clearly Adrian Henri, with whom she had the ten-year relationship starting at age 16. Little Red Cap falls in love with the Wolf and
I made quite sure he spotted me
Sweet sixteen
the same age Duffy and Henri met at. The poem describes how their relationship helped Little Red Cap grow into adulthood
But then I was young – and it took ten years
Saras said the wood represents her adolescence and how she grows up. Adrian Henri is the person who has helped her grow. After a while she gets disillusioned by him and says:
that a greying wolf
Howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out
Season after season, same rhyme, same reason
As her poem states, the two shared a sexual relationship, and they inspired each other's writing.
Of course, in keeping with the volume The World's Wife, every familiar story has been re-interpreted from the woman's angle. So too, here the Little Red Riding Hood tale is re-imagined from the viewpoint of the girl who is taken in at first, but in the end gets her own back by taking the axe to the wolf who had swallowed her grandmother:
As he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw
The glistening, virgin white of my grandmother’s bones
I filled his old belly with stones.
She gets rid of the hold Adrian Henri, the wolf, had over her sexually, and through his poems. She emerges from the wood into adulthood.
KumKum said it was Talitha in 2008 who introduced Carol Ann Duffy to KRG by reading the poem Anne Hathaway, from The World's Wife which ends
I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head
as he held me upon that next best bed.
She has also written a poem in 2010 for David Beckham, when a torn achilles tendon dashed the footballer’s hopes of playing in the World Cup.
Shoba
Two poems of Margaret Atwood were featured by Shoba. Margaret Atwood was born in Nov 1939. She is a Canadian poet, novelist, critic, teacher, environmental activist and inventor of the LongPen, a device that facilitates remote robotic writing. She is also the founder of the Griffin Poetry Prize and Writer s Trust of Canada.
She has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of non-fiction and 8 children’s books. She has won the Booker Prize twice: for The Blind Assassin in 2000 and for The Testament in 2019. At 79 she became the oldest ever writer to take home the Booker. She has also won The Arthur C Clarke Award and PEN centre USA Lifetime Achievement Award.
She was born in Ottawa. Her mother Margaret Dorothy was a dietician and nutritionist. Her father, Carl Edmund Atwood was a scientist, studying forest entomology. She spent much of her childhood in his company, in the backwoods of northern Quebec. She did not attend school until the age of 8. She was the second of three children, with an older brother Harold and a younger sister Ruth.
She began to write poems and stories from the age of 6. At 16 Atwood began to take writing seriously and decided to pursue it full time. She studied at Victoria College at the University of Toronto and did her Masters at Radcliffe college in Cambridge, Mass. She attended Harvard University in 1962-63, and 65-67.
She taught at various universities while writing.
She was married to Jim Polk, an American writer. They divorced in 1973. Since then, she has been in a relationship with novelist Graeme Gibson. He died in 2019.
She won fame and recognition through her book The Handmaid’s Tale, adapted as a serial on Netflix. She wrote the book in 1984, while living in West Berlin, before the Wall dividing it from East Berlin fell.
Her writing has been labelled as feminist. Atwood rejects the epithet, and believes her work to be just human.
Six of her books have been adapted for TV and film: The Surfacing, The Rubber Bride, Wandering Wendy, Payback and Alias Grace. She wrote The Testament in 2019, a sequel to the Handmaid’s Tale.
Our land is more valuable than your money. It will last forever. It will not even perish by the flames of fire. As long as the sun shines and the waters flow, this land will be here to give life to men and animals. We cannot sell the lives of men and animals; therefore we cannot sell this land. It was put here for us by the Great Spirit and we cannot sell it because it does not belong to us. You can count your money and burn it within the nod of a buffalo's head, but only the great Spirit can count the grains of sand and the blades of grass of these plains. As a present to you, we will give you anything we have that you can take with you, but the land, never. –– Crowfoot, chief of the Blackfeet, circa 1885
“To select, for approbation the peculiar elements that come from some supposedly Jewish heredity is to open the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory ... At thirteen I was not only converted to other religious views, but I also stopped believing that the Jewish people are in any way ‘the chosen people.’”
The Poems
Talitha
Two poems by Jane Hirshfield
1. I Wanted To Be Surprised
To such a request, the world is obliging.
In just the past week, a rotund porcupine,
who seemed equally startled by me.
The man who swallowed a tiny microphone
to record the sounds of his body,
not considering beforehand how he might remove it.
A cabbage and mustard sandwich on marbled bread.
How easily the large spiders were caught with a clear plastic cup
surprised even them.
I don’t know why I was surprised every time love started or ended.
Or why each time a new fossil, Earth-like planet, or war.
Or that no one kept being there when the doorknob had clearly.
What should not have been so surprising:
my error after error, recognized when appearing on the faces of others.
What did not surprise enough:
my daily expectation that anything would continue,
and then that so much did continue, when so much did not.
Small rivulets still flowing downhill when it wasn’t raining.
A sister’s birthday.
Also, the stubborn, courteous persistence.
That even today please means please,
good morning is still understood as good morning,
and that when I wake up,
the window’s distant mountain remains a mountain,
the borrowed city around me is still a city, and standing.
Its alleys and markets, offices of dentists,
drug store, liquor store, Chevron.
Its library that charges—a happy surprise—no fine for overdue books:
Borges, Baldwin, Szymborska, Morrison, Cavafy.
(Published in The New Yorker, June 10 & 17, 2019, issue)
2. Optimism
More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs—all this resinous, unretractable earth.
Arundhaty
poem by Rita Dove
The Bistro Styx
She was thinner, with a mannered gauntness
as she paused just inside the double
glass doors to survey the room, silvery cape
billowing dramatically behind her. What's this,
I thought, lifting a hand until
she nodded and started across the parquet;
that's when I saw she was dressed all in gray,
from a kittenish cashmere skirt and cowl
down to the graphite signature of her shoes.
"Sorry I'm late," she panted, though
she wasn't, sliding into the chair, her cape
tossed off in a shudder of brushed steel.
We kissed. Then I leaned back to peruse
my blighted child, this wary aristocratic mole.
"How's business?" I asked, and hazarded
a motherly smile to keep from crying out:
Are you content to conduct your life
as a cliché and, what's worse,
an anachronism, the brooding artist's demimonde?
Near the Rue Princesse they had opened
a gallery cum souvenir shop which featured
fuzzy off-color Monets next to his acrylics, no doubt,
plus bearded African drums and the occasional miniature
gargoyle from Notre Dame the Great Artist had
carved at breakfast with a pocket knife.
"Tourists love us. The Parisians, of course" –
she blushed – "are amused, though not without
a certain admiration ..."
The Chateaubriand
arrived on a bone-white plate, smug and absolute
in its fragrant crust, a black plug steaming
like the heart plucked from the chest of a worthy enemy;
one touch with her fork sent pink juices streaming.
"Admiration for what?" Wine, a bloody
Pinot Noir, brought color to her cheeks. "Why,
the aplomb with which we've managed
to support our Art" – meaning he'd convinced
her to pose nude for his appalling canvases,
faintly futuristic landscapes strewn
with carwrecks and bodies being chewed
by rabid cocker spaniels. "I'd like to come by
the studio," I ventured, "and see the new stuff."
"Yes, if you wish ..." A delicate rebuff
before the warning: "He dresses all
in black now. Me, he drapes in blues and carmine –
and even though I think it's kinda cute,
in company I tend toward more muted shades."
She paused and had the grace
to drop her eyes. She did look ravishing,
spookily insubstantial, a lipstick ghost on tissue,
or as if one stood on a fifth-floor terrace
peering through a fringe of rain at Paris'
dreaming chimney pots, each sooty issue
wobbling skyward in an ecstatic oracular spiral.
"And he never thinks of food. I wish
I didn't have to plead with him to eat...." Fruit
and cheese appeared, arrayed on leaf-green dishes.
I stuck with café crème. "This Camembert's
so ripe," she joked, "it's practically grown hair,"
mucking a golden glob complete with parsley sprig
onto a heel of bread. Nothing seemed to fill
her up: She swallowed, sliced into a pear,
speared each tear-shaped lavaliere
and popped the dripping mess into her pretty mouth.
Nowhere the bright tufted fields, weighted
vines and sun poured down out of the south.
"But are you happy?" Fearing, I whispered it
quickly. "What? You know, Mother" –
she bit into the starry rose of a fig –
"one really should try the fruit here."
I've lost her, I thought, and called for the bill.
Devika
Punjabi poem by Amrita Pritam
Main Tenu Fir Milaan Gi
Kithey? Kis Tarah? Pata Nai
Shayad Terey Takhayul Di Chinag Ban Ke
Terey Canvas Tey Utraan Gi
Ya Khowrey Terey Canvas Dey Utey
Ikk Rahasmayi Lakeer Ban Ke
Khamosh Tenu Tak Di Rawaan Gi
I will meet you yet again
How and where? I know not.
Perhaps I will become a
figment of your imagination
and maybe, spreading myself
in a mysterious line
on your canvas,
I will keep gazing at you.
Yaa Khowrey Sooraj Di Loo Ban Ke
Terey Rangaan Wich Ghulaan Gi
Yaa Rangaan Diyan Bahwaan Wich Baith Ke
Terey Canvas Nuu Walaan Gi
Pata Nai Kiss Tarah? Kithey?
Par Tenu Zaroor Milaan Gi
Perhaps I will become a ray
of sunshine, to be
embraced by your colours.
I will paint myself on your canvas
I know not how and where –
but I will meet you for sure.
Yaa Khowrey Ikk Chashma Bani Howaan Gi
Tey Jeevan Jharneyaan Da Paani Udd-da
Main Paani Diyaan Boondaan
Terey Pindey Tey Malaan Gi
Tey Ikk Thandak Jahi Ban Ke
Teri Chaati Dey Naal Lagaan Gi
Main Hor Kujh Nai Jaandi
Par Aena Jaandi
Ke Waqt Jo Vii Karey Ga
Aey Janam Mairey Naal Turey Ga
Maybe I will turn into a spring,
and rub the foaming
drops of water on your body,
and rest my coolness on
your burning chest.
I know nothing else
but that this life
will walk along with me.
Aey Jism Mukda Hai
Tay Sab Kujh Muk Jaanda
Par Chaityaan Dey Dhaagey
Kaainaati Kana Dey Hundey
Main Onhaan Kana Nuu Chunaan Gi
Dhaageyaan Nuu Walaan Gi
Tey Tenu Main Fair Milaan Gi…
When the body perishes,
all perishes;
but the threads of memory
are woven with enduring specks.
I will pick these particles,
weave the threads,
and I will meet you yet again.
(Translated from the Punjabi by Nirupama Dutt)
Geeta
Poem by by Hema Nair
Silence of Solitude
I am outside the window, looking in
I see smiles, affection
Warm fire of love burning
But I don’t go in
I may be welcomed
But I fear being ignored.
The draught of a cold stare
Or vacuum of an impenetrable space I may walk into
Holds my feet frozen
And so I stay out, looking in
I will stay a while, even though I shouldn’t
It’s cold outside and the longing will only worsen
But I can’t seem to stay away
Force my legs to wander away
When I do stroll on
It is with a studied nonchalance
Blinking to clear my eyes
Rubbing my palms like I care a damn
My shadow and I
We head back home
I’ll light my own fire to thaw my soul
Drink warm ale or clean out my loft
Waiting endlessly for those who never come in
Choices, regrets and silences
I’m no longer an outsider looking in
Geetha
Poem by by Toru Dutt
Our Casuarina Tree
LIKE a huge Python, winding round and round
The rugged trunk, indented deep with scars,
Up to its very summit near the stars,
A creeper climbs, in whose embraces bound
No other tree could live. But gallantly
The giant wears the scarf, and flowers are hung
In crimson clusters all the boughs among,
Whereon all day are gathered bird and bee;
And oft at nights the garden overflows
With one sweet song that seems to have no close,
Sung darkling from our tree, while men repose.
When first my casement is wide open thrown
At dawn, my eyes delighted on it rest;
Sometimes, and most in winter,—on its crest
A gray baboon sits statue-like alone
Watching the sunrise; while on lower boughs
His puny offspring leap about and play;
And far and near kokilas hail the day;
And to their pastures wend our sleepy cows;
And in the shadow, on the broad tank cast
By that hoar tree, so beautiful and vast,
The water-lilies spring, like snow enmassed.
But not because of its magnificence
Dear is the Casuarina to my soul:
Beneath it we have played; though years may roll,
O sweet companions, loved with love intense,
For your sakes, shall the tree be ever dear.
Blent with your images, it shall arise
In memory, till the hot tears blind mine eyes!
What is that dirge-like murmur that I hear
Like the sea breaking on a shingle-beach?
It is the tree’s lament, an eerie speech,
That haply to the unknown land may reach.
Unknown, yet well-known to the eye of faith!
Ah, I have heard that wail far, far away
In distant lands, by many a sheltered bay,
When slumbered in his cave the water-wraith
And the waves gently kissed the classic shore
Of France or Italy, beneath the moon,
When earth lay trancèd in a dreamless swoon:
And every time the music rose,—before
Mine inner vision rose a form sublime,
Thy form, O Tree, as in my happy prime
I saw thee, in my own loved native clime.
Therefore I fain would consecrate a lay
Unto thy honor, Tree, beloved of those
Who now in blessed sleep for aye repose,—
Dearer than life to me, alas, were they!
Mayst thou be numbered when my days are done
With deathless trees—like those in Borrowdale,
Under whose awful branches lingered pale
“Fear, trembling Hope, and Death, the skeleton,
And Time the shadow;” and though weak the verse
That would thy beauty fain, oh, fain rehearse,
May Love defend thee from Oblivion’s curse.
Gopa
Two poems by Imtiaz Dharker
1. Blessing
The skin cracks like a pod.
There never is enough water.
Imagine the drip of it,
the small splash, echo
in a tin mug,
the voice of a kindly god.
Sometimes, the sudden rush
of fortune. The municipal pipe bursts,
silver crashes to the ground
and the flow has found
a roar of tongues. From the huts,
a congregation: every man woman
child for streets around
butts in, with pots,
brass, copper, aluminium,
plastic buckets,
frantic hands,
and naked children
screaming in the liquid sun,
their highlights polished to perfection,
flashing light,
as the blessing sings
over their small bones.
2. This Room
This room is breaking out,
Of itself, cracking through
Its own walls
In search of space, light,
Empty air.
The bed is lifting out of
Its nightmares
From dark corners, chairs
Are rising up to crash through clouds.
This is the time and place
To be alive:
When the daily furniture of our lives
Stirs, when the improbable arrives.
Pots and pans bang together
In celebration, clang
Past the crowd of garlic, onions, spices,
Fly by the ceiling fan.
No one is looking for the door.
In all this excitement
I’m wondering where
I’ve left my feet, and why
My hands are outside, clapping.
Joe
3 Poems by Louise Glück (rhymes with click)
1. The Red Poppy [From The Wild Iris, her sixth collection in 1992]
The great thing
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those; they
govern me. I have
a lord in heaven
called the sun, and open
for him, showing him
the fire of my own heart, fire
like his presence.
What could such glory be
if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters,
were you like me once, long ago,
before you were human? Did you
permit yourselves
to open once, who would never
open again? Because in truth
I am speaking now
the way you do. I speak
because I am shattered.
2. Mock Orange
[From the fourth collection The Triumph of Achilles in 1985. The mock orange is a bush with flowers having a strong scent of oranges, but produces no fruit]
It is not the moon, I tell you.
It is these flowers
lighting the yard.
I hate them.
I hate them as I hate sex,
the man’s mouth
sealing my mouth, the man’s
paralyzing body—
and the cry that always escapes,
the low, humiliating
premise of union—
In my mind tonight
I hear the question and pursuing answer
fused in one sound
that mounts and mounts and then
is split into the old selves,
the tired antagonisms. Do you see?
We were made fools of.
And the scent of mock orange
drifts through the window.
How can I rest?
How can I be content
when there is still
that odor in the world?
3. Love Poem [From House on Marshland, her second collection in 1975]
There is always something to be made of pain.
Your mother knits.
She turns out scarves in every shade of red.
They were for Christmas, and they kept your warm
while she married over and over, taking you
along. How could it work,
when all those years she stored her widowed heart
as though the dead come back.
No wonder you are the way you are,
afraid of blood, your women
like one brick wall after another.
Kavita
Poem by by Mary Oliver
Morning Poem
Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange
sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again
and fasten themselves to the high branches–
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands
of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails
for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it
the thorn
that is heavier than lead–
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging–
there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted–
each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,
whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.
KumKum
Two Poems by Alice Oswald
1. A Story of the Falling Rain
It is the story of the falling rain
to turn into a leaf and fall again
it is the secret of a summer shower
to steal the light and hide it in a flower
and every flower a tiny tributary
that from the ground flows green and momentary
is one of water's wishes and this tale
hangs in a seed-head smaller than my thumbnail
if only I a passerby could pass
as clear as water through a plume of grass
to find the sunlight hidden at the tip
turning to seed a kind of lifting rain drip
then I might know like water how to balance
the weight of hope against the light of patience
water which is so raw so earthy-strong
and lurks in cast-iron tanks and leaks along
drawn under gravity towards my tongue
to cool and fill the pipe-work of this song
which is the story of the falling rain
that rises to the light and falls again
2. Full Moon
Good God!
What did I dream last night?
I dreamt I was the moon.
I woke and found myself still asleep.
It was like this: my face misted up from inside
And I came and went at will through a little peephole.
I had no voice, no mouth, nothing to express my trouble,
except my shadows leaning downhill, not quite parallel.
Something needs to be said to describe my moonlight.
Almost frost but softer, almost ash but wholer.
Made almost of water, which has strictly speaking
No feature, but a kind of counter-light, call it insight.
Like in woods, when they jostle their hooded shapes,
Their heads congealed together, having murdered each other,
There are moon-beings, sound-beings, such as deer and half-deer
Passing through there, whose eyes can pierce through things.
I was like that: visible invisible visible invisible.
There's no material as variable as moonlight.
I was climbing, clinging to the underneath of my bones, thinking:
Good God! Who have I been last night?
Pamela
Two Poems by Denise Levertov
1. Aware
When I found the door
I found the vine leaves
speaking among themselves in abundant
whispers.
My presence made them
hush their green breath,
embarrassed, the way
humans stand up, buttoning their jackets,
acting as if they were leaving anyway, as if
the conversation had ended
just before you arrived.
I liked
the glimpse I had, though,
of their obscure
gestures. I liked the sound
of such private voices. Next time
I’ll move like cautious sunlight, open
the door by fractions, eavesdrop
peacefully.
2. Prisoners
Though the road turn at last
to death’s ordinary door,
and we knock there, ready
to enter and it opens
easily for us,
yet
all the long journey
we shall have gone in chains,
fed on knowledge-apples
acrid and riddled with grubs.
We taste other food that life,
like a charitable farm-girl,
holds out to us as we pass—
but our mouths are puckered,
a taint of ash on the tongue.
It’s not joy that we’ve lost—
wildfire, it flares
in dark or shine as it will.
What’s gone
is common happiness,
plain bread we could eat
with the old apple of knowledge.
That old one—it griped us sometimes,
but it was firm, tart,
sometimes delectable …
The ashen apple of these days
grew from poisoned soil. We are prisoners
and must eat
our ration. All the long road
in chains, even if, after all,
we come to
death’s ordinary door, with time
smiling its ordinary
long-ago smile.
Priya
Poem by Polish poet Wisława Szymborska
Love at First Sight
They’re both convinced
that a sudden passion joined them.
Such certainty is beautiful,
but uncertainty is more beautiful still.
Since they’d never met before, they’re sure
that there’d been nothing between them.
But what’s the word from the streets, staircases, hallways –
perhaps they’ve passed by each other a million times?
I want to ask them
if they don’t remember –
a moment face to face
in some revolving door?
perhaps a “sorry” muttered in a crowd?
a curt “wrong number” caught in the receiver?
but I know the answer.
No, they don’t remember.
They’d be amazed to hear
that Chance has been toying with them
now for years.
Not quite ready yet
to become their Destiny,
it pushed them close, drove them apart,
it barred their path,
stifling a laugh,
and then leaped aside.
There were signs and signals,
even if they couldn’t read them yet.
Perhaps three years ago
or just last Tuesday
a certain leaf fluttered
from one shoulder to another?
Something was dropped and then picked up.
Who knows, maybe the ball that vanished
into childhood’s thicket?
There were doorknobs and doorbells
where one touch had covered another
beforehand.
Suitcases checked and standing side by side.
One night, perhaps, the same dream,
grown hazy by morning.
Every beginning
is only a sequel, after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.
Saras
Poem by by Carol Ann Duffy
Little Red Cap
At childhood’s end, the houses petered out
Into playing fields, the factory, allotments
Kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men
The silent railway line, the hermit’s caravan
Till you came at last to the edge of the woods
It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf
He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud
In his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw
Red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears
He had! What big eyes he had! What teeth!
In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me
Sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink
My first. You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry
The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the woods
Away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place
Lit by the eyes of owls. I crawled in his wake
My stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazer
Snagged on twig and branch, murder clues. I lost both shoes
But got there, wolf’s lair, better beware. Lesson one that night
Breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem
I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for
What little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf?1
Then I slid from between his heavy matted paws
And went in search of a living bird – white dove –
Which flew, straight, from my hands to his open mouth
One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said
Licking his chops. As soon as he slept, I crept to the back
Of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with books
Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head
Warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood
But then I was young – and it took ten years
In the woods to tell that a mushroom
Stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds
Are the uttered thought of trees, that a greying wolf
Howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out
Season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe
To a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon
To see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf
As he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw
The glistening, virgin white of my grandmother’s bones
I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up
Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone
Shoba
Two Poems by Margaret Atwood
1. The Moment
The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,
is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.
No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.
2. Bored
All those times I was bored
out of my mind. Holding the log
while he sawed it. Holding
the string while he measured, boards,
distances between things, or pounded
stakes into the ground for rows and rows
of lettuces and beets, which I then (bored)
weeded. Or sat in the back
of the car, or sat still in boats,
sat, sat, while at the prow, stern, wheel
he drove, steered, paddled. It
wasn't even boredom, it was looking,
looking hard and up close at the small
details. Myopia. The worn gunwales,
the intricate twill of the seat
cover. The acid crumbs of loam, the granular
pink rock, its igneous veins, the sea-fans
of dry moss, the blackish and then the graying
bristles on the back of his neck.
Sometimes he would whistle, sometimes
I would. The boring rhythm of doing
things over and over, carrying
the wood, drying
the dishes. Such minutiae. It's what
the animals spend most of their time at,
ferrying the sand, grain by grain, from their tunnels,
shuffling the leaves in their burrows. He pointed
such things out, and I would look
at the whorled texture of his square finger, earth under
the nail. Why do I remember it as sunnier
all the time then, although it more often
rained, and more birdsong?
I could hardly wait to get
the hell out of there to
anywhere else. Perhaps though
boredom is happier. It is for dogs or
groundhogs. Now I wouldn't be bored.
Now I would know too much.
Now I would know.
Thommo
Poem by by Louise Glück
Midsummer
On nights like this we used to swim in the quarry,
the boys making up games requiring them to tear off the girls’ clothes
and the girls cooperating, because they had new bodies since last summer
and they wanted to exhibit them, the brave ones
leaping off the high rocks — bodies crowding the water.
The nights were humid, still. The stone was cool and wet,
marble for graveyards, for buildings that we never saw,
buildings in cities far away.
On cloudy nights, you were blind. Those nights the rocks were dangerous,
but in another way it was all dangerous, that was what we were after.
The summer started. Then the boys and girls began to pair off
but always there were a few left at the end — sometimes they’d keep watch,
sometimes they’d pretend to go off with each other like the rest,
but what could they do there, in the woods? No one wanted to be them.
But they’d show up anyway, as though some night their luck would change,
fate would be a different fate.
At the beginning and at the end, though, we were all together.
After the evening chores, after the smaller children were in bed,
then we were free. Nobody said anything, but we knew the nights we’d meet
and the nights we wouldn’t. Once or twice, at the end of summer,
we could see a baby was going to come out of all that kissing.
And for those two, it was terrible, as terrible as being alone.
The game was over. We’d sit on the rocks smoking cigarettes,
worrying about the ones who weren’t there.
And then finally walk home through the fields,
because there was always work the next day.
And the next day, we were kids again, sitting on the front steps in the morning,
eating a peach. Just that, but it seemed an honor to have a mouth.
And then going to work, which meant helping out in the fields.
One boy worked for an old lady, building shelves.
The house was very old, maybe built when the mountain was built.
And then the day faded. We were dreaming, waiting for night.
Standing at the front door at twilight, watching the shadows lengthen.
And a voice in the kitchen was always complaining about the heat,
wanting the heat to break.
Then the heat broke, the night was clear.
And you thought of the boy or girl you’d be meeting later.
And you thought of walking into the woods and lying down,
practicing all those things you were learning in the water.
And though sometimes you couldn’t see the person you were with,
there was no substitute for that person.
The summer night glowed; in the field, fireflies were glinting.
And for those who understood such things, the stars were sending messages:
You will leave the village where you were born
and in another country you’ll become very rich, very powerful,
but always you will mourn something you left behind, even though
you can’t say what it was,
and eventually you will return to seek it.
Zakia
Poem by Mary Jo Salter
Institute for the Hand
It feels like jail, or church:
each of us nursing a private pain,
head down, or gazing into space,
inwardly cursing when the search
for gratitude things aren't worse
steps childishly backward again.
Most of us misstepped
to get here: the architect who tripped
on a railing four inches high, landing
on the hand that was his career,
and tumbling through the universe
(as in the universal nightmare)
even in his daydreams now,
will fall until his soul's rebuilt;
the first-time mother, a pianist,
who in slipping on the ice had broken
the baby's fall with her own wrist,
and is consumed by guilt
for daring to mourn it. Yet
what Being begins to care? White-
pawed in outsized plaster, she
suspects that something in us shapes
God in our image. Bad news if we
are a race evolved from apes.
A hit-and-run case, brute
injustice on a motorbike
has brought that old man and his wife
(whose hands flew to their faces) here
to undo the crash three times a week
for the worst part of the winter.
He's mostly cured, I've guessed
from his newly-waxed moustache, a touch
unthinkable to the depressed;
but her index finger's locked in that same
wire gizmo, pointing outward as if
one of us is to blame.
I look away and pluck
with my good hand a magazine
from the table. What if I stumble on
an exercise routine, or a scene
of skiers afloat on flawless luck?
(Skiing: that's what did me in.)
Too risky. I scan my purse
instead for Edgar Allan Poe,
and pry open with my teeth a coffin
for reading glasses - the latest blow
in a series of indignities
that wound my vanity alone,
yet seem part of some grand conspiracy,
as if they're meant.
In the mystery I turn to, a girl
has been throttled, it appears, by a hand
too mammoth to be human, an agent
that may be diabolical
or, as Dupin divines, a wild
ex-con who's an orangutang.
A beast with less sense than a child
of motive, or of right and wrong,
whose ideal state is to be jailed,
whose innocence we can't forgive for long.
(https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=171&issue=3&page=20)
Very well done Joe! Enjoyed reliving those moments.
ReplyDeleteLove Pamela.
Hi Joe,
ReplyDeleteThank you for this very enjoyable Blog post of yours on Women Poets. It was a beautiful Session which we ladies decided to participate with our dangling earrings.
Incidentally, you and I read two poets for this session who failed to appeal to us. Both are very successful poets. Obviously, we lacked something.
Thank you, Pamela. Glad you enjoyed the blog's recounting of the reading.
ReplyDeleteKumKum, I was disappointed after reading Louise Glück's poems. They are highly praised by many, but not all. I have stated why I could not connect – but it was not for lack of trying. Perhaps I can come back to these poems after a year, ...
Loved Rita Dove and Gluck’s Midsummer. Thank you Joe for this thoroughly interesting recollection of the session
ReplyDeletePriya
I only lay out what everyone said, taking a little trouble to deepen the account with other things on the Web. Glad you could appreciate two very different poems by Glück (don't forget the umlaut), and Dove.
ReplyDelete