Category Archives: poetry

Baltimore, poetry

There never was a spring like this

I’m in the library, grading writing, with a feeling of great freedom, as one only can write when the obligation of a deadline has been removed. It is very nice that the half-thesis was due a couple weeks before the end of the semester. It means the end of the semester won’t be so arduous.

Through the window on D Level, I can see the Ferris wheels of Hopkins’s Spring Fair turning, and the sky becoming a medium gray. The heat is elusive. It’s a real and inconstant April.

The flowers are out. Our yard, which used to be a demure dark green, looks like it’s wearing an exploding piñata. You can’t walk down the street without being pelted with seed pods. Therefore, spring poem:

To John Keats, Poet, At Spring Time

I cannot hold my peace, John Keats;
There never was a spring like this;
It is an echo, that repeats
My last year’s song and next year’s bliss.
I know, in spite of all men say
Of Beauty, you have felt her most.
Yea, even in your grave her way
Is laid. Poor, troubled, lyric ghost,
Spring never was so fair and dear
As Beauty makes her seem this year.

I cannot hold my peace, John Keats,
I am as helpless in the toil
Of Spring as any lamb that bleats
To feel the solid earth recoil
Beneath his puny legs. Spring beats
her tocsin call to those who love her,
And lo! the dogwood petals cover
Her breast with drifts of snow, and sleek
White gulls fly screaming to her, and hover
About her shoulders, and kiss her cheek,
While white and purple lilacs muster
A strength that bears them to a cluster
Of color and odor; for her sake
All things that slept are now awake.

And you and I, shall we lie still,
John Keats, while Beauty summons us?
Somehow I feel your sensitive will
Is pulsing up some tremulous
Sap road of a maple tree, whose leaves
Grow music as they grow, since your
Wild voice is in them, a harp that grieves
For life that opens death’s dark door.
Though dust, your fingers still can push
The Vision Splendid to a birth,
Though now they work as grass in the hush
Of the night on the broad sweet page of the earth.

“John Keats is dead,” they say, but I
Who hear your full insistent cry
In bud and blossom, leaf and tree,
Know John Keats still writes poetry.
And while my head is earthward bowed
To read new life sprung from your shroud,
Folks seeing me must think it strange
That merely spring should so derange
My mind. They do not know that you,
John Keats, keep revel with me, too.

– Countee Cullen

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poetry

Half-thesis

turned in! (Half-brain left.)

This is our first-year portfolio, and although we still have classes and papers and other things to finish, this is the most symbolic part of completing the year.

23 pages (would be over 30 if you keep to the 32 lines/page thing, but 23 pages with normal pagination), 17 poems. All in. The thesis at the end of next year has to be about twice as long.

It hasn’t sunk in yet, but it will later tonight, at the beer garden Hopkins puts up as part of its Spring Fair. See you there.

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poetry

no mascara, no evidence

Friday poem:

Makeup

My mother does not trust
women without it.
What are they not hiding?
Renders the dead living

and the living more alive.
Everything I say sets
the clouds off blubbering
like they knew the pretty dead.

True, no mascara, no evidence.
Blue sky, blank face. Blank face,
a faithful liar, false bottom.
Sorrow, a rabbit harbored in the head.

The skin, a silly one-act, concurs.
At the carnival, each child’s cheek becomes
a rainbow. God, grant me a brighter myself.
Each breath, a game called Live Forever.

I am small. Don’t ask me to reconcile
one shadow with another. I admit—
paint the dead pink, it does not make
them sunrise. Paint the living blue,

it does not make them sky, or sea,
a berry, clapboard house, or dead.
God, leave us our costumes,
don’t blow in our noses,

strip us to the underside of skin.
Even the earth claims color
once a year, dressed in red leaves
as the trees play Grieving.

– Dora Malech (who visited Maryland last week, and came to class)

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poetry

Take that, Vatican II

What do we talk about when we talk about poetry? Punctuation conventions. Last night, at the Great Emdash Colloquium Synod of 2010, otherwise known as the proofreading party, the following resolutions were approved:

1) Two hyphens does not equal one emdash. (Sigh.)
2) The use of spaces before and after emdashes is a matter of style*.

If you have other resolutions to submit to the council, please do so at this time.

*over substance.

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poetry, the chorus

hello, out there

I was recently reminded of the fact that I possess a blog by one of my students. It has been a long time since I’ve written in it.

So.2. Since I last wrote here, the chorus group has met two more times, to work on some Shakespeare and some Yeats. I have been really consumed with this, to the extent that I’ve forgotten about almost everything else.*

All three meetings, so far, have tested me and the methods I have in ways that I really need. I hadn’t realized to what extent my chorus techniques were becoming didactic from primarily teaching in student contexts. Working with adult actors and musicians feels like such a luxury. I have missed it. I have missed it in the way that you miss things in French, where the missed thing is the subject and you are the object.

With this group of people, there is nothing to teach, nothing to be communicated — there is only the chance to explore a largely unexplored region of performance, and I am learning from their work. It’s amazing.

We are doing things that I haven’t tried in years, if ever, including doubling voices on top of other voices with digital recorders, and using simultaneous pieces of different texts. I am back in an environment where my word on a subject is not the final word. That’s a good thing. I have even done something which I haven’t done since Clytemnestra/Cassandra (if there is anyone reading this besides Z who remembers that, I will give you a prize): participated in the vocal realizations of the choruses myself. That is to say, sung.

I have dreamed of being able to work on choruses once a week for a long time. (This is a revised dream from the original dream, which would have been working on them every day, all day and all night.) It is startling to me how long I’ve waited to make this happen, and how I probably wouldn’t have made it happen, at all, if not for the particular environment of Hopkins and Baltimore, for the Single Carrot actors I know, for the friends from poetry classes.

I have lots of interesting sound files that I would like to put up, but that probably won’t happen until after finals are completed. I do, however, hope to create some kind of Internet presence for them that will allow me to post them more regularly. Maybe a subpage of this site, or another site. Or a Myspace.

At any rate, I’m very grateful to the collaborators who have made this possible.

* Oh, and — the “half-thesis” or first-year portfolio for the MFA is due to the faculty tomorrow. Needless to say, that’s about all there is to talk about right now.

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music, poetry, the chorus

so,

Good meeting on Saturday. Choruses (poems) spoken, music played. I have notes from it. I was going to put them up here as a rehearsal report of sorts. Good intentions. But we’re going to meet again next week. I am looking forward to this project generating sound files, to having something that can be played to explain itself.

Apart from that, a lot of discussion about whether a flawed interpretation of a great text matters — whether the text’s greatness transcends the interpretation. It does, I suppose. It must.

Also heard M. Doty read at the BMA. He mentioned a sense of discomfort whenever he hears his poems set to music. I can see why. Of what he read, I didn’t hear any with a choral component. But there are many poems with that sort of public and dramatic structure — many, many poems — that are suitable.

Also, would he not be as uncomfortable if the poem was not “set” to music? Not pinned, as it were, to the notes? If the principle of improvisation were present? I am preaching to my own choir. Obviously, I think that would be different.

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Baltimore, poetry, quotes

Let us go back to snow

Yesterday, walking home, white flowers over a tree I last remembered covered in white snow. It’s a good enough reason for Richard Hugo’s snow poem, which I didn’t know in the time of the last blizzard. It’s April, it’s warm, students in sundresses.

SNOW POEM

To write a snow poem you must ignore the snow
falling outside your window.

You must think snow, the word as a snotty owl
high on the telephone pole

glowering down and your forehead damp with fear
under the glare

of the owl who now is mating. On rare days
we remember the toy

owl we buried under the compost heap,
white sky passing above, warm chirp

of wren and the avenging hawk.
That was summer. Let us go back

to snow and forget that damn fool lecture
I gave last winter.

Well, then: here is your window.
The storm outside. Outside, the dead dove drifting.

– Richard Hugo

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Lydia, poetry, quotes

as if to mock

my mockery of his statements about lyrics being better off simpler, some of Sondheim’s simplest lyrics have been haunting my head for the past few days. Particularly those from “Ever After.” Happy now and happy hence / And happy ever after!

I have been auditing an undergraduate music theory course this semester, and if I can bring myself to dispel the mystery, I will eventually know why that one particular chord change is so good. I think it will only make me like it more to know what he is doing.

But chords aside, we’re here to talk about lyrics, right? I have been thinking of INTO THE WOODS for poetic purposes, wanting to write about it, and this is the song that says the most to me at the moment. Here is the last stanza, narrative aside, when the poet sums up, when the poem expands, when the lyrics inflate to their most “statemental.” And I cannot, at present, wish them more complicated. It’s a great song. Risks vulnerability, risks sentimentality, probably achieves both. But it’s a great song.

Herewith, last stanza of I KNOW THINGS NOW (from Into The Woods)

[…]

And I know things now,
Many valuable things,
That I hadn’t known before:
Do not put your faith
In a cape and a hood,
They will not protect you
The way that they should.
And take extra care with strangers,
Even flowers have their dangers.
And though scary is exciting,
Nice is different than good.

Now I know:
Don’t be scared.
Granny is right,
Just be prepared.
Isn’t it nice to know a lot!

And a little bit –
not…

– Stephen Sondheim

Whatever else I may or may not have done, I have lived while he is still living. Sondheim is alive, somewhere. In New York. I could get on a bus and be there in four hours, right? I feel so strongly about his work that it reminds me of Matthew’s play, the speech where Androcles says that he rejoices in Syntyche’s existence regardless of what else may happen for him. I am glad to have been alive in an age of theater he helped make. When I think of it that way, I ought never to complain about theater again. Ever.

You say honestly. Rest you merry. Or, as the Germans would say, “noch ein mal,” which means, one more time. Better luck tomorrow, RRH. See you then. Gentlemen: let us repair to The Coal Hole in the Strand.

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poetry

Fill it full with Wills

This is Sonnet 136. I’m sure I’ve SOSed it before, but it is time to bring it out again. I have always treasured this snicker-inducing sonnet as proof of Shakespeare’s susceptibility to the same stuff to which the rest of us are susceptible. May you have an absurd Monday.

If thy soul check thee that I come so near,
Swear to thy blind soul that I was thy Will,
And will, thy soul knows, is admitted there;
Thus far for love, my love-suit, sweet, fulfil.
Will, will fulfil the treasure of thy love,
Ay, fill it full with wills, and my will one.
In things of great receipt with ease we prove
Among a number one is reckoned none:
Then in the number let me pass untold,
Though in thy store’s account I one must be;
For nothing hold me, so it please thee hold
That nothing me, a something sweet to thee:
Make but my name thy love, and love that still,
And then thou lovest me for my name is ‘Will.’

– W.S.

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music, poetry

There is nothing to do with a day except live it

…
Shall a plate be broken? A new thing understood?
Shall we be lonely, and by love consoled?
What shall I whistle, splitting the kindling-wood?
    Shall the night-wind be cold?

How should I know? And even if we were fated
Hugely to suffer, grandly to endure,
It would not help at all to hear it all fore-stated
    In an overture.

There is nothing to do with a day except live it.
Let us have music again when the light dies
(Sullenly, or in glory) and we can give it
    Something to organize.

– Richard Wilbur, from his poem “C Minor,” in The Mind-Reader

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