I read on Monday. 7 poems, 4 new, 2 heavily revised, and 1 somewhat revised. Mostly botanical. I was planning, up until right before the reading, to read poems about people sandwiched in between all the plants, and then I cut them all out and only read things that had some vegetable elements.

As before, the most popular poem was the “easy” one, the one I revised the least, and almost cut for being too light and fluffy. Eh. It goes to show, I guess, that things that come easily to you come easily to others, and things you agonize over bear the marks of that agonizing.

Forgive me for not telling you about the reading, Baltimoreans, but I wasn’t ready: I have resolved that for the next two, I will do a better job of being willing to tell people.

part of my problem with poems is thinking in pieces that are too big. I have gotten used to think of time as something that takes at least seventy-five minutes with no intermission.

The Oldest Living Thing in L.A.

At Wilshire & Santa Monica I saw an opossum
Trying to cross the street. It was late, the street
Was brightly lit, the opossum would take
A few steps forward, then back away from the breath
Of moving traffic. People coming out of the bars
Would approach, as if to help it somehow.
It would lift its black lips & show them
The reddened gums, the long rows of incisors,
Teeth that went all the way back beyond
The flames of Troy & Carthage, beyond sheep
Grazing rock-strewn hills, fragments of ruins
In the grass at San Vitale. It would back away
Delicately & smoothly, stepping carefully
As it always had. It could mangle someone’s hand
In twenty seconds. Mangle it for good. It could
Sever it completely from the wrist in forty.
There was nothing to be done for it. Someone
Or other probably called the LAPD, who then
Called Animal Control, who woke a driver, who
Then dressed in mailed gloves, the kind of thing
Small knights once wore into battle, who gathered
Together his pole with a noose on the end,
A light steel net to snare it with, someone who hoped
The thing would have vanished by the time he got there.

– Larry Levis

Once, at a bipartisan chiefs of staff retreat in Charlottesville, [Huck] Gutman stepped in to demonstrate the power of poetry. A training session had grown tense, recalls Stephen Ward, chief of staff for the Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.). Gutman rose, Ward says, and announced that he felt compelled to recite a poem. The 12-liner by Philip Larkin makes liberal use of a certain four-letter word that begins with the letter “f.” The chiefs of staff cracked up. Tension gone.

– From a Washington Post article on the poetry-propagating Huck Gutman, chief of staff to Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who runs an email list sending out poems to Washingtonians. Via AJ.

While this America settles in the mold of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.

from “Shine, Perishing Republic.” Here’s hoping for a little less of that “heavily thickening to empire” business in 2010, unlikely as it seems. Happy cautiously optimistic New Year, everyone.

Although he had attempted to make his living exclusively from his writing since the publication of TYPEE, he was constantly struggling against poverty and debt, and increasingly against failing physical and mental health as well. […] Family life for the Melvilles was often tense and unhappy. By 1867, his wife and some of the family on both sides were convinced Melville was insane; that year, Elizabeth’s minister suggested a plan to remove her from the home and thus get her away from her husband, and the eldest child committed suicide at age eighteen.
Meanwhile, Melville had given up fiction and turned to publishing poetry…

From Elizabeth Renker’s introduction to the 1998 Signet Classic of Moby-Dick. Apart from my usual morbid interest in the deteriorating households of writers, this is the second time I’ve run across Melville’s poetry this year. I found this earlier in the semester, in the Concise Encyclopedia Of English & American Poets & Poetry, Donald Hall and Stephen Spender, eds., (1961):

MELVILLE, Herman (1819-91), the author of Moby-Dick, spent the last thirty-five years of his life writing poetry. His Collected Poems show qualities which remind one of Emily Dickinson, and Clarel is a kind of nineteenth-century Waste Land written, unfortunately, in Hudibrastics*.
* iambic tetrameter, rhymed AA BB CC DD, etc. After Samuel Butler’s Hudibras.

Interesting, eh? Here’s what Renker says about it:

His first two published volumes, BATTLE-PIECES AND ASPECTS OF THE WAR (1866) and CLAREL (1876) were both grandly ambitious. BATTLE-PIECES was a poetic record of the Civil War and CLAREL an epic account of a pilgrimage through the Holy Land. Both failed with the public.

MOBY-DICK was published in 1851. It is hard to imagine how someone who was capable of writing this novel could have written anything but a good epic poem, even in Hudibrastics. I’m going to find out, just as soon as I finish all the other things I’m supposed to be doing.

Then he said “Good-night!” and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war;
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon like a prison bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.

– from “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I used to have this entire poem memorized, though I can no longer remember in what grade, or for what teacher, this was done. It was pre-high school for sure. At any rate, this stanza has always been my favorite, and my favorite line of it is the one about the moon. It gets stuck in my head the way a song does. I suspect that if I put some effort into it I could get the poem back.