Li-Young Lee’s Behind My Eyes

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I had a lot of driving to do today, and fortunately I  remembered that I have this book, Li-Young Lee‘s Behind My Eyes (Norton, 2008), which includes a CD of the poet reading 22 of the poems. So I listened (a lovely experience), and read, too, and eventually made it through the entire book — and it’s 10:30 in the evening (on the 12th, which I thought all day was the 11th) — and I’m exhausted, and I’m very happy to have this book to recommend to you.

This book was given me by a friend, and I swear, I have read it, or read around in it. But I had never sat down and read it all the way through. And I had never been deliberate enough to take the CD out to the car (where I do my book-listening) and actually play it.

I know Li-Young Lee’s work mostly from a “greatest hits” perspective. Reading an entire book of his poetry is a quite different experience. Some of the poems seem remarkably un-poetic, sort of colloquial and mundane. “Self-Help for Fellow Refugees,” for instance, ends with this stanza: “Alone in your favorite chair / with a book you enjoy / is fine. But spooning / is even better.” Had I read just this poem (or such lines), I would have set the book aside with a shrug. But, tasked to read on, I encountered many powerful lines.

Let me say, however, that I think I have a lot of nerve critiquing Lee’s work. He is a master.

And the effect of a book is partly cumulative, of course (as I hope I’ve noted in earlier posts this month). Imagine finding just one Emily Dickinson poem and trying to understand why other people spend their entire life studying her. Anyway, in Lee’s “My Favorite Kingdom,” I found this little sequence of images, which is both simply put and swoon-worthy:

My favorite color is
my father’s apple trees in the rain.

My favorite color
is my father’s pear trees
in a cloud of bees.

So, who really knows what makes one reader yawn, and another sit up straight and listen harder? One has to take the time to sit with a poet to begin to appreciate them properly.

Here is a short poem that — listening to the CD — I knew I had to see on the page. It (too) is deceptively simple, but evocative of so much more.

To Hold 

So we’re dust. In the meantime my wife and I
make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet,
we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight,
measuring by eye as it falls into alignment
between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I’m lucky,
she’ll remember a recent dream and tell me.

One day we’ll lie down and not get up.
One day, all we guard will be surrendered.

Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize
what we love, and what it takes
to tend what isn’t for our having.
So often fear has led me
to abandon what I know I must relinquish
in time. But for the moment,
I’ll listen to her dream,
and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling
more and more detail into the light
of a joint and fragile keeping.

Edward O’Dwyer’s Bad News, Good News, Bad News

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I met Edward O’Dwyer at On the Nail, in Limerick last October, after we had both read on the open mike following the featured readers. He was curious about my book, and I about his, Bad News, Good News, Bad News (Salmon Poetry, 2017), so we traded. His book has a beautiful cover, and he wrote a really lovely inscription.

I also told him I had a daughter who had asked me to bring home “an Irish boy,” and he said, beaming, “Well, you’ve found a single one.”

Reading his poems, he doesn’t seem very single. But as many of the poems appear to be persona poems, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, should he ever show up on our doorstep.

In the interview (to which I’ve linked his name, above) he talks about Bad News and its context. Here’s a poem that I especially enjoyed, the last poem in the book:

The Credits 

(for Naomi, 09/04/2014)

A man with a very large camera
snapped our picture on Downhill Beach
during a week spent in a cottage outside Bushmills.

He said we’d wandered into his shot
yet we are in the centre of the frame, making
it a picture of us, and the intrusion his camera’s.

We are walking away, our backs to him,
the sun setting in front of us.
Our shadows stretch out long behind.

We are two darkened shapes blending,
at mid-distance, but it’s us. We know
it could be nobody else walking towards that sunset.

Here’s the thing: that moment
would have been a fine one for the world to end.
You could easily imagine the four horsemen

sweeping into the frame, and us
taking no great notice, accepting what will be,
wholly content for such a last moment.

This thought I have jokingly shared with you,
coaxing you to imagine that sky coming down,
dropping emphatically on us,

then one of those cinematic fades to black
where, if this were all a film,
the credits would start rolling down.

Sarah de Leeuw’s Skeena

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Perhaps I should cop to my ulterior motive in doing this series.

I am a person who will spend her last dollar on a book. I have a house full of books, a number of them unread, and yet it’s difficult for me to attend a conference or a reading without coming home with … more books.

You know that expression, “like a kid in a candy store.” You can now amend that to, “Like a poet at a book sale.” My ulterior motive, then, is to finally create a good reason to actually read these books all the way through. I bring them home with the best of intentions, and I usually read a poem or two before they find their way to my shelf. Maybe I take them down now and then and read a little more. But I have a bad habit of not taking the time to them all the way through. So that, my friends, is what I’m doing.

Reading Sarah de Leeuw‘s Skeena (Caitlin Press, 2015) was, as with the other books, a surprise and a pleasure. It is not at all the sort of poetry I aspire to write; nonetheless, it had lessons for me in how one might think differently about what a poem is, and what it looks like.

Skeena is a book-length poem about the Skeena, the second-largest river in British Columbia. Leeuw is an award-winning Canadian poet, but she also has a Ph.D. in Geology, and the book is a collage of voices and textures, incorporating photographs, First People’s stories, the voice of the river, geologic time and details, and newspaper accounts. The book is not tidy, divided into ragged sections, and often exploding all over the pages, kind of like a river at floodtime. In addition to the artfulness of the poem’s execution, the dust jacket is a work of art. (Designed and hand screen printed by Briar Craig). Skeena was a finalist for the Willa Literary Award: Women Writing the West.

To hear part of Sarah de Leeuw’s interview with Cascadia Poetry Festival organizer Paul Nelson, including a reading of “Rain” (one of the most experimental of the sections) from Skeena, click here.

The blog does not accommodate poems (not easily) that are choreographed, so I’m going to cheat and share a picture. This is a book I would love to pass along to someone worthy, so let me know if you are interested.

Terrence Hayes’ LIGHTHEAD

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I was privileged to attend Seattle Arts & Lectures three years ago when Terrance Hayes read from his 2010 poetry book Lighthead. It was a performance to remember, and in a rush of gushing enthusiasm I stood in line to buy his book and get it signed by the poet his own dazzling self.

Lighthead is jazz and verve and sex and no-holds-barred, come-at-you-swinging stuff. Hayes plays and dances with language and gets very very serious about race and politics. It’s a book-length elegy for an American Dream of justice, liberty, and equality that died before it was born. He lets no one off the hook, not even himself.

You kind of have to read it — oh taste and see! — to know it. Like a couple other of the books I’ve read this month, this one at times had me wanting to swap it for something simpler. And I admit that sometimes I felt the poems were washing over me, knocking me off my feet. Then, the magic began to work.

Here is just a sample, the first poem in the collection:

Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy

Ladies and gentlemen, ghosts and children of the state,
I am here because I could never get the hang of Time.
This hour, for example, would be like all the others
were it not for the rain falling through the roof.
I’d better not be too explicit. My night is careless
with itself, troublesome as a woman wearing no bra
in winter. I believe everything is a metaphor for sex.
Lovemaking mimics the act of departure, moonlight
drips from the leaves. You can spend your whole life
doing no more than preparing for life and thinking,
“Is this all there is?” Thus, I am here where poets come
to drink a dark strong poison with tiny shards of ice,
something to loosen my primate tongue and its syllables
of debris. I know all words come from preexisting words
and divide until our pronouncements develop selves.
The small dog barking at the darkness has something to say
about the way we live. I’d rather have what my daddy calls
“skrimp.” He says “discrete” and means the street
just out of sight. Not what you see, but what you perceive:
that’s poetry. Not the noise, but its rhythm; an arrangement
of derangements; I’ll eat you to live: that’s poetry.
I wish I glowed like a brown-skinned pregnant woman.
I wish I could weep the way my teacher did as he read us
Molly Bloom’s soliloquy of yes. When I kiss my wife,
sometimes I taste her caution. But let’s not talk about that.
Maybe Art’s only purpose is to preserve the Self.
Sometimes I play a game in which my primitive craft fires
upon an alien ship whose intention is the destruction
of the earth. Other times I fall in love with a word
like somberness. Or moonlight juicing naked branches.
All species have a notion of emptiness, and yet
the flowers don’t quit opening. I am carrying the whimper
you can hear when the mouth is collapsed, the wisdom
of monkeys. Ask a glass of water why it pities
the rain. Ask the lunatic yard dog why it tolerates the leash.
Brothers and sisters, when you spend your nights
out on a limb, there’s a chance you’ll fall in your sleep.

–Terrance Hayes

The wisdom of this poem — Lovemaking mimics the act of departure, Not what you see but what your perceive: that’s poetry, an arrangement of derangements — is uncanny and weird (and maybe this is just my own ignorance speaking). It’s hard to get away from, “there’s a chance you’ll fall in your sleep.” Here is a poet playing poetry the way a boy plays basketball, obsessively with a lunatic joy, out on a quaking limb.

Learn more about Hayes by visiting his website: https://terrancehayes.com/.