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National Poetry Month: poetry book #1

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Welcome to National Poetry Month!

If you are looking for a full rundown on what NPM is, skip over to https://www.napowrimo.net/ for a prompt a day and links to lots else. I also want to recommend Chris Jarmick’s blog, Poetry Is Everything. Chris, the owner of BookTree in Kirkland, Washington, will happily provide you with great quotes, prompts (daily in April!) and more links to poetry enthusiasts. I notice that rather than posting daily (as I believe he has in past Aprils), he is lumping the prompts into groups. If you are patient, you can find all of them. (And write 30 new poems!)

The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.”
― Dylan Thomas

I have a modest goal this month of sharing a poem a day from the pile of books beside my desk. Some of these I read in August during the Sealey Challenge. Others — well, it’s about damn time. I may not read a book a day, and I’m not pushing myself to do the usual blog reviews (though some may ensue), just this: one book, one poem.

Today it is Bones in the Shallows: poems from Mission Creek by Seattle poet Tito Titus. I reviewed his I can still smile like Errol Flynn (Empty Bowl Press, 2015) a few years back.

Tito Titus’s Mission Creek is located near Cashmere, Washington, and runs into the Wenatchee River. (Forgive me if I have any of this wrong.) As the title, Bones in the Shallows, suggests, the creek disappears every summer, drained by drought, by natural disasters, by greed. And in this slim book the creek, its creatures, and the people whose lives are lived on its banks are lovingly chronicled. Nature can heal us, Titus all but says, but only if we don’t destroy it first.

 

October coming down

How do you describe a creek?
Twenty cubic feet per second, the engineer said.

I toss a slender woody shoot,
watch it meander through ripples,
fouette through eddies,
dive from glittering rocks,
float toward the Wenatchee River —
a one-legged ballerina, dancing
toward the ravenous Columbia.
Past the equinox now, the creek
runs ten-feet wide, a few inches deep.

Still, no rain.

Now I know — in this parched tenth month —
how much water the upstream orchards
swallows when fish rotted on dry rocks:
enough to seduce innocent Coho
climbing freshwater reaches,
unaware of the Mission Creek murders
of their cousins, only a month before.

Twenty cubic feet per second,
enough to pretend the drought is done.

— Tito Titus

In “Last summer on Mission Creek,” we get a sense of all the beauty at stake:

Sumac leaves, stark and dark green,
wrestle summer winds.

Creek burbles play. Their watery laughter
climbs our woody bank.

And this poignant line: “My life becomes more beautiful than I knew, / and faster, too!” That’s nature’s power to renew itself, and our spirits.

Titus and his wife of 40 years now live in Seattle. You can find a copy of Bones in the Shallows at Edmonds Bookshop, or visit www.poetfire.com.

 

PEACE, PEACE they say

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PEACE, PEACE  they say, poems by Martine van Bijlert, Rainfed Press, 2024 (paper, $15.95).

Every February for the last six or seven years I have taken part in a postcard exchange for peace.

It’s somewhat informal. There’s no cost. A friend of mine runs the sign-up list and gets all our addresses straight. She calls it the Peace Poets Postcard Exchange. Which is exactly what it is. This year there are 5 groups—participants from numerous United States, and several other countries—each of us sending a postcard to 26 or 27 other people in the month of February, each postcard with an original poem about peace.

I think of it as a way to put more peace into the world.

In 2022 a Dutch mixed-media poet, artist, and writer named Martine van Bijlert joined our ranks. She is no ordinary participant, but has worked as an aid worker, researcher, and diplomat, mostly in Afghanistan. PEACE, PEACE they say is the extraordinary result of her three years of postcards. It is dedicated “to the peace makers” and in her introduction she writes:

As I sat down to write about peace, I kept turning to war, wondering whether I would stand out—a sender of dark collages and words that refused to sound upbeat. A poet who kept reaching for memories of aftermath and foreboding. (p. 3)

Having spent “a large part of [her] life surrounded by ripples of war” she found herself groping for the stock images. “Somewhere along the way,” she writes, “I lost the words.” It is a stirring and beautiful introduction, and ends with these words:

So we live. We can’t be overcome by despair and we can’t pretend [war]’s not there. We can’t keep calling peace what isn’t peace, but we also can’t disparage what is, or what could be, however insignificant it might feel. We should speak of it, even if we can’t find the words. Because we need to hear from people who no longer know what to say. (p. 4)

This is the first poem in the book:

and on this first day

I realise I know
how to write
about

riddled bodies
a whole country
in mourning

how to listen to
longing and people
who still dream

how to feel anger how to
watch the young their
eyes still shining but

I don’t know

where I left this
elusive thing

that was given to me
for safe keeping too

—Martine van Bijlert

The poems are sometimes tentative, raising hard questions: “is happiness always built on oblivion / and forgetting // always stacked on the bodies of the tired”; “listening // to a lone bird sing… / I woke to rain // wanting to know where I could  // learn a song / like that”; “can we talk about peace building // about saying bodies / and meaning institutions // saying agreement / and meaning a document.”

Some of the poems are hopeful, as if the poet can’t help herself (and I couldn’t read the following poem without thinking of Dickinson’s abashed bird in “’Hope’ is the thing with feathers”):

while I was away

summer swept in suddenly
rained down sun and coaxed out buds

bursting with impatience

leaves unfolding everywhere
shiny and tiny

and abashed
by their own brightness

—Martine van Bijlert

The 2023 poems are colored by the unexpected and “too early” death of a friend:

my friend died

and I’m not grieving

the books he’ll
never write

         but the hole

burnt in the fabric of time

the rooms that will
never get to greet

his stooped
frame

—Martine van Bijlert

I apologize for putting—in a review!—three entire poems, but they are so short, and I found the cumulative effect of them so moving. In this last one, the words “but the hole” stand alone in the poem, indented, set off by white space on all sides, a hole in the poem. The poet writes “I’m not grieving,” but we don’t believe her. The poem is made of grief.

I hope some of you will find this book for yourself. Her website is a good starting place: https://www.martinevanbijlert.com.

Or you can order the book by following this link: https://bookshop.org/p/books/peace-peace-they-say/5e8d047f184d048a?ean=9789083457406&next=t&.

As I write this I think of Gaza, Afghanistan, and the other 45 countries where the Geneva Convention reports armed conflict. This week marks the three year anniversary of Putin’s unlawful invasion of Ukraine. And there is our own deeply divided United States. As van Bijlert writes, peace belongs to all of us. So does violence. I wish for you the words you need to express all that you feel in this tumultuous year, and, despite the tumult,  I wish you bright moments pocked by peace.

Last Call of the Dark

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My review of Mary Crane’s Last Call of the Dark just went up today, on-line at Raven Chronicles. Follow the link to read the full review!

As a bonus for reading my blog, here’s a poem – about spring, which cannot get here fast enough for me.

Hazel Catkin

I greeted the first spring-like day
with exhaustion, no appreciation
of a small portion of sun
in gray mosaic, and a stiff wind.
I was tired. The retreating season
offered no space for my small needs,
as the world iced over in suspicion
and decent people passed away.

I once fell in love with a hazel catkin –
heads drawn together, breath quickened,
we gazed into its bright red styles
instead of one another’s animated faces.
I don’t need to recreate the love
but the fall – the descent into desire
as the buds swell up, the body warms,
and a blush reawakens into life.

—Mary Eliza Crane

Crane is a western Washington poet who has resided in the hills above the Snoqualmie Valley for nearly four decades. Our paths have crossed at poetry open mics in Kirkland’s Book Tree and at Easy Speak in Wedgewood (Seattle); she is a co-host of her local poetry night in Duvall. To learn more about Last Call of the Dark, see my review (of course), or visit Cirque Press.

And if you are looking for an open mic, you can find it here: Western Washington Poets Network.

Dusk-Voiced, poems by Jayne Marek

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I learned this week of the death, January 9, of my friend the literary scholar and poet Jayne Marek. My friend and my comrade poet. You can read her inspiring obituary here. My review of her new book, Dusk-Voiced (Tebot Bach, 2024), is waiting to be posted at Escape into Life (apparently there is a problem with distribution of Tebot Bach’s books). You can hear Jayne talk about and read from Dusk-Voiced at the Meter-Cute substack.

Jayne and I met at a writer’s conference. Because she lived in Port Townsend and I live in Edmonds, we did not often see each other. Neither of us were crazy about long phone calls. We did not become the sort of friends who hang out on Zooms together, or share poems vis email, though we did share publication in Triple No. 10 from Ravenna Press.

Every November, for the last 7 or so years, both Jayne and I were invited to the Glen Cove Writers’ Retreat on Hood Canal, and every year (with the exception of 2020), we went. At Glen Cove we took long walks together and bird-watched. Jayne was an avid naturalist, and she took amazing photographs of mushrooms and bugs. Evenings, we drank wine and read each other poems.

Recently, when we were asked to share a poem with our Glen Cove hosts, this is the poem that Jayne offered.

Friday Morning

I slice cucumbers and tomatoes in sunlight
that swaths the kitchen counter with heat.
I think of my friends who have passed
who also chopped vegetables for their families,
friends and visitors, themselves. All of us
feeling solitary (though their spirits are at my shoulder),
our hands warmed, our minds intent on the task
and its goodwill of sharing and feeding.

Out the window, ducks swim and dive.
They surface with fragments of eelgrass
in their bills, ruffle their wings
to throw off water—their medium,
their home, but only one of their worlds.
I suppose they see my shape on the other side
of this glass, moving, my human actions
mysterious but understandable: these things I do,
they do theirs, our spheres visible to one another.

There seems no way to cross over, to explain to the ducks
how I prepare food, to ask how birds learn to forage.
Sunlight probes the water a few inches deep,
shines through the windowpane and in the woods,
farther than any of us can see. I think of friends’ names
and what they liked to cook—more, how they would think,
surely, as I do now, of time and eternity, the divider
of death, the ways water and sunshine touch,
whether any of us may learn to understand.

—Jayne Marek (1954-2025)

Glen Cove, Nov. 2024