A few offerings to lift your thoughts

/5 Comments/in /by

This morning I cracked open another poetry book that proves resistant to being read quickly. But I also found a new post from blogger Deborah Brasket, waiting patiently for me in my voluminous gmail.

Brasket turns to the poetry of Czeslaw Milocz to find direction and comfort in our difficult times.

Days After the World Was Supposed to End

Two other bloggers, or, I guess, sub-stackers, that I read regularly are Richard Rohr (you can find his daily meditations here: https://cac.org/tag/richard-rohr/ ) and Parker J. Palmer, whose Living the Questions always encourages me (find him here: https://parkerjpalmer.substack.com/.

Completely by accident — I was searching for the source of a quote from Lorene Niedecker — I came across this:

Uncaging the Bird in the Mind: William Henry Hudson and the Gift of the Ruin of Your Best Laid Plans

Leah Naomi Green, THE MORE EXTRAVAGANT FEAST

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE MORE EXTRAVAGANT FEAST, Leah Naomi Green, Graywolf Press, 2020. Winner of the Walt Whitman Award, 2019, selected by Li-Young Lee.

Because I have skipped a couple Aprils of my poetry-book-a-day in celebration of National Poetry Month, there’s a huge stack of poetry books waiting for my close attention. Where do all these books come from? People send me books; I exchange books with poets at readings; I pick up books in my local bookstore and can’t bring myself to put them down again; on occasion, I deliberately choose a book by a poet I don’t know—curious about the poet, or about the press.

I see each book as a sort of debt incurred, and this month is an opportunity to pay back the poetry community for supporting me.

So, where or when did I pick up this book? I don’t remember! That it was selected by Li-Young Lee (a favorite poet of mine) for this prestigious award no doubt has much to do with my having it.

Waking Up the Bell

The poem is the slag heap,
and what I keep I keep.

The axe I did not make, the trees
do what I can’t: converting light

for when it’s gone. The fire
and the forges

call the metals back
like meteorites from orbit.

The ore is that which changes me,
extracts me from myself.

The iron tonsil of the bell
I neither wrought nor swung

cleaves hours into halves,
muscles to my bone.

It scores my weeks,
spills them

one at a time
in the lap of the ferrous valley.

We’ll break them open this way,
melt them back to days.

—Leah Naomi Green

Although the poems are not what I would call Whitmanesque, each section has an epigraph from Whitman, and, like Walt Whitman’s poems, these poems celebrate and sing the body. Stiff hip, whorl of an ear, “fingers and formed lung.” Some of my favorite poems in this collection are about pregnancy and childbirth. Other poems are about introducing a child to the world, about the death of grandparents, about eating and other kinds of caring that go into sustaining our bodies.

The tenderness and simplicity of these lines in “Week Twenty: Indulgences” threw me back to my own daughters’ early childhood:

Last night
her small clothes
hung on the line waiting,
and I loved them there
all night,
their drying
in the quiet.

High praise from the back cover:

“Time doesn’t move, we move,” says Tolstoy. And so we travel—inside our bodies, inside our days, our families. Leah Naomi Green’s calm, clear eye documents the essential, elemental music of this journey. —Ilya Kaminsky

The darkness and suffering of living on earth are assumed in this work, woven throughout the fabric of its lineated perceptions and insights, and yet, it is ultimately informed by the deep logic of compassion (is there a deeper human logic?) and enacts the wisdom of desire and fecundity reconciled with knowledge of death and boundedness. —Li-Young Lee

To write poems “informed by the deep logic of compassion” is a great goal.

You can learn more about Leah Naomi Green at her website, including how to purchase her book.

Photo by Emine: https://www.pexels.com/photo/pigeons-on-person-s-hand-15010957/

Matthew Murrey, LITTLE JOY

/2 Comments/in , , /by

I’m really phoning it in today—my apologies. It’s been one of those days (2 days) with a thousand interruptions. Much of it good: carpet edge is reset; electrician has rewired for the new stove and installed the light fixture over the sink; faucet and garbage disposal going in today; appliances, soon. (It looks as though I will have a working kitchen again within 2 or 3 days, early next week at the latest.)

A month or so ago I reviewed Matthew Murrey’s book, Little Joy (from The Portage Poetry Series, Cornerstone Press, 2026) for Escape Into Life. You can read my review by following this link.

And here is one poem, to demonstrate what I mean about the delight Murrey threads through the entire book:

Shifting

I was wind and sunlight again
on the El platform as a train pulled in.

Its doors opened to a woman
with wild, gray hair and loose layers

of mismatched clothes. Without one word
she tossed a blessing of birdseed for the birds

then pigeoned back from the closing doors.
I could call her crazy, but what about you and me

shifting for ourselves in our drabs and grays that hide
our iridescent purple and green fly-away dreams?

I wish I could wear my wings on my sleeve, even as I grub
for the money that gets me the food I need and the place I sleep.

—Matthew Murrey, Little Joy

Think of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” with its resounding end-line, “You must change your life.” Rilke closely observes a statue; Murrey, an old woman feeding birds. If you need a prompt today, take note of two or three things—unusual, maybe—that catch your attention today. Jot down some details from one, and, dwelling on it, consider what you might change about your own life in answer to its call.

Gregory Orr, image from Copper Canyon

poetry will save you

/0 Comments/in , /by

POETRY AS SURVIVAL, Gregory Orr, University of Georgia Press, 2002.

In the depths of a blues my husband used to call “the Dempsey Dumpster,” I had a dream, or a fragment of dream that woke me in the winter dark, and this single line struck me and stuck with me, long after the details of the dream had vanished:

poetry will save you

I don’t feel too saved, not yet, but I have been reading a book, Gregory Orr’s Poetry as Survival, unearthed from stacks of unread books beside my desk, and I’m finding it helpful.

My goal during National Poetry Month is to post every day—to inspire you every day—but that won’t necessarily mean a review (I’m currently reading a friend’s 100-page poetry collection). But it could mean…something. So here’s a fragment from the great Gregory Orr:

On a day-to-day basis our threshold is constantly shifting and disappearing and being repressed out of anxiety, whereas in poetry we seek out poems that can take us to our threshold (or one of our thresholds). It is just such a place where we feel most alive, where both exchange of energy and change itself can happen. It is on a threshold, at the edge, where we are most able to alter our understanding of the world and our lives in it. (53)

I’m discovering, too, Orr’s delightful images:

It’s possible to imagine the rectangle of a doorway as the rectangular shape of the page on which a poem appears. (52)

Meanings in symbol are like the twenty circus clowns emerging from a tiny car, and we are well advised to yield to the naïve wonder of such abundance. (104)

In yesterday’s post I was tempted to use the clown car trope to describe Kathleen Flenniken’s dexterity with layers (upon layers) of meaning. I should have.

So, there you have it. I’m accompanying my dear friend Priscilla Long to Book Tree this afternoon (4ish?) for her workshop and reading, and I will be reading on the open mic. You could read on the open mic, too.