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

Matthew Murrey, LITTLE JOY

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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

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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.

Michael Daley, GROUND WORK

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GROUND WORK: POEMS 2020-2025, Michael Daley, Ravenna Press 2025

It’s my pleasure today to share a poem from Michael Daley’s newest book, Ground Work. My full review appears in the current print edition of Rain Taxi, and you can learn more about Michael by visiting his page at Empty Bowl, or Poets & Writers. (My on-line search for sites to share with you yielded numerous Michael Daley interviews, poems, and recordings.)

I love this poem (below) because I, of late, have been in danger of being buried in the bottom of a toolbox. House projects began piling up in December—new gutters turned into a new roof, delayed and expanded by the discovery of rotted roof struts; new flooring because of the damaged carpets revealed a leak in the kitchen, a subfloor that had to be replaced, then the perhaps stupid choice to go for a whole new kitchen; and did I mention the doors, the windows?—suffice to say we are not yet at the end. (Though now when things come up I am learning to say, “That’s a 2027 problem.”)

Rereading Michael’s poems about work, and about failed work, gives me heart.

On the Gift of Yet Another Torn Cardboard Box of the Late Great Master Poet’s Letters

For Fred Manvellor

Maybe fifty years from now, some kid mechanic
desperate to locate a caulking gun or jigsaw blade
inside a greased box labeled “finest bourbons”—
under a cache of stripped screws, bent brads,
cigarette butts, garage soot, crumpled bloodied toilet tissue—
might uncover such a trove of my own unread sketches, unsent letters,
drafts of failed poems, and dreams—if I’m lucky.

—Michael Daley, Ground Work

Nina Burokas, in her Raven Chronicles review, calls the poems of Ground Work, “incantatory,” and adds a timely reminder (for me) that all work (house repairs as well as the writing or poetry reviews) is prayer.

Michael Daley is truly a northwest treasure and I invite you to take a deeper look.

Sandra Yannone’s BOATS FOR WOMEN

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BOATS FOR WOMEN, Sandra Yannone, Salmon Poetry, 2019.

If you don’t know Sandra Yannone, I am here to tell you, you really should. In addition to being Poet Laureate of her hometown, Old Saybrook, Connecticut, consider this impressive list of activities from her website:

She is co-founder and host of Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry, an international, intersectional, intergenerational poetry group and reading series. In addition, Sandy hosts Last Tuesdays with Sandy & Thomas, a special monthly online reading event for Olympia Poetry Network subscribers, and co-hosts the West-East Bicoastal Poets of the Pandemic & Beyondonline reading series. Previous hosting and co-hosting appearances include The Collectibles Lesbian Trading Card Reading Series with Headmistress Press, and as the featured poet and collaborator on the Little Oracles: Divinations podcast miniseries.

I met up with Sandy at my June reading for Olympia Poetry Network, and we exchanged books. Her Boats for Women witnesses the sinking of the R.M.S. Titanic, rides along with Houdini’s wife, and dramatizes what it looks like to survive one’s own raucous and wild choices.

The title poem, a prose poem, marries marine history with personal history, capturing all the themes of the book—“Silence. Disaster. Desire. Hope. These cardinal directions…” Notice the anaphora (the repetition of a word at the beginning of clauses) of yes, yes, yes running all the way through the poem.

Boats for Women

Yes, the boat sank. Yes, it broke in two like a stereotypical
broken heart before it plummeted to depths no one could measure
until seventy years later technology caught up and looked its
ancestor in the face. Yes is the way the years oxidize the steel,
and yes wipes the name Titanic off the bow. Yes are the lifeboats,
the davits, the call for women and children first. Yes are the men
who cry from the decks. Sometimes when I kiss her, I am
leaving a yes on her lips to remind her that I will go down
with the ship. Sometimes when she whispers yes, she is staying
on board. But there is always room on the lifeboats for two
more women. Yes is the fact that if we were alive on that
night, we would have lived.

—Sandra Yannone

If you are writing a poem a day during National Poetry Month, Sandy’s “Some Talk About Rain” suggests a good prompt. (And, yes, it is raining today in the Pacific Northwest with a 100% chance of rain.) It begins: “We were in the soggy middle again and in between / she was talking about the rain, remembering / how it rained…” A few lines later: “how we would spill / wet against the bricks, sequined trails / / rushing ahead…” Are we talking about rain or about relationships or a hike, or all three? The imagery and chimed sounds (notice the plosive sounds: weT againsT the briCKs, seQuined) here, and throughout the collection suggest, definitely, the glad all of it.

To learn more about the poet, visit her website, https://www.sandrayannone.com, where you’ll also find links to her on-line events, and for purchase of her books.

Photo from PEXELS, by Mike van Schoonderwalt: https://www.pexels.com/photo/fishing-boats-on-water-5502827/