BillyBlog's Favorite Poems, #6 ("Rock and Hawk" by Robinson Jeffers)

Robinson Jeffers is one of the best underrated poets of the 20th Century. Perhaps I am biased due to my being a fellow alumnus from Occidental College (he was the original oxypoet) , but his work stands the test of time, as a truly amazing California poet.

In 1987, when I was a sophomore at Occidental, the college celebrated Jeffers' centennial. I was too busy being preoccupied with being a college student to appreciate it, or attend any of the centennial events, but I managed to salvage and keep a poster that marked the occasion.

[Come to think of it, I haven't seen it in a while. Could it have been lost along with my Ferlinghetti? That would suck.]

Anyway, here is the poem:

Rock and Hawk
by Robinson Jeffers
Here is a symbol in which Many high tragic thoughts Watch their own eyes. This gray rock, standing tall On the headland, where the seawind Lets no tree grow, Earthquake-proved, and signatured By ages of storms: on its peak A falcon has perched. I think, here is your emblem To hang in the future sky; Not the cross, not the hive, But this; bright power, dark peace; Fierce consciousness joined with final Disinterestedness; Life with calm death; the falcon's Realist eyes and act Married to the massive Mysticism of stone, Which failure cannot cast down Nor success make proud.

See the Occidental online resource center here.

Previous Favorite Poems for National Poetry Month:

#7 - "Nostalgia" by Billy Collins
#8 - "A Piece of the Storm" by Mark Strand
#9A - "The Colonel" by Carolyn Forché and
#9B - "may i feel said he" by e.e.cummings
#10 - "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps" by Galway Kinnell
#11 - "Symposium" by Paul Muldoon
#12 - "Poem for the Class of..." by Max Eberts
#13 - "Boss of the Food" by Lois-Ann Yamanaka
#14 - "Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath
#15 - "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop
#16 - "Buddhist Barbie" by Denise Duhamel
#17 - "One Train May Hide Another" by Kenneth Koch
#18 - "Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!) by Frank O'Hara (with Audio)
#19 - "Crumbs" by Hal Sirowitz (Audio Added)
#20 - "This Is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams
#21 - "They Feed They Lion" by Philip Levine
#22 - "Looking at Kilauea" by Garret Hongo
#23 - "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" by Randall Jarrell (Audio Added)
#24 - A Handful of Richard Brautigan
#25 - "A Buddha in the Woodpile" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#26 - "Separation" by W.S. Merwin
#27 - "The Flea" by John Donne
#28 - Poem Twenty from Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
#29 - "Magpie's Song" by Gary Snyder
#30 - "Eunoia" by Christian Bok

A Non-Poetry Jury Duty (Sort of) Post

7:49 am. Well, I am off to jury duty at Kings County Civil Court. Instead of "live blogging," I'm just periodically recapping. I mean, what could be more exciting than jury duty, right? And Civil Court no less.

Aside from my BillyBlackBerry, I am armed with three (3) short stories I printed out from The New Yorker site (T.C. Boyle, Salman Rushdie, and Roddy Doyle) and a non-fiction piece by Nick Paumgarten about elevators.

Also, I have last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, with an unmolested crossword puzzle.

Plus, Kurt Vonnegut's first posthumous colection Armageddon in Retrospect, as well as a non-fiction tome, Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community, by Margo DeMello (Duke University Press).

Not to mention my journal. Even though I just did. With all this to do, I shouldn't be bored. But I will be.

10:17 a.m. Homeward bound. Plans to have the kids off and occupied tomorrow, and the fact that this is a week they are off from school, threw a wrench into the juryworks. I received a postponement. And I barely cracked the tattoo book. So much for an exciting post!

On the train home, read the aforementioned T.C. Boyle story, "The Lie". Vintage TCB: dark as always, with a seemingly good protagonist slipping on a moral slippery slope that transported him from benign to tragic. Read it here.

BillyBlog's Favorite Poems, #7 ("Nostalgia" by Billy Collins)

Either you love Billy Collins, or you don't. This poem shows why so many people love him:
NOSTALGIA

Remember the 1340's? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called "Find the Cow."
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent a badly broken code.

The 1790's will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.

Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.

As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.
This poem and "Litany" are among his best.

Listen: "Nostalgia" (mp3) by Billy Collins.

Previous Favorite Poems for National Poetry Month:

#8 - "A Piece of the Storm" by Mark Strand
#9A - "The Colonel" by Carolyn Forché and
#9B - "may i feel said he" by e.e.cummings
#10 - "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps" by Galway Kinnell
#11 - "Symposium" by Paul Muldoon
#12 - "Poem for the Class of..." by Max Eberts
#13 - "Boss of the Food" by Lois-Ann Yamanaka
#14 - "Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath
#15 - "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop
#16 - "Buddhist Barbie" by Denise Duhamel
#17 - "One Train May Hide Another" by Kenneth Koch
#18 - "Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!) by Frank O'Hara (with Audio)
#19 - "Crumbs" by Hal Sirowitz (Audio Added)
#20 - "This Is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams
#21 - "They Feed They Lion" by Philip Levine
#22 - "Looking at Kilauea" by Garret Hongo
#23 - "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" by Randall Jarrell (Audio Added)
#24 - A Handful of Richard Brautigan
#25 - "A Buddha in the Woodpile" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#26 - "Separation" by W.S. Merwin
#27 - "The Flea" by John Donne
#28 - Poem Twenty from Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
#29 - "Magpie's Song" by Gary Snyder
#30 - "Eunoia" by Christian Bok

BillyBlog's Favorite Poems, #8 ("A Piece of the Storm" by Mark Strand)

I would select “Keeping Things Whole” by Mark Strand but that’s from a Poetry in Motion poster that I featured here last year. Oh wait, I featured "A Piece of the Storm" too. Sigh. I can't be bothered.

Behold, this amazing poem from Blizzard of One is a worthy replacement:

A Piece of the Storm

For Sharon Horvath

From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed.
That's all There was to it. No more than a solemn waking
To brevity, to the lifting and falling away of attention, swiftly,
A time between times, a flowerless funeral. No more than that
Except for the feeling that this piece of the storm,
Which turned into nothing before your eyes, would come back,
That someone years hence, sitting as you are now, might say:
"It's time. The air is ready. The sky has an opening."

More Strand poetry here.

I love both the literal and metaphoric image of a single snowflake falling and having an impact.

This poem still interests me years after I first read it.

Previous Favorite Poems for National Poetry Month:

#9A - "The Colonel" by Carolyn Forché and
#9B - "may i feel said he" by e.e.cummings
#10 - "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps" by Galway Kinnell
#11 - "Symposium" by Paul Muldoon
#12 - "Poem for the Class of..." by Max Eberts
#13 - "Boss of the Food" by Lois-Ann Yamanaka
#14 - "Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath
#15 - "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop
#16 - "Buddhist Barbie" by Denise Duhamel
#17 - "One Train May Hide Another" by Kenneth Koch
#18 - "Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!) by Frank O'Hara (with Audio)
#19 - "Crumbs" by Hal Sirowitz (Audio Added)
#20 - "This Is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams
#21 - "They Feed They Lion" by Philip Levine
#22 - "Looking at Kilauea" by Garret Hongo
#23 - "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" by Randall Jarrell (Audio Added)
#24 - A Handful of Richard Brautigan
#25 - "A Buddha in the Woodpile" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#26 - "Separation" by W.S. Merwin
#27 - "The Flea" by John Donne
#28 - Poem Twenty from Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
#29 - "Magpie's Song" by Gary Snyder
#30 - "Eunoia" by Christian Bok

Two for Tuesday Favorite Poem Bonus! (#9A – “The Colonel” by Carolyn Forche and #9B – “May I Feel Said He” by e.e.cummings)

As mentioned in the last post, I added someone extra in the teens and threw off my count, so instead of 30 posts, I was looking at 31. So, to right the ship, I am pairing off two poems that have absolutely nothing in common, other than the fact that I think they’re brilliant.

WARNING: The following two poems may not be suitable for children.

#9A is “The Colonel” by Carolyn Forché. I believe it is the first prose poem in the top 31 list. Be sure to listen to the audio link

The Colonel

WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true. I was in his house. His wife carried
a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went
out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the
cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over
the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English.
Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to
scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On
the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had
dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for
calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of
bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief
commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was
some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot
said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed
himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say
nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries
home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like
dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one
of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water
glass. It came alive there. I am tried of fooling around he said. As
for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck them-
selves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last
of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some
of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the
ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.
May 1978

There’s a bevy of literary analysis on this poem here.

It is worthwhile to jump to that page and scroll down to the excerpt of an interview with Bill Moyers as they discuss the poem. It was in that context that I first heard it read aloud.

It is one of the most haunting poems I’ve ever read, or heard. Forché, when she reads it, speaks in a volume a notch above a whisper. I get chills thinking about it. Listen to her reading it in this YouTube clip:



On a more light-hearted note is this one by e.e. cummings:

may i feel said he
may i feel said he
(i'll squeal said she
just once said he)
it's fun said she


(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she


(let's go said he
not too far said she
what's too far said he
where you are said she)


may i stay said he
(which way said she
like this said he
if you kiss said she


may i move said he
is it love said she)
if you're willing said he
(but you're killing said she


but it's life said he
but your wife said she
now said he)
ow said she


(tiptop said he
don't stop said she
oh no said he)
go slow said she


(cccome?said he
ummm said she)
you're divine!said he
(you are Mine said she)

I discovered this sexy love poem in a version published accompanied by paintings by Marc Chagall. It’s an awesome self-inclusive marriage of poetry and art and it is HIGHLY recommended by me.

See more about Chagall here.

Click the badge below to buy it from Amazon. You won’t regret it.

   

 Previous Favorite Poems for National Poetry Month:

#10 - "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps" by Galway Kinnell
#11 - "Symposium" by Paul Muldoon
#12 - "Poem for the Class of..." by Max Eberts
#13 - "Boss of the Food" by Lois-Ann Yamanaka
#14 - "Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath
#15 - "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop
#16 - "Buddhist Barbie" by Denise Duhamel
#17 - "One Train May Hide Another" by Kenneth Koch
#18 - "Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!) by Frank O'Hara (with Audio)
#19 - "Crumbs" by Hal Sirowitz (Audio Added)
#20 - "This Is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams
#21 - "They Feed They Lion" by Philip Levine
#22 - "Looking at Kilauea" by Garret Hongo
#23 - "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" by Randall Jarrell (Audio Added)
#24 - A Handful of Richard Brautigan
#25 - "A Buddha in the Woodpile" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#26 - "Separation" by W.S. Merwin
#27 - "The Flea" by John Donne
#28 - Poem Twenty from Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
#29 - "Magpie's Song" by Gary Snyder
#30 - "Eunoia" by Christian Bok

BillyBlog's Favorite Poems, #10 ("After Making Love We Hear Footsteps" by Galway Kinnell)

Well, I seem to have miscalculated. The addition of Max Eberts' poem may have thrown off my pacing, and I am now facing my top 10, with 11 poets to go. Oops. I guess I could go back and strike one of the other poems, but that would just not be in the spirit of National Poetry Month now, would it?

So, 31 it is, which means I either post two on one day or post the last one on May 1. Let's go with one today and make tomorrow a Two-for-Tuesday.

The following poem is from Galway Kinnell. It is much-anthologized and even appears in the same anthology I was published in. That pleased me to be in such great company.

It's a great poem for anyone who has been a parent and has experienced the lack of privacy that a child carries along with them:

After Making Love We Hear Footsteps

For I can snore like a bullhorn

or play loud music

or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman

and Fergus will only sink deeper

into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash,

but let there be that heavy breathing

or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house

and he will wrench himself awake

and make for it on the run—as now, we lie together,

after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies,

familiar touch of the long-married,

and he appears—in his baseball pajamas, it happens,

the neck opening so small he has to screw them on—

and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep,

his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.



In the half darkness we look at each other

and smile

and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body—

this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,

sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,

this blessing love gives again into our arms.

Listen: Galway Kinnell reading "After Making Love, We Hear Footsteps" (m4a)

Previous Favorite Poems for National Poetry Month:

#11 - "Symposium" by Paul Muldoon
#12 - "Poem for the Class of..." by Max Eberts
#13 - "Boss of the Food" by Lois-Ann Yamanaka
#14 - "Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath
#15 - "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop
#16 - "Buddhist Barbie" by Denise Duhamel
#17 - "One Train May Hide Another" by Kenneth Koch
#18 - "Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!) by Frank O'Hara (with Audio)
#19 - "Crumbs" by Hal Sirowitz (Audio Added)
#20 - "This Is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams
#21 - "They Feed They Lion" by Philip Levine
#22 - "Looking at Kilauea" by Garret Hongo
#23 - "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" by Randall Jarrell (Audio Added)
#24 - A Handful of Richard Brautigan
#25 - "A Buddha in the Woodpile" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#26 - "Separation" by W.S. Merwin
#27 - "The Flea" by John Donne
#28 - Poem Twenty from Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
#29 - "Magpie's Song" by Gary Snyder
#30 - "Eunoia" by Christian Bok

BillyBlog's Favorite Poems, #11 ("Symposium" by Paul Muldoon)

Favorite Poem #11 honors goes to Paul Muldoon. The Irish-born poet recently assumed the helm of Poetry Editor at The New Yorker.

Mr. Muldoon is an engaging person, whose readings are never boring. He has a fantastic reading voice and, despite a complexity to some of his work, remains accessible.

When thinking about Muldoon, I am drawn to one poem in particular. Although, it should be said, I love his collaboration with the late Warren Zevon on the album My Ride's Here. His musical ear melds with academia on the title track and another song called "Macgillicuddy's Reeks".

Symposium

You can bring a horse to water but you can't make it hold
its nose to the grindstone and hunt with the hounds.
Every dog has a stitch in time. Two heads? You've been sold
one good turn. One good turn deserves a bird in the hand.

A bird in the hand is better than no bread.
To have your cake is to pay Paul.
Make hay while you can still hit the nail on the head.
For want of a nail the sky might fall.

People in glass houses can't see the wood
for the new broom. Rome wasn't built between two stools.
Empty vessels wait for no man.

A hair of the dog is a friend indeed.
There's no fool like the fool
who's shot his bolt. There's no smoke after the horse is gone.

Do yourself a favor and listen to it here.

Previous Favorite Poems for National Poetry Month:

#12 - "Poem for the Class of..." by Max Eberts
#13 - "Boss of the Food" by Lois-Ann Yamanaka
#14 - "Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath
#15 - "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop
#16 - "Buddhist Barbie" by Denise Duhamel
#17 - "One Train May Hide Another" by Kenneth Koch
#18 - "Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!) by Frank O'Hara (with Audio)
#19 - "Crumbs" by Hal Sirowitz (Audio Added)
#20 - "This Is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams
#21 - "They Feed They Lion" by Philip Levine
#22 - "Looking at Kilauea" by Garret Hongo
#23 - "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" by Randall Jarrell (Audio Added)
#24 - A Handful of Richard Brautigan
#25 - "A Buddha in the Woodpile" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#26 - "Separation" by W.S. Merwin
#27 - "The Flea" by John Donne
#28 - Poem Twenty from Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
#29 - "Magpie's Song" by Gary Snyder
#30 - "Eunoia" by Christian Bok

BillyBlog's Favorite Poems, #12 ("Poem for the Class of..." by Max Eberts)

This is a cheat. A repost. But it fits the bill. It's originally from February 6, 2007:

I was cleaning through some old files and....

Let me start another way. In a recent poetry podcast, a poet was asked what magazines he read. The podcast was authored by the Poetry Foundation, which publishes Poetry magazine, the oldest poetry journal in the U.S. The poet admitted he did like to page through Poetry, because every once in a while, he discovered a brilliant gem.

I related to that. It was in back issues of Poetry magazine that I first discovered my favorite poet, Charles Simic. A lot of the time, the poetry there doesn't knock my socks off, but once in a while, it does.

Regular readers may remember a poem I posted in October, from the magazine's Summer Humor Issue (if you missed it, go here to read it again).

Anyway, I was cleaning through some old files and discovered a poem that I ripped out of an issue of Poetry a while back.

The poet is identified as Max Eberts, and I didn't even know what issue this came from, at first. Googling found the index, and I indentified this as coming from the June 1996 issue. I wanted to know more about the poet, but I cannot find any more poetry by Mr. Eberts. There is a Max Eberts who contributed a piece of prose to an anthology of ghost stories. There is also a Max Eberts who was in the publicity department at a little company in Texas called Enron. And a Max Eberts who was editor of Collegium, a publication at the University of Houston. Hmmm. There could be three or four different Max Eberts, or they could all be one in the same. Either way, this poem is among my favorites. It was nice to find it again.

PROGRAM FOR THE CLASS OF...

Out of the arbor of shade, into the light,
our black gowns shimmering like the pigeons
lined up on the balustrades, we enter the open
air glaze of suits and hats, of banners floating,
moving in a rhythm not like the arched arcades, we enter,
a pageant of shadows, long brush strokes of black
through a watercolor. Here in this thick tongue
of early summer air, the bass drum beating, already
we begin to dissolve. Through rows of chairs, past
endless names carved on every folding bench, on every
curved back, rows and rows in memory of those before us,
we take our predetermined seats, unmindful of the dark
birds brooding in the tabernacles, unmindful of the grave
countenance of the priesthood plodding by -
black gowns, velvet bars, mortarboards,
tassels, soft caps, the satin flesh of hoods gleaming
with color - blue, crimson, orange, red - flaring
from all the black, like flames from a smoky pyre.

The speaker on the podium quotes Ecclesiastes;
nothing new under the sun about waiting
for his speech to end, so much talk
about our mission in life as we sit propped
like body bags. And on the East Lawn, peaceful
with the prayerful murmurs of mourning doves,
we mingle, guests after the wake, moving
through the maze of kisses and hugs, of handshakes
and flowers, the darting eyes we won't see again,
flushed faces and fleshly desires, the young lovers
in their shrouds. The light diffuses the oak leaves
into green air and holes of dim reflection.
A blue jay shrieks Thief! Thief!
We linger, not ready just yet to leave the cloister,
not ready to shed our dark habits. One more stroll
along the lawn, past the hollow, where the owl, hidden,
waits for night, waits to swoop
like a cleaver thrown in the dark.

I have changed the title from the original "Class of '87" to "Class of...", per the instructions of the poet himself. In February I received the following e-mail:

Hello Billy,

A friend emailed me your blog, which I really enjoyed. One of the reasons my friend emailed it to me was because it included a poem I wrote, “Program for the Class of ’87,” which I wrote a year or so after I graduated from college in 1993. (I’ve since changed the name of the poem to “Program for the Class of…”). I’m so glad you like that poem. Thank you for your kind words. You said you wanted to know about the person who wrote it but couldn’t find much info except that there is a Max Eberts who contributed a short story for a ghost anthology (Night Shade), was the editor of Collegium (the magazine of the University of Houston), and former manager of public relations and marketing communications at Enron. I am that Max Eberts....Keep creating your beautiful blog…even the name is wonderful…Billy Blog.

Take care, Max

Needless to say, I was blown away when I saw that e-mail. I hope by posting it, I am not appearing too self-indulgent, but it's a perfect shining example of why I do what I do. Here is someone who years ago wrote something that moved me and, in turn, he is thanking me for expressing my feelings about his work.

Mr. Eberts has the honor of making my favorite poems list as the only writer therein who has only written one poem I have read. I thank him again for that.

Previous Favorite Poems for National Poetry Month:

#13 - "Boss of the Food" by Lois-Ann Yamanaka
#14 - "Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath
#15 - "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop
#16 - "Buddhist Barbie" by Denise Duhamel
#17 - "One Train May Hide Another" by Kenneth Koch
#18 - "Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!) by Frank O'Hara (with Audio)
#19 - "Crumbs" by Hal Sirowitz (Audio Added)
#20 - "This Is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams
#21 - "They Feed They Lion" by Philip Levine
#22 - "Looking at Kilauea" by Garret Hongo
#23 - "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" by Randall Jarrell (Audio Added)
#24 - A Handful of Richard Brautigan
#25 - "A Buddha in the Woodpile" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#26 - "Separation" by W.S. Merwin
#27 - "The Flea" by John Donne
#28 - Poem Twenty from Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
#29 - "Magpie's Song" by Gary Snyder
#30 - "Eunoia" by Christian Bok

BillyBlog's Favorite Poems, #13 ("Boss of the Food" by Lois-Ann Yamanaka)

Before time, there was one show on PBS called "United States of Poetry". It wen air in the Nineties, eh? And was watching 'em, an' like get all da poems and da buggahs dat write 'em, eh? An' was watching, and dis wahine come one an' read this poem, an its in pidgin! "Whoa," I think, "now dat's da kine poetry!"

Pardon me if my pidgin is a bit rusty. It's also a lot harder fo write than talk. Anyway, "Boss of the Food" is a great poem in my book, great story too. The series premiered just as the poet, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, had released her third novel Blu's Hanging. She was appearing at the L.A. Times Book Festival shortly thereafter. I showed up at the event, was instantly drawn in by Yamanaka's persona, her charm, and her warmth. At the signing after a panel discussion, I introduced myself and presented her with a bag of Raisinets.

She was so genuinely thrilled with the gesture, I got one big-time hug of Aloha, and a literary friendship began. Now, by that I am not saying Lois and I are buddies, but we have exchanged notes/letters/cards. She gets a holiday card from me (she's met my daughter, Jolee, once, and my mother several times). Whenever she comes to New York, I make it a point to go hear her read, and I'm always warmly remembered and appreciated.

Lois once heaped praise on a poem that I had sent her, and that praise still sustains me over a decade later. So that's the back story and why this poem is special to me.

Caution to the keiki, careful, eh? Get da "f" word in 'em. So if you stay shy li' dat, no read, eh?

BOSS OF THE FOOD
Before time, everytime my sista like be the boss
of the food. We stay shopping in Mizuno Superette
and my madda pull the Oreos off the shelf
and my sista already saying, Mommy,
can be the boss of the Oreos?

The worse was when she was the boss
of the sunflower seeds.
She give me and my other sistas
one seed at a time.
We no could eat the meat.
Us had to put um in one pile on one Kleenex.
Then, when we wen' take all the meat
out of the shells and our lips stay all cho cho,
she give us the seeds one at a time
cause my sista, she the boss
of the sunflower seeds.

One time she was the boss
of the Raisinettes.
Us was riding in the back
of my granpa's Bronco down Kaunakakai Wharf.
There she was, passing us one Raisinette at a time. My mouth was all watery
'cause I like eat um all one time, eh?
So I wen' tell her, Gimme that bag.
And I wen' grab um.
She said, I'ng tell Mommy.
And I said, Go you fuckin' bird killa;
tell Mommy.

She wen' let go the bag.
And I wen' start eating the Raisinetes all one time.
But when I wen' look at her,
I felt kinda bad cause I wen' call her bird killa.
She was boss of the parakeet too, eh,
and she suppose to cover the cage every night.
But one time, she wen' forget.
When us wen' wake up, the bugga was on its back,
legs in the air all stiff.
The bugga was cold.
And I guess the thing that made me feel bad
was I neva think calling her bird killa
would make her feel so bad
that she let go the bag Raisinettes.

But I neva give her back the bag.
I figga what the fuck.
I ain't going suffer eating one Raisinette at a time.
Then beg her for one mo
and I mean one mo
fuckin' candy.

Hear Lois read this here: "Boss of the Food" (m4a)

Previous Favorite Poems for National Poetry Month:

#15 - "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop
#16 - "Buddhist Barbie" by Denise Duhamel
#17 - "One Train May Hide Another" by Kenneth Koch
#18 - "Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!) by Frank O'Hara (with Audio)
#19 - "Crumbs" by Hal Sirowitz (Audio Added)
#20 - "This Is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams
#21 - "They Feed They Lion" by Philip Levine
#22 - "Looking at Kilauea" by Garret Hongo
#23 - "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" by Randall Jarrell (Audio Added)
#24 - A Handful of Richard Brautigan
#25 - "A Buddha in the Woodpile" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#26 - "Separation" by W.S. Merwin
#27 - "The Flea" by John Donne
#28 - Poem Twenty from Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
#29 - "Magpie's Song" by Gary Snyder
#30 - "Eunoia" by Christian Bok

BillyBlog's Favorite Poems, #14 ("Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath)

Before I unveil "Lady Lazarus," let me direct you to a previous post I did on Sylvia Plath, in June 2006, here.

This poem stands alone and contains one of the most haunting boasts in poetry, one of the best exclamation points at the end of a poem.

Lady Lazarus

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it-----

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?-------

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The Peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot ------
The big strip tease.
Gentleman , ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart---
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair on my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash---
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there----

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

Hear Sylvia Plath reading the poem "Lady Lazarus" (m4a).

And, as interpreted via YouTube:



Previous Favorite Poems for National Poetry Month:

#15 - "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop
#16 - "Buddhist Barbie" by Denise Duhamel
#17 - "One Train May Hide Another" by Kenneth Koch
#18 - "Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!) by Frank O'Hara (with Audio)
#19 - "Crumbs" by Hal Sirowitz (Audio Added)
#20 - "This Is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams
#21 - "They Feed They Lion" by Philip Levine
#22 - "Looking at Kilauea" by Garret Hongo
#23 - "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" by Randall Jarrell (Audio Added)
#24 - A Handful of Richard Brautigan
#25 - "A Buddha in the Woodpile" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#26 - "Separation" by W.S. Merwin
#27 - "The Flea" by John Donne
#28 - Poem Twenty from Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
#29 - "Magpie's Song" by Gary Snyder
#30 - "Eunoia" by Christian Bok

BillyBlog's Favorite Poems, #15 ("One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop)

Delusions of grandeur that I would be unveiling rare and unusual poems have fallen by the wayside. Chances are, if I have a favorite poem in the Top 15, it has been seen before by regular readers of poetry. It's not a cop-out. That's just the way it is.

"The art of losing isn't hard to master," the opening line of Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" is in itself one of the more brilliant lines in poetry (in my humble opinion). Bishop's fans may choose others as greater works, but I love this poem- its rhythms, its rhymes, and ultimately, its message. There is little more to say. If you click the poem link above, you'll be transported over to a blog called The Great American Pinup which offers some additional insight on this work.

ONE ART

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is not disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved homes went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it make look like (Write it!) a disaster.

More on Bishop here, along with some links to more poems.

Previous Favorite Poems for National Poetry Month:

#16 - "Buddhist Barbie" by Denise Duhamel
#17 - "One Train May Hide Another" by Kenneth Koch
#18 - "Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!) by Frank O'Hara (with Audio)
#19 - "Crumbs" by Hal Sirowitz (Audio Added)
#20 - "This Is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams
#21 - "They Feed They Lion" by Philip Levine
#22 - "Looking at Kilauea" by Garret Hongo
#23 - "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" by Randall Jarrell (Audio Added)
#24 - A Handful of Richard Brautigan
#25 - "A Buddha in the Woodpile" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#26 - "Separation" by W.S. Merwin
#27 - "The Flea" by John Donne
#28 - Poem Twenty from Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
#29 - "Magpie's Song" by Gary Snyder
#30 - "Eunoia" by Christian Bok

BillyBlog's Favorite Poems, #16 ("Buddhist Barbie" by Denise Duhamel)

Denise Duhamel’s poem “Buddhist Barbie” is just a fingernail sliver of one of my favorite poems. It represents pretty much all of her poetry in the sense that I enjoy it. I like most everything I’ve read by Denise, and I chose this one because it was short (after Kenneth Koch and Garret Hongo, you deserve a shorter one). Denise’s book Kinky was her "breakout" work, a plethora of hilarious “Barbie” poems. Just the concept touched a nostalgic nerve in my body, because I grew attached one Labor Day weekend to a McDonald’s Happy Meal Barbie, dubbed “Crazy Horse Barbie,” because I obtained her on the Vegas strip. But I digress. So much for the high road.

“Buddhist Barbie”

In the 5th century B.C.

an Indian philosopher

Gautama teaches "All is emptiness" 

and "There is no self." 

In the 20th century A.D.

Barbie agrees, but wonders how a man 

with such a belly could pose, 

smiling, and without a shirt.

More awesome Denise Duhamel poems here and the complete volume of The Woman With Two Vaginas: Poetry based on Eskimo Mythology here and the very fun “Sex with a Famous Poet”.

Full disclosure: I met Denise at the Dodge Poetry Festival in 1998 and we have corresponded sporadically over the years, although it’s been a while since I’ve talked to her. I sent her an e-mail shortly after the 9/11 attacks and she used, with my permission, a snippet from my e-mail, among the bits from many others, in her long poem "Love Which Took Its Symmetry for Granted" from her wonderful book Two and Two.

I am a fan of her work through and through and she sits on the ridge of the top 15 and the bottom 15 of my thirty favorite. Here’s a teaser, the top 15 are truly beloved by me. I hope you’ll be back to see how the list plays out….

Previous Favorite Poems for National Poetry Month:

#17 - "One Train May Hide Another" by Kenneth Koch
#18 - "Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!) by Frank O'Hara (with Audio)
#19 - "Crumbs" by Hal Sirowitz (Audio Added)
#20 - "This Is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams
#21 - "They Feed They Lion" by Philip Levine
#22 - "Looking at Kilauea" by Garret Hongo
#23 - "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" by Randall Jarrell (Audio Added)
#24 - A Handful of Richard Brautigan
#25 - "A Buddha in the Woodpile" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#26 - "Separation" by W.S. Merwin
#27 - "The Flea" by John Donne
#28 - Poem Twenty from Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
#29 - "Magpie's Song" by Gary Snyder
#30 - "Eunoia" by Christian Bok

BillyBlog's Favorite Poems, #17 ("One Train May Hide Another" by Kenneth Koch)

Poem # 17 is from Kenneth Koch. Of course, my appreciation for the late poet was enhanced by this tale.

One of my favorite pieces by him is "To Jewishness" (posted here). However, for the sake of conformity, I have selected one of his most widely-known poems, "One Train May Hide Another".

One Train May Hide Another

(sign at a railroad crossing in Kenya)

In a poem, one line may hide another line,

As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.

That is, if you are waiting to cross

The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at

Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read

Wait until you have read the next line--

Then it is safe to go on reading.

In a family one sister may conceal another,

So, when you are courting, it's best to have them all in view

Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another.

One father or one brother may hide the man,

If you are a woman, whom you have been waiting to love.

So always standing in front of something the other

As words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas.

One wish may hide another. And one person's reputation may hide

The reputation of another. One dog may conceal another

On a lawn, so if you escape the first one you're not necessarily safe;

One lilac may hide another and then a lot of lilacs and on the Appia

   Antica one tomb

May hide a number of other tombs. In love, one reproach may hide another,

One small complaint may hide a great one.

One injustice may hide another--one colonial may hide another,

One blaring red uniform another, and another, a whole column. One bath

   may hide another bath

As when, after bathing, one walks out into the rain.

One idea may hide another: Life is simple

Hide Life is incredibly complex, as in the prose of Gertrude Stein

One sentence hides another and is another as well. And in the laboratory

One invention may hide another invention,

One evening may hide another, one shadow, a nest of shadows.

One dark red, or one blue, or one purple--this is a painting

By someone after Matisse. One waits at the tracks until they pass,

These hidden doubles or, sometimes, likenesses. One identical twin

May hide the other. And there may be even more in there! The obstetrician

Gazes at the Valley of the Var. We used to live there, my wife and I, but

One life hid another life. And now she is gone and I am here.

A vivacious mother hides a gawky daughter. The daughter hides

Her own vivacious daughter in turn. They are in

A railway station and the daughter is holding a bag

Bigger than her mother's bag and successfully hides it.

In offering to pick up the daughter's bag one finds oneself confronted by

   the mother's

And has to carry that one, too. So one hitchhiker

May deliberately hide another and one cup of coffee

Another, too, until one is over-excited. One love may hide another love

   or the same love

As when "I love you" suddenly rings false and one discovers

The better love lingering behind, as when "I'm full of doubts"

Hides "I'm certain about something and it is that"

And one dream may hide another as is well known, always, too. In the

   Garden of Eden

Adam and Eve may hide the real Adam and Eve.

Jerusalem may hide another Jerusalem.

When you come to something, stop to let it pass

So you can see what else is there. At home, no matter where,

Internal tracks pose dangers, too: one memory

Certainly hides another, that being what memory is all about,

The eternal reverse succession of contemplated entities. Reading

  A Sentimental Journey look around

When you have finished, for Tristram Shandy, to see

If it is standing there, it should be, stronger

And more profound and theretofore hidden as Santa Maria Maggiore

May be hidden by similar churches inside Rome. One sidewalk

May hide another, as when you're asleep there, and

One song hide another song; a pounding upstairs

Hide the beating of drums. One friend may hide another, you sit at the

   foot of a tree

With one and when you get up to leave there is another

Whom you'd have preferred to talk to all along. One teacher,

One doctor, one ecstasy, one illness, one woman, one man

May hide another. Pause to let the first one pass.

You think, Now it is safe to cross and you are hit by the next one. It

   can be important

To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.

You can read the poem and hear Koch reading it here.

Previous Favorite Poems for National Poetry Month:

#18 - "Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!) by Frank O'Hara (with Audio)
#19 - "Crumbs" by Hal Sirowitz (Audio Added)
#20 - "This Is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams
#21 - "They Feed They Lion" by Philip Levine
#22 - "Looking at Kilauea" by Garret Hongo
#23 - "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" by Randall Jarrell (Audio Added)
#24 - A Handful of Richard Brautigan
#25 - "A Buddha in the Woodpile" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#26 - "Separation" by W.S. Merwin
#27 - "The Flea" by John Donne
#28 - Poem Twenty from Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
#29 - "Magpie's Song" by Gary Snyder
#30 - "Eunoia" by Christian Bok

Rite of Spring: A New Beginning

There are many Rites of Spring. This is one of them:


"Pray tell," one might exclaim, "which Rite of Spring" is this? The answer is on the other side of the tag:


And so a new chapter begins....

And while we're all mulling over the narrative possibilities of our new wind chimes (50% off, no less), they are at this moment dangling from our balcony, and the wind has picked up, 20 MPH from the North.

And the sound I hear is music to my ears.

To Be Continued....

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, go here.

BillyBlog's Favorite Poems, #18 ("Poem" by Frank O'Hara)

Frank O'Hara was one of the great figures in The New York School of Poets. His poems are beautiful snapshots, laced with humor and lined with passion.

Much of O'Hara's poetry is set in the landscape of New York City. He was famous for writing numerous "untitled" poems, while on his lunch breaks during his tenure as a crurator at the Museum of Modern Art. We are left with wonderful moments in time, many of which are untitled. His wonderful poem "The Day Lady Died" (click link to read and also to hear Philip Levine read the poem) is a shining example of this.

I could choose from many of his works as among my favorites, but I have selected this one:

Poem

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

Listen: "Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!)" (m4a) Read by Frank O'Hara.

A production note: I have also added the audio of Hal Sirowitz and Randall Jarrell reading their poems below. Click links to listen.

Previous Favorite Poems for National Poetry Month:

#19 - "Crumbs" by Hal Sirowitz (Audio Added)
#20 - "This Is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams
#21 - "They Feed They Lion" by Philip Levine
#22 - "Looking at Kilauea" by Garret Hongo
#23 - "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" by Randall Jarrell (Audio Added)
#24 - A Handful of Richard Brautigan
#25 - "A Buddha in the Woodpile" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#26 - "Separation" by W.S. Merwin
#27 - "The Flea" by John Donne
#28 - Poem Twenty from Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
#29 - "Magpie's Song" by Gary Snyder
#30 - "Eunoia" by Christian Bok

BillyBlog's Favorite Poems, #19 ("Crumbs" by Hal Sirowitz)

I first heard of the poet Hal Sirowitz in the PBS series The United States of Poetry. This was the poem that introduced me to Sirowitz. I met him once at a small reading in the Village and he signed his Poetry in Motion poster (see it here).

I love his matter-of-factness, that masks deep-rooted parental issues that I think some of us (not all of

Crumbs

                  Don't eat any more food in your room,
            Mother said. You'll get more bugs.
          They depend on people like you.
        Otherwise, they would starve.
       But who do you want to make happy,
     your mother or a bunch of ants?
    What have they done for you?
  Nothing. They have no feelings.
They'll eat your candy.  Yet
you treat them better than you treat me.
You keep feeding them.
But you never offer me anything.

Listen: "Crumbs" (m4a) by Hal Sirowitz.

Read more Sirowitz here, here, and here.

Previous Favorite Poems for National Poetry Month:

#20, "This Is Just to Say," by William Carlos Williams
#21 - "They Feed They Lion" by Philip Levine
#22 - "Looking at Kilauea" by Garret Hongo
#23 - "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" by Randall Jarrell
#24 - A Handful of Richard Brautigan
#25 - "A Buddha in the Woodpile" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#26 - "Separation" by W.S. Merwin
#27 - "The Flea" by John Donne
#28 - Poem Twenty from Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
#29 - "Magpie's Song" by Gary Snyder
#30 - "Eunoia" by Christian Bok

Umbrellacide III: Spring Edition

Don't worry, just a couple of what I think are artistic shots:


And I like this one with some spring colors in the background:

BillyBlog's Favorite Poems, #20 ("This Is Just To Say" by William Carlos Williams)

I'll be a Minimalist today and just present the poem:

This Is Just To Say
by William Carlos Williams
I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold

This is just to say there is nothing more to say.

Previous Favorite Poems for National Poetry Month:

#21 - "They Feed They Lion" by Philip Levine
#22 - "Looking at Kilauea" by Garret Hongo
#23 - "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" by Randall Jarrell
#24 - A Handful of Richard Brautigan
#25 - "A Buddha in the Woodpile" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#26 - "Separation" by W.S. Merwin
#27 - "The Flea" by John Donne
#28 - Poem Twenty from Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
#29 - "Magpie's Song" by Gary Snyder
#30 - "Eunoia" by Christian Bok

BillyBlog's Favorite Poems, #21 ("They Feed They Lion" by Philip Levine)

Philip Levine is an award-winning poet who has written amazing poetry about gritty, blue-collar life, growing up and coming of age in Detroit, Michigan. By the flimsiest of correlations, as the child of a Detroit-born father, who went to the same high school as Levine (Central), but missed him by a few years (although I believe he was in the same class as my Aunt Bobby), the beloved Detroit Tigers won their first game of the season last night in Boston, after a week and a half of winless futility.

What a mess that sentence was!

The point is, Tigers won, here's a Detroit poet, with a Detroit poem. This is one of Levine's finest, which I have heard him read at least once, at the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival in 2004. At the end of the poem you'll find a link to listen to it as well.

They Feed They Lion

By Philip Levine

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.

Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch,
They Lion grow.

Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
"Come home, Come home!" From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion grow.

From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From "Bow Down" come "Rise Up,"
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
The grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.

From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.

Listen: "They Feed They Lion" (mp3)

Incidentally, I spoke to Levine about the family connection. He did not know/remember my Aunt, but he did know who my grandfather, William Cohen, the man for whom I was named, was. It was certainly an inspiring moment, to have a Pulitzer Prize winning poet acknowledge the connection to a man who (and I am certainly understating this) was a public figure in Detroit in the middle of the last century as an attorney who championed the causes of the working men and women of Hamtramck.

Previous Favorite Poems for National Poetry Month:

#22 - "Looking at Kilauea" by Garret Hongo
#23 - "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" by Randall Jarrell
#24 - A Handful of Richard Brautigan
#25 - "A Buddha in the Woodpile" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#26 - "Separation" by W.S. Merwin
#27 - "The Flea" by John Donne
#28 - Poem Twenty from Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
#29 - "Magpie's Song" by Gary Snyder
#30 - "Eunoia" by Christian Bok