How To Be a Poet

BY WENDELL BERRY

(to remind myself)

i   

Make a place to sit down.   

Sit down. Be quiet.   

You must depend upon   

affection, reading, knowledge,   

skill—more of each   

than you have—inspiration,   

work, growing older, patience,   

for patience joins time   

to eternity. Any readers   

who like your poems,   

doubt their judgment.   

ii   

Breathe with unconditional breath   

the unconditioned air.   

Shun electric wire.   

Communicate slowly. Live   

a three-dimensioned life;   

stay away from screens.   

Stay away from anything   

that obscures the place it is in.   

There are no unsacred places;   

there are only sacred places   

and desecrated places.   

iii   

Accept what comes from silence.   

Make the best you can of it.   

Of the little words that come   

out of the silence, like prayers   

prayed back to the one who prays,   

make a poem that does not disturb   

the silence from which it came.

The Afterlife

The Afterlife

Dean Young

Four a.m. and the trees in their nocturnal turns

seem free from our ideas of what trees should be

like the moment in a dance you let your partner go

and suddenly she's loose fire and unapproachable.

Yesterday I saw L again, by a case of kiwis

and she seemed wrongly tall as if wearing cothurni.

Would it be better never to see her at all?

 

In Jim's poem about death, shirts pile on a chair.

I imagine them folded, the way shirts are,

arms behind the back, then boxed in mothballs

and marked with Magic Marker, Jim's Shirts.

Probably what would really happen

is his wife might save a few to hang among her own.

Even that off-the-shoulder thing of hers

commingled with grief, overlapping    ghosts.

The rest she'd give away, maybe dump

in a Salvation Army bin in some parking lot

or just drop off in People's Park. It scares me

to think of that guy with sores on his face 

trying on the parrot shirt. It scares me

how well it fits. Maybe if I just walked up to her

and said, Enough. Maybe she still has my blue belt.

Outside, the rain riffs off the shingles, wind 

mews down the exhaust tube of my heater.

On the isinglass flames rush in smudges

like lovers who must pass through each other

as punishment for too much lust and feeding.

Still life

Still Life

Kathy Nilsson

I'm having trouble looking animals in the eye.

Their empty suits in outer space!

Monkeys injected with a virus to show off

Our eminent domain, the nervous system.

Teacup pigs we breed and obsessive mice

Worrying themselves bald in a miniature opera.

For pleasures of the tongue we are

Winking cattle out of meadows

Slashing their throats and swiftly quartering them.

In riding habits with gold flame pins we ride horses

To hounds, chase a fennec fox until his red

Coat flares up against the extinction

Of light. Once in a circus we made

An elephant disappear and he did not mind.


It was difficult to choose a poem out of those I has available to me today. So many seemed to have images of shut and violence and death and I felt too sensitive for it today. Or maybe I like poems that make me feel holy in a less human way.

So this poem was a compromise, concerned as it is with the obscenity of our cruelty to animals, our exploitation of them. It deals with those horrors but without too much horror - I say that, but there is plenty of horror actually. Still somehow I find it more bearable here.

How is it more bearable? I guess because her list is quite detached, almost jokey in a way. There are these things that we do, but somehow these things are made so bizarre that it is easy to detach, to feel it to be happening somewhere else, done by someone else, under the umbrella of 'we'.

I'm not sure that I can identify the technical elements... There are some pleasurable sound effects - "empty suits in outer space"; chase a fennec fox until his red coat flares up against the extinction of light". i can't really find an explicit pattern to the rhythm. The are some nice subtle rhymes or echoes - space/mice; show off/ nervous; opera/we are; red/made.

This light touch, these subtly rhythms and rhymes do seem to keep the whole thing light. And then there is a overwheming tragedy to the description of the fox's death - this beautiful creature hounded and savaged to death, to to the end of light, to extinction - like so many other creatures we have made extinct.

And then the elephant who is made to disappear in a circus. Another kind of cruelty, another kind of extinction, and in the service of our entertainment. And the elephant did not mind? Not sure about that - a kind of mystery. Maybe he didn't mind because he was out of our control; maybe he didn't mind because so lobotomised by imprisonment; maybe did not mind as in paid no mind, paid no attention.

I remember you

I remember you

Norman MacCaig

The boat sits stuck in light, the water
Lies heavy as honey; and which
Is stiller, the supple air or the gray
Boulder lichened on the beach?

Here, one would think, is a whole legend,
Not to be added to, caught and held
In the still hallucination of summer
That honey's to blue the breathless wood.

But through the pine tops slants a mallard
Down to its gushing arrowhead;
It makes a whole mountain tremble;
It waves the arras of green shade.

Onto a Vast Plain

Onto a Vast Plain

Rainer Maria Rilke

You are not surprised at the force of the storm—
you have seen it growing.
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:
he whom they flee is the one
you move toward. All your senses
sing him, as you stand at the window.

The weeks stood still in summer.
The trees' blood rose. Now you feel
it wants to sink back
into the source of everything. You thought
you could trust that power
when you plucked the fruit:
now it becomes a riddle again
and you again a stranger.

Summer was like your house: you know
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.

The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.

Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.

Magdalene - The Seven Devils

MAGDALENE–THE SEVEN DEVILS

by Marie Howe

“Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven devils had been cast out” —Luke 8:2.

The first was that I was very busy.
The second — I was different from you: whatever happened to you could not happen to me, not like that.

The third — I worried.
The fourth – envy, disguised as compassion.
The fifth was that I refused to consider the quality of life of the aphid,
The aphid disgusted me. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
The mosquito too – its face. And the ant – its bifurcated body.

Ok the first was that I was so busy.
The second that I might make the wrong choice,
because I had decided to take that plane that day,
that flight, before noon, so as to arrive early
and, I shouldn’t have wanted that.
The third was that if I walked past the certain place on the street
the house would blow up.
The fourth was that I was made of guts and blood with a thin layer of skin
lightly thrown over the whole thing.

The fifth was that the dead seemed more alive to me than the living

The sixth — if I touched my right arm I had to touch my left arm, and if I touched the left arm a little harder than I’d first touched the right then I had to retouch the left and then touch the right again so it would be even.

The seventh — I knew I was breathing the expelled breath of everything that was alive and I couldn’t stand it,

I wanted a sieve, a mask, a, I hate this word – cheesecloth –
to breath through that would trap it — whatever was inside everyone else that
entered me when I breathed in

No. That was the first one.

The second was that I was so busy. I had no time. How had this happened? How had our lives gotten like this?

The third was that I couldn’t eat food if I really saw it – distinct, separate from me in a bowl or on a plate.

Ok. The first was that I could never get to the end of the list.

The second was that the laundry was never finally done.

The third was that no one knew me, although they thought they did.
And that if people thought of me as little as I thought of them then what was
love?

Someone using you as a co-ordinate to situate himself on earth.

The fourth was I didn’t belong to anyone. I wouldn’t allow myself to belong
to anyone.

Historians would assume my sin was sexual.

The fifth was that I knew none of us could ever know what we didn’t know.

The sixth was that I projected onto others what I myself was feeling.

The seventh was the way my mother looked when she was dying.
The sound she made — the gurgling sound — so loud we had to speak louder to hear each other over it.

And that I couldn’t stop hearing it–years later –
grocery shopping, crossing the street –

No, not the sound – it was her body’s hunger
finally evident.–what our mother had hidden all her life.

For months I dreamt of knucklebones and roots,
the slabs of sidewalk pushed up like crooked teeth by what grew underneath.

The underneath —that was the first devil. It was always with me.
And that I didn’t think you— if I told you – would understand any of this -