Number 172: Naomi Shihab Nye "Kindness"

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

-- Naomi Shihab Nye

Hap Notes: I just have a few comments to add to this wonderful poem. If we were not born to be happy then why do babies laugh? What's the point? When you are a child looking up at the sky and see a bird flying in the sky, the first time that you think; "I wonder what that feels like – to fly?"; you are actually planting the first seeds of empathy. How does it feel to be another?

Nye tells us that loss shows us something real and profound about existence; it ain't always easy. And sometimes it seems completely hopeless. How do we recover from losses? Some of the healing is the distance of time. Some of it may come from the kindness of others. When we understand that the tragedy of another is close to our own lives a variety of emotions can grow but one of them can be a vexing guilty willful indifference.

You know that feeling you get, when something bad happens to somebody else, that makes you say things like, "Well, they shouldn't have built a house by the river – it was sure to get flooded!" or "If you do something stupid like that you are bound to get hurt." As you say it, there's a little wing that beats in your chest or a little shadow on your shoulder that makes you feel a little crappy about saying such a thing. You may brush it off and say it louder, with more conviction to scare off that feeling but it's too late. Kindness is always tapping you on the shoulder. You are free to ignore it, but it will come back over and over again until you let it in. Often it takes some tragedy or trouble in your own life to see that.

I love the idea in the poem that kindness is what you have been looking for and has been looking for you. Kindness is a friend or companion that will follow you around the rest of your life.

In the end, the only person you really have to live with your whole life is you. You can choose to see misery and be resentful about the "thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to" or you can feel a kindness towards others and wish for their well being. You'll feel better, richer and more connected to the earth if you feel kindly, even in the face of your own sadness.

The Buddhists say that one should treat each creature as if he/she was your own child. I wonder what the world would be like if kindness was the goal of each person? Do you imagine wars or poverty or crime or heartache would stem from this? What is the value of human life? What are we trying to achieve and why?

What is the cloth the poet is speaking about? What is the fabric of life, the tapestry of civilization, the flying carpet of existence, made from?

Here's where we have talked about Nye before: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/01/number-36-naomi-shihab-nye-traveling.html

The masthead is an inset of a photograph of Lubomir Bukov "Shadows of the Past." Isn't it delightful?

Number 171: Robert Lowell "For the Union Dead"

For the Union Dead

"Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam." 

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.
Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the crowded, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
a girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half of the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die-
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic

The stone statutes of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year-
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns…

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statutes for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
when I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessed break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

-- Robert Lowell


Hap Notes: Since memorial day was originally observed to commemorate the more than 600,000 Americans lost in the Civil War, this would seem like an appropriate poem for the day.

Let me set the scene a bit for you since this was written in the 60s, and while the poem has a lot of extraordinary things to tell us about our own era, it was written when specific things were happening then.

Lowell has a few historical inaccuracies in the poem but none of them are glaring omissions and serve the ends of the poem, as you will see. Lowell is looking at the Capitol Area of Boston where the old aquarium used to be (there in the poem but closed down and defunct) and a statue of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment has been displaced and the Capitol building has been braced for the building of a parking garage under the Capitol building. All the literal earth quaking in the poem is from the construction "dinosaurs" unearthing and the various other sounds of massive construction. The poet sees an ad for Mosler safes (a safe that really did make it through the bombing in Hiroshima) as the only reminder of WWII.

Now the statue of Colonel Shaw is by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and depicts him riding with his all black troops. The regiment got badly beaten at Fort Wagner in South Carolina and the confederates bury the Colonel in a ditch with his black troops as an insult. Shaw had previously stated that he wished to be buried with his brave men if the time ever came and his relatives were glad that he got to be buried with them (he had the right, as an officer, to have his body taken home for a burial.) The film "Glory" is based on this, by the way. (Helen Vendler also points out that Shaw's sister was married to one of Lowell's relatives. The letters he quotes were in the family's archives.) William James gave a speech at the statue's dedication on this day (Memorial Day, but it was May 31, like usual for the day,) in 1897. The Latin epigraph of the poem is a slightly altered version of the one on the statue. Lowell has it read "They relinquished everything to serve the republic", the original says "he" not "they."

It's also worth pointing out that the poem is written at a turbulent time for civil rights. Although, perhaps with the onslaught of the not-so-subtle racism of the Obama "birthers" it's obvious that we are still far from the goal.

Okay, so let's cut to the chase, what is Lowell saying here? Well, there's a lot and some I think you will uncover by yourself but he's more than hinting that contemporary values are base, commercial and care little for the past. He's dreamily angry, the way Lowell often is, thinking about the statue, the value of moral honor and courage and the brusque way we are sinking into the ooze of ignorant idiot commercialized capitalism- using the hymn "Rock of Ages" as an ad catch phrase. The monument sticks like a fishbone in the throat of this modern city. The Colonel in the statue is "lean as a compass needle", a moral compass I think Lowell believes we have misplaced.

There's very little air in this poem. It's claustrophobic with cars, bubbles that need to pop and breathe, the tension of black school children during de-segregation. Even the safe is closed and safe and airless.

The fish are out of the tank now and the cars have taken their place. That dark downward vegetating kingdom is us and we slide through with "savage servility." Even the cars live in the "underworld."

The poetic license he takes is with the safe company who had no specific ad like that (although advertising is full of examples of this kind of ignorance.) The parking garage building at the capitol also included a bit of restoration. Shaw's father never made that "niggers" statement although it was much used during the Civil War on both sides for good and ill.

There is much, much more in this poem, but I think this will get your started.

I would give ten full years of my life to write a poem this good.

Here's where we've talked about Lowell before:
happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/01/number-33-robert-lowell-dolphin.html

Number 170: John Updike "Perfection Wasted"

Perfection Wasted

And another regrettable thing about death

is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,

which took a whole life to develop and market —

the quips, the witticisms, the slant

adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest

the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched

in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,

their tears confused with their diamond earrings,

their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,

their response and your performance twinned.

The jokes over the phone. The memories packed

in the rapid-access file. The whole act.

Who will do it again? That's it: no one;

imitators and descendants aren't the same.

-- John Updike

Hap Notes: Frost, Hopkins and Keats have gotten a lot of space since we started talking about poetry in December but Updike is an up-and-comer. This is our fourth Updike authored poem and there's a fifth if we count his Borges translation. And I still have several more I'd like to use at some point. It dawns on me that my claim to any slight literary fame may be that I have been adamant that Updike is a poet who disguised himself as a novelist so that he could make a living. In a hundred years or so, Updike may be remembered more for his poetry than his novels (which will be considered like slices of a bygone era.)

Updike is saying something very interesting about the way people act with their familiar loved ones; friends, family, well-wishers, fans etc. as well as our interactions with the world. He says we "adjust the slant" of what we say to talk, amuse and sometimes amaze. It's well put. We all become "marketers" of our own "act" and bend and shape our words and jokes and snappy patter to please those around us. It would seem ingenuous, and typical of a guy who said that there was no money in poetry so he turned to fiction except one thing stands out in all this. It's his phrase "your own brand of magic."

Because in amidst all this joking and anecdotal sharing and revising, trying to please people, enamored of their applause and grateful acceptance, there is something beyond just a tap dance and pulling a rabbit out of a hat. There is real magic inside of him and you and even me.

That's why nobody can imitate or replicate. If it was just an "act" then anybody could do it just like you do. If someone who looked like you did each and every thing you did in an exact replication of your moves, your words, your facial expressions and gestures, it would still be lacking some quality of perfect mimicry. It's your magical something. And the magic has a bit to do with both the speaker and the responders- that pooled warm breath, the sparkling responses, their heartbeats; the way it all mixes together just so. It cannot be replicated.

Life isn't an experiment- each time we do something there are variables that change the results. One can't explain how each and every person will react every time. Updike is right- it's more of an "act." That's what Shakespeare thought, too (that whole life is but a stage and we poor players and so on.) We play out our lives in front of our "audience" in the world. What is deep inside you, that ineffable spark or flame or, okay, magic– remains with you. You'll never get it all out no matter what you do. We are never ending waterfalls of strange magics.

I don't know what it is exactly, this magical (dare we say "divine') spark, and Updike doesn't either but it's poets who see it there most vividly and keep trying to explain it. They're always giving it a good go; for centuries they've been having one hell of a time describing it.

This is a very thoughtful poem even on the surface. Updike chose the word "magic" with all the illusions and illusive qualities that surround it but the word resonates to each of us differently. So you can see yourself as a phony-baloney vaudeville magician or tap dancer or comedian and, yeah, there's only one of you, big deal, and there's an end to it. But WHY is there only one of you in a world filled with billions of other creatures with your same cell structure in the same species? How can that be?

Some poets call it magic.

Here's where we've talked about Updike before:

happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/04/number-139-john-updike-sunflower.html

happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2010/12/number-4-john-updike-thoughts-while.html

happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/03/number-96-john-updike-ex-basketball.html

Number 169: Raymond Carver "Happiness"

Happiness

So early it's still almost dark out.
I'm near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.

When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.

They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren't saying anything, these boys.

I think if they could, they would take
each other's arm.
It's early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.

They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.

Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.

Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.

--Raymond Carver

Hap Notes: Raymond Carver (1938-1988) is arguably one of the most influential short-story writers and poets of the last few decades. There are few people writing, who, once they have read his work, are not strongly influenced by his brevity and power with words.

The beginning of his life reads like a Richard Brautigan story, born in a mill town in Oregon to a saw mill worker and a waitress, he grows up, works in a sawmill, marries and has two kids by the time he's 20. The couple move to California to be with his mother-in-law.

While he's there he takes a creative writing class taught by John Gardner, who was to be his mentor for a time. He goes to Chico State and Humboldt State and starts writing. His wife, Ruth, gets her degree from San Jose State and becomes an English teacher. He also attended the Iowa Writer's Workshop.

Like Vonnegut working as a night watchman at a General Electric plant and writing, Carver worked as a night janitor, in the middle of the 60's, at a hospital in Sacramento, whisked through his job and then spent the night writing. His first book of poems was written then,

He worked a plethora of jobs until his career got rolling and by that time Carver was drinking pretty heavily. He taught at some universities and even edited for a science textbook company. By the time he was teaching at the Iowa Writer's Workshop in 1973, he and fellow teacher John Cheever, mostly sat around drinking. He was hospitalized several times before he figured out that drinking was killing him. He went to AA.

It's always been a bone of literary contention whether his work with Esquire writer/editor Gordon Lish really created his style. Of course, Lish says he's responsible for showing Carver the light. Carver felt Lish was a bit too terse. However, I love the work of Gordon Lish and I hear he is a stern and eccentric teacher that nobody goes away from without a mark. Carver was immensely talented, Lish knew how to refine it, Carver, like anyone, at some point had to break it off and create his own style. Lish is awesome but he can throw the baby out with the bathwater sometimes.

At any rate, Carver's new lease on life gave him a 10 year period of being a professor and director of the creative writing program at Syracuse University before he died of lung cancer at 50 years old.

His short stories have often been made into movies, notably Robert Altman's Short Cuts. Carver's spare style and sense of the poetry of the every day has been, as I said, enormously influential with contemporary fiction writers and poets.

But it's Carver's eye and ear that sets him apart, I think. Note the perfect facts in today's poem to tell us a story that sends our imagination reeling about the poet at the window and the story of the two boys. There's an immediate and intense connection with these people. Carver knew exactly which things would move us. He doesn't tell us the color of their sweaters and caps, he doesn't wax too poetic about the sunrise. He knows the moment is transcendent and he lets us have a moment like that, too. There's a deep generosity in this poem, the poet looking at the boys, the poet sharing it with us.

Here's a good Carver quote: "I hate tricks. At the first sign of a trick or gimmick in a piece of fiction, a cheap trick or even an elaborate trick, I tend to look for cover. Tricks are ultimately boring, and I get bored easily, which may go along with my not having much of an attention span. But extremely clever chi-chi writing, or just plain tomfoolery writing, puts me to sleep. Writers don't need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing- a sunset or an old shoe- in absolute and simple amazement."

and another:

"It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power."

You can find more Carver here: famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/raymond_carver/poems

P.S. I know usually on Saturdays we have a sillier poem but honestly, this is the one that came into my head that made me feel the happiest and happiness is what I shoot for on Saturdays. Hope it worked.

Number 168: Robert Graves "Wild Strawberries"

Wild Strawberries

Strawberries that in gardens grow
Are plump and juicy fine,
But sweeter far as wise men know
Spring from the woodland vine.

No need for bowl or silver spoon,
Sugar or spice or cream,
Has the wild berry plucked in June
Beside the trickling stream.

One such to melt at the tongue's root,
Confounding taste with scent,
Beats a full peck of garden fruit:
Which points my argument.

May sudden justice overtake
And snap the froward pen,
That old and palsied poets shake
Against the minds of men.

Blasphemers trusting to hold caught
In far-flung webs of ink,
The utmost ends of human thought
Till nothing's left to think.

But may the gift of heavenly peace
And glory for all time
Keep the boy Tom who tending geese
First made the nursery rhyme.

-- Robert Graves

Hap Notes: Well, Robert Graves (1895-1985) is far too big and complex a subject for a late spring morning but I'll sketch in a bit of background. This poem, by the way, is not actually only about strawberries – it's about literary theory and one which Graves felt intently. It all has to do with the White Goddess. We'll get to that in a minute.

Graves was born and raised in Wimbledon in south London. His father was a school inspector and Gaelic scholar and his mother was from a German family hence his full name Robert von Ranke Graves, which caused him considerable troubles in school stemming from events leading up to WWI with Germany. He began writing poetry as a youth. He took a commission in the Royal Welch Fusiliers at the outbreak of the war in 1914 even though he had a scholarship to St. John's College, Oxford. He would attend there after the war. (If you get a minute look up the Royal Welch Fusiliers, it's fascinating stuff. And, yes, it's Welch.)

Graves was severely wounded, recovered and went back to the war. He met and knew Siegfried Sassoon as well as Wilfred Owen (another fine WWI poet). Graves' experiences in the war left him shell shocked and miserable for years. He wouldn't even pick up a telephone for more than 10 years after the war because he had been electrocuted by a trench telephone. He said in his autobiography, Goodbye To All That, "Since 1916, the fear of gas obsessed me: any unusual smell, even a sudden strong smell of flowers in a garden, was enough to send me trembling. And I couldn't face the sound of heavy shelling now; the noise of a car back-firing would send me flat on my face, or running for cover."

A very important side note about those who fought in WWI, is the horror that these men felt in the first war that was conducted with rapid killing machinery and chemicals. Those front loading muskets used during the Revolutionary War were like children's toys compared with the destruction of the machine gun. Other new weapons to destroy men included the tank, grenades, flame throwers and poison gas. It was a whole new way to fight war, most grim and gruesome and shocking. Watching a man die from poison gas in the field, a man you knew and chatted with, while you had a gas mask on as protection, was one of the nightmares from which most of the young men in WWI never recovered.

Graves knew everybody from T.E. Lawrence (of whom he wrote a biography) to Robert Bridges and John Masefield. He studied classics and literature after the war and continued to write poetry. His output is so prolific in poetry, novels, biographies and translations that we will cut to the chase. (Breaking off briefly to say his translation of Suetonius' The Twelve Caesars is revelatory and his books on Greek and Roman myths are somewhat embroidered but still standard texts. You might be familiar with his books I, Claudius and Claudius the God from the BBC mini-series based on them. Or you may have read them, I hope.)

In 1948 Graves wrote The White Goddess, a book which has never been out-of-print, in which he detailed his inspiration for writing and talks about the nature of myths and myth making. The White Goddess of birth, love and death was Graves word for this creative power which should be worshiped. Graves speaks of worshiping a single goddess under many names and this matriarchal religious stuff gave him no end of both fame and grief. He cites ancient texts as precedents for this and continued laboring on the goddess religion throughout his life. Grave felt that goddess worship was the mother (no pun intended) of all religions and had become obscured by male dominated theories and changes. (We could talk all day about this so let's get to the poem.) I highly recommend that you read the book.

First off, that's not a misprint, "froward" means "difficult to deal with" or "controversial." In the poem Graves is telling us that "wild" strawberries grown the natural way are best and tastiest. He then extrapolates that poets, weaving their over-wrought, over-thought inky webs, should be silenced and the natural, inspired way a young boy tending the geese makes up a rhyme is the way it should be – natural, goddess given, charged with a heavenly spontaneity. I suppose had we but world enough and time we could also talk about the finer points of strawberries. We'll save that, maybe, for another poem.

There's so much more to talk about with Graves; his bi-sexuality, his affair (he left his wife) with poet Laura Riding, his Celtic tree astrology and alphabet, his friendship with Spike Milligan (Remember the "Ning Nang Nong"? Here: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/04/number-141-spike-milligan-on-ning-nang.html) and so much more.

He died at the age of 90 and was buried the in a small churchyard on a hill at Deia on the site of a shrine which had once been sacred to the White Goddess of Pelion.

Here's a good Graves quote: "Since the age of 15 poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles; which has sometimes won me the reputation of an eccentric."

You can find enough Graves to keep you busy for a lifetime here: homes.ukoln.ac.uk/~lispjh/graves/poetry/index.html

Number 167: Louise Erdrich "Dear John Wayne"

Dear John Wayne

August and the drive-in picture is packed.
We lounge on the hood of the Pontiac
surrounded by the slow-burning spirals they sell
at the window, to vanquish the hordes of mosquitoes.
Nothing works. They break through the smoke screen for blood.

Always the lookout spots the Indian first,
spread north to south, barring progress.
The Sioux or some other Plains bunch
in spectacular columns, ICBM missiles,
feathers bristling in the meaningful sunset.

The drum breaks. There will be no parlance.
Only the arrows whining, a death-cloud of nerves
swarming down on the settlers
who die beautifully, tumbling like dust weeds
into the history that brought us all here
together: this wide screen beneath the sign of the bear.

The sky fills, acres of blue squint and eye
that the crowd cheers. His face moves over us,
a thick cloud of vengeance, pitted
like the land that was once flesh. Each rut,
each scar makes a promise: It is
not over, this fight, not as long as you resist.

Everything we see belongs to us.

A few laughing Indians fall over the hood
slipping in the hot spilled butter.
The eye sees a lot, John, but the heart is so blind.
Death makes us owners of nothing.
He smiles, a horizon of teeth
the credits reel over, and then the white fields

again blowing in the true-to-life dark.
The dark films over everything.
We get into the car
scratching our mosquito bites, speechless and small
as people are when the movie is done.
We are back in our skins.

How can we help but keep hearing his voice,
the flip side of the sound track, still playing:
Come on, boys, we got them where we want them, drunk, running.
They’ll give us what we want, what we need.
Even his disease was the idea of taking everything.
Those cells, burning, doubling, splitting out of their skins.

-- Louise Erdrich

Hap Notes: Louise Erdrich (born 1954) was born in Little Falls, Minnesota and is a member of the Anshinaabe Nation (Ojibwa and Chippewa). It's John Wayne's birthday today and this poem came into my head as I read that fact online this morning.

Erdrich's parents were teachers at the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) school and her grandfather was a tribal chair for the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. Her father was of German-American descent, her mom was French and Anshinaabe. She grew up in North Dakota. She went to Dartmouth and got her M.A. at Johns Hopkins in creative writing. She's won the Pushcart Prize for her poetry, the O. Henry Award for her short stories and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.

Erdrich is primarily considered a novelist and her books are wonderfully written stories that have gotten much acclaim (Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, Tracks, The Antelope Wife, Shadow Tag, etc.) I consider her a poet who occasionally writes narratives (it's my blog, so there.)

In today's poem we see a group of Native Americans watching a John Wayne movie at a drive-in theater, where his face can fill the sky under the stars (Ursa Major- the great bear, of which the Big Dipper is a part.) She has loaded this poem with ironies and sadness from the Pontiac (named for an Ottowa chief, who urged his tribe to shun "white" goods and customs because they diluted the Indian culture. That's a painting of him in the masthead) the group is sitting upon, to the final words describing Wayne's death from cancer. The poem is filled with acquisition from the mosquitoes out for blood to the settlers taking land from the Native Americans by force to the cancerous cells overtaking the body.

I have to break off not so briefly to say that while the death of anyone diminishes us and I'd not wish cancer on anybody, I have never cared much for John Wayne. Okay, change that "never cared for much" to "always detested." I loathed his politics and despise most all of his movies. He came to epitomize, for me, everything that is wrong with this country- our misaligned affections, our cowardly attacks with machinery and guns, our lionization of guys who acted for a living (not worked in a factory, or on a road, or picking up trash- he sat in a trailer putting on make-up and drinking iced tea- what a wuss!) He never fought in any real war. Never. He just put on costumes and pretended. I'm sure he had his finer points but they get obliterated by this wave of jingoist junk.

Martial victory is a flaccid thing, really. No bells peal at the time, no soundtrack swells with the attacks, no happiness blooms in the hearts of those that have committed murder. Conflicts are sweaty, stinky, noisy, vile, brutal and idiotic and those weary folks that were in them, if they are decent human beings, are wracked with guilt, shame, anger, confusion and despair. I went to college with a lot of Vietnam vets and I saw what war does to a regular human – a good half of those guys had mental disorders from their war experiences. (Did you know that almost 50 percent of the homeless problem in the 80s and 90s was Vietnam vets? We treat veterans shamefully, which seems to illustrate that we don't want to think about what we made them do for our comfort. It's despicable. Where was I? Oh, yeah, John Wayne/Erdrich/poem- sorry. Kinda dropped the tranny there.)

Erdrich's poem points out that there are creatures who must be crudely and constantly acquiring and nothing seems to stop them; not the spiral bug coils lit to keep away mosquitoes nor the cancerous cells that just keep on splitting. These creatures are not human. Note the use of the word skin throughout the verses also. The spilled butter always seems like blood to me, in the poem- maybe that's just me though. It's interesting that she says the dark "films" over everything too, yes?

Here's a good Erdrich quote: "My father used to give me a nickel for each story I wrote, and my mother wove strips of construction paper together and stapled them into book covers. So at an early age I felt myself to be a published author earning substantial royalties."

You can find more Erdrich here: www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/louise-erdrich

Number 166: Donald Justice "Poem"

Poem

This poem is not addressed to you.
You may come into it briefly,
But no one will find you here, no one.
You will have changed before the poem will.

Even while you sit there, unmovable,
You have begun to vanish. And it does not matter.
The poem will go on without you.
It has the spurious glamor of certain voids.

It is not sad, really, only empty.
Once perhaps it was sad, no one knows why.
It prefers to remember nothing.
Nostalgias were peeled from it long ago.

Your type of beauty has no place here.
Night is the sky over this poem.
It is too black for stars.
And do not look for any illumination.

You neither can nor should understand what it means.
Listen, it comes with out guitar,
Neither in rags nor any purple fashion.
And there is nothing in it to comfort you.

Close your eyes, yawn. It will be over soon.
You will forget the poem, but not before
It has forgotten you. And it does not matter.
It has been most beautiful in its erasures.

O bleached mirrors! Oceans of the drowned!
Nor is one silence equal to another.
And it does not matter what you think.
This poem is not addressed to you.

--Donald Justice

Hap Notes: Here's a fairly shocking thing to tell you: Donald Justice (1925-2004) wrote no bad poems. He wrote nothing that makes you nod off, no twenty page odes to the plinths of Nineveh, no over-heated dishevelments about some girl he met on the quad. Justice knew his medium and he wrote without fanfare or cape-swirling or flash powder. It's hard to think of anyone who actually understood poetry in all its forms better than Justice. (Now, take that in because it is epic.) If you really want to understand how to write poetry, read Justice. His oevre is relatively small and easily read, but if you understand what he's doing, it says it all.

Justice is probably the most lauded of all the teachers at the Iowa Writer's Workshop and none of his students came away from him without valuable instruction and surprise at how little he is known. Justice had been a student there himself and studied under John Berryman and Robert Lowell, both of whom made an impression on him. Justice taught a who's who of contemporary poets including yesterday's poet, Mark Jarman.

Justice was born and raised in Miami and there's a peculiar tone to the southern voice in Florida; it's not like the rest of the South but retains remnants of it. His early work has traces of this. He was a composition student at the University of Miami under composer Carl Ruggles who urged him to study more with Hindemith at Yale. Justice, talented as he was with music, chose writing and poetry. It may make a certain amount of sense, what with the popular view that poetry is music but Justice disagrees with that thought and as he had a good deal of talent for musical composition, I bow to the master on this one.

In fact, he said in an interview, "If my poems are musical, as indeed some have claimed, they have, I hope, the music of poetry and not the music of music. But then how could they have the music of music, which is completely and utterly different from the music of poetry? I think the two kinds of music have nothing--or next to nothing--in common. In poetry the word music is pretty much a figure, not a fact--a metaphor at best. The most that I would be willing to grant is that both music and poetry come out of similar sensibilities."

Today's poem is a classic example of how to make your work mean more with less. Is the poem poking fun at the idea that poetry lives forever? Is it having a good time at the expense of the reader like so much "confessional" poetry? Is it making fun of romantic notions about poetry clad in purple and full of stars? Is it telling you something about how you read and what you expect from the writer and what the writer writes and what he expects from you as a reader? The poem is the object, there is a writer, the poem assumes there is a reader- if there was not, who would be in oblivion the reader or the poem? Does this poem beg for your attention? How? And that's just the surface of the poem. You can think on this for days and come up with different questions and answers. It's a phenomenal poem.

For me, this poem is always a heart-stopper. You know how you read a poem and everything goes silent, your heart stops and you feel that thrill like just the millisecond before you go down the roller coaster? You ever get that?

Here's a great Justice quote: "If you are going to write formally, learn the forms--the meters especially--from study of the great poets and poems of the past. It also helps a lot to know some poets from other languages (but perhaps not too many)--a few stars to be guided by. If you are going to write free verse, study of the great past masters of free verse is likewise absolutely necessary, I should think: Stevens & Williams, Pound & Eliot--and a scattering of other poems if not poets. Then of course everyone will--whether advised to or not--develop two or three favorites, whether they're really all that marvelous or not, and these favorites are to be prized--they are an important part of the mix."

You can find more Justice here: famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/donald_justice/poems