Retrieve
My husband has shut me in my room.
This happens sometimes.
I am reading lines from Mary Daly's
Sin Big, 'Decode their mysteries...'.
He is making a narrow space
where our puppy can learn retrieving.
Only one person at a time can train a dog
but each can reinforce the good behavior.
It begins with a pair of socks
curled heel to toe into a sack
he tosses the length of two closed doors
toward a closed window.
The pup must wait for the command.
Fetch. The trainer must not delay the pup
too long or berate too harshly
or interest wanes, the retrieve will never happen.
When their session's done they go downstairs.
My door's still shut. So I open it.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Working on this one today- A poem from March to cool us off in blistering July heat!
Residue
My neighbor is burning his brush
in spite of the wind, which means
all day the pale blue smoke of briar and leaf
will roll over the fields and Howland Pond,
nest in dropped bittersweet, the gooseberry
thickets and cat tails that narrow Shingle Brook
to a leaf-brown thread
that falls through the little woods,
finds the Eel River,
where there are no more eels
or elvers. When the smoke clears
the ash-black scab on the old hay will glitter,
bits of sky trapped in pools
of hose water will tremble.
For a little while
soft cinders will go on falling.
My neighbor is burning his brush
in spite of the wind, which means
all day the pale blue smoke of briar and leaf
will roll over the fields and Howland Pond,
nest in dropped bittersweet, the gooseberry
thickets and cat tails that narrow Shingle Brook
to a leaf-brown thread
that falls through the little woods,
finds the Eel River,
where there are no more eels
or elvers. When the smoke clears
the ash-black scab on the old hay will glitter,
bits of sky trapped in pools
of hose water will tremble.
For a little while
soft cinders will go on falling.
July 13, 2010 - no poem yet
I've been re-reading Eavan Boland's, essay The Woman Poet: Her Dilemma. Who ever you are, female or male, if you want to understand some things basic to the way women have written in the 20th century, go read this essay. But be sure to question her claims too. After all, she writes about having identified herself as a writer before she became a wife and mother, at which time, she was thrown from her own center as a writer, to the hinterlands, so to speak, of those other roles.
I can't identify with that experience, having come to my self-identity as a writer long into my careers as wife and mother, having had no such 'center' for the first half of my life. It was a hidden part of me, one I protected and did not invite scrutiny of, in case I was wrong, in case I was pathetically presumptuous of my own ambition.
In fact I don't know many women who started out as Boland did. That has much to do with the fact that I left college within a year of arriving and was a wife and mother by the time I was 19. I did not move in the collegial or academic spaces where a woman in the early 1970's might begin to believe such things about her self. The women writers I know, are, by and large, former closet writers whose love of the practice was for long years, subservient to other practices including spousehood, parenthood, the work of making a living, etc.
I also realize that much of that lack of self-confidence came directly from that fact that I did use the lens of the canon to evaluate the worthiness of my own themes and subject matter in my poems.
So I do agree with so much of what Boland has to say about 'ghosts' and her discussion of Adrienne Rich's idea that we are 'drenched in assumptions.' That is, that women, at least into the mid-late 20th century, took their cues of their poems' poetic worthiness from themes and approaches the male poets had established, ie: we assumed the value of a topic based on what had already been found valuable to the canon. AND I agree with Boland that we owe the ghosts of other women and our own pasts their due in poetry.
This part of her discussion reminded me of a line from a poem by Louise Bogan, which reads in part "women have no wilderness in them". Bogan was not fond of many women poets and their work it seems. Or maybe it was that she was, herself, too drenched in those assumptions to see any other way of writing.
Go read this essay. I'm sure it's online somewhere. I'm reading it in my copy of Poetry in Theory, an anthology of essays on poetic theory by a staggering range of writers, from poets, to philosophers, to literary critics.
I'll go write on paper now and maybe have something to post by the end of the day.
I can't identify with that experience, having come to my self-identity as a writer long into my careers as wife and mother, having had no such 'center' for the first half of my life. It was a hidden part of me, one I protected and did not invite scrutiny of, in case I was wrong, in case I was pathetically presumptuous of my own ambition.
In fact I don't know many women who started out as Boland did. That has much to do with the fact that I left college within a year of arriving and was a wife and mother by the time I was 19. I did not move in the collegial or academic spaces where a woman in the early 1970's might begin to believe such things about her self. The women writers I know, are, by and large, former closet writers whose love of the practice was for long years, subservient to other practices including spousehood, parenthood, the work of making a living, etc.
I also realize that much of that lack of self-confidence came directly from that fact that I did use the lens of the canon to evaluate the worthiness of my own themes and subject matter in my poems.
So I do agree with so much of what Boland has to say about 'ghosts' and her discussion of Adrienne Rich's idea that we are 'drenched in assumptions.' That is, that women, at least into the mid-late 20th century, took their cues of their poems' poetic worthiness from themes and approaches the male poets had established, ie: we assumed the value of a topic based on what had already been found valuable to the canon. AND I agree with Boland that we owe the ghosts of other women and our own pasts their due in poetry.
This part of her discussion reminded me of a line from a poem by Louise Bogan, which reads in part "women have no wilderness in them". Bogan was not fond of many women poets and their work it seems. Or maybe it was that she was, herself, too drenched in those assumptions to see any other way of writing.
Go read this essay. I'm sure it's online somewhere. I'm reading it in my copy of Poetry in Theory, an anthology of essays on poetic theory by a staggering range of writers, from poets, to philosophers, to literary critics.
I'll go write on paper now and maybe have something to post by the end of the day.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Daily poem June 25, 2010
The Dance
It was winter in Vermont,
When Agha Shahid Ali,
poet and samba man extraordinaire
whirled me in tight circles in the Commons,
his grip so tight we became a single
centrifuge, our sweat and laughter mingling.
My breath forced out to my skirt hem, which flew
wider and wider, opening the space around us,
the rhythm of my heart wilder
than bounding doe's.
Snow howled on the porch, pressing for admission.
Revelers stamped in and out.
The ring of women around us,
human manadala, rosary,
crop circle, druid choir,
called out their ullulations
to the Kashmiri exile
poet and the middle-class visitor from Massachusetts---
both of whose eyes were shining,
open--- in that moment
we have no ancestors.
There is nothing else to believe.
It was winter in Vermont,
When Agha Shahid Ali,
poet and samba man extraordinaire
whirled me in tight circles in the Commons,
his grip so tight we became a single
centrifuge, our sweat and laughter mingling.
My breath forced out to my skirt hem, which flew
wider and wider, opening the space around us,
the rhythm of my heart wilder
than bounding doe's.
Snow howled on the porch, pressing for admission.
Revelers stamped in and out.
The ring of women around us,
human manadala, rosary,
crop circle, druid choir,
called out their ullulations
to the Kashmiri exile
poet and the middle-class visitor from Massachusetts---
both of whose eyes were shining,
open--- in that moment
we have no ancestors.
There is nothing else to believe.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Beginning of Summer, 3 days late, Here's hoping for daily poems again!
Homesick
On the eleventh day
I weary of my beloved
Italian,
its noise in my head.
Like wind
it rattles the loose
shutters of English words
I use to cool my rooms.
My mind refuses to translate;
can't hear the conjugated verbs---
so often in the third person,
so often irregular.
I find myself listening only for
the familiar---
the direct address.
The you: present
form, ending almost every time
in i.
On the eleventh day
I weary of my beloved
Italian,
its noise in my head.
Like wind
it rattles the loose
shutters of English words
I use to cool my rooms.
My mind refuses to translate;
can't hear the conjugated verbs---
so often in the third person,
so often irregular.
I find myself listening only for
the familiar---
the direct address.
The you: present
form, ending almost every time
in i.
Monday, May 24, 2010
May 24, 2010 - revised July 13, 2010
Faith
Churches, I suddenly think--- no,
hear the word
and see the cathedral at Trani
above the harbor in misting rain---
dun and taupe against the blue gray sky,
clouds stained lilac,
fissures of pink
where the setting sun tries to pierce them.
In Ostuni, the narrow fresco of Santa Elisabeth,
the small church, painted white
as all buildings must be in the centro storica.
When the allies bombed
the harbor there the people rushed
to pile sandbags against the saints
to shield them from percussions that shook down old walls
all over town.
They saved Santa Elisabeth, Santa Maria, Giuseppe,
at least in part---
When we stand before her we cannot fathom the fear
or faith of that time;
or our fathers high above
where the saints are invisible---
where longitude and latitude
joined
like hands in prayer.
Churches, I suddenly think--- no,
hear the word
and see the cathedral at Trani
above the harbor in misting rain---
dun and taupe against the blue gray sky,
clouds stained lilac,
fissures of pink
where the setting sun tries to pierce them.
In Ostuni, the narrow fresco of Santa Elisabeth,
the small church, painted white
as all buildings must be in the centro storica.
When the allies bombed
the harbor there the people rushed
to pile sandbags against the saints
to shield them from percussions that shook down old walls
all over town.
They saved Santa Elisabeth, Santa Maria, Giuseppe,
at least in part---
When we stand before her we cannot fathom the fear
or faith of that time;
or our fathers high above
where the saints are invisible---
where longitude and latitude
joined
like hands in prayer.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Summer is almost here. I'm writing again.
Song
Upstairs my husband
plays a riff in a minor key
which I once explained to my students is
the key of sorrows, but also
revery. Outside the sky is
mute in wooly nimbus beds
and an osprey rises in widening gyros
above the little pond where every Spring
the State dumps farmed trout
that are gone by summer.
All day we have stayed at home.
No business to take us further than the barn
or garden. The clouds have hidden all the contrails
of the planes bound for Europe---
Crows have fed on the robins' worms.
It isn't that we don't care to travel.
Sometime we simply cannot think
of where to go, or why to leave the room.
Still, all day I've been remembering
the Adriatic; mowed meadows
running down to that blue---
the tattered scatter
rug we found beside the road, its fringe
half torn, pattern obscured
by a thousand fallen olive blossoms.
Not a prayer rug; a prayer.
I carried it all the way back
here. Upstairs, song ended,
I hear the click of case clasps---
footfall down the stairs.
Upstairs my husband
plays a riff in a minor key
which I once explained to my students is
the key of sorrows, but also
revery. Outside the sky is
mute in wooly nimbus beds
and an osprey rises in widening gyros
above the little pond where every Spring
the State dumps farmed trout
that are gone by summer.
All day we have stayed at home.
No business to take us further than the barn
or garden. The clouds have hidden all the contrails
of the planes bound for Europe---
Crows have fed on the robins' worms.
It isn't that we don't care to travel.
Sometime we simply cannot think
of where to go, or why to leave the room.
Still, all day I've been remembering
the Adriatic; mowed meadows
running down to that blue---
the tattered scatter
rug we found beside the road, its fringe
half torn, pattern obscured
by a thousand fallen olive blossoms.
Not a prayer rug; a prayer.
I carried it all the way back
here. Upstairs, song ended,
I hear the click of case clasps---
footfall down the stairs.
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