Louise Gluck’s poetry has been honored in just about every way imaginable: The Pulitzer Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award for The Wild Iris (1993); the Academy of American Poets prize for Firstborn (1968); the New Yorker’s Book Award in Poetry for Meadowlands (1996). And then there are the awards and honors from the National Book Critics Circle, the Library of Congress, the Boston Globe, the Poetry Society of America, PEN, Yale and Wellesley, to mention only a few. She was named poet laureate of the United States in 2003. Gluck has published 12 individual books of poetry, one collection and a book of essays.

Whew.

A Village Life is Gluck’s latest book of poetry, published in September. It is about the life and lives in an unnamed Mediterranean village. The poems are simple, personal and cover the range of village experience. While they are not narrative poems per se, they are stories – Gluck tells wonderful stories in poetic form.

Sunset

At the same time as the sun’s setting,
a farm worker’s burning leaves.

It’s nothing, this fire.
It’s a small thing, controlled,
like a family run by a dictator.

Still, when it blazes up, the farm worker disappears;
from the road, he’s invisible.

Compared to the sun, all the fires here
are short-lived, amateurish –
they end when the leaves are gone.
Then the farm worker reappears, raking the ashes.

But the death is real.
As though the sun’s done what it came to do,
made the field grow, then
inspired the burning of earth.

So it can set now.

Farm workers, shop owners, the elderly, café conversations, cats let out at night, teenagers falling in love at a picnic, a Christmas dance – such are the stories Gluck tells, simply and elegantly.

Poet Jack Gilbert wrote his first book of poetry in 1962, Views of Jeopardy, which attracted considerable media and critical acclaim and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. And then – retreat and isolation, almost as if the attention was too overwhelming for the then 37-year-old (and what do you for an encore?).

In the intervening years, Gilbert continued to write and publish in various journals, and produced several other volumes of poetry, including Monolithos (1984), The Great Fires (1994), Refusing Heaven (2005), Tough Heaven: Poems of Pittsburgh (2006), Transgressions (UK, 2006), and The Dance Most of All (2009). He’s now 84, and lives in Northampton, Mass.

My introduction to Glibert’s poetry has been The Great Fires, which falls approximately in the middle between his triumphant first volume and the works published in the current decade. His poems are lyrical and clean, like clear ice. They suggest a distance, a separation. The poet is sitting on the side, detached, watching and not participating. From “The White Heart of God:”

The snow falling around the man in the naked woods
is like the ash of heaven, ash from the cool fire
of God’s mother-of-pearl, moon-stately heart.
sympathetic but not merciful. His strictness
parses us. The discomfort of living this way
without birds, among maples without leaves, makes
death and the world visible. Not the harshness,
but the way the world can be known by pushing
against it. And feeling something pushing back.
The whiteness of the winter married to this river
Makes the water look black. The water actually
is the color of giant mirrors set along the marble
corridors of the spirit, the mirrors empty
of everything. The man is doing the year’s accounts…

And there’s a reason for the detachment – the poet, and the poems are haunted. All of these poems, some directly but most indirectly, even the ones about an affair with a Danish woman named Anna, are about the death of Gilbert’s wife, Michiko Nogami, in 1982. The poem in the collection that bears her name:

Michiko Nogami (1946-1982)

Is she more apparent because she is not
anymore forever? Is her whiteness more white
because she was the color of pale honey?
A smokestack making the sky more visible.
A dead woman filling the whole world. Michiko
Said, “The roses you gave me kept me awake
With the sound of their petals falling.”

Haunted and haunting, indeed.

Here’s another poem by one of our participants in our Twitter parties/poetry jams (me). I posted it on my blog in October.

Glynn Young

http://www.twitter.com/gyoung9751

http://faithfictionfriends.blogspot.com

The Real Poet

All ministry begins at the ragged edges of our own pain.
• Ian Cron, Chasing Francis

Appearance: of quiet.
Silence assumed an
Acquiesence,
With, perhaps,
A slight touch of arrogance.
You know too much.
You do too many
Things well.
But more a silence
Of understanding,
Deep and prophetic,
Afflicting the comfortable.
Corporate rebel.

Substance: of doubt,
Self, faith, friends, God.
Not defining,
Not lasting,
But sparked by
A question, look,
An exclusion;
Tempered by
The gift of faith
In the face of doubt.

Substance: of longings.
A father’s touch,
A friend’s voice
A spirit’s breath
If ever so slight.

Substance: of words.
Shape-shifting tools
Of prophets,
Liars and kings.
Words for mouths
And ears,
Words to herald,
Words to remember,
Words to persuade
Or give the impression
Of persuasion.
Words to bury,
Words to apologize
Without admission;
Words to admit
Without apology.
A life constructed
Of constructed words.

Then, new words,
Unbidden;
A new way to lay
The road to Golgotha,
The street of sorrows
Paved with sharp,
Tearing stones
That bruise and
Pierce and hurt.
Words that redeem
Even a poet.

L.L. Barkat is a writer, a poet, a managing editor at the High Calling Blogs, an artist, a mother and a wife, among a lot of other things. She’s the author of Stone Crossings: Finding Grace in Hard and Hidden Places. Every other Friday, L.L. publishes a “Random Act of Poetry” in which she highlights the work of various writers and poets. She’s also one of the three founders of TweetSpeakPoetry.

A few days ago, we learned that her poems would be published by the International Arts Movement in a collection entitled InsideOut. This poem, “When Morning Comes,” is one of the poems that will be included in that collection.

L.L.Barkat

http://www.twitter.com/llbarkat

http://seedlingsinstone.blogspot.com/

http://insideoutpoems.blogspot.com/

When Morning Comes

I open my mouth and breathe the day,
wish for a kiss like the one this golden
trumpet of jewelweed is getting full
on the mouth. Furry bumblebee embraces

her like there’s no tomorrow. And I remember
to hold the moment because it’s true, there may not
be a morning after. And this is why I pause when
rusty shovel unearths rotted pit, peach long gone,

her hope for progeny emptied but now home to
red ants, tiny thousands pouring forth like honey,
spilling onto cocoa shells newly lain beneath
the hyssop, soft pink and pungent. Now I trouble

the bronze-suited honeybee who is fumbling Russian
Sage, tickling her purply-blue tongues, riding her
shining silver leaves that curl in rainbowed mist.
Shall I forget the three-leafed maple fragment red

upon the stair, its green seeds like outstretched arms
now blushing dusty rose? Let me not forget these
seeds, nor the catbird who delights to echo each
whine of my clipping shears, nor the Bible leaf

relieved of yellow flower but fragrant still when I
break a spear and press it to my face. Let me not forget
the white carnation, purple aster, and the stars who
shut their eyes and sleep when morning comes.

Copyright 2009 L.L. Barkat. All Rights Reserved. Used with Permission.

Eric Swalberg is one of the founding editors of TweetSpeak Poetry. He blogs (and publishes his poems) at Journey of Words.

Eric Swalberg

http://www.twitter.com/TchrEric

http://www.journeyofwords.com/

the mirror

the mirror stands as a testament to
imperfectly reflect that which is real,
the surface reflects what we need to do
we see dimly, looking hard for his seal
behind the veil which separates the worlds
of here and now and of eternity
which, in part, we are shown by his heralds,
glimpses brief ‘til called to see completely,
our journey is not a means to an end
rather it is the end within itself
remember what is reflected will lend
chance to see reality of oneself
        hidden behind the veil for all to see
        what the reflection offers us to be

Copyright 2009 Eric Swalberg. All rights Reserved. Used with Permission.

I was at the University of Missouri bookstore in Columbia, looking through the poetry section. And I saw Breakfast with Blake at the Lacoon, with a rather plain cover and looking more like a pamphlet than a book. It was a collection of poems by a young poet named John Estes, who teaches at the university.

I opened it, and went to the second poem, one entitled “Prayer in the Study of Art.” It includes these lines:

In your writing of icons,
Where you in theory
No longer exist; in the face,
The image becomes a likeness
And color and shape graft
Us to forms worth following.

I bought the book. After reading it (twice), I’m glad I bought the book. He also has another short collection entitled Swerve, and a full-length collection entitled Kingdom Come that will be published in 2010.

Estes’ poems evoke a sense of the literary and a sense of everyday reality. He ranges from Virgil to a one-armed, drunken grandfather, from the art of Brueghel to a divorced man at a family barbeque. My favorite in this collection is the poem entitled “The last rites of Pavel Florensky,” a narrative of the death of the Russian theologian, inventor, philosopher and engineer in the Soviet Gulag in 1937.

Maybe while developing
some intercepted samizdat,
hovered around as purple
vapors betrayed him –
self-evident to his enemies
even in ink, ink cloaked
by an invisible hand –
the troika damned him
for those relatively obscure
sentences on the physics
of the kingdom of God,
or for positing an icon
recalls eternity where a poem
recalls times or worse –
for proving it with numbers.

Legend says that Florensky was condemned for refusing to disclose the hiding place of the head of St. Sergii Radonezhsky. No proof for that, of course, but it makes a good story. And a truly fine poem.

In his artist’s statement in Tusculum Review, Estes said this:

“What if Americans read more poetry? We might be less deceived, might treat ourselves and others with more kindness. Except for frauds and hucksters, who we’d more easily identify, and ridicule. The holy fool would again achieve social status.”

“The holy fool would again achieve social status.” I like that.

This is a poem by Monica Sharman, one of our Tweet Party contributors.

Monica Sharman

http://www.twitter.com/monicasharman

http://mybigthree.highcallingblogs.com/2009/10/30/heart-talk/

Heart Talk

The words of my mouth
reading a story aloud
to the child on my lap
but though I read
every word perfectly
I do not know
the storyline,
my mind on less
important thoughts
though the child
is on my lap.

The words of my mouth
asking “How are you?”
to the friend on the phone
but though she pours
out the real answer
I do not hear,
my mind on less
important thoughts
though the friend
is on the phone.

The words of my mouth
chatting with the neighbors
on the driveway telling
of aches in the hips
and strawberries that the deer ate
but though I nod
at their daily lives
I do not hear,
my mind on less
important thoughts
though the neighbors
are on the driveway.

The words of my mouth
are not the same
as the words of my heart.

Father, change me…

Copyright 2009 Monica Sharman. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.

Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems were published in 1916, when he was 34 years old. “Chicago,” the poem that helped establish his reputation, was published in Poetry Magazine two years before that. (It contains the line Chicagoans love – “City of Big Shoulders.”)

Except for “Chicago,” I hadn’t read any of these poems before. As I read those collected with “Chicago” and the others grouped under the headings of “Fogs and Fires,” “Shadows,” and “Other Days,” the words and themes and ideas were oddly familiar. After searching my memory for a while, I realized two connections.

First was the obvious one. Sandburg’s Chicago poems are of the same root as Upton Sinclair’s novel “The Jungle.” Sinclair was focused upon telling the story of the plight of immigrants at the turn of the 20th century and how they were exploited by employers, landlords and shopkeepers. And the novel did cause quite a stir when it was published, but not for reason Sinclair had hoped. Readers focused on the descriptions of the meatpacking industry, and national outrage led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, which established the Food & Drug Administration. Everyone overlooked or forgot about the immigrants.

In the Chicago Poems, Sandburg writes about the immigrants and laborers who helped turn Chicago into the economic powerhouse it became. And many of the poems clearly have a Sinclair kind of feel to them. Take “Onion Days,’ for example:

Mrs. Gabrielle Giovannitti comes along Peoria Street every morning at nine o’clock
With kindling wood piled on top of her head, her eyes looking straight ahead to
find the way for her old feet.
Her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Pietro Giovannitti, whose husband was killed in a tunnel
Explosion through the negligence of a fellow-servant,
Works ten hours a day, sometimes twelve, picking onions for Jasper on the Bowmanville road.

Jasper, as it turns out, sits in his Episcopal church service, enjoys the chanting of the Nicene Creed, and plans how to advertise the onion-picking jobs so he can attract even more applicants and drive wages down.

The second connection I made was that the Sandburg poems evoke the same kind of thoughts and feelings when I look at paintings by Edward Hopper. I‘ve written three poems about Hopper paintings and posted them at my own blog, and reading these works by Sandburg put the paintings back in mind. It may be that, chronologically, Sinclair, Sandburg and Hooper were of overlapping generations, and Sinclair and Sandburg both had a strong Chicago connection. And one of Hopper’s most famous paintings, Nighthawks, is in the Chicago Art Institute.

All said, I enjoyed reading Sandburg’s poems. They are of a period – some of them include language and ethnic nicknames that would be deemed politically incorrect today – but they are good stuff. And I read the Dover thrift edition of the Chicago Poems, which cost me all of $2. Can’t beat that price.

Continuing our feature to highlight poems by the contributors to various Tweet Parties (Poetry jams on Twitter), today we have Stitch Robinson’s (@jazzvigil) “jazz@sunset.” Among other things, Stitch is a DJ for WUMR at the University of Memphis. On Friday nights, you can hear his livestreamed program beginning at midnight (central time) by going to http://www.memphis.edu/wumr/ and then clicking on “Listen Now.”

Stitch Robinson

http://unclewaltacivicrestoration.blogspot.com/2009/10/jazzsunset.html

http://www.twitter.com/jazzvigil

jazz@sunset

splendour of ended day,
floating and filling,
hour prophetic, roiling hour
resuming the past, inflating
my heart with divinest things,
you — o earth and life and all–
till last ray gleams,
i sing.

open song
of my soul rides
gladness, eyes of my soul
bestow perfection, natural
spirit’s faithful praisings, testify,
celebrate forever this triumph
of wings.

Copyright 2009 Stitch Robinson. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.

Today on her blog, L.L. Barkat posted four possible covers for her book of poems, and then casually mentioned that her poems were going to be published by the International Arts Movement.

In journalism class, we called that backing into the lead.

This needs a SHOUT OUT – one of our fellow Tweet Partiers is getting her poems published! This is a BIG DEAL, L.L.! CELEBRATE! This calls for CHAMPAGNE and CHOCOLATE, at least of the virtual kind.

So check out her post – see the great covers displayed there – and congratulate our friend.

On Notice of “To Be Published”

These words from stones, //From a life lived,  // From bits of data,  //Infinitesimally small, // To pages shed by woods, // Cycled and recycled to use // For beauty, // Encouragement, // Inspiration; // To help us see // What is there, // And to savor the life  // Of the // Infinitesimally // Large.