It’s interesting how the brain makes connections.

We’ve been celebrating the color red here this month at Tweetspeak, so red has been a bit on my mind. Valentine’s Day has something to do with the color red, not to mention that February is National Heart Month in the United States.

Last Friday, my wife and I went to see a movie. It was chilly, she pulled the hood of her coat up, and my brain went head, hood, red, cape, and it was on to grandmother’s house we go.

Then I took a walk Saturday morning, a two-mile roundtrip from our house to the center of our St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood. And head-hood-cape-red kept playing in my mind. All it took was a red convertible (with the top up; it is February, after all) to drive by, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Red Whistles at the Wolf

Red, Red’s riding in the hood
scarf on her head
lady looking good

Red, Red’s driving in the hood
convertible blush
lady’s in a rush

Lipsticked red
sunglasses red
tight dress red
retro retro red red red

Red, Red’s cruising in the hood
white hubcapped wheels
bringing those meals

Red, Red’s speeding in the hood
in her redfinned missle
gives the wolf a whistle

Red, Red’s roaring in the hood
wolf takes a jump
becomes a speed bump

Red, Red’s slowing in the hood
wolf’s now dead
don’t mess with Red

Photograph: 1960 Red Chrysler Imperial Convertible (The Imperial Club). This is similar to the car Red was driving when she whistled at the wolf. Post by Glynn Young, author of Dancing Priest: A Novel

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Buy a year of Every Day Poems, just $2.99— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In February we’re exploring the theme Red.

When I think of red, I think of Rothko.

One afternoon in a cottage above the Missouri River, I sat with a friend and blathered about poetry. She listened closely. She realized I was talking about words like a painter might talk about primary colors.

“Do you know Mark Rothko’s work?” she asked.

“Not really,” I answered.

Friendly bikers could be heard below on the Katy Trail. A cool wind marched through the screened-in porch and brought cow smell and lilac. I got on Google and quickly became entranced by Rothko’s No. 15, Untitled.

Red and gold.

This introduction to Rothko spurred me to a flurry of inspiration that would culminate in a literary triptych (three sections of 15 poems). Rothko’s powerful choices of red, gold, yellow, are prominent in the resulting 45-poem swath.

For me, the painting cannot be separated from the poems. Rothko might concur, for he said, “A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer.”

Sensitive and inspired, I slung a new layer of oil on top of Rothko’s canvas—romantic stories set in the natural and cultural landscape of my home in the Ozarks. Was the painting ultimately quickened by my activity? Maybe yes, maybe no. But I was surely quickened, as I came home to red.

6 | Rothko’s Reds

We are joined at the hipbones
like Rothko’s reds. Slight spaces
between like woman man skin
sticking, unsticking—blotchy fuzz
Rothko wrists into the painting.
No matter how you triangulate the canvas,
you see us. Naked pulsing red mists—
no boundaries on land,
pond, and autumn gold field.

Post by Dave Malone, author of Under the Sycamore.

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Buy a year of Every Day Poems— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In February we’re exploring the theme Red.

In Night of the Republic: Poems, poet Alan Shapiro loads his minds-eye camera with film (or, these days, a disk) and takes a series of detailed, rather stark photographs. His subjects are the common, everyday things we notice only when we need them but generally ignore: a car dealership, a gas station restroom, a park bench, a dry cleaner, a swimming pool, a museum, a doorbell, a funeral home.

Shapiro’s poetic photographs are sharp and clear; we’re not left guessing the subject. But they often lead in an unexpected direction, as common, everyday things can do. Consider “Barbershop,” which becomes a meditation on eternity:

Eternity is the spiral up the poles
spiraling to its endless end.
Time is the vitrine
of antiquated gels,
conditioners, restoratives,
stray sections from yesterday’s Today
all over the table
in the waiting area where
Eternity is waiting…

These are poems to be read two and three times, and then two or three times more, like photographs that need to be reexamined to see how new angles or shades or colors can change the created whole. In “Stone Church,” for example, the emphasis on the stone construction gives way to what happens inside:

…At night, high
over the tiny
galaxy of candles
guttering down
in dark chapels
all along the nave,
there’s greater
gravity inside
the grace that’s risen
highest into rib
vaults and flying
buttresses, where
each stone is another
stone’s resistance to
the heaven far
beneath it…

These photograph-like poems, or poetic photographs, are filled with quiet wonder. And like fine photographs, their meanings can keep changing. Night of the Republic is a stellar collection of poetry.

Shapiro, who has won several poetry awards, is a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is also publishing his first novel, Broadway Baby, in January.

Some of the most powerful stories in the Bible are about women – Eve, Sarah, Deborah, Ruth, Esther, Mary, Mary Magdalene, the woman at the well, and the woman who touched Jesus’s clothes, to mention a few of the more obvious ones. Their stories are stories of sin, disbelief, leadership, faithfulness, courage, faith and steadfastness. These stories speak to both men and women, and most likely because they are most of all human stories, things we recognize and understand.

In poetry, these stories can become our stories. That’s what poet Tania Runyan accomplishes in A Thousand Vessels: Poems – to write both poems about Biblical characters and non-Biblical characters and situations, to help see the connections to the stories in the Bible and how they apply to us. From “Beach Walk:”

I wore my leopard bikini like the mannequin
at Bullock’s: shoulders back, breasts out,
fingertips light on my hips. Dina swiveled
her buttocks in a fuchsia French-cut
that pointed like an arrow between her thighs…

Poems about Dinah (the sister of the 12 sons of Jacob) and her rape are paired with a poem about child sex offenders. Poems about the woman at the well in the gospel of St. John are paired with a poem about the sins committed by a child against another child. Poems about Esther are grouped with a poem about walking on a beach. The stories of Jairus’s daughter are matched to a poem about children who nearly die. In “Children of Near-Death,” Runyan describes the near death of a 10-year-old named Edward:

…I dove. No more stuttering in Class. No more stinky
dodgeball courts, the cool kids lobbing
at my face. I swam deeper

a million pounds of water behind me. Kelp waved at me
like a crowd gathered in the grandstand.
Wrapped around my arms and legs

till I couldn’t get loose. Darkness…

These are not all dark poems. To the contrary, these are hopeful poems, not the least for the biblical characters represented and described. But what the addition of the non-Biblical poems does is to make the Biblical characters recognizable and contemporary – the woman who makes a terrible mistake, the woman who scoffs, the woman who assumes a leadership role, the woman who is faithful and caring even when no one expected her to be.

In that sense, A Thousand Vessels becomes a contemporary application of the Biblical stories. It’s a wonderful collection, full of faith, hope and truth.

Quick: name a contemporary love poem.

Hard, right? In contemporary poetry, one doesn’t find much about love – the emotion, the feeling, the condition that is so characteristics of a considerable body of poetry from earliest times to the 20th century. Think Song of Solomon, the Greeks and Romans. Think of Boccaccio, the Elizabethans (those sonnets!) and the Cavalier poets, the Romantics and even the Victorians.

But something happened in the century just past. Perhaps two world wars, a major depression, the rise of the media and the dominance of Freudian psychology pushed love poetry into a forgotten corner. I’ve even heard that feminism made love poetry a dangerous occupation. Whatever the cause or causes, love poetry isn’t what it has been in times before ours.

Which makes Dave Malone’s book of poetry Under the Sycamore all the more remarkable. Malone, the author of several books of poetry and a university professor, first published the book in 2003. It is a volume of 100 poems, all untitled and all short (the longest is eight lines). And they are all poems about love – love yearned for, love found, love lost, love regained – almost a story of a relationship that happens over an entire lifetime.

He begins:

Looking at the stars,
I have one thought
where I’m holding you
until they disappear.

And then this:

The moonlight on your face
through the open window
is actually my breath.

These short poems are filled with longing and passion, the self- and shared knowledge of two lovers, along with emptiness, loss and then reconciliation.

I lost my way in the snow
until I heard your voice
in the swirling wind.

To read these poems (and to read them aloud) is to sit in a well-lit, under-furnished room, watching the object of your love, who is unaware of being observed. Under the Sycamore is a beautiful volume of love poems. We need more of them.

Stanley Moss is a poet, a publisher of poetry, and a private art dealer, specializing in Spanish and Italian Old Masters. His first book of poetry was published almost 50 years ago; at Sheep Meadow Press, he’s published such authors as John Ashberry, Stanley Kunitz and Frederico Garcia Lorca (posthumously).

Now Moss has published what must stand as a testament to his career as a poet, God Breaketh Not All Men’s Hearts Alike: New & Later Collected Poems. The poems are dazzling in their breadth, from mythology to art, and from love to religion. There are extended farewells to friends who’ve died; there are poems that celebrate and remember.

Many of the poems are about time and aging. Moss feels time pressing upon him, and he presses back. From “Glutton:”

If I could gorge on time, twirl hours on my fork
and wipe my plate clean with my daily bread,
but I am Time’s pretzel, his pistachio nut.
I wish I were time’s spaghetti carbonara.
I am what he munches, kept on the bar
Long enough for the waitress to take the order,
for Time to be seated, whoever he is –
this Godlike No God who little by little
devours me. Eat , eat my Lord,
you will not swallow me in one gulp…

He keenly feels the loss of friends to death, perhaps a reminder of his own mortality. There were several poems about or dedicated to poet and writer Stanley Kunitz, such as “Autumn:”

In a dream after he died
I received picture postcards
from him every day for two weeks
in a single night – the picture:
blazing maples and walnut trees,
New England in full foliage.
I wept that he should write
To me and my wife in a handwriting not his
in blue ink so often.
Since I do not remember the text,
I suppose the message was:
“Every autumn you know where to find me.”

He remembers swimming across the Hudson River when he was seven; in one excellent poem he compares Walt Whitman to the falling of the World Trade Center towers; he ponders the Holocaust; and he writes a six-poem commentary on Antony and Cleopatra called “Along the Tiber.”

He understands the basic of many religions while he seems to wrestle, like Jacob, with the God of his Jewish faith. And this wrestling becomes more important with age. In fact, many of the poems in this volume are about God, and understanding God.

God Breaketh Not All Men’s Hearts Alike is an extraordinary collection of a man’s life.

I hadn’t read Rodney Jones’s previous books of poetry (this one is his ninth), but I will now that I’ve read Imaginary Logic: Poems. It a collection full of the familiar and the everyday but described in unexpected and precise ways, and with an eye that is focused and accurate.

The poems cover a wide terrain – recollections of youth and childhood, prayers, family relationships, the stories houses tell, and, among others, driving at night through St. Louis (Jones is a professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, about 90 minutes southeast of St. Louis). The poems vary in length from a few stanzas to several pages, but they are all written in distinctly readable and approachable language; this is not so much the poetry of academia as it is the poetry of recognizable life.

One of his longer poems in the collection, “The Previous Tenants,” is about the couple who lived in the house previously to the teller of the story:

The couple who built our house had great plans
for this lot where they would live out their days:
he in dedicated husbandry, priming a garden
with sludge from the sewage plant, hauling stones
from the condemned homesteads by the new lake
to buttress the terraces; and she reading Aquinas
or pouring Pinot Noir for predinner conversations
after her work as a counselor at the women’s center…

But plans don’t work out; he gets Alzheimer’s or something like it while she becomes enraged at what he’s turning into. Jones turns the story into a poetic meditation on death, relationships, and what we leave behind us.

We know them from the colors they left more than their words.
We know them more from the marks they left on the wood
than the pulses that quickened when they entered rooms.
We know the four flower beds. We do not know their love…

These poems are quiet works, reflective, provoking the reader’s own memories of growing up and growing old. It’s a fine collection.

Born in Croatia and raised in Slovenia, Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun has published 30 collections of poetry in his native language. His poetry has been translated into more than 20 languages, and he’s had nine collection published in English. The Blue Tower: Poems is the tenth in English, and translated with the author by Michael Biggins of the University of Washington; it was first published in Slovenian in 2007.

To read the poems of The Blue Tower is to become disoriented and dislocated, and that is perhaps the point. Here’s a representative example, from the first poem in the collection, “The Bride Wins Both Times:”

To provoke the pasture’s ladder, to wash out the cat’s message,
What you hear through walls is panic coming here.
In Morocco he whipped slaves. First I open the chest.
The ribs turn gray. I saw nomads, women on horseback. The dog days will
     come dressed in a
T-shirt. I’ll show you hand, my hand is your hand…

This is language being used in an unconventional way, simultaneously drawing attention to itself and pushing the reader to the next phrase the next line, seeking the connections or the context and finally realizing there may not be any (in this poem, in a kind of refutation of the title, there isn’t even a mention of a bride).

Another example of this dislocating action is from the poem “Persia.” But here, the word and idea of “jump” helps to knit the poem together, as does a bit a repetition:

When I jumped on the sieve, the sieve
got sick. The word departed from the flesh and
became the fruit of Nicodemus. No one is free
of gentle bonds, buttons and ribbons
excepted. We dug them in pearlike flutters.
From there a short jump to a branch. Johnny Weissmuller,
Such a well-stitched tarp, where do you see these now? We turned
Gristle into myriads. Into mush. Into pharaohs…

This is not stream of consciousness poetry. Each sentence, each phrase is usually so well contained and tightly written that this isn’t a flow of language but indeed a very careful, heavily crafted use of it.

The effect, interestingly enough, is to push the focus of the poems to the reader, trying to make sense of the phrases and sentences and finally evaluating each phrase and sentence on its own merit and personal meaning.

The Blue Tower is full of arresting ideas and language, but a slow and careful reading is a necessity to grasp them.

From the time I was 8 until I was 14, I spent a week each summer at my grandmother’s house in Shreveport. I would sleep in the second bedroom, which was always called “the back room” even though it and my grandmother’s bedroom formed the back of the house. It was the room with a ceiling door in the closet that led to the attic; it was the room where my grandmother stored a lot of things, including my grandfather’s cane; it was the room and the bed where my grandfather died. That I slept in that bed and in that room never bothered me; instead, I felt closer to him, this man who died when I was nine months old but had shaped so many in the family, including my father.

I was continually reminded of this “back room” while reading former U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall’s The Back Chamber: Poems, a collection filled with memory, desire, imaginings and longings, the collection Hall needed to write as he enters his ninth decade. The title poem captures the essence of the collection:

Here is the houses’ genius: pram and bedstead,
Heart-shaped valentine candy
Boxes, oil lamps, a captain’s chair,
And Ben Keneston’s underwear,
A century ago
Folded away in case it came in handy,
By prudent family dead.

Here chests keep layers of relics: a beaded purse.
A graduation dress
That Ben’s wife Lucy made in homespun,
Reports from school in nineteen-one,
A century ago,
And painted China heads, now bodiless,
From dolls of three dead daughters.

Here, in a few short lines, is memory, family history, relics from that history. Old report cards – the small things of living and the small things of a life that become more important as the end of life becomes closer, not the big, major events of life but the common, everyday things that happen, almost as a matter of course, what Hall refers to in “The Things” as “the masters of the trivial.”

A highlight of the poems is “Ric’s Progress,” which in 21 sections tells the story of Ric, his first and second marriages, how his life changed with the loss of a job, where he ends up at age 60. It’s not exactly a happy ending. As Hall says, “…if stories are happy, they haven’t ended.” The poem series ends with Ric and his second wife Molly contemplating their sagging and wrinkled skin.

These are poems about memories, both real and imagined: old loves, teenage years, the inevitable aging process. Hall’s first wife, poet Jane Kenyon who died at 48, is cited frequently, her shadow looming large in the poet’s mind, as she’s described in the extended poem “Meatloaf:”

…Jane Kenyon, who loved baseball, enjoyed
the game on TV but fell asleep
by the fifth inning, She died twelve years
ago, and thus would be sixty now,
watching baseball as her hair turned right.
I see her tending her hollyhocks,
gazing west at Eagle Pond, walking
to the porch favoring her right knee.
I live alone with baseball each night
but without poems…

It is memory real and memories imagined, the relationships the poet has and with people alive and dead, that so mark this strong collection. These are poems of a life lived long.

The Back Chamber will be published Sept. 13.

I am a teacher of Poetry.

This means that several times a year I walk into a classroom, the seats filled with Bright Young People between the ages of 18 and 22, and try to make them fall in love with poetry. This, I admit, is a challenge. Poetry is difficult to define and defend—and past the age of 8, is difficult to learn to appreciate.

To read poetry, we need to cultivate a mode of reading that is less frantic than the hunt-and-gather method instilled in us by content-driven disciplines (not to mention daily life), to discover how to be patient with ambiguity and uncertainty, and to give ourselves permission to read for the pure pleasure of it.

As W.H. Auden once observed, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” A poem exists for its own sake, and the experience of the poem—for both the writer and the reader—is its only reason for being. It won’t earn you a grade, it won’t get you a job, it won’t even buy you a latte.

“So what’s the point?” my busy, practical, and brutally-honest students often ask.

“Exactly,” I answer.

And so the courtship begins.

The first step towards falling in love, of course, is the cultivation of friendship. And so I have to convince my students that poetry—and the poets who write them—are friends worth getting to know. My strategy here is simple: I trot out the smartest, handsomest, wittiest, most engaging poems (and poets) I know, invite them into the room with us, and let them talk.

Who could resist Shakespeare whispering, “When my love swears that she is made of truth, / I do believe her though I know she lies.”

Who would ignore young John Keats as he ponders his own impending mortality (at age 23) when he confesses “Then I stand alone upon the shore and think / Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.”

Who doesn’t laugh, albeit ruefully, along with John Gay, when he inscribes upon his own tombstone, “Life is a jest, and all things show it. / I thought so, once. And now I know it.”

Who does not grieve, with Edna St. Vincent Millay, as she regrets her bygone youth and beauty, confessing, “What lips my lips have kissed, and where and why / I have forgotten.”

Who does not yearn, with W.B. Yeats, for a return to the paradise of childhood as he dreams aloud, “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree.”

Who does not comprehend, along with Elizabeth Bishop, the unassuageable agony of loss, even as she bravely claims, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”

Who could resist Emily Dickinson’s injunction, “Tell all the Truth, but tell it Slant,” Robert Browning’s invitation, “Grow old along with me. / The best is yet to be.”

We are charmed.

Not just by the words, but by the outrageous beauty of their arrangement. Samuel Taylor Coleridge once offered this homely definition of poetry as “the best words in their best order.” The poems we fall in love with contain words that are ordinary enough (love, life, lips, kiss, woods, sleep), but poetry makes them new by making them into music. Poetry is newspaper talk turned Jazz, corner-bar kvetch-and-gossip gone Bach, daily domestic dispute ascending into opera. Poetry sings—so much so that John Keats thought poetry a genre that occupied a space between music and visual art, partaking of both yet belonging to neither.

In my (hypothetical) classroom, after my students have delighted in the discovery of these poems—shouts of Where have you been all my life? all-but-audible in the room—our next step is to make them our home-boys and –girls. We need to be at ease with them, to lay claim to the poems, somehow—and what better way to do that than to memorize them—to eat their words, breathe them with our own breaths, speak them with our own tongues, mimic their rhythms with the beat of our own iambic hearts.

At this point, our relationship to the poems has become sensory, physical—one might say incarnational. (And the words were made flesh and dwelt within us.) We have entered into communion with them and they have become part of us through a strange, new kind of eucharist. Thus, we have arrived at the final stage of passionate friendship, intimacy.

My students (at least the game ones) have fallen in love with poetry. I know this because they no longer ask “What’s the point?”—and they no longer worry about what Poetry is. Instead, they’ve begun to recognize it when they hear it.

I’m reminded of Louis Armstrong’s quick and clean response to an interviewer who once posed the daunting question, “What is Jazz?”: “Man, if you gotta ask, you’ll never know!” Somehow, now, these students know.

Post by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, author of Saint Sinatra and Other Poems. Image by Claire Burge. Used with permission.
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Further Resources, for Teachers or Writer’s Groups:

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