Behold this swarthy face!

I just love Walt Whitman. He's a trip. Yes, sometimes he can go on too long, and sometimes he rambles about really strange stuff, and sometimes his poetry is pretty crappy...I mean, questionable. But then he busts out with stuff like the first canto of "Song of Myself," or this great little poem:


When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts, the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the learned astronomer where he lectured with much applause
in the lecture room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

Here's the age-old dilemma: is science, in its quest for answers and rationalizations, robbing nature of its mystery and beauty? Whitman seems to think so. Or is there something also beautiful in "the proofs, the figures"?

(I didn't say I agreed with the poem. I said I liked it.)

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Laura referenced this poem in a comment on my last post, and it's such a wonderful poem I thought I'd post it in its entirety:

God's Grandeur
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil ;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod ?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod ;
And all is seared with trade ; bleared, smeared with toil ;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell : the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent ;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things ;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah ! bright wings.

And while we're on the subject of Hopkins, here's another poem of his that I like. His images, his sounds, his rhyme and rhythm all work together so well to create an intense and energized poem. This is "As Kingfishers Catch Fire":

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies, dráw fláme ;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring ; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name ;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same :
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells ;
Selves—goes itself ; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me : for that I came.

I say móre : the just man justices ;
Kéeps gráce : thát keeps all his goings graces ;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

One Year Later

This is a poem I wrote after seeing a picture Nolan took when he went to Mississippi following Hurricane Katrina last year. Here's the picture:

Something about this image stuck in my head, and, a few days later, a poem came out of it. It's been tweaked a bit since I first published it (on my other blog), but the essence remains the same. I don't know about a title...it doesn't have one right now. Anyway, here's the poem (some of the alignment doesn't format well in Blogger, but it doesn't disrupt the poem too much):


While press conferences and politicians play at placing blame,
taking steps to stabilize, mobilize, organize, emphasize, criticize,
devastation’s stench hangs thick in the brightening air
and she silently sits upon the splinters of somewhere she once knew.

To say it’s gone and to see it’s gone are different than
stepping into the arms of Gone.

An anthology of works, of words, she sat reading in the blue armchair once,
now not blue, but black with the aftermath of mud and chaos; But oh,
the anthology gone, too. All of her books. Everyone’s books

and cats and dogs and and refrigerators and rats and parents and plants and jazz and gin and calendars and cell phones and lovers and lemonade and magazines and mercedes and everyday and

Everything.

And the space between the living and the dead
is the space of a carefully blinking eye,
And the nothing that descends like madness
is now the nothing that belongs to

Everyone.

Seeing that which she cannot unsee
Knowing that which she cannot unknow
faster than the colors of dreams the world can vanish before you
only to reappear a wholly unrecognizable place,
where blue steps lead to nothing,
or they only lead to everything and

Everywhere.

Now, only the steps remain.

And steps they remain, for those who will go
and listen for the beating of hope’s great green wings.

Riddles in the dark...

It's funny -- I couldn't stand Emily Dickinson for the longest time. I got frustrated with her short verse, her choppiness, her stupid dashes and slant rhymes, her craziness...

I don't know what happened, but I began really enjoying her poetry about a year or a year and a half ago. She's a master of the image, she's got incredible rhythm, and her rhymes and near-rhymes are incredibly clever. Her poems are like the concentrated essence of things, boiled down to the core, and they are fantastically simple while still remaining aloof and complex. Her poems are tricky, dynamic, and almost always surprising. Here's a particular poem I like, and it really does surprise me every time:

A Route of Evanescence
With a revolving Wheel--
A Resonance of Emerald--
A Rush of Cochineal--
And every Blossom on the Bush
Adjusts its tumbled Head--
The mail from Tunis, probably,
An easy Morning's Ride--

It's a poem, but it's a riddle. Do you know what she's talking about? (Don't say it if you already know the answer! Only valid guesses will be accepted!) She gives you clues with the descriptions, yes, but the sounds in the first four lines are also a hint.

This is what is so cool about imagery, about metaphors and similes and synecdoche and metonymy and all kinds of figurative language: you use it to go away from whatever it is you are talking about in order to see that thing (whatever it is) in new ways. It's a paradox -- by going away from the object (comparing it to something it isn't or describing it in a way that is totally new), you somehow come closer to it. And you can look at it the same way again! I've got a Wallace Stevens poem coming up next that is a great example of this kind of image-making...and it models a fantastic exercise that can help aspiring poets work on imagistic language. Stay tuned...

Why you should read this blog.

Because I'm writing it, of course. Silly you.

Seriously, this blog is even more an exercise in self-indulgence than my other blog, so I'm not expecting much of an audience. But if you're curious about poetry, curious about how someone could possibly ever like it (much less study it for a living), or just curious about the utter strangeness of poets (Emily Dickinson didn't venture out of her family's house for almost 20 years; Sylvia Plath committed suicide by putting her head in an oven; Walt Whitman wrote a poem entitled "City of Orgies"), this might be the place for you! I'm not planning on posting excessive amounts of my own poetry, though it will make an occasional appearance. I just want to talk about poetry. Because, like it or not, we're all connected to it.

Poetry (coming from the Greek word poesis) is about creation. Poesis translates into "making" or "creating," and it is a fundamental tool we use when language reaches a kind of limit. You know that feeling when you just can't quite express how you feel? Or can't quite find the right words to say what you mean?

Enter poetry, stage right.

Poetry has the uncanny ability to express what we often feel is inexpressible. It's why poets write about love, God, nature, time, and all manner of things that can elude plain prose. It's how we use language to go beyond itself toward something even better.

That's why this blog is called "Sudden Rightnesses." Wallace Stevens came up with that one, and it describes what poetry can sometimes do. It's that flash of insight; that "Aha!" moment; that brief instance where you really "get it," though you may not be able to say exactly what it is that you "got." It's just suddenly and inexplicably "right."

So Stevens says that poetry is basically just a bunch of sounds passing through these "sudden rightnesses." It isn't always about what it means (check out the Billy Collins poem from my first post down there). It's often about how it makes us feel. Like music. Like art. Like love or hate or anger or peace. Like something beautiful.

And if you're interested in any of those things (and I hate to break it to you like this), you're interested in poetry.

What good amid these, O me, O life?

That's the question Big Uncle Walt puts to us in a short poem he wrote in the early 1880's. What is good in a world of faithlessness, foolishness, vanity, and struggle? What is beautiful or worthwhile among the seemingly empty and useless years? His answer:

That you are here - that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

So, I started this blog. Not just to contribute my verse, but to post poems that I like, to talk about why poetry is important, and to generally frolic around in my own nerdiness. Won't you please join me?

I imagine what will emerge will be an almagam of my own poems, my thoughts about poetry, poems from guys (and gals) like Whitman there, and maybe some song lyrics or other poeticalish type things that float across my mind. It may turn out to be an outline of the type of poetry class I would teach...if I taught poetry...

...like the great Billy Collins! He teaches poetry! And he was the poet laureate! So I open with his "Introduction to Poetry":

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with a rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.


Stay tuned. There's more to come.