On The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor, today's poem is "Forgetfulness" by Billy Collins. Click on the poem's title to watch an innovative video with Collins reading this beautiful poem about the slippery ways of memory. This poem will resonate with anyone who has had a loved one suffering from Alzheimer's or dementia.
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I love the way Jeff Worley's poem emerged from a turtle shell he found, and I especially like the unexpected image of the unencumbered, naked turtle dancing under the moon--marvelous. American Life in Poetry: Column 256 BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE A poem is an experience like any other, and we can learn as much or more about, say, an apple from a poem about an apple as from the apple itself. Since I was a boy, I’ve been picking up things, but I’ve never found a turtle shell until I found one in this poem by Jeff Worley, who lives in Kentucky. On Finding a Turtle Shell in Daniel Boone National Forest This one got tired of lugging his fortress wherever he went, was done with duck and cover at every explosion through rustling leaves of fox and dog and skunk. Said au revoir to the ritualof pulling himself together. . . I imagine him waiting for the cover of darkness to let down his hinged drawbridge. He wanted, after so many protracted years of caution, to dance naked and nimble as a flame under the moon-- even if dancing just once was all that the teeth of the forest would allow. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2008 by Jeff Worley, whose most recent book of poems is Best to Keep Moving, Larkspur Press, 2009, which includes this poem. Reprinted from Poetry East, Nos. 62 & 63, Fall, 2008, by permission of Jeff Worley and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. On oprah.com, there's a good interview with poet Mary Oliver--"Maria Shriver Interviews the Famously Private Poet Mary Oliver." Here's an excerpt:
Maria Shriver: One line of yours I often quote is, "What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" What do you think you have done with your one wild and precious life? Mary Oliver: I used up a lot of pencils. Maria Shriver: [Laughs.] Mary Oliver: What I have done is learn to love and learn to be loved. That didn't come easy. And I learned to consider my life an amazing gift. Those are the things. Today I'm posting a poem I love from Krista Tippett's on Being program this week, "A Wild Love for the World," with Rainer Maria Rilke poems translated by Joanna Macy, a philosopher of ecology and a Buddhist scholar: http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2011/wild-love-for-world/ Go to the Limits of Your Longing by Rainer Maria Rilke; translation by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don't let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand. Book of Hours, I 59 Today you could see every shade of green being worn in the halls at SMSU. In Marshall, even though our population tops out at about 12,000, we have a St. Patrick's Day parade down Main Street--short but spirited. Every year I celebrate the day by baking a loaf of Irish Soda Bread and playing our Irish/Celtic music CD's.
Two years ago, I visited Ireland for the first time--a magical return to the homeland of my great grandparents, the O'Connell's. My husband and I were celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary, and we toured Dublin, Kilkenny, Killarney, Valencia Island--where Great Grandfather Thomas O'Connell lived--and the Skelligs. So much beautiful poetry, literature and music honored and woven into the everyday fabric wherever we travelled, from the airport to the welcoming pubs to the wonderful bookstores. Who are your favorite Irish poets? Past and present? I like poems by Irish poet, writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1995) Seamus Heaney. Here is one of his most popular poems, particularly suited to writers and the digging we do. Digging Between my finger and my thumb The squat pin rest; snug as a gun. Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look down Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds Bends low, comes up twenty years away Stooping in rhythm through potato drills Where he was digging. The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft Against the inside knee was levered firmly. He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep To scatter new potatoes that we picked, Loving their cool hardness in our hands. By God, the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man. My grandfather cut more turf in a day Than any other man on Toner's bog. Once I carried him milk in a bottle Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up To drink it, then fell to right away Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods Over his shoulder, going down and down For the good turf. Digging. The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head. But I've no spade to follow men like them. Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I'll dig with it. - Seamus Heaney Today was beautiful in Marshall--brilliant sunshine warming the thawing prairie, temps climbing up into the 40's, the ring of brown grass around our towering backyard fir tree growing wider, the dirty snow mounds almost melting in front of our eyes. In Minnesota, we are all so hungry for the sights, smells, sounds of spring. Time for a spring poem by Mary Oliver, one of my favorite poets.
Such Singing in the Wild Branches It was spring and finally I heard him among the first leaves-- then I saw him clutching the limb in an island of shade with his red-brown feathers all trim and neat for the new year. First, I stood still and thought of nothing. Then I began to listen. Then I was filled with gladness-- and that's when it happened, when I seemed to float, to be, myself, a wing or a tree-- and I began to understand what the bird was saying, and the sands in the glass stopped for a pure white moment while gravity sprinkled upward like rain, rising, and in fact it became difficult to tell just what it was that was singing-- it was the thrush for sure, but it seemed not a single thrush, but himself, and all his brothers, and also the trees around them, as well as the gliding, long-tailed clouds in the perfectly blue sky— all, all of them were singing. And, of course, yes, so it seemed, so was I. Such soft and solemn and perfect music doesn't last for more than a few moments. It's one of those magical places wise people like to talk about. One of the things they say about it, that is true, is that, once you've been there, you're there forever. Listen, everyone has a chance. Is it spring, is it morning? Are there trees near you, and does your own soul need comforting? Quick, then— open the door and fly on your heavy feet; the song may already be drifting away. — Mary Oliver Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays, Beacon Press, Boston, 2003, pp. 8-9 Jim Reese gave a terrific reading at SMSU tonight--beautiful, powerful poems, equal parts humor--about lingerie catalogs--and gut-punching pathos--about his work teaching prisoners writing. He read poems from his new book, ghost on 3rd (click on book title to read the review in the American Poetry Journal), brand new unpublished poems, and a rollicking new piece of non-fiction about budding teenage sexuality in all its steamy, innocent indoor-roller-rink glory.
Jim is the founder and editor of Paddlefish, a publication of Mount Marty College in Yankton, South Dakota. Here's a poem from the most recent issue of Paddlefish by Leo Dangel, beloved professor emeritus of SMSU. Leo always filled the house when he gave readings on campus--with faculty, students, staff, and people from the surrounding communities. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser wrote of Dangel's book of collected poems, Home from the Field, "These poems are warm and generous and perfectly formed to the mouths of the people who speak them.” Independent Harvester If our oats crop was ripe on the 4th of July, there was no liberty for us. My father pulled the grain binder out from its place under a cottonwood tree, the sickle sharpened and fierce. Our uniform was faded cotton and straw hats. My mother drove the rusty tractor, and my father operated the binder, the sickle rattling back and forth, sounding like a machine gun, mowing down the standing grain in its path. My sisters and I set the bundles into shocks that covered the field in rows of monuments. No one thought of Washington or flags. I remember how the water, kept cool in a Mason jar under a shock, tasted, how the stubble felt when it bent and broke under my soles. The hemp twine that tied our harvest together had a certain smell. We saw the late sun slanting on the field. This Tuesday, March 15 at 7 p.m., Jim Reese will be reading from his new book of poems, ghost on 3rd, in the Whipple Art Gallery at Southwest Minnesota State University. Jim has been the National Endowment for the Arts' Writer in Residence at the Yankton Federal Prison Camp since 2008. Here are two poems based on his experiences teaching at the prison. Jim is a terrific writer and performer. I hope you can join us. Please spread the word. Let's fill the seats.
Jesus Christ Pose I walk both sides of the fence. I have no sympathy for those who premeditate and execute heinous crimes. In a theatre practicum in San Quentin I watch you, a prisoner, standing in the center of the room. You raise your hands, palms up, head dangling down, your Jesus Christ pose. You begin to stand on one foot. The room is quiet. People begin shifting in their seats. Minutes pass. You begin to lose your balance. Every morning, you say, after my foster father left for work, she made me stand in the corner like this. When your desperate left foot hits the ground you scream in the voice of a child being beaten. And now I understand why some of you are here. * * * Habit I suppose it's just habit, when I pass the guys in the yard that I ask, How's it going? Always since I was a kid, I'd ask, How's it going? To strangers--to friends. Today, as I pass men in their prison-issued khakis and numbered shirts, one stops and tells me, Don't you know--you're not supposed to ask us that? And those few seconds that we stand face to face-- I try to conjure up what I should have said before a guard orders him away. What I should have said was, No, I didn't know. How stupid of me not to think of something smarter to say. Me, the teacher, who can leave this prison camp any time I like. As part of the SMSU Visiting Writers Series, Jim Reese will read from his new book, ghost on 3rd, on Tues., March 15, at 7 p.m., in the Whipple Art Gallery at Southwest Minnesota State University. The event is free and open to the public, and Reese's books will be available to purchase.
Here's what Reese's website has to say about his new book: Jim Reese’s newest collection, ghost on 3rd, is riddled with love, latent violence, humor, and prison life. Critics who said that his last collection kicked “like an old pump-12 gauge” will be happy to find the barrels sawed off in this book. Reese shows no sign of putting the hammer down—he takes his reader on the daily routine and long nights that are an inescapable part of raising two small daughters—shows us how family is not a burden but a complex source of joy. Ride shotgun with him down the lonesome byways of the Great Plains westward into San Quentin prison, where he has full access and isn’t afraid to ask the hard questions. Author John Price writes: “Reese’s beautiful and powerful poems are born of ‘wish and skin and bone,’ of dirt and dignity, of faith and fry grease, of laughter and lament. To read them is to be carried to a place where risk is a promise fulfilled—whether it be the homing memory of a grandfather or eating suspicious pastries or raising children or teaching poetry to inmates. It is a place where the familiar opens into the extraordinary, and even, at times, the miraculous.” Recommendations: We call it the heartland but we seldom drop by for a visit. Jim Reese catches the dying fire of the small town wasteland that staggers on with meth, desire, and neglect. These loving poems open the door to the real little house on the prairie. Time to step inside and finally have one honest moment with the forgotten center of our people. - Charles Bowden author of SOME OF THE DEAD ARE STILL BREATHING: LIVING IN THE FUTURE Here’s a poet of extraordinary talent who juxtaposes the voices of ordinary people with those of his young family. Reese is most moving, however, when he writes with tenderness about his wife and children, and the delicate place that the young husband and wife create for themselves in the midst of everyday small town life and in the odd, precious moments when their children don’t need them. These poems will make you laugh and cry. Ghost on 3rd is one of the strongest books of poetry I’ve read in a very long time. - Maria Mazziotti Gillan winner of the 2008 American Book Award for ALL THAT LIES BETWEEN US In Ghost on 3rd, everything is connected, and everything is fragile. In these poems, ordinary life with its children and neighbors crackles like a mirage, and shifts and opens, and we find we’ve been all along in San Quentin prison. What is it we just saw?—a five-year-old child swinging on the monkey bars, or a tattooed convict, crying? Reese’s eye is the eye of a father, and he finds his world both alien and comforting. These are poems of praise and poems of warning, infused with love and latent violence. Reese makes us feel the threat throbbing inside the song. - Kent Meyer author of THE TWISTED TREE I'm a fan of award-winning poet Dorianne Laux, and I enjoyed her poem "Antilamentation," which is posted on The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor today. It's from The Book of Men, her new book of poems just out this February. Here's what Zinta from Portage, Michigan, wrote on the Better World Books website about Laux's new book:
"Mushrooms and stamens and pollinating bees, all bursting from a man’s briefs … this new collection of poetry by Dorianne Laux. . . is as seductive and enticing a literary treat as one has come to expect from one of America’s most delicious poets. If a treatise on boys and men, men on their own, men in the poet’s life, men observed at a distance, men in the moon, then it is also very much a collection for women and by one." |
AuthorI love to play with words. To capture moments on the page. To explore the physical and spiritual geography of what I call "fly-over country." I write from imagination, observation and my own experience of wandering in fly-over country--the literal, physical spaces of my life on the Minnesota prairie and the inner territory of the soul. Archives
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