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Autumn's Featured Poet: Billy Collins
 Former Poet Laureate Billy Collins has managed to become that rarest of contemporary Americans, a a poetry superstar. He's famous enough so that actor Bill Murray introduced him to a sold-out performance at Lincoln Center in Washington.
Imagine, a big crowd turning out to hear a person read poetry!
People who otherwise wouldn't read verse seem comfortable with Collins. Even my friend Matt, an accountant and self-acknowledged poetry-phobic has a volume of Billy's poems.
Critics love Collins as well. This means he has accomplished another remarkable feat: winning the adulation of both tough critics and the general population.
When you read almost any one of his poems, you can see why. Here is a selection of six gems.
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 rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
Dear Reader
Baudelaire considers you his brother,
and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs
as if to make sure you have not closed the book,
and now I am summoning you up again,
attentive ghost, dark silent figure standing
in the doorway of these words.
Pope welcomes you into the glow of his study,
takes down a leather-bound Ovid to show you.
Tennyson lifts the latch to a moated garden,
and with Yeats you lean against a broken pear tree,
the day hooded by low clouds.
But now you are here with me,
composed in the open field of this page,
no room or manicured garden to enclose us,
no Zeitgeist marching in the background,
no heavy ethos thrown over us like a cloak.
Instead, our meeting is so brief and accidental,
unnoticed by the monocled eye of History,
you could be the man I held the door for
this morning at the bank or post office
or the one who wrapped my speckled fish.
You could be someone I passed on the street
or the face behind the wheel of an oncoming car.
The sunlight flashes off your windshield,
and when I look up into the small, posted mirror,
I watch you diminish—my echo, my twin—
and vanish around a curve in this whip
of a road we can't help traveling together.
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Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."
Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House
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The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.
The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,
and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.
When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton
while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.
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You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine...
-Jacques Crickillon
You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.
However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.
It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.
And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.
It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.
I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.
I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine.
Anonymous submission.
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What scene would I want to be enveloped in
more than this one,
an ordinary night at the kitchen table,
floral wallpaper pressing in,
white cabinets full of glass,
the telephone silent,
a pen tilted back in my hand?
It gives me time to think
about all that is going on outside--
leaves gathering in corners,
lichen greening the high grey rocks,
while over the dunes the world sails on,
huge, ocean-going, history bubbling in its wake.
But beyond this table
there is nothing that I need,
not even a job that would allow me to row to work,
or a coffee-colored Aston Martin DB4
with cracked green leather seats.
No, it's all here,
the clear ovals of a glass of water,
a small crate of oranges, a book on Stalin,
not to mention the odd snarling fish
in a frame on the wall,
and the way these three candles--
each a different height--
are singing in perfect harmony.
So forgive me
if I lower my head now and listen
to the short bass candle as he takes a solo
while my heart
thrums under my shirt--
frog at the edge of a pond--
and my thoughts fly off to a province
made of one enormous sky
and about a million empty branches. |
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Summer's Featured Poet: David Whyte (www.davidwhyte.com)
 Poet David Whyte grew up among the hills and valleys of Yorkshire, England. An Associate Fellow at Templeton College and Said Business School at the University of Oxford, he is one of the few poets to take his perspectives on creativity into the field of organizational development, where he works with many American and international companies. The author of five books of poetry, he holds a degree in Marine Zoology and has traveled extensively, including working as a naturalist guide and leading anthropological and natural history expeditions. He brings this wealth of experiences to his poetry, lectures and workshops.
In organizational settings, using poetry and thoughtful commentary, he illustrates how we can foster qualities of courage and engagement; qualities needed if we are to respond to today’s call for increased creativity and adaptability in the workplace. He brings a unique and important contribution to our understanding of the nature of individual and organizational change.
In addition to his five volumes of poetry, David Whyte is the author of The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, published by Doubleday/Currency, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity, published by Riverhead Books, an audio lecture series and an album of poetry and music. He lives with his family in the Pacific Northwest.
About poetry, Whyte has written:
Poetry is a break for freedom. In a sense all poems are good; all poems are an emblem of courage and the attempt to say the unsayable; but only a few are able to speak to something universal yet personal and distinct at the same time; to create a door through which others can walk into what previously seemed unobtainable realms, in the passage of a few short lines.
In addtion three of his poems, please also note a fascinating COMMENTARY, from Mr. Whyte (below - post poems) |
SLIGO GLEN: WALKING OUT OF SILENCE
(excerpt)
...So that you suddenly realized
you were given
the complete and utter gift
of your own transparency,
the revelation of your
own exact boundary with
the world.
The frontier
between silence and speech
exactly
the line you must cross
to give yourself
while saving yourself,
the gleam in your heart
and your eye,
another sun rising,
the old memories alive
after a long night of absence
and the world again
suddenly worth
risking,
worth seeing,
worth innocence,
worth everything.
All The True Vows
All the true vows
are secret vows
the ones we speak out loud
are the ones we break.
There is only one life
you can call your own
and a thousand others
you can call by any name you want.
Hold to the truth you make
every day with your own body,
don't turn your face away.
Hold to your own truth
at the center of the image
you were born with.
Those who do not understand
their destiny will never understand
the friends they have made
nor the work they have chosen
nor the one life that waits
beyond all the others.
By the lake in the wood
in the shadows
you can
whisper that truth
to the quiet reflection
you see in the water.
Whatever you hear from
the water, remember,
it wants you to carry
the sound of its truth on your lips.
Remember,
in this place
no one can hear you
and out of the silence
you can make a promise
it will kill you to break,
that way you'll find
what is real and what is not.
I know what I am saying.
Time almost forsook me
and I looked again.
Seeing my reflection
I broke a promise
and spoke
for the first time
after all these years
in my own voice,
before it was too late
to turn my face again.
"All the True Vows" from The House of Belonging by David Whyte. ÊCopyright © 1997, 2004 by David Whyte. ÊUsed by permission of the author and Many Rivers Press (www.davidwhyte.com) ÊAll rights reserved.
Loaves and Fishes
This is not the age of information.
This is not
the age of information.
Forget the news,
and the radio,
and the blurred screen.
This is the time
of loaves
and fishes.
People are hungry,
and one good word is bread
for a thousand.
from The House of Belonging
Thoughts from David Whyte, Fall, 2005
Two hundred years ago, William Blake worked in his engraving shop etching planes of metal with acid in the same manner in which he wrote: with a kind of burning intensity. In his own words, Melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.
He wanted to see, not only beneath inherited artistic surfaces of his time, but beneath the brutal surface of the Georgian London in which he lived. He wished to see beneath glittering surfaces; a wish that was seen at the time as a deep form of insanity. He championed not only child chimney sweeps and infants indentured to textile machines, but wild creatures with no human voice of their own. His language brooked no defenses. A robin redbreast in a cage, puts all heaven in a rage. He was ahead of his time; a harbinger of future sanities that we now, almost, take for granted. His social concerns were all part of a greater artistic vision. We look back now and hear his voice as one of the very few sane voices in a very, very insane society.
We might look at our own time and ask ourselves what particular form of insanity we live with that future generations would look on with disbelief. Many of the massive imbalances of our time are becoming so clear to us that we can no longer turn away. The forgotten poor of America herded into the New Orleans dome. The dispossessed of Africa just a short commute from the bond dealing floors of London.
As individuals, we see elements and dynamics that seem to have no fit together. Even the most ordinary life seems to need a kind of imaginative personal artistry, one such as Blake possessed, to hold all of these conflicting dynamics together. We wonder if we are up to it. We are adolescents, with an adolescent political leadership, entering an adult world of consequences that we did not necessarily wish upon ourselves.
I had a very humbling and very adolescent experience earlier this year, through an artistic residency in Tacoma, attempting to put the art of poetry into a new and different form - glass. Glass in all its forms: Molten glass. Blown glass. Cast, solid glass. Glass to be worked with slowly and painstakingly over days and then broken and shattered and quickly swept away. Glass to be burnt and seared by; glass to be sweated and muttered over; glass to be held up to the light and almost reluctantly admired. I longed for the utter simplicity of pen and paper, of fingers typing and a laptop keyboard. But no, it was glass, glass and glass.
Holding disparate elements together at molten temperatures, coaxing and pampering them as they cooled, I had to learn, and learn quickly, in the company of some very accomplished glass artists, how things held together through astonishing variations of fluidity and temperature.
The central insight was that there was almost always a way, despite my asking the glass workers to do things they had never contemplated doing, with often unfamiliar materials. There was always a trick, a method, a way that pleased the elements and in the end, the eye and the imagination. Out of dozens and dozens of attempts we emerged with just a few good precious pieces, but more especially with very, very precious and unforgettable images. The poetry broke through some invisible barrier at high temperature, alive and shimmering in the glass at 1500 degrees, glowing and revealing infinities in ways that would have made Blake very glad of heart.
I think of the molten flowing realities of our time. The brittle nature of each of us when we cool and become static. The way there is a trick to everything. Even perhaps, to negotiating our present difficulties and creating a future human society more at ease with itself and natural creation, holding all kinds of elements together we never imagined possible. I think of the central metaphor of artistry; the ability of human beings to form an image on a page, in glass, or on canvas that will hold together all the disparate images of their lives, no matter how diverse. I think also of the way, no matter our calling, each of us must learn a way to hold our individual artistry and integrity while risking ourselves bodily in society, as we see Blake did, for a future, others said, it was insanity even to imagine.
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Previous Issue
Featured Poet for Spring: Mark Jarman
Mark Jarman, is one of America's finest and most accomplished poets. He is the author of numerous collections: To the Green Man (Sarabande, 2004); Unholy Sonnets (2000); Questions for Ecclesiastes, which won the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Black Riviera (1990), which won the 1991 Poets' Prize; Far and Away (1985); The Rote Walker (1981); and North Sea (1978). In 1992 he published Iris, a book-length poem.
His poetry and essays have been published widely in such periodicals and journals as American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, and Southern Review.
He is professor of English at Vanderbilt University. National Literary Review is pleased to present this selection of four of his poems, all previously published.
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"God is in the details."
Albert Einstein
In which of these details does God inhere?
The woman's head in the boy's lap? His punctured lung?
The place where she had bitten through her tongue?
The drunk's truck in three pieces? The drunk's beer,
Tossed from the cooler, made to disappear?
The silk tree whose pink flowers overhung
The roadside and dropped limp strings among
The wreckage? The steering column, like a spear?
Where in the details, the cleverness of man
To add a gracenote God might understand,
Does God inhere, cold sober, thunderstruck?
I think it's here, in this one: the open can
The drunk placed by the dead woman's hand,
Telling her son, who cried for help, "Good luck."
From Unholy Sonnets, Poems by Mark Jarman, published by Story Line Press, 2000. Copyright 2000 by Mark Jarman. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.
Ground Swell
Is nothing real but when I was fifteen,
Going on sixteen, like a corny song?
I see myself so clearly then, and painfully--
Knees bleeding through my usher's uniform
Behind the candy counter in the theater
After a morning's surfing; paddling frantically
To top the brisk outsiders coming to wreck me,
Trundle me clumsily along the beach floor's
Gravel and sand; my knees aching with salt.
Is that all I have to write about?
You write about the life that's vividest.
And if that is your own, that is your subject.
And if the years before and after sixteen
Are colorless as salt and taste like sand--
Return to those remembered chilly mornings,
The light spreading like a great skin on the water,
And the blue water scalloped with wind-ridges,
And--what was it exactly?--that slow waiting
When, to invigorate yourself, you peed
Inside your bathing suit and felt the warmth
Crawl all around your hips and thighs,
And the first set rolled in and the water level
Rose in expectancy, and the sun struck
The water surface like a brassy palm,
Flat and gonglike, and the wave face formed.
Yes. But that was a summer so removed
In time, so specially peculiar to my life,
Why would I want to write about it again?
There was a day or two when, paddling out,
An older boy who had just graduated
And grown a great blonde moustache, like a walrus,
Skimmed past me like a smooth machine on the water,
And said my name. I was so much younger,
To be identified by one like him--
The easy deference of a kind of god
Who also went to church where I did--made me
Reconsider my worth. I had been noticed.
He soon was a small figure crossing waves,
The shawling crest surrounding him with spray,
Whiter than gull feathers. He had said my name
Without scorn, just with a bit of surprise
To notice me among those trying the big waves
Of the morning break. His name is carved now
On the black wall in Washington, the frozen wave
That grievers cross to find a name or names.
I knew him as I say I knew him, then,
Which wasn't very well. My father preached
His funeral. He came home in a bag
That may have mixed in pieces of his squad.
Yes, I can write about a lot of things
Besides the summer that I turned sixteen.
But that's my ground swell. I must start
Where things began to happen and I knew it.
From Questions for Ecclesiastes published by Story Line Press, 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Mark Jarman. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
Jeffers
To raise a stump of rock into a tower, rolling a stone
in place as the years pass.
Strangers who only know your silhouette bid it farewell and
travel to Japan,
Cross China, venture into India, to Europe, and, changed
by time and space,
Sail home over the bulging eye of ocean only to see, when
landfall looms in view,
The stump of rock--your tower--on the headland, and you there,
rolling a stone in place,
The edifice apparently no taller, as if each night you had
dismantled it
And every day had raised it up again. To know, only in
completion, the nisus
That dominates the spider when it spins, the bird building
its nest, the gray whale
Turning toward Mexico and the sea lion clambering up shingle
toward its mate--
The nisus of cairn-building, rock-piling, mortaring stone has
dominated you.
It dominates the reader bent above the book, poised like a
stork hunting; like sleep,
It is an utter unity of will and action, known--at least by
man or woman--
Only when it is over. And when the work is over--tower
building, poem writing--
You hear gulls cry and see them kiting at the bull terrier
out in the garden.
He has snatched up some strip of bloody fur they meant to mince
with beaks. Best to detach it
From his jaws, let gulls eat refuse like that. Go out into
the damp twilight, feel
The chill along the arms, through cloth, and take the petty
morsel from the pet dog, toss it
To the scolding gulls, down the rocky bank beyond the garden.
And lead the dog to food
Inside the kitchen. Enter, expecting to see the woman, the two
sons, and your place at table,
Waiting. And find you are alone. Even the dog at heel--
vanished. The stone house
Glumly dark and a dumb cold coming from its walls, that only
whiskey cuts.
The cold and dark conceal much, and memory must be evoked
to penetrate them.
Meanwhile, they are the elements that starlight loves.
Clear cold, pure darkness, outside the window,
Beside the guestbed, where you have planned to lie at last,
viewing the pure, clear stars without
Obstruction by the crude suburban dwellings--that absurd roof,
down there, like a coal scoop,
And the spite fences either side your property. Nothing
in creation shows
More the supreme indifference to humanity, despite the patterns
of the zodiac.
The stars, like bits of crystal ground into a griststone's
granite rim, are small themselves.
Only the surrounding emptiness is great. Take comfort in the
emptiness; lie down.
The drink will help you sleep awhile alone, without her, until
that section of the night
You've come to know--that region you once sailed through
peacefully, worn out by work and love.
Now, stranded there till dawn, sleepless, it will not matter
that you foresaw the planet's end
Or our end on the planet. Only sleep will matter. At that
hour, in those conditions,
Just out of reach, receding like the dark itself as daylight
pushes in, sleep only
Will be the thing you want. Powerless to attain what you
desire, yet bitterly
Desiring at all costs. Perhaps, then, memory, not starlight,
will intercede,
And the stone house gather warmth from its hearth fire, and
loved ones reappear, and you will sleep.
From Iris, published by Story Line Press, 1992. Copyright © 1992 by Mark Jarman. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
Descriptions of Heaven and Hell
The wave breaks
And I'm carried into it.
This is hell, I know,
Yet my father laughs,
Chest-deep, proving I'm wrong.
We're safely rooted,
Rocked on his toes.
Nothing irked him more
Than asking, "What is there
Beyond death?"
His theory once was
That love greets you,
And the loveless
Don't know what to say.
From The Rote Walker, published by Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1981. Copyright © 1981 by Mark Jarman. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
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