Kimiko Hahn Captures This Moment

It’s been ages since I last posted here, mostly due to personal issues and life changes. But as I am traumatized by the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the support for this in “developed countries”, among other things, I found this poem by the wonderful poet Kimiko Hahn captures the moment’s tribulation. I will insert it as a photo to get the formatting right.

Kimiko Hahn is an award-winning major poet: winner of the 2023 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the winner of the 2008 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and the 2007 Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America, as well as the American Book Award for her book The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1996), the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize for Earshot (Hanging Loose Press, 1992), and more.

Poetry Magazine says “Her work is noted for its intertextuality and wide-ranging subject matter,” and she “asserted that her early exposure to activism and community organizing as well as her racial identity profoundly influenced her approach to poetry.” Thus, in a lecture she mentioned:

“How could my parents have known that in dance class I’d meet Aichi Kochiyama and come to know her radical family (her mother Yuri Kochiyama, well known for her radical politics, held the dying Malcolm X in the Audubon Ballroom).”

Maybe that’s why her poem is is so prescient and meaningful – and to have been published now, it’s likely the events unfolding in the Middle East hadn’t yet begun (unless publishing processes have picked up speed). Just to help us all see the universality of the human condition and its many struggles for justice, against the enemies of truth.

Lucille Lang Day: Rebel, Poet, Scientist

Lucille Lang Day has been on my radar for quite some time, but today I actually discovered her. Not just her poetry, her 11 books of poetry (as I counted from her website), her many awards and her anthologies, books of prose and memoirs, like Married at Fourteen, not even the poem I had just read this morning which led me to all this from a link in my inbox, not even her scholarly science papers, her degrees, but more than all this it was the discovery of her, who inspired me to come back and post on this website again, after the death of my husband, and of others too, including my oldest brother, and then the losses not by death but estrangement that in some ways hurt the most. Lucy Day’s life story itself is so vibrant, and so unusual, something she embraces to the benefit of all of us. As if her story is telling me now it’s high time to embrace my own oddities, those histories it seems no one could possibly accept. And not just accept, but flaunt them, no holds barred. It is her delightful courage really that inspires.

So this poem kind of exemplifies what I love in her work, the impetuous storytelling, the sense that life is just bursting from the seams, and that we can’t just hold it all in, that it was meant, and so we can make it destined, to be shared.

Return to Acushnet
To my mother, Evelyn Lang

I finally see your life—
a page ripped from a book, 
its meaning, emotions, intent 
fragmentary and obscured.
I’ve found the town where you were born,
whose name you never told me,
and met the family you were torn from,
not as a baby
but as a child old enough to know
your mother was dead,
your father was letting you go.

I ran an ad to find descendants 
of your father’s sisters. 
One lived in a log cabin in Acushnet,
amid red maples, weeds, abandoned cars. 
Her crazy brother lived alone next door 
in the shingled farmhouse that belonged 
to your grandparents when they were young
and raising children, chickens, pigs, and cows.

The fireflies in Massachusetts winked and glowed
in the elms in early summer,
constellations of memories
appearing and disappearing amid the leaves,
your life itself like a leaf
cleaved too soon from the tree.

Out back, a tractor sat rusting in tall grass—
the carcass of an animal,
fossilized, extinct. The barn 
had fallen down the year before. The porch 
that used to wrap around the house
was gone. A notice in the window said 
“Condemned.” The once grand stairs inside
were carpeted with dust. Paint peeled 
from the walls; boxes, bags, and garbage 
filled the rooms. I went upstairs: 
I had to see it all. Pine floorboards 
were loose, cobwebs everywhere.

I closed my eyes and saw bright quilts 
where long ago your father’s sisters slept. 
When I came back down, 
Cousin Ken stared straight ahead
in the kitchen, trembling from his drugs.

Mother, eight years dead, 
your father, aunts and uncle, 
all long gone, are listed on the Internet. 
Imagine it! Ernestine, born first, 
watched the little ones: Valetta, 
Harriet, and Mabel, who quilted, sang, 
and put on plays; Rowland and your father,
Ebenezer, who liked to trick the girls. 
The night I visited the house 
where they were born, Grandpa Eb 
appeared in a dream, lithe 
and handsome, with his big mustache.

“Go back to California,” he said. 
“I’ll come visit you.” I think he wanted
to stand beside me, watching
a Western gull, its pink feet
skimming the crests of the Pacific,
hear Hutton’s vireo call
from the top of a California oak, wrap
his taut arms tight around us both
like a shipwrecked sailor clinging to the mast,
but I knew in the end he’d let go.

Remembering Extraordinary Poet Susan de Sola

It is hard for me to imagine that Susan de Sola (Rodstein) is no longer with us. She was always so vital, the very embodiment of creative energy coupled with a vibrant sense of humor. Although we only met virtually, I consider her a dear friend, who reached out to me because we both have five children, and whose kindness transcended borders and preconceptions. Both poet and critic, her recent book Frozen Charlotte (Able Muse Press, 2019) has met rave reviews, a book so expressive of her unique poetic voice. A winner of the Frost Farm Poetry Prize for her moving poem ”Buddy,” she also wrote a poem in the voice of a rock, indicative of her imaginative style. We had all thought this was the first of many books. A delight as both a poet and a generous, loving human being, I will always remember her, and wish her family well. From her book, these lovely poems:

Eve Sleeps

Each night we form a double C.
Hand rests on hip or curves to breast,
chest to back, his strong legs pressed
to make a chair of flesh for me.
Adjudications of the breath,
Adam’s apple near my head,
we’re stacked for storage in this bed
as sleep suspends us near a death.
Twins in the dark, we knit a seam
from toe to crown, a tensile wire.
Our eyes roll blind, they roll desire.
Locked in body, branched to dream,
we fall into this darker space.
Each cannot see the other’s face.

The Tulips

We bought them at a farmer’s field, so plump
and red—great goblets, plush concavities
which made of content an irrelevancy.
For days we took delight in their post-mortem
magic. What had this red exuberance
to do with death? They anchored down the table,
held center stage, just like an aria,
a swelling note we held against the odds.

But now they start to fall apart, and see,
they deconstruct so cleanly! Diving petals
reveal a pattern on the inner corner,
a three-point wedge of aubergine-black, capped
by arching yellow bands; a stylized print
of itself in little, vector to the ribbed red
flank, which had barely aged. The tiny tulip-
print anticipates its slide to symbol.
The sleekly flattened violet pistils spill
out scarcely any powder. Slim green stalks
with small white crowns stand bare. Abstract.
A Dutch-bobbed slouching flapper of a flower,
so modernist and sleek, a silhouette.
A flower a cartoonist might invent.

I sweep the petals up in great big bunches,
the dustbin blazing; it had never looked better.
But it’s become almost a game. The petals
fall at random—yet they seem to fall
in answer to our conversation, plunging
at key words, thumping downward during our
significant pauses, heard in silences.
Blowsy, lipsticked interlocutors;
drunken smacks, and dried-out goodbye kisses.

Poet Louise Glück Wins Nobel Prize

The extraordinary poet Louise Glück has won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Literature, a very well-deserved honor. The New York Times interviewed her here. The most stunning excerpt from that interview, very telling of the kind of transformative poet she is, is this statement about aging, which she describes as “a new experience” from the point of view of the artist as “an adventurer”:

“You find yourself losing a noun here and there, and your sentences develop these vast lacunae in the middle, and you either have to restructure the sentence or abandon it. But the point is, you see this, and it has never happened before. And though it’s grim and unpleasant and bodes ill, it’s still, from the point of view of the artist, exciting and new.“

Her incredibly prolific body of work is so impressive, it’s hard to choose just one poem, but here is one that was particularly meaningful to me.

The Empty Glass

BY Louise Glück

I asked for much; I received much.
I asked for much; I received little, I received
next to nothing.

And between? A few umbrellas opened indoors.
A pair of shoes by mistake on the kitchen table.

O wrong, wrong—it was my nature. I was
hard-hearted, remote. I was
selfish, rigid to the point of tyranny.

But I was always that person, even in early childhood.
Small, dark-haired, dreaded by the other children.
I never changed. Inside the glass, the abstract
tide of fortune turned
from high to low overnight.

Was it the sea? Responding, maybe,
to celestial force? To be safe,
I prayed. I tried to be a better person.
Soon it seemed to me that what began as terror
and matured into moral narcissism
might have become in fact
actual human growth. Maybe
this is what my friends meant, taking my hand,
telling me they understood
the abuse, the incredible shit I accepted,
implying (so I once thought) I was a little sick
to give so much for so little.
Whereas they meant I was good (clasping my hand intensely)—
a good friend and person, not a creature of pathos.

I was not pathetic! I was writ large,
like a queen or a saint.

Well, it all makes for interesting conjecture.
And it occurs to me that what is crucial is to believe
in effort, to believe some good will come of simply trying,
a good completely untainted by the corrupt initiating impulse
to persuade or seduce—

What are we without this?
Whirling in the dark universe,
alone, afraid, unable to influence fate—

What do we have really?
Sad tricks with ladders and shoes,
tricks with salt, impurely motivated recurring
attempts to build character.
What do we have to appease the great forces?

And I think in the end this was the question
that destroyed Agamemnon, there on the beach,
the Greek ships at the ready, the sea
invisible beyond the serene harbor, the future
lethal, unstable: he was a fool, thinking
it could be controlled. He should have said
I have nothing, I am at your mercy.

My Review of Talukder’s City of the Beloved Published

Poetry International has published my review of Adeeba Shahid Talukder’s Kundiman Prize-winning debut full-length poetry collection Shahr-e-Jaanaan: City of the Beloved (Tupelo Press, 2020), a truly gorgeous unforgettable book available at Tupelo Press and Barnes & Noble and elsewhere (including you-know-who – let’s try other places first).

Check out the review!

Remembering Marie Ponsot 1921-2019

Marie Ponsot, who died on July 5, 2019, at the age of 98, left a legacy of elegantly crafted, deeply meaningful and yet entirely unique poetry in five collections, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert Frost Medal, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement, among others. From the Washington Post article regarding her death,

Reflecting on Ms. Ponsot’s work, the poet and critic Susan Stewart once wrote: “What she has written of her relation to the night sky — ‘it becomes the infinite / air of imagination that stirs immense / among losses and leaves me less desolate’ — could be claimed by her readers as a description of her own work…

Married to the painter Claude Ponsot, she wrote her first poetry collection dedicated to him, and titled it True Minds, taken from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116. They had seven children, and when they divorced in 1970, she published her second book of poetry entitled Admit Impediment, also taken from the same sonnet: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ admit impediments.” This is the sort of imaginative wordplay one can find in her work, not without its subtle humor either.

She retreated from publishing for about 25 years, although she continuously wrote poetry. She said it just “didn’t occur” to her to publish. There’s also an element of deep humility in her life and voice, which also rings confidently and with both gusto and acumen.

This poem I found particularly gorgeous:

This Bridge, Like Poetry, Is Vertigo

       In a time of dearth bring forth number, weight, & measure.–    William Blake

Describing the wind that drives it, cloud
rides between earth and space. Cloud
shields earth from sun-scorch. Cloud
bursts to cure earth’s thirst.      Cloud
–airy, wet, photogenic–
is a bridge or go-between;
it does as it is done by.
It condenses. It evaporates.
It draws seas up, rains down.
I do love the drift of clouds.
Cloud-love is irresistible,
untypical, uninfinite.

Deep above the linear city this morning
the cloud’s soft bulk is almost unmoving.
The winds it rides are thin;
it makes them visible.
As sun hits it or if sun
quits us it’s blown away
or rains itself or snows itself away.

It is indefinite:
This dawns on me: no cloud is measurable.
Make mine cloud.
Make mind cloud.
The clarity of cloud is in its edgelessness,
its each instant of edge involving
in formal invention, always
at liberty, at it, incessantly altering.
A lucky watcher will catch it
as it makes big moves:
up the line of sight it lifts
until it conjugates or
          dissipates,
its unidentical being    intact
though it admits flyers.
It lets in wings. It lets them go.
It lets them.
It embraces mountains & spires built
to be steadfast; as it goes on
it lets go of them.
                It is not willing.
                 It is not unwilling.
Late at night when my outdoors is
indoors, I picture clouds again:
                  Come to mind, cloud.
                  Come to cloud, mind.

(Note the wordplay here, evident throughout her poetry.)

Writing poems by hand and putting down ideas on scraps of paper or napkins between changing diapers and all the labor-intensive work that goes with raising children, she is a very sympathetic character, a teacher, translator, essayist and critic. Her poetry shows formal dexterity, imagination, and a delightful spirit.

Here is a beautiful sample of her more formal poetry and her depth of understanding:

Among Women

What women wander?
Not many. All. A few.
Most would, now & then,
& no wonder.
Some, and I’m one,
Wander sitting still.
My small grandmother
Bought from every peddler
Less for the ribbons and lace
Than for their scent
Of sleep where you will,
Walk out when you want, choose
Your bread and your company.

She warned me, “Have nothing to lose.”

She looked fragile but had
High blood, runner’s ankles,
Could endure, endure.
She loved her rooted garden, her
Grand children, her once
Wild once young man.
Women wander
As best they can.

Astronomer-Poet Rebecca Elson Remembered at Brainpickings

Rare indeed is the scientist-poet, gifted in language and math/ scientific thinking at the same time, but this describes Rebecca Elson, featured in this post on the Brainpickings site, a gift from one-woman-curator Maria Popova. Elson’s stellar scientific career, for which she was a natural genius, was cut short by 9/11 funding crises and the scientific patriarchy which did not give women their due at the time. At that point she turned to poetry; and the result is amazing, a collection of poetry, essays, and other writings selected by those who knew her and published as A Responsibility to Awe in 2001. She died at the age of 39 in 1999.

Despite her untimely death, she returned to scientific inquiry and is remembered most for her scientific contributions (52 scientific research papers), although her poetry also remains popular and was highly praised even at its publication: The Economist named her book as one of the best of the year in 2001.

Since I myself wanted to be both a poet and astronomer at the age of 9, Elson’s work holds a particular fascination to me. And as I attempted to explain relativity in college by having people on my dorm floor act it out (or at least one dramatic aspect of it), at which point I had an epiphany about it, I was particularly drawn to this poem of hers from the book:

Explaining Relativity

Forget the clatter of ballistics,
The monologue of falling stones,
The sharp vectors,
And the stiff numbered grids.

It’s so much more a thing of pliancy, persuasion,
Where space might cup itself around a planet
Like your palm around a stone,

Where you, yourself the planet
Caught up in some geodesic dream,
Might wake to feel it enfold your weight
And know there is, in fact, no falling.

It is this, and the existence of limits.

Alicia Ostriker’s “The History of America” for 4th of July

On this 4th of July, aka Independence Day, we think — hopefully — about freedom, which should mean, on this of all holidays, freedom from oppression, tyranny, freedom of speech, religion, and the press, freedom which comes from the rule of law, which does NOT mean “law and order” or “police state,” as Trump would have it, but rather means NO ONE is above the law, certainly not the president or any of his cabinet, certainly not members of Congress or the judiciary, all of whom are public servants. With a president who has never acknowledged publicly that he too is subject to the law, who taunts the freedoms made part of the Constitution in the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights, promoting only the second amendment, which he thinks means everyone must be armed with assault weapons, or at least be able to exercise their “right” to wield such weapons. But then, the history of America has always had its overbearing side.

And no one has expressed this more eloquently than Alicia Ostriker in her breathtaking poem “The History of America.” If America has national treasures, Ms. Ostriker is certainly one of them, having written a lifetime of enduring poetry on the most vital subjects of our time.

The History of America

—for Paul Metcalf

A linear projection: a route. It crosses
The ocean in many ships. Arriving in the new
Land, it cuts through and down forests and it
Keeps moving. Terrain: Rock, weaponry.
Dark trees, mastery. Grass, to yield. Earth,
Reproachful. Fox, bear, coon, wildcat
Prowl gloomily, it kills them, it skins them,
Its language alters, no account varmint, its
Teeth set, nothing defeats its obsession, it becomes
A snake in the reedy river. Spits and prays,
Keeps moving. Behind it, a steel track. Cold,
Permanent. Not permanent. It will decay. This
Does not matter, it does not actually care,
Murdering the buffalo, driving the laggard regiments,
The caring was a necessary myth, an eagle like
A speck in heaven dives. The line believes
That the entire wrinkled mountain range is the
Eagle’s nest, and everything tumbles in place.
It buries its balls at Wounded Knee, it rushes
Gold, it gambles. It buys plastics. Another
Ocean stops it. Soon, soon, up by its roots,
Severed, irrecoverably torn, that does not matter,
It decides, perpendicular from here: escape.

A prior circle: a mouth. It is nowhere,
Everywhere, swollen, warm. Expanding and contracting
It absorbs and projects children, jungles,
Black shoes, pennies, blood. It speaks
Too many dark, suffering languages. Reaching a hand
Toward its throat, you disappear entirely. No
Wonder you fear this bleeding pulse, no wonder.

My Review of Neely’s Passing Through Blue Earth in WRR

The Whale Road Review has published my review of Cynthia Neely’s chapbook Passing Through Blue Earth. Please check it out, as well as the fine poetry and reviews in this truly excellent site. Well worth your time. Also here is a link to where you can buy a copy of Neely’s award-winning chapbook, selected by the fantastic and illustrious Kwame Dawes, one of my favorite poets too.

Arrested for a Poem: Dareen Tatour, Poet of Resistance

The long-standing question “Does Poetry Matter?” has found a resounding answer in the affirmative in the arrest, trial, and conviction — and its aftermath — of Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour for a poem, the writing and publication of which was determined by an Israeli court on May 3, 2018 to constitute an act of terror and “incitement to violence.” This is almost 3 years after her arrest in October of 2015, during which time she had been in various forms of detention, starting with prison and then house arrest under severe restrictions in an apartment far from her home town, and, after an outcry from PEN, Israeli writers and artists, and other people and international organizations, finally a judge allowed house arrest in her home town with the same previously imposed ban on internet usage and electronic monitoring that restricted her movements. All this for a poem, or actually a small group of poems. Yes, the world says, poetry matters.

As Ms. Tatour said, “My trial ripped off the masks. The whole world will hear my story. The whole world will hear what Israel’s democracy is. A democracy for Jews only. Only Arabs go to jail. The court said I am convicted of terrorism. If that’s my terrorism, I give the world a terrorism of love.”

Further, “I cannot live without poetry,” Tatour told Haaretz. “They want me to stop writing. For me to be a poet without a pen and without feelings.”

Her attorney, Gaby Lasky, decried the “criminalization of poetry” in which translation and interpretation played a large part, asserting “When the state tries people for poetry, that derogates from the cultural richness of all society.”

Perhaps the best witness would be Tatour’s poetry itself.

Detaining a Poem

One day,
they stopped me,
shackled me,
tied up my body, my soul,
my everything…

Then they said: search her,
we’ll find a terrorist within her!
They turned my heart inside out—
my eyes as well,
rummaged through even my feelings.
From my eyes they drew a pulse of inspiration;
from my heart, the ability to sketch out meanings.
Then they said: beware!
She’s hiding weapons deep in her pockets.
Search her!
Root out the explosives.
And so they searched me…

Finally, they said, accusing me:
We found nothing
in her pockets except letters.
We found nothing except for a poem.

(Translated from the Arabic by Andrew Lever)

*********

I Will Not Leave

By Dareen Tatour

(Translated by Jonathan Wright)

They signed on my behalf
And turned me into
A file, forgotten
Like cigarette butts.
Homesickness tore me apart
And in my own country I ended up
An immigrant.

I abandoned those pens
To weep over the sorrows
Of the inkwells.
They abandoned my cause and my dream
At the cemetery gates
And that person who’s waiting
Laments his luck
As life passes.

Besiege me,
Kill me, blow me up,
Assassinate me, imprison me.
When it comes to my country,
There’s no backing down.

*******

Perhaps the best witness would be the poem for which she was convicted:

Resist, My People, Resist Them

Resist, my people, resist them.

In Jerusalem, I dressed my wounds and breathed my sorrows

And carried the soul in my palm

For an Arab Palestine.

I will not succumb to the “peaceful solution,”

Never lower my flags

Until I evict them from my land.

I cast them aside for a coming time.

Resist, my people, resist them.

Resist the settler’s robbery

And follow the caravan of martyrs.

Shred the disgraceful constitution

Which imposed degradation and humiliation

And deterred us from restoring justice.

They burned blameless children;

As for Hadil, they sniped her in public,

Killed her in broad daylight.

Resist, my people, resist them.

Resist the colonialist’s onslaught.

Pay no mind to his agents among us

Who chain us with the peaceful illusion.

Do not fear doubtful tongues;

The truth in your heart is stronger,

As long as you resist in a land

That has lived through raids and victory.

So Ali called from his grave:

Resist, my rebellious people.

Write me as prose on the agarwood;

My remains have you as a response.

Resist, my people, resist them.

Resist, my people, resist them.