Mlle Hazelwood (Home)

structureandstyle:

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other’s bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the   come to the   God   come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health—just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

—Sharon Olds

I love the line breaks in this poem, and in particular the sixth line, which draws attention to the word “wet.” So good. So much delight here, in the erotic, in the poetic form. The repetition of “come to the” is pretty damn accurate, too, like the natural build-up of an orgasm. But I guess the best, most heartbreaking lines are the last three, because with all of that “come to the,” there is still the body, “alone in the universe/against its own best time.” How terrifying—or, how liberating. Sometimes I’m not sure which I feel. Sometimes I feel both at once.

Sharon Olds gets dismissed a lot because she’s “sensational” (much like Sylvia Plath), but dammit, she’s still extremely talented. You can find this poem in The Dead and the Living.

-R

structureandstyle:

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it—

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?—

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave at will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like a cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate every decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot—
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies,

These are my hands,
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

“A miracle!”
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart—
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge,
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—

A cake of soap.
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer,
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

—Sylvia Plath

I want to talk about this poem because it’s the anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s death in 1963. But I also want to talk about this poem because nearly 50 years after her death, Plath’s still the best at describing what it feels like to be watched oppressively. It’s all over the place, this imagery of being on display. There’s the circus: “The peanut-crunching crowd/Shoves in to see/Them unwrap me hand and foot—/The big strip tease./Gentlemen, ladies,/These are my hands,/My knees.” Even the Nazi imagery implies the idea of being watched. Have you ever seen footage or photos of concentration camps? The people contained in those camps—all of the people deemed “unfit” to live—were banded up and stripped of everything they owned. Including clothes. They had nowhere to hide, nothing to keep for themselves—including their own bodies. And they were watched. The speaker feels the same way, so she says she “rocked shut/As a seashell.” She says, “They had to call and call/And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.” What a terrible thing to endure.

And yet in the end, this is a confessional poem and the speaker is looking for a resurrection, a rebirth like Lady Lazarus. I sometimes wonder why the speaker (or why I) share so much if it always feels like we’re on display. “Gentlemen, ladies,/These are my hands,/My knees.” I think it’s because while yes, it feels awful to have someone see your failures (or your family’s failures), it’s even more awful to have nothing to share with anyone. Our lives don’t seem to have meaning if we don’t have someone to share the good with, too. My good news means nothing if I can’t tell my best friends, and my mother. So I take that good knowing that my loved ones and everyone else will also see my failures. I take that chance.

I’m sorry Sylvia Plath ran out of lives—because, let’s face it, it’s too hard to separate the poet from the speaker here. But I’m equally thankful for the brief burst of productivity that created Ariel (which this poem is from) right before her death. I’m glad not to be alone in this feeling.

-R

structureandstyle:

If your name suggests a country where bells
might have been used for entertainment

or to announce the entrances and exits of the seasons
or the birthdays of gods and demons,

it’s probably best to dress in plain clothes
when you arrive in the United States,
and try not to talk too loud.

If you happen to have watched armed men
beat and drag your father
out the front door of your house
and into the back of an idling truck

before your mother jerked you from the threshold
and buried your face in her skirt folds,
try not to judge your mother too harshly.

Don’t ask her what she thought she was doing
turning a child’s eyes
away from history
and toward that place all human aching starts.

And if you meet someone
in your adopted country,
and think you see in the other’s face
an open sky, some promise of a new beginning,
it probably means you’re standing too far.

**

Or if you think you read in the other, as in a book
whose first and last pages are missing,
the story of your own birthplace,
a country twice erased,
once by fire, once by forgetfulness,
it probably means you’re standing too close.

In any case, try not to let another carry
the burden of your own nostalgia or hope.

And if you’re one of those
whose left side of the face doesn’t match
the right, it might be a clue

looking the other way was a habit
your predecessors found useful for survival.
Don’t lament not being beautiful.

Get used to seeing while not seeing.
Get busy remembering while forgetting.
Dying to live while not wanting to go on.

Very likely, your ancestors decorated
their bells of every shape and size
with elaborate calendars
and diagrams of distant star systems,
but with no maps for scattered descendants.

**

And I bet you can’t say what language
your father spoke when he shouted to your mother
from the back of the truck, “Let the boy see!”

Maybe it wasn’t the language you used at home.
Maybe it was a forbidden language.
Or maybe there was too much screaming
and weeping and the noise of guns in the streets.

It doesn’t matter. What matters is this:
The kingdom of heaven is good.
But heaven on earth is better.

Thinking is good.
But living is better.

Alone in your favorite chair
with a book you enjoy
is fine. But spooning
is even better.

—Li-Young Lee

I’ve liked this poem for a while now, realizing that while I’m not a literal refugee, I sometimes feel like a figurative refugee in my life—someone battered, hurt, and always on the run. But I guess that’s all of us. I love the line “Don’t lament not being beautiful” and the next stanza, which continues the thought. But I love most the last stanza: “Alone in your favorite chair/with a book you enjoy/is fine. But spooning/is even better.” It’s sort of the embodiment of this poem, isn’t it?

This poem is from the collection Behind My Eyes. Read more, if you have time.

-R

structureandstyle:

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast,
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it—it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-minded to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less—
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

—Robert Frost

I loved Robert Frost in middle school, never realizing how “lovely, dark and deep” his poems were. There’s a real menacing air, a loneliness and solitude and solipsism in his poems that my middle school brain refused to process. The darkness I see as an adult seems more refreshing, more real.

This poem reminds me a lot of section 50 of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” because of how often Frost refers to “it.” Poets are not typically imprecise with their language, using “it” and “they” without purpose. In section 50 of Whitman’s poem, the “it” seems to be the thing itself he cannot name (“There is that in me—I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me”), and Frost seems to be using “it” similarly. Whatever “it” is—the woods have it, and the speaker of this poem does not. And that’s pretty damn lonely.

Isn’t it interesting, too, that the desert and the snow are completely opposite climates, and yet the speaker finds them both lonely? We see what we see; we bring our own world views to everything we touch.

-R

structureandstyle:

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size.
But when I start to tell them,
They think I’m telling lies.
I say,
It’s in the reach of my arms,
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

I walk into a room Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
They swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It’s the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can’t touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them
They say they still can’t see.
I say,
It’s in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Now you understand
Just why my head’s not bowed.
I don’t shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It’s in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need for my care.
‘Cause I’m a woman
Phenomenally
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

—Maya Angelou

I teach college in rural Georgia, not far from a town where the high school still segregates its prom and homecoming. I teach college at a public liberal arts college that often struggles to assert the “liberal arts” in students’ beliefs. I’m supposed to teach them to think, if possible. To analyze. To look for patterns. To read new things. And yet I realized right after I was done making up my syllabus for this semester that I had not included many poets of color. My dear friend and co-contributor to this blog, Savannah, gave me a huge list of poets of color, including Yusef Komunyakaa, Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn Brooks, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Audre Lorde, and many others. But classes were starting in a day, and I didn’t change my syllabus.

I think about how much I believe in the ability of literature to make us understand and empathize with others. I think that maybe we could, all of us, use all of the empathy for one another that we can get—people of different races included. I think that maybe I failed my students in not including more poets of color. And so I can only resolve to do better, to read more widely, for the next time I teach literature—if there is a next time.

This poem is amazing—phenomenal, really, because I think it does what a lot of creative nonfiction does: it tries to answer a question in the writing of it. The speaker of the poem says, repeatedly, that she’s a phenomenal woman, “That’s me.” Perhaps she’s trying to convince herself, just as many of us are, that she’s phenomenal and wonderful, worthy of the attention she’s getting. Perhaps she’s trying to figure out why. And perhaps the way she’s doing that is listing her phenomenal attributes, in much the same way my therapist used to have me list the things I liked about myself. I like that these things include “The span of my hips” and “The swing in my waist”—all of the things that make the speaker, a woman, who she is. Oftentimes, I find that learning to appreciate my body makes me appreciate the rest of me more. Maybe it’s the same for the speaker. Whether my interpretation is right or not, I appreciate this poem so, so much.

-R

structureandstyle:

To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
     dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
     Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
     As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
     Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
     Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

     No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
     Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins

I woke up this morning with the first two lines of this poem in my head—“I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-/dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding”—and I almost made it to the end of the second line from memory. I love this poem. I love the sounds, the almost-excessive alliteration and rhyme (end and internal), and the way Gerard Manley Hopkins imposed his “sprung rhythm” on the line. (“Sprung rhythm” is hard to explain, but I know he was actively messing with the meter a couple of decades before Eliot and Pound. I always look to the irregularity of “dapple-dawn-drawn”—and its beauty—for an example of rhythm that’s been “sprung” from staid regularity.)

Most of the time I have to tease out the “meaning” again (hint: look at the epigraph)—and Hopkins did us no favors with this task by inventing words like “sillion”—but a lot of times I read this poem just for the sound of it. I know we all want meaning in our lives and we look for it everywhere. But isn’t it nice to just appreciate beautiful sounds, especially in the morning? Read this poem aloud. Or, if you don’t think you can do it justice, the Poetry Foundation has a very cheesy recording of it that will probably do the trick.

Good morning to all. My own work can begin now.

-R

structureandstyle:

The June breeze will tell you:
the middle of things is where the juices are;
where the years bulge best with desire
though nothing worth desire can be defined—
I have known this so long and wanted to tell you.

You are the servant of something about to happen.
You were never meant to be young—a dreadful mistake
on the verge of correction.

I am only your carpet, your coat, a soft pillow,
a good place to file—those things you miss only
in their absence, like teeth, like water.

When your heart has that afternoon hurt,
breathe deeply the comfort from those you have harmed.
We have all failed in all things that matter
and excuse ourselves even better than gods.

Think of clean nights under the stars,
the way light startles the water,
other beds and hair dark on the pillow,
of what I am like with another
his hand massaging my heart,
how dangerous I am loving you better
and rocks rinsed by waves
on shores where cranes wade at dawn.

—Mary Ellen Miller

This poem is from Mary Ellen Miller’s collection The Poet’s Wife Speaks. She is the wife of the late Jim Wayne Miller, an incredible poet. She is also one of my former professors and will always be one of my mentors. I always loved to write, but her words of encouragement are what pushed me to be serious about myself and my writing.

I think what I love best about this particular poem is how the line works as a unit. There are some fantastic lines in this poem: “the middle of things is where the juices are,” “You were never meant to be young—a dreadful mistake,” “a good place to file, those things you miss only,” “breathe deeply the comfort from those you have harmed,” and “how dangerous I am loving you better.” Those all work as a single line and pack such a punch, but them when you read them in context, with the stanza and poem as a whole, it’s like a double-whammy. I love it!

And I love the imagery in this poem, the years bulging with desire, the carpet, the clean nights, and the cranes, these are all hooks that draw me into the poem and make me feel the words. I think that’s part of why I love MEM’s collection so much: like her gentle prodding, her poems also ground me and bring me home to writing.

-S

I, too, would not have had the confidence to write were it not for Mary Ellen Miller. I wonder how many hundreds or thousands of students have written better and had more faith in themselves as writers because of MEM.

structureandstyle:

Thinking we were safe — insanity!
We went in to make love. All the same
Idiots to trust the little hotel bedroom.
Then in the gloom…
…And who does not know that pair of shutters
With the awkward hook on them
All screeching whispers? Very well then, in the gloom
We set about acquiring one another
Urgently! But on a temporary basis
Only as guests — just guests of one another’s senses.

But idiots to feel so safe you hold back nothing
Because the bed of cold, electric linen
Happens to be illicit….
To make love as well as that is ruinous.
Londoner, Parisian, someone should have warned us
That without permanent intentions
You have absolutely no protection
— If the act is clean, authentic, sumptuous,
The concurring deep love of the heart
Follows the naked work, profoundly moved by it.

—Rosemary Tonks

This poem seems so ordinary, so in touch with everyday language. And yet it’s definitely a poem and would be so identifiable even if it were a prose poem. Mary Oliver remarks in A Poetry Handbook, “Every poem contains within itself an essential difference from ordinary language, no matter how similar to conversational language it may seem at first to be. Call it formality, compression, originality, imagination—whatever it is, it is essential…the space between daily language and literature is neither terribly deep nor wide, but it does contain a vital difference—of intent and intensity.” Another creative writing handbook calls this “density.” Whatever it is, I’m haunted by the “conversational” language of this poem and its subject matter.

“To make love as well as that is ruinous.” Such a simple, true line in such a simple, thoughtful poem.

-R

structureandstyle:

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

—Wallace Stevens

For a long time, I enjoyed this poem as if I were the only one who knew it, as if “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” belonged to me alone, as if I had locked it away in a drawer and no one could find it. The poem seemed that personal. But eventually I realized that most poems are supposed to feel intimate, personal, to those who read them, and they are supposed to be shared. I hope you have a poem that you love the most, and I hope you share it with someone.

-R

structureandstyle:

Be strong Bernadette
Nobody will ever know
I came here for a reason
Perhaps there is a life here
Of not being afraid of your own heart beating
Do not be afraid of your own heart beating
Look at very small things with your eyes
& stay warm
Nothing outside can cure you but everything’s outside
There is great shame for the world in knowing
You may have gone this far
Perhaps this is why you love the presence of other people so much
Perhaps this is why you wait so impatiently
You have nothing more to teach
Until there is no more panic at the knowledge of your own real existence
& then only special childish laughter to be shown
& no more lies no more
Not to find you no
More coming back & more returning
Southern journey
Small things & not my own debris
Something to fight against
& we are all very fluent about ourselves
Our own ideas of food, a Wild sauce
There’s not much point in its being over: but we do not speak them:
I had written: “the man who sewed his soles back on his feet”
And then I panicked most at the sound of what the wind could do
               to me
       if I crawled back to the house, two feet give no position, if
       the branches cracked over my head & their threatening me, if I
       covered my face with beer & sweated till you returned
If I suffered what else could I do

—Bernadette Mayer

A friend with amazing taste in poetry (e.g. Catie Rosemurgy’s The Stranger Manual) posted this on facebook five days ago. At least four or five reads later, Bernadette Mayer’s words sank in. As I tell my students, if you have trouble understanding poetry, read it aloud and read it again.

Aren’t we all just in Antartica? Aren’t we all just lonely and isolated? But, “Perhaps there is a life here/Of not being afraid of your own heart beating/Do not be afraid of your own heart beating.”

Thanks to the Poetry Foundation for everything they do, including publishing “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” first in Poetry magazine—and keeping this poem on their site.

-R