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A Fond Farewell It’s hard to say good-bye to someone who enlivened his surroundings with insight and wit. Jules Spector, who died recently, was such a person. I knew Jules through a series of poetry classes we shared. His poems were unfailingly strong, spare, and shrewd yet loving. “I entered into his world every time he read one of his pieces to us,” said one classmate. Another added, “Jules' poems always took us into a life rich with family characters, acting in wildly too-human ways.” We will miss his voice in our classes, but thankfully he left us a splendid collection of poems, We Live in Hopes published by Opus, an arm of Washington’s Politics and Prose Bookstore. Thank you, Jules, for your wry and sensitive poetry.
Starstruck
In the darkened theater, the tall
actor with his Yiddish tongue
beguiled my mother. During my
stark childhood days, her fantasy
of him, this star of stars
brought before me a glimmer of
what might exist beyond my loneliness.
On Sunday afternoons she took me
with her to the playhouse on Walnut Street
to see an unlikely miracle, Yiddish
drama presented by actors, rags
upon their bodies, passion in their
eyes, swords in their scabbards.
Above all, my mother loved this
prince of actors, Maurice Schwartz.
His dark good looks, his widow’s
peak, his stride across the stage.
He commanded it all, surmounted
obstacles, averted disaster.
I saw him in her eyes when she looked
at me, when she smiled.
What did she think that day, arriving
early, finding him there in the small
box office. Where were the dark eyelashes?
The eyebrows, the high-colored cheeks?
The man before her, dull gray
not a shining beam of light in God’s universe.
He glance up, saw our sadness, turned away.
We sat through the play. Suffered
with the sufferers on stage. Surely
my mother felt disillusioned, but I
could not agree. In that dark space
light and life remained.
Illusion and imagination.
A dream of dreamers.
An opening in my mind.
Trouble is, we’re often taught to approach a poem by analyzing metaphor, understanding allusion, and probing for deeper meaning. Instead, Zapruder advises, start with the words themselves. “One of the greatest pleasures of reading poetry is to feel words mean what they usually do in everyday life, and also start to move into a more charged, activated realm,” he writes.
“Somewhere, in every poem, there are words that shine forth, light up, almost as if plugged in,” says r. “This is what poetry can do for language, and for us.”
Read Zapruder’s “Critic’s Take” here. .................................................................................................................................... Root, Trunk, Bark, Bough I used to climb them, but that was long ago. Now I write about them, and sometimes I’m lucky enough to have my tree poems published. One of them, “Paperbark Maple,” is in a beautiful new book called These Trees. Photographer Ruthie Rosauer has gathered more than 130 of her photographs and paired them with poems. The collection, handsomely designed and printed, would make a great gift for anyone who loves trees.
Paperbark Maple
Wind animates the three-lobed leaves
curled to cup the summer air
A folio of bark peels off in shaggy sheets
scribbled with imagined verses
These paperbarks are artist trees
self-portraits en plein air
They tell their stories leaf
by silent leaf
for us to read their changes
Fall brings a fiery palette, then winter
twigs write letters on the sky
In spring winged double seeds hang-
glide on wind in artful acrobatics
Where they take hold another year
will bring its own new poetry
“Take the time to visit the individual sites of lit mags that you are interested in,” says Becky Tuch, founding editor of The Review Review, a useful newsletter of views on publishing. “Read their guidelines,” she continues. “For some reason, people often consider themselves exempt from rules. You're not. You must play by the rules like everyone else. It doesn't make you boring. It makes your writing accessible.”
This is just one of Tuch’s tips for getting published in literary journals. Read seven more in From Pen to Print. My favorite? “Approach your writing with fierce determination.” ....................................................................................................................................
Renga Round the Rosie
A couple of months ago, I
included a haiku I wrote for a class studying
Buddhist influences in the work of
Jane Hirshfield and
Billy Collins. At the close of the class, we
ventured beyond haiku to renga, a genre of
Japanese collaborative poetry. Poets work in
pairs or small groups, taking turns to compose
alternating three-line and two-line stanzas. The
first stanza, called the hokku, became the basis
for the haiku, with its 5, 7, 5 syllables; the
second stanza consists of two lines of 7
syllables each. Together, the two stanzas
constitute a tanka.
Traditionally, I understand, the work of
composing was amply fortified with sake, and the
resulting renga could be hundreds of lines long.
We had to do without the sake in class, but we
soldiered on, paired off and writing from
prompts. My partner, Rachel Gur-Arie, and I
collaborated on four rengas. For example, given
the prompt “heartsick in November,” I wrote the
haiku and Rachel wrote the second stanza:
Now the year winds down />
but you are never here.
Heartsick in the fall.
Winter comes. Can spring be far?
Oh yes it can, I know it.
From the prompt “leaving home,” Rachel wrote the haiku and I wrote the rest:
The boat left the shore.
Far home on the horizon
is getting smaller.
Good bye my childhood dreaming.
The future comes into view.
My summer goal is to write a haiku a day (or, more realistically, every few days).
....................................................................................................................................Letter from Mexico
Life in the village of Ajijic, Mexico, is more tranquil and less costly than in the U.S., says poet Mel Goldberg, who settled south of the border after a life of teaching and writing in this country and England. (Mel, you might recall, wrote the moving poem “The Chocolate Cake,” which appeared in Joys of the Table, our anthology of culinary verse.) He recently sent this poem, which suggests his tranquil life is punctuated by excitement:
Climbing Mt. Lassen
In Northern California
Mt. Lassen rises ready to explode
like a sleeping giant
angry and waiting his time.
His shoulders are snowcapped,
but his muscled trails
dared me to climb
in a buzz like pulsing electricity
as I rested at night in my tent.
Unprepared, I accepted his challenge,
listened to the scream of broken stones
and held my breath in the cold,
keeping my fear deep within me
afraid if I faltered
they would crush me.
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Beyond 140 Characters Writing recently in the Los Angeles Times, Lori Anne Ferrell took advantage of National Poetry Month to make a brief but powerful argument for poetry. “This most verbally obsessed of art forms never uses two words where one can do,” she wrote, “and never lets that one word mean just one thing.”A humanities professor at Claremont Graduate University, Ferrell directs two poetry awards for the university. The awards, she said, “give us the chance to recognize poetry at a time when language is being applied roughly and recklessly in public forums across media and the nation, when complicated arguments and crude insults have been reduced to 140-character parodies of the elegant concision and keen insights poetry is known for.”
Her advice: say so long to Twitter and send someone a poem instead. Maybe it will spark a deeper conversation.
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National Poetry
Month |
Isn’t it encouraging to see poetry showcased everywhere? (For 30 of the year’s 365 days, at any rate.) And isn’t it inspiring and energizing to take on one of the many poem-a-day challenges available this month?
Well, if you have taken up a daily challenge, I hope you’re doing better at it than I am. Eliot famously said, “April is the cruelest month,” but I think it’s more intimidating than cruel. This is a bad time to be in a poetic slump, a bad time to have epic hopes with only doggerel results. It’s a bad time to rack up rejections and see your most recent acceptances recede on the calendar.
Oh, I’m writing, but nothing to be proud of. How do you handle the poetic doldrums? Reading the poetry of others helps, but for me it tends to spur me into something that soon fizzles. I won’t bore you with examples.
Let me know how you’re doing, this month of months.
.................................................................................................................................... Words You Should Know Celebrated American poet Edward Hirsch knows a thing or two about writing poetry. With nine books of poems to his credit, he’s also written The Essential Poet’s Glossary, an excerpt of which appeared earlier this month in Literary Hub, my favorite email newsletter.
From Aubade to Epigram to Lyric, Hirsch provides thoughtful commentary and examples on many of the words and concepts important to poets. The one I keep returning to is his explanation of Inspiration. “In-breathing, indwelling. Inspiration is connected to enthusiasm, which derives from the Greek word enthousiasmos, or ‘inspiration,’ which in turn derives from enthousiazein, which means ‘to be inspired by a god,’” he begins, then goes on to discuss two views of the source of inspiration: “that it comes as a force from beyond the poet” and “that it comes as a power from within the poet.”
Whatever the source, it’s what the poet does with inspiration that counts. Hirsch ends his discussion by quoting Paul Valery: “A poet’s function—do not be startled by this remark—is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others.”
You can read the entire excerpt here.
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Time to Step Up
Like many writers, I live
inside my head, talking to my various selves, hoping
a few others might hear. But these days, it’s time
to step outside ourselves and step up for our imperfect
democracy. Protests are blossoming not just in the
streets, but also in literary journals as poetry
regains its old role of social criticism. Such an Ugly
Time
That’s what
Rat's Ass Review,
one of my favorite online journals, is calling its
special theme section on the first 100 days of the
Trump administration. I’m honored that RAR editor
Roderick Bates chose to include three of my poems:
Muslim Wife, Words for Dark Times, and Dark Feelings.
You can read them
here.
Meanwhile … Finch flies from the wire
How do you feel about haiku
and its cousins tanka, haibun, and renga? Are they
appropriate forms for English-language poets? Send
me your ideas. What Are
You Writing? Why should we get all the bylines?
Submit your latest poem—just one for now—and we’ll
publish the poems we like best in an upcoming blog
post. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please
let us know if the poem is accepted or published
elsewhere. Send your poem, plus a few lines about
yourself, in the body of an e-mail message to:
How many wars, revolutions, and repressions must
we witness, how many despairing refugees must we
turn away, while we sit safe in our shining city
on a hill, girded with oceans, lulled by a national
dream as evanescent as any dream and as impermanent.
It’s time to step up for Freedom, Justice, and Equality.
And for small-d decency, hand to hand, soul to soul,
me to you.
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....................................................................................................................................
For a poetry class on Buddhist
influences in
Jane Hirshfield
and, improbably,
Billy Collins,
I experimented a bit with haiku. The form is more
spare and controlled than I’m used to, but I’m intrigued.
Here’s what I came up with first:
idea of bird remaining
I imagine spring
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poetryeditor@RicherResourcesPublications.com
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Sally Zakariya, Poetry Editor
Richer Resources Publications
Charan Sue Wollard
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Kevin Taylor
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