New Poet Laureate of Colorado

David Mason (born 1954) of Colorado Springs, Colo., will become the seventh poet laureate of Colorado. He will be appointed to the post at the State Capitol in Denver on July 1.

Mason is a professor at Colorado College and co-directs the Creative Writing program. He has published six books including News from the Village by Red Hen Press in 2010; Ludlow by Red Hen Press in 2010; Arrivals by Story Line Press in 2004; The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry by Story Line Press in 2000; The Country I Remember by Story Line Press in 1996; and The Buried Houses by Story Line Press in 1991.

Colorado was the second state in the nation to appoint a poet laureate. Alice Polk Hill was appointed in 1919 and served until she died in 1921. Nellie Burget Miller served 1923-1952; Margaret Clyde Robertson served 1952-1954; Milford E. Shields served 1954-1975; and Thomas Hornsby Ferril served 1979-1988. Mary Crow has served 14 years, from 1996-2010.

Fathers and Sons

Some things, they say,
one should not write about. I tried
to help my father comprehend
the toilet, how one needs
to undo one’s belt, to slide
one’s trousers down and sit,
but he stubbornly stood
and would not bend his knees.
I tried again
to bend him toward the seat,

and then I laughed
at the absurdity. Fathers and sons.
How he had wiped my bottom
half a century ago, and how
I would repay the favor
if he would only sit.

Don’t you–
he gripped me, trembling, searching for my eyes.
Don’t you–but the word
was lost to him. Somewhere
a man of dignity would not be laughed at.
He could not see
it was the crazy dance
that made me laugh,
trying to make him sit
when he wanted to stand.
………………………………
David Mason

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Poem of the day, June 28 2010

Mowing

There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound—
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

…………………………….

by Robert Frost (1874-1963)

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Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 1996

Jorie Graham won the Pulitzer in 1996 for her book The Dream of the Unified Field. The following is an excerpt about Graham from the book Women Poets on Mentorship Efforts and Affections, edited by Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker and published in 2008:

Katie Ford on Jorie Graham

One of my teachers, Jorie Graham, told us all — her first students at Harvard after leaving the Iowa Writers’ Workshop — that writing poems would help us go through something we might otherwise choose to go around. To go through something, however, is not what the mind wants to do. And so the decision to write poems is the decision, she taught us, to live inside one’s difficulties, to inhabit them, to trespass against the solitudes they wish to keep.

When I first took her poetry course at Harvard, I was a stray from Harvard Divinity School, where I was enrolled in a master’s program in theology among Buddhist nuns, protestants, agnostics, Jewish Unitarians, questioners, academics, Catholic contemplatives, and many others. . . .

When I began seriously writing poetry, in the fall of 1999, I couldn’t abandon my theology courses altogether — but I began to see all of my studies as serving my poetry. . . . At that time, I was reading Julian of Norwich, a medieval mystic who lived in a small brick cell attached to St. Julian’s Church in England in the era of Chaucer. Julian was a recluse, but she was expected to speak to visitors who sought her out. Her cell didn’t have any windows, so she spoke through a slight gap in the bricks — maybe two or three were missing— having to pitch her voice up and out without even seeing her visitor’s eyes. What moved me about Julian’s story wasn’t her revelations or visions but the structure of her cell: The walls of the cell. The bricks of the wall. The gap in the bricks. The stark fact that there was only one way her voice could get out, a slight gap in the bricks to speak through — an image, for me, of what it is to speak as a poet.

Because it is slight, the space that allows only the most exacting words through. This was the narrow way I wanted: I wanted to find the language that would speak accurately, compellingly, lastingly. Jorie taught us how to move through that eye of the needle, how to pitch our subject matter through that gap, that way, with no knowledge of who, if anyone, is on the other side.

History

by Jorie Graham (born 1950)

Into whose ear the deeds are spoken. The only

listener. So I believed

he would remember everything, the murmuring trees,

the sunshine’s zealotry, its deep

unevenness. For history

is the opposite

of the eye

for whom, for instance, six million bodies in portions

of hundreds and

the flowerpots broken by a sudden wind stand as

equivalent. What more

is there

than fact? I’ll give ten thousand dollars to the man

who proves the holocaust really

occurred said the exhausted solitude

in San Francisco

in 1980. Far in the woods

in a faded photograph

in 1942 the man with his own

genitalia in his mouth and hundreds of

slow holes

a pitchfork has opened

over his face

grows beautiful. The ferns and deepwood

lilies catch

the eye. Three men in ragged uniforms

with guns keep laughing

nervously. They share the day

with him. A bluebird

sings. The feathers of the shade touch every inch

of skin — the hand holding down the delicate gun,

the hands holding down the delicate

hips. And the sky

is visible between the men, between

the trees, a blue spirit

enveloping

anything. Late in the story, in northern Italy,

a man cuts down some trees for winter

fuel. We read this in the evening

news. Watching the fire burn late

one night, watching it change and change, a hand grenade,

lodged in the pulp the young tree

grew around, explodes, blinding the man, killing

his wife. Now who

will tell the children

fairytales? The ones where simple

crumbs over the forest

floor endure

to help us home?

…………………………………………………………..
Other Pulitzer finalist in1996 were Charles Wright for his book Chickamauga and Donald Justice for his book of New and Selected Poems.

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Poem of the day, June 15 2010

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Poem of the day, June 14 2010

The Legend

In memory of Jay Kashiwamura

In Chicago, it is snowing softly
and a man has just done his wash for the week.
He steps into the twilight of early evening,
carrying a wrinkled shopping bag
full of neatly folded clothes,
and, for a moment, enjoys
the feel of warm laundry and crinkled paper,
flannellike against his gloveless hands.
There’s a Rembrandt glow on his face,
a triangle of orange in the hollow of his cheek
as a last flash of sunset
blazes the storefronts and lit windows of the street.

He is Asian, Thai or Vietnamese,
and very skinny, dressed as one of the poor
in rumpled suit pants and a plaid mackinaw,
dingy and too large.
He negotiates the slick of ice
on the sidewalk by his car,
opens the Fairlane’s back door,
leans to place the laundry in,
and turns, for an instant,
toward the flurry of footsteps
and cries of pedestrians
as a boy — that’s all he was —
backs from the corner package store
shooting a pistol, firing it,
once, at the dumbfounded man
who falls forward,
grabbing at his chest.

A few sounds escape from his mouth,
a babbling no one understands
as people surround him
bewildered at his speech.
The noises he makes are nothing to them.
The boy has gone, lost
in the light array of foot traffic
dappling the snow with fresh prints.

Tonight, I read about Descartes’
grand courage to doubt everything
except his own miraculous existence
and I feel so distinct
from the wounded man lying on the concrete
I am ashamed

Let the night sky cover him as he dies.
Let the weaver girl cross the bridge of heaven
and take up his cold hands.
……………………………………
by Garrett Hongo (born 1951)

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Poem of the day, June 12 2010

White Night

A far-off time arises in my memory,
The house in Petersburg Quarters,
A humble daughter of the modest gentry,
Born in Kursk, you’re here taking courses.

You are cute, — you have many admirers.
This white night, it is only us two,
Sprawling out on your windowsill, tireless,
From your skyscraper, observing the view.

Streetlamps, like gaseous butterflies,
Trembled from morning’s first chills
And the words I whispered in quiet sighs
Resembled slumbering hills.

By some chance, we were caught here together,
By one mystery, in timid fidelity,
As the landscape beyond the Neva, —
Lands of Petersburg stretching unendingly.

In those distant, impregnable thickets,
On this vernal and pale white night,
The nightingales’ thunderous singing
Awoke all the woodlands in sight.

A frenzied chirping of pure emotion
From a little, soaring songster
Evoked both, passion and commotion,
From the depths of mesmerized forests.

The night, like a barefooted wanderer,
Moved there slowly in a leisurely walk
And behind it, from the windowsill, rambling,
Ran the trail of an overheard talk.

Within an earshot of our conversations,
In fenced enclosures of the garden,
The apple and the berry trees, with patience,
Put on the sunlight’s glowing garments.

And trees, like phantoms, seeming white,
By the roadside, stood in a line,
To pay their dues to the receding white night
That has witnessed so much in its time.
…………………………………………
by Boris Pasternak (1890-1960)
translated by Andrey Kneller

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Poem of the day, June 11 2010

Adjectives of Order

That summer, she had a student who was obsessed
with the order of adjectives. A soldier in the South
Vietnamese army, he had been taken prisoner when

Saigon fell. He wanted to know why the order
could not be altered. The sweltering city streets shook
with rockets and helicopters. The city sweltering

streets. On the dusty brown field of the chalkboard,
she wrote: The mother took warm homemade bread
from the oven. City is essential to streets as homemade

is essential to bread. He copied this down, but
he wanted to know if his brothers were lost before
older, if he worked security at a twenty-story modern

downtown bank or downtown twenty-story modern.
When he first arrived, he did not know enough English
to order a sandwich. He asked her to explain each part

of Lovely big rectangular old red English Catholic
leather Bible. Evaluation before size. Age before color.
Nationality before religion. Time before length. Adding

and, one could determine if two adjectives were equal.
After Saigon fell, he had survived nine long years
of torture. Nine and long. He knew no other way to say this.
………………………………………….
by Alexandra Teague

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Poem of the day, June 10 2010

Just Now

In the morning as the storm begins to blow away
the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me
that there has been something simpler than I could ever believe
simpler that I could have begun to find words for
not patient not even waiting no more hidden
than the air itself that became part of me for a while
with every breath and remained with me unnoticed
something that was here unnamed unknown in the days
and the nights not separate from them
not separate from them as they came and were gone
it must have been here neither early nor late then
by what name can I address it now holding out my thanks
………………………………………………
W.S. Merwin (born 1927)

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Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 1995

Philip Levine (born 1928) won the Pulitzer for his book "The Simple Truth"

The following excerpt is from the essay Where the Angels Come Toward Us by David St. John in his book of Selected Essays, Reviews and Interviews, published in 1995:

One of the valid conventional wisdoms about Philip Levine is that he is one of the few urban — as opposed to suburban — poets. He is, certainly, our most gripping poet of the city. Perhaps this is because he sees the used and abused city, the working city, not the city of galleries, museums and restaurants. He sees and records the workings of the ravaged and exhausted city; he witnesses the blood and courage of those who live and work within it.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Levine’s poetry is the place that anger is granted in his work. One of the few sources of power left to many of his speakers is to touch their own frustration and rage, and it is that current that electrifies their presence in these poems. The daily injustices that build into a larger sense of outrage accrue in Levine’s poems much as they do in his speakers’ lives — slowly and inexorably. It is an especially clarifying anger that we find at work throughout Levine’s poetry, an anger that grants us the perspective of the real, and not a literary, world. It is an anger that we experience as a relief, the same relief we feel when the lens of a movie projector finally comes into focus; it is the clarity of truth that provides our sense of relief. No other American poet so clearly acknowledges the place and necessity of anger — in our lives and in our country — and it gives Levine’s poetry an energy and an unkempt integrity that is unique.

In Levine’s search for an authentic American voice, we can see the influence of daily speech, as well as the echo of black speech. It’s not simply Levine’s empathy with the oppressed and victimized that gives rise to a poem like They Feed They Lion. It is also his desire to unleash the full power that he sees latent in American speech, in all of America’s voices. We can hear it crashing forward in this poem, along with echoes of Whitman, Yeats and Christopher Smart:

They Feed They Lion

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.

Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones’ need to sharpen and the muscles’ to stretch,
They Lion grow.

One facet of Levine’s special genius is that those “literary” influences are always an internal fuel for his poems, never an exterior decoration. They Feed They Lion concludes with:

From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From “Bow Down” come “Rise Up,”
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
The grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.

From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.

Just as Philip Levine chooses to give voice to those who have no power to do so themselves, he likewise looks in his poems for the chance to give voice to the natural world, taking — like Francis Ponge — the side of things, the side of nature and its elements. And Levine is in many ways an old-fashioned troubadour, a singer of tales of love and heroism. Though it comes colored by the music of his world, what Levine has to offer is as elemental as breath. It is the simple insistence of breath, of the will to live — and the force of all living things in nature — that Levine exalts again and again.

Here is the poem in its entirety:

They Feed They Lion

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.

Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones’ need to sharpen and the muscles’ to stretch,
They Lion grow.

Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
“Come home, Come home!” From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion grow.

From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From “Bow Down” come “Rise Up,”
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
The grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.

From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.
……………………………………………………………..
Other Pulitzer finalists in 1995 were Allen Ginsberg for his book Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986-1992 and Kenneth Koch for his book On The Great Atlantic Rainway: Selected Poems 1950-1988 and One Train.

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Nobel Laureate in Literature 1971

Pablo Neruda (Chile, 1904-1973)

The People

Just as I’ve always thought of myself as a carpenter-poet. I think of Rafita as the poet of carpentry. He brings his tools wrapped in a newspaper, under his arm, and unwraps what looks to me like a chapter and picks up the worn handles of his hammers and rasps, losing himself in the wood. His work is perfect.

A little boy and a dog accompany him and watch his hands as they move in careful circles. His eyes are like those of Saint John of the Cross, and his hands raise the colossal tree trunks with delicacy as well as skill.

On the rauli wood beams, I wrote with chalk the names of dead friends, and he went along carving my calligraphy into the wood as swiftly as if he had flown behind me and written the names again with the tip of a wing.

Some Words for a Book of Stone

This stony book, born in the desolate coastlands and mountain ranges of my country, was abandoned in my thoughts for twenty years. It wasn’t possible to write it then for wandering reasons and the tasks of every year and day.

It is the poet who must sing with his countrymen and give to men all that is man: dream and love, light and night, reason and madness. But let’s not forget the stones! We should never forget the silent castles, advance to kill or die, adorn our existence without compromise, preserving the mysteries of their ultraterrestrial matter, independent and eternal.

My compatriot, Gabriela Mistral, said once that in Chile it is the skeleton that one sees first, the profusion of rocks in the mountains and sand. As nearly always, there is much truth in what she said.

I came to live in Isla Negra in 1939 and the coast was strewn with these extraordinary presences of stone and they spoke to me in a hoarse and drenching language, a jumble of marine cries and primal warnings.

Because of this, the book, adorned with portraits of creatures of stone, is a conversation that I open to all the poets of the earth, so that is may be continued by all in order to encounter the secret of stone and of life.

The Sea

The Pacific Ocean was overflowing with borders of the map.
There was no place to put it. It was so large, wild and blue that it didn’t fit anywhere. That’s why it was left in front of my window.
The humanists worried about the little men it devoured over the years.
They do not count.
Not even that galleon, laden with cinnamon and pepper that perfumed it as it went down.
No.
Not even the explorers’ ship — fragile as a cradle dashed to pieces in the abyss — which keeled over with its starving men.
No.
In the ocean, a man dissolves like a bar of salt. And the water doesn’t know it.
………………………………………………
From Neruda’s book Isla Negra, published in 2001 and translated by Dennis Maloney and Clark Zlotchew.

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