Dear Readers,
I was at the Apache Junction Public Library the other day and I checked out a book called the "The Best American Poetry 2001," Guest Editor Robert Hass, Series Editor David Lehman. I've read about half of the book so far. Some of the poems are really cool, but I thought far too many of them were far too dense. They're nearly impossible to "understand". (I put "understand" in quotation marks because deep poets would probably say that you're not supposed to "understand" a poem, you're supposed to "experience" a poem.)
Here's my favorite line of ultra-dense poetry. It's from Ceriserie by Joshua Clover. This is exactly the way it appears in the poem:
"Gold leaf: Wedding dress of the verb to have, it reminds you of of"
Ha ha ha! What in tarnation does that mean?
I appreciate the opaque poems for what they are, and that's cool if you're into that kind of poetry, but I prefer poems that are more communicative.
So about a third of the way into "The Best American Poetry 2001", I hit a poem that was a breath of clear air: Snow Day by Billy Collins. It's beautiful. Reading the poem calls up beautiful imagery of a city beneath snow, but it also somehow talks about the struggle between civilization and anarchy. I wish you could read that poem, but in the beginning of the book there's a warning, "All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form," so I won't type the whole thing here.
I've read a bit of Billy Collins' poetry before and I really really really like it. Here's a place where you can read some of his poems.
In fact, I think the winner of the "Telemoonfa's Favorite Poet" Prize is a tie between Billy Collins and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Edna St. Vincent Millay was so good at writing sonnets. Have you ever tried to write a sonnet? It's pretty difficult, but the form is really rewarding. Sonnets have rhymes, and fourteen lines. I wrote about her a little in this post.
I try to write poetry a lot. Most of the time I write a few lines and it doesn't go anywhere so I throw it away. But sometimes I write poems that I enjoy, and sometimes people have told me that they have enjoyed my poems, and I really appreciate that.
Poetry itself is such an enjoyable exercise. Even bad poetry is better than no poetry.
I don't have as much free time to write poems as I would like. I work and sleep and go to church and spend time with my family and eat and do chores. And writing poetry usually takes a while, and I have to be in the right relaxed, contemplative mood, and blah blah blah.
Recently I was wondering why I hide behind sarcasm and absurdity so frequently in my writing. My recent posts giving love advice are perfect examples of the kind of sarcasm and absurdity I'm talking about. Why didn't I write serious love advice?
I know some people - we've all met them - who are so sarcastic so much of the time, that I find myself refraining from interacting with them more than I have to. There is a time for sarcasm, and I appreciate it sometimes, believe me, but I think it's more admirable and important to be serious.
I think I don't write seriously very often because I don't want to become vulnerable. Sarcasm and absurdity is like a wall I put around myself when I write. Maybe some time I'll do a blog post about real love advice. I do think that I have some wisdom to offer, even though I'm still in my twenties.
OK, see you later.
Sincerely,
Telemoonfa
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In July 1984 I was one of five artists (two writers, two visual artists and a composer) who was a fellow at the Millay Colony for the Arts at Edna St. Vincent Millay's old estate in Austerlitz, NY (near the MA Berkshire County border).
Edna's sister Norma Millay, a visual artist, was still alive and living in the house back then. She was very feisty and about 90. That month was the Democratic convention and I remember the day after the acceptance speeches (I had to listen on the radio in my studio so I didn't see it), she ridiculed how Vice Pres. Mondale and Rep. Ferarro couldn't clasp their hands overhead like the tickets usually did. "What did they think," Norma said, "that we'd believe they were engaged in hanky-panky?"
One day her friend the actor Roscoe Lee Browne came to visit and he brought his friend Tom Selleck, on whose show he'd appeared. I got to meet them. I was in awe of Browne, whom I'd seen in the searing 1967 NET (old PBS) show of "Benito Cereno," based on Melville's novella. Selleck's "Magnum, P.I." was then popular, so he was pretty cool to meet too.
My favorite Millay sonnet was one I discovered as the epilogue in Lois Gould's novel Such Good Friends, which I read when it came out in about 1971 when I was in college and upset about breaking up with someone. The novel is about a woman whose husband dies suddenly of a heart attack and then she soons learn that he was cheating on her with half the women in Manhattan.
The poem is from Fatal Interview and I still remember it (I wrote it out on construction paper and scotch-taped it to my door):
Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly;
In my own way, and with my full consent.
Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely
Went to their deaths more proud than this one went.
Some nights of apprehension and hot weeping
I will confess; but that's permitted me;
Day dried my eyes; I was not one for keeping
Rubbed in a cage a wing that would be free.
If I had loved you less or played you slyly
I might have held you for a summer more,
But at the cost of words I value highly,
And no such summer as the one before.
Should I outlive this anguish—and men do—
I shall have only good to say of you.
Years ago I had a copy of Billy Collins' chapbook called Video Poems, which I bought at the Gotham Book Mart in 1980. It was before he was famous, and I thought he was about my age or younger (I was 29). I donated it to the community college in Florida where I was a professor but I wish I had all those old small press books from the 1970s. The cover had a nerdy-looking boy of about 12 watching one of those little TVs in a chair they used to have at airport waiting areas.
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