Even More Poetry for National Poetry Month

Since last week was so much fun, we're extending our poem-on-poetry-a-day run for a few more days!

Today, we're moving slightly out of Braziller territory with two prose poems by Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, whose work is considered by Charles Simic in his new book, The Renegade.

Here's Simic's commentary on Herbert's distinct sense of humor, followed by the poems:

One of the favorite strategies of Herbert is what Baranczak calls "unmasking," the unveiling of the true face of some object or idea which up to that moment had been concealed by its false appearance. A clock, for example, may appear as the placid face of a miller, full and shiny as an apple with one dark hair creeping across it, when, in fact, if you were to look inside, you would discover a nest of worms or the bowels of an anthill. Although Herbert's intentions are often satirical, his way of defamiliarizing the familiar reminds me of folk humor. It's the same freee play of the imagination and jocularity one encounters in fairy tales, riddles and creation myths, which thrive on making the familiar strange. These two prose poems show how such unmasking works:

MOON

I don't understand how you can write poems about the moon. It's fat and slovenly. It picks the noses of chimneys. Its favorite thing to do is climb under the bed and sniff at your shoes.(1)

HEN

The hen is the best example of what living constantly with humans leads to. She has completely lost the lightness and grace of a bird. Her tail sticks up over her protruding rump like a too large hat in bad taste. Her rare moments of ecstasy, when she stands on one leg and glues up her round eyes with filmy eyelids, are stunningly disgusting. And in addition, that parody of song, throat-slashed supplication over a thing unuterably comic: a round, white, maculated egg.
The hen brings to mind certain poets.(2)

(1. Translated by Alissa Valles.)
(2. Translated by Czeslaw Mislow and Peter Dale Scott.)

(This essay was originally published by the New York Review of Books in 2007, reviewing Zbigniew Herbert's Collected Poems: 1956-1998, from HarperCollins.)

Poetry Week Day Five: Langston Hughes

Poetry week closes with two short, sharp Langston Hughes poems from The Langston Hughes Reader. Think of these as a response to Julia Alvarez's "Poetry Makes Nothing Happen"? Have a great weekend!

Sliver

Cheap little rhymes
A cheap little tune
Are sometimes as dangerous
As a sliver of the moon.

A cheap little tune
to cheap little rhymes
Can cut a man's
Throat sometimes.


Poet to Bigot

I have done so little
For you,
And you have done so little
For me,
That we have good reason
Never to agree.

I, however,
Have such meagre
Power,
Clutching at a
Moment,
While you control
An hour.

But your hour is
A stone.

My moment is
A flower.

Poetry Week Day Two: Daniel Hoffman

We continue our week of poetry on poetry with this great opening piece from Daniel Hoffman's collection of sonnets, Makes You Stop and Think:

The Sonnet
(Remembering Louise Bogan)

The Sonnet, she told the crowd of bearded
youths, their hands exploring
rumpled girls,
is a sacred

vessel: it takes a civilization
to conceive its shape or know
its uses. The kids
stared as though

a Sphinx now spake the riddle of
a blasted day. And few,
she said, who would
be avant-garde

consider that the term is drawn
from tactics in the Prussian
war, nor think
when once they've breached

the fortress of a form, then send
their shock-troops yet again
to breach the form,
there's no form--

--they asked for her opinion of
"the poetry of Rock."
After a drink
with the professors

she said, This is a bad time,
bad for poetry.
Then with maenad
gaze upon

the imaged ghost of a comelier day:
I've enjoyed this visit,
your wife's sheets
are Irish linen.

(NB: The poem is presented here sans formatting, since html is unfriendly to unconventional spacing.)

Celebrate National Poetry Month with George Braziller

We kicked off National Poetry Month with a beautiful excerpt from Charles Simic's new book, The Renegade. Now that we're almost halfway done (!) with April, it seems like a good time to look at how our poets experience poetry in their work. Every day this week we'll be posting a poem from one of our books that deals with the theme of poetry and writing.

We'll start with Simic again, from his Selected Early Poems:

Poem

My father writes all day, all night:
Writes while he sleeps, writes in his coffin.
It's nice and quiet in our house.
You can see the specks of dust in the sunlight.

I look at times over his shoulders
At all that whiteness. The snow if falling,
As you'd expect. A drop of ink
Gets buried easily, like a footprint.

I, too, would get lost but there's his shadow
On the wall, like a perched owl.
There's the sound of his pen
And the bottle on the table sunk in thought.

When the bottle empties
His great dark hand
Bigger than the earth
Feels for the moon's spigot.

Charles Simic in Defense of Lyric Poetry

In celebration of National Poetry Month, which begins on Wednesday, here's a fascinating meditation on the power of lyric poetry from Charles Simic's new collection of essays, The Renegade: Writings on Poetry and a Few Other Things:

Epic poetry is dead and dramatic poetry is moribund, but lyric poems continue to be written by both serious poets and teenagers in love. While its ancient origins are said to be songs composed for an occasion of celebration or mourning, the lyric has long since evolved into an expression of personal experience rather than of collective feelings. In his well-known denunciation of poetry in the Republic, Plato found use for hymns to the gods and eulogies to civic leaders, but singled out the lyric for being particularly self-indulgent and false in depicting reality. Stripped of musical accompaniment and plaintive tunes that could charm the listener, such poems not only showed their complete absence of ideas, but were harmful to those who seek truth. Plato was suspicious of the imagination. If he had not been, he would have realized that ideas in the way philosophers usually approach them have little to do with poems whose main concern is with using feelings to find what is authentic.

The more subjective and candid the poems were, the more dangerous they appeared to those who made it their business to worry about the moral uplift of their fellow citizens. Scandal is most likely the reason the lyric poem has been so successful over the centuries. To scribble, knowing that one's secret thoughts and language are disapproved of by everyone from one's parents to one's clergymen, is a delicious feeling. Every form of tyranny has taken a dim view of such irreverence. The main public use of the first-person pronoun that authoritarians approve of is the one extracted through forced confessions of heretics and enemies of the state. This much has always been true: if you want to get in trouble with whatever language police is in force, write verses about what you really feel and think.

Of course, there's much more to the lyric than risky subject matter. There's the ineffable something that makes poetry poetry, the sensation that every word has suddenly begun to mean much more than it usually does. Lyric poems require an exquisite ear on the part of the poet, an ability to weigh the exact amount of silence necessary between words and images in order to make them rich with meaning. The shorter such poems are, the harder they are to write. We know from experience the impact a line of poetry can have, the miraculous way in which two selves unknown to each other until that very moment come to share not only an understanding but a single imaginative space. In no time at all, cultural and historical differences are abolished and a poem written almost three thousand years ago comes to life on a page. Nowhere else in literature does one find the experience of living in the moment so vividly rendered as in lyric poetry. Despite seemingly infinite odds, somebody's private sentiments continue to enthrall generations of future readers. And yet, every time we read a poem, this is more or less what happens.

(This excerpt, from the essay, "The Life of Ruins," was originally published in the New York Review of Books in 2006.)

Charles Simic in PW

15th U.S. poet laureate Charles Simic's new book of essays, The Renegade, which features a collection of his most memorable writings on poetry, art, and the events that have shaped the lives and work of some of the West's greatest writers, recently received a glowing review in the February 9 issue of Publishers Weekly:

U.S. poet laureate Simic casts his knowing eye over a range of subjects in 16 biographical/critical pieces, many originally published in the New York Review of Books and other journals. In the opening, autobiographical piece, Simic, born in 1938, recalls his Belgrade, Yugoslavia, childhood unsentimentally... and continues with his arrival in America as a teenager and how his growing distaste for Serbian nationalism turned him into a renegade. Simic then roves outward to figures such as the misunderstood and underappreciated E.A. Robinson; melancholy Robert Creeley of Black Mountain Review fame; surrealist-inspired Yves Bonnefoy; and fellow U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall. He examines the endless quirks of Witold Gombrowicz, the eclectic originality of W.G. Sebald and certainly one of the greatest artistic renegades anywhere, Christopher Marlowe. Also among these elegant, penetrating writings are essays on a MoMA exhibit of Dada and on Whitman, not to mention a memorable segue on the world's worst haircut.

Catch The Renegade in April, just in time for National Poetry Month!