The Garden of Verse: Finding the Right Words in August's Verse-Virtual

So many excellent poems in the August 2020 issue of  Verse-Virtual -- Here are a few of my favorites.

Robert Wexelblatt's poem "On the Road Near Chiangling the Poet Chen Hsi-wei
Encounters a Young Musician, Summer, 597" follows his Hsi-wei Tales, a newly published collection of stories about the vagabond peasant-poet who wanders through China during the Sui period. Its opening stanza is a stylish evocation of that point in the summer when we've all had a bit too much of it:

"Prickly lettuce and withered jasmine

lie flat, like bing cakes baking on the dirt.

Paving tiles burn right through straw sandals."

            The young musician of the poem's title then surprises the poet by expressing love for one of his early poems. The final lines contain an image that beautifully sums up the meaning, and the feeling, of the encounter:

"Taking up her liuqin, she begins to sing

and it’s like running water by a dusty road.

I feel my forgotten poem surfacing from

Lake Weishan itself transformed, summoned

by the sudden beauty of this butterfly."

David Graham finds the right words as well in "News That Stays News," a poem about reading great poems: "Now nearing midnight, wind raises

its wordless ruckus all over town—

that great nothing that is something—"

            That's what wind is, isn't it, "a wordless ruckus"? And it's also, perhaps like so many of the world's ordinary gifts, a "great nothing that is something."

            Something about winter, and the winter of life, permeates a second poem, "A Winter Drive With Dad," concerning a day when an older relative transcends the routine plague of remembering names:

"these taunting glimpses,

 these lucid landmarks lost in ice fog."

 

            It's the language in Kate Sontag's "Covid Notes On A Silver Standard Poodle" that turns a quotidian dog walk into a regal procession. There's "nothing standard," the poem observes, about the pet's 

"legendary lavender tint revealed through wanton

brown cover-girl curls poofed as a topiary lamb,

sprouting surreal head to tail. Oh puppy, we stare

in disbelief at such Brothers Grimm style, pointed

snout gleaming in profile wolfish as Little Red

Riding Hood’s grandma, velvety eight-month-old

face shaved to show off an authentic silver lining,

topknot and ears bouffant as a woodsman’s wooly

cap, laps flying mid-air, equally animal and human..."

            The parade of language goes on from there, convincing me that even non-pet owners would worship this "anthropomorphic princess." 

            Kate's poem Corona Triolets -- a triolet, one discovers (who knew?), is a short poem of eight lines with only two rhymes used throughout -- offers another splendid dish of word music, from its opening line, "This new form of distancing gives me pause/

with every breath." right to the end. It's the poem's repetition of the rhyming phrases, I think, that makes me think of music. And that first sentence evokes the pace of moving in Corona time: "distancing --pause -- breath."  

 

Felicia Chernesky's "Castles" is a seasonal poem that seems to have all the right words working together. You can practically hear the ocean approach in two sweet lines, playing with both consonants and vowels:

"Each surge of surf that sweeps

your summer castles clean away"...

And see the insubstantiality of those sandy constructions in the lines that follow:  

"builds such dreams          

on briny foam and tiny grains"

How can we not love the music of "briny foam and tiny grains"?

I could go on quoting the word music, but I don't want to spoil the ending.

 

            I'm a sucker for poems with a late 60s flavor, and Sharon Waller Knutson's two concise narrative poems deliver the goods. The nut of the story in "Santa Monica Dec. 3, 1969" is a  similarity in appearance shared by the narrator and one of the defendants in the notorious murder case that unfolded on that date. But appearances mislead, the poem tells us:

"After the press conference, her hands

are cuffed behind her back, while mine grip

the steering wheel and type the story."

            Appearances mislead as well in "Hollywood 67" when a drab "cleaning lady" turns out to be a famous comedian. 

 

            Another striking reminiscence poem, Steve Klepetar's "Privilege" offers an unbeatable metaphor: "Privilege is a white bird streaking the sky." We absolutely know why that bird is "white," regardless of whether many of us find ourselves still 'streaking' or not. In the lines that follow the poem efficiently evokes a youthful moment of ordinary pleasures, cum philosophical sophistication: 

            "We are young and white and none of this is real."

            Those were the days, my friends.

           

So many strong poems appear in the August 2020 issue. The more I look into its virtual pages, the more I find.

Find these poems and many others at 

 http://verse-virtual.org/poems-and-articles.html 

 

 

 

The Garden of Memory: Memory Pictures of Beirut

My daughter Sonya lived and worked in Lebanon for 15 years. Now she's raising money to help that country recover from a disaster that killed many and left thousands homeless. If you can't go to her meeting, there's a place here to leave a donation. Please help if you can.

 https://www.facebook.com/events/1286644688333624/

 

 

 

Pictures of Beirut

 

In my earliest photos of Lebanon, taken on film, not the tiny ‘card’ I coax out of my camera these days with aging fingers,

the sky is so blue the technician in the shop that developed them questioned me on my use of a blue filter. No, the only blue filter was the sky of that dry

and sunny climate in a country, where the French poet called his home in the valley of the Bekaa region the most beautiful place in the world.

That sky was October. We never visited in the thicker skies of summer. 

We stayed, that first time, in the English hotel, ate yogurt and fruit for breakfast, grabbed fries and shwarma from fast-food restaurants, encouraged coffee houses to try making ‘iced coffee’ – ‘it’s big back in Boston,’ we assured the shopkeepers.

 

We dined on rooftops long after dark, on ‘room temperature’ evenings,

perspired in the ‘interior’ hills of Balbec among monuments the Romans made bigger there than anywhere else outside their own land,

as explained by a Lebanese guide who knew eleven tongues, including Russian,

and left exposed to the casual inspections of early 21st century wanderers such as ourselves.

 

And, on at least one occasion, talked politics in the streets of the Christian neighborhood.

“Tell Bush,” a man told me, “to make the Syrians leave.”

The Lebanese knew the names of American Senators better than we did. They knew who, at least in that decade, held the cards.

 

One tough neighborhood, I wrote afterward,

After Syria pulled their troops from Beiruti checkpoints --

and before that tragic land suffered its own implosion --

before the Israelis, once again, bombed Beirut and were driven back to their own borders by Hezbollah.

Later in Boston, while being treated for prostate, my doctor’s resident, a Lebanese, told us Israel’s bombs had turned the stones where Christ walked into dust .

 

There were no beggars in Beirut. When a woman on a minibus, the country’s informal public transport, showed us her baby and opened her palm, our daughter, defender of her adopted country, dismissed her as a ‘gypsy.’

 

After the Arab Spring faded into the Syrian disaster, things changed. We gave a few Lebanese lira to sidewalk Madonnas, wearing black in the sunlight, holding children.

One day I yelled at a man who insisted he could polish my sneakers. On another Anne and I ran from the streets of Hamra, pursued with demonic persistence by a poor imp,orphan of her country’s devastation,

demanding more money than we had already given her.

Still, the enduring picture is a beautiful country, with a rare history, and a strong and varied people, savvy, with a clear sense of the ravages they had borne,  who knew more about the world than most of the world knew about itself.

Now bearing the new catastrophes of a political system that has never really worked, a century-long path of too many compromises with the greed, and the sectarian and doctrinal rigidity of a few,

And the warning signs blazoned in the towers of uncollected trash,too long ignored

Which other lands, including our own, appear likely to discover in the ruins of our own social explosions, exploited by the greed of a few, and the privileges of a favored caste,

The signs of our dissolution,

All about us,

Littering the roadside.

 

 

The Garden of the Seasons: The Daylilies Wear Us Out, But Beautifully

Every Day

there is one of you,

born anew 

Each as beautiful as the day before 

Everyday as the day wears out,

one less bloom to look forward too

Every day that passes is one less day for you

and for us too.

Good Morning, Morning Glories

We say it each good morning 

Greeting 'glory' in the morning 

It's glory in the morning to greet the Morning Glories 

Every day your stories are pretty much the same 

You're with us in the morning, and gone from us at noon

I like your working hours!, see you again real soon

Second Life Clematis

Second generation, you're smaller than the first. 

Just because you're second, doesn't mean you're worse 

The first guys, well they're big and bright, 

and took the princely share of all that's best, 

the water and the light 

But we don't look upon you

as something worse for wear 

We're delighted by your visit,

It's a miracle you're there!

Group Photo

So what's it like living so close together?

Don't you want your own nests, like birds of a feather?

I see yarrow tufted white, while blue balloons expand in upward flight 

Still other plants flower, some with black eyes,

mingling skyward, each one of the guys

No one's too little, no one's on top

Just a hunger for living, to go till they stop.

 Big Family

In the album of July, many flowers live their days

Often many lilies share their day, it's comfy in a kinship way

All these Hemerocallis blooms opened on a single day   

They swallowed sunshine, sniffed some air 

But just one day?

Some things don't seem fair!

Scarlet Women?

Or are they "dandies" dressed to show

what some dudes get up to 

some people never need to know?

I suppose I am deluded 

to see them in the style of us.

They're just being beautiful --

no need to make a fuss.

A Personal Point of View on "Arcadia" -- the perfect place -- in the August 2020 Verse-Virtual

 

"Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?"

Keats once posed this rhetorical question, although in a poem that was actually, and famously, about autumn.

Well, here's one of them, up on the new August 2020 issue of Verse-Virtual.org. It's titled "Et in Arcadia Ego," and is actually about June, a month most of which makes it into the 'spring' category according to the astronomical calendar. (Meteorologists prefer to say summer begins on June 1.)

I wrote the poem looking at our perennial flower garden on a day in early June when the Iris were blooming and the blossoms on the lilac tree were still holding strong. The poem also names some of the other plants blooming within my viewspace on that day.

The title is the sort of phrase that people now call a "meme." Translated as "And I was in Arcadia." Or, "I too was in Arcadia," the phrase has been traced back to various origins. To famous paintings, in which the "I" stands for the figure of Death. To Virgil. To other other sources.

My understanding is that "Arcadia" means the most perfectly untouched natural paradise you can find on earth. One line of scholarship locates that place in the most remote rural part of Ancient Greece, where 'shepherds' -- another meme, standing for those who were naturally good and completely uncorrupted by civilization -- composed pastoral love songs in good clean unsophisticated fun.

This notion of "Arcadia" places it in the Greek peninsula -- called the Peloponnesus -- where Anne and I and our adult children visited a few years back. So, in one sense, I too have been in Arcadia.

My poem, of course, is simply about finding that perfectly natural place in your own backyard, or wherever your special places are. 

Here it is:

Et in Arcadia Ego

The characteristics of rustic charm:
Will an Adirondack chair do?
Temperature: near eighty
Companions: 
Summer Snowflake Viburnum, hands to the side, fingers stretched,
a don't-touch-me from the nervous bride. 
Flag iris, white also,  
and a couple blue, as if bidding for a role in the wedding.  
Sadly missing: the show-off yellow,
kidnapped, perhaps, by the steadily advancing shadow of 
Grandfather Oak.
Spreading Korean lilac, showing the Japanese maple and 
the two-toned fashion-plate Wiegelia
who's boss in this corner of things.  
Music? Piano melt.
Good government? Hmmm, I've heard the phrase
Sports? No. The multi-millionaires are squabbling. 
 
You can't have everything.
Enjoy the silence
while it lasts.
                        

I have two other poems in the August Verse-Virtual. You can find them here.

My Poems

To find all the poems and other content in this month's issue go here:

Table of Contents

Please take a look!

fer.. get ee  s... s s