The Garden of Verse: A World of Wonder and Creativity in April's Verse-Virtual, Magicked Up Before Eveything Changed

Here's my take on some of the poems that spoke to me in the April Verse-Virtual... Everything in this issue so wonderfully seems to evoke the world we loved, or worried over, or had various issues with while also delighting in the countless wonders of being alive, even the most quotidian... all of this written before, of course, our world changed so radically.

            So, maybe in light of the more narrowed existences we are all experiencing, I am particularly aware of the presence of wonder in these poems.

            In Steve Klepetar's "My Father Quotes Goethe at the Restaurant," when the recitation begins -- "something about golden apples" -- an ordinary hour suddenly became extraordinary.

"... The waiter walked by and stopped to listen.

Soon all the waiters were gathered there

as my father went on through several scenes.

One had tears in his eyes, another stared at us in wonder."

            I love poems when some kind of special experience breaks away, organically or not, from the facts at hand and lifts us all, at least a little ways, out of ourselves.

            I found a similar pleasure in his poem about the "Magic Girls," who one moment are simply cousins, making Halloween decorations, and then -- wonderfully -- achieve poetic lift-off:

"How talented they were, those magic girls

who sang like wild angels and climbed trees

and brought home trophies every week."

Other poems bring home these trophies at well. It's the madness of spring, perhaps, an idea I take from David Graham's poem "First Day of Open Windows." The speaker is watching the truck traffic on a state road when the spirit of Walt Whitman, bard of the open road and "Song of Myself" inhabits the moment: "in exactly the American tune

full of stink

and clank, two men on a loading dock

sharing a cigarette and talking shit..."

            Others share the tune, such as "the lone cardinal," narrating the tale, the poem tells us, in his own understanding.

The American open road tells a tale, called an "omen" here, in William Greenway's "Black Pick-up":

"and so I pictured,

just for a moment, me, migrant,

squatting in the empty bed,

my hair blowing backwards,

on the way to some green field

of sweet watermelon manna..."

            Read the rest of the poem to see where the omen leads.

The elevated moment takes place in the mind of the speaker of the poem in Martin Levinson's poem "Making Contact," a kind of classic demonstration of the extended metaphor. A marital conversation turns into a sort of 'inside baseball':

"I haven’t decided what pitch

to fling to the catcher sitting in

my skull, who’s motioning for a

fast ball, which may not be the

best idea,"

... because, as the speaker tells us, the batter might be expecting just that. We know how important those 'expectations are.' Just ask the Houston Astros.

On the theme of memorable moments -- the unexpected kind -- Penelope Moffet's complex, beautifully written poem "Trust" has a big cat in its tank.

"By a creek in the woods

a flicker of movement

and there she is,

upwind of me,

fifteen feet away, cougar

I’ve been seeking for decades.

She doesn’t see me

as she comes my way.

Only when I stand and shout

does she lift her head

to stare into my eyes."

            This poems is about as close as I've come to being stared at by any comparable creature. "Trust" delivers a complex vision of animals and, especially, people, some of whom, its ending suggests, you shouldn't trust very far.

Mary Makofske's poem "Ask Her" depicts the state of mind of a student who resists the pull of a poem's word magic. To the poem's 'her,' an older student, the poem in question is a flight from responsibility.

"She fought the current, built 

a dam against the poem’s seduction.

It was clear she’d had enough comings

and goings, alibis, evasions."

            Well told, the poem is a tale with a persuasive conclusion.

Robert Wexelblatt's "Bolting" isn't about wonder, but it is one. Too big for a brief description, the poem's rhymed stanzas, alternating with the free verse passages, provide a kind of commentary: "Her hair’s fragrance is so sweet

            yet his liberty’s so dear;

            tonight he’ll kiss her feet— 

            tomorrow he’s not here."

            And I can't help quoting the stanza that's like an entire ballad in itself, implying the frame of the tale and providing the perfect, down-through-the-ages refrain:

"Consolation is the pleasure of soothed pain. 

            They were sometimes one: a May night in the rain

            when they got drunk and laughed like they’d gone insane;

            when she crooked her finger saying, Do that again.

            Consolation is the pleasure of soothed pain."

Wonder is dreamlike in Michael Gessner's "Irving's Piazza," the Hudson River retreat from which one of the first 'name' American writers found the components of his reveries. The poem's speaker finds his own inspiration in a Southwestern setting, where  

"the moon’s lost

delirium embraces the memory

of casual sylphs, enchanted poets..."

Find the rest of this poem, and so many others at http://www.verse-virtual.org/poems-and-articles.html

Verse-Virtual April 2020 

The Garden of Selfless Engagement: My Poem on Emerson's and Thoreau's Encounter with the Bhagavad-Gita in April's Verse-Virtual

The Bhagavad-Gita, a 700-verse Hindu scripture written thousands

of years ago (estimates vary) as an episode in the epic poem called 

"Mahabharata," a kind of encyclopedic encapsulation of history and philosophy from a time well before the start of Western Civ, had its moment during the late 60s and no doubt is still studied by those interested in "Eastern" ways. 

         As I discovered recently, in reading about the great 19th century New England thinkers Emerson and Thoreau, classical Hindu thought and the "Gita" was very influential back then as well. Most commentators sum up its message as an argument for selfless action in the complex and imperfect arena of human affairs. In the middle decades of the 19th century, the outstanding moral issue for many Americans -- and certainly for the pair I'm concerned with here -- was slavery. 

         And, I think, we have our own equivalents today. I am posting the poem below. You can find others by me, and by 39 poets in all in the April 2020 Verse-Virtual here Verse-Virtual April 2020

 

 Concerning Engagement

In "Emerson and Thoreau Meet the Bhagavad-Gita,"

the poem that I hope some day to write,

our two great American spokesmen

lean on the wisdom of another age,

in another dispensation of human consciousness,

to seek a guidance for their conduct,

      or so I see the matter,

in the crisis of their day.

The Bhagavad-Gita, one tale -- one narrative gesture

            within a gigantic cycle of mythical stories

dating from a millennium we don't have on our side of the world --

in which a god not easily understood in Western terms, 

            Krishna,

speaks to the chief warrior of his age,

            Arjuna,

on the doorstep of the his culture's primeval "World War"

as he decides whether or not to participate

in what is essentially a civil war, as all wars are,

if humanity is your family,

and which he knows will result in great suffering and

stupendous loss of life.

Yet Krishna, Lord of All the Senses, Friend of the Afflicted,

(but also Beloved Cowherd and possessor of 105 other common titles) 

explains the history and meaning of almost everything

in order to show the reluctant warrior hero

why he 'must play his part'

in this most terrible battle of the world in which he is

            fated, destined,

and therefore must choose to live.

Just so Thoreau, and more reluctantly Emerson,

came not only to condemn slavery,

and to aid in the escape of fugitive slaves,

but to praise the violent deeds

of the anti-slavery martyr John Brown,

even at the risk

of plunging their nation into what proved to be

an enormously costly, bloody,

            endlessly consequential, 

Civil War,

leading us to consider,

What Do We Do Now?

                       

Bio Note: I write poems, fiction, and newspaper copy for The Boston Globe. My novel Suosso's Lane treats the Plymouth, Mass. origins of the Sacco-Vanzetti case exactly 100 years ago. A second novel won a competition for a work of speculative fiction, though still has no publication date (but who's complaining?). I've had poems recently in The American Journal of Poetry and New Verse.News. A couple of the poems below are taken from my recent poem-a-day project begun, for no particular reason, in early February.

The Garden of the Printed Book: Some Ways to Pass the Time in Viral Lock-up By Happily Turning Pages

So how's the hunkering down, walking outdoors, and virtual interaction lifestyle suiting you? Phone time or Facetime? Zoom in, or simply crash and die? 

         Six feet between us still better than six feet under? 

         I would add to the roster of indoor activities most of us are surviving with by going back to an actually ancient, but viable human-centered technology -- the book. Which is accessed by "reading." And requires the application of human physical and mental senses. 

         And so, based on my own recent downtime experience, a short list of recommended reads. 

         But first, my friend Karl recently wrote me about reading Nathaniel Philbrick's book "Mayflower," a history of the Plymouth Colony from its founding through King Philip's War. A good choice to start with. There are lots of reasons why this book, published some years ago, is worth a read, one of them being this year's celebration of the 400th anniversary of the founding of Plymouth. Another, as Karl points out, is the book's treatment of King Philip's War, Colonial America's first 'Indian War,' a neglected subject in American history courses, and a permanent stain on the nation's human rights record.

           The history of the relations between the Europeans who arrived here in the 17th century (and then kept on coming) and the indigenous peoples who had been living here for thousands of years will never, I suspect, cease to be relevant. In my opinion, the history of those relations still calls out for something like the full "Truth and Reconciliation" process carried in South Africa. 

          From history let's move to fiction. The best novels often seem to me to be "history as interpreted by human imagination" -- and repurposed for various needs by the fundamental human gift of storytelling. 

           I've recently enjoyed three such novels.

           "The Strangler Vine," by M.J. Carter, is first rate historical fiction set in India during its rule by the East India Company in the early 19th century. I love novels that give me a sense of what it felt like to 'be there' in some other place at some other time. The was clearly a historian, and has published nonfiction books. Since writing "The Strangler Vine" -- a plant found in the Indian forest that suggests a comparison to the East India Company's hold on India -- she has added two more fictions using the same central characters, one of them "The Infidel Stain," I heard read on discs and found stay-in-the-car-and-listen engrossing. In that book the main characters from "Strangler" are back in England during the period of the Chartist Movement, a time of political upheavals: ghastly crimes, Victorian London, political intrigue, radical politics -- I loved it.

  

         "The Future Home of the Loving God" is the most recent novel by Louise Erdrich, who has written many books dealing with the present and past days of a Native American community in Minnesota. This book fits the current vogue for a dystopian fiction, triggered by -- guess what -- a biological threat completely destabilizing American society. Erdrich is a brilliant character creator, and readers of her other books will note some similarities between the key players here and characters in her previous books. In this book, explaining its title, her pregnant narrator and other Indian characters are obsessed with the Native American Roman Catholic saint Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha -- the name of a church, I recalled, from our days in Plymouth.

          Finally, "Orfeo" is a timely work by another prolific American novelist, Richard Powers. I loved his big recent book about the role trees play in Earth's preservation, "The Overstory."

"Orfeo" is about a musical genius -- Powers' books are always seeped in a thorough knowledge of some field of the arts or sciences -- who is also an amateur chemist who gets in trouble by experimenting in creating genetic changes in -- guess what -- microbes. The book's evocations of various musical works (both famous masterpieces and fictional works created by our spectrum-like hero) are beautifully written. I think I would have appreciated the book on another level if I knew more about, one, music theory or, two, biochemistry. But "Orfeo" is another character-driven thriller (like Erdrich's book), this one  impelled by a post-9/11 -- wow, remember that -- theme of government over-reach in the name of security.

           I don't want to hear anybody say they have nothing to do. Maybe "self-quarantining" is simply the universe's way of saying "drop everything and read a book."