Franz Wright, Bob Hicok: Poems about Fathers

An Old Pic

A New Pic

Postcard 2 by Franz Wright : Poetry Magazine

O my pa-pa by Bob Hicok : Poetry Magazine

With readers’ help and the brilliance of the poem “To Myself” last time, I’ve gotten more interested in Franz Wright than I had been, so here’s a very different critter from him, a prose poem titled “Postcard 2.”  It may or may not be about his famous-poet-dad, James Wright; I’m hanging on to the New Criticism to that extent.

I’d also like to hear your thoughts as you compare it to Bob Hicok’s poem, “O my pa-pa,” a work about fathers, sons, and to a lesser extent, the whole nature of writing poetry.

I think maybe Bob Hicok and Franz Wright should not be let into the same room on this subject, but that’s all I’ll say for now.  

Well, one more thing. If this pair of poems doesn’t start people—male or female—talking about fathers and children, maybe nothing will.

On the subject of fathers, here’s singer-songwriter John Prine with Steve Goodman's song on the subject: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voGE5hLHBUg

And here’s what some of us said about “O my pa-pa” back in January of 2010:

http://banjo52.blogspot.com/search?q=bob+hicok+%22o+my+pa-pa%22

Sparrow Dad Feeds Junior

Franz Wright, "To Myself": Nitty-Gritty Love

Wood Stork Love? Guana River Preserve, FL, 2010

My thanks to Caitlin Kimball for introducing me to this poem by Franz Wright (son of poet James Wright, by the way, for those who think they have a tough parent act to follow).

To Myself by Franz Wright : The Poetry Foundation

At the Poetry Foundation website, Ms. Kimball includes “To Myself” in a mostly humorous piece titled

Ten Poems to Read When You Get Stuffed in a Locker by Caitlin Kimball.  I recommend it.

About Franz Wright’s last line she says, “Every time I read this last line, I snort and question its good taste. Then my eyes well up.”  I think I know just what she means, though, as a male, maybe I’m not supposed to. 

Rural South Carolina. He Hopes the Bus Stop Is Near

Field, Michigan's Thumb, August 2011

For those who don't know Michigan geography, natives say the Lower Peninsula is shaped like a mitten, and the southeastern portion of the state is The Thumb.

A Lot of "I"--Overlooking the Field, Michigan Thumb, August 2011

I’m eager to hear your responses. Is the poem a romantic rapture, full of modernized conceits? Or is it simply grandiose, delusional foolishness for a speaker (and an author?) to say he is the fields, and he is the little lights and the rain and the loneliness and—why not?—he is the universe itself?  Is it both romantic and ridiculous? Is that OK? Do we still believe that being romantic is being ridiculous, and anything less is coldly pragmatic?  Do we all long for a mate who wants to catch our cold, share out germs, or hold us while we vomit?  Don't ignore Wright's title.

To Myself by Franz Wright : The Poetry Foundation

Emily Dickinson, "This Quiet Dust"

Thanks to Hannah Stephenson for calling attention last March 30 to this eight-liner, Poem 813 by Emily Dickinson. I had never read it.

         This quiet dust was gentlemen and ladies

         And lads and girls—

         Was laughter and ability and sighing,

         And frocks and curls;

         This passive place a summer's nimble mansion,

         Where bloom and bees

         Fulfilled their oriental circuit,

         Then ceased like these—

Whatever else we might say about it, it's an example of how one can write about the grimmest subjects and be lovely at it—not by writing prettily, in lacy calligraphy, but by capturing the subject in a way that enhances the subject. Dickinson's subject here is mortality and the brevity of human experience. One way to capture that is to be brief, imitating your subject, being as icy with your subject as death is.

What specifics do we remember about someone we knew, now deceased, or humanity in general? I'm bowled over by Dickinson's unpredictable and stunning combination in Line 3:  "laughter and ability and sighing."

It's "ability" that throws a fantastic monkey wrench into what we'd expect. We can imagine ourselves going on and on sentimentally about laughter and sighs; most of us probably think consciously or otherwise that most of what's good is about laughter and sighs, moonlight and roses, splendor in the grass, tip-toeing through the daisies, God's hand patting us on the head or stretching out to show us where the good places are.

So who the hell threw "ability" into that sweet, familiar picture? Well, Emily Dickinson for one.

When we try to attribute  meaning and purpose to our lives, don't we place our abilities and achievements right up there with romantic and family love? "What makes me proud, or at least OK, about being me?" "What did I do or make that was good?" Babies?  Wooden cabinets (when I think of making, I always think first of carpenters, I'm not sure why)?  Space ships, poems, computer programs, a new arrangement of office space on the 43rd floor, an indestructible condom in six colors and sizes—it’s called the 36er  (6 x 6, get it?). 

I made that. Or, my spouse or child or friend made that. If we could know our heart of hearts, or others' heart of hearts, and be honest about it, I bet we admire abilities as much as relationships or more. Anybody can fall in love (or lust). Most people can breed. Most are mediocre at raising children.

By comparison to moonlight, lace, or splendiferous grasses, ability sounds cold and functional. But do you know anyone who can honestly say, "I don't have any ability at anything, and that's fine with me"?

Somewhere in these pages, I’ve told the story of the eminent William Faulkner and his daughter. He was starting a drinking binge, which she'd seen before, and she said something like, “Pappy, pappy, don’t start.” He replied, “Nobody remembers Shakespeare’s children.” 

That cruelty and self-importance are almost unimaginable. However, there's no denying Faulkner's talent, and that complicates the whole situation.  So much for lads and girls and frocks and curls. In demanding attention for “ability,” E.D. has in a way stuck a mean old Faulkner-stick in the middle of hickory dickory dock mush. 

I could go on beating this drum about single words—a mansion that’s “nimble,” or the “circuit” of bees and blooms that’s “oriental”—but maybe I’ve made the point. Emily Dickinson may have felt her poem tugging her toward just another trite, smarmy, whiny protest about death’s unkindness and how sad it is that the laughing, flirting, pretty rich people in the drawing room have to become dust. By inserting curious, attention-demanding words like the few I’ve singled out, E.D. can have her cake more complicated and eat it too.

For those who want to mourn death as the consumption of wealthy elegance, here’s Poem 813. For those who wonder a little more vigorously just what it is we miss when a human dies, here’s Poem 813. E.D. tosses in some nuts and bolts that skew and enlarge the whole discussion. 

This quiet dust was gentlemen and ladies
And lads and girls--
Was laughter and ability and sighing,
And frocks and curls;

This passive place a summer's nimble mansion,
Where bloom and bees
Fulfilled their oriental circuit,
Then ceased like these--

Tony Hoagland, Stephen Dunn, and What's Memorable

Let me begin with something I said in the Visitor Comments last time. I find Stephen Dunn’s work unusually consistent, especially for a poet so prolific. I'm not sure I've ever seen work by him that I thought was bad, though I have of course liked some poems better than others.

On the other hand, I can't offer a single Stephen Dunn title off the top of my head. Some of the poems feel important and powerful as I read them or hear him read (two or three times), but I'm not called back to them the way I am to many poems, and I don’t know why that’s the case. Is it a comment on the poems or on me?

Here is the popular Tony Hoagland's "Don't Tell Anyone," which might be comparable to Dunn’s “Here and Now” in looking at love in maturity—unspectacular love in an unspectacular situation, but also love that becomes spectacular because it continues to discover something new, important, alarming and sad, while remaining grounded in the everyday.

Don’t Tell Anyone by Tony Hoagland : Poetry Magazine

Here and Now- Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More

If I end up remembering Hoagland’s “Don’t Tell Anyone” better than Dunn’s “Here and Now,” that alone doesn’t mean I find Hoagland’s poem better than Dunn’s—just more sticky-brain (probably), which might mean Yeatsian elegance or greasy kids' stuff. 

So help, please. Weigh in on this business of being memorable, whether the subject is poems' phrasing and poignant images, or people, places or events in your own lives.  Also feel free to explain me to me in relation to these two poems and memorability.

The Crooked Beak of Psychology

Don’t Tell Anyone by Tony Hoagland : Poetry Magazine

Stephen Dunn’s “Here and Now”: a Brainy Look at Love

Here and Now- Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More

Stephen Dunn’s “Here and Now”:  a Brainy Look at Love

Stephen Dunn’s work sometimes makes a very good bridge between prosy, chatty, talk-y poem-ish words and the rich tightness or musicality of thought and language that were once required of poetry.

In “Here and Now” some short passages could easily and naturally be heard as prose, but there’s a satisfying weightiness in the content and sometimes a new twist on a familiar word, phrase, or idea. All that might be diminished if presented in cumbersome, pedestrian prose, without benefit of purposeful line breaks and white space that create additional emphasis and meaning.

Consider these lines cast as prose:  “Heaven did exist, I discovered, but was reciprocal and momentary . . . . ”  Sounds like a reflective essay, does it not?  Compare that to Dunn's versification:

                                    Heaven did exist,

            I discovered, but was reciprocal

            and momentary . . .

Now we see some hefty questions more clearly. What exactly does it mean for Heaven to be “reciprocal”?  How important is the fact that Heaven is a thing to be “discovered”—and not through Catholicism but through romantic, erotic love?  By the way, if it’s Heaven, how can it be “momentary”?  I can imagine those questions taking up a healthy hour of discussion and then keeping the participants awake that night.

It's breaking these ideas into lines that encourages us to look more carefully at each word and phrase. We pause at “reciprocal,” which makes us remember that it’s Heaven that Dunn is calling “reciprocal.”  If not presented as poetry, I suspect these big assertions would shrink, would be glossed over, cheated, buried in the endless coffin of a prose paragraph. In Dunn's fairly short lines, they dance.

Do you see other parts of the poem that might work as prose ideas but unveil themselves and breathe better as poetry? 

Here are a couple more examples from me. I'm tempted to balk at the gawky passive voice in “must be arrived at,” but as a fairly short line of poetry, it makes me wrestle with it. I have to see it and wonder about it. Maybe there's a reason for the klutzy structure.

And why the imperative in “must”?  Why must one arrive at it? Why even choose the verb “arrived at” when it requires that awkward, tacked-on preposition, “at”?  Is the meaning of "arrive" worth the clumsiness of adding "at"?  I think there are reasonable, mostly favorable responses to all these questions, and they reveal Dunn's skill in laying out his argument. 

And for sheer, perhaps dismissive playfulness in a serious poem, how about this:

                        let heaven

            go its mythy way,

Am I going too far if I say Dunn might be including, by sound-association, The Milky Way? Perhaps our galaxy is, like the old High Mass Heaven, one more thing that's secondary to love.

Well, that’s enough for now. It’s just that . . . I feel as if I’ve harped a lot here about poetry that’s too prosy, or so prosaic it’s not even poetry, and here’s an example of a memoir-y, philosophical, talk-y poem—in free verse, no less—that meets the standard of verse with room to spare.  IMHO.  At the end of the day, going forward, it’s all good. 

Here and Now- Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More 

           

           

Birds, Nerds, and Where the Love Is

Birding: the Central Park Effect.  See it!  HBO.  Saturday through Wednesday and maybe beyond, at least once per day.

Today’s post is intended as a public service announcement. At various times (check your TV guide or listings), at least once per day, today through Wednesday, and maybe beyond, on HBO, there is a very fine hour-long show celebrating birds, birders, and New York City’s Central Park—previously unknown to me as a birders’ delight.

Moorhen

Great Egret

Tri-Colored Heron

Mockingbird

The captures of birds on video are a reason to watch, but anyone can love gorgeous animals. The real stars of the show are the birders. Even the nastiest hockey team or street gang might see in these nature lovers a new kind of role model. Without pretention, the bird-nerds are articulate, likable, down to earth, self-effacing, and in one case, remarkably courageous. As a group, they articulated perfectly the reasons for my own attraction to the critters, some of which I wasn't sure of myself. It can feel good to be part of a group, even as a Class D minor leaguer.

By the way, one well-known name among the Central Park group is novelist Jonathan Franzen.

Although I still love football and like baseball, my new team just might be The Bird Nerd Crawdads. Colors? Anything bright, though sparrows and wrens are admitted without bias. 

My photos today are from the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge in southern Florida.

Russell Edson with John Prine, Iris DeMenthe, and Pacific Banjo

Idyll?

Imaginer? Seer?

It's a summer Monday. We all might need a pretty scene and a lighter touch, so here is a Russell Edson prose poem I enjoyed. I hadn't been back to him for years, and some readers might not know him at all. Maybe the first question is how seriously we should take his prose poems. Are they merely entertaining diversions, or is there more? Shall we call it substance? Skill? Or rip-off? Or more meekly, verbal shenanigans? (I like the word "shenanigan").

Let Us Consider by Russell Edson : The Poetry Foundation

Maybe I'm forcing it, but I see at least a vague, thin connection from Edson to John Prine's song to blogger Pacific Banjo's engaging pictorial accompaniment. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRb1h989_jk&list=PL86EBCFC7DE01ECF8&index=1&feature=plpp_video

The Tendril That Stole the Show