Louise Glück, “Presque Isle”

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Presque Isle, MichiganH

Here’s a poem by Louise Glück, winner of last year’s National Book Award for Poetry. This poem makes me think of something my teacher, Nelson Bentley, used to say, “Recurring memories are poems, asking to be written.”

PRESQUE ISLE

In every life, there’s a moment or two.
In every life, a room somewhere, by the sea or in the mountains.

On the table, a dish of apricots. Pits in a white ashtray.

Like all images, these were the conditions of a pact:
on your cheek, tremor of sunlight,
my finger pressing your lips.
The walls blue-white; paint from the low bureau flaking a little.

That room must still exist, on the fourth floor,
with a small balcony overlooking the ocean.
A square white room, the top sheet pulled back over the edge of the bed.
It hasn’t dissolved back into nothing, into reality.
Through the open window, sea air, smelling of iodine.

Early morning: a man calling a small boy back from the water.
That small boy — he would be twenty now.

Around your face, rushes of damp hair, streaked with auburn.
Muslin, flicker of silver. Heavy jar filled with white peonies.

–Louise Glück

Ellen Bass, “The World Has Need of You”

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My introduction to poet Ellen Bass was courtesy of Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, Nov. 19, 2008, when he read “After Our Daughter’s Wedding.” It was a poem I loved so much I printed out copies of it and gave it to friends. I love how deceptively simple her poems are, how they feel almost like a woman sitting down beside you and telling you how her day went. And then, there’s always the surprising image that makes your own imagination leap.

Here’s a poem from her new collection, Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon, 2014). (Click on the title to go to the PBS Newshour review.)

THE WORLD HAS NEED OF YOU

everything here
seems to need us
Rainer Maria Rilke

I can hardly imagine it
as I walk to the lighthouse, feeling the ancient
prayer of my arms swinging
in counterpoint to my feet.
Here I am, suspended
between the sidewalk and twilight,
the sky dimming so fast it seems alive.
What if you felt the invisible
tug between you and everything?
A boy on a bicycle rides by,
his white shirt open, flaring
behind him like wings.
It’s a hard time to be human. We know too much
and too little. Does the breeze need us?
The cliffs? The gulls?
If you’ve managed to do one good thing,
the ocean doesn’t care.
But when Newton’s apple fell toward the earth,
the earth, ever so slightly, fell
toward the apple as well.

Big Poetry Giveaway

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Even though I seriously intended, long before poetry month began, to participate in the Great Poetry Giveaway commemorating National Poetry Month, I put off the communication necessary, and it’s now too late to be “official,” on Kelli Russell Agodon’s blog, Book of Kells. Even so, I have two give-aways to share. If you leave your name in the comments section below this post, you’ll be eligible for the drawing to win one of them. Be sure to leave me contact information.

If you don’t want to leave contact information on a public forum, email me at bethany.alchemy@gmail.com. You can still be in the drawing.

Here are the books:

1) Signed copies of my TWO books, Sparrow, published in 2012 by Big Pencil Press, and winner of the Gell Poetry Prize; AND The Coyotes and My Mom, published in 1989 by Bellowing Ark Press (and now out of print). If you already own my books, you’re still welcome to enter the drawing — you can give your new copies to a friend.

2) For my second giveaway, what if I gave away a WHOLE STACK of poetry books? I am, after all, buried in books, drowning in books. So (see the picture), that is what I will do. They begin with Jane Hirshfield’s Of Gravity and Angels (Wesleyan, 1988), a book I’ve read numerous times (it is a bit shopworn). The poem I used on the blog this month, “Woman in a Red Coat,” is included in this collection. THEN, should your name be drawn, you get these others, too, including Ted Kooser’s Splitting an Order, in hardback! 

And all you have to do in order to be included in the drawing, is comment on this post.

Holly J. Hughes, “Desire Lines”

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I want to remind you again that I am reading — one of five readers — at Edmonds Bookshop this Thursday evening. To see more information, you can click on the “Upcoming Events” tab above.

Speaking of “all trades, their gear and tackle and trim” (Hopkins), I want to once again recommend Sailing by Ravens by Holly J. Hughes  for an immersion lesson into all things watery. (To see my review and links to others, click here.)

I was thinking of Holly’s book because I spent yesterday at a family party hosted by my sister and brother-in-law. My mom was there, holding court, as well as a few of her sisters and a few of our cousins. Lots of family stories. And Mom, of course, perpetually conversing with the people long dead. My sister brought out a family album and I started thinking that I could write a poem about my grandfather. So, to inspire me (surely an exercise right out of her book with Brenda Miller, The Pen and the Bell), here is Holly’s prose poem, “Desire Lines”:

DESIRE LINES

Desire lines: where people have walked, made their own paths

About her great-grandfather, the English sea captain, she knows less. As the family story goes, the ship he commanded set sail from London, a seventeen-year-old Spanish girl of noble blood aboard bound for finishing school in Cuba. When the ship docked in New Orleans, they eloped. So much the story doesn’t say. What were her first words to him, the stately captain? How many days out from port before he gazed into the vanishing horizon of her eyes? When did they stand at the bow, glimpse together a future glimmering? At what precise coordinate did they cross desire’s shimmering line? Where in the vast Atlantic, as the ship steamed south, did their bodies know they would not — could not — return to the lives they’d left behind?

By Thursday night, maybe I’ll have a logging poem for you about my grandfather.