Ed Harkness

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THE LAW OF THE UNFORESEEN, Poems by Edward Harkness. Pleasure Boat Studio, 3710 SW Barton St., Seattle, WA 98126,  2018, 116 pages, $14, paper, pleasureboatstudio.com.

In the cover notes, Anne Pitkin describes Ed Harkness’s poems as riding “a current of melancholy, a certainty of loss which deepens the vitality.” A northwest native, Harkness writes about his travels at home and abroad and reaches back through time to share the paths his ancestors took before him. And, in this poem, Walt Whitman joins the chorus.

Today’s poem suggests a great poetry prompt. What would happen if you invited a poet from the past (Dickinson, Rilke, Yeats?) to join your morning walk? What will they notice that you might otherwise miss? What snippets from their poems might you weave in? What will the two of you talk about as you meander?

Whitman Reading by Moonlight

Walt Whitman pads around on the lawn
in bathrobe and slippers. Moonlight
silvers the lilac tree by the dooryard,
the flowers long gone from lavender to rust.
He opens his notebook to read a recent draft,
the title appearing as–he can’t make it out–
“Growing Broken Berry,” it looks like.
Back in bed he sees himself forlorn,
alone on the stern, riding the Brooklyn Ferry,
his shirt collar turned up, his fingers
clutching the brim of his straw hat.
He opens his notebook and reads aloud
by moonlight a draft, its working title:
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” In bed,
staring at the blank screen of the ceiling,
he watches himself tear out one page
from the notebook, then another.
When he releases them, they rise like gulls
aloft on the back draft, awhirl in a billow
of coal smoke and steam. Pages flutter
ungainly, as if wounded, alighting
on the wake’s white fire where they swim,
swirl, flatten and disappear
into the black waters of the Hudson.

Kathleen Kirk

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ABCS OF WOMEN’S WORK, Kathleen Kirk. Red Bird Chapbooks, 1055 Agate St., Saint Paul, MN 55117, 2015, 52 pages, $12 paper, www.redbirdchapbooks.com.

What a delight to spend my morning with this book. It’s an abecedarian of poems, and a work of art itself, hand-sewn, a print of a needlework alphabet sampler on the cover. Several of the poems are ekphrastics (poems about works of art), beginning with “Annunciation,”  after the Botticelli painting. The poems continue through the alphabet — “Before I Can See,” “Cold in the House,” and so forth.

I was mightily tempted to share Kirk’s poem for Q (“Quinsy,” a two-page riff on Q words: “Quirky and antique,” “the dear quotidian”). But I think the poem that really has me dazzled is the last one. In addition to working in band names (such as Feist and Morphine), this poem itself is an abecedarian.  Look for the letters A-M down the left margin, and N-Z, up the right. What a hoot!

(XYZ) ABCs of Woman’s Work

John Sloane, A Woman’s Work (1912)

A woman’s work is better done with a jazz
background, I learned late in life. Hanging laundry
can be a breeze with the right music, and sex
doesn’t drag with a lush instrumental. How
easy now to polish the lav,
Feist on the boombox, or U2.
“Genteel euphemisms” aside, it’s hot
here in the kitchen, cooking with gas.
I am a realist, not a Realist with a capital “R.”
John Sloan can’t paint me as his Susie Q–
Kathleen, Poet with Dust Mop, 
leaning over the fire escape railing to shake it to
Morphine, “Early to Bed,” earbuds in.

My morning’s response was to write an A poem…but I think an abecedarian (A Waitress’s Alphabet?) is definitely in the works.

Maurice Harmon

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LOVE IS NOT ENOUGH: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, Maurice Harmon. Salmon Poetry, Cliffs of Moher, County Clare, Ireland, 2010, 105 pages, €12.00, www.salmonpoetry.com.

I blogged about Maurice Harmon‘s Love Is Not Enough in April 2018 (click on the link to go to that longer post). His 90th birthday is coming up fast, and though I can’t be in Dublin for the party, I thought rereading his book and sharing another poem would lessen the distance.

As I’m working on a poem of my own about walking, I wrote this stanza into my journal this morning —

I could make magic too.
But this is real, the old road part of me,
an artery strafed by rain, the bay
from Skerries to Clogherhead a seething cauldron.
I cycled this road to Streamstown,
the ditches filled with Queen Anne’s Lace,
hawthorn’s communion cloth,
the chestnut’s candlelabra,
the rowan’s offerings
beech canopies,
grasslands kings desired,
woods ringing with song,
sturdy stands.
My holy road, my pilgrim path, my royal way.

from “The North Road”

Love Is Not Enough includes a range of Harmon’s work, and he never flinches from the controversial (see his long poems about the Catholic Church, Irish politics, and academe). Harmon is a scholar-poet, and other books include a translation, The Dialogue of the Ancients of Ireland (2009) and the anthology, Irish Poetry After Yeats (1978, 1998). His more formal poems (rolling rhythms, unexpected rhyme) are my favorites.  This poem, for instance, which first appeared in The Last Regatta (2000):

Slow Learner

We lived so far from town I did
not go to school for years,
truant of woods and shore.

I knew the ways of birds,
could track the rabbit and the fox,
guarded the hens against the hawk.

When goats were born I raised
them as my own, when pups were drowned
I mourned, but loved the one we saved.

I got no marks at school for flinging sticks,
could neither read nor write, so late
to class the Catechism was my ABC.

Christ sat upon the mat. Morality was strange:
commandments, mysteries, big sins, little sins.
I was a rabbit trapped within the furze.

I reared away from priestly bit and ban.
I shied from sin. What I knew best
was climbing slowly through dreamy firs

until I hung above a swaying world,
could see the castle turning on its hill,
could feel the ocean roll toward Rockabill.

 

 

Carmen Germain

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THE OLD REFUSALS, Carmen Germain, Moon Path Press, P.O. Box 445, Tillamook, OR 97141, 2019, 64 pages, $16 paper, http://MoonPathPress.com

In November, 2019, it was my privilege to read on the Foothills Writers Series in Port Angeles with poets Karen Whalley and Carmen Germain. Although I had crossed paths with Germain once or twice, this was my first real introduction to her work, and it has been my pleasure to get to know her better through her poems. Rereading The Old Refusals this morning I had a sense of a long conversation about books she is reading, places she’s traveled to, paintings she’s studied. Also a visual artist, Germain brings a painter’s love of color and line to every poem. (Her sonnet, “A Coupling” — a sample image: “your hand a bloated pomegranate” — made me want to get out my journal and see if I couldn’t condense my week in a Paris apartment into something that adept.)

According to the notes, this poem uses “techniques of collage and cut-ups from random sources” (61). It made me think of a surrealist painting. It blows my mind.

The doomed queen is outwardly stately

clustering her subjects by the shipwreck–
the off-duty singer, the glassblower,
the waiter who comes to clear the plates.

Full of elegant repetitions,
she has the grin of an adman,
but no one believes the crisis is over.

Even experts lack expertise
and anyone listening in the hold
knows the flash drive’s concealed in the cake.

How at the click of a button,
can opener, batteries, and flashlight appear.
Tins of soup and bottled water,

tranquil trickling sounds,
mechanics emerging from the pirate ship
like coins spilling from a purse.

Underneath the sea bed, buildings and rusty spoons.
Evidence of so many busy street corners
so many meals on the fly.

-Carmen Germain