Holly Hughes: PASSINGS

It’s Earth Day, and this morning I spent my early hours rereading Passings, 15 poems about extinct birds—a luminous, heartbreaking, award-winning collection of poems from Holly J. Hughes.

Passings was first published in 2016 by Expedition Press as a limited-edition letterpress chapbook. It garnered national attention in 2017 when it received an American Book Award from The Before Columbus Foundation. As Holly says in her acknowledgments, “fitting that a small letterpress, itself an endangered art form, would be honored.” More than fitting, richly deserved.

It is our great good fortune that in 2019 Passings was reprinted by Jill McCabe Johnson’s Wandering Aengus Press. Although the gratitudes are slightly expanded, it is essentially the same and available from the press, or your independent bookstore

When I contacted Holly, she wrote back with these words—and it’s impossible for me to excerpt or condense them. Consider this essay, and the poem following, her Earth Day gift to all of us.

Listening Hard for All the Voices:  Writing Passings

Sometimes we don’t have a choice. Each time I tell this story I remember that moment coming down the stairs of my cabin and seeing the Audubon painting of the passenger pigeon I’d just  hung on the wall. The dusky-blue plumage and russet breast glow eerily in a stray shaft of morning sun, and the pair of birds caught by Audubon seem alive, inviting me to enter their intimate moment together. I’m not sure how long I stood there watching; at some point I heard a voice say: Write about us. You know. What happened. Yes, I did know, but I wasn’t sure I could. It was painful to contemplate writing about the slaughter of those vast flocks of passenger pigeons that filled the skies like a great storm back in the early 1900s. But the chance glimpse of their ghost spirits that morning felt like an invitation I couldn’t refuse.

That was the first poem in Passings.

Now they need company, I thought, and of course, there is no shortage of species of birds that have gone extinct, the list a heart-wrenching litany. As I researched each bird, I dug down through the sobering, overwhelming statistics for firsthand accounts, for stories that would bring each bird to life on the page, details that would allow us to see each departed bird in all its fleeting, fragile, idiosyncratic beauty.

I’m not sure when I knew I had a collection, but at some point, the project took on a life of its own. As the poems stacked up, the stories of how each species met its end began to repeat, became depressingly familiar: slaughter for feathers, for meat, for sport, for revenge; habitat loss, rats plundering nests. The list went on and on. I had written close to thirty poems when I realized I would choose only fifteen to include, no more, for that might be all we could bear. That decision allowed me to finish the collection. That and a book called Swift as a Shadow: Extinct & Endangered Birds, by photographer Rosamond Purcell, whose haunting portraits of extinct birds reminded me not to turn away.

This morning, as I write this, I’ve just returned from my morning walk listening to the shrieks of an osprey and eagle as they circle high above my cabin. While I watch, the eagle dive-bombs the osprey, who deftly somersaults, then regains balance, her wings flashing light as they catch the morning sun, this moment held briefly aloft. Eventually, the osprey returns to her nest in a tall snag down the street where I hope a young one waits. I’m not sure this is connected, but I think it has to do with being willing to listen hard for all the voices, past and present, and to make space for the silenced voices, too. If not the poets and artists, who will do this?

“Passenger Pigeon” is the first poem in Passings, and you can follow this link to listen to a choral presentation of it, performed by The Crossing Choir.

PASSENGER PIGEON

Echtopistes migratorius

— from the painting by James J. Audubon, 1824. On Sept. 1, 1914,
Martha, the last passenger pigeon died in the Cincinnati Zoo.

See how she bends to him, her beak held within his
while she waits for his food to rise up to her hunger.

He rests on the arcing branch, his neck a perfect answer to hers,
wings held aloft and slightly splayed while long tail feathers stream

away, Prussian blue going to dusk, breast russet, branch below
studded with viridian lichen to match his coat, colors chosen

by Audubon as he painted them in courtship in situ.
See how her colors foreshadow the fall—dun, mustard, black—

how her tail balances his wings painted in parallel planes,
how the drooping oak leaf holds them in place, stasis

in which they are aware of no one but each other.
Audubon captured them in gouache, graphite, and pastels,

not knowing they would soon be gone; in his time
they were more numerous than all other species combined.

They say the pigeons flew over the banks of the Ohio River
for three days in succession, sounding like a hard gale at sea.

Years later, guns splattered shot into skies stormy with pigeons.
Thousands plummeted, filling railroad cars bound for fine restaurants.

Now, of those hundreds of millions that once darkened
the skies, we are left with Martha, who never lived in the wild,

stuffed in the Smithsonian, Prussian blue feathers stiff,
glass eyes staring, waiting, still, for her mate.

—Holly Hughes

“Carolina Parakeet” also has a  choral piece and this great painting by Audubon (see below). As a final note, let me add this direction, from the notes: “What You Can Do to Help Protect Birds,” climate.audubon.org

 

 

 

Kaveh Akbar

I really do sincerely feel that bewilderment is at the core of every great poem, and in order to be bewildered, you have to be able to wonder. You absolutely have to be permeable to wonder. —Kaveh Akbar

A neighboring blog (so to speak), The Poetry Department…aka The Boynton Blog,  not long ago posted this quote from the poet Kaveh Akbar. I had never heard of him, but I’ve been curious about him ever since, and luckily managed to lay my hands on his book, Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books, 2017).

So now I’m embarrassed. Kaveh Akbar is huge. He is the poetry editor of The Nation, his poems have appeared all over the place, including The New Yorker, which I read faithfully (or thought I did), teaches all over the place, and founded Divedapper, “a home for dialogues with the most vital voices in American poetry.”

Having confessed to my obliviousness, I hardly consider myself to be a reliable guide to his poems. But a few clues about this book: a yellow sticky note that a previous reader left between pages, reading “addiction”; the sticky note borne out by the epigraph to the first section, “All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation” (W. H. Auden).

Themes interwoven (and overlapping) throughout the poems: alcoholism, hunger, desire, sex, God, death.

Sample lines: “If the body is just a parable / about the body if breath / is a leash to hold the mind” (“Against Dying”).

And: “blue water plus yellow sun equals // green plants it’s almost too simple to speak” (“The Straw Is Too Long, the Axe Is Too Dull”).

Well, it all just blows my mind.

francine j. harris’s praise from the back cover: “You can open this stunning debut, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, anywhere and find the critical tenderness that permeates Kaveh Akbar’s work.” I heartily agree. Or, as in the quote I began with, the poems are everywhere “permeable to wonder.” I don’t pretend to fathom this book, and certainly not this poet on one read-through, but here is one poem—others have more elaborate choreography, most are much longer—

Recovery

First, setting down the glass.

Then the knives.

Black resin seeps

into the carpet.

According to science,

I should be dead.

Lyptus table, unsteady

boat, drifts away.

Angostura, agave,

elderberry, rye—

the whole paradisal

bouquet spins apart.

Here, I am graceless.

No. Worse than that.

—Kaveh Akbar

Poetry Month Announcements

I’m booked all day, Tuesday, 20 April, from early morning to evening, so I am taking a little break from reading a poetry book cover to cover and writing a “real” blog post, to share these reading announcements from both Anita K. Boyle and David D. Horowitz.

Anita’s first reading is Wednesday, April 21, 7pm on ZOOM, and is through West Seattle’s PoetryBridge Community. She will share featured poet position with Joannie Stangeland (whose book was included in last April’s blog round-up). There is an open mic right after the two features, and if you’re interested in reading &/or listening to more poetry, please email the event host Leopoldo Seguel at info@poetrybridge.net to get the link for this reading.
The second reading is Thursday, April 22, 6pm, courtesy of the superlative Edmonds Bookshop. Six poets will be reading from the Rose Alley anthology, Footbridge Above the Falls: Carolyne Wright, James Bertolino, David D. Horowitz, Randolph Douglas Schuder, and Anita K. Boyle. The reading will be live-streamed through Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/EdmondsBookshop/.  More information can be found at https://edmondsbookshop.indielite.org/event/our-annual-poetry-reading.

The third reading is extra special. Bellingham’s SpeakEasy is featuring our new Washington State Poet Laureate Rena Priest, Saturday, April 24 at 7pm. A few of Rena’s Bellingham mentors and friends will be reading with her: James Bertolino,  Nancy Pagh, Jeanne Yeasting, and Anita K. Boyle. More information and the link to this event can be found at  Other Mind Press’s website, and at https://www.facebook.com/events/470241207425214.

Finally, I want to point people toward The Seattle Times story about Rena that appeared in Sunday’s paper: “New Washington State Poet Laureate Aims to Celebrate Poetry in Indigenous Communities.” The featured photo above (isn’t it lovely?) accompanied the article.

Ruth Stone (1915-2011)

I have to admit that this morning I felt utterly exhausted. I seemed to be suffering from a complete lack of forward momentum and was just about to commit to taking a day off from my #nationalpoetrymonth blog marathon, when I opened my email and found this:

I was thinking about how I think of my life as stories, which tripped me to think about short stories, which caused me to wonder about how a poem is like a short story….I went to your blog and right off the bat, found two great examples of poems that are short stories. Gary Copeland Lilley and Jeanne Lohmann gave me a knock on the side of the head.

It made me want to join the conversation again.

I have been reading—sometimes memorizing—Ruth Stone’s poems ever since I came across her early poem, “Orchard” in a small Modern Library anthology with a blue cover: Twentieth Century American Poetry. Published by Random House in 1944, and again in 1963, that “Twentieth-Century” seems poorly chosen, or at least arbitrary. I mean, why did the editors decide to include Emily Dickinson? Perhaps because she was published in the 20th century? But in 1944, we still had half a century to survive and write about!

Since that time I have picked up numerous copies of Ruth Stone’s books (she had 12, during her life). And now, thanks to Copper Canyon Press, we have a new, Essential Ruth Stone. I paid for a ticket so I could attend their Zoom book launch last fall, and bought a copy of the book.

Please, please follow the link (in paragraph above) to Copper Canyon and listen to Ruth’s granddaughter, Bianca, read aloud “Pokeberries.” Worth the price of admission. (And is it too much to hope that one day I’ll have a granddaughter who writes poems?)

Speaking of reading poetry aloud, I once heard Dorianne Laux recite this poem aloud—this was during her keynote talk at Litfuse, in maybe 2015. I had read the poem before, probably more than once. Frankly, it had never really come alive for me. But when Dorianne Laux recited it! Years later, I can still hear Dorianne’s voice—and Ruth Stone’s words. It also strikes me as being a perfectly condensed short story. Addressed to her late husband (who committed suicide when their daughters were young), the poem pours a whole life into its lines:

Curtains

Putting up new curtains
other windows intrude.
As though it is that first winter in Cambridge
when you and I had just moved in.
Now cold borscht alone in a bare kitchen.

What does it mean if I say this years later?

Listen, last night I am on a crying jag
with my landlord, Mr. Tempesta.
I sneaked in two cats.
He screams, “No pets! No pets!”
I become my aunt Virginia,
proud but weak in the head.
I remember Anna Magnani.
I throw a few books. I shout.
He wipes his eyes and opens his hands.
OK OK keep the dirty animals
but no nails in the walls.
We cry together.
I am so nervous, he says.

I want to dig you up and say, look,
it’s like the time, remember,
when I ran into our living room naked
to get rid of that fire inspector.

See what you miss by being dead?

—Ruth Stone

Forgive my pronunciation of Anna Magnani. I practiced it, and still didn’t get it right.