Naomi Shihab Nye’s Transfer

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Thanks to Dave Bonta at the blog Via Negativa, and his twitter feed, I’ve been spending a little time over the last couple of days with other poetry bloggers. (It was a lovely surprise to find a bunch of retweets leading me to bethanyareid.com. Someone IS reading me!)

This infusion of enthusiasm came just in time. Maybe because I had just gotten my own poetry manuscript off to an editor, maybe because I spent the weekend awash in poetry, maybe because someone at Goodreads asked if the project wasn’t going to give me “poetry indigestion” — I was questioning my purpose. But, then, the tweet, the blogs, and the books themselves renewed me.

No indigestion here. It was my great pleasure to spend the day with Naomi Shihab Nye, one of my poetry heroes. I learned yesterday that she will be speaking in at WWU in Bellingham on April 28 and I immediately recruited some compatriots in the land of poetry and made our reservations.

I also — since I was at Village Books when I saw the poster — picked up a copy of her 2011 book, Transfer (another poetry book, Bethany? really?). Worth it.

Transfer is a a tribute to Shihab Nye’s father, Aziz Shihab, who was a journalist and died of kidney failure and heart complications in 2007. The book includes some of his own words. I loved every poem. I took a picture of one poem, “Last Wishes,” about a 95 year old woman, and sent it to my friend Carolynne who just threw a birthday party for a 90 year old neighbor. I read lines aloud to my daughter. I wrote down these lines in my poetry journal: “There’s a way not to be broken / that takes brokenness to find it” (“Cinco de Mayo”). She manages to write out of and about her experience as a Palestinian American, and at the same time to capture what crosses and transcends cultural boundaries and speaks directly to my human heart. Her father was always looking for a home in the world, she tells us. At the same time, he — and his daughter — seemed to have found that home, in poetry, in writing, in family and friends, in acts of radical kindness to strangers.

Her poem “Kindness” is in my 2015 post, which you can find here.  And here is a poem whose title came from her father’s notebooks:

When One Is So Far from Home, Life Is a Mix of Fact and Fiction 

No one should hold that against you.
It’s a means of survival.
Sometimes I thought my best talent was
taking a skinny story, adding wings and a tail.
Dressing it in a woolen Bedouin cloak
with stitching around the edges.
Putting a headdress on it.
Making a better picture.
Your mother got mad at me sometimes
for telling a story differently but it wasn’t a lie,
just a story in different clothes
with other things emphasized.
My own mother dressed up stories for 106 years
till that last winter she rode in her bed
like a boat, sitting up to sleep.
Maybe it’s our duty to be shaped
a hundred times by the same stories.
We think we’re telling them
but really they’re keeping us alive,
memory oxygen breathed out and in.

Kevin Craft’s Vagrants & Accidentals

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This luminous book makes my heart happy. It takes up big themes–like identity, loss, space and time–and fastens them to the page with the smallest of details, precise and exact, that flare up in the imagination, opening into fissures that grow wider and wider with each rereading.

I’ve known Kevin Craft for about 20 years, we once shared an office at Everett Community College, and we both wrote our poems and shared them while wrangling our way from part-time English instructors to full-time, from newbie probationers, to tenured faculty, to …well, you get the picture. He’s still there, and despite a full plate of family, teaching, travel, and somehow managing to be executive editor of Poetry Northwest, has continued to write. And so, this book, Vagrants & Accidentals, which is the seventeenth book in the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series. You can read more about him, and a sampling of his poems, at Poetry Foundation.

Here’s a poem that I keep going back to:

Old Paradox

Consider that a single grain of sand
cannot be arranged so as to form
a heap.

Consider that it’s difficult
if not impossible to discover the exact
moment a tadpole becomes a frog,

the precise instant al dente
loses its bright tooth. At noon I am
half in love with you, half distracted

by the dishes in the sink.
Now the soul: tell me where is it
that split-second before

and after the old woman who is mother
and grandmother and cousin
to those assembled in a hospice room

kisses her own immigrant grandmother
on the cheek as she leaves that Napoli
she left long ago

forever in the past? In dying, does she
take the flyswatter with her,
does every cell turn off at once?

One death permeable as grief,
another obdurate: they lean against
each other, accumulating

mass. On a scale of extravagant
to frugal, we fall everywhere
between.

–Kevin Craft, Vagrants & Accidentals (University of Washington Press, 2017)

Joanie Mackowski’s The Zoo

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Back in the day–when I was earning an MFA from the University of Washington–I knew Joanie Mackowski. She was clearly a rising star even then and I have kept my eye on her. This book, The Zoo (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), won the 2000 Associated Writing Program Award in Poetry. I have a signed copy (from Joannie’s book launch at Open Books), and I admit to not merely having read it all the way through several times, but to having used the poems as models in my one-bad-poem process (2005-2010).

I love Joanie’s poems. They are crammed with scientific detail, with color and with and remarkable riffs of sound. To hear her reading her own work and discussing Sylvia Plath’s, visit this site. Meanwhile, here is the first poem of The Zoo, a book I am happy to recommend to you.

Ants 

Two wandering across the porcelain
Siberia, one alone on the windowsill,

four across the ceiling’s senseless field
of pale yellow, one negotiating folds

in a towel: tiny, bronze-colored, antennae
“strongly elbowed,” crawling over Antony

and Cleopatra, face down, unsurprised,
one dead in the mountainous bar of soap.

Sub-family Formicinae (a single
segment behind the thorax), the sickle

moons of their abdomens, one trapped in bubbles
(I soak in the tub); with no clear purpose

they come in by the baseboard, do not bite,
crush bloodless beneath a finger. Peterson’s

calls them “social creatures,” yet what grim
society: identical pilgrims,

seed-like, brittle, pausing on the path
only three seconds to touch another’s

face, some hoisting the papery carcasses
of their dead in their jaws, which open and close

like the clasp of a necklace. “Mating occurs
in flight”–what better way? Weightless, reckless

rapture: the winged queen and her mate, quantum
passion spiraling beneath the tamarisk,

and then the queen sheds her wings, adjusts
the pearl-like larvae in their cribs of sand:

more anvil-headed, creeping attentions
to follow cracks in the tile, the lip of the tub,

and one starting across the mirror now, doubled.

Dorianne Laux’s The Book of Men

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How can I possibly write about Dorianne Laux without gushing?

This book qualifies for my series this month (poetry books I’ve been meaning to read cover-to-cover) because, in 2013, when she was the keynote speaker at Litfuse in Tieton, I came home with a whole stack of books, and I suspect this one got lost in the shuffle. I would like to swear that I did read The Book of Men (Norton, 2011) immediately and all the way through. But sitting here this evening, the poems seem awfully new to me. Whichever way it goes, I’m so glad I got to read them today, all in “one fell swoop,” as they say. I will be reading them again.

I love this poem — which appeared in the anthology A Cadence of Hooves (as did two of my poems) — a long time ago. And, yes, it, too, feels brand new, even though I know I’ve read it many times. I think what I’m confronting here is the freshness and vivacity of the images and words. As Ezra Pound famously said, “Poetry is news that stays news.”

The Rising

The pregnant mare at rest in the field
the moment we drove by decided
to stand up, rolled her massive body
sideways over the pasture grass,
gathered her latticed spine, curved ribs
between the hanging pots of flesh,
haunches straining, kneebones bent
on the bent grass cleaved
astride the earth she pushed against
to lift the brindled breast, the architecture
of the neck, the anvil head, her burred mane
tossing flames as her forelegs unlatched in air
while her back legs, buried beneath her belly,
set each horny hoof in opposition
to the earth, a counterweight concentrated there,
and by a willful rump and switch of tail hauled up,
flank and fetlock, her beastly burden, seized
and rolled and wrenched and winched the wave
of her body, the grand totality of herself,
to stand upright in the depth of that field.
The heaviness of gravity upon her.
The strength of the mother.

In addition to the rough music of this poem, I hope you will notice that it is all one sentence until we reach the third to last line. Then the heaviness, gravity, and strength come under the poem in two short sentences that hold the weight of all of it together. A beautiful poem. An amazing poet.