Kaveh Akbar

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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

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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)

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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.

Jeanne Lohmann

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This morning, feeling busy and harassed (and distracted by the poetry reading at 4 p.m.), I thought I’d phone it in with a favorite poem by Jeanne Lohmann (1923-2016). Instead I found myself rereading all of her 2001 book, Flying Horses (Fithian Press).

She Who Travels Alone

No, not in Bristol or in Galway will I find him,
not Minneapolis or Sioux City. Though I am brave
and go as far as Antarctica, he does not
ride the ice floes or swim under frozen water.
He does not live with sheep in the Midlands
or walk the abandoned cloister. He
is not to be found on the benches in pubs
or the next seat at the theater. His shadow
does not hang on a thornbush or darken
the lost emerald lake in British Columbia.
The greenest of fields in Africa will not revive him,
or castanets in cantinas south of the border. He
does not rake stones in the Japanese garden,
sit silent and patient with open eyes in the zendo.
He does not lift luggage into the car or insist
on the open window. Though I am a tireless traveler
I cannot search out his face or bring him to bed.
The last kiss was goodbye, God be with you
most trusting and hopeful of prayers
for each restless departure,
each solitary coming home.

—Jeanne Lohmann

This is a book that I reread every so often. I love her praise poems and have several copied out in my commonplace book. But each time I read Flying Horses I’m caught by a different theme, or one poem I’ve overlooked leaps out at me. Today I’ve noticed how Lohmann plays with language, and draws other poets and writers into her poems–Dickinson and Whitman, John Donne, and D. H. Lawrence, Shakespeare, Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Sea Song Out of Beowulf

Dree me to nim the swan-road, breast-hoard, suffer me
to hole the sea’s storehouse, thole and take hold
of the bone-house, body-box, dree the skeleton store,
all the way suffer and endure the body walking light on the sea,
the body walking and the swan-road a-sheen, the body’s trunk
walking on the sea shining. Thole the breast-hoard,
nim the bone-house, seize the body-box, suffer
the store of thoughts and feelings home to the sea,
dree the skeleton all the way to the sea, the swan-road a-sheen
in the morning, the sea shining and singing in the morning.

—Jeanne Lohmann

I have been struggling with creating a new manuscript of poems, daunted at the task of choosing a smaller number of poems out of the cacaphonous 120 or so in my notebook and calling it “whole.” But Flying Horses takes numerous motifs—horses, the death of her parents and friends and especially of her husband, births of children, travels, all she is reading—and weaves them into a tapestry. (One poem, “Across the Warp,” seems to speak deliberately to this: “This rough underside, this is where we work / against the threads’ resistance, the tangled / colors.”)

Lohmann is often identified as a Quaker poet, and in many of these poems the spirit is present, shimmering. In a late poem, “Wasp in the House,” she writes about the trick of catching the wasp in a drinking-glass. She concludes: “As when tired of words / and the world, I am able to befriend / some small humming complexity / and let it go.”