Valerie Martinez, “Rock and Marrow”

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I came across VALERIE MARTÍNEZ at the Taos Summer Writers Conference, several years ago. I attended a reading, I think, though maybe it was a panel, and I bought her book, World to World, which I have been lucky to own ever since, and will be giving away in The Big Poetry Giveaway. (See my blogpost on April 13 for more information.)

Lisa D. Chavez calls these poems “lush and lovely” and notes that they “speak the secret languages of desire.” I like that, “languages,” plural. Although the poems are in English, reading them you drop through into other levels of language, like the “dark coin” of a child’s eye, or the doors that “become doors.” Here is something short, but richly evocative in exactly that way. You may also notice that with the “you” of the sixth line, and the directive of the sentence after, it becomes an instruction poem.

ROCK AND MARROW

Yes, yes, the inside of morning
is cheekbone, elbow, pelvis.
Elsewhere, as the chlorophyll shrinks
earthward, so does the steady rain.
I imagine the center of the planet
hot and colorful. You see,
it needn’t always be vivid and visible.
Lie low in this monochrome
tangle of limbs. I like it
vague and warm at the center
of the densest of things.

–Valerie Martinez (from World to World)

William Dunlop (1936-2005)

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A quick reminder, that if you want to take part in the drawing for the Big Poetry Giveaway at this blogsite, you need to comment here (the post from April 13). Visit Kelli Russell Agodon’s blog for more opportunities. Happy National Poetry Month! I hope you’re writing!

In addition to being a fine poet, William Dunlop was my professor when I was an undergraduate at the University of Washington, and trying my hand at Victorian studies. What I remember best about him is how he would lean against the chalk tray on the blackboard and get chalkdust all over the back of his tweed jacket. I also remember him peering out the window at anti-war protesters in the quad below, and saying, in his British accent, “Ah, it makes me miss the dear, dead days.” (I presumed he meant the sixties, but who knows?) I remember that when we studied Thomas Hardy, he made us read the poems, too. I also remember that when the class thought he was reading aloud the first chapter of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, I noticed that he wasn’t turning the pages and was actually reciting from memory.

So here is a poem from his book, Caruso for the Children & Other Poems, published by Rose Alley Press in 1997.

FINAL DIRECTIONS

I hate a tended grave. Save me a place
to go to seed in, growing so absorbed
some craft beyond a common practice shapes
my plot and has me, breathless, utter
what comes most natural. There’s a point
where skillful trimming is the work of hacks:
death should be one word no-one can compose
neat settings for. With life ruled out at last
it’s time to wax romantic, and go dead.

If there’s a stone, I want that soon to sag,
lurch in the fetters ivy loops about it,
relinquish all distinction. I trust the various weather,
lichen, and snail make epitaph a cipher,
and name a blank. I hope the fat
swags of rank grass, weeds bogged in succulence
thrive on what contributions I submit
to snag and ramble: let extravagance
brag in green garbled tongues that they compound
and bring to light what I could not account for:
slips of the tongue, jetsam of dreams, stray tags
of nonsense rhymes, the potpourri of fancies
a lifetime’s editing rightly rejected.

I want my bones’ allotment to run mad: that small
cloudburst of wilderness tell the passer-by
no more of me than, when I came to die,
confusion was my style: I lost control.

Joannie Stangeland, “An Hour for Practice”

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It’s hard to say if the music of poetry creates the emotion in a poem, or if it is the poet’s emotion that creates the music.” –Kenneth Koch

Over at Joannie Stangeland’s blog, where she is offering a poetry prompt per day this month, today’s prompt is about sound. A perfect day, it seems to me, to share one of Joannie’s poems. I have two of her books on my shelf, A Steady Longing for Flight, which was (in 1995) the very first book chosen by Floating Bridge Press for its chapbook series; and Into the Rumored Spring (Ravenna Press, 2011). I am also happy to recommend her new book, In Both Hands (also Ravenna). You can read more about Joannie at this site.

Joannie wrote “Into the Rumored Spring” for a friend with cancer. Here is a poem from that collection in which the subject listens to her daughter practice her music. It is luscious to read out loud.

AN HOUR FOR PRACTICE

Thrum to the hum of her heart,
a drum — and from the next room
the boom of the bass, the chase
of the cymbal, sticks racing
a paradiddle on the snare.
Get the triangle and tambourine,
castanets clacking like the flicker
that pecks at the streetlamp, clapping
like the sound of a book snapping shut.
Let the beat bounce off the walls
while down the hall the other daughter
blows the bassoon. Scales and arpeggios,
wood in the wind, a song of the forest
here, in the house. Oh,
banish all hush.

-Joannie Stangeland

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

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“Keeping Quiet” by Pablo Neruda

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fisherman in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

—from Extravagaria (translated by Alastair Reid, pp. 27-29, 1974)

What I would really like to do is have you listen to my friend Madelon read this poem aloud.