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National Poetry Month: poetry book #1

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Welcome to National Poetry Month!

If you are looking for a full rundown on what NPM is, skip over to https://www.napowrimo.net/ for a prompt a day and links to lots else. I also want to recommend Chris Jarmick’s blog, Poetry Is Everything. Chris, the owner of BookTree in Kirkland, Washington, will happily provide you with great quotes, prompts (daily in April!) and more links to poetry enthusiasts. I notice that rather than posting daily (as I believe he has in past Aprils), he is lumping the prompts into groups. If you are patient, you can find all of them. (And write 30 new poems!)

The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.”
― Dylan Thomas

I have a modest goal this month of sharing a poem a day from the pile of books beside my desk. Some of these I read in August during the Sealey Challenge. Others — well, it’s about damn time. I may not read a book a day, and I’m not pushing myself to do the usual blog reviews (though some may ensue), just this: one book, one poem.

Today it is Bones in the Shallows: poems from Mission Creek by Seattle poet Tito Titus. I reviewed his I can still smile like Errol Flynn (Empty Bowl Press, 2015) a few years back.

Tito Titus’s Mission Creek is located near Cashmere, Washington, and runs into the Wenatchee River. (Forgive me if I have any of this wrong.) As the title, Bones in the Shallows, suggests, the creek disappears every summer, drained by drought, by natural disasters, by greed. And in this slim book the creek, its creatures, and the people whose lives are lived on its banks are lovingly chronicled. Nature can heal us, Titus all but says, but only if we don’t destroy it first.

 

October coming down

How do you describe a creek?
Twenty cubic feet per second, the engineer said.

I toss a slender woody shoot,
watch it meander through ripples,
fouette through eddies,
dive from glittering rocks,
float toward the Wenatchee River —
a one-legged ballerina, dancing
toward the ravenous Columbia.
Past the equinox now, the creek
runs ten-feet wide, a few inches deep.

Still, no rain.

Now I know — in this parched tenth month —
how much water the upstream orchards
swallows when fish rotted on dry rocks:
enough to seduce innocent Coho
climbing freshwater reaches,
unaware of the Mission Creek murders
of their cousins, only a month before.

Twenty cubic feet per second,
enough to pretend the drought is done.

— Tito Titus

In “Last summer on Mission Creek,” we get a sense of all the beauty at stake:

Sumac leaves, stark and dark green,
wrestle summer winds.

Creek burbles play. Their watery laughter
climbs our woody bank.

And this poignant line: “My life becomes more beautiful than I knew, / and faster, too!” That’s nature’s power to renew itself, and our spirits.

Titus and his wife of 40 years now live in Seattle. You can find a copy of Bones in the Shallows at Edmonds Bookshop, or visit www.poetfire.com.

 

Tito Titus, I Can Still Smile Like Errol Flynn

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I CAN STILL SMILE LIKE ERROL FLYNN, Tito Titus. Empty Bowl Press, Chimacum, Washington, 2015, 100 pages, $15 paper, www.emptybowl.org.

I had heard about Tito Titus, had maybe bumped elbows with him at Litfuse in Tieton some years past; sometime, somewhere, someone had given me his book of poems. On Saturday at the launch of I Sing the Salmon Home, he said hello and introduced himself. Today, I rummaged through my bookshelves, found his book, and read it all the way through, even the end notes (which are sort of a poem, themselves).

These words, from Titus’s website, capture the experience:

In I can still smile like Errol Flynn Tito Titus interrogates life, aging, and death with a delicate blow torch. These poems adore the beauty of youth and memory, fluently articulate the melancholy and nostalgia delivered by loss; and, with irreverence and awe, dicker with Death. It’s wry, wistful, fierce, searing, erotic, humorous, regretful, brave, and lonely.

“A delicate blowtorch.” Exactly. The poems are also, at least part of time, quite charming.

Someone’s darling daughter

approached me today
with a bag of weed
at a good price,
even for Hilo,
and I said yes
because the plumeria
tattoo peeking above
her low slung sarong
told me pleasure
lasts only a while.

—Tito Titus

In these poems the body gets all the attention it craves. Nose hairs, penises, “the old bastard’s feet,” bellies. And so much music that you begin to picture the writer with a guitar in his hands.

As Joannie Stangeland remarks in her cover blurb, the book also “reaches further back to childhood, facing the past’s violence and the silence after, its bruises and scars.” In the last section, we’re introduced to a cast of characters just as they’re leaving life’s stage. You’d think it would be too heartbreaking to read, but Titus uses a conversational tone that drew me in.

Here’s a poem, so you can make up your own mind. I love the long title.

The evening of the day after things changed like they’d never changed before

He wanted to sit on the front porch
watching no one pass on the empty street,
but it was cold, wet, and windy,
so he sat in the darkened room
watching the telephone. It rang once
earlier in the day. A wrong number.
He thought to engage the caller
in conversation but let it pass. Perhaps
someone else would call. Or maybe not.
Or probably not. Or not at all.
The radio played songs he didn’t know
by performers he didn’t know.
The newspaper still lay by the front door.
He cleaned the refrigerator. It contained so little.
He forgot to turn on the furnace,
put his hands in his pockets and shivered.
At last he reached for the bookshelf.
Sometimes he felt a little bit Leonard Cohen,
but he felt like Bukowski tonight.

—Tito Titus

The spareness, bawdiness, and understated (often macabre) humor that runs through this book reminded me a lot of the school of Charles Bukowski. If you, too, would like to know more about Tito Titus, visit his website, particularly the scrapbook page: https://www.poetfire.com/scrapbook.