Tag Archives: Poetry

New Year’s Customs and Traditions

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This is my annual New Year’s post, a longstanding tradition here at FmH. Please let me know if you come across any broken links.

A while ago, I came across a Boston Globe article from January 1st that compiled various folkloric beliefs about what to do, eat, and avoid on New Year’s Day to bring good fortune for the year ahead. I’ve regretted not clipping and saving it ever since—though I tend to think about it around this time every year (grin). As a parent now, I’m especially interested in traditions that go beyond the typical New Year’s activities like binge drinking, watching bowl games, and making resolutions.

Marteniza-ball

A web search brought me this, less elaborate than what I recall from the Globe but to the same point. It focuses on food-related traditions, which is interesting because, unlike most major holidays, New Year’s Day in 21st-century America doesn’t seem to revolve much around special foods (except, perhaps, the inevitable New Year’s resolution to lose weight). But…

Traditionally, it was thought that one could affect the luck they would have throughout the coming year by what they did or ate on the first day of the year. For that reason, it has become common for folks to celebrate the first few minutes of a brand new year in the company of family and friends. Parties often last into the middle of the night after the ringing in of a new year. It was once believed that the first visitor on New Year’s Day would bring either good luck or bad luck the rest of the year. It was particularly lucky if that visitor happened to be a tall dark-haired man.

Traditional New Year’s Foods

In many parts of the world, certain foods are considered good luck for the coming year. Many cultures believe that anything shaped like a ring is auspicious because it symbolizes the completion of a cycle. For example, in the Netherlands, eating donuts on New Year’s Day is thought to bring good fortune.

blackeye_peas_bowl_text

Black-Eyed Peas and Other Good Luck Foods

In the United States, a traditional New Year’s meal often includes black-eyed peas, sometimes served with hog jowls or ham. These peas are believed to bring prosperity, and the hog symbolizes abundance because of its forward-moving nature. Cabbage, another lucky food, is consumed on New Year’s Day in many cultures, symbolizing paper currency. Some regions also consider rice a lucky food for the new year.

English: Fireworks over Edinburgh on New Year'...

Hogmanay: The Scottish New Year Celebration

In Scotland, New Year’s celebrations (Hogmanay) focus heavily on warmth, hospitality, and making a fresh start. Special foods enjoyed during Hogmanay include shortbread, oatcakes, ginger cordial, currant loaf, and scones. Another tradition involves “First Footing,” where the first person to cross your threshold at midnight should be a tall, dark-haired man, ideally bearing gifts like coal or whiskey to ensure prosperity for the coming year.

In some regions, people also perform Mummer’s Plays, where actors dress in white (with one dressed as the devil in black). It’s considered bad luck to propose marriage, break glass, or carry out rubbish on New Year’s Eve.

Here’s why we clink our glasses when we drink our New Year’s toasts, no matter where we are. Of course, sometimes the midnight cacophony is louder than just clinking glassware, to create a ‘devil-chasing din’.

New Year’s Traditions Around the World

  • Georgia (USA): Eating black-eyed peas and turnip greens on New Year’s Day symbolizes prosperity and wealth. The Southern dish Hoppin’ John, made with black-eyed peas, bacon, and rice, is also a popular New Year’s tradition.
  • Greece: On New Year’s Day, a sweetbread called Vasilopita is traditionally served with a silver coin baked inside. The person who receives the slice with the coin is thought to be blessed with good fortune.
  • Italy: Lentils, oranges, and olives are commonly served. Lentils represent wealth (because they resemble coins), oranges symbolize love, and olives are associated with prosperity.
  • Norway: In Norway, a traditional New Year’s meal might include lutefisk (dried cod), while in Pennsylvania, sauerkraut is said to bring good fortune.
  • Spain: At midnight, Spaniards eat twelve grapes—one for each stroke of the clock, each grape bringing luck for a specific month of the year.
  • Denmark: Jumping off a chair at midnight symbolizes leaping into the new year.
  • Brazil: People in Rio celebrate by receiving blessings from the “Mother-saints” of the Macumba and Candomblé religions. Afterward, they dive into the ocean, jumping over seven waves to ensure good luck for the year ahead.

Unlucky Foods and Rituals

There are also foods to avoid on New Year’s Day. Lobster, chicken, and cows are considered unlucky because of how they move—lobsters crawl backward, chickens scratch the ground, and cows move slowly, symbolizing setbacks. Read on for more foods superstitious people try to avoid on the holiday. (Mental Floss)

 

 

 

International Customs to Start the New Year Right

In Rio,

 

The crescent-shaped Copacabana beach… is the scene of an unusual New Year’s Eve ritual: mass public blessings by the mother-saints of the Macumba and Candomble sects. More than 1 million people gather to watch colorful fireworks displays before plunging into the ocean at midnight after receiving the blessing from the mother-saints, who set up mini-temples on the beach.

When taking the plunge, revelers are supposed to jump over seven waves, one for each day of the week.

This is all meant to honor Lamanjá, known as the “Mother of Waters” or “Goddess of the Sea.” Lamanjá protects fishermen and survivors of shipwrecks. Believers also like to throw rice, jewelry and other gifts into the water, or float them out into the sea in intimately crafted miniature boats, to please Lamanjá in the new year.

In many northern hemisphere cities near bodies of water, people also take a New Year’s Day plunge into the water, although of course it is an icy one! The Coney Island Polar Bears Club in New York is the oldest cold-water swimming club in the United States. They have had groups of people enter the chilly surf since 1903.

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  • Ecuadorian families make scarecrows stuffed with newspaper and firecrackers and place them outside their homes. The dummies represent misfortunes of the prior year, which are then burned in effigy at the stroke of midnight to forget the old year. Bolivian families make beautiful little wood or straw dolls to hang outside their homes on New Year’s Eve to bring good luck.1cdd196c97bc4886c7d0b3a9c1b3dd97
  • China: People clean their homes to appease the Kitchen God and scare away evil spirits. Red paper cuttings are displayed in windows for good luck, and during the Dragon Dance, families open their doors to welcome in fortune.
  • India (Diwali): The festival of lights is celebrated with thousands of small clay lamps (dipa), attracting good fortune for the year.
  • Thailand: On New Year’s Day, people pour fragrant water over the hands of their elders as a mark of respect.
  • France: Eating a stack of pancakes is a New Year’s breakfast tradition.
  • Denmark: banging on friends’ doors to “smash in” the New Year, where it is also a good sign to find your doorstep heaped with broken dishes on New Year’s morning. Old dishes are saved all years to throw at your friends’ homes on New Year’s Eve. The more broken pieces you have, the greater the number of new friends you will have in the forthcoming twelve months.
  • Japan: In Japan, people cleanse their souls by listening to a gong toll 108 times—one for each sin.
  • Puerto Rico: At midnight, people throw water out of their windows to rid the house of evil spirits.In China, homes are cleaned spotless to appease the Kitchen God, and papercuttings of red paper are hung in the windows to scare away evil spirits who might enter the house and bring misfortune. Large papier mache dragon heads with long fabric bodies are maneuvered through the streets during the Dragon Dance festival, and families open their front doors to let the dragon bring good luck into their homes.
  • going in the front door and out the back door at midnight in Ireland.
  • making sure the First Footer, the first person through your door in the New Year in Scotland, is a tall dark haired visitor.
  • water out the window at midnight in Puerto Rico rids the home of evil spirits.
  • cleanse your soul in Japan at the New Year by listening to a gong tolling 108 times, one for every sin
  • it is Swiss good luck to let a drop of cream fall on the floor on New Year’s Day.
  • Belgian farmers wish their animals a Happy New Year for blessings.
  • In Germany and Austria, lead pouring” (das Bleigießen) is an old divining practice using molten lead like tea leaves. A small amount of lead is melted in a tablespoon (by holding a flame under the spoon) and then poured into a bowl or bucket of water. The resulting pattern is interpreted to predict the coming year. For instance, if the lead forms a ball (der Ball), that means luck will roll your way. The shape of an anchor (der Anker) means help in need. But a cross (das Kreuz) signifies death. This is also a practice in parts of Finland, apparently.
  • El Salvadoreans crack an egg in a glass at midnight and leave it on the windowsill overnight; whatever figure it has made in the morning is indicative of one’s fortune for the year.
  • Some Italians like to take part in throwing pots, pans, and old furniture from their windows when the clock strikes midnight. This is done as a way for residents to rid of the old and welcome in the new. It also allows them to let go of negativity. This custom is also practiced in parts of South Africa, the Houston Press adds.
  • In Colombia, walk around with an empty suitcase on New Year’s Day for a year full of travel.
  • In the Philippines, all the lights in the house are turned on at midnight, and previously opened windows, doors and cabinets throughout the house are suddenly slammed shut, to ward off evil spirits for the new year.
  • In Russia a wish is written down on a piece of paper. It is burned and the ash dissolved in a glass of champagne, which should be downed before 12:01 am if the wish is to come true.

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“It’s a bit bizarre when you think about it. A short British cabaret sketch from the 1920s has become a German New Year’s tradition. Yet, although

 

The 90th Birthday or Dinner for One

 

is a famous cult classic in Germany and several other European countries, it is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, including Britain, its birthplace.” (Watch on Youtube, 11 min.)

So if the Germans watch British video, what do you watch in Britain? A number of sources have suggested that it is Jools Holland’s Hootenanny, “even though it’s awful and everyone hates it.“

On a related theme, from earlier in the same week, here are some of the more bizarre Christmas rituals from around the world. 

The History Behind New Year’s Traditions

The early Christian Church was initially opposed to New Year’s celebrations, viewing them as pagan rituals. It wasn’t until the Middle Ages that the tradition of celebrating January 1st as the start of the new year became more widely accepted. Documentation of observance of the new year dates back at least 4000 years to the Babylonians, who also made the first new year’s resolutions (reportedly voews to return borrowed farm equipment were very popular), although their holiday was observed at the vernal equinox. The Babylonian festivities lasted eleven days, each day with its own particular mode of celebration. The traditional Persian Norouz festival of spring continues to be considered the advent of the new year among Persians, Kurds and other peoples throughout Central Asia, and dates back at least 3000 years, deeply rooted in Zooastrian traditions.Modern Bahá’í’s celebrate Norouz (”Naw Ruz”) as the end of a Nineteen Day Fast. Rosh Hashanah (”head of the year”), the Jewish New Year, the first day of the lunar month of Tishri, falls between September and early October. Muslim New Year is the first day of Muharram, and Chinese New Year falls between Jan. 10th and Feb. 19th of the Gregorian calendar.

The classical Roman New Year’s celebration was also in the spring although the calendar went out of synchrony with the sun. January 1st became the first day of the year by proclamation of the Roman Senate in 153 BC, reinforced even more strongly when Julius Caesar established what came to be known as the Julian calendar in 46 BC. The early Christian Church condemned new year’s festivities as pagan but created parallel festivities concurrently. New Year’s Day is still observed as the Feast of Christ’s Circumcision in some denominations. Church opposition to a new year’s observance reasserted itself during the Middle Ages, and Western nations have only celebrated January 1 as a holidy for about the last 400 years. The custom of New Year’s gift exchange among Druidic pagans in 7th century Flanders was deplored by Saint Eligius, who warned them, “[Do not] make vetulas, [little figures of the Old Woman], little deer or iotticos or set tables [for the house-elf] at night or exchange New Year gifts or supply superfluous drinks [another Yule custom].” (Wikipedia)

The tradition of the New Year’s Baby signifying the new year began with the Greek tradition of parading a baby in a basket during the Dionysian rites celebrating the annual rebirth of that god as a symbol of fertility. The baby was also a symbol of rebirth among early Egyptians. Again, the Church was forced to modify its denunciation of the practice as pagan because of the popularity of the rebirth symbolism, finally allowing its members to cellebrate the new year with a baby although assimilating it to a celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus. The addition of Father Time (the “Old Year”) wearing a sash across his chest with the previous year on it, and the banner carried or worn by the New Year’s Baby, immigrated from Germany. Interestingly, January 1st is not a legal holiday in Israel, officially because of its historic origins as a Christian feast day.

Auld Lang Syne

Auld Lang Syne (literally ‘old long ago’ in the Scottish dialect) is sung or played at the stroke of midnight throughout the English-speaking world (and then there is George Harrison’s “Ring Out the Old”). Versions of the song have been part of the New Year’s festivities since the 17th century but Robert Burns was inspired to compose a modern rendition, which was published after his death in 1796. Its lyrics, asking whether old friends should be forgotten, have become synonymous with New Year’s celebrations. (It took Guy Lombardo, however, to make it popular…)

Should auld acquaintance be forgot

and never brought to mind?

Should auld acquaintance be forgot

and days of auld lang syne?

For auld lang syne, my dear,

for auld lang syne,

we’ll take a cup of kindness yet,

for auld lang syne.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot

and never brought to mind?

Should auld acquaintance be forgot

and days of auld lang syne?

And here’s a hand, my trusty friend

And gie’s a hand o’ thine

We’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet

For auld lang syne

New Year’s Wishes Around the World

Here’s how to wish someone a Happy New Year around the world:

 

 

  • Arabic: Kul ‘aam u antum salimoun
  • Brazilian: Boas Festas e Feliz Ano Novo means “Good Parties and Happy New Year”
  • Chinese: Chu Shen Tan Xin Nian Kuai Le (thanks, Jeff)
  • Czechoslavakia: Scastny Novy Rok
  • Dutch: Gullukkig Niuw Jaar
  • Finnish: Onnellista Uutta Vuotta
  • French: Bonne Annee
  • German: Prosit Neujahr
  • Greek: Eftecheezmaenos o Kaenooryos hronos
  • Hebrew: L’Shannah Tovah Tikatevu
  • Hindi: Niya Saa Moobaarak
  • Irish (Gaelic): Bliain nua fe mhaise dhuit
  • Italian: Buon Capodanno
  • Khmer: Sua Sdei tfnam tmei
  • Laotian: Sabai dee pee mai
  • Polish: Szczesliwego Nowego Roku
  • Portuguese: Feliz Ano Novo
  • Russian: S Novim Godom
  • Serbo-Croatian: Scecna nova godina
  • Spanish: Feliz Ano Nuevo
  • Swedish: Ha ett gott nytt år
  • Turkish: Yeni Yiliniz Kutlu Olsun
  • Vietnamese: Cung-Chuc Tan-Xuan

If you speak any other languages, feel free to share a New Year’s greeting in the comments!

Which of these customs appeal to you? Are they done in your family, or will you try to adopt any of them? However you’re going to celebrate, my warmest wishes for the year to come… and eat hearty!

[thanks to Bruce Umbaugh (here or here) for original assistance]

Related?

Link

I killed a spider
Not a murderous brown recluse
Nor even a black widow
And if the truth were told this
Was only a small spider
Sort of papery spider
Who should have run
When I picked up the book
But she didn't
And she scared me
And I smashed her

I don't think
I'm allowed

To kill something

Because I am

Frightened.

― Nikki Giovanni, Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid

Via Goodreads

R.I.P. Peter Orlovsky

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Allen Ginsberg with partner Peter Orlowski, Fr...

Poet and Ginsberg Muse is dead at 76: “Peter Orlovsky, who inspired Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg, with whom he had a romantic partnership for decades, and who wrote emotionally naked, loopy and occasionally luminescent poetry of his own, died in Williston, Vt., on Sunday. He was 76, and lived in St. Johnsbury, Vt.” (New York Times )

Related:

Going to Bed

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I check the locks on the front door

and the side door,

make sure the windows are closed

and the heat dialed down.

I switch off the computer,

turn off the living room lights.

I let in the cats.

Reverently, I unplug the Christmas tree,

leaving Christ and the little animals

in the dark.

The last thing I do

is step out to the back yard

for a quick look at the Milky Way.

The stars are halogen-blue.

The constellations, whose names

I have long since forgotten,

look down anonymously,

and the whole galaxy

is cartwheeling in silence through the night.

Everything seems to be ok.

— George Bilgere
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Diagnosis

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By the time I was six months old, she knew something

was wrong with me. I got looks on my face

she had not seen on any child

in the family, or the extended family,

or the neighborhood. My mother took me in

to the pediatrician with the kind hands,

a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel:

Hub Long. My mom did not tell him

what she thought in truth, that I was Possessed.

It was just these strange looks on my face—

he held me, and conversed with me,

chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother

said, She’s doing it now! Look!

She’s doing it now! and the doctor said,

What your daughter has

is called a sense

of humor. Ohhh, she said, and took me

back to the house where that sense would be tested

and found to be incurable.

`– Sharon Olds, from One Secret Thing. © Random House, Inc., 2009.

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Story

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Silver Moon

“I don’t know what made me do it. It was like getting up late at night and going out to find the moon, hung full, at the end of the block. Framed, between the low row of houses. As if it had been there, waiting, all the time.

When I came back inside, there was my life, enormous about me. It hung, as in a story, and then started to shrink. A girl with pigtails came into the room and reached up and grabbed the thing like the moon and started swaying with it back and forth, tossing it up and down.

I lay down, letting the page turn, for choice. Letting the light come up, as a decision. When I woke, you were there, at the head-end of the crib, still in your blankets. A small form. Your breath like someone escaping, then being caught.

As if this time it will be different. Up in the sky, intact. A small stranger opening her arms. Letting the thin silver slip through into the blank before the hands can clasp. Or, in the undergrowth, the little squirrels, or in the dark burrows, beneath the house.” — Nadia Herman Colburn (RealPoetik)

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What I Understood by Katha Pollitt

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When I was a child I understood everything

about, for example, futility. Standing for hours

on the hot asphalt outfield, trudging for balls

I'd ask myself, how many times will I have to perform

this pointless task, and all the others? I knew

about snobbery, too, and cruelty—for children

are snobbish and cruel—and loneliness: in restaurants

the dignity and shame of solitary diners

disabled me, and when my grandmother

screamed at me, “Someday you'll know what it's like!”

I knew she was right, the way I knew

about the single rooms my teachers went home to,

the pictures on the dresser, the hoard of chocolates,

and that there was no God, and that I would die.

All this I understood, no one needed to tell me.

the only thing I didn't understand

was how in a world whose predominant characteristics

are futility, cruelty, loneliness, disappointment

people are saved every day

by a sparrow, a foghorn, a grassblade, a tablecloth.

This year I'll be

thirty-nine, and I still don't understand it.

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Amor Fati by Katha Pollitt

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Everywhere I look I see my fate.

In the subway. In a stone.

On the curb where people wait for the bus in the rain.

In a cloud. In a glass of wine.

When I go for a walk in the park it's a sycamore leaf.

At the office, a dull pencil.

In the window of Woolworth's my fate looks back at me

through the shrewd eyes of a dusty parakeet.

Scrap of newspaper, dime in a handful of change,

down what busy street do you hurry this morning,

an overcoat among overcoats,

with a train to catch, a datebook full of appointments?

If I called you by my name would you turn around

or vanish round the corner,

leaving a faint odor of orange-flower water,

tobacco, twilight, snow?

Today is political commentator and poet Katha Pollitt‘s 60th birthday. Many happy returns!

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Me by Spike Milligan

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Born screaming small into this world-

Living I am.

Occupational therapy twixt birth and death-

What was I before?

What will I be next?

What am I now?

Cruel answer carried in the jesting mind

of a careless God

I will not bend and grovel

When I die. If He says my sins are myriad

I will ask why He made me so imperfect

And he will say 'My chisels were blunt'

I will say 'Then why did you make so

many of me'.

via PoemHunter.

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R.I.P. Jim Carroll

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[Image 'https://i0.wp.com/graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/09/14/arts/14carroll190.jpg' cannot be displayed]

Poet and Punk Rocker Who Wrote ‘The Basketball Diaries’ Dies at 60: “As a teenage basketball star in the 1960s at Trinity, an elite private school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Mr. Carroll led a chaotic life that combined sports, drugs and poetry. This highly unusual combination lent a lurid appeal to “The Basketball Diaries,” the journal he kept during high school and published in 1978, by which time his poetry had already won him a cult reputation as the new Bob Dylan.” (New York Times obituary)

Even when I didn’t listen to punk, ‘People Who Died’ was in my regulsr rotation. Time to punch it up on the iPod and add one more name to the list…

Dissertations — in 17 syllables

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Grave of YosaBuson (与謝蕪村墓)

“The Web site Dissertation Haikus has been around for a few years, but it’s enjoying a late-summer surge in popularity. The concept is irresistible. As its creator explains, “Dissertations are long and boring. By contrast, everybody likes haiku. So why not write your dissertation as a haiku?” Why not, indeed! For the writer, the site provides a way to dramatically expand the universe of people with a loose grasp on how you spent several or 10 or 12 years of your life. For the reader, it provides a way to painlessly survey what passes for the cutting edge of knowledge, without having to negotiate precious, colon-hobbled titles or scientific jargon.” (Boston Globe via laurie)

Hunting Season

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Once every year, the Deer catch human beings. They do various things which irresistibly draw men near them; each one selects a certain man. The Deer shoots the man, who is then compelled to skin it and carry its meat home and eat it. Then the deer is inside the man. He waits and hides in there, but the man doesn't know it. When enough Deer have occupied enough men, they will strike all at once. The men who don't have Deer in them will also be taken by surprise, and everything will change some. This is called “takeover from inside”.

—Gary Snyder

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The Broken Sandal

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Dreamed the thong of my sandal broke.
Nothing to hold it to my foot.
How shall I walk?
Barefoot?
The sharp stones, the dirt. I would hobble.
And–
Where was I going?
Where was I going I can't
go to now, unless hurting?
Where am I standing, if I'm
to stand still now?

— Denise Levertov (1923-1997)

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‘I’m Not a Man’: Harold Norse

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I'm not a man, I can't earn a living, buy new things for my family.

I have acne and a small peter.

I'm not a man. I don't like football, boxing and cars.

I like to express my feeling. I even like to put an arm

around my friend's shoulder.

I'm not a man. I won't play the role assigned to me- the role created

by Madison Avenue, Playboy, Hollywood and Oliver Cromwell,

Television does not dictate my behavior.

I'm not a man. Once when I shot a squirrel I swore that I would

never kill again. I gave up meat. The sight of blood makes me sick.

I like flowers.

I'm not a man. I went to prison resisting the draft. I do not fight

when real men beat me up and call me queer. I dislike violence.

I'm not a man. I have never raped a woman. I don't hate blacks.

I do not get emotional when the flag is waved. I do not think I should

love America or leave it. I think I should laugh at it.

I'm not a man. I have never had the clap.

I'm not a man. Playboy is not my favorite magazine.

I'm not a man. I cry when I'm unhappy.

I'm not a man. I do not feel superior to women

I'm not a man. I don't wear a jockstrap.

I'm not a man. I write poetry.

I'm not a man. I meditate on peace and love.

I'm not a man. I don't want to destroy you

San Francisco, 1972 via Exquisite Corpse

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R.I.P. Poet Harold Norse, 92

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[Image 'https://i0.wp.com/graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/06/13/arts/13norse190.jpg' cannot be displayed]

“Although Mr. Norse is often classified with the Beats, he had already developed his themes and his style when, in the early 1960s, he fell in with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Gregory Corso, just a few of the many writers with whom he formed romantic or professional relationships. A disciple of William Carlos Williams, who once called him “the best poet of your generation,” Mr. Norse found common cause with the Beats in his rejection of academic poetry and traditional metric schemes and his outsider status as a gay man.” (New York Times obit)

Is Slam in Danger of Going Soft?

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“Slam poetry was invited into the White House last month and it is also the focus of the recent HBO documentary series “Brave New Voices.” So you might think that the originator of the poetry slam, a raucous live competition that is more likely to take place in a bar than in a bookstore, would be feeling rather pleased these days.

But from his base here at the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge, Marc Kelly Smith expresses mixed feelings about the growing popularity and respectability of the art form that he created almost 25 years ago. From the start, he envisioned slam poetry as a subversive, thumb-your-nose-at-authority movement, and he wants to ensure it stays true to those origins.” (New York Times )

Related:

R.I.P. poet Craig Arnold

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An extended search of the Japanese island Kuchino-erabu for traces of Craig Arnold had offered up hope the poet might be injured, but still alive, among one of the island’s many crevices.

That hope died Friday afternoon once a search team announced that a trail discovered the previous day showed signs that Arnold, 41, suffered a leg injury, then fell from a steep cliff to his death soon afterward.

…Arnold graduated with a doctorate from the [University of Utah’s] creative writing program 2001 after earning his bachelor’s degree from Yale, and went on to teach poetry and literature at the University of Wyoming in Laramie in 2004. Arnold was exploring the island for a book he planned to write on the world’s active volcanos, and had been missing since April 27.

via Salt Lake Tribune.

Incubus, a poem by Arnold:

The chain uncouples, and his jacket hangs
on the peg over hers, and he’s inside.

She stalls in the kitchen, putting the kettle on,
buys herself a minute looking for two
matching cups for the lime-flower tea,
not really lime but linden, heart-shaped leaves
and sticky flowers that smell of antifreeze.
She talks a wall around her, twists the string
tighter around the teabag in her spoon.
But every conversation has to break
somewhere, and at the far end of the sofa
he sits, warming his hands around the cup
he hasn’t tasted yet, and listens on
with such an exasperating show of patience
it’s almost a relief to hear him ask it:
If you’re not using your body right now
maybe you’d let me borrow it for a while?

It isn’t what you’re thinking. No, it’s worse.

Why on earth did she find him so attractive
the first time she met him, propping the wall
at an awkward party, clearly trying to drink
himself into some sort of conversation?
Was it the dark uncomfortable reserve
she took upon herself to tease him out of,
asking, Are you a vampire? That depends,
he stammered, are you a virgin? No, not funny,
but why did she laugh at him? What made her think
that he needed her, that she could teach him something?
Why did she let him believe she was drunk
and needed a ride home? Why did she let him
take her shirt off, fumble around a bit
on the spare futon, passing back and forth
the warm breath of a half-hearted kiss
they kept falling asleep in the middle of?
And when he asked her, why did she not object?
I’d like to try something. I need you to trust me.

Younger and given to daydreams, she imagined
trading bodies with someone, a best friend,
the boy she had a crush on. But the fact
was more fantastic, a fairy-tale adventure
where the wolf wins, and hides in the girl’s red hood.
How it happens she doesn’t really remember,
drifting off with a vague sense of being
drawn out through a single point of her skin
(a bedsheet threaded through a needle’s eye)
and bundled into a body that must be his.
Sometimes she startles, as on the verge of sleep
you can feel yourself fall backward over a brink,
and snaps her eyelids open, to catch herself
slipping out of the bed, her legs swinging
over the edge, and feels the sudden sick
split-screen impression of being for a second
both she and her.
What he does with her
while she’s asleep, she never really knows,
flickers, only, conducted back in dreams:
Walking in neighborhoods she doesn’t know
and wouldn’t go to, overpasses, ragweed,
cars dry-docked on cinderblocks, wolf-whistles,
wanting to run away and yet her steps
planted sure and defiant. Performing tasks
too odd to recognize and too mundane
to have made up, like fixing a green salad
with the sunflower seeds and peppers that she hates,
pouring on twice the oil and vinegar
that she would like, and being unable to stop.
Her hands feel but are somehow not her own,
running over the racks of stacked fabric
in a clothing store, stroking the slick silk,
teased cotton and polar fleece, as if her fingers
each were a tongue tasting the knits and weaves.
Harmless enough.
It’s what she doesn’t dream
that scares her, panic she can’t account for, faces
familiar but not known, déjà vu
making a mess of memory, coming to
with a fresh love-bite on her left breast
and the aftershock of granting another’s flesh,
of having gripped, slipped in and fluttered tender
mmm, unbraided, and spent the whole slow day
clutching her thighs to keep the chafe from fading,
and furious at being joyful, less
at the violation, less the danger, than the sense
he’d taken her enjoyment for his own.
That was the time before, the time she swore
would be the last-returning to her senses,
she’d grabbed his throat and hit him around the face
and threw him out, and sat there on the floor
shaking. She hadn’t known how hard it was
to throw a punch without pulling it back.

Now, as they sit together on her couch
with the liquid cooling in the stained chipped cups
that would never match, no matter how hard
she stared at them, he seems the same as ever,
a quiet clumsy self-effacing ghost
with the gray-circled eyes that she once wanted
so badly to defy, that seemed to see her
seeing him-and she has to admit, she’s missed him.
Why? She scrolls back through their conversations,
searching for any reason not to hate him,
She’d ask him, What’s it like being a girl
when you’re not a girl? His answers, when he gave them,
weren’t helpful, so evasively poetic:
It’s like a sponge somebody else is squeezing.
A radio tuned to all stations at once.
Like having skin that’s softer but more thick.

Then she remembers the morning she awoke
with the smear of tears still raw across her cheeks
and the spent feeling of having cried herself
down to the bottom of something. Why was I crying?
she asked, and he looked back blankly, with that little
curve of a lip that served him for a smile.
Because I can’t.
And that would be their secret.
The power to feel another appetite
pass through her, like a shudder, like a cold
lungful of oxygen or hot sweet smoke,
fill her and then be stilled. The freedom to fall
asleep behind the blinds of his dark body
and wake cleanly. And when she swings her legs
over the edge of the bed, to trust her feet
to hit the carpet, and know as not before
how she never quite trusted the floor
to be there, no, not since she was a girl
first learning to swim, hugging her skinny
breastless body close to the pool-gutter,
skirting along the dark and darker blue
of the bottom dropping out –
Now she can stand,
and take the cup out of his giving hand,
and feel what they have learned inside each other
fair and enough, and not without a kind
of satisfaction, that she can put her foot
down, clear to the bottom of desire,
and find that it can stop, and go no deeper.

Arnold’s own biographical sketch of himself:

“Craig Arnold grew up in the United States, Europe and Asia. He graduated from Yale in 1990 with a BA in English, and received his PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Utah in 2001. W. S. Merwin chose his first book, Shells, as the 1998 volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. His writing has appeared in three volumes of Best American Poetry (1998, 2004, and 2006), as well as in Poetry, the New Republic, Paris Review, Yale Review, Denver Quarterly, Open City, Barrow Street, American Literary Review and Poetry Northwest. Among his numerous awards and honors are the Rome Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the Hodder Fellowship from Princeton, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and a residency at the MacDowell Colony. His second collection, Made Flesh, was a finalist for the New Criterion Prize and the Pitt Poetry Series, and will now be published by Ausable Press in the spring of 2009.” He is currently working on a book of lyric essays about volcanoes and the end of the world as we know it. In real life, he teaches poetry at the University of Wyoming MFA Program, where he also directs the Visiting Writers Series. He lives in Laramie with his son.”

[via steve silberman]

Talent

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MANCHESTER, ENGLAND - MAY 01: Carol Ann Duffy...

This is the word tightrope. Now imagine

a man, inching across it in the space

between our thoughts. He holds our breath.

There is no word net.

You want him to fall, don’t you?

I guessed as much; he teeters but succeeds.

The word applause is written all over him.

— Carol Ann Duffy, the new poet laureate of Great Britain
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The Loon — James Tate

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A loon woke me this morning. It was like waking up

in another world. I had no idea what was expected of me.

I waited for instructions. Someone called and asked me

if I wanted a free trip to Florida. I said, “Sure. Can

I go today?” A man in a uniform picked me up in a limousine,

and the next thing I know I’m being chased by an alligator

across a parking lot. A crowd gathers and cheers me on.

Of course, none of this really happened. I’m still sleeping.

I don’t want to go to work. I want to know what the loon is

saying. It sounds like ecstasy tinged with unfathomable

terror. One thing is certain: at least they are not speaking

of tax shelters. The phone rings. It’s my boss. She says,

“Where are you?” I say, “I don’t know. I don’t recognize

my surroundings. I think I’ve been kidnapped. If they make

demands of you, don’t give in. That’s my professional advice.”

Just then, the loon let out a tremendous looping, soaring,

swirling, quadruple whoop. “My god, are you alright?” my

boss said. “In case we do not meet again, I want you to know

that I’ve always loved you, Agnes,” I said. “What?” she said.

“What are you saying?” “Good-bye, my darling. Try to remember me

as your ever loyal servant,” I said. “Did you say you loved

me?” she said. I said, “Yes,” and hung up. I tried

to go back to sleep, but the idea of being kidnapped had me

quite worked up. I looked in the mirror for signs of torture.

Every time the loon cried, I screamed and contorted my face

in agony. They were going to cut off my head and place it on

a stake. I overheard them talking. They seemed like very

reasonable men, even, one might say, likeable.

“The Loon” by James Tate from Return to the City of White Donkeys. © Ecco Press, 2004. via a blind flaneur.

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R.I.P. Sal Salasin

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And am pleased to inhabit the earth with this species. Goodbye and God bless you all. More of the evil work of Denise and her evil twin Denise, bleeding through my dreams. Man is the only animal that builds jails. He can also eat peanuts and chew tobacco. Let's go back to the phones where we'll discuss idempotent transactions in just a moment. Well, yes, I'm sorry I did the best I could which was obviously inadequate.

Fate and too many painkillers.

Recently I had the pleasure of driving alone in an American car on American roads listening to American radio from Perth Amboy to Seattle. And this had its rewards although it didn't do the planet any good.

And if it makes you feel any better, I didn't use my tongue. I'm also extremely good at removing the lint after each use and believe I should get some credit for that. “By the light of a thousand suns, I am become death.” I'd sympathize but all in all, I'd rather talk about me. Just get my butt back safe from the K-Mart and I'm yours forever.

via RealPolitik.

A Girl

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The tree has entered my hands,

The sap has ascended my arms,

The tree has grown in my breast-

Downward,

The branches grow out of me, like arms.

Tree you are,

Moss you are,

You are violets with wind above them.

A child – so high – you are,

And all this is folly to the world.

— Ezra Pound

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Happy Birthday, Jane Hirshfield

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Jane Hirshfield was born in New York City in 1953. After receiving her B.A. from Princeton University in their first graduating class to include women, she went on to study at the San Francisco Zen Center. Her books of poetry include After HarperCollins, 2006; Given Sugar, Given Salt 2001, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Lives of the Heart 1997, The October Palace 1994, Of Gravity & Angels 1988, and Alaya 1982.

She is the author of Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry 1997 and has also edited and translated The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan 1990 with Mariko Aratani and Women in Praise of the Sacred: Forty-Three Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women 1994.

Poem Holding Its Heart In One Fist

Each pebble in this world keeps
its own counsel.

Certain words–these, for instance–
may be keeping a pronoun hidden.
Perhaps the lover’s you
or the solipsist’s I.
Perhaps the philosopher’s willowy it.

The concealment plainly delights.

Even a desk will gather
its clutch of secret, half-crumpled papers,
eased slowly, over years,
behind the backs of drawers.

Olives adrift in the altering brine-bath
etch onto their innermost pits
a few furrowed salts that will never be found by the tongue.

Yet even with so much withheld,
so much unspoken,
potatoes are cooked with butter and parsley,
and buttons affixed to their sweater.
Invited guests arrive, then dutifully leave.

And this poem, afterward, washes its breasts
with soap and trembling hands, disguising nothing.

Poem With Two Endings

Say “death” and the whole room freezes–
even the couches stop moving,
even the lamps.
Like a squirrel suddenly aware it is being looked at.

Say the word continuously,
and things begin to go forward.
Your life takes on
the jerky texture of an old film strip.

Continue saying it, hold it moment after moment inside the mouth,
it becomes another syllable.
A shopping mall swirls around the corpse of a beetle.

Death is voracious, it swallows all the living.
Life is voracious, it swallows all the dead.
neither is ever satisfied, neither is ever filled,
each swallows and swallows the world.

The grip of life is as strong as the grip of death.

(but the vanished, the vanished beloved, o where?)

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Approaching Storm

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dead leaves, some the color of cement if cement were
rust, scrape my knees on their way to the grave, buried
in gravity, the maple still full and maple leaves soft as
spring, drops begin their pattern on the pond, leaf rustle
hath a new inflection, foliate, smallest sunfish leap, dace
shimmer, scurry to every edge where arcs lap, cross, fade
back into pond, there is no pause, can be no interruption,
below words is sound, beneath sound, silence, then dark
cacophonies of need, a river, swells, above sound are the
sounds creatures make to each other by which they are
known, above these song, all this winding its way into
winter, time’s valance most acute in the fall, you’re over-
taken again, there’s nowhere to go except in, to listen as
Babels of rain sweep across the roof in a darkening room

— Skip Fox

via Realpoetik

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Praise Song for the Day

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Praise song for the day.

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others’ eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, “Take out your pencils. Begin.”

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, “I need to see what’s on the other side; I know there’s something better down the road.”

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp — praise song for walking forward in that light.

— Elizabeth Alexander, 01/20/09
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Adrian Mitchell, R.I.P.

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British Poetry’s Voice of the Left is Dead at 76: ‘Mr. Mitchell, a spiritual descendant of William Blake, Walt Whitman and Bertolt Brecht, combined ferocity, playfulness and simplicity, with a broad audience in mind, in his poetry, plays, novels, song lyrics, children’s books and adaptations for the stage. His voluminous output included white-hot tirades against the Vietnam War, rapturous nature poems, nonsense verse and children’s tales of a wooly mammoth who returns to the modern world.

“Mitchell is a joker, a lyrics writer, a word-spinner, an epigrammist, a man of passion and imagination,” the art critic and novelist John Berger once wrote. “Against the present British state, he opposes a kind of revolutionary populism, bawdiness, wit and the tenderness sometimes to be found between animals.”

via New York Times obituary.

My Literary Career So Far

As I prowled through Parentheses

I met an Robin and a Owl

My Grammarboots they thrilled

like bees

My Vowelhat did gladly growl

Tis my delight each Friedegg Night

To chomp a Verbal Sandwich

Scots Consonants light up my Pants

And marinade my Heart in Language

Alphabet Soup was all my joy!

From Dreadfast up to Winnertime

I swam, a naked Pushkinboy

Up wodka vaterfalls of rhyme

And reached the summit of Blue Howl

To find a shining Suit of Words

And joined an Robin and a Owl

In good Duke Ellington’s Band of Birds

Returning to Earth by Jim Harrison

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I'm getting very old. If I were a mutt
in dog years I'd be seven, not stray so far.
I am large. Tarpon my age are often large
but they are inescapably fish. A porpoise
my age was the King of New Guinea in 1343.
Perhaps I am the king of my dogs, cats, horses
but I have dropped any notion of explaining
to them why I read so much. To be mysterious
is a prerogative of kingship. I discovered
lately that my subjects do not live a life,
but are life itself. They do not recognize
the pain of the schizophrenia of kingship.
To them I am pretty much a fellow creature.

via The Writer’s Almanac. Happy birthday to Jim Harrison.

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The Secret

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Anna as Denise Levertov

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can’t find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

— Denise Levertov

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Happy Birthday, Robert Pinsky

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Robert Pinsky, U.S.Robert PinskyPinsky: “The longer I live, the more I see there’s something about reciting rhythmical words aloud — it’s almost biological — that comforts and enlivens human beings.” (via Garrison Keillor)

First Things to Hand
by Robert Pinsky

In the skull kept on the desk.
In the spider-pod in the dust.

Or nowhere. In milkmaids, in loaves,
Or nowhere. And if Socrates leaves

His house in the morning,
When he returns in the evening

He will find Socrates waiting
On the doorstep. Buddha the stick

You use to clear the path,
And Buddha the dog-doo you flick

Away with it, nowhere or in each
Several thing you touch:

The dollar bill, the button
That works the television.

Even in the joke, the three
Words American men say

After making love. Where’s
The remote? In the tears

In things, proximate, intimate.
In the wired stem with root

And leaf nowhere of this lamp:
Brass base, aura of illumination,

Enlightenment, shade of grief.
Odor of the lamp, brazen.

The mind waiting in the mind
As in the first thing to hand.

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