A Poem-A-Day Celebration

Poem submission by ericboydblog

are idiots.
they aren’t even
writers at all.
they are turtlenecked housewives
and college-degreed hamburger flippers
who talk about a whole lot more
than they have to say.

they don’t suffer
and they don’t beg
or cry
or do time
or kiss ass
or break down
or find god.
they sit around
feeling smug smug smug.

most writers
try to squeeze
wine out of a raisin
, the mechanism long dead,
if it was ever there at all.

they take experience and thought
worth less than nothing;
these people
tediously attempt
to do the impossible:

to be writers, when they should be writing.

they type what they
think they should
as cleverly as
their word processor
tells them to…

most writers
don’t understand
that if they weren’t
born with it,
they won’t
die with it.

It struggles
and gets bored and sets itself on fire and finally dies.
and then someone else reads It
, takes It and steals It and spits It out.
and that is only if you’re lucky

this writing — 
you’re just born with it.

me,
I came out of the womb
with a Remington-portable
in one hand,
the other hand desperately
clinging
to the walls
,trying to stay inside,

where 
it was 
warm.

Kenneth Koch (1925-2002) was a legendary teacher of poetry, whose presence is still felt among the many young poets who passed through his classroom. He liked to teach elementary-school children as well as the usual graduate students; today’s poem, which appeared in his final collection, A Possible World, came out of a trip he took to Haiti in 1975, invited by the American ambassador to teach poetry in a Port-au-Prince lycée. As Koch later wrote about his poetry experiments in other countries, with their distinct literary traditions and contexts for poetry, “I did the foreign teaching, I think, mostly out of curiosity: to see if the teaching would work, and to see what kinds of poems the children would write. I didn’t think that the ease, excitement, and spontaneity, the quick and poetic responsiveness of my students at P.S. 61 in New York were exclusively American phenomena.” As it turned out, despite the pupils’ lack of familiarity with his teaching method and the atmosphere described below, Koch did break through to the Haitian children, using Blake’s “Tyger” and Rimbaud’s “Vowels” as examples for them to follow.

- Knopf Poetry Team

***

A Schoolroom in Haiti

In Haiti, Port-au-Prince, a man walked up and down the school hallways
     carrying a bull whip.
Oh, he never uses it, the school administrator said. Its purpose is only to
     instill good discipline in the students.
They were from fourteen to seventeen years old,
Boys in white shirts and white short pants. They stood up
And wouldn’t sit down till the Minister of Education
Beckoned to them to do so.
They concentrated very hard on the ideas they were being given for
     writing poems.
After the officials left, they started writing their poems in Creole.
After four or five days they were asking to come forward and sing to the
     rest of the class these Creole poems. They did so.
This experiment was never repeated. The government became even more
     repressive.
One poem begins “B is for black, Bettina, a negress whom I dote on.”
The assignment was a poem about the colors of the vowels or the
     consonants in the manner of Rimbaud.
What has happened to those poems? What has become of those students?
I have the poems in New York. In Haiti I had asked to teach ten-year-olds
     but I had been told
They won’t be able to write well enough. The reason was they didn’t
     know French,
Not well enough to be able to write poetry. Their native language was
     Creole,
The language they spoke at home, but at the Lycée Toussaint L’Ouverture
And every other school, the instruction was in French.
They were stuck behind the French language. It loomed over them a wall
Blocking out everything:
Blocked mathematics, blocked science, blocked history, blocked literature
While Creole stayed back with them, cooking up poetry
But that was all. For the most part, except for a few rich boys
Who could afford to study French in the afternoons
They were left fatally behind.

***

Excerpt from COLLECTED POEMS © 2005 by The Kenneth Koch Literary Estate. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Poem submission by David Jibson

I sometimes worry about the unexpected death
the grand piano that falls from the third story window
when the rope the movers are using breaks

or being struck by lightning on a sunny day
when I’m nowhere near a golf course

the Lincoln Continental that drives through
the front window of the restaurant and crushes me
when I’m just about to order the clams casino
that would have poisoned me
had I been alive to eat it

then there is the radio plugged into a wall socket
that falls into the bath tub
I never take baths just to be on the safe side
even though I don’t own a radio (except in my car)
because one could find its way into the bathroom

speaking of cars
I haven’t made a left turn in fifteen years
it’s just too dangerous

then there’s the train that derails at high speed
when I’m in the front of the line of cars at the crossing
you never want to be in the first car at a crossing

I worry about these things
but I never worry about the second heart attack
the one that might be overdue
or the prostrate cancer I get checked for every six months
or the fact that I am overweight and don’t eat right
or the promise to myself I break each morning
that I am going to walk more
life is simpler that way

Poem submission by kelwomack

There has to be something here

Perhaps the way the water bends

And slides over the rocks as an image

Of your hair cascading the crevices

And angles of your shoulders, the collar-

Bones as branches wedged into the

Draws formed by gently winding

Trapezius. Or maybe they’re just

Rocks, and water, simply, beautifully

And without the responsibility

Of living up to your winding river.

Poem submission by ben-davis-poetry

Nature God

In a tree

In a field

On grass

Mountain top

In storms

Under sun

On two feet

Running fast

Snow angel

Moon dweller

True to life

Human nature

Touching god

Feeling world

One universe

And one soul. 

Mary Kinzie’s interest in the expressive fragmenting of language gives her verse a particular poignancy - a kind of a melancholy nod to the passing beauty and potential of our words.

- Knopf Poetry Team

***

Theine

If compelled
to give it up
I would lift
as leaves do
loosened
from the tree
and feel the floating
thread of my thought
blown out
beyond itself
               line loose
               on the water
wandering
cinder
sleepier
than air

***

Excerpt from DRIFT © 2003 by Mary Kinzie. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Poem submission by nicedice

Sometimes

i dive into the ocean just to feel the blue.

And i pick the peaches from trees

because i like the sound of separating stem from branch.

I’ll often walk along any road i please

to feel something solid beneath my feet.

And i wonder sometimes what the world does to me

just for the simple pleasures.

Is the breeze because it likes the feel of my hair between it’s fingers?

or the glimmer of the stars because it likes to look down upon my face?

I’m content with the settlement we’ve come to

if that is indeed the case.

I like the blue,

i like the stars and the road,

and i like the simplicity between us,

the world and I.

A poem submission by T.L. Kirk

I pull warm words out from my pocket and
Splatter them on yellowing leaflet pages
A literary Jackson Pollock
I stand over my canvas,
Let the brush dance and
Fill the floor with a series of pirouettes and pliés
Won’t the crowd love me?
Litter my feet with round, red roses
But please,
Remove the thorns

Poem submission by seesheflies

You’re typical: cigarettes and liquor and tailored, fitted hats,

with shoes that blend seamlessly 

with the dirt, the earth, the nature of our youth.

Dark, but iridescent, eyes that change 

with the passing of your memories

fade and return, unmoved.

And what left, but an empty glass and ring on the table 

of condensation—condescension— gliding downward 

to form an imprint of our heavy descent
into contemplation and condemnation,

beaten down with nothing but our own unnecessary torment?

Victors hail spoils; we linger at the burdens in dark nights

lit by glowing neon signs and surrounded 

by docks of stable lives, symbols of ”the other side.”

Surrounded by norms, we wrote to define a character 

not typical of the warped figures in our modern, magazine age,

nor of the cliched, sepia prints that speak of

cigarettes and liquor and tailored, fitted hats.

And who’s to say life isn’t more than cafes and bookshops

and the same routines that drive our generation 

into apathy and cubicles until we’re aged and our soles only touch

Corporate Carpets?

We dreamt once, on the road past strip malls and gas stations,

that we would leave this earth at last call,

when we were filled—satisfied—with our drink and consumption,

free from guilt from our actions and the necessity to leave
any sort of mark beyond a faded signature on the wall:

the possibility of eternity.

In poet Laurie Sheck’s reimagining of Mary Shelley’s famous monster, the creature we come to know is a highly sensitive observer of the strange lives and works of human beings (who’ve shunned him, with the partial exception of Mary herself; in Sheck’s telling, she meets him at her mother’s graveside as a girl, and later draws upon their relationship to create the novel). The monster’s notes are a gathering of all kinds of information — scientific, philosophical, personal; his lonely account of his travels, including his insights into the tragic lives of Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, becomes a moving meditation on outsiderhood, and on the power of the written word to console and connect us. In the passage below, the monster is speaking to the creator who abandoned him. The note he finds is written by Henry Clerval — the doomed friend of Victor Frankenstein in Shelley’s novel, for whom Sheck supplies an improved fate. (Clerval lives out his dream of traveling to the East, where he studies and translates the Chinese classic Dream of the Red Chamber.)

- Knopf Poetry Team

***

When you fled you left your laboratory notes behind. Though I carry them with me, mostly I have no desire to see your handwriting in front of my eyes (it pains me to see it). But once, as I unpacked my few things in the woods, a note from Clerval slipped out from your papers, and I read it:

My friend, I know you’re suffering and wish there was more I could do to bring you comfort. I still worry about your fever, though I know it’s much better. I worry about the tremor in your hands, the look in your eyes I find troubling but hard to describe, the way you stay always alone (though I myself mostly prefer to be alone). Sometimes I think you’ve mistaken my tenderness for a kind of frailty, some central flaw, an inability to face the harsher aspects of who you are. But I’m less foolish than you think. We’ve known each other from before I can even remember—an intimacy such as ours becomes almost a separate creature, composed of cells we can’t see or hardly fathom. Maybe in some ways we are simply each other’s native tongue. Caxton wrote in Sonnes of Amyon, “It is sayd, that at the end a frende is known.” I don’t believe this. I understand you’re unknowable to me. Still, I’d have liked to comfort you. Now I’ve decided to go east—it’s what I’ve wanted for so long. I’ve told no one, just you. I wish to live out my life among books, even those written in a language I don’t yet understand. I plan to find a teacher in London, then make my way to China. I hope never to return. Your friend always, Henry Clerval

I hadn’t known a human being could sound like that. He used the words “comfort” and “tenderness.” He called you “My friend.” Nights I’d lie in the woods thinking only that I wished I could see him, and wondered, if he saw me, what might he think? Would he flee from me like you did? But he wrote those words…I imagined him not fleeing.

Now I watch his slender fingers turning pages, the way he’s careful with each one, and a feeling almost of peacefulness comes into me.

Sometimes I imagine he left that note for me, not you. And that, along with Sonnes of Amyon (I have since read many books) he also knew this line from Turner, “rais’d by the Comfort of The Sunne to water dry and barren grounds.”

***

Excerpt from A MONSTER’S NOTES © 2009 by Laurie Sheck. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Poem submission by Harley Prechtel-Cortez

I breathed new life into some old language swimming around my head. 

I deciphered it’s meanings and gave it lungs from the remains of muted gills. 

Now I swallow pain night and day in the vain of things still left to say. 

My aquatic grandfather spoke a Cherokee tongue 

but that was before that teary eyed trail left him blind. 

In this cuneiform-ed wetland of a great great grand fodder, 

I was stuck with figuring out where my ancestors stood or swam. 

I knew I had too many sharks in that water so I laid these metaphors to rest. 

They now swim with fishes ever so eloquently. 

  

Poem submission by Enrique Rosas

A man came for a job
His English was okay
And his dress was tidy.
He was not slow,
He checked often for full garbage bags,
He walked back and forth
And asked if there was something else he could do

He was here for two days
The excuse for him being fired was,
He did not sweep or mop properly.

Really? Is that so?
Well then how come others have stayed,
Yet he had to go?
This is foolish to me.
The only reason I see
For him being fired
Is that he couldn’t see with one eye
It was dry and looked bad.
This is why he was fired.

So I saw him just now…
And his figure caused me great pain inside.
For I saw him walk by, well dressed,
But with heaviness for he has not a job.
So he walked down the street
To continue his search
For a place that will hire
A man who is blind in one eye.
For when people look at him
All they see is his eye.
They do not see his good posture,
Or his well ironed clothes.
They don’t hear his good accent
They don’t see his hard work.
They just see his dead eye.

But it is them who are blind.
For who are they, who are you, who am I
To judge a man who cannot see with one eye.
For his hard work should speak
Not his one shaded eye.
It is him who can speak
For his eye may not see,
But then again, there is not much to see
In a world such as this.
So when you see a blind man
You should see not his eyes.

If he is begging,
Do not look at the cup he is holding
For the generous tips of those who behold him
And truly do pity his poor blind condition.
Because truly, who will give him a job?
They won’t hire a man with one eye
So how will they hire one with no eyes?
You should see who he is on the inside.
You should see that he’s not give up.
And while you may complain that your life is too hard
Try to think of their day
Try to envision their life.
I guarantee you
You will  move aside
The next time you see a blind man walking by.
And you will move,
Not because he needs to pass by,
You will move to respect him
And the burden he hides.

Poem submission by peaceindiscord

Icy as the chill of a winter breeze,

Fiery as the sting from the frozen seas.

Wild as the tears from a child’s cries,

Calm as the pierce from young staring eyes

Behind each soul, a story untold,

Unlock the secret, and a world unfolds.

Heart’s still beating, but life is still

This world anew, is yours to fill.

Paint the skies and add new lands,

Turn stars to diamonds, and diamonds to sand.

You are free to do with it as you please

But you are limited by your creativities.

For If you can think it, so it shall be,

But you’ll find it’s hard to let your mind free

But, no matter how simple my world may seem,

It’s mine to live, and mine to dream

Poem submission by Benvenuto Garisto

Words cannot express,

So I will make a new alphabet!

A new language!

New stories!
New libraries!

I will make new dungeons
to house it’s secrets.

I’ll make new voices
that can’t be heard
and have no sound.

I’ll make it all!

I’ll make new legends,
new legacies,
new testaments,
and lore,

I’ll make everything and nothing,
I’m yearning for more!

More towers,
more screaming,
no exit,
no door,

From here to the sky
and the ocean floor!

Nothing is safe
and nothing has started,
so remain calm,
seated
and keep your hair parted,

Nothing is sacred,
nothing can rest,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

I vow to impress,

As I tell the feeling,

Words cannot express!

W. H. Auden’s social, political, and personal consciousness—not to mention his well-rhymed music—hits a tonic note even seventy years later, in our own disorganized time.

- Knopf Poetry Team

***

Leap Before You Look

The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

Tough-minded men get mushy in their sleep
And break the by-laws any fool can keep;
It is not the convention but the fear
That has a tendency to disappear.

The worried efforts of the busy heap,
The dirt, the imprecision, and the beer
Produce a few smart wisecracks every year;
Laugh if you can, but you will have to leap.

The clothes that are considered right to wear
Will not be either sensible or cheap,
So long as we consent to live like sheep
And never mention those who disappear.

Much can be said for social savoir-faire,
But to rejoice when no one else is there
Is even harder than it is to weep;
No one is watching, but you have to leap.

A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear.

                                                            December 1940

***

Excerpt from COLLECTED POEMS © 1976, 1991 by The Estate of W. H. Auden. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

In Jonathan Galassi’s Left-handed, a transformation unfolds in three powerful sections, as the book’s speaker, at midlife, tries for what he calls in the first section, “A Clean Slate.” He feels his way through a difficult, if at times exhilarating, middle passage (“A Crossing”), to arrive at last at the tentative joys he discovers in the final group of poems in “I Can Sleep Later.” Today’s selection, “Pretzels,” falls more than halfway along in this chronicle of old and new love, with its painful goodbyes.

- Knopf Poetry Team

***

Pretzels

You twisted your-
self into a pretzel
trying to tolerate
something you hated
in me it turned out
was essential. Does
that mean I should
twist myself into a
pretzel trying not
to be the thing that
made you twist
yourself into a
pretzel? Having
been salty and
wrenched for so
long it’s a relief I
find to unwind and
simply be bent but
not twisted; neither
of us can be pret-
zels anymore. Why
is that so hard to
understand? I’m sad
about it too but
I’m not angry. No,
I’m glad I’m not
twisted into a pret-
zel. You be glad too.

***

Excerpt from LEFT-HANDED © 2012 by Jonathan Galassi. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Bonus: Click here to listen to Jonathan Galassi read “Pretzels” and download our broadside.

Poem submission by Guy Peace

Days pass by like pages flapping in the wind
One by one,
Many in one go
Often
And then the last page goes 
And you turn all over again
From the first one
Memories erase memory
Days days
Leaving me blank 
Leaving me alone at last

Poem submission by Amy Li Baksh

There is a cloud over my house

It  rained and rained, and I am trapped.

A cloud over my house

That I built up so fine and neat

The water dripped in, and I have no bucket.

A cloud over my house

My third house, built this time of stone

Not the soft thatch that blew away with the winds

Not the twigs I had gathered that snapped to bits.

There is a cloud over my house

I can hear the bellowing as my windows shiver

And the snarls that shake my kitchen wares.

I built up a palace on the sunny days

Drunk on self-assuredness

But the rains came for my walls—

My third house—

Spoilt and sodden and washed away.

Poem submission by Josh Wilson