A Poem-A-Day Celebration

Month

April 2012

122 posts

The World and I

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.

Apr 17, 201276 notes
#poetry #poemaday #knopfpoemaday2012 #submission
Dancer

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

Apr 17, 201245 notes
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sellout.

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.

Apr 17, 201236 notes
#poetry #poemaday #knopfpoemaday2012 #submission
Laurie Sheck's A MONSTER'S NOTES

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.

Apr 17, 201221 notes
#lit #poetry
excerpts from a dead sea

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. 

  

Apr 16, 201225 notes
#poemaday #poetry #knopfpoemaday2012 #submission
Blind Man

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.

Apr 16, 201242 notes
#poetry #poemaday #knopfpoemaday2012 #submission
Chambers of the Heart

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

Apr 16, 201251 notes
#poetry #poemaday #knopfpoemaday2012 #submission
New Words

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!

Apr 16, 201247 notes
#poetry #poemaday #knopfpoemaday2012 #submission
W. H. Auden's "Leap Before You Look"

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.

Apr 16, 201265 notes
#lit #poetry #wh auden #auden
Jonathan Galassi's "Pretzels"

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.

Apr 15, 201237 notes
#lit #poetry #poetry month 2012 #Poem-a-day #jonathan galassi
The last page

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
Apr 14, 201231 notes
#poetry #submission #knopfpoemaday2012 #poemaday
Third House

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.

Apr 14, 201215 notes
#poetry #poemaday #knopfpoemaday2012 #submission
The sound of your soul

Poem submission by Josh Wilson

Apr 14, 201241 notes
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Don Marquis and Archy's "a spider and a fly"

For those who don’t know Archy, he was the cockroach poet who used the typewriter of his “boss,” Don Marquis, a columnist for the New York Sun from 1916 into the 1930s, in order to type out his poems, which then became the fodder for Marquis’s highly popular Sun Dial column. Together with his sidekick, the cat Mehitabel (she claimed to have been Cleopartra in a previous life), Archy discoursed on all manner of subjects, using only lower-case letters and no punctuation (because of his difficulty in operating the shift key). In our new Pocket Poets edition, The Best of Archy and Mehitabel, we reproduce E. B. White’s introduction to a 1950 volume collecting Marquis’s Archy columns, in which he writes, “The creation of Archy, whose communications were in free verse, was part inspiration, part desperation. It enabled Marquis to use short (sometimes very very short) lines, which fill space rapidly, and at the same time it allowed his spirit to soar while viewing things from the under side, insect fashion….Vers libre was in vogue….It was the time of ‘swat the fly,’ dancing the shimmy, and speakeasies. Marquis imbibed freely of this carnival air, and it all turned up, somehow, in Archy’s report. Thanks to Archy, Marquis was able to write rapidly and almost (but not quite) carelessly. In the very act of spoofing free verse, he was enjoying some of its obvious advantages.”

- Knopf Poetry Team

***

a spider and a fly

i heard a spider
and a fly arguing
wait said the fly
do not eat me
i serve a great purpose
in the world

you will have to
show me said the spider

i scurry around
gutters and sewers
and garbage cans
said the fly and gather
up the germs of
typhoid influenza
and pneumonia on my feet
and wings
then i carry these germs
into the households of men
and give them diseases
all the people who
have lived the right
sort of life recover
from the diseases
and the old soaks who
have weakened their systems
with liquor and iniquity
succumb it is my mission
to help rid the world
of these wicked persons
i am a vessel of righteousness
scattering seeds of justice
and serving the noblest uses
it is true said the spider
that you are more
useful in a plodding
material sort of way
than i am but i do not
serve the utilitarian deities
i serve the gods of beauty
look at the gossamer webs
i weave they float in the sun
like filaments of song
if you get what i mean
i do not work at anything
i play all the time
i am busy with the stuff
of enchantment and the materials
of fairyland my works
transcend utility
i am the artist
a creator and a demi god
it is ridiculous to suppose
that i should be denied
the food i need in order
to continue to create
beauty i tell you
plainly mister fly it is all
damned nonsense for that food
to rear up on its hind legs
and say it should not be eaten

you have convinced me
said the fly say no more
and shutting all his eyes
he prepared himself for dinner
and yet he said i could
have made out a case
for myself too if i had
had a better line of talk

of course you could said the spider
clutching a sirloin from him
but the end would have been
just the same if neither of
us had spoken at all

boss i am afraid that what
the spider said is true
and it gives me to think
furiously upon the futility
of literature
                                       archy

***

Excerpt from THE BEST OF ARCHY AND MEHITABEL © 2011 by Everyman’s Library. Excerpted by permission of Everyman’s Library 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.

Apr 14, 201232 notes
#lit #poetry #poetry month 2012 #Poem-a-day
Another Rainy Thursday

Poem submission by Michael Malpiedi


Noon of today the cumulonimbus
Discharged fulminological wisdom to my being
And poured drops of knowledge lost to us.

Whispered of how she wonders about our fleeing
From her gentle precipitating kiss,
And she asked if truths are not worth seeing.

She told me that maybe ignorance’s bliss 
Has caused us to forget our creation
From the combination of rains such as this.

Our bodies are her waters after solidification,
And our tears are our dreams
Of melting back within her, the beauty of unification.

And with my enlightenment, all of me returned through streams
Of self evaporating while finding love within crystal seams.

Apr 13, 201231 notes
#poetry #poemaday #knopfpoemaday2012 #submission
Untitled

Poem submission by copyists


A winsome man, who
At half past twelve every day
Asks for a water and a decaf,
Waters the plant 
On one coffee shop table 
And under the careful lamp light,
His eyes would retreat
Into thought of 
I don’t know what
But he would gently
Sip the rest of his coffee,
Complete a crossword,
Tuck his chair in
And leave, newspaper under arm,
With those same eyes.

I thought
I should tell him
He needn’t bother himself
With watering that little tree,
That I, or some other employee,
Could take care of it.
But when I went up to him
And he looked straight at me,
My lips could only muster, “Hello,”
And his gave back, “I was
Beginning to wonder if you’d 
Ever come talk to me
After all that staring.”

Apr 13, 201243 notes
#poetry #poemaday #knopfpoemaday2012 #submission
starving stream

Poem submission by Janée Romesberg

dear starving stream
running beside the three-lane highway,
i see you nibbling at its bank,
trying to fill your belly-
rebelling against progress the only way you know how.

you are small and you are hungry but
graze elsewhere, else
the traffic currents and blacktop rapids 
decide to sweep you away and
drive you under.

then,
you will be filled but
no one will know you,
no one will remember you 
once trickled against our grain.

Apr 13, 201229 notes
#poetry #poemaday #knopfpoemaday2012 #submission
Susan Minot's "Interloper"

We like to page through our backlist in search of gone but not forgotten little gems like this one from the novelist Susan Minot.

- Knopf Poetry Team

***

Interloper

There’s a cat up on the roof
with stripes across his face.
He has the curious guarded look
of a cat who knows this place
may be inhabited
by other cats.
I see him through the window
past yellow tangles on the sill,
beyond the long pegged rack
of all my heartsick hats.
He lifts his paw and shakes off rain.
His face is wild and true.
For a moment he relieves me
of the pain of loving you.

***

Excerpt from POEMS 4 A.M. © 2002 by Susan Minot.  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.

Apr 13, 201238 notes
#poetry #lit #susan minot
A Letter to Little Mikala

Poem submission by 1forbiddenlove


Dear Little One,

The world is going great for you right now,
Soon the weight of the world will lay on you.
Turning your body into a constant bow,
Because your naive mind can’t handle the truth.

One of the ones you hold dear,
Will be gone in two years.

You’ll deal with pain and depression,
Another 2, 3 years you’ll go through self-realization.

I just want to warn you ahead of time,
So maybe you’ll have a chance to change our screwed up life.
This isn’t just some nonsense rhyme,
Don’t you even think ‘bout touching those pills or that knife.

When you catch yourself thinking,
About that boy.
And you swear to God you hear bells ringing;
He just wants a cheap toy.

He will break you and then he’ll look down,
And he’ll be smiling, watching your tears make you drown.

People will whisper and stare,
The know the rumors-who, what, and where.

When you get to where I am,
You are going to be lonely, tired, and just want to quit.
Your thoughts will make you believe everything is an illusion- a scam,
But when you finally find yourself, hun, you’re going to be brilliant. 

Apr 12, 201230 notes
#poetry #poemaday #knopfpoemaday2012 #submission
The Aftermath

Poem submission by Anurag Sharma

Last time when it rained,
It flooded everywhere I could see.

Tall trees were deep into water
The street turned into a mighty river.

The storm shook my house
The flood washed away my office.

I was homeless and jobless
And used a boat instead of my car.

Now when the rain is gone
Far-far away from me.

Leaving no drop of water
Anywhere around me.

Not a single cloud in sight
I long for rain, I really long.

Apr 12, 201227 notes
#poetry #poemaday #knopfpoemaday2012 #submission
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