A Poem-A-Day Celebration

A poem that arrives in a single sentence brings a neat jolt of pleasure to the reader; for our final day, we offer one such by the great Polish poet Janusz Szuber, whose poems always seem forged in gratitude, even when they take on painful historical realities. In this spirit, and in acknowledgment of all that poetry can do for us, we thank you for joining us this April. We will be back in your inbox with another month of selections next spring. Until then, read well.

- Knopf Poetry Team

***

I Had Dreams

I had beautiful dreams and was
Also happy when awake,
Always thanks to you, never
From myself in myself, so continue to be,
Now, only yourselves for me,
Like yellow flags, irises, girls by the water.

Translation by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough.

***

Excerpt from THEY CARRY A PROMISE Translation © 2009 by by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough. 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 download the broadside for “I Had Dreams.”

The final, posthumous volume by Deborah Digges, now available in a paperback edition, opens with this poem - an urgent hello-goodbye to the reader.

- Knopf Poetry Team

***

The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart

The wind blows
through the doors of my heart.
It scatters my sheet music
that climbs like waves from the piano, free of the keys.
Now the notes stripped, black butterflies,
flattened against the screens.
The wind through my heart
blows all my candles out.
In my heart and its rooms is dark and windy.
From the mantle smashes birds’ nests, teacups
full of stars as the wind winds round,
a mist of sorts that rises and bends and blows
or is blown through my rooms of my heart
that shatters the windows,
rakes the bedsheets as though someone
had just made love. And my dresses
they are lifted like brides come to rest
on the bedstead, crucifixes,
dresses tangled in trees in the rooms
of my heart. To save them
I’ve thrown flowers to fields,
so that someone would pick them up
and know where they came from.
Come the bees now clinging to flowered curtains.
Off with the clothesline pinning anything, my mother’s trousseau.
It is not for me to say what is this wind
or how it came to blow through the rooms of my heart.
Wing after wing, through the rooms of the dead
the wind does not blow. Nor the basement, no wheezing,
no wind choking the cobwebs in our hair.
It is cool here, quiet, a quilt spread on soil.
But we will never lie down again.

***

Excerpt from THE WIND BLOWS THROUGH THE DOORS OF MY HEART © 2010 by The Estate of Deborah Digges. 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 Alexander Neubauer’s Poetry in Person, we are treated to a series of remarkable conversations that were recorded in the classroom of the legendary New School poetry teacher Pearl London, from the early 1970s through the mid-1990s - a time when a significant generation came of age in American poetry. Among the many visitors to her class (whom London asked to bring drafts of poems in progress, so that her students could learn about the nitty-gritty of creation and revision) were Lucille Clifton, Robert Pinsky, Paul Muldoon, Derek Walcott, Louise Glück, Charles Simic, and Galway Kinnell. In the chapter excerpted below, we hear London talking with Amy Clampitt, who came to the classroom in February of 1983, right at the time of her late-in-life début with The Kingfisher. She was sixty-three when it was published (and hailed by Helen Vendler in The New Yorker). The poem under discussion here is “Black Buttercups,” which would appear in Clampitt’s second book, What the Light Was Like. (The full text of the poem follows the conversation.)

- Knopf Poetry Team

***

PEARL LONDON: Let me say that, first, I’m so delighted, because we’ve all been wondering who Amy Clampitt is and what she looks like, and now we have you with us. Tell us about the metaphor of “Black Buttercups.” Are there really “black buttercups that never see daylight”?

AMY CLAMPITT: No. [Laughter] I’m very happy to talk about this poem because I think perhaps this poem has been longer in the making than almost anything I’ve ever finished. In various forms I was trying to write about what for strange reasons was for me a very traumatic experience— it sounds simple enough, moving from one house to another. But in the process of thinking about that experience, I suppose I began going back into something that went deeper. I’m not being psychoanalytical, but the metaphor of the black buttercups has to do with unfulfilled possibilities. I suppose we all know about such things in our own background and among our own families, among friends: about the experience of being moved from one place to another—”uprooted,” as it were— at the age of not quite ten.… One problem I ran into in writing this poem— I was going to describe an idyllic place I was forced to leave, but the fact is, although it was an idyllic place in my memory, there’s also a place where I discovered a lot of nonidyllic things. So have you got a poem there anymore? I don’t know. That’s one reason why it took me a long time to write this, because it turns out that when I started thinking about the years I spent in that house, which was the earliest house I remembered, I had to acknowledge that there were many things that were anything but idyllic. So I suppose that’s kind of the central core of the poem— there are these contradictions and there is this sense of things that went wrong that were never acknowledged. So that’s the black buttercups really.

LONDON: In “Black Buttercups” you ask, “When / … did the rumor / of unhappiness arrive?” And then we know that there’s that whole sense of menace and there is no safety— menace in the water, menace where the bull is in the pasture, and menace walking in that graveyard, I think it was. But that one understands in childhood. What was difficult to grasp for us were some of the particulars. Let me read you these lines and see if you can comment for us: “The look of exile / foreseen, however massive or inconsequential, / hurts the same; it’s the remembered / particulars that differ.”

[reads]

How is one to measure
the loss of two blue spruces, a waterfall
of bridal wreath below the porch, the bluebells
and Dutchman’s-breeches my grandmother
had brought in from the timber
to bloom in the same plot with peonies
and lilies of the valley? Or out past
the pasture where the bull, perennially
resentful, stood for the menace of authority
(no leering, no snickering in class),
an orchard—or a grove of willows
at the far edge of the wet meadow
marking the verge, the western barrier
of everything experience had verified?

CLAMPITT: That whole catalog is really things that— I could go on forever. Part of the difficulty of writing that poem was to narrow down all of the things that I remembered, and they’re mostly growing things. My earliest memories were flowers, and it seems as though the pleasure I found in being a child had to do with spring arriving and finding things in bloom, and when you’re a child, of course, it seems like a thousand years since the last spring; you don’t believe it’ll ever arrive again. So they tended to gather around things that bloom; that’s what I meant.

_____________________________

Black Buttercups

In March, the farmer’s month
for packing up and moving on, the rutted
mud potholed with glare, the verb to move
connoted nothing natural, such as the shifting
of the course of streams or of the sun’s
position, sap moving up, or even
couples dancing. What the stripped root, exhumed
above the mudhole’s brittle skin, discerned
was exile.
                 Exile to raw clapboard,
a privy out in back, a smokehouse
built by the pioneers, no shade trees
but a huddle of red cedars, exposure
on the highest elevation in the township,
a gangling windmill harped on by each
indisposition of the weather,
the mildewed gurgle of a cistern
humped underneath it like a burial.
                                                    Menace
inhabited that water when the pioneers,
ending their trek from North Carolina, farther
than Ur of the Chaldees had been from Canaan,
settled here and tried to root themselves:
four of the family struck down on this farm
as its first growing season ended. Menace
still waited, literally around the corner,
in the graveyard of a country church,
its back against the timber
just where the terrain began to drop (the creek
down there had for a while powered a sawmill,
but now ran free, unencumbered, useless)—
that not-to-be-avoided plot whose honed stones’
fixed stare, fanned in the night
by passing headlights, struck back
the rueful semaphore:
There is no safety.
                                  I was ten years old.
Not three miles by the road that ran
among the farms (still less if
you could have flown, or, just as unthinkable,
struck out across country, unimpeded
by barbed wire or the mire of feedlots)
the legendary habitat of safety
lay contained: the memory
of the seedleaf in the bean, the blind
hand along the bannister, the virgin sheath
of having lived nowhere but here. Back there
in the dining room, last summer’s
nine-year-old sat crying on the window seat
that looked into the garden, rain
coursing the pane in streams, the crying
on the other side and it one element—and sits
there still, still crying, knowing
for the first time forever what it was
to be heartbroken.
                                  The look of exile
foreseen, however massive or inconsequential,
hurts the same; it’s the remembered
particulars that differ. How is one to measure
the loss of two blue spruces, a waterfall
of bridal wreath below the porch, the bluebells
and Dutchman’s-breeches my grandmother
had brought in from the timber
to bloom in the same plot with peonies
and lilies of the valley? Or, out past
the pasture where the bull, perennially
resentful, stood for the menace of authority
(no leering, no snickering in class),
an orchard—or a grove of willows
at the far edge of the wet meadow
marking the verge, the western barrier
of everything experience had verified? We never
thought of going there except in February,
when the sap first started working up
the pussywillow wands, the catkins
pink underneath a down of eldritch silver
like the new pigs whose birthing coincided,
shedding their crisp cupolas’ detritus
on the debris of foundering snowbanks
brittle as the skin of standing ponds
we trod on in the meadow, a gauche travesty
of calamity like so many entertainments—
the nuptial porcelain, the heirloom crystal
vandalized by wanton overshoes, bundled- up
boredom lolling, while the blue world reeled
up past the pussywillow undersides of clouds
latticed by swigging catkins soon to haze
with pollen-bloat, a glut
run riot while the broken pond
unsealed, turned to mud
and, pullulating, came up buttercups
lucent with a mindlessness as total
as the romp that ends up wet-mittened,
chap-cheeked, fretful beside the kitchen stove,
later to roughhouse or whine its way
upstairs to bed.
                                  Night froze it up again
for the ten thousandth time, closing the seals
above the breeding ground of frogs, the Acheron
of dreadful disappointed Eros
stirring up hell—the tics,
the shame, the pathological ambition,
anxiety so thick sometimes that nothing
breeds there except more anxiety,
hampering yet another generation, all
the sodden anniversaries of dread:
black buttercups that never see daylight
or with lucent chalices drink of the sun.
Did we then hear them moving
wounded from room to room? Or in what shape
was it we first perceived it—the unstanched
hereditary thing, working its way
along the hollows of the marrow,
the worry taking root within like ragweed,
the noxious pollen flowering into
nothing but sick headaches
passed down like an heirloom? When,
under the same roof the memory of
a legendary comfort had endowed
with what in retrospect would seem
like safety, did the rumor
of unhappiness arrive? I remember waking,
a February morning leprous with frost
above the dregs of a halfhearted snowfall,
to find the gray world of adulthood
everywhere, as though there never
had been any other, in that same house
I could not bear to leave, where even now
the child who wept to leave still sits
weeping at the thought of exile.

***

Excerpt from POETRY IN PERSON © 2010 by Alexander Neubauer. 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.

Franz Wright’s most recent collection, Kindertotenwald, is book of prose poems that serve to remind us how tragic is the loss of childhood, not just when we first lose it but throughout our lives. Wright, now in his late fifties, has remained alert to the hauntings of youth, as well as to surreal visitations like that of the seagull in the corn below.

- Knopf Poetry Team

***

DEAD SEAGULL

Seagull in the corn, postage stamp-size cornfield in the woods,
in the middle of the state, and how you ever got here. Weather
of heaven, July Massachusetts, the blue sky one endless goodbye.
Give me a minute, maggot-swarming preview of the future, give
me a moment. You can hone a blade until there is no blade, or
dwell with magnifying glass so long on a word that finally it darkens,
is not, and fire in widening circles consumes the world. For a moment
only, stay with me, mystery. Before you change completely into
something other, slow cloud, entrance, spell, not yet remembered
name, stay; tell me what you mean. A dead bird is not a dead bird
I was once told by someone who knows.

***

Excerpt from KINDERTOTENWALD © 2011 by Franz Wright. 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.

There is nothing else in American poetry like the late James Merrill’s multiple-prize-winning The Changing Light at Sandover, a 560-page epic poem about his evenings spent at the Ouija board with his partner, David Jackson, first published in one volume in 1982. Among other things, it is one of the only accounts of a longtime domestic partnership that we have in verse; as they sit in their candle-lit Stonington, Connecticut dining room, using a five-&-dime Willowware cup as the “pointer” in their alphabetical soundings of the beyond, “JM” and “DJ” learn much about themselves, and process the events of their daily lives as they communicate with the past presences who come to call. Beginning in the summer of 1955, when they first experiment with the Ouija process and meet with their “familiar” and guiding spirit, Ephraim, a first-century Greek Jew, they will make contact with many departed luminaries in the course of their decades-long journey, including Plato, W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, and the eminence “God B” (“God Biology”). Readers of the now classic Sandover have often argued about the degree to which Merrill’s account is “real,” but those who knew him still tell how they sat in the dining room and witnessed the cup flying around the board - whether guided by spirits or by poetic genius is perhaps irrelevant now. It is impossible to read the volume without at some point giving oneself over to the radiance of otherworldly lessons, and marveling at this monumental reflection on our endangered efforts to make a good life here on earth.

Throughout the book, Merrill uses upper-case letters to indicate when voices are speaking from the board. Thus Ephraim’s words are given in caps below, in this section which tells of his initial instructional visit with JM (whom the spirits called “scribe”) and DJ (called “hand”).

- Knopf Poetry Team

***

Correct but cautious, that first night, we asked
Our visitor’s name, era, habitat.
EPHRAIM came the answer. A Greek Jew
Born AD 8 at XANTHOS    Where was that?
In Greece WHEN WOLVES & RAVENS WERE IN ROME
(Next day the classical dictionary yielded
A Xanthos on the Asia Minor Coast.)
NOW WHO ARE U    We told him. ARE U XTIANS
We guessed so. WHAT A COZY CATACOMB
Christ had WROUGHT HAVOC in his family,
ENTICED MY FATHER FROM MY MOTHER’S BED
(I too had issued from a broken home—
The first of several facts to coincide.)
Later a favorite of TIBERIUS    Died
AD 36 on CAPRI    throttled
By the imperial guard for having LOVED
THE MONSTERS NEPHEW (sic) CALIGULA
Rapidly he went on—changing the subject?
A long incriminating manuscript
Boxed in bronze lay UNDER PORPHYRY
Beneath the deepest evacuations. He
Would help us find it, but we must please make haste
Because Tiberius wanted it destroyed.
Oh? And where, we wondered to the void,
Was Tiberius these days? STAGE THREE

Why was he telling us? He’d overheard us
Talking to SIMPSON    Simpson? His LINK WITH EARTH
His REPRESENTATIVE    A feeble nature
All but bestial, given to violent
Short lives—one ending lately among flames
In an Army warehouse. Slated for rebirth
But not in time, said Ephraim, to prevent
The brat from wasting, just now at our cup,
Precious long distance minutes—don’t hang up!

So much facetiousness—well, we were young
And these were matters of life and death—dismayed us.
Was he a devil? His reply MY POOR
INNOCENTS left the issue hanging fire.
As it flowed on, his stream-of-consciousness
Deepened. There was a buried room, a BED
WROUGHT IN SILVER    I CAN LEAD U THERE
IF    If? U GIVE ME    What? HA HA YR SOULS
(Another time he’ll say that he misread
Our innocence for insolence that night,
And meant to scare us.) Our eyes met. What if …
The blood’s least vessel hoisted jet-black sails.
Five whole minutes we were frightened stiff
—But after all, we weren’t that innocent.
The Rover Boys at thirty, still red-blooded
Enough not to pass up an armchair revel
And pure enough at heart to beat the devil,
Entered into the spirit, so to speak,
And said they’d leave for Capri that same week.

Pause. Then, as though we’d passed a test,
Ephraim’s whole manner changed. He brushed aside
Tiberius and settled to the task
Of answering, like an experienced guide,
Those questions we had lacked the wit to ask.

Here on Earth—huge tracts of information
Have gone into these capsules flavorless
And rhymed for easy swallowing—on Earth
We’re each the REPRESENTATIVE of a PATRON
—Are there that many patrons? YES O YES
These secular guardian angels fume and fuss
For what must seem eternity over us.
It is forbidden them to INTERVENE
Save, as it were, in the entr’acte between
One incarnation and another. Back
To school from the disastrously long vac
Goes the soul its patron crams yet once
Again with savoir vivre. Will the dunce
Never—by rote, the hundredth time round—learn
What ropes make fast that point of no return,
A footing on the lowest of NINE STAGES
Among the curates and the minor mages?
Patrons at last ourselves, an upward notch
Our old ones move    THEYVE BORNE IT ALL FOR THIS
And take delivery from the Abyss
Of brand-new little savage souls to watch.
One difference: with every rise in station
Comes a degree of PEACE FROM REPRESENTATION
—Odd phrase, more like a motto for abstract
Art—or for Autocracy—In fact
Our heads are spinning—From the East a light—
BUT U ARE TIRED MES CHERS    SWEET DREAMS    TOMORROW NIGHT

***

Excerpt from THE CHANGING LIGHT AT SANDOVER © 1980, 1982 by James Merrill. 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.

Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem is a surprising little volume from our Everyman’s Pocket Poets library. It contains everything from anonymous “murder ballads” and verse by the likes of Thomas Hardy and Robert Browning to more contemporary entries by Frank Bidart, Carol Ann Duffy, and Kimiko Hahn. The below, by Marie Howe, is one of those rare poems that actually captures a conversation as it takes shape, in this case a particularly Manhattan, walking-in-the-West-Village sort of conversation.

- Knopf Poetry Team

***

After the Movie

My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing
       about the movie.
He says that be believes a person can love someone
and still be able to murder that person.

I say, No, that’s not love. That’s attachment.
Michael says, No, that’s love. You can love someone,
       then come to a day

when you’re forced to think “it’s him or me”
think “me” and kill him.

I say, Then it’s not love anymore.
Michael says, It was love up to then though.

I say, Maybe we mean different things by the
       same word.
Michael says, Humans are complicated: love can exist
       even in the murderous heart.

I say that what he might mean by love is desire.
Love is not a feeling, I say. And Michael says, Then
       what is it?

We’re walking along West 16th Street - a clear
       unclouded night - and I hear my voice
repeating what I used to say to my husband: Love is
       action, I used to say to him.

Simone Weil says that when you really love you are
       able to look at someone you want to eat and not
       eat them.

Janis Joplin says, take another little piece of my heart
       now baby.

Meister Eckhart says that as long as we love any
       image we are doomed to live in purgatory.

Michael and I stand on the corner of 6th Avenue
       saying goodnight.
I can’t drink enough of the tangerine spritzer I’ve just
       bought -

again and again I bring the cold can to my mouth and
       suck the stuff from the hole the flip top made.

What are you doing tomorrow? Michael says.
But what I think he’s saying is “You are too strict.
       You are a nun.”

Then I think, Do I love Michael enough to allow him
       to think these things of me even if he’s not
       thinking them?

Above Manhattan, the moon wanes, and the sky turns
       clearer and colder.
Although the days, after the solstice, have started to
       lengthen,

we both know the winter has only begun.

***

Poem © 2008 from The Kingdom of Ordinary Time by Marie Howe, used by gracious permission of W.W. Norton. Excerpt from KILLER VERSE © 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.

One of the pleasures of knowing a poet over many years is to watch a life’s journey play out in verse, perhaps in tandem with our own, or lighting our way helpfully just ahead, or even just behind, allowing us a good look back at our own experience. Over the years, we’ve seen Sharon Olds find her balance on both sides of the parental equation. She has written frequently as the daughter, still walking the paths laid out by her parents, but probably nearly as frequently from her point of view as a mother of growing and then adult children.

- Knopf Poetry Team

***

Possessed

I have never left. Your bodies are before me
at all times, in the dark I see
the stars of your teeth in their fixed patterns
wheeling over my bed, and the darkness
is your hair, the fragrance of your two heads
over my crib, your body-hairs
which I count as God counts the feathers of the sparrows,
one by one. And I never leave your sight,
I can look in the eyes of any stranger and
find you there, in the rich swimming
bottom-of-the-barrel brown, or in the
blue that reflects from the knife’s blade,
and I smell you always, the dead cigars and
Chanel in the mink, and I can hear you coming,
the slow stopped bear tread and the
quick fox, her nails on the ice,
and I dream the inner parts of your bodies, the
coils of your bowels like smoke, your hearts
opening like jaws, drops from your glands
clinging to my walls like pearls in the night.
You think I left—I was the child
who got away, thousands of miles,
but not a day goes past that I am not
turning someone into you.
Never having had you, I cannot let you go, I
turn now, in the fear of this moment,
into your soft stained paw
resting on her breast, into your breast trying to
creep away from under his palm—
your gooseflesh like the shells of a thousand tiny snails,
your palm like a streambed gone dry in summer.

***

Excerpt from THE DEAD AND THE LIVING © 1975, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983 by Sharon Olds. 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.

Alan Hollinghurst’s widely acclaimed new novel, The Stranger’s Child, is a century-spanning story set in England and built around the myth of a single poem: “Two Acres” is written in 1913 by Cecil Valance, an aristocratic young man who, in the book’s opening, visits a Cambridge school chum, George Sawle, for the weekend; before he returns to university, Cecil composes the poem in the autograph album of George’s younger sister, Daphne. Daphne is dazzled by Cecil: he is older and handsome, and a talked-about young poet, the scion of a rich family with a major country estate (she longs to visit him at “Corley Court”), while her existence is modest, dull by comparison. The title “Two Acres” refers to the Sawle’s own small property outside London, where Cecil, during his three-day stay with the family, both makes love to George and flirts with Daphne, giving the innocent girl her first kiss out in the garden. In the passage below, we get fragments of the poem, which, as Hollinghurst’s novel develops and Cecil is killed in World War One, becomes a touchstone for a generation, cited by Winston Churchill and subsequently recited by every schoolchild in England. Far less publicly, it also becomes the complex launching pad for the lives that George and Daphne and the generations that come after them go on to lead. Before the novel ends, we get to witness Daphne, in her eighties, still guarding her corner of that long-ago love triangle when an eager Valance biographer comes to call; we have to marvel at the way a poem begins as just a little piece of one life and then, regardless of its quality or original intent, comes to carry multiple meanings, conflicts, sorrows—a unique form of kinetic energy—into many lives down through the ages.

- Knopf Poetry Team

***

A minute later George came back down, with Jonah at his heels, and Daphne’s mauve album open in his hands. “My word, sis … ,” he said abstractedly, turning the page and continuing to read; “he’s certainly done you proud!”

“What is it?” said Daphne, pushing back her chair but determined to keep her dignity, almost to seem indifferent. Not just his name, then: she could see it was much, much more—now that the book was here, open, in the room, she felt quite frightened at the thought of what might come out of it.

“The gentleman left it in the room,” said Jonah, looking from one to the other of them.

“Yes, thank you,” said Daphne. George was blinking slowly and softly biting his lower lip in concentration. He might have been pondering how to break some rather awkward news to her, as he came and sat down across from her, placing the book on the table, then turning the pages back to start again. “Well, when you’ve finished,” Daphne said tartly, but also with reluctant respect. What Cecil had written was poetry, which took longer to read, and his handwriting wasn’t of the clearest.

“Goodness,” said George, and looked up at her with a firm little smile. “I think you should feel thoroughly flattered.”

“Oh, really?” said Daphne. “Should I?” It seemed George was determined to master the poem and its secrets before he let her see a word of it.

“No, this is quite something,” he said, shaking his head as he ran back over it. “You’re going to have to let me copy this out for myself.” Daphne drained her teacup completely, folded her napkin, glanced across at the two servants, who were smiling stupidly at the successful retrieval of the book, and also formed a somewhat inhibiting audience to this agitating crisis in her life, and then said, as lightly as she could, “Don’t be such a tease, George, let me see.” Of course it was a tease, the latest of thousands, but it was more than that, and she knew resentfully that George couldn’t help it.

“Sorry, old girl,” he said, and sat back at last, and slid the album towards her.

“Thank you!” said Daphne.

“If you could see your face,” said George.

She pushed her plate aside—”Will you take all this, please,” to the maid; who did so, with gaping slowness, peering at the columns of Cecil’s black script as though they confirmed a rather dubious opinion she’d formed of him. “Thank you,” said Daphne again sharply; and frowned and coloured, unable to take in a word of the poem. She had to find out at once what George meant, that she should be flattered. Was this it, the sudden helpless breaking of the news? Perhaps not, or George would have said something more. The harder she looked at it, the less she knew. Well, it was called, simply, “Two Acres,” and it ran on over five pages, both sides of the paper—she flicked back and forth.

“Formally, it’s rather simple,” said George, “for Cecil.”

“Well, quite,” said Daphne.

“Just regular tetrameter couplets.”

“That will be all,” said Daphne, and waited while Veronica and Jonah went off. Really they were most irritating. She flicked further back for a moment, to the Revd. Barstow, with his scholarly flourish, “B. A. Dunelm”; and then forward to Cecil, who had broken all the rules of an autograph book with his enormous entry, and made everyone else look so feeble and dutiful. It was unmannerly, and she wasn’t sure if she resented it or admired it. His writing grew smaller and faster as it sloped down the page. On the first page the bottom line turned up sideways at the end to fit in—”Chaunticleer,” she read, which was a definite poetry word, though she wasn’t precisely sure of its meaning.

“I suppose he’ll be publishing it somewhere,” said George, “the Westminster Review or somewhere.”

“Do you think?” said Daphne, as levelly as she could, but with a quick strong feeling that the poem was hers after all. Cecil hadn’t just written it here, in her book, by chance. She was still trying to see if it said things about her personally, or if it was simply about the house—and the garden:

                         The Jenny nettle by the wall,
                         That some the Devil’s Play-thing call—

that was a conversation she’d had with him—now quite simply turned into poetry. Her father had called stinging nettles Devil’s Play-things, it was what they called them in Devon. She felt thrilled, and a little bewildered, at being in on the very making of a poem, and at something else magical, like seeing oneself in a photograph. What else would be revealed?

                         The book left out beneath the trees,
                         Read over backwards by the breeze.
                         The spinney where the lisping larches
                         Kiss overhead in silver arches
                         And in their shadows lovers too
                         Might kiss and tell their secrets through.

Again the minutely staggered and then breathtaking merging of word, image and fact. She was really going to have to read this somewhere apart, in private. “I think it would be most appropriate to read this in the garden,” she said, getting up and feeling very slightly sick; but just then her mother appeared in the doorway, with her heavy morning face, and her bright morning manner. In fact her manner was flustered; there was something behind her smile. Word must already have got through. Beyond her Veronica loitered, the informer.

“Well, child … !” her mother said, and gave Daphne a strange, eager look. “What excitements.”

“Everyone can see it when I’ve finished reading it,” said Daphne. “People seem to be forgetting that it’s my book.”

***

Excerpt from THE STRANGER’S CHILD © 2011 by Alan Hollinghurst. 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 the long aftermath of grief, the right words have a compensatory beauty, as in these lines by Kevin Young.

- Knopf Poetry Team

***

Serenade

I wake to the cracked plate
of moon being thrown

across the room—
that’ll fix me

for trying sleep.
Lately even night

has left me—
now even the machine

that makes the rain
has stopped sending

the sun away.
It is late,

or early, depending—

who’s to say.
Who’s to name

these ragged stars, this
light that waters

down the milky dark
before I down

it myself.
Sleep, I swear

there’s no one else—
raise me up

in the near-night
& set me like

a tin toy to work,
clanking in the bare

broken bright.

***

Excerpt from DEAR DARKNESS © 2008 by Kevin Young. 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 Maxine Hong Kingston’s verse memoir, we are carried along in the flow of the author’s experiences as a Chinese-American writer, mother, teacher, wife, and time traveler, as she brings us to China and back again, contemplating her multiple home landscapes, and even reconsiders the fate of Fa Mook Lan, the “woman warrior” whose story she popularized a generation ago. In the excerpt below, we see Maxine as another kind of woman warrior - a peace marcher, being arrested on the sidewalk outside the White House in 2003, along with other women writers and protesters.

- Knopf Poetry Team

***

The Metropolitan Police, the men, stood
in one-line formation. The women, we,
the demonstrators, drew one another close.
We were a bouquet knot of pink roses.
How can it be that all the cops are men,
and all for Peace women? I can’t live
in such a world. I don’t want to keep
living out the myth that men fight
and women mother. We regressed—the junior
high dance. One boy crossed
the wide floor, chose one girl,
escorted her back to the other side, where
he arrested her. “My wife
is gonna kill me,” said a black cop;
“I’m arresting Alice Walker.” “Don’t hold
hands with me,” said a white cop,
shaking off his partner, who was smiling up
at him; “Don’t take my arm either.”
They had each one of us stand by herself
alongside the van, and took our pictures.
“Quit smiling. What are you smiling for?
This is an arrest.” This is your mug shot,
not your prom photo. I was smiling from
happiness; my government will not disappear me;
the tarp was but backdrop for shooting pix!
And the beautiful pink aura was still upon me.
My cop and I did not speak. A woman
officer in casual uniform, no gun,
took my purse, hair clips, pink poncho,
my earrings, and put them in a plastic bag.
Ready for handcuffing, I presented
my hands, wrists together, in front,
but my arresting officer signaled: in back.
I won’t be able to write, to touch, to catch
myself, and will fall on my face. I turned about,
held my arms behind me as high as I could,
bending way forward, making my gestures
large for the witnesses to see. Handcuffs
in this age of new plastics work like the ties
for bread and trees. My arrester could
have tightened the cable-tie so that it cut
into the skin. The hands turn blue, burst.
These police were kind to tie us loosely.
Our belongings taken, our pictures taken,
handcuffed, we were made to get into
a paddy wagon, about 8 per wagon.
There are cages, like dog cages, between
the front seat and the side benches. I sat
in the middle of a bench, my shoulders touching
women’s shoulders beside me, my legs touching
women’s legs before me. Women outside
pounded, drummed on the van. Through the windshield,
we could see them applauding us. Somebody said,
“There’s my daughter.” The van started up;
the crowd parted, let the van through.
It got quiet. We were driving away from
the magic. The rose light went out.

***

Excerpt from I LOVE A BROAD MARGIN TO MY LIFE © 2011 by Maxine Hong Kingston. 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.

Today’s selection is by Vera Pavlova, a Russian poet whose signature is the very short poem—in her country, there are thousands of these in print. Her first volume in English, If There is Something to Desire, gives us a hundred poems—a good sampling of her rueful lines on love and passion, childhood and motherhood, the call to poetry, and many other subjects. (Translation from the Russian is by Steven Seymour, Pavlova’s husband.)

- Knopf Poetry Team

***

“Who will winter my immortality”

Who will winter my immortality
with me? Who will thaw with me?
Come what may, I shall never trade
the earthly love for the subterranean.
I still have time to turn
into flowers, clay, white-eyed memory…
But while we are mortal, my love, to you
nothing will be denied.

***

Excerpt from IF THERE IS SOMETHING TO DESIRE. Translation copyright © 2010 by Steven Seymour. 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.

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.

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.

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.