Poem of the Week: Because You Left Me A Handful of Daffodils

I have some daffodils in a vase in my apartment, and they are so cheerful, so sunny and spring-y.  Here’s a poem.

Because You Left Me A Handful of Daffodils

by Max Garland

I suddenly thought of Brenda Hatfield, queen
of the 5th grade, Concord Elementary.
A very thin, shy girl, almost
as tall as Audrey Hepburn,
but blond.

She wore a dress based upon the principle
of the daffodil: puffed sleeves,
inflated bodice, profusion
of frills along the shoulder blades
and hemline.

A dress based upon the principle of girl
as flower; everything unfolding, spilling
outward and downward: ribbon, stole,
corsage, sash.

It was the only thing I was ever
Elected. A very short king.
I wore a bow tie, and felt
Like a third-grader.

Even the scent of daffodils you left
reminds me. It was a spring night.
And escorting her down the runway
was a losing battle, trying to march
down among the full, thick folds
of crinoline, into the barrage of her
father’s flashbulbs, wading
the backwash of her mother’s
perfume: scared, smiling,
tiny, down at the end
of that long, thin, Audrey Hepburn arm,
where I was king.

Poem of the Week: February Evening in New York

Poem of the Week: Having a Coke with You

I don’t know how the weather is where you are, but it is absolutely gorgeous today in DC.  Sunny and warm and not-at-all-February.  In celebration of this out-of-season loveliness, and continuing with last week’s Valentine’s theme, here’s an exuberant love poem.

Having a Coke with You

by Frank O’Hara

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it

Poem of the Week: I Wish in the City of Your Heart

One of my favorite romantic poems, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

I Wish in the City of Your Heart

by Robley Wilson

I wish in the city of your heart
you would let me be the street
where you walk when you are most
yourself.  I imagine the houses:
It has been raining, but the rain
is done and the children kept home
have begun opening their doors.

Poem of the Week: The Snow Man

The Snow Man

By Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Who wrote O? Nevermind.

Somebody wrote a book called O, which is a fictional story of President Obama’s future 2012 re-election campaign. Of course, I saw “somebody” because the book is actually attributed to “Anonymous,” although, probably not the same “Anonymous” who wrote Primary Colors. Which is too bad—Primary Colors was at least a fun book. The book appears January 25, and I’m sure you’re dying to read it.

Johnathan Karp, the publisher of the quite-likely-prophetic tome, doesn’t want anybody to try and guess, reports the New York Post (Yeah, citing the New York Post! Does that give me seventy quintillion blog points?):

After wild speculation about the author’s identity, Karp blasted an e-mail early yesterday with the subject line “O,” asking political reporters and DC staffers to keep quiet. He said, “It would be great if you refrained from commenting, in solidarity with the principle that a book should be judged on its content and not the perceived identity of its author.”

Or, in plainer English, you can only be disappointed. Hell, you’ve probably never even heard of him (or her!) anyway.

In other news, check out The Solution to Quantum Mechanics, my forthcoming book. But, don’t you dare ask if I’m qualified for such a venture.

O! (Get it? See what I did there?), the Post (not that one, that one’s terrible) thinks it’s maybe a former McCain aide:

But we’re hearing buzz that Mark Salter, John McCain‘s closest aide and speechwriter on the 2008 campaign, is the ghostwriter. Salter co-authored [right..."co-"] McCain’s biography, “Faith of My Fathers,” and continues to work as a speechwriter. His adjective-filled style is similar to the “O” author’s.

Poem of the Week: Winter Poem

Winter Poem

by Nikki Giovanni

once a snowflake fell
on my brow and i loved
it so much and I kissed
it and it was happy and called its cousins
and brothers and a web
of snow engulfed me then
i reached to love them all
and i squeezed them and they became
a spring rain and i stood perfectly
still and was a flower

Poem of the Week: Song

Song

by Adrienne Rich

You’re wondering if I’m lonely:
OK then, yes, I’m lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.

You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely

If I’m lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawn’s first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I’m lonely
it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning.

V+V Remembers 2010: Books we only liked enough to get from the library (and sometimes never finished)

Poplicola:

Game Change. The first 20 pages I read were way too terrible to continue reading. To compensate, for the rest of the year I only read American novels and novellas from 1920s through the 1960s. In other words, yes, Mark Halperin drives me to read books by drunks.

Jack Burden:

Small Business Financial Management Kit For Dummies, by Tage C. Tracy and John A. Tracy: Yes, the yellow one, how else to know the difference between a S corp and C corp?

Didn’t finish: Henry Clay by David Heidler and Jeanne Heidler – but seriously, all the dueling was spot on.

Lady Blaga:

Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

(I’m a little ashamed that my book category has almost nothing in it, but I don’t tend to read books the year they come out, apparently.)

The Ghost of Hemingway’s Gun:

1. Paul Auster – Sunset Park
2. Philip Roth – Nemesis
3. Michael Lewis – The Big Short

Didn’t Finish:

1. Hitch-22
2. John Hick – Between Faith and Doubt: Dialogues on Religion and Reason
3. Time Parks – Teach Us to Sit Still
4. Yann Martel – Beatrice and Virgil (And I will never finish that garbage)

But, some that were totally worth buying:

1. Tony Judt – Ill Fares the Land
2. Jonathan Franzen – Freedom
3. Jorge Luis Borges – The Perpetual Race of Achilles and the Tortoise
4. Colm Toibin - The Empty Family
5. Judith Schalansky – The Atlas of Remote Islands

Nemo:

Well, here’s the deal.  I don’t read new books. Unlike music, movies, or video games, reading books requires a massive investment in time and intellectual and/or emotional energy. And there are a lot of them! So, my usual M.O is to let myself fall behind the literary zeitgeist and read the books that still seem worthwhile 5-10 years after publication. Right now I’m reading The Enchantress of Florence, which is the newest book I’ve read, and that’s a major exception made for one of my favorite authors.

Poem of the Week: Words, Wide Night

This week’s poetry selection is by Carol Ann Duffy, the current poet laureate of Britain–and the first female poet laureate ever chosen there.

Words, Wide Night

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you

and this is what it is like or what it is like in words.

Happy Birthday, Emily Dickinson

As I learned from listening to Prairie Home Companion today, December 10 was Emily Dickinson’s 180th birthday.  In honor of that occasion, I spent some time this afternoon with The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.

This stanza stuck out to me today:

I can wade grief,
Whole pools of it, —
I’m used to that.
But the least push of joy
Breaks up my feet,
And I tip—drunken.
Let no pebble smile,
‘T was the new liquor, —
That was all!

A writer’s mantra:

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.

One more Dickinson poem:

Exhilaration is the Breeze
That lifts us from the ground,
And leaves us in another place
Whose statement is not found;
Returns us not, but after time
We soberly descend,
A little newer for the term
Upon enchanted ground.

Poem of the Week: Chanukah Lights Tonight

For the second night of Chanukah, I cooked latkes and lit menorahs with some non-Jews who, like all of us, can appreciate the beauty of fried potatoes and candlelight.  My hair smells like cooking oil now, but I kinda like it that way.

Here’s a poem about someone else’s festive celebration.

Chanukah Lights Tonight

By Steven Schneider

Our annual prairie Chanukah party—
latkes, kugel, cherry blintzes.
Friends arrive from nearby towns
and dance the twist to “Chanukah Lights Tonight,”
spin like a dreidel to a klezmer hit.

The candles flicker in the window.
Outside, ponderosa pines are tied in red bows.
If you squint,
the neighbors’ Christmas lights
look like the Omaha skyline.

The smell of oil is in the air.
We drift off to childhood
where we spent our gelt
on baseball cards and matinees,
cream sodas and potato knishes.

No delis in our neighborhood,
only the wind howling over the crushed corn stalks.
Inside, we try to sweep the darkness out,
waiting for the Messiah to knock,
wanting to know if he can join the party.

In Which I Win Another V&V Bet

Excuse the self-promotion, but…

That’s right.  It’s only November 28, and I just exceeded the NaNoWriMo word count goal.  50,322, and I’ll probably keep writing for the next couple days (and perhaps beyond).

Is this a good book?  Not hardly.  There might be some bright spots, but much of the writing is maudlin, trite, self-indulgent, and flabby.  Am I still really psyched to have written that many pages?  Hell yes.

You guys, I am not by any measure a “disciplined” writer.  I go months without any creative writing whatsoever, and then I write a sad journal entry about how I “never write anymore,” and then I go another few months without writing.  My (first) point is: if I can do it, you can too.  And: sometimes it’s fun to aim really high.

Final point: this project has made me very, very happy, even though it’s also occasionally made me frustrated and whiny and caused me to go on serious chocolate binges.  In terms of Happiness Project success, this ranks way up there– it added to my day-to-day happiness, and it’s given me a longer term boost.  It’s really fun to find out I’m capable of something I’d never before even considered attempting.

(One other result of this is that I’ve bested Clev at the V&V NaNoWriMo challenge–in past years, he’s attempted a novel but never finished.  This means he owes me a blog post on the topic of my choice, TBD.)

NaNoWriMo Day 25 Excerpt (Present Day Interlude)

Week 4 of my non-novel project, and I’m still working on the college section.  But here’s an excerpt from a present-day tangent, about a girl who is the epitome of friendship, the kind of friend I aspire to be.  This Thanksgiving, I’m very thankful to have such inspiring people as my friends.

One of the strange things about our information age is how hard it can be to get in touch with anyone.  We screen our calls, emails, and texts, and with good reason.  Each night the week of my diagnosis, I left my job feeling drained and weepy, and wanting to talk to someone.  Inevitably, when I tried calling various friends, phones rang to voicemail.  K. and I had played a couple rounds of phone tag throughout the week, and when I tried her on Thursday night, she didn’t answer.  In my message, I briefly told her the news about the diagnosis, and said that it’d been a rough week.

I didn’t hear back til the next morning, when K. texted me a sweet and encouraging message, which was nice.  Then she called, and emailed, and said similarly kind and peppy things.  She’d done some online research on the illness and said she felt confident I could make a full and fast recovery.  I smiled to think of her doing this research and reaching out to me via three different mediums before lunchtime.

On my way home from errands that afternoon, I got a call from the front desk of my apartment building.

“Are you home?”

“No, but I’ll be back in a few minutes.  Why, what’s going on?”

“You have an Edible Arrangements package here, so I wanted to see if you’d be able to come get it soon.”

I figured this must have been my parents’ doing, or maybe my grandma– they’re good with kind gestures, and in our family it is well known that food is one of the best ways of expressing love.  But when I got home, I found two prettily wrapped and beribboned boxes of chocolate-covered strawberries, with a get-well-soon message from K.  I might have teared up a little, I was so surprised and touched.  And then I ate four of the strawberries that afternoon, because, duh, they go bad quickly if you don’t eat them.

Poem of the Week: Yam

Enjoy your Thanksgiving feasts, everyone.

Yam

by Bruce Guernsey

The potato that ate all its carrots,
can see in the dark like a mole,

its eyes the scars
from centuries of shovels, tines.

May spelled backwards
because it hates the light,

pawing its way, padding along,
there in the catacombs.

NaNoWriMo Day 20 Excerpt (In Which I Endeavor to Get Involved)

Oh, the follies of freshman year of college.

That winter, my roommate C. and I decide to work jointly on Project Get Involved, in which we become more well-rounded students by padding our resume with extracurriculars.  Doubtless, we will make great friends and meet cute boys in the process.

There are dozens if not hundreds of student activities to choose from.  Perhaps, you might be thinking, Lady B. and C. opted for one involving a shared interest.  Maybe they joined up with the large and active College Democrats group?  Or a smaller club, committed to one progressive cause in particular?  Perhaps they got further involved in Hillel, or formed an interfaith dialogue group.

I won’t keep you guessing.  We do none of those things.  Our brilliant idea that winter is to rush the sororities.

I know.  This is the worst plan I’ve had since running for student council in seventh grade.  Greek life doesn’t dominate the social scene at OSU, it’s just a sizable minority of the student body who participate.  Why C. and I thought we should be among them, I honestly can’t tell you.  There’s no mention in my journal of this foolhardy concept.  I don’t remember which one of us thought of it, though I’d guess that we saw a flyer for rush week, made fun of it for a few minutes, and then one of us said how funny it’d be to check it out, and then the other laughed and agreed, and all of a sudden we’d decided to show up and it had stopped being solely a joke.

The first rush event was held in a large auditorium filled with hundreds of striving freshmen girls.  Stars of the sorority system spoke of the congeniality, the service projects, the sense of community, the leadership.  We learned about the rigorous schedule of rush week events, which would commence over the weekend.  The showcase piece of this initial event is, I kid you not, a fashion show, in which sorority sisters model what to wear and what not to wear for the subsequent rush events.  Actual commentary from the MC:  “Ripped jeans are so out.”

Somehow, C. and I come away from this believing that we too, shall benefit from the sisterhood of a sorority.  We show up on Saturday morning for the Day 1 Interviews, in which we spend five minutes with a representative from each sorority, and they take notes on us.  I dig out the three pieces of makeup I own for the occasion, pull stray hairs off my one pair of black pants.  C. fits the part better, with her designer shoes and Anne Taylor Loft cardigans.  After hours in our heels, we fill out a form listing our top three choices of sororities, picking the same top two, the ones that seemed a bit nerdier.  Later that night, we get the calls telling us who chose us.  It could be worse: every year, some girls don’t get picked by any sororities.  We each got invited back to one, but not one of our favorites.  We are instructed to show up at the house at 8am the next morning, but this was enough rushing for me, and Christy gives up after another day or two.

NaNoWriMo Day 18: Excerpt (In which my friend K. and I Have Adventures)

From the Summer After High School Graduation section.

One weekend, she comes with me and my dad and brother on a camping trip a few hours away.  We hike, build a fire, share a tent.  The second day, we all head over to a large and picturesque lake, adorned with unequivocal signage banning swimming.  Obviously, K. and I are undeterred by this.  We mosey around to the far side, where we confer, deciding that simply flouting the ‘no swimming’ rule would be dull, and so we hang all our clothes on some branches and go for a skinny dip in the middle of the sunny afternoon.  We paddle around, splashing at each other and enjoying the warm water and mild rebellion.  Then we see the police car that has parked all the way on the other side of the lake, and from which a uniformed officer has just emerged.

“There is no swimming here.  You must get out immediately!” shouts the cop, who we’re fairly sure can’t tell from the shore that we are naked.  We are, after all, 90% under water.  Getting out presents a bit of a challenge, though, and we’re a little worried that he’ll come around the perimeter after us.  We opt for a mad dash through the thick foliage, hopping into our clothes as we scurry.  Any worry we have about legal consequences is overshadowed by the knowledge that we have acquired an excellent anecdote, and so already we are laughing about the near-miss of public obscenity charges.

We keep laughing until a few days later, when the poison ivy rash sets in.  Let me rephrase that, actually, because “rash” is an imprecise term.  What develops across the backs of both my thighs is not a rash but rather a blanket, an oozing, burning, angry red quilt.  K. is spared, but I am left in the awkward position of having an affliction that renders all articles of lower body clothing—in addition to the very act of sitting down—pretty much unbearable.

Even with immediate medical attention, the rash persists for almost a week.  When I show up to camp, wearing a knee-length skirt in lieu of the usual khaki shorts, my entire bunk shuns me.  I can understand them not wanting to sit on my lap anymore, or beg me constantly for piggyback rides, but it’s more than that.  The girls seem to suddenly forget my name, and find it hilarious to call me Poison Ivy instead, while pointing and making faces.

Poem of the Week: Mending Wall

Mending Wall

by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.

Continue reading »

Poem of the Week: The City’s Oldest Known Survivor of the Great War

In honor of Veterans Day.

The City’s Oldest Known Survivor of the Great War

marches in uniform down the traffic stripe
at the center of the street, counts time
to the unseen web that has rearranged
the air around him, his left hand
stiff as a leather strap along his side,
the other saluting right through the decades
as if they weren’t there, as if everyone under ninety
were pervasive fog the morning would dispel
in its own good time, as if the high school band
all flapping thighs and cuffs behind him
were as ghostly as the tumbleweed on every road
dead-ended in the present, all the ancient infantry
shoulder right, through a skein of bone, presenting arms
across the drift, nothing but empty graves now
to round off another century,
the sweet honey of the old cadence, the streets
going by at attention, the banners glistening with dew,
the wives and children blowing kisses.

-by James Doyle