On Letter from a Young Poet (the fledgling Poems Out Loud interview series), we now hear from Ron Egatz: poet, designer, and founder of Camber Press. Ron is also currently being filmed for a documentary on the state of contemporary American poetry. Listen to Ron read one of his recent poems, “Post-Eisenhower Nourishment”, and then check out the smart things he has to say about lucid poetry, the effects of his homemade popcorn on women, and so on.
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Valentine’s Day has come and gone, but love will never die. Indeed, nor will the erotic poetry of Edward Estlin Cummings. Originally meant to shock the Puritanical sensibilities of the 1920s, Cummings’s poems of sexual and romantic love remain just as fresh and provocative today. The fifty poems included in Erotic Poems (all originally published in Cummings’s Complete Poems) are accompanied by twelve drawings by the poet himself which were recently featured in a slideshow on The Daily Beast. Poems Out Loud decided we’d call in the experts to take a close look at these erotic poems and report back on their findings. David Baker shows us how Cummings is in “so careful a rush”, Patricia Smith takes the express to Chicago, and Ann Townsend introduces the Grape-Vine Lady.
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I’ve been writing love poems.
Or rather, I’ve been trying to write love poems.
To be precise, I’ve been cursing the blank page where my love poems should be. I’m in love, damn it. Where are the poems? When I’m sad, I can write about sadness. When I took a cable car up Mount Pilatus, I could describe the view from 7,000 feet.
It’s not uncommon for a lover to ask, “why aren’t I in your poems?” Usually the poet thinks, “You don’t want that. Showing up in poems is a bad sign.” There is a truism that poems do not thrive on the agar of contentment. No, that’s not quite it; great poems do not thrive on the agar of contentment. Mediocrity flourishes in any petri dish. William Butler Yeats, in “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” diagnosed the problem. “Only an aching heart,” he said, “Conceives a changeless work of art.”
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Okay, false advertising. This is not the story behind the hate—there is no story behind the hate, or if there is, I’m not telling. Instead, I have an observation, one that has probably occurred to many: hate and love can be described in the same, outlandish, hyperbolic and indistinguishable terms, probably because hate and love require the same degree of passionate intensity. Don’t say Yeats didn’t warned us, but it may be that hate and love are the same thing. Surely both are equally capable of mass destruction.
Weirdly enough, when we’re talking about language, not people, hate redeems love. Hate poetry, I mean, redeems love poetry. Take those sagging lyrics from “I Love You Truly” and substitute the word hate for love.
That’s what I did for the first lines of this poem:
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I have recently begun to think of writing as what Susan Sontag calls “a wisdom project” in her forward to Another Beauty, a collection of autobiographical essays by the great Polish poet Adam Zagajewski.
“…autobiography is an occasion to purge oneself of vanity, while advancing the project of self understanding—call it the wisdom project—which is never completed, however long the life.”
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Thoughts on Haiti
A few years ago, I reviewed the children’s classic Popo and Fifina: Children of Haiti, written by Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes in 1931. The Haiti presented in that book was a simple, lyrical place, in some ways almost paradisaical, and totally at odds with the terrible scenes of destruction and human suffering we are seeing in newspapers and on television broadcasts since the earthquake. Even before the earthquake, however, Haiti’s troubles in recent years, its political instability, social chaos, and poverty, made it an unlikely destination for most travelers.
This didn’t deter my husband, who began making regular trips to Haiti in 1995 to research a trilogy of historical novels (All Souls Rising, Master of the Crossroads, and The Stone That the Builder Refused) about the Haitian slave revolt of 1791. Since he is an intrepid, resourceful traveler, who recognizes little in the way of danger, I decided it would be pointless to worry about his safety until the day of one trip, when the Haitian Times landed on our doorstep in Baltimore running the bold headline “Kidnappers Run Amok.” Fortunately, his plane to Haiti had already taken off, which was a good thing, since I know that that particular story wouldn’t have stopped him from going. But my misgivings on that occasion spurred the poem “You Have Flown to the Dangerous Country.”
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Poet Todd Boss knows Winter. He was born in Wisconsin, currently lives in Minnesota, and spent his MFA years in Alaska. He started the intermittent, online poetry journal Flurry as “a way of lighting the darkness of the season, staying connected during an isolating time, nourishing the spirit in the midst of a deep freeze, and celebrating nature even at its most foreboding.” Considering I woke up this morning to falling snow, Todd’s announcement that Volume 3 of Flurry is now online couldn’t have come at a better time. This issue features new poems by Robin Chapman, Sharon Chmielarz, Karl Elder, Alixa Doom, and Athena Kildegaard. And be sure not to miss Tim Nolan’s “New Year’s”.
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Elizabeth Bishop once described the writing of a poem as a “happy accident.” She knew that the image or event that triggers a poem is always unexpected. It can’t be planned or contrived, willed or wished for.
This has certainly been true for me. I remember how a long-ago trip to the town dump in Stonington, Maine—certainly not a beautiful or “poetic” place—inspired a poem of mine titled “The Woman on the Dump.” And, a few years later, how a visit to my daugher’s elementary school led to my writing “Snail.”
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From The Ticking is the Bomb
For those few years when I worked in New York City public schools as an itinerant poet—Crown Heights, Harlem, the South Bronx—I’d lug a satchel heavy with books on the train every morning. Much of what I taught was directed toward finding out what the students saw every day. It was a way to honor their lives, which isn’t generally taught in public schools. The beginning exercises were very simple: Tell me one thing you saw on the way into school this morning. Tell me one thing you saw last night when you got home. Describe something you see every day, describe something you saw only once and wondered about from then on. Tell me a dream, tell me a story someone told you, tell me something you’ve never told anyone else before. No one, in school at least, had ever asked them what their lives were like, no one had asked them to tell about their days. In this sense it felt like a radical act. I tried to imagine what might happen if each of them knew how important their lives were.
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Friday Links for the Discerning Reader
• Watch out DC, poetry is about to stop being polite and start getting real. The Real World goes to DC the same year that the Beltway Poetry Quarterly turns 10 years old!
• Readers of Fiction Writers Review are getting a special subscription rate (just $12) on Poets & Writers Magazine between now and January 15th. Act now! Operators are standing by.
• The new issue of Cerise Press is now available. Francophiles rejoice!
• Poetry and e-readers. Match made in heaven? or Neruda is spinning in his grave? Comment with your thoughts in haiku form.
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On Love Poems (and Other One-Horned Beasts)
You Have Flown to the Dangerous Country
All Living Things Have Shoulders
Edmund Keeley 
David Baker 
Dana Goodyear 
