Some well-known poets were fans of Tang Dynasty poets: Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Bly, Gary Snyder and James Wright, for instance. All embraced Chinese influences using language like “homage to” or “in the manner of.”

I’ve written in-the-manner-of most of my life. In the-manner-of-Ed Field, for example. His easy-going poems about movies led me to write lots of easy-going poems about movies and pop culture.

Like Gary Snyder owes a debt to Li Po, I owe a debt to Field and Frank O’Hara and Ted Kooser. I saw what they could do and wanted to do it too. Bly, Snyder and Wright saw what ancient Chinese poets did, and they tried their talented hands at it.

First here’s Pound’s loose translation of a poem originally called A Song of Changgan. He read a translation by Ernest Fenollosa and Ernest was helped in his translation by two Chinese scholars named Mori and Ariga. I’m a sucker for this kind of love poem. The last couple of lines just kill me.

The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter

BY EZRA POUND After Li Po

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead

I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.

You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,

You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.

And we went on living in the village of Chōkan:

Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.

I never laughed, being bashful.

Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.

Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,

I desired my dust to be mingled with yours

Forever and forever, and forever.

Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed

You went into far Ku-tō-en, by the river of swirling eddies,

And you have been gone five months.

The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.

By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,

Too deep to clear them away!

The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.

The paired butterflies are already yellow with August

Over the grass in the West garden;

They hurt me.

I grow older.

If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,

Please let me know beforehand,

And I will come out to meet you

As far as Chō-fū-Sa.

Next let’s look at Gary Snyder’s loose translation from his collection of Cold Mountain poems. The original poems are by the 7^th century Chinese poet Han Shan who wore a bark hat and wrote poems on rocks and trees and cliffs.

Let’s see how three translators handled the same line.

Snyder: “Men ask the way to Cold Mountain / Cold Mountain: there’s no through trail.”

Burton Watson: People ask the way to Cold Mountain / Cold Mountain road doesn’t get through.”

Red Pine/Bill Porter: People ask the way to Cold Mountain / but roads don’t reach Cold Mountain.”

The same but different, right? Here’s the whole poem:

“Men ask the way to Cold Mountain.
Cold Mountain: there’s no through trail.
In summer, ice doesn’t melt
The rising sun blurs in swirling fog.
How did I make it?
My heart’s not the same as yours.
If your heart was like mine
You’d get it and be right here.”

It’s Snyder’s poem but without Han Shan there’s likely no poem at all. Or a very different one.

Finally my poem in-the-manner-of. It turns out that Sun Yung Feng is better known as Sun Yung Shin, a Chinese woman born in 1974 and now living in Chicago. So I didn’t have to go back into the past to be influenced by a very old man.

After Sun Yum Feng

Homesick for the wealth I once possessed,

I drive through the best part of town.

Beautiful children in white stand politely

until a shadow opens their car door.

A wisp of smoke rises from one chimney,

perhaps someone burning a love letter.

I am such a fool, but I pull to the curb

and write this down, anyway.

This poem was picked up for an anthology of poems aimed at young readers. Not high school! Younger than that. A teacher from Tennessee e-mailed me with many of his students’ interpretations and asked which one was “right.”

“Poetry interpretation” was a popular phrase decades ago. Still is, probably. It means that poems need someone to make them available to Readers. A middle-man so to speak. An Interpreter. Someone in-the- know.

That actually may be true when it comes to what is loosely known as “difficult poetry.” I’m thinking of Black Mountain writers like Charles Olson And Robert Creeley. Those guys and their friends drove the bus that carried a lot of young poets away from poetry and - in my case - right over the cliff.

However, my poem in-the-manner-of many Chinese poets isn’t difficult at all: The writer (the one I am pretending to be) has some money problems. He drives through an affluent suburb, sees some kids and a wisp of smoke. He’s probably been a fool for love and as a poet can’t resist any excuse to write a short poem.

Remember the teacher from Tennessee? His students were sure there were hidden meanings in “After Sum Yung Feng” and they wanted to know what they were.

Some of the kids said the poem meant that Life Is Hard. A few said their fathers were unemployed too. I told the teacher and his students that though there are difficult poems, mine isn’t one of them. I said that I almost never think about my poems’ meanings much less their messages since a poem isn’t a carrier pigeon.

I suggested putting meaning aside for a while and trying a movie-approach: Picture someone in a car -- what he sees and how what he sees makes him feel: children being catered to, smoke from a fireplace, a fantasy about a love letter, the driver pausing and writing.

The teacher wrote back, thanked me for my reply, and said that his students were more excited about poetry now. They even wanted to write poems of their own!

* * *

Well, as I said last week, this is my last Substack for a while. It’s been fun writing these pieces. I started months ago when Pandora’s Kitchen came out and just kept going.

I’m not going to stop writing. I work every day though I’m so crazy about poetry it really isn’t work at all. And as I said in the last lines of my poem for today -- I’ll always pull to the curb and write something down.

Goodbye for now. See you on the flip side.

We’re going to look at two versions of my poem about Alcestis An early draft and a later one. Here’s the first draft.

Alcestis

Devoted wife. So devoted that when it was time

for her husband to die, she took his place.

Hercules admired that kind of love,

so challenged Thanatos to a wrestling match,

pinned him and returned Alcestis to the other world.

Her children were happy to see her:

Was it hot where you were How tall was Thanatos?

Kids she could forgive. but what about her best friend:

“You made me look bad, doting on your husband, always

telling him how handsome he is. What are servants for?

And then you died for him. So now guess who drinks

too much wine and says, “When it’s my turn, you should

die for me too.” See what you’ve done, Alcestis!

That whole downcast eyes thing. I think you knew

Hercules would drape you across those muscular arms.

Otherwise why dress for death like you did -- the finest

purple wool, a gold pendant drawing attention to your

I have to admit astonishing breasts.”

The first part of the poem is background with a more or less omniscient author telling the Reader about a very loyal and loving wife. Hercules heard about her sacrifice. Impressed by her devotion, he went to the underworld and brought her back to her husband and family.

In teh second half, , the POV in the poem changes and a friend of Alcestis tells another side of the story -- how Alcestis’ sacrifice affected her. The emotional collateral damage, in a way.

That first draft troubled me. The first part -- to use an automotive metaphor -- just idle. And, really, what are those smarty-pants kids doing in there? The second part, though, picks up speed. Hmmm. Is this one poem with two parts? Two poems? Or - Yikes! - no poem at all?

Louis Brandeis said, ‘There is no writing, just rewriting.” So I did that. And I do it often. I don’t think and then write; writing tells me what I’m thinking. Here is a second version of the poem with a new title.

* * *

Alcestis Comes Back From the Underworld and Gets a Scolding

From Her Best Friend.

Of course I’m glad to see you again. What an adventure --

Brought back from the land of the dead! Well, good for you.

This isn’t the first time you’ve made me look bad. Remember

doting on your handsome husband all the time?

And then you died for him. So now guess who drinks too much

wine and says, “When it’s my turn, you should

do what Alcestis did.” Thanks a lot. I never trusted you, anyway.

That whole downcast eyes thing. I think you knew

Hercules would show up in nothing but a lion’s skin

and drape you across those muscular arms.

Otherwise why dress for your own funeral like you did --

the finest purple wool, shimmering earrings and bracelets,

a gold pendant drawing attention to your I have to admit

astonishing breasts.

In poetry writing workshops, people can’t help but say, “I like this poem about flying horses.” Or “I don’t like this flying-horse poem.” The real question isn’t like or dislike: the real question is this -- does the poem work? Do all the parts come together to make something complete and satisfying? Generous readers can dislike a poem and also see why it is effective. In the so-called real world, some drivers don’t like the new transmission in the 2026 Ford F-150, but the truck still runs.

The second version of my Alcestis poem runs better than version one thanks to a single Narrator. The new title orients my Readers, and the tart tone comes in early and stays acerbic.

A noticeable improvement if I say so myself. Is the poem finished? Almost. I’m going to let this one rest for a bit. But -- and I hope you agree -- so far, so good.

P.S. There are lots of poems about the Greek deities. Here are my favorites: Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan,” Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts,” Caroll Ann Duffy’s “Circe,” Margaret Atwood’s “Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing.” (I just re-read the latter and it’s a dandy!) All of these poems are only a Google away. Take a look at your leisure.

P.S.S. This is the second-last Substack for a while. Summer ends soon. And like the industrious cricket, I have work to do.

These twins always stayed together, passing items back and forth and whispering, oblivious to or accustomed to being a center of attention though it was clear that for them only the other existed. They moved together, now and then touching each other lightly like they were testing paint to see if it was dry.

My poem today is about my experience with twins, but first some twin lore. Let’s begin with what’s called twin-telepathy/pain-sharing, where twin A in Vermont (she is not pregnant) feels twin B’s sharp contractions though B is in Arizona. Science -- and we know how trustworthy a buzzword like that is -- admits to “emotional synchrony” but not to demonstrable pain-sharing. Not actual telepathy but deep emotional sharing. Well, tell that to a neighbor of mine years ago who knew when her sister had to have some serious dental work done, she took a day off from work, too.

The internet -- everyone’s favorite hangout -- says there are thirty-two films about twins or doubles, but few that anyone would see, well, twice. Twins -- nobody in the writers’ room had to work hard to get that title -- starred Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito. Legend is about Reggie and Ronnie Cray, twin gangsters from the UK. And let’s not forget Mary-Kay and Ashley Olsen. They made fourteen films together, most of them about their twinness.

Poetry does not fare well when it comes to twin-poems. This 4-line stanza can stand in for many entire poems-about- twins:

A meeting convened one day

In Heaven’s sacred hall.

The Ideal mother must be found

for twins so sweet and small.

Shakespeare had twins, in Twelfth Night, the Greeks had Romulus and Remus, and who can forget the creepy twins in The Shining? But enough of that. Time for you to meet my twins:

Double Vision

I went to high school with the Johnson

twins - Jane and Joan. In my junior year

I liked Jane and left a note in her locker.

Joan met me after social studies. She

said Jane liked me, too, yet Joan’s eyes

were flirty and provocative.

She told me to meet Jane after school.

When we were alone, Jane whispered,

“Kiss me passionately and occasionally

call me Joan.”

At the Spring Fling as Jane and I danced,

Joan cut in. Then Jane returned and she

and Joan danced together.

I got dizzy and had to be driven home

by Jane, though it could have been Joan

in an identical lavender formal.

I was always on edge. Whose hand was I

holding? Whose voice on the telephone?

Who wanted to borrow my math homework?

Who was flirting with my friend Rick?

The night we broke up, I told them both

goodbye, As I drove away from their house,

Jane was crying and Joan was smiling.

Or was it the other way around?

This basically is a rueful, comic poem. Is it true? Yes and no. I did date Jane who had an identical twin named Joan. Did I make stuff up? A little. Did I leave things out? Of course. Poetry is rarely autobiography, and autobiography is rarely poetry.

I started “Double Vision” thinking that it should rhyme. What’s more twin-like than rhyme? But the music got in the way, like a soundtrack for a different movie. Also, near-rhyme (Joan and Jane) is supposed to grate a bit vs. full rhyme like Joan and alone. My experience with the high school twins might have been exasperating but it wasn’t irritating. And rhyme badly handled does a real disservice to a poem. It made this one jangly, and noise wasn’t what I was after. Even in 2026 in every beginners’ workshop I teach, someone will say, “You mean I don’t have to rhyme if I don’t want to?” The doors to Poetry open wide. Everyone is invited in.

In a 50s film set in a nightclub, I knew that the men in dinner jackets were dress extras, which meant they owned their own tuxedos and got paid much as $18.00 a day compared to people in crowd scenes who got $5.00 or $6.00 a day. I knew set decorators were fanatical about silver and linen.

I knew there was such a thing as Central Casting. I knew a studio casting director might need 50 upscale dress extras for a ballroom scene or 200 average crowd workers for a street brawl. Someone lucky enough to get oneof those parts was known an “atmosphere person.” Or just “atmosphere.” I liked imagining an Assistant Director shouting, “It’s fight scene. More atmosphere!” I loved the word atmosphere in this context and sometimes remember more about background than plot.

For me, without the 2001 Odyssey Disco where John Travolta danced there’s no Saturday Night Fever. John Wick fans remember the Red Circle nightclub before and after the shootout. Let’s not forget Rick’s American Café in Casablanca. Much less the swanky club in Gilda where Rita Hayworth sang “Put the Blame On Mame.” Fred Astaire danced pretty much everywhere but I particularly liked the Thackeray Club in Top Hat and the Paradise Club in Follow the Fleet.”

Here’s today’s poem which addresses in its own way all the things I’ve just been writing about this morning.

Nightclubs

I think I could sit forever at one

of those little tables just big enough

for a lamp, an ashtray, and two flutes

of champagne. The bar never closes,

the band never takes a break.

Time is not hurrying the corridors

of the world but standing still

in the corner, smoking, listening

to the singer and whispering,

“You’re so beautiful tonight,”

until he turns away to retrieve

from the stunned hatcheck girl

his dark coat and shiny hourglass.

The scene in this poem is familiar to any moviegoer: -- nightclub, singer, hatcheck girl. All that’s missing is someone like Robert Mitchum (noir) or Fred Astaire (blanche). But I added an allegorical figure instead. The poem works as a love note to a certain kind of film even as it suggests in what I hope is a noteworthy way that time is a precious commodity and one should make the most of it.

P.S. One of my favorite Hollywood films (a movie about making movies) is Day of the Locust with Karen Black and Donald Sutherland. If you don’t know it, take a look. Oh, and then there’s The Player with a key scene shot in South Pasadena at the actual Rialto theatre.

P.P.S. In “Gilda,” Rita Hayworth did not sing. Her voice was dubbed. The singer’s name is Anita Ellis.

Thanks for dropping by again, and I’ll see everyone next week.

Bianca and I were 30 miles north of Phoenix recently. Away from a lot of urban light pollution, there were the stars and their popular friend the moon. What better place to learn more about the moon than by a pool at noon under a merciless sun:

The Moon is about one-quarter the size of Earth. Its diameter is roughly 3,475 kilometers making it similar in width to the contiguous United States. By comparison, Earth has a diameter of roughly 7,918 miles. Because Earth is larger in three dimensions, it would take nearly 50 moons to fill the volume of Earth, and the Earth is roughly 81 times more massive

There is no exact, official tally of how many songs are written about the moon, but rough estimates suggest there are over 750 to 1,000+ songs spanning all kinds of music. Humans have been writing songs for thousands of years, dating all the way back to the Hurrian Hymn No. 6 (dedicated to the moon goddess Nikkal in 1400 B.C.)

Of course Google supplied all the names and numbers in the two paragraphs above. The names and numbers are interesting, but I can’t say they are poetic. “Poetic.” You know what I mean.

And you know I could ( and will) go on to name a few popular songs about the moon: ”Fly Me to the Moon” (Frank Sinatra), “Blue Moon (Billie Holiday), “Moonshadow” (Cat Stevens), “Walking On the Moon” (The Police), “Bad Moon Rising “(Credence Clearwater.)

And of course hundreds of poems about the “queen of the night” including Shelley’s “To the Moon,” Cummings’ “Amores(III),” Stevens’ “Lunar Paraphrase.” And -- of course -- one of mine.

Fun Facts About the Moon

The moon has different names at different times

of the year: Snow Moon, Wolf Moon, Harvest Moon.

One of India’s lunar orbiters found tunnels on the dark side

suggesting a massive underground system of caves.

An astronomer named Franz von Paul Gruithuisen

wondered about lunarians living just beneath the crust.

Apollo 10 astronauts heard and recorded sounds

that might have been alien music.

These are some of the things Lily knows from a Google

search relating to her middle school report.

Lily also knows the moon is slowly, slowly moving away

from the Earth and she wonders

if the moon’s feelings are hurt the way Sean’s

were during that unfortunate incident at MacDonald’s,

him nudging his cheeseburger almost imperceptibly

away from hers as the manager’s immense shadow

fell over their table like an eclipse.

* * *

When I saw “Fun Facts About the Moon” in a niece’s textbook,Euterpe - the muse of poetry - took my hand. I knew a list was fine for a report, but not for poetry. Each stanza had to be attractive and intriguing. I like to think of Readers asking, “Where’s Ron going with this?” And then willingly coming along for the ride. And, for the record, I rarely know where a poem is going until I get there. I was pleasantly surprised by the last lines which ran away and took me along, like the dish that wasn’t happy without the spoon.

P.S. I’m grateful for the moon over Cave Creek, Arizona. It suggested this week’s Substack. And I’m happy to offer an extra poem today. It mentions a full moon, so it fits right in. Do I have to say that I love this poem? There. I’ve already said it. Read it out loud. Take your time.

Warming Her Pearls

BY CAROL ANN DUFFY

for Judith Radstone

Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress

bids me wear them, warm them, until evening

when I’ll brush her hair. At six, I place them

round her cool, white throat. All day I think of her,

resting in the Yellow Room, contemplating silk

or taffeta, which gown tonight? She fans herself

whilst I work willingly, my slow heat entering

each pearl. Slack on my neck, her rope.

She’s beautiful. I dream about her

in my attic bed; picture her dancing

with tall men, puzzled by my faint, persistent scent

beneath her French perfume, her milky stones.

I dust her shoulders with a rabbit’s foot,

watch the soft blush seep through her skin

like an indolent sigh. In her looking-glass

my red lips part as though I want to speak.

Full moon. Her carriage brings her home. I see

her every movement in my head.... Undressing,

taking off her jewels, her slim hand reaching

for the case, slipping naked into bed, the way

she always does.... And I lie here awake,

knowing the pearls are cooling even now

in the room where my mistress sleeps. All night

I feel their absence and I burn.

See everyone next week. Thanks for dropping by.

So just we’re all on the same page, this morning let’s take a look at the poem-in- question before I write more about it.

Gretel

said she didn’t know anything about ovens

so the witch crawled in to show her

and Bam! went the big door.

Then Gretel strolled out to the shed where

her brother was fattening, knocked down

a wall and lifted him high in the air.

Not long after the adventure in the forest,

Gretel married so she could live happily.

Her husband was soft like Hansel. Her

husband liked to eat.

Ever after was the size of a kitchen.

Gretel remembered when times were better.

She laughed out loud when the witch

popped like a weenie.

“Gretel! Stop fooling around and fix

my dinner.”

“There’s something wrong with this oven,”

she says, her eyes bright as treasure.

“Can you come here a minute?”

“Gretel” really is an easy-to-read poem. And the students are right; there isn’t a hidden meaning that only certain people are privy to. The reason the teacher from South Carolina wrote to me, though, wasn’t just to say his students preferred “Gretel” to other poems in the anthology. He wanted to say how happy he was that the students started to look at how the poem meant, not just what it meant.

Freed from the handcuffs of meaning, they concentrated on other things: the way the poem looked on the page, how the lines ended, what the transitions did, how the pace mattered. If the poem was a house, not what the house meant, but how the house was built.

Especially how the poem ended. Some students argued vigorously for cutting the last line. Others disagreed. So let’s take a look at the ending. First the way I wrote it, then the way a few students preferred.

“There’s something wrong with this oven,”

she says, her eyes bright as treasure.

“Can you come here a minute?”

Or

“There’s something wrong with this oven,”

she says, her eyes bright as treasure.

The malcontents argued that the final line was not necessary because it fell into the it-goes-without-saying category. Others pushed back, saying that the last line was essential to ensure that the Reader really gets what Gretel is about to do in order to escape this domestic ever after.

The poet Carolyn Kizer said, “I like poems with a sting in the tail.” And I’ve asked for that -- or something like that -- from students who showed me poems that needed to be plugged into a socket so they could throw off sparks.

Now the students from South Carolina made me look at my poem again. Where’s the sting? And is there more delightful venom in the 3-line, original version or in the abbreviated one.

I love the movies, and have used my affection for them as a teacher-of-poetry. So let’s film “Gretel.” It’s basically two scenes. One from the past, one from the present.

In the first two stanzas, Gretel tricks the witch, then celebrates her survival skills with Hansel. It’s a scene of joy and relief. In the later stanzas we see a different Gretel. More subdued and, once again, in someone’s clutches.

In the second big scene, the camera pans the small kitchen, pausing at the oven. We don’t see the husband in another room but we hear him. The camera registers Gretel’s dismay at the stereotypical demand for dinner, then stays close as it dawns on her that what worked once could work again!

Does the movie end on her eyes “bright as treasure?” Or do we also hear her invite her husband into the kitchen one last time?

The teacher asked me which version I preferred, and I wrote to say that since there’s more sting in the shorter version, I agree with the discerning minority. And I promised to take that line away when I collect poems for a new book.

Never to late to learn right? Said the old dog.

“Are you gay?” “How much money do you have?” “Did your first dog actually like you or just pretend to.”

I’ve been on panels at writing retreats where I heard every kind of question and answer. Some writers say they eke out every word. (Eke out means “to manage with great difficulty.” Yikes!) Others claim, “It just pours out of me,” and once in Iowa the scribe beside me muttered, “Well, get a mop, for Christ’s sake.”

What follows is advice of various kinds from a few different writers: Virgina Woolf said, “Listen to the way people talk. Carry a little notebook.” At a conference once, an essayist opened his satchel, pulled out half a dozen of those marble-patterned composition books and said, “I’ve been eavesdropping most of my life.”

Stephen King says, “Details, details, details. Weeds growing in the cracks of a library’s steps say more about the town and its citizens than pages of exposition.”

Hemingway said, “All you have to do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

Dr. Seuss: “Nonsense wakes up the brain cells.”

Neil Gaiman: “Finish what you start.”

Ray Bradbury: “Stay drunk on writing so reality can’t destroy you.”

Natalie Goldberg: “Write about what disturbs you, what you’re afraid of, what you’d never tell anybody.”

Some of the recommendations above seem silly, some tongue-in-cheek, some earnest, some - like Stephen King’s - really good! But I’d venture to say there’s something in all of it that a young writer could use. But Knowing what to pay attention to is half the battle.

My advice about writing poetry is in the form of a poem

where I do what I suggest. See what you think.

“Do You Have Any Advice For Those of Us Just

Starting Out?”

Give up sitting dutifully at your desk. Leave your house

or apartment. Go out into the world.

It’s all right to carry a notebook but a cheap one is best,

with pages the color of weak tea and on the front

a kitten or a space ship.

Avoid any enclosed space where more than three

people are wearing turtlenecks. Avoid snow-covered

chalets, especially those with deer tracks across

the muffled tennis courts.

Not surprisingly, libraries are a good place to write.

And the perfect place in a library is near an aisle

where a child a few years old is playing as his

mother browses the ranks of the dead.

Often he will pull books from the bottom shelf.

The title, the author’s name, the brooding photo

on the flap mean nothing. Red book on black, gray

book on brown, he builds a tower. And the higher

it gets, the wider he grins.

You who asked for advice, listen: When the tower

falls, be like that child. Laugh so loud everybody

in the world frowns and says, “Shhhh.”

Then start again.

The advice for young writers in this much-anthologized poem of mineis solid: don’t take yourself too seriously and shrug off rejection. I felt this poem needed a light touch, so I poked a little fun at leather-bound journals with silver clasps as well as what I consider two of the most dangerous subjects for poetry: snow and deer!

* * *

Let’s end with something from the poet Alan Shapiro. It’s not about HOW to write but about how he feels about HAVING WRITTEN: “To me, the only thing that has kept me going through the years, as a writer, is that deep, private, self-forgetful joy that I feel when I’m working. When you sit down at the table and it’s eight o’clock in the morning and then you look up and it’s, God, it’s three o’clock in the afternoon. All that time has gone by as if in a single moment. And in that prolonged moment, you were completely given over to the task at hand, you were joyful, even if you were writing about how joyless your life has been. Because you had totally forgotten everything but the poem you were trying to make.”

Robert Frost said that poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom. Shelley said it “awakens and enlarges the mind itself.” Auden calls poetry “a vessel for empathy and truth.” Vessel as a bowl or pitcher. Poetry as something that holds empathy and truth. But it interests me to think of a poetry as another kind of vessel loaded to the Primsoll line, sailing from one port to another and unloading bales of empathy and truth for people raised on retribution and lies.

Sir Philip Sydney suggested that Poetry’s moral purpose was to “teach and delight,” and though I’m not a fan of Poetry as a tutor or God forbid a schoolmaster, I personally can’t get enough delight. I’ve even used the word delight twice in the last few lines. Once from Frost, now from Sir Philip who died at the age of 31 in 1586. He wrote a long pastoral romance called ”The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.” It is not, I’m afraid, delightful. It is, however, a handbook of what not to do and I believe “alabaster neck” and “exceedingly fair eyes” are examples enough. So I will avert my ordinary eyes and say no more.

Closer to home and to 2026, here are some less lofty definitions of Poetry and what it is and does. “It reflects the volatility of consciousness.” It is “ . . . a struggle between ordinary conversation and ritual.” T. S. Eliot says that Poetry can communicate before it is understood (my students will side with that) and someone else said Poetry is simply “ . . . a dynamic use of language.”

Flaubert famously quipped (though it’s long for a quip), “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to when we long to move the stars to pity.” Can we trust Flaubert? I do. He was such a craftsman that when he wrote the grueling scene in Madame Bovary where Emma commits suicide by drinking poison he felt the effects of his prose so strongly that he threw up in sympathy. Madame Bovary is prose, but Gustave also wrote this: “There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.”

And finally, Louis Armstrong said that musicians don‘t retire until “ . . . there’s no more music in them.” Le’s see if I’ve got a little music left in me today. Here’s the poem :

Baby, It’s You

Poetry lifts language from its knees

in the kitchen, from its tired behind

at a desk full of bills, from off its feet

beside the ironing board, from under

the beater that needs a clutch.

Poetry kisses with its mouth open

and whispers, “Sure, I’m idiomatic,

but nobody loves you like I do.”

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For some people, this modest poem opens a real can of worms as it tells a Reader what Poetry (note the capital) does. I can name any number of poets (Matthew Zapruder, A.E. Stallings, Ron Silliman, and the list goes on and on) who’d at least mildly disagree and who’d likely go on to prove their point. Would they be wrong? Nope. But I’m not wrong, either. Poetry is a mansion with many rooms, including a bowling alley and a creepy basement. For me, Poetry does exactly what the first stanza says: it helps get people back on their feet. And sometimes it does that in an intimate, flirtatious way.

P.S. If someone wants to bring up Auden’s famous phrase -- “For Poetry makes nothing happen,” -- I’d just say this: for most people, those five words mean Poetry doesn’t really do anything. But shift the emphasis a little and it reads like this: Poetry makes NOTHING happen. Like a match makes fire happen.

Happy July 5, my friends. See you next week.

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

I’d brought that poem to class to talk about Imagism. Marco said that whenever he found himself over-writing or over-explaining in his poems, he’d look up the Pound couplet again and use it as a antidote to excess.

Imagism -- Pound pretty much lit the fires of that movement -- was an antidote to conventional, ornamental 19^thcentury Romanticism. Just a few lines from Elizabeth Barrett Browning will show you what Imagism was in opposition to:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.

I can almost hear Pound and his friends saying, “Yikes! Pound’s couplet puts us on our feet in a subway station. Apparition lets us know what follows is likely to be at least a little mysterious, and then -- and this is the reading I prefer -- a soot-colored train speeds past and faces in the windows remind him of petals on a dark, damp branch. It really is striking compared to the gassy love poem by EBB.

I’m not always an Imagist poet but I like the rules of Imagism: Treat the subject directly, make every word count, prefer music over the metronome of meter.

Here’s a poem of mine.

Open at 10:00 A.M.

I burst in at 10:01 and surprise

the pretty clerks whispering,

giggling, fussing with each other’s

hair, holding out their pale wrists

suffused with the newest scent.

Everybody blushes as I stare.

I feel like one of the characters

of mythology stumbling upon

naiads bathing. But not Acteon

with his ravenous hounds.

Just a bumpkin standing by

the water’s edge, one hand

on the warm flank of his

lost cow.

Amy Lowell took up Pound’s argument for Imagism’s cause and laid out a few rules of her own for anyone who was interested: “Use language of common speech, create new rhythms, allow freedom of choice as far as subject goes, present an image, produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred or indefinite.”

“Freedom of choice as far as subject goes.” Some of you know how just reading Ed Field’s “ Bride of Frankenstein” poem 40+ years ago opened so many doors for me so I could write about Dagwood and Devil Girls From Mars! (Ed’s poem is on-line if you want to take a look.)

“Open at 10:00 A.M.” isn’t strictly an Imagist poem but I do like Lowell’s Pound-like guidelines. The diction here is everyday, the rhythm is not traditional meter, I wrote about going shopping, the setting and characters are seeable, and the details are concrete.

Here’s something I ask my poetry students to do -- write the gist of their poems out in prose. Sometimes I do that too -- I went into Banana Republic before the clerks, all young women, were really ready for customers. I surprised them and I felt like I’d intruded. That’s pretty much what happened, but nobody would call that a poem. Playing along with Amy Lowell’s and Ezra Pound’s mandates helped me turn a simple incident into something that’s more fun to read.

I imagine every poet has been asked to write a poem for a special occasion. When that happens, I do my best, deciding between free verse or a form like the sonnet or ghazal. I did write an ode to my hometown once, and it’s celebratory because that was the assignment. Was I inspired? I’m not a fan of that word, anyway. I don’t wait around for Inspiration to show up and sprinkle enchanted glitter on me. I sit down and go to work.

For the record, here are a few pretty well-known occasional poems: Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb,” written for Obama’s Presidential inauguration. “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Tennyson commemorating the tragic Battle of Balaclava. And a gorgeous lament by Auden used as a commemorative elegy -- “Funeral Blues.” If you liked the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral, you heard it there.

My poem today is about the occasional poem. It is not itself an occasional poem. It’s about the occasional poem.

The Occasional Poem

Recently I wrote “I Buy Myself a Shirt” and “On Getting

Out of Bed.” That’s why it’s so great to be a poet today:

Basically I’m self-employed with nobody to please but myself.

In the past, there was a court poet. He got out of bed, too,

and probably put on a shirt, but he couldn’t write about that.

His subjects were momentous: marriage, birth, death.

Take a royal wedding, for example. There sat the king

horny and bored, stuffed with peacock and swan. The poem

had to be perfect – part epithalamion, part bawdy limerick.

And nine months later, a poem on birth. For an heir,

an eclogue in Virgilian hexameters with references to

a golden age. For a girl, well – something pretty.

A song of praise but tempered with regret.

When it came to death, a lingering illness helped. Time

to strike just the right note. Black-clad parishioners

should nod and weep silently. The meter should match

the tolling of the bells.

Sudden death was the worst. News brought by horseback.

The messenger pacing in the courtyard, children shrieking

and taunting each other while upstairs the poet mutters

and chews his quill.

Clearly occasional poems are written for occasions and on demand. They are not poems written occasionally in the sense of now-and-then.

My poem today is if not long, then long-ish. Six stanzas can be a lot if the poem maunders. Readers give up, and that’s the last thing any writer wants.Let’s see what I did to keep that from happening:

In stanza #1 I set the tone – easy-going and light-hearted.

#2 ushers Readers into the past.

#3 as in an essay, gives examples and the middle line is meant to propel the Reader onward with its unpredictable adjectives and nouns.

#4 reminds everyone of how things were in the past as far as gender parity is concerned.

#5 adds a poetry-lesson when “deliberate meter” comes in. And “the tolling of the bells” is three iambic feet.

Finally I end with a photo of a court poet (what Robert Frost called “a tame poet”) working under duress.

* * *

P.S. One of the most charming poems I’ve read recently was written by an eleven year old boy: “On Liking Lynne A Lot”

Ah, falling in love. Always an occasion worth celebrating!

A list of sci-fi films is a long and comprehensive; real fans know the different sub-genres -- Space Opera, Cyberpunk , Time Travel, and Hard Sci-Fi. I’m just going to name some of the classics: The Day the Earth Stood Still, War of the Worlds, Forbidden Planet, Them, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. and one of my recent favorites, Nope, by Jordan Peele.

A lot of ink has been spilled talking about the themes of sci-fi -- loss of humanity, colonialism, mind control -- but not much attention has been paid to the allure and incantation of their titles. Samuel Taylor Coleridge said that good prose was this: “Words in the best order.” Try these words -- The Day the Earth Slowed Way Down, Quarrel of the Worlds, Permissible Planet, Those, Invasion of the Body Borrowers, Yep. None would get me into the theatres. Okay, maybe Yep.

Today’s poem (mine as usual) honors the sci-fi genre and especially the B-movie category. The Speaker is an unusual alien. read on. You’ll see what I mean.

Bears from Space

Plastic honey bears on every table in every coffee shop.

Nanoparticles in the yellow nozzles send information

back to Constellation Ursa. Thousands of bears are on alert.

Our space ships stand ready.

When the bear-ships land – huge, monolithic, imposing --

humans will go to their knees. They will roll over and show

their fat, white stomachs.

Only one thing from coffee shop data is worrisome: most

hominids tip the little bear and squeeze. But a few rip

the bear’s hat off and dip a spoon into its skull.

This suggests a savagery that must be taken into account.

Perhaps earthlings are not as naked and puny as they appear.

This poem was fun to write and I remember – brace yourself for a fancy word -- its provenance: my local coffee shop. Usually I don’t like to work anywhere except at home. But I do like coffee with steamed soy milk. I’m waiting for the barista when somebody at a nearby table picks up a honey bear and says to his friend, “What a great place for nanotechnological spyware.” Bingo. I sat down and made a few notes on a napkin. The first few drafts weren’t promising: easy (aka dumb) jokes, FBI/CIA stuff, a noir shamus in a trench coat. But I still liked the idea of bears with a plan for world domination. In lots of sci-fi movies, humans are called “puny earthlings” and yet in film after film we prevail. Then one morning I saw an ad for toys, and one of those was Talking Teddy. Once I had a bear-narrator things got better faster.

The first edition of his now famous book was called A Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition. Really, Peter? You don’t think that’s a little prolix, long-winded and grandiloquent?

If you’ve read one of my recent posts, you know about my affection for the thesaurus. I’ve alway always been a word-guy and wore out a few editions of Roget’s book which was, by the way, an immediate best seller when it was first published in April of 1852. I once bought a copy at a used book store and found $200.00 inside. I loved the idea that someone hid those twenties in the thesaurus making it an actual treasury.

My poem, today, however, is not about Peter. Nor about his real wife.

It’s a flight of fancy. (Keats once wrote an ode to Fancy, and he meant fancy as a synonym for imagination.) When I taught Poetry to kids, I used to assign What If poems: What if animals talked. What if Jack found something very different at the top of the beanstalk.

This what-if poem has a -- as we say in the business -- Speaker.At first he seems like a bit of a cad. Someone who kisses-and-tells. Yet in the poem he has to assure Roget’s wife that he’s not a scholar or academic but just a regular guy. Did he do this every time they met? Or were there other liaisons with other men?

Making Love to Roget’s Wife

We’d meet in a different cheap room.

Every time I had to swear I worked

with horses and used books to kill flies.

But nothing happened until

we heard Peter from the courtyard

below: “Strumpet, whore, courtesan,

jade, wench . . .”

Then she closed and barred

the whitewashed shutters

and stepped out of her only dress.

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The Irish poet Eavan Boland talks about the “anarchic individualism” associated with the word poet while she wanted to write about, among other things, domesticity and what she called “dailiness.” I’m a very different poet from Ms. Boland, but I like the idea of dailiness, too. In my case, it’s what occurs to me on any given day.

This poem is a good example of that. I wondered what it might be like to be married to a man who for years could not stop thinking about words and their every nuance and hue. Overlooked, perhaps? And if so, what might she do? I’m not anarchic in the chaos-and-turmoil sense but I do like to suggest to my Readers that there’s more than one way of looking at almost everything.

“The Dictionary is a poem about everything.” Stephen Wright.

Noah Webster wrote more than 30 books and textbooks, though I’d skip A Brief History of Epidemics and Pestilential Diseases. He taught himself 26 languages. He played the flute, was obsessive (he counted all the houses in every city he visited.) Thanks to Noah Webster there are copyright laws. His first dictionary (1843) sold a mere 2500 copies and Mr. Webster died thinking that he was a failure.

I got my first dictionary when I was ten years old. I felt like Howard Carter when he opened King Tut’s tomb, looked in and saw “Wonderful things.” When I discovered Roget’s Thesaurus (I liked thinking that the word thesaurus sounded like some sort of dinosaur!) another door opened to more wonderful things.

I still prowl through any dictionary or thesaurus that I can hold in my hand.

The pages of a good dictionary use what is called Bible paper or India paper. Lightweight and durable. A breeze will turn those pages.

Death for ancient Egyptians meant a journey to the idyllic Fields of Reeds. So for that journey, they included things they loved and needed. -- barley, wine, and weapons. When my time comes, I’d like a dictionary , a thesaurus, and a copy of the Daily Racing Form.

Here’s today’s poem. It’s all about words.

Noah Webster

What if God had said to Noah,

“Prepare a great ship and take on it

all manner of words, two by two.”

Enmity and Rancor demand separate

staterooms while Obsequiousness

and Fawning insist that any old place

is fine with them. Really.

Doubt and Suspicion check their tickets

again while Fastidiousness tiptoes on

with Meticulousness, both carrying

cans of Lysol.

Pomp takes forever to board and Pageantry

isn’t much better. Pretentious, left behind,

demands to speak to the person in charge.

Danger and Peril hang from the rigging

and wave good-bye to Risk who is happily

treading water and lighting another

unfiltered cigarette.

I remember writing this poem as an antidote to some very dry assigned reading.The homework (as in work at home) plodded along; the language was utilitarian at best and meaning, message, substance was everything. Yawn. There’s an axiom in writing that goes like this -- No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. It’s good advice. For this poem, that axiom might read like this: no fun for the writer, no fun for the reader. That’s the test for this poem. Certainly not what it means: it means what it says. It was fun to write. Was it fun for you to read? If so, I succeeded. If not, I failed. It’s that simple.

That night I talked to an actual model and her boyfriend. They were both vegetarians; they didn’t drink or use drugs. Their goal was to make enough money to “get out of town.” Steven worked for a valet company and parked cars at swanky bashes all over L.A. Sylvie modeled and told stories about staying thin, ten-hour days, callous rejections at open calls, no work for weeks then a month in Belarus. And Harvey Weinstein wasn’t the only creep in Hollywood.

I sensed that I’d write something about Sylvie if I was patient. The Quakers practice “expectant waiting” so I waited for the spirit to move me. One day when I was reading about unusual forms for poems -- sijo, cento, glosa, sapphics -- the latter stayed for dinner.

Sapphics are named after the Greek poet Sappho. Almost all of her poetry is lost except for fragments. Some of those fall into the 4-line stanza. So I wrote a lot of sapphics about models. Originally I had fifteen or sixteen. Some were pretty weak and resisted revision; those were put on ice floes and sent to perish in the cold. I was left with four or five that I liked.

For sapphics, there are very strict rules for syllable count, for words stressed and unstressed, but I wasn’t interested in those rules. I tend to write fast and not get in my own way, so I make a lot of mistakes. Not a good habit for a surgeon, but useful for me and for writers like me. My only rule was this: As many surprises in every four lines as possible without the stanza boiling over and calling too much attention to itself instead of the different supermodels who are telling us what their job can be like.

Supermodel Sapphics

You in the velvet bustier. Your feet

frighten children. Nobody can look

at you and not laugh, despite all that

smokey-eyed make up.

Handsome client likes to flirt.

Gifts brimming with allurement.

Tempting for sure. Too bad

he’s stupid as a snow drift.

I like changing clothes beside

you, girl. I am not that way usually.

Kiss me, anyway. You’ll find

zero resistance.

Everybody in the cab is all gossip,

flutter and impulse. Don’t they know

this could turn into mice and a pumpkin

with just one pimple?

Who would rend their garments

if I died? Not that silver-sandaled

skinny bitch who’d throw my ashes

right out the window.

Every photographer says I’m beautiful.

Enter some nimble 16 year old.

97 pounds of her and I imagine the fat

plutocrat of my dreams.

See you all next week. Thanks for dropping by.

BY WALLACE STEVENS

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

This is the kind of poem that drove me screaming (not really) from grad school. What really drove me from grad school was grad school. Scholarship was not for me. Research was not for me. I could write a little, even though what I wrote in the 70s was -- as many have pointed out -- barely poetry. I was having fun doing what Auden once said, “Fooling around with words.”

Then I found Edward Field’s first book (Stand Up, Friend, with Me) and fell in love with it -- Easy-going, insouciant, and fun to read.

What I did like about the Steven’s poem was not, Lord knows, what it means. But some of the language Stevens used: slovenly, for instance, to modify wilderness The odd rhymes of air, everywhere and bare that seem carelessly tossed on the page. The internal round and ground. In his own way he seemed as nonchalant about so-called rules as Ed Field.

There are, of course, bookish explications/explanations of what “Anecdote” is “really about” as some teachers say. Here’s part of an essay by a smart guy I found on - where else? - the net. This is what he says about the Wallace Stevens poem:

“Anecdote of the Jar” is very short, three stanzas. It’s about looking at a wilderness, untamed and chaotic that then becomes organized and knowable when a manmade jar is placed in the middle of it. The most common interpretation is that it’s about what civilization does to nature, but this time I looked at it and saw that jar as identity in the middle of the chaos of reality. The wilderness has no meaning until that jar is put down, then the chaos is seen in relation to the jar and becomes ordered, it’s behind the jar or to the right of the jar, it’s curved like the jar, it contrasts in color to the jar. The jar becomes the organizing point of the wilderness and the wilderness is defined and ordered in relationship to it.”

All that makes sense, and it made me want to carry on a conversation with the original poem. Of course the first thing I tried was Parody. So I put a jar in Texas. From that I learned that the anapest (metrical foot that goes da da Dum) of Tennessee is just about perfect compared to the clunky trochee of TEX-us.

I tried a box in Tennessee but the wilderness didn’t organize well around a square. I tried carton, casket, footlocker. I was intrigued by casket but I stalled after a line or two.

Finally I understood that I was basically making friends with something mysterious, secretive and sly. So what I was most satisfied with was part homage/ part companion poem. Here that is in prose poem form.

Anecdote

I’m so baffled by Wallace Stevens’ poem about a jar, that I dial the Hartford Insurance hot line. Even though Mr. Stevens is dead, he picks up. I ask him to chat with me about the poem. “Oh,” he says, “Sure. Well, I was in Tennessee for business, so I visited my granddaughter. When I got to the house, she was out back recycling. Pretty soon I was barefoot with my good pants rolled up scrubbing old mayonnaise out of a Best Foods jar. At one point Beth Ann asked me what I was thinking about and I said, ‘Oh, just some silly poem,’ and she said, ‘Pay attention to what you’re doing,’”

P.S. See everyone next week. And if you happen to have a child around 12 who happens to like fantasy, Gary Schmidt and I wrote a Middle Grade novel that just came out to good reviews -- STYX & STONES.

But it Doesn’t Have To Be

I’m part of an ongoing poetry writing workshop. Participant. Not the teacher. Twice a month. Six-to-ten people. We’re friends of various ages and genders. We’re kind to each other, but we don’t blow smoke up anybody’s skirt, either.

We had an interesting ninety minutes not long ago. So this week I’m writing about someone else’s poem! I know. What a surprise. I have the poet’s permission for this. No names.

Just to get started, here’s her poem:

Synecdoche.

My mother rushed in, “Mrs. Ammon doesn’t

answer her phone!”

I carried a short ladder over, peered through

the kitchen window.

The usual table set for one. Then, on the spotless

floor, a shattered cup.

{For the record, synecdoche. Suh NECK duh key. Where the part stands for the whole. “Bob got new wheels.” Not literally since he got the entire car. “Lily’s pen was poison!” Not literally but Lily wrote scathing reviews.}

Here’s how the discussion went. The poet (let’s call her Violet) said she was afraid that there wasn’t much to the poem beside the obvious: she named a slightly obscure figure of speech and gave an example.

Some of us said the single cup suggested a lot about Mrs. Ammon’s simple and maybe even stark existence. Robert -- about Violet’s age and that’s somewhere in the 50s -- said that the incident reminded him of his small hometown where neighbors always kept tabs on people who lived on their own.

Ashley said, “That’s really old school. It probably wouldn’t happen in a city.”

Ophelia disagreed and said in her apartment building if nobody has seen a tenant around for a couple of days, he or she gets a knock on the door.

Oscar said he was surprised that a girl - Violet - carried the ladder and did what most people might expect a boy to do. “I like it when my expectations get turned upside down,” he said.

Arabella asked, “How do you know this is autobiographical?” She turned to Violet. “Was it you?”

Violet said, “Nope. It was a neighbor kid named Kevin.”

“And why,” asked Ashley, “does gender matter?”

“Maybe the gender doesn’t,” Zach said, “but here’s the question -- is this really a poem or a better-than-average example of a figure of speech? Remember Emerson said that his poems were an invitation to a voyage, so we should read him and see fresh sights. Is this a fresh sight?”

I said, “The part I thought was strongest and maybe freshest was when the kid didn’t just go to the front door and knock but used a ladder like a peeping Tom.”

That’s when Violet pulled an interesting switcheroo. She handed around more copies. “How about now?” she asked.

Synecdoche.

My mother rushed in, “Mrs. Ammon doesn’t

answer her phone!”

I carried a short ladder over, peered through

the kitchen window.

The usual table set for one. Then, on the spotless

floor, a shattered cup.

As the ambulance pulled away, my neighbors

wondered how much

the place was worth and who would buy it.

“Anyody,” said Mr. Newman, “but a Jew.”

Christopher said, “Now it’s more interesting. The first version was kind

of flat.”

Merrill agreed, “It’s really about something. Coming face-to-face with everyday racism makes the poem heftier. But I’d like to be a little more grounded. Where am I exactly. And when?”

Megan took a turn, “This doesn’t sound like L.A.” Robert countered with, “Maybe not the L.A. you know, but it’s the one I know. Everybody on my block kind of looks out for everybody else.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s not the South,” said Arabella, “because if it’s set in the South Mr. Newman would probably use the N-word instead of the J-word.”

Zach said, “I wonder if it’d work being set in the past and in the South and Mr. Newman used the J-word, anyway?”

“Or what if Mr. Newman was Black? What would he say?”

“Let’s stick to the poem that’s in front of us,” Christopher said. “The kid learned a bitter lesson about prejudice because Mr. Newman (whose views aren’t exactly new!) stands for a whole lot of other antisemitic people.”

Violet stepped in then. “Okay. I’ve had my ten minutes. Lots to think about. Thanks as usual. Now who’s next?

* * *

There are stories about workshops that broke people’s hearts, sent them running from the classroom, and made them stop writing for years. That is not this workshop. I’ve asked for help with poems that were -- metaphorically -- drowning and somebody in the workshop swam out and saved them.

I hear a lot about how lonely the writer’s life is, the cold white marble of the page, blah blah blah.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Put your hand, friend, in mine.

Fee Fi Fo Fum

My affection for fairy tales is no secret to fans of my poetry or flash fiction, and this isn’t the first Substack that I’ve written about tales, myths, and fables. My poem today (below) is a familiar one since it’s based on “Jack and the Bean Stalk,” a classic tale of pluck and wiles.

As an introduction to this Sunday’s post, I thought I’d include

a few précis of some other tales in their original form. Pre-Disney, for sure.

One of things that was once new to me in the study of folk tales is the Darkness Scale, where the stories are assigned numbers from 1 to 10. 10 being darkest. I’ve included the numbers just for, well, fun.

2/10

A variant of the much-loved ‘Cinderella’ fairy tale, ‘Donkey-Skin’ is Charles Perrault’s sinister tale of hidden identity and a love-sick prince, with themes of oedipal attraction, spine-chilling disguises, and fairy godmothers.

3/10

The Brothers Grimm wrote the original ‘Snow White’ fairy tale. But ‘Schneewittchen’ has many more gruesome twists and turns than the story as we now know it, featuring lethal jealousy, murder plots, and a pair of red-hot iron dancing shoes.

4/10

A Hans Christian Andersen tale of murder and revenge, ‘The Rose Elf’ was first published in 1888 and features themes of brutal murder, hidden skulls, and attempted retribution.

9/10

The Dead Mother

A mother dies giving birth, leaving her husband alone to care for their baby. He hires an old woman to nurse the child, but it cries all day long and refuses to suckle. At night, however, the babe is silent. The old woman stays up one night to observe the child and discover why it sleeps so soundly. To her horror, she sees the melancholic ghost of the baby’s mother. Each night she comes to care for her child under the cover of darkness.

Not every Folklorist uses or respects the Darkness Scale, but I find it irresistible. You will soon see for yourself how dark my version of “Jack and the Bean Stalk is and how it relates to the present day. Is it the darkest of them all? Read on if you dare!

The Ogre’s Wife

I don’t remember being little, growing up, having friends

over, much less opening the door for ogre suitors

clutching limp bouquets in their huge, hot hands.

I seem to have always been what I am: the ogre’s wife.

This much I know: he hates it when I think. He wants

his dinner, he wants to count his gold, he wants to snore.

He’d beat me if he knew I was writing this in blood

on the cutting board, but I like to see my thoughts

laid out until the house starts to shake and a cup

of water washes them all away.

He throws open the door and drops something

on the table: a cow or a limp boy in the clothes

his mother made for him.

I’ve walked to the end of the straight road, and it

just stops. When I looked down, nothing but the tops

of clouds.

What am I to do except stoke the fire, feed it with

the homespun pants and shirt, wash the almost perfect

body, then sharpen my knife.

From the other room comes the clink of coins, plop

of another priceless egg, his command to “Play!”

then the harp eking out the only song it knows.

More than a few women have told me how this poem affected them. After a reading not long ago, someone said that it made her want to finalize her divorce since this poem described so perfectly her psychologically abusive marriage. Is that what I set out to do? Of course not. I wanted to -- and who knows why -- write about the Jack-in-the-Beanstalk story.

I tried a version of this poem from Jack’s POV; then I had the ogre narrate. Then third-person. Nothing really clicked until I, in a way, became the ogre’s wife. Where did she come from? Why did she marry an ogre? In any version of this tale (and there are more than a few), the ogre’s wife is a secondary character at best. Jack is the hero.

Children are supposed to learn a lesson like Listen To Your Mother. Or, maybe, Don’t Be Greedy. I’m never interested in morals-to-my-stories. But I was interested in hearing what the ogre’s wife had to say about living with a cannibal. That’s what the ogre is, a fact played down in most re-tellings. As one draft followed another, I knew more and more about the ogre’s wife as she, in a way, told me her pitiable tale so that I could tell others.

Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” (1976): Bishop’s famous villanelle about loss went through at least 19 different drafts (and likely more).

Syvia Plath’s poems in Ariel were famously written on the backs of old drafts of her husband Ted Hughes’s poems. showing heavy crossings-out and revisions,

Allen Ginsberg, “Howl” (1956): The poem was refined over a series of messy, typed, and hand-corrected manuscripts, with at least five distinct drafts

Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1920): Written in 1917, this poem exists in several drafts, with crucial annotations and revisions suggested by Siegfried Sassoon,

John Keats, “Ode on Melancholy” (1820): Manuscripts show that Keats worked through the poem, with at least one draft showing the final stanza attached to earlier ones.

Nick Virgilio: A famous haiku poet, Virgilio worked on single, tiny poems for years, leaving dozens of drafts and revisions to get the nuance just right,

I’m in very good company here, and believe me when I say the following poem --“Shadow” -- is not as memorable as any of the poems or poets in the list above.(For the record, though, I am quite a bit taller than Keats.)

I asked my friends about revising their work and heard that some love it while others would rather go to a dentist who works out of his van. I heard, “Almost never,” as in first-thought-best-thought. And I also heard, “I’m still revising things that have been published!”

Why is Poem A so relatively easy to get along with while Poem B sulks and pouts? Why does A get good grades and make his bed every morning while B has to be picked up from the police station. Again.

Today’s poem went through ten drafts. 10. “Shadow” (one of many possible titles I tried) would not leave me alone! I’d put it aside and it would show up. I threw it away once, then went back and found it. What’s going on here? Who knows. If writing poetry weren’t so mysterious, I wouldn’t bother to write it.

Shadow

You have an appointment that takes almost all day,

so I stop by your apartment and feed the cat.

I wash and dry a few dishes, do some laundry, cook

something easy for us later.

Too nervous to sit still, I walk to the pet store for Friskies

Maxi-Treats. Shadow is a fussy eater so I make a trail

leading up to the untouched salmon pâté

hoping momentum will carry her right into the bowl

the way I start kissing your belly button and rush headlong

to your lips.

Finally you burst in, head straight for the bourbon, wave

the bottle at me, “Where’s Humphrey Bogart

when you need him.”

I get my trench coat. We’ll figure things out at the Blue Parrot.

You love the buzzing neon – a tipsy champagne glass

with bubbles that never burst.

This noir-ish poem started out as a fairly easy-going piece about a couple. They don’t live together because the Speaker (as we say in the poetry business) stops by his girlfriend’s place. But so what? It wasn’t until I named the cat that things got interesting for me. The other character in this poem -- the ‘you ‘ addressed in line #1 -- has a day-long appointment. Thus a possible shadow of some kind across their love affair. At that point, the pace picked up for me. The momentum mid-poem matches what happens next: she bursts in upset, he gets his trench coat. There is a Blue Parrot bar in the movie Casablanca, and I liked the reverb off the color. My mother and her sisters used to “get the blues.” Some readers will expect a parrot as part of the neon sign but because it’s expected. I turned away from that and happened onto (many drafts, remember?) the bubbles that never burst, since this couple’s plans (a happy life together) are in jeopardy.

I was an only child but not a lonely child. I had a lot of imaginary friends. They were always younger than I and needed my guidance and care. They died a lot and sometimes came back to life the next day as if nothing had happened.

In grade school we had old fashioned desks with tops that lifted up like the hoods of cars. I remember a boy who made room for his imaginary friend Jason by using only half of his desk so Jason could sit beside him. That made perfect sense to me, and I missed my own chimerical friends who’d died in a spectacular fire set by Satan himself.

Fast forward to college (1960) where I took a class in in Folklore and Mythology. It was interesting, but a little dry. Fast forward again (2010) , and I’m reading Anne Sexton’s Transformations. That book made my heart beat fast.

Not only did Anne Sexton write about transformation -- frog to prince, straw to gold -- she transformed the tales themselves, making them current. She was wry, she was sexy, and she was funny as hell.

Anne Sexton invited me back into fairy tales. I could imagine her saying, “Sure, come on in. Plenty of room in the forest.” Pretty soon I had a bunch of re-visited tales that became a book from Candlewick Press. Lies, Knives, and Girls in Red Dresses. Complete with very cool illustrations by Andrea Dezsö.

For today’s poem, though, I chose one from a small, independent magazine.

Hansel

Gretel enrolls in night school. A creative writing class.

There are other women in their fifties. One keeps pointing

her expensive breasts at the teacher. One has crazy hair

and a pentagram. They’re nice enough, though.

Gretel likes to sit with the young people. The girls treat

her like a mom, spilling all kinds of secrets. Their idea

of an endearment is to give her a joint or two

in a Sucrets box.

Gretel likes the class. The teacher is bigger than she

expected, strong like a woodsman. She’s sorry when

he hands out the last assignment.

At home, she sits in the window seat and smokes.

The marijuana makes her sleepy and before that she

feels – she learned this word recently – phantasmagorical.

The moon is either there or she knows where it is.

A forest fills her little yard. A trail of white pebbles

leads God-knows-where. She lets herself cry once

a week and this is the time. “Oh, honey. I miss you so much.”

Here’s one answer to the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” In my hometown, a brother-and-sister (Angus and Hazel) who went to my church lived together for decades. Neither married. They preferred each other’s company; it was that simple. When Angus passed, my mom wrote to me to say how lost Hazel was without her brother. They were peculiar and eccentric in the Southern Gothic way; they would’ve fit in any Flannery O’Conner story. I knew them and liked their courtly manners and air of musty decay. This poem grew from that soil.

When I can’t write directly about something, I try to get in another way, like a burglar who goes from one window to another until something slides open. Nobody would know this poem is about Angus and Hazel. It’s a poem about how Gretel might feel if Hansel died. I liked setting this poem in the Now, and though some disagree I also like the frank sentiment at the very end.

See you all next week.

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

I can remember being in high school English (circa 1958) and watching even the usually polite girls stifle a yawn. The boys in the back stared at their desks and wondered what was for lunch. I didn’t like poetry, either. Every poem meant something. It’s meaning was hidden but teachers knew. I imagined late at night and just before graduation, teachers-to-be were taken into a candlelit room and given the meanings to every poem in the world. I was only a few years away from reading John Ciardi who asked not what does a poem mean but how does it mean it? After that, poetry got to be a lot more fun.

“The Red Wheelbarrow” suffers from exposure. It’s been looked at so many times it’s hard to see it. It’s been explained to death or at least put on life-support. But I like this sentence about the poem (and Williams’ poems in general): “Willaims helps us break out of our personal isolation, get out of our head and engage with the world around us.”

That seems fair to me. WCW teases with “ so much depends” and then gives the poem a lot to space to breathe. He breaks the word rainwater in half. And again with wheelbarrow. He uses two colors. Someone could -- and god knows someone did - - draw the picture and title it “So Much Depends.”. I don’t have to know why so much depends on this barnyard scene. He says it does and I believe him. So I look and see how he did it.

Now almost every poet who belongs to the Smarty Pants School of Poetry has written a parody of this poem. Here are a couple.

so much depends

upon

a red cadillac

slick

with turtle

wax

beside the white

chicks.

by Willie “Slick” Williams

***

I fucking depended on you and

you left the fucking wheelbarrow

out and it’s fucking raining

and now the white chickens

are fucking filthy

by Mary Ruefle

Slick Willie’s poem -- ha ha -- is a lightweight parody, but Mary Ruefle’s knocks my socks off. She’s a dandy, anyway. Here’s what Tony Hoagland says about her poetry: “The result (for those with ears to hear) is a poetry at once ornate and intense; linguistically marvelous, yes, but also as visceral as anything you are likely to encounter.”

Doesn’t visceral just say it all? Mary Ruefle’s poem was like the thunderstorm that brought Victor Frankenstein’s creature to life. I loved her poem and kind of re-loved the original.

My poem today isn’t a parody. It isn’t about a wheelbarrow or chickens but about Mr. Williams as a physician and a poet who kept his eyes open.

Another Muse in Stained Pajamas

William Carlos Williams wrote about what he saw and did.

As a physician, childbirth entered his work and accidents

involving a tractor or combine.

Let’s watch him today making rounds at the contagious hospital.

He’s bald and wears glasses, his face partly hidden by one

of those surgical masks.

He makes a point of touching patients and chatting with them

before having coffee alongside a pretty nurse in a white room

with white furniture wiped down twice a day with disinfectant.

“Good-bye, everybody,” he says, then walks to his car which

is not that big or new, but the motor turns over easily. He lets

it idle against the cold. He can’t stop thinking about that hopeless

case whose bed was against the wall by the window. Dr. Williams

reaches for a piece of paper.

Immediately the dying man opens the door on the passenger’s side

and gets in. Look how that noxious breath clouds the windshield.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Williams’ mother was Puerto Rican and his father English. Spanish was his first language. He was friends with Ezra Pound and a mentor to Allen Ginsberg. A critic used three wonderful words to describe Williams’ work: “fresh, clear and economical.” It isn’t that I don’t love economy in poetry, but I took a more chatty approach to my poem. . . . “Let’s watch him today . . .” After a false start or two, I turned into a kind of docent, pointing things out about Mr. Williams as the tour continued: Here’s what he looked like, here’s how he was with patients, here is an example of where his poems came from. I also wanted to toy with the idea that not every muse has a Greek name (Erato/Calliope) or wears a diaphanous gown. (I was careful to use the adjective stained in the title as kind of provocation to my readers.) Clearly, inspiration (from the Latin to breathe) can come from the most unlikely places: “Immediately the dying man opens the door on the passenger’s side and gets in.” And the verb clouds in the last line of the last stanza makes things, paradoxically, clearer.