Poem for June: Do not go gentle into that good night.

by Dylan Thomas

Read, and also listen, to the poem here.

So the thing about memorizing a poem is that you become very familiar with its nuances. In a good poem, this is fun, as wonderful turns of phrase are still wonderful near the end of the month after you’ve said them fifty-plus times. However, sometimes what seems to be a good poem, reveals its flaws in the memorizing process in a way they do not upon first reading. That word that isn’t quite the right word suddenly becomes that much more of clinker and weighs down the poem a bit in an unsatisfying way.

So it was with this poem. My problem is with the fifth stanza where I find the repetition of the word “blind” as in “…see with blinded sight/blind eyes should…” a bit lazy. In my view, successful poets are supposed to express things using a vast thesaurus of words. Repetition of words can happen and is sometimes successful in a poem, but in this case, I think that he could have found another word.

Poem for May: Entrance

You can read this month’s post by clicking here. It’s not mentioned on the site but this version is translated by Dana Gioia. Interestingly, there is a version translated by Edward Snow, which is quite different and not as lyrical to my mind.

My poems of late seem to consist of a sort of “make your own reality” theme. It’s where I am, I guess.

Poem for April: Love after Love

Go and read it here:
http://www.cjbecker.com/love_after_love.htm

(Ignore the centered spacing in the above layout, it really should be left justified)

I came across this poem while reading O, the Oprah Magazine. I immediately clipped it. Its brevity meant that I could stick it to a 3×5 card and add it to the stack of quotes that sit on my desk at work. It’s still the only poem in that stack.

Like last month’s selection, this poem is one that brings me back to myself. I can spend a lot of time being distracted by what isn’t in my life, and I need reminders to be redirected back to the fact that what is in my life, is lovely.

Poem for March: Wild Geese

Read the poem by clicking somewhere on this sentence.

After somewhat dogging on the Mary Oliver book I read last month, I, of course, decided to memorize one of her poems this month. This poem is on the side of my friend Deborah’s refrigerator. It is also Responsive Reading #490 in the Unitarian Hymnal Singing the Living Tradition. I really like the first five lines, as they are good reminder for modern life.

Poem for February: Oranges

This is still probably under copyright, so read it by clicking (http://matthewkaberline.blogspot.com/2008/04/gary-soto-oranges.html)

Though this is not the Gary Soto poem I was looking for, it does have a lot of nice imagery easily accessible to the middle school population. This is why, of course, it is assigned by so many middle school teachers.

Back in January, I lamented the lack of poems coming into my life. At the time, I was “reading” three poems a night from a poetry anthology. As the quotes around the word reading indicate, I wasn’t actually doing that. I needed to find time for poetry every day, but where?

A few things happened at once, in the way that life goes. First off, I started eating breakfast at home again. I had been bringing my breakfast to work and eating at my desk. I realized I was eating 80% of my food at work, sitting in front of my computer and decided to cut back that practice. I had to cut out the morning meditation, but it is so pleasant to now eat two meals at a table that I think the trade off was worth it.

Next, the newspaper started to arrive very late. The paper is supposed to get here by six o’clock on weekdays and my paper guy was not meeting the cut most days. So I had nothing to read while eating my breakfast. A-ha! An opening for more poetry! I got two anthologies and a book by a single author. I rotate through them as I eat my breakfast, which is delightful. Although sometimes not if a poem is particularly graphic or disturbing. Though that is rare and mostly, it is wonderful.

Now I have more poems coming into my life, which means it is easier to find poems to memorize.

Poem for January: The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel

click over here (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15433) to read this poem.

I’ve been having a problem lately finding poems. I have not been making time to read enough poems to discover ones I loved enough to memorize. So this month was passing and I still hadn’t chosen a poem. I remembered a very short poem–four to eight lines–that I loved as a teenager that was written by Gary Soto and called, I thought, “Oranges”. So that was going to be the short poem of the month. But when I finally got around to finding “Oranges,” I found that it was not the poem I thought it was. It was a good poem, but too long to cram in my memory in the few remaining days of the month. By chance, I recalled Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem. A-hah! That would be short enough to memorize for January and “Oranges” could be my February poem.

I have fond memories of this poem. For some reason, we spent a lot of time in my English classes during Junior High and High School reading about the Harlem Renaissance. I loved the poems we read so much that my junior year when I had to choose an author to study for the entire year, I chose Langston Hughes. I think the emphasis on the Harlem Renaissance was a way to gear our curriculum toward something beside the white guys. And I have to say, the disenfranchisement felt by this group of talented authors resonated with my adolescent self. While my white, middle-class upbringing wasn’t anywhere near disenfranchised, I felt–as I think many adolescents do–a kinship with these authors. Life wasn’t very fair for me, either, it seemed at the time.

This poem in particular sticks in my head because we watched a video which included Gwendolyn Brooks reading this poem. Until I watched that video I had been reading her poem thusly:

We real cool. Pause. Inhale. We left school. Pause. Inhale. We lurk late. Pause. Inhale. and so on.

When I heard Brooks read it, it changed from a good poem with a kicker of a last line to an awesome poem that sounded like a song. The transformation was such a surprise that I had one of those flash bulb memory moments and can picture perfectly the room where I was watching the video. I remember that I was not the only one surprised as there was a general gasp in the room and the teacher gave a satisfied, “Yep. Pretty cool, eh?” sort of comment.

You too can hear Gwendolyn Brooks read her poem, as well as deliver some commentary about how she would like people to know her for her other poems too, by going to the link above and clicking on the play button. I highly recommend it.

Next month, stay tuned for how I have found a way to read more poems on a daily basis.

Poem for December: For the young who want to.

For the young who want to
by Marge Piercy

This is under copyright. Please see this link: (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=176837)

Reading about Piercy’s life, I feel as though she was born one decade early. She went to college in the 1950s, when it was all about getting your MRS, when she would have clearly fit in much better in the 1960s, when it was all about–well, thanks to innumerable books, movies, history channel specials and general fawning over the times–we all know what it was all about.

So there is a thread of bitterness that runs through her poems which I respect because she earned her bitterness the hard way. No one has ever told me I should have a baby and for that I thank the hard work of Piercy and her contemporaries, and all the feminists who come before them.

Poem for November: Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nothing Gold Can Stay
Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

I had a different poem in mind for November. It was a good one. I just kept forgetting to copy it onto paper so I could have it with me for memorizing. More and more time passed and I was suddenly left with only one good week’s worth of memorizing. So I switched it up. I googled “short poems to memorize” and came up with this one. It works.

The secret club

One of the most delightful things about memorizing poems is when you encounter poems you have memorized in other contexts. There is a flash of quizzical recognition, “Hey, that sounds familiar! Why?” and a happy realization. “They know the same poem I do!” It’s like being in a secret club. This editorial discusses the poem I memorized last December. She enjoys reciting it this time of year as much as I do.

Poem for October: Praise Song for the Day

Praise Song for the Day
Elizabeth Alexander

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

I chose this poem for October because it was the poem read at Barack Obama’s inauguration. I wasn’t enchanted when the poet read it that day, but when I read it on my own I really liked it. In a political season with words more declaimed than whispered and more spiny than smooth, I felt like this was a poem to commit to memory.

The past two political years haven’t turned out as I would have chosen. I would like to see more compromise–and not just by Democrats sliding ever close to the Republicans‘ positions while the Republicans refuse to move. I would like to see elections that cannot be bought by a few and I would like to see a political process that finds commonalities in our population, instead of pitting us against one another. This election cycle I saw a lot of “you have something that I don’t have (pension, decent health care, etc.) and because I don’t have it, you shouldn’t either.” I would like us to work towards, “how can we get everyone to have something good?” I know there is a lot more figuring it out at the kitchen tables and it makes me tired. This poem, celebrating a “sharp sparkle” and the idea that “any thing can be made” is a bit of a buoy in this acrimonious, bought and paid for, rude and grabby time.