Winthrop: More Poetry in Music

Ever since my last post about poetic song lyrics, I've been keeping a sharp ear out for more. Came across one song that I have been enchanted by for awhile. It's by Indigo Girls, and it's one you probably haven't heard before. It's called "Winthrop," from their rarities CD, which was released a few years ago.

Winthrop
By Indigo Girls

when we get back to winthrop
a few miles from the airport
on a plastic chair
on a deck where my friends live
i watch the taking off airplanes
i watch the ocean waves crashing
with all of this movement something's got to give

down at the high tide
passed down through the family
the fishermen gather to complain about the catch
they talk about time
they talk about tides
the pull of the moon and the
coffee deep night black
and i listen to them
and i listen to you
and for everyone there is
something never coming back


The "coffee deep night black" line is wonderful, and at the end of the song it 
repeats, but this time as "deep night coffee black." I also enjoy the near rhyme 
of "time" and "tides." 

What you really need to do is listen to it to fully appreciate it. You can 
also find the full lyrics here.

Are there songs that you find especially poetic? My musical expertise is 
certainly limited, and I always welcome suggestions.

Short Poems Fascinate Me

Brevity is not a strong point of mine. So when a poet is able capture meaning or create a beautiful image using only a few lines, I'm almost always amazed. Take this one for example:

A strange old man
Stops me,
Looking out of my deep mirror.

--HITOMARO (trans. Kenneth Rexroth)

If I tried to write a poem about going older, I'd ramble on and on, probably. Stanza after stanza of lame attempts at reflecting upon the passage of time. Hitomaro does it brilliantly in 11 words. Not only that, but he keeps the meaning a secret during the first two lines, waiting until the last minute to reveal to us what the poem is really about. I also like that it's not just a mirror, but a deep mirror. Ten words would have been just fine--the poem could do without that word, "deep." But it just wouldn't be as good with only 10 words, would it?

I love finding short poems to discuss with my students. They lend themselves to zooming in on individual words. They're also good for dictation, which I don't do a ton of, but which I think is a valuable method of teaching poetry.

One thing I've been thinking about is how to get students to write short poems. Is teaching them a form (haiku, etc.) the best way to limit their "wordiness?" Do they need rules like those provided by haiku and similar forms? Or do they just need really good models to serve as mentor poems and to inspire their writing? Or maybe all of the above? I'm thinking of perhaps doing a short poems "mini-unit" this year where we spend time just reading and writing short poems. No idea yet how I'll structure this, but I'm open to suggestions!

I'll leave you with this rather famous short poem by Ezra Pound:

In a Station of the Metro
by Ezra Pound
The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.

Poetry Friday: Poetry in Georgia

I am in suburban Atlanta this weekend, traveling with my family to a cousin-in-law's college graduation. The South is pretty foreign to me, and I have to admit, it doesn't have much appeal. (Hopefully none of my 3 subscribers are from the South--I'm just being honest here, sorry. Now that I mention it, why don't I have more subscribers? C'mon people, help an up-and-coming poetry blogger out!) Maybe it's the heat, I don't know, but I don't think my "Places I'd Like to Visit" list has many entries south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Perhaps I'm rambling, but I do have to say poetry has been on my mind. Perhaps it was the family roadtrip or driving through the mountains or the daily monsoon-like rains we've had to endure. Lots of inspiration in all those places. Whatever the case, I did a little Google-ing tonight, searching for poets from Georgia and their poems, hoping to find something to share for Poetry Friday.

I had no idea the poem I posted about earlier this week was written by a Georgian. (Coincidence?) But I also found this gem by 1999 Georgia Poet of the Year Barbara Ras to share, too...

You Can't Have It All
by Barbara Ras
But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back. You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August, you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love, though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys until you realize foam's twin is blood. You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs, so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind, glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness, never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who'll tell you all roads narrow at the border. You can speak a foreign language, sometimes, and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead, but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands as if they meant to spend a lifetime together.

The entire poem can be found here. I hope you check it out and let me know what you think.

I really enjoy the long lines and the stream-of-consciousness effect that they create. The title speaks to me, too. Ras takes a common, overly-used phrase and makes it the title of her poem (A title which also serves as the first line--a technique I really like). She then goes on to make you forget all about what you can't have because that's not what the poem is about. It's about what you CAN have. And that, my friends, is a lot. Finally, when you read it all, you'll hopefully find that Ras concludes the poem perfectly: "You can't have it all, but there is this."

Nicely done, Georgia. I can't get behind your residents' driving skills and the urban sprawl and the Confederate flag bumper stickers and the 110 percent humidity, but I've got to tip my cap to your poets and their poems. Maybe I can learn a lesson from Barbara Ras's poem, too.

Poetry Friday is hosted by Author Amok this week. Be sure to check out what's happening in the rest of the poetry blogosphere.

Sign For My Father

I took my dad to dinner for Father's Day today. What's that? It's August? Well, better late than never, I suppose. It was nice to sit down with him and chat, just the two of us--something we hardly ever get to do. We used to play golf a lot in the summer, which gave us plenty of time to talk, but that was before I entered parenthood. Those days are gone, now.

I gave him another "gift" after we ate--a poem. It's by David Bottoms and its called "Sign For My Father, Who Stressed the Bunt." I discovered last summer, thanks to my good friend Joe Tsujimoto (buy his books on Amazon, people! They're pure gold, I tell you!). It pulled at my heart-strings because its message is something I've never really been able to say to my dad. This is probably true for many sons, I suppose. Hopefully the poem will say it for me.

It comes from that all-American genre of "Baseball Poetry," but it's much more than a baseball poem. Much, much more. Here are the first few lines:

On the rough diamond,
the hand-cut field below the dog lot and barn,
we rehearsed the strict technique
of bunting.  I watched from the infield,
the mound, the backstop
as your left hand climbed the bat, your legs
and shoulders squared toward the pitcher.
You could drop it like a seed
down either base line.  I admired your style,
but not enough to take my eye off the bank
that served as our center-field fence.

The rest of the poem is a must-read--like so many poems, the beauty is in the ending. In fact, I think I find the ending to be quite sublime. Now that I mention it, so is the title.

And, if you have the time, watch this video of Mr. Bottoms reading it himself. Happy Father's Day, Dad.

More From Montana

I had been stumped on what to write about today, but then I remembered a poem I came across when hunting down info for my post about Henry Real Bird. It's a poem that was shared with me last year and I like it a lot. I share it here in its entirety because there is no good place to cut it off. (Sorry for this infringement. I'll take the poetry blogging demerits, I suppose. If you'd rather, you can find the poem and its permissions here.)

Once in the 40's
by William Stafford
We were alone one night on a long road in Montana. This was in winter, a big night, far to the stars. We had hitched, my wife and I, and left our ride at a crossing to go on. Tired and cold--but brave--we trudged along. This, we said, was our life, watched over, allowed to go where we wanted. We said we'd come back some time when we got rich. We'd leave the others and find a night like this, whatever we had to give, and no matter how far, to be so happy again.

What a great story captured in 11 lines. "Whatever we had to give, and no matter how far..." Such simple language illustrating a deep emotion. And how about "far to the stars?" Kind of a surprising way of stating that...and with such nice sounds. I feel at a loss for words when it comes to describing all the great things about this poem. Maybe you can try.

Whitman Re-imagined

I missed the past few weeks responding to the writing prompt over at Big Tent Poetry. This week's challenge was a doozy, so I thought I'd try to get back into the act.

The goal: write a poem placing a pop icon in a mundane, domestic situation. Yikes. If you check out the results, you'll find some fabulous responses: a sordid take on Martha Stewart after dark, Jack Bauer making dinner, and more.

I had a lot of trouble thinking of what to do with this one. So I put kind of a twist on it. I imagined what Walt Whitman would think if he were alive in the year 2010 and working some dead-end office job. Is Uncle Walt the pop icon the Big Tent folks had in mind? Probably not. But I think it works just the same.

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

O 2010!
By Ben Curran
(after Whitman)

O me! O life!  Here in perpetuity, confined to endless days a spiral of monotony:
Awake, arise, dress, drive, work, perform, text, review, adjust, count, type, tweet...
Stranded to repeat today and day the next within windowless walls,
One more day tied to these spreadsheets, bound to this net.
One more day confined to this cubicle, tortured by the cursed blinking cursor.
One more day among those that stalk the concrete, bombarded by
    wars on terror, carbon, recession.

Questions abound--Do you ask them, too?
What has brought me here?
What have I become?
What will it take to sever my ties?
From whence comes the strength for escape?

To break free from that which binds my spirit and mind,
To grow my beard and wistfully tread among the flora of the forest:
    Baneberry, chicory, pensternon, more.
To know no obligation to desk nor outlets nor walls.
To dig my hands deep in soil and feel nutrients coursing into me.
To contribute my verse to the pages of the anti-modern world.
To never go back to the trappings of Man.

O me! O life! This new unavoidable question:
What now?
Satchel strapped. Life unplugged. Caution tossed.
Onward toward the answer.

Big Sky Poetry

It seems to me that one of life's best tiny gifts is the discovery of a new poet. I suppose there are different ways new poets arrive in our midst, but, for me, most of the time it's happenstance. This week it was via NPR's All Things Considered. They profiled the poet laureate of Montana, Henry Real Bird. Mr. Real Bird apparently is a rancher and has been referred to as a "cowboy poet."

The NPR feature and interview of Mr. Real Bird centered around his summer project--riding on horseback across Montana, handing out books of his poems to people he passes along the way! This seems like nothing short of brilliant, in my mind. Here's a link to the NPR story.

I found this story fascinating for a number of reasons. First, I'm a bit obsessed with "The West." I'd love to live in Wyoming or Montana someday. Second, Henry Real Bird came across as a true word-smith. In a short time on the air, he showed an innate ability to not only connect with the land and people of Montana, but also an ability to capture this connection in words. Here's a quote I pulled from the transcript of his interview with Michelle Norris. She asked him to share a few lines of his poetry. I'm not sure how the lines are supposed to be arranged, so I'm just taking it straight from the transcript:

Sunrise quarrels, recapitulation of sunrise quarrels, thoughts of man, civilization recedes, waves on shore of sand, attached to a reality now touches in life's span, (unintelligible) beginning of end strands, scratched thoughts drawn on rock of cave preserve our humble beginning, recorded in computer reserve. We question, wonder, learn, origin and beyond, shifting winds up the canyon walls, no barrier. We yawn from the constant vigil of progress that marches toward both ends of the spectrum cloning to nuclear arches. We give life and take life like them.

That strikes a chord with me somehow. I can't put a finger on exactly why. It just does.

The only frustrating part of this new discovery is that the work of Henry Real Bird is really difficult to find. My searches have turned up very little thus far. At this point, I'm pretty much obsessed with finding it somewhere. If you have any thoughts or clues, please let me know. The one spot I did find a few poems was on a Montana Arts Council page, but there's got to be more out there somewhere. I'll keep you updated. Until then, here's a bit from "Hoola Hand," by Henry Real Bird. Visit the aforementioned page to read the rest:

Today as I let go, a hoola hand into the dawn
Among silhouetted horse heads, held by a rope corral
But then, that day was many winters ago
To good horses you are drawn
I have asked that you ride the best
Of beautiful words to create images
Of life’s reflections filled with feelings of reality
Winters many may you ride the best.