POETRY MONDAY:  July 5, 2010

Jim Haba

I’m proud to be able to introduce someone that many of you will recognize in this photo. Jim Haba was the tireless person everywhere at once at the famous Dodge Poetry Festival — behind the microphone introducing world-famous poets to cheering crowds and organizing talks and workshops all over a sylvan campus every two years. There was much more, as you will read below, but what many of you may not know is that he is, and has been for many years, a fine poet himself.

Jim Haba grew up on farms and islands in rural Washington. In 1962 he earned a B.A. from Reed College and in 1967 a Ph.D. from Cornell University. He taught in the English department at Rutgers, New Brunswick, from 1966 to 1972. From 1967 to 1970 he also began to study visual art, at Douglass College and at The Studio School for Drawing and Sculpture in New York City. In 1972 he joined the English department of Glassboro State College, now Rowan University, where he taught a wide range of courses and organized dozens of readings and workshops by distinguished poets. He retired from Rowan in 2003.

From 1986 through 2008 he was responsible for developing and directing the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Program. In this capacity, and as Festival Director, he designed and produced all twelve ground-breaking Geraldine R. Dodge Biennial Poetry Festivals, the largest poetry events in North America. In 1987 he inaugurated the Dodge Poetry-in-the-Schools Program, which sends poets into New Jersey high schools and provides a variety of poetry-related experiences for New Jersey teachers at every classroom level. In 1992 he designed and organized what has become an annual, statewide series of poetry discussion and writing groups for teachers called Clearing the Spring, Tending the Fountain. He became the Dodge Foundation’s Poetry Director in 1999.

In 1995 he edited the best-selling book The Language of Life, which included poems by and interviews with poets featured at the 1988 and 1994 Dodge Poetry Festivals. He served as Poetry Consultant for the 1995 Bill Moyers (8-hour) television series The Language of Life and three other Bill Moyers series also derived from Dodge Poetry Festivals: the 1989 series The Power of the Word (6 hours) and both 1999 series — Fooling With Words (2 hours) and Sounds of Poetry (4 ½ hours). In addition, he served as Poetry Consultant for the 1998 series Poetry Heaven (3 hours) and three, separate one-hour PBS programs that grew out of other Dodge Poetry Festivals, including Bill Moyers’ 1994 Emmy-winning portrait of Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon: A Life Together.

He began writing poems while teaching at Rowan University and has become a frequent reader in the northeast. His poems have won both fellowships and prizes. As a visual artist he continues to construct painted-paper collages and with his wife, Erica Barton Haba, he also designs and produces ceramic tile murals. Work from their studio in Hillsborough, New Jersey www.jimhaba.com), has been installed from Maine to California.
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Now that you’ve read about Jim Haba’s life, here are three of his poems. All three are from his chapbook, Love Poems (2006), .Go to a quiet place, read them aloud, and savor them. Then read them again and again. They deserve it.

Irene Willis
Poetry Editor




The Listener

When my wife tells me that she wasn’t
able to listen to my poems carefully,
I am convinced that my worst fears
have come true; but when, knowing
how I hear her, she adds that she felt
too close to them, that she felt,
in fact, like a wooden instrument
upon which they were being played,
something inside me shifts and,
for the first time, I glimpse
the secret inner life
music shares with marriage.

                               Luxuries

our pulsing hearts               our steady breathing
a room windows,                 one facing east
a dry bed pillows,                a quilt

your miraculous skin         and mine

beyond the window            leafless trees
beyond the trees                  quiet fields
beyond the fields                 darkness that is not darkness

a pale pearlescence            a gathering glow
tangerine, cerulean            rose streaked with gold
all changing                           all alive

your miraculous                 skin and mine

a dry bed pillows,               a quilt
a room windows,                one facing east
our pulsing hearts              our steady breathing

                                    luxuries

Listen, Friends

We live like barnacles clinging to rocks
swept night and day by tides of love.

Let’s not waste time asking if war is ever good.

With each flood curiosity, desire, ecstatic action.
With each ebb suspicion, dread, armored solitude.

What stands between us and what we want?
What could we want except to live as love,

fluid and in motion, unafraid and eternal?
Listen, Friends, this drunkenness needs no wine.

When did we last kiss as if it were our last kiss?

Sylvia Plath

Laurel Blossom

 (Photo by Steven Haas)

Our June poet, Laurel Blossom, has published widely, in such journals and anthologies as The Paris Review, Harper’s, and Billy Collins’ 180 More: Exraordinary Poems for Every Day. Since her first published collection, a chapbook, Any Minute (Greenhouse Review Press, 1979), she has published four books, the most recent of which are a book-length narrative poem, Degrees of  Latitude (Four Way Books, 2007) and Wednesday: New and Selected Poems (Ridgeway Press, 2004).  Her poetry has been nominated for both a Pushcart Prize and the Elliston Prize.

Blossom has also edited two anthologies: Splash! Great Writing about Swimming (Ecco Press, 1996) and Many Lights in Many Windows: Twenty Years of Great Fiction and Poetry from The Writers Community (Milkweed Editions, 1997).  She also serves on the editorial board of Heliotrope: a Journal of Poetry. 

The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Ohio Arts Council, Blossom was elected Regent Emeritus of Harris Manchester College (Oxford University) in 2008.

My own gratitude to Laurel Blossom, which I’m sure holds true for many other poets and writers, dates to 1976, when she co-founded The Writers Community, a community-based creative writing workshop and residency program for poets and fiction writers.  I was honored to be a member during its first year, when Robert Lowell was one of many outstanding visiting poets and workshop leaders.  The program, which ran for ten years out of a former chiropractor’s office in New York City, went on to become one of the most esteemed programs of its kind.  Later it merged with The Writer’s Voice at the West Side YMCA and then with the YMCA National Writer’s Voice, where it remains an offering of the National YMCA’s Arts and Humanities Initiative.

Now residing in rural South Carolina, Blossom continues to serve poetry with membership on the Boards of the Laura (Riding) Jackson Foundation in Vero Beach, Florida, and Edgefield Regional Arts in South Carolina.

Lest my lengthy introduction distract from her fine poems, below are three new ones by Laurel Blossom.
                                           
                                             Irene Willis
                                             Poetry Editor
 
         
      Hermaphrodite of the Carpathians

At 94 she still worked the fields
as if she owned them.  No one

in her family had ever walked more
than ten miles from that village

except your great grandmother who,
at 18, walked all the way to the Hague

and took ship to America.  She wore
boots up to her thighs, that old woman.

Some young man had to help her
out of them at night.  When she laughed,

her brown teeth stood in her mouth
like timber.   And you, so tall

and so ready to fall,  my love,
descended from her like testicles.

           
           
                                    Mountain Ash

            Late summer.  Fresh vermilion rowanberry juice
      
                        added to gin tastes exactly

            Like Angostura bitters.  Fruit often remains

                        on the tree during winter months.

  
            Large clusters of small white flowers, well-shown
             
                        in the plate, develop late spring to early summer.

            Leaves pinnate, with tooth-edged leaflets, dark green

                       above, paler below,  autumn colours dull to

            
             Lovely reds and gold.  Common all over the British

                       Isles and in many parts of Europe and Scandinavia.

            Lightfoot notes it near ancient stone circles.

                       Quicken, one of its several names, means bring to

           Life, and at the same time, hurry. 


                                           

          Miracle on the Fourth Day     

The cat’s fur backlit, gleaming like an aura
in the morning sun, is that it?

The note from Viki, full of praise, is that it?
Is the decision I finally made

the amazing result the chain letter promised
if only I followed instructions?  Is it

the heron I startled into flight?
The Valentine from my granddaughter Emma?

Is it that I was able to see my part
in the argument?  The smile on his face

when I said so, is that it?
Or the fact that there’s enough water in the well?

I don’t know what I expected.  An end to the drought?
I wished for a miracle, and look at what I got.

Jay Rubin

I’m pleased this month to introduce Jay Rubin, whose poems have appeared widely in the past few years, in such publications as Blue Earth Review, Rosebud, Prague Review, Poetry South, and The Poetry of Relationships.  He teaches writing at The College of Alameda in the San Francisco Bay area and lives in San Francisco with his wife and son.  He is also the founder, editor and publisher of the all-poetry literary journal, Alehouse (www.alehousepress.com), an enterprise about which  his  comments in a recent interview might be of special interest to our readers.  “Serving as an editor, after years of writing poetry, is like a long-term psychoanalysis patient becoming the psychiatrist.  It’s a whole different game when you sit on the chair across from the couch.  The  whole world opens up, and it changes you – and your poetry.”

                                                         Irene Willis
                                                         Poetry Editor
Home Sick
—for Robyn Aronson

My mother rolled in the old black-&-white
Brought in a table, a sandwich, some soup
She put her lips to my dry forehead, loose
Hair tickling my nose, seducing a sneeze
My temperature was ninety-eight degrees
Still—achy, chilled, I stayed home from school
I couldn’t drink a thing, and thoughts of food
Unglued my stomach; I’d have rather died

Of course, I wasn’t really sick—not ill
Not suffering some virus, not the flu
—Only the lesson that all fools learn
The cruel definition of the verb to jilt
That a quick, fickle grin is common proof
That the shiniest hope, unroped, will burn

Birthright

Where your father smokes, jokes
In a cloud of coarse men
Their light laughter lingering
On the words, A boy! A boy!
 
You float like fog, mist down the hall
Photos of your rheumy eyes
Your quiet room, your napping dolls
The starched skirt of a nurse

No, no, she says, Be a good girl
But tiny fingers turn a knob
Press, the hinges squeak

On her bed, her hair a mess
Your mother winces, shifts and sighs
Your brother nesting at her breast

from Blue Earth Review
Obituary
         —after Justice, after Vallejo

On the day that I die,
white doves will fly from their cages,
filling the sky with fireworks,
chasing away the rain.
The women I’ve known
will come out from their homes,
join hands in a ring, dance and sing,
till my memory loses its shadow.
On the day that I die,
my brother will wake from a nap,
light a smoke, then drift back to sleep.
My mother and father will wash
their hands in a stream of water
poured from a pitcher on the porch; 
then my mother will pick up the telephone
while my father returns to the yard.
On the day that I die,
my unborn brothers and sisters
will rise from the bottom
of a clear blue swimming pool,
breaking the surface like champagne
bubbles, effervescing the air.
My wife and my son will share a wink
take a hike to the top of Mt Tamalpias,
unleash the terrier and let her run
with the flocks of migrating geese.
On the day that I die,
consonants and vowels spelling my name
will separate like atoms in steam,
each floating off alone to find
a new vocabulary.  Not even
my tombstone will mourn.

Sonnet for Helen Meyers

Childhood as stepping stone became the road ‘
all roads led to, ever-branching,
The future in the mason’s hands building a city
In the mind no wind could tear asunder,
A city where light feared darkness not,
And dark itself found light enough to claim
Its face from buried memory, see without eyes
What is never seen, only felt,
Where dream and fate collide, where conflict
Leads to restful peace within its own
Restlessness. Using childhood as stepping
Stone, you steered a course out of sorrow
Into the nets of a far-flung sea,
Nets of captive life that set the life force free.

Eugene Mahon April 9, 2010

Click Here to Read: Smith College Professor Justin Cammy remembers Abraham Sutzkever, the most important Yiddish poet of the Holocaust By Anne-Gerard Flynn in The Republican on April 09, 2010.

Justin D. Cammy, assistant professor of Jewish Studies at Smith College in Northampton, poses with some of the works of the legendary Yiddish poet and Holocaust survivor Abraham Sutzkever, who died on Jan 20, at the age of 96 in Tel Aviv.

Click Here to Read:  The  Poem “To My Child” by Abraham Sutzkever was used in Anna Ornstein’s Plenary at the American Psychoanalytic Association.

Click Here to Read:  Abraham Sutzkever: In Memoriam By Ruth R. Wisse The Jewish Ideas Dialy on January 22, 2010 on this website.

A Tribute to Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

 Although homage to this great poet would seem fitting at any time, it seems especially fitting for this column to offer it during National Poetry Month. I’m delighted, for strongly personal reasons, to have this opportunity. I remember how I felt as a teenager, sitting in my high-school English classroom and opening a literature anthology to her poem, “Renascence,” the way it spread thrillingly across the page, lifting me up and out of it.

Other women have reported a similar experience with that poem, which catapulted Millay into fame when she was only nineteen years old.  She became wildly popular, in a way that few poets are today, went on to publish many poetry collections, plays, and short-stories, and in 1923 was the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize.  Dismissed by some critics because of the feminist tone of her work, by others because of what they considered her anti-modernism and sentimentality, and later for her political activism, Millay began to be re-assessed and now is firmly established as a member of the canon.  In most anthologies of American poetry, her name is back in the index, with multiple pages listed.  She is fully recognized now for her technical virtuosity and dazzling range and is regarded as one of the most important American poets. 

In addition to the legacy of her poetry, however, another legacy, less well-known, deserves tribute.  For the last twenty-five years of her life she resided at a farmhouse she and her husband, Eugene Boissevain, named “Steepletop,” in Austerlitz, New York, overlooking the Hudson Valley on the West and the Berkshire Hills on the east. On Millay’s death, her sister Norma Millay Ellis, who inherited the estate, set aside a portion of the property as a retreat for artists, the Millay Colony for the Arts, which awards month-long residency fellowships to writers, sculptors, visual artists and composers to pursue their work in solitude.  I had the great good fortune to be one of those fellows in April 2003, for which I will be eternally grateful.  It was where I completed my second poetry collection, At the Fortune Café.

A separate entity keeping Millay’s reputation alive and benefiting the public is the Edna St.Vincent  Millay Society, which has been working for years to preserve the house and grounds as a Historic House and Garden Museum.  In 2003 a Millay Poetry Trail was opened on the grounds.  For the past three years the Society has been offering yearly exhibitions in the former Ellis Studio across the road from the farmhouse, and for the past two years they have also offered guided garden tours.  The barn at Steepletop holds the office of the Executive Director of the Millay Society, Peter Bergman, as well as space for workshops and  meetings.  Currently, he and I are leading a poetry workshop there for six promising poets, selected anonymously by outside judges. 

This year, for the first time, the farmhouse itself will be open to the public. Tours of Steepletop will include Millay’s private suite on the second floor, which contains her bedroom, workroom and library, much as she left them. Restoration work for the lower floor is still in the planning stage, but visitors will also be able to walk the grounds, which held a pool, patio and bar where many parties were held when Millay and her husband were in residence.

Reservations for the house tour ($15), should be made in advance: www.millay.org or 518-392-3362,  Tours are planned for Fridays through Mondays, from May 28 through October 18. Guided garden tours ($12) will be available Fridays through Tuesdays.  The current exhibit, “Where She Lived,” will be open Thursdays through Tuesdays ($8).

For those of you who are familiar only with her oft-quoted, “My candle burns at both ends ….” and her short lyrics, here is a brief section of her long narrative poem, “Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree”(1923).

                                                  XIV

                      She had a horror he would die at night,
                     And sometimes when the light began to fade
                     She could not keep from noticing how white
                     The birches looked — and then she would be afraid,                                                             
                      Even with a lamp, to go about the house
                      And lock the windows; and as night wore on
                      Toward morning, if a dog howled, or a mouse
                      Squeaked on the floor, long after it was gone
                      Her flesh would sit awry on her.  By day
                      She would forget somewhat, and it would seem                          
                      A silly thing to go with just this dream
                      And get a neighbor to come at night and stay.
                      But it would strike her sometimes, making the tea:
                      She had kept that kettle boiling all night long, for company.

                                                   XV

                       There was upon the sill a pencil mark,
                      Vital with shadow when the sun stood still
                      At noon, but now, because the day was dark,
                      It was a pencil mark upon the sill.
                      And the mute clock, maintaining ever the same
                      Dead moment, blank and vacant of itself,
                      Was a pink shepherdess, a picture frame,
                      A shell marked Souvenir, there on the shelf.
                      Whence it occurred to her that he might be,
                      The mainspring being broken in his mind,
                      A clock himself, if one were so inclined
                      That stood at twenty minutes after three –
                      The reason being for this, it might be said,
                      That things in death were neither clocks nor people,
                              but only dead.

        (used by permission of Elizabeth Barnett, literary executor)

                                                             Irene Willis
                                                             Poetry Editor

Click Here to Read:  The Shakespeare Whodunit: A scholar tackles doubters on who wrote the plays; Hollywood weighs by Alexandra Alter in the Wall Street Journal on April 2, 2010.

Click Here to Read: Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? By James Shapiro, Reviewed by Boyd Tonkin on the Independent Boosk Website on March 26, 2010.

Click Here to Read: The Psychology of the Authorship Question by Richard Waugaman in the online Journal Brief Chronicles: An Interdisciplinary Journa.

Click Here to Read: The pseudonymous author of Shakespeare’s works by Richard Waugaman in the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

Click Here to Read: Chapter 1: Four Pivotal Sonnets: Sonnets 20, 62, 104, 129 from What Silent Love Hath Writ: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Shakepeare’s Sonnets by Martin S. Bergmann and Michael Bergmann. 

Click Here to Read: Chapter 2 from What Silent Love Hath Writ by Martin S. Bergmann and Michael Bergmann

Archibald MacLeish

Chard deNiord

I have admired Chard deNiord’s poems for some time, but his life — the whole tale of how he came to pursue a career in poetry — is so impressive as an example of the sacrifices that some people make for poetry that I want to share it with you before telling you of his publishing history.  Following his graduation from Yale Divinity School, where he had considered pursuing ordination as an Episcopal minister, he followed the advice of his bishop to gain some work experience first. For five years (1978-1983) he worked at the Connecticut Mental Health Center in New Haven, spending three years on the research floor, where he helped to carry out many double blind protocols in the treatment of depression, schizophrenia and heroin addiction and later moving to the outpatient department, where he worked as a therapist for two years. At that point – and here is where the fields of poetry and psychoanalysis intersect most interestingly – he learned that he had been accepted at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His supervisor in New Haven was the analyst and psychiatric historian, Dr. Stanley Jackson, who had been a friend and doctor to the eminent American poet, Theodore Roethke.  Jackson advised deNiord that this “once in a lifetime opportunity” had to be pursued.

Chard deNiord left the security of his job at CMHC and took his wife and two children to Iowa, where he found work as a teaching assistant and part-time minister to help support his family. His wife also gave up her job as a middle-school teacher to make the move and worked several tedious jobs to become the main bread-winner during their time in Iowa. After receiving his MFA in poetry, he worked as an English teacher at the Gunnery School in Connecticut and then at the Putney School in Vermont, where he held an endowed chair in comparative religions and philosophy. Since 1998, he has been teaching writing and literature at Providence College. In 2000, he co-founded, with poets Gerald Stern and Jacqueline Gens, a stellar, single-genre MFA program in poetry at New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire, He remained there as director until 2007and now oversees its post-MFA program.

Chard deNiord has published three books of poetry, Asleep in the Fire (University of Alabama Press, 1990), Sharp Golden Thorn (Marsh Hawk Press, 2003), and Night Mowing (The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). His new book of poems, The Double Truth, is due from the University of Pittsburgh Press in spring 2011. Also coming out in spring 2011 is Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs, a book of essays and interviews on contemporary poetry. His poems and essays have appeared recently in Best of the Pushcart Prize, New England Review, Best American Poetry, Hudson Review, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review and Salmagundi. He lives in Putney, Vermont.

Here, for March, are three new poems by Chard deNiord.

Irene Willis
Poetry Editor




HAPPY HOUR

                          This is the wristwatch
                          telling the time
                          of the talkative man
                          that lies in the house of Bedlam.

                                             –Elizabeth Bishop

I stood behind the table of urinals
on evening shift, my last day on the job,
and turned this ward into a bar.
Patients glanced at me from the lounge
and almost smiled. “Listen up,” I said.
“It’s happy hour!
All drinks are free!”

“You’re as crazy as we are,” Robert said.
Nancy laughed like a chickadee.
“What’ll it be?” I asked.
Rhoda was on an upswing,
walking like a penguin down the hall.
“Give me a screwdriver,” she said,
“to tighten my screws.”
“Comin’ right up.” I said.
“I’m NPO for ECT, my dear.
Better not. I’m getting
the hangover that lasts a year.”

I asked Kenny if he wanted a gin and catatonic.
Not funny. Suddenly quiet.
I was at an altar now instead of a bar.
“How about a lemonade or sarsaparilla?”
He stood as still as a mannequin
against the wall and stared at something
so far away it came too close to him.

Alex stopped his pacing in front
of the bar to regard me.
I pictured a worm devouring his brain
like so many leaves.
“I’ll take a daiquiri,” he said
The first thing he’d said in days.
I poured him a glass of air
and passed it to him, which he took
and thanked me for and drank,
then returned the glass as if it were real,
which it was, it was.

I poured one for me
and held it high. “L’ chaim,” I said,
“to all of you.” “And also to you,”
Rhoda chimed.  “We’ll miss you, dear.”

I drank as Alex did, in a single swig,
then put my goblet down on the bar
and smelled that smell that was also mine.
“You’ll never leave this ward,”
a voice cried out from inside the cans.

I’ve never mentioned this before
and wonder now just why I it took so long.
 

ANIMA

I keep her in a little red cage
where she sits like Buddha one minute,
then flies like a banshee the next.
Each morning I invent a new lock
to replace the one she picked
the night before with a hair
from her hair that equals my days.
 

ANCHORITE IN AUTUMN                                        

You rose from bed and coughed
for an hour. Entered your niche
that was also a shower. Shaved
your legs with Ockham’s razor.
Rinsed your hair with holy
water. Opened the curtain
that was double-layered—candescent
on the outside with a dark interior.
Slipped on your robe like a shroud
of desire. Gazed in the mirror
with gorgeous terror. Took out
a cigarette and held it
like a flower. Lit it devoutly
with a miniature flare. Dragged
on it and hummed a prayer.
Stared out the window
at the leaves on fire, fire, fire…