W. H. Auden, ''In Praise of Limestone''
Hart Crane, ''The Bridge''
Hart Crane, ''Voyages''
T. S. Eliot, ''The Waste Land''
T. S. Eliot, ''Four Quartets''

James Merrill, ''The Book of Ephraim''
John Berryman, ''77 Dream Songs''
William Carlos Williams, ''Spring and All''
William Carlos Williams, ''Asphodel, That Greeny Flower''
John Ashbery, ''Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror''

Elizabeth Bishop, ''At the Fishhouses''
Robert Frost, ''After Apple Picking''
Robert Frost, ''Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening''
Robert Frost, ''Directive''
Robert Hayden, ''Middle Passage''

Ezra Pound, ''The Cantos''
Ezra Pound, ''Homage to Sextus Propertius''
Edwin Arlington Robinson, ''Eros Turannos''
James Schuyler, ''The Morning of the Poem''
Gertrude Stein, ''Tender Buttons''

Wallace Stevens, ''The Auroras of Autumn''
Wallace Stevens, ''The Comedian as the Letter C''
James Wright, ''Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota''

These are the best poems of the 20th century as voted on by a panel of poets/assembled by David Lehman. I just found this list and thought I’d think about how I’d change it. I’d remove Pound and Crane from this list. Robinson would have to go, too. I’d substitute Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room” for “At the Fishhouses” and add “Crusoe in England” (I’m all about the volcanoes). I’d also add “The Moose,” for the powerful opening sentence (yes, I mean sentence). Moore’s “The Octopus” would make my cut. Robert Hayden is a great choice, but I’d prefer “Those Winter Sundays.” Ditto with Williams—I’d choose“Paterson.” I’d also have to include “Facing It” by Kumunyakaa. Also, where’s my pal J. Alfred Prufrock? Where’s Lowell--“Skunk Hour”? Where’s Galway Kinnell? Where’s Roethke (“I knew a Woman” is my personal favorite)? Certainly Hecht deserves a shout-out, too, for The Venetian Vespers. “The Book of Yolek” for me is about as good as a sestina gets. Frost could be better represented here: “Design,” “Birches” and “Home Burial” are better choices. Stevens has to have added “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and“Sunday Morning,” a poem that sings my soul every time I read it. I don’t like Schuyler’s or Merrill’s work—I’m sure this is my own bias, as it is with Crane away from the big design. As for Auden—I’d have to use “Musee des Beaux Arts.” (I think of him as a British poet, but will definitely give a green card to “Musee des Beaux Arts”). I don't know what to do with G. Stein--she is superb but uncategorizable.

Here’s my list, which isn't ranked:
W. H. Auden, “Musee des Beaux Arts”
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
T. S. Eliot, ''Four Quartets''
John Berryman, ''77 Dream Songs''
William Carlos Williams, ''Paterson”

Elizabeth Bishop, ''In the Waiting Room”
Elizabeth Bishop, “Crusoe in England”
Elizabeth Bishop, “The Moose”
Robert Frost, ''Design”
Robert Frost, ''Home Burial”

Robert Frost, “Birches”
Robert Hayden, ''Those Winter Sundays”
Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning”
Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
Anthony Hecht, “Venetian Vespers”

Anthony Hecht, “The Book of Yolek”
Marianne Moore, “The Octopus”
Marianne Moore, “The Steeple Jack”
Robert Lowell, “Skunk Hour”
Yusef Kumunyakaa, “Facing It”

Galway Kinnell, “The Fundamental Project of Technology”
Galway Kinnell, “The Book of Nightmares”
Mark Doty, “To a Green Crab’s Shell”
Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool”
Theodore Roethke, “I Knew a Woman” (This is my favorite poem and one I associate with my engagement of 3 days).

How did I do, as compared to a panel of experts? They had 23—I had 25. We have two poems in common.

Nest Egg? I'd Like to Have a Dozen...

GIFTS I'D LIKE TO GIVE:

I've always had a hunger for gaud, going for baroque at every turn. I thought at first that I should be the one to have this egg, since I'm of Russian extraction (my maiden name in its non-anglicized format is Belenko), and also it matches my Mix-Master (the most expensive thing in pink enamel I will ever own). On further pondering, and since I am such a selfless person, I think that Her Imperial Radishness should be the recipient, since it would look marvelous with her tiara and would be a fitting royalty (pun intended) for her upcoming book.

"Prettier by Optics"--My Russian Horoscope/Apologia Part 2--Reasons to Learn

RUSSIAN HOROSCOPE

Cancer, if you, until now, think that sun-protecting glasses bear only in summer, urgently get rid of this error--leave for the drugstore after growing prettier by optics. This council is urgent, in the first place, for those representatives of sign, who plan to conduct the begun week at the mountain-skiing health resort. But also for all remaining Cancers, it now is worthwhile to recall about the fact that the ultraviolet is harmful both for the eyes and for the tender skin around them. You will place dark glasses into the bag and put on them, as soon as the sun will look.

I just love the idea of the sun looking at me.

_____
APOLOGIA PART TWO

I believe in teachers. I believe that poetry teaches the "unteachable" student.

_____

SONNET FOR JOE--Sandra McPherson

When I tell you I would rather you describe a clock than time,
that the essence of your ocean sentiments is not the ocean,
I'm wondering if you would live if your feet got tangled in seaweed.
Write me the superstructure of water.

And now you drop your face. I see my mistake. You did not write
to contend. So it was the ocean in four dry lines
like seaweed from Japanese groceries that thickens and plumps
when ladled in water. Look, you don't even like it

when I give you some copies of ocean poems. You detest the sea
and its marketable herring, its common tuna, and starfish
always losing their legs. Think of the man

who fell from his fishing boat in the fog off Alaska. He heard the motor
slowly trupping away, its cargo of vain fish under its wing. Think of
his widow who detests the sea, who lives beside it, who writes now to her friend.

_____

After I'd handed in one of the worst poems in the history of undergraduate writing, one of my teachers gave me "Sonnet for Joe" with the following passage rewritten in broad strokes of red FLAIR (I still see the letters before me, as distinctive as Chinese calligraphy).

I see my mistake. You did not write/to contend. Do you see yours?

He also gave me a copy of the poem "Collapsars" (from McPherson's book Radiation). This poem is one in which sections of poems "talk to each other" and is an influence on my own poetry to each day.

At Thanksgiving this year, I'll give thanks for that professor (now deservedly a big shot at a MFA program you all know about) for having the wisdom to believe that poetry mattered, that every student's work mattered, that 98.6 of a secretary's life mattered. I was and am that secretary. He also taught that good poetry teaches us where our own poems go wrong. That's a trick I use with my own students, in his honor: Match up the poem with the student, and the student can learn more from the poem about revision than she'll ever learn otherwise.

What teacher (or student) are you grateful for this Thanksgiving?

Reasons to Live: Apologia Part 1

I believe that stories save us. I believe that beauty saves us. This poem has saved me countless times.

The Impossible

Winter's last rain and a light I don't recognize
through the trees and I come back in my mind
to the man who made me suck his cock
when I was seven, in sunlight between boxcars.
I thought I could leave him standing there
in the years, half smile on his lips,
small hands curled into small fists,
but after he finished, he held my hand in his
as if astonished until the houses were visible
just beyond the railyard. He held my hand
but before that he slapped me hard on the face
when I would not open my mouth for him.
I do not want to say his whole hips
slammed into me, but they did, and a black wave
washed over my brain, changing me
so I could not move among my people in the old way.

On my way home I stopped in the churchyard
to try and find a way to stay alive.
In the branches a red-wing flitted, warning me.
In the rectory Father prepared
the body and the blood for mass
but God could not save me from a mouthful of cum.
That afternoon some lives turned away from the light.
He taught me how to move my tongue around.
In his hands he held my head like a lover.
Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what.

Bruce Weigl

More than the Staff of Life? Music in The Last Supper

Check it out: A requiem may be hidden in the painting The Last Supper. The article's more fascinating than The da Vinci Code and certainly better written.

The requiem is beautiful, too.

Homage Poems: Asia and Whitney Bring It!

Listen as my students and I take on Berryman ("Dream Song 14"), Bishop ("One Art"), and Wallace Stevens ("The Emperor of Ice Cream"), on National Public Radio. I am so proud of these poems. This was one of the most fun writing prompts we've tried.

I also take on George Steinbrenner in my entry in the Joe Torre Haiku Contest sponsored by the NY Times. (See below). Thanks again to Jilly for the link.

An Age-Old Question Solved?

Every day I learn from Jilly's Poetry Hut Blog (link above). Here's the latest: What's a Poem?

Our 214 classes are writing definitions of poetry. I should have known jurisprudence would beat us to the punch.

[Judge] Keenan's 79-page decision included...a detailed summary of what constitutes a poem.

"A poem sometimes possesses rhyme or meter, though this is not necessary," Keenan wrote. "A poem is typically free from the usual rules of grammar, punctuation and capitalization." In a footnote, he cited testimony that before "World War Two, a poem almost always had rhyme or meter." Now, "the popular definition of poem has become much more lenient."

Among the factors in Keenan's decision: Whether a 1920 letter from Parker to fellow wit Robert Benchley, written in rhyming couplets, was easily defined as a poem. Silverstein testified that it wasn't and that he had demonstrated creativity by including it in his book.

On the contrary, Keenan wrote, "where a line does not fit within the margins, it is indented below and kept apart from the next line in order to preserve the rhyme scheme.

"The Letter to Robert Benchley is objectively recognizable as a poem."

Would that my own writing were thus seen that way!

Hard to Believe She'd Be 79 Today...

I was born doing reference work in sin, and born confessing it.
Anne Sexton, To Bedlam and Partway Back

Anne Sexton's Transformations is a touchstone book for me. Every year, I find something astounding in the poems.

"Pity! Party of One! Your table is ready..."

It's a beautiful advertisement, very seductive (love the red lipstick), but....



When will I be the one sitting in front of that lovely typewriter? I'm giving up on emails, much less National Novel Writing Month. And writing poetry--what's that?

(I'm doing well these days just to find two shoes and my car keys).

I sat upon the shore....

I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the giant squid beneath me
Shall I at least set my schoolbooks in order?

Take-off on Eliot for Harry Potter.

I'd really, really like to try this with J. Alfred Prufrock--(substituting Dumbledore), but I've already made fun of this poem once.

"When I Am an Old Woman, I Shall Wear Purple"

To the Coworker Who Asked Me If I Agreed with This Poem (and who always teases me about my inappropriate footwear), I offer the following.



Yes, I'm wearing them. Yes, I'm 50. If you want to make something of it, be advised that these shoes are also considered weapons in 11 states (Steve Madden Korect Mary Janes. $129.99. Also available in teal and mustard suede, as well as basic black).

Adieu, Jon Anderson

The Secret Of Poetry

When I was lonely, I thought of death.
When I thought of death I was lonely.

I suppose this error will continue.
I shall enter each gray morning

Delighted by frost, which is death,
& the trees that stand alone in mist.

When I met my wife I was lonely.
Our child in her body is lonely.

I suppose this error will go on & on.
Morning I kiss my wife's cold lips,

Nights her body, dripping with mist.
This is the error that fascinates.

I suppose you are secretly lonely,
Thinking of death, thinking of love.

I'd like, please, to leave on your sill
Just one cold flower, whose beauty

Would leave you inconsolable all day.
The secret of poetry is cruelty.

Jon Anderson (from In Sepia)

Va-Jay-Jay: Origins and a Mini-Rant

Most of the article is pretty informative--I'm always interested in how words enter the language--but this excerpt was really exasperating.

Another view was offered by John H. McWhorter, a linguist and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who pointed out that the women associated with introducing the word — Ms. Winfrey, the Miranda Bailey character on “Grey’s Anatomy” — are middle-age African-Americans.

“The reason that vajayjay has caught on, I think, is because there is a black — Southern especially — naming tradition, which is to have names like Ray Ray and Boo Boo and things like that,” Dr. McWhorter said. “It sounds warm and familiar and it almost makes the vagina feel like a little cartoon character with eyes that walks around.”

I find this to be a condescending, sexist, ageist, and stereotypical viewpoint. Chandra Wilson is 38 years old. She is not middle-aged. I am 50 years old. That is middle-aged, heading into AARP territory. Ellen Pompeo will be 38 years old in a week. Sandra Oh is 36 years old. That's not middle-aged, either, but interesting how none of them was mentioned as middle aged--just Winfrey (who is) and Wilson (who isn't). If I understand the age of a surgical resident correctly (after over 25 years working in a teaching hospital, for a medical school, for a state health department, and a community college, all of whom rotated medical students and residents), Wilson may be playing a character who's a little younger than her actual age. Where does this classification come from other than a stereotype?

I'd also like to point out the awkwardly constructed last sentence. (A linguist wrote that?)