The Cultural Canon – Page 43

NPM: Nikki Giovanni

My favorite poem, as requested by the house poet:

Balances

in life
one is always
balancing

like we juggle our mothers
against our fathers

or one teacher
against another
(only to balance our grade average)

3 grains of salt
to one ounce truth

our sweet black essence
or the funky honkie down the street

and lately i’ve been wondering
if you’re trying to tell me something

we used to talk all night
and do things alone together

and i’ve begun
(as a reaction to a feeling)
to balance
the pleasure of loneliness
against the pain
of loving you

Like all of my favorite poems, this poem has a distinct shift from the general to the specific. With the line beginning and lately i’ve been wondering, we’re suddenly taken from a comical view of manipulation to a real balancing act, one of longing and loss — to be cliché, the balance of knowing one is better off having loved and lost than never having loved at all. Real cliché.

What is your favorite poem? Feel free to leave it in its entirety in the comments.

Poets: A Request

I’m working on my unit plan on poetry and have run into a writing wall. I’m drawing blanks on post-Reconstruction American poets and need some examples of poets who are usable in a public high school. Not to mention compelling enough to use in a high school.

Funny that I can come up with tons for the blog, but not for school. Wonderful.

Any and all suggestions are welcome. The sooner the better.

NPM: Sylvia Plath

It should be a requirement of all angsty adolescent girls to read and adore Sylvia Plath. Like I did. I wrote lines from her poems all over my notebooks and school things: “like the cat I have nine times to die”

“Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well. / I do it so it feels like hell. / I do it so it feels real.”

“Out of the ash /I rise with my red hair /And I eat men like air.”

I forget sometimes how poignant Plath is, having permanently associated her with my teen years. I wonder what her last book of poetry would have looked like had her estranged widower, Ted Hughes, not destroyed it.

Lady Lazarus

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it–

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?–

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot–
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart–
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash–
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there–

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr god, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

See more at PlathOnline, built and maintained by Emily of Strangechord.

NPM: Christina Rossetti

Although I prefer the moralistic mysticism of Christina Rossetti’s The Goblin Market, this one seems most appropriate. This one is for Dad.

Remember

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

NPM: Sherman Alexie

Sherman Alexie is one of my favorite authors. His book “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” is one of the only books I’ve read that has made me cry openly in public. Heart-wrecking, wrenching sobs. Yes it was embarrassing, but totally worth it.

This poem, “Reservation Love Song,” makes one think of simple love, family, and tradition. But more.

I can meet you
in Springdale buy you beer
& take you home
in my one-eyed Ford

I can pay your rent
on HUD house get you free
food from the BIA
get your teeth fixed at IHS

I can buy you alcohol
& not drink it all
while you’re away I won’t fuck
any of your cousins

if I don’t get too drunk
I can bring old blankets
to sleep with in winter
they smell like grandmother

hands digging up roots
they have powerful magic
we can sleep good
we can sleep warm

Known in part for his social commentary, Alexie does wonderful justice to the expression of individual empowerment in the face of disempowerment. There appears to be a lack of masculine power in this courtship, and from a romantic angle, this poem seems to be the lover’s answer to the beloved’s “reservation.”

NPM: Kim Addonizio

I love this poem like I love Edie in Desperate Housewives (and yes, I love Desperate Housewives). It’s everything a woman isn’t supposed to be: direct, demanding, and not a sexual object, but a sensual subject. Add a wee bit of bitter vulnerability, covered by pride. Damn good poem.

I doubt this is the answer Freud was expecting, but hell, at least he asked.

“What Do Women Want?” by Kim Addonizio

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what’s underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I’m the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment
from its hanger like I’m choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,
it’ll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.

Amen.

NPM: Gwendolyn Brooks

I’m bored with politics. Perhaps it’s papaphobia.

Today’s poet (since I’m apparently following National Poetry Month) is Gwendolyn Brooks, best known for her bluesy poem often featured in high school text books, “We Real Cool.”

I love “The Bean Eaters” because of its quiet tone and use of subtle detail.

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.

And remembering . . .
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that
is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,
tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

There’s something desperately somber about this picture, an elderly couple going about the day-to-day monotony surrounded by trinkets of better times past. I’ve always been excited about growing old (strange, enit?) gathering stories and gems of wisdom throughout my life. But this poem reminds that it isn’t always pleasant and, oftentimes, lonely.

National Poetry Month

If I observed National Poetry Month properly, this blog would turn into all poems all the time. One of my favorite series is John Berryman’s Dream Songs, poems arranged around ordinary events, often spoken to and through an alter-ego named Mr. Bones.

Although Berryman was considered part of the confessional movement, he scorned the idea of being a confessional poet. Considering the number of parallels between his poetry and his life, it’s fairly obvious that Berryman was to some extent reflecting on his own existence, as many authors tend to do. Whether or not he was a “confessional” poet is to be debated, though it seems that Henry, at the same time a narrator and referred to by the narrator, is another one of Berryman’s reflective voices.

Dream Song 4 occurs at a dinner party in which Henry (Berryman) and Mr. Bones muse about the attractiveness of a guest who is unfortunately married to a slob. Bonus points for working in spumoni.

Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken páprika, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her

or falling at her little feet and crying
‘You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry’s dazed eyes
have enjoyed, Brilliance.’ I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni. Sir Bones: is stuffed,
de world, wif feeding girls.

Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes
downcast . . . The slob beside her feasts . . . What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
Mr. Bones: there is.

[Dream Songs 1 and 29]

In retrospect, one of the saddest things about these poems (that also works with the humor to make them so endearing) is Henry/Berryman’s self-despair. Berryman committed suicide in 1972 by jumping off a bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota.