Sarah Hannah

Yesterday we received an e-mail that poet Sarah Hannah had passed away. It's so hard to make sense of this tragic loss. I don't think there is a way to. Although I never had her as a professor (I would've in the fall), many of my friends who did raved about her, not only as a professor but also as a poet and human being. I had countless opportunities to tell her how much her first book, Longing Distance, meant to me, and I was never brave enough to approach her. This comes at a time when I'm feeling particularly low, so this hits deep and hard. I love you, Sarah Hannah.

Eclipse
Sarah Hannah

Every so often I am dilated; the pupils
Swallow everything—a catchall soup,
Two cauldrons, stubborn in the bald glare

Of bathroom light. They are hunting sleep—
The sea grass, the blue cot rocking;
In sleep I am a Spanish dancer,

Awaiting my cue at the velvet curtain,
Now and then groping for the sash,
Or on horseback, abducted, thumping

Through pampas. I sleep too much;
I curl in at midday, sheepish,
In strange rooms. Clouds are hurrying by—

The walls, a wash of white; still my eyes
Are mazing through their dark gardens,
The great lamp shut, the crescents duplicating.

It is only a temporary state of affairs.
The sun boils behind the moon.

The Emerson Review

I debated whether or not to post this, but it's applicable to this blog.

Though school has ended, if you're in Boston and around Emerson's campus, you may be able to find a copy of The Emerson Review, Spring 2007. It just came out a few weeks ago. It's a really great publication with a lot of amazing writing. They were even crazy enough to publish two of my poems! If you can't find any on campus, I'm sure they'll be restocked in the fall.

Speaking of Men

Bob Hicok is today's featured poet on Poetry Daily with his poem "O my pa-pa" and of course it's packed with one amazing line after another.

For the past four days I've been "home" in Meadville and although it's been a short visit, it's shown me how much I don't belong here. I'm still too connected to write anything about it, but I'm thinking it'll become the subject of many personal writings this summer. That's all I'll say about that because this isn't my diary, it's merely here for poetry. Just know that right now the future has never seemed so unpredictable, threatening, and terrifying.

Something Gritty

One afternoon while I was in the bookstore browsing the shelves, I came upon Manthology: Poems on the Male Experience. My first thought was, I wish I had known about this for Masculinities paper! But c'est la vie because that paper was long completed. However, my fascination about maleness, gender, and sexuality as represented in poetry is still strong and progressively growing.

There are ninety-three poets featured in the anthology, organized alphabetically. I've only made it to the letter 'H' so far because I am really bad about summer reading. I hop back and forth between books and continuously purchase more before I've finished the others. Regardless, I couldn't continue reading without sharing this poem by Tony Hoagland. In short, it blew me away.

Hoagland adds so many nice touches to the poem. Notice in stanzas five and six how he transitions from the hammer, a simple tool, into the idea of a "song". In the seventh stanza he describes the actions of a gun being "cocked and loaded" but ends with the word "psalm". I'm particularly interested in the contrast and discrimination that he brings into the poem halfway through it, and how he turns it back on himself, especially with the surprise ending. Sorry, none of that probably makes sense, and that's because for two days I've been suffering from a terrible cold. Or flu. Or allergies. All of the above? The jury's still out. Ignore this commentary and focus, rather, on the writing below.

I think this could also make for a great writing exercise. Take a word that means something to you (good or bad) and write about it. See where it takes you from there.

Dickhead
Tony Hoagland

To whomever taught me the word dickhead,
I owe a debt of thanks.
It gave me a way of being in the world of men
when I most needed one,

when I was pale and scrawny,
naked, goosefleshed
as a plucked chicken
in a supermarket cooler, a poor

forked thing stranded in the savage
universe of puberty, where wild
jockstraps flew across the steamy

skies of locker rooms,
and everybody fell down laughing
at jokes I didn’t understand.

But dickhead was a word as dumb
and democratic as a hammer, an object
you could pick up in your hand,
and swing,

saying dickhead this and dickhead that
a song that mean the world
was yours enough at least
to bang on like a garbage can,

and knowing it, and having that
beautiful ugliness always
cocked and loaded in my mind,
protected me and calmed me like a psalm.

Now I have myself become
a beautiful ugliness,

and my weakness is a fact
so well established that
it makes me calm,

and I am calm enough
to be grateful for the lives I
never have to live again;

but I remember all the bad old days
back in the world of men,
when everything was serious, mysterious, scary,
hairier and bigger than I was;

I recall when flesh
was what I hated, feared
and was excluded from:

Hardly knowing what I did,
or what would come of it,
I made a word my friend.

Hello, May

This is it. It's May. I'm a senior in college, and I'm days away from turning that magical number: twenty-one. There are so many posts I've been constructing in my mind that I will be able to get to, finally. Surprisingly, much of what I want to talk about deviates from poetry. Right now it's all about issues of Time Magazine and National Geographic as well as the music of Laura Veirs and all of the books that are piling up for my summer 2007 reading fest. As long as you'll indulge me in all of that, I promise I'll also cap things off with poetry.

Such as, well, right now. I woke up this morning to a featured poem on Poetry Daily by my adviser. One of my favorite hobbies is stalking (re: reading) my professors. But I haven't actually read a lot of my adviser's poetry, even though it's his main genre (he's written creative nonfiction as well), he's a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Iowa, and he used to be the chair of the entire writing department. Due to time constraints I'm forced to end things here, but enjoy his poem.

The Wish Mind
John Skoyles

Eternity might very well
be the longed for kiss
you wish would stop,
or the brazen ambition
to live with god,
now folded in the churchyard
with the horse chestnuts.

Eternity could simply
be the thirty shots of radiation
that took you thirty times
until the ending didn't finish,
nor the beginning start.

A girl pats her forehead
with a powder puff,
as if dotting the letter i.
She becomes an x, you change
to o, and the infinite game
ends always in a tie.

Eternity might take the shape
of a werewolf in the wish mind.
The librarian bends over
to look up a skirt.
The howl is strong
and we hear it forever.

Or maybe it's the dominating
see-saw in the center
of the playground,
whose rusty fulcrum squeals
to the children:
Life is long, William.
Life is short, Kate.