Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Wrote my last poem for NaPoWriMo yesterday, a small poem about LB's reading on Friday. I enjoyed her inventiveness and admired her risk-taking. The poem about two stags in rut, with the scent in the air but not the presence of the doe, was very striking. Her mole poem gave me the idea for my poem. Marie Ponsot sat at the next table. It was a pleasure to speak with her for a while, though distressing to learn that she had a stroke, which rendered her for sometime speechless. We spoke a little about asking the stroke to speak. I think "Eve's Fault" is the best poem I wrote this month. It is not faultless, but it stretched me to write it. I love how the poem enters the garden, and then leaves it. It is not strictly biographical, but it melds several biographical elements with a revision of the myth. The Norton Anthology has whet my appetite for the writing of Renaissance and Restoration women poets. They are feisty, they had to be, and their daring is extremely attrac...

What Do I Want well I want to get better —Marie Ponsot, “Simples” The oldest living woman poet in the country is listening to a youthful edition of herself talk about illness in a poem about the mole. Its dark abnormality. Its busy digging to fit its body into the ground. Star-shaped nose. And she whose poems are musical and easy is hacking and hacking into bunched tissues. She is allergic to spring, the old poet explains, after you end with Survival is a bitter malady. for LB

A Defense of Passion Only to themselves are the passionate hot. —Marie Ponsot, “Against Fierce Secrets” But only to ourselves are we ever ourselves. To the seeing, we are a patch of gleaming dark. To the searching, we are a lookout. To the hurting, we are a pointed remark. To the writing, we are about. To the philosophizing, we are ignoring. To the flying, we are unevolved. To the boring, we are boring. To the believing, we are mystery solved. To the governing, we are reluctant, if not unruly. To the watching, we are flaunting. To the killing, we are the enemy. To the weighing, we are wanting. Even to ourselves, the passionate, we are more often us.

The Garden joined forces with the Poetry Society of America to present a series of readings of Emily Dickinson's poems. Last night's kickoff had Billy Collins, Marie Ponsot and Brenda Wineapple (a biographer). Collins, reading partly from his introduction to a selected Dickinson, was particularly witty and concise. The Garden Cafe was packed to overflow, with about 150 people who had traveled to this location twenty minutes by train from Grand Central Station. Before the reading, HS and I wandered in Emily's Victorian homestead, recreated in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. We admired the tulips, heliotropes, bellflowers, camelias, daisies, columbines, peonies, and roses but were especially taken by the spectacular foxgloves. The lilacs, HS's favorite because of their lovely smell, were gone. When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd...

I took a year long manuscript course with Marie at 92Y last year. In class she would ask us to describe a workshopped poem instead of judging it immediately, and we discovered that description is also a form of judgment, but keener-eyed. Last Thursday, the New School Writing program, where Marie teaches, and Pen American Center sponsored an evening's tribute to her. It also launched her new book, with the wonderful title, Easy . The large Tishman auditorium was less than half filled. I felt a little sad about that. She has won all kinds of awards but I've always felt that she is in danger of being under-appreciated. The story most often told of her life is that of a poet who published a first book when young and then her second thirty years later. In that interval of apparent silence, she was raising seven children and spending a few minutes each day writing. The moral for young poets, which a number of readers that night rehearsed, is not to rush into publication. It is a n...

Edited by Peter Fallon, this selection of poems comes from 6 books published over a period of 29 years, roughly one book every five years. Chuilleanáin was 30 when she first published Acts and Monuments in 1972, and 59 when she published The Girl who Married the Reindeer in 2001. In the first book she imagines herself reading “in a ruin/ By a sour candle” and compares the future death of a lover to a plane crash in which You will be scattered like wreckage, The pieces every one a different shape Will spin and lodge in the hearts Of all who love you. In the last book death has come, and taken away people the poet loved. “Agnes Bernelle, 1923-1999” is a moving elegy that compares, with considerable tact, the departed with a spider “that makes her own centre every day,/ Catching brilliantly the light of autumn.” Besides the fictions and facts of death, the poems also say life is a journey, traveling often by water. Born in Cork, Ireland, Chuilleanáin traveled to Oxford for her studies, ...

Audrey died of cancer on the morning of May 8. She was my classmate in Marie Ponsot's poetry thesis workshop, a year-long course on shaping a sheaf of poems into a book. She looked younger than her age, dressed carefully, almost distinguished, and talked with the soft and musical precision she must have advocated in classrooms for years. I do not have her manuscript now, having thrown it out, along with other manuscripts from that class, during a bout of spring-cleaning. I do not remember its title. I remember the poems are about her grandfather and World War One. The poems are about Audrey's memories of her Scottish grandfather, and her journey, through art, literature and travel, to find out the meaning of the war.  Some of the poems relied for their effect on stock images of that war, such as rats in trenches. Other poems put up with too much literary freight. But there were poems that stopped my heart: a collage of memories written in long, lonely lines; a narrative...

I'm reading this afternoon at the Bowery Poetry Club for the 15th Annual Alternative New Year's Day Spoken Word/Performance Extravaganza, called EX TENEBRIS RISING. Alternative to what, I hear you ask. No one has told me, but my guess is alternative to the new year's reading at St. Mark's Poetry Project. Both Bowery and St. Mark's are great New York institutions, if the former has a reputation for grungier experimentation. I have read in both places, St. Mark's more recently, and I am looking forward to reading on the huge stage at the Bowery again. Given three minutes, like all readers, I will probably read three sonnets from Payday Loans , to see if I could sell a few more copies of the book. The last days of 2008 were spent proofreading the galley for my new book, Equal to the Earth (Poets Wear Prada Press, March 2009). Roxanne, my publisher, has been marvelously patient as we went back and forth via emails over the smallest detail. That collaboration would ...

I went to the Philoctetes Center tonight to hear Marie Ponsot talk about Donne. Unfortunately I could only stay for half an hour, but managed to hear her on "Good Morrow." The Center, housed on the third floor of the NY Psychoanalytic Institute, pursues the interdisciplinary study of the imagination (neuroscience, psychology, mathematics, psychoanalysis, humanities and art, philosophy and theology). Besides roundtable discussions, they hold readings and film screenings. I took the Center's version of the Philoctetes story from its website: Philoctetes is a mythological character from the Greek tragedy by Sophocles, a warrior who was on his way to the Trojan War when a serpent bit him. The smell of his wound was so noxious that he was left on the island of Lemnos and ostracized by his countrymen. When the war started, Cassandra, the seer, said that without the bow of Heracles, which is only possessed by Philoctetes and which he inherited from his father, the war...

92nd Street Y just contacted me today to tell me Marie Ponsot has accepted me for her year-long Poetry Thesis Workshop, based on my 6-page manuscript submission. The workshop meets once a week, on Wednesday evenings, in two semesters of eight weeks each. I am really looking forward to working with her and the other workshop participants on my Book of the Body sequence. I have to immerse myself in that sequence again soon. Get into the Body, so to speak.