Pursuit

Pursuit
by Stephen Dobyns


Each thing I do I rush through so I can do
something else. In such a way do the days pass—
a blend of stock car racing and the never
ending building of a gothic cathedral.
Through the windows of my speeding car, I see
all that I love falling away: books unread,
jokes untold, landscapes unvisited. And why?
What treasure do I expect in my future?
Rather it is the confusion of childhood
loping behind me, the chaos in the mind,
the failure chipping away at each success.
Glancing over my shoulder I see its shape
and so move forward, as someone in the woods

at night might hear the sound of approaching feet
and stop to listen; then, instead of silence
he hears some creature trying to be silent.
What else can he do but run? Rushing blindly
down the path, stumbling, struck in the face by sticks;
the other ever closer, yet not really
hurrying or out of breath, teasing its kill. 


"Pursuit" by Stephen Dobyns, from Cemetery Nights. © Penguin Books, 1987. 

Do it sooner this year.

Four Kinds of Lilacs by Leo Dangel

"Why don't you turn at the next corner,"
she said, "and take another road home.
Let's go past that farm with all the

different colored lilacs."

"That's seven miles out of the way,"
he said. "I wanted to plant the rest
of the corn before evening. We

can look at lilacs some other time."

"It'll take only a few minutes"
she said. "You know that lilacs
aren't in bloom for long—if we

don't go now, it will be too late."

"We drove past there last year,"
he said. "They're like any other lilacs
except for the different colors. The rest

of the year, they're all just bushes."

"They're lilac, purple, white, and pink,"
she said. "And today, with no breeze,
the scent will hang in the air—no flowers

smell as good as lilacs in the spring."

"I thought of planting lilacs once,"
he said, "for a windbreak in the grove.
The good smell lasts only a few days.

I suppose we can go, if we hurry."

"Now slow up," she said.
"Last year, you drove by so fast
we couldn't even get a good look.

It wouldn't hurt to take it easy."

"Well, there they are," he said,
"and looking pretty scraggly—past
full bloom already. You should
have thought of doing this sooner."

"Four Kinds of Lilacs" by Leo Dangel, from Home from the Field: Collected Poems. © Spoon River Poetry Press, 1997.

Two poems from the New Yorker 2/6/12

The Chameleon by David Orr


Alone among the superheroes,
He failed to keep his life in balance. 
Power Man, The Human Shark--they knew 
To hold their days and nights in counterpoise, 
Their twin selves divided together, 
As a coin bears with ease its two faces. 


Not so The Chameleon. He was 
Too many things to count, and was counted on 
To be too many things. When he came to grief, 
As was perhaps inevitable, 
His body was overlooked for hours, 
Having been pressed by force of habit 


Into the likenesss of what had killed him.

The Westerns by Philip Schultz


Once again, 
Randolph Scott is thinking out loud on TV 
about the end of freedom, 
God, mercy, why
barbed-wire fences no longer hold back 
old or new grudges, rabid squatters, 
the wagonloads 
of gruelling pilgrim faith 
in an ever-westward-expanding destiny, 

while once again 
I'm up late remembering 
the lacquered sunsets 
on the Paramount's patched screen 
Saturday mornings, me 
and ten to fifteen other hoodlum sons 
ofimmigrant dreamers aloft 
in the filthy froth of the balcony, 
surrounded by the ear-popping
fall-to-your-knees-
and-say-hallelujah serendipity 
of the swooning music. 
Westerns 
were what we wanted, couldn't get enough of, 
all those standoffs between 
postwar rectitude vs. existential greed 
feeding our burgeoning hunger 
to be part of 
the great American rhapsody. 
Everyone mumbling, believing only in gullibility, 
Technicolor, 
eradicating evil, 
owning everything--is this why 
every ten minutes the plot questioned 
everyone's manhood for no reason whatsoever, 
the town drunk drank, 
the hero sought revenge from a flashback 
(that'd murdered his entire family in slow motion), 
why everyone believed in 
the rewards of futility, 
the solace of violence, 
the dignity of misfortune, 
waited endlessly for the always late, 
just around the bend, 
steeped in appetite, 
in irresistible grief,
beaten to a pulp
utterly insulted point to arrive, 
hoping 
it'd tie everything together, finally, maybe, 
why 
all these peculiar curlicues 
are whirling through my sleepy brain, 
because nothing has changed, 
and my tiny moment is also quickly passing 
while the end is taking me somewhere 
the beginning never wanted me to be? 


Two poems from The New Yorker 2/6/12

Explode?

Harlem by Langston Hughes


What happens to a dream deferred?


Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?


Or fester like a sore--
And then run?


Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.


Or does it explode?

Isn't it romantic?

Poetic Propositions: Verse And The Art of Seduction


by DAVID ORR


Valentine's Day is a tricky occasion for poets. Granted, it's hard not to be pleased with a holiday on which poems are thought to be genuinely useful, in the ordinary sense of the word. As the former Poet Laureate Charles Simic puts it in his introduction to an anthology called Isn't It Romantic, "Love poetry is the only type of poetry that can be put into practical use" — which is to say, it supposedly results in "spirit becoming flesh; words becoming deeds; the two of you hopping into bed."

The problem is that love poetry's record as an aphrodisiac is fairly mixed, at least for its authors. W.B. Yeats, possibly the greatest love poet of the last century, wrote poem after poem to Maud Gonne, who not only turned down his four marriage proposals but didn't sleep with him for decades (at which point, it's tempting to credit persistence rather than virtuosity). Robert Lowell's "Water" can be read as a love poem directed at his close friend Elizabeth Bishop, who was (unfortunately for Lowell) a lesbian. And of course, Dante barely even knew (if he met her at all) the Beatrice he idealizes in La Vita Nuova and The Divine Comedy.


If you're thinking about seducing someone by writing a poem, you might be better off picking up some conversation hearts instead. You'll spend less time, and at least you'll have something to eat afterward.


There are counterexamples, to be sure, but in general, if you're thinking about seducing someone by writing a poem, you might be better off picking up some conversation hearts instead. You'll spend less time, and at least you'll have something to eat afterward.


But why is that? After all, we've been assured by everything from movies like Shakespeare in Love to novels like A.S. Byatt's Possession that poets are in the business of huskily whispering their lines into the ears of the soon-to-swoon. One clue comes from that very reluctant love poet, T.S. Eliot. In a lecture from 1953 called "The Three Voices of Poetry," Eliot declared, "Surely the proper language of love — that is, of communication to the beloved and no one else — is prose." This is the case because "a good love poem, though it may be addressed to one person, is always meant to be overheard by other people."


This helps underscore something unusual about love poems: They're explicitly both private and public. They say "I love you" or "I would very much like to sleep with you" or "I'm very sad that I'm no longer sleeping with you." But they also say, "And you people reading this poem, I hope you're entertained by what I've said thus far." As Eliot puts it in his charmingly stilted love poem "A Dedication to My Wife": "These are private words addressed to you in public."


To understand the difficulty that this sort of poem poses, it helps to think about that classic meditation on love poetry, the Cameron Diaz movie Bad Teacher. Diaz (the bad teacher) reluctantly befriends a sensitive junior high doofus named Garrett. We know Garrett is a doofus in part because he insists on reciting his own poems. Worse, they're poems about the girl he's got a hopeless crush on. He does this twice in the film — once in front of his supportive family and an eye-rolling Diaz; then again in front of his classmates on a field trip. The poetry is wonderfully dreadful. A sample:


One glance, one dance
because together
we can achieve ba-lance.


But the interesting thing — the reason the scenes are excruciating — isn't the ineptitude of the poetry, but the way in which the character seems oblivious to the audience hearing his lines. He seems to think he's alone when he isn't. Of course, if Garrett were performing his awful poems to himself in his room, we'd still think they were bad. But we wouldn't cringe as we do when he blurts them out in front of kids who are going to say (as his beloved does), "Gross!" We want him to recognize that his private thoughts are public as well.


In good love poetry, that sort of recognition is built into the lines themselves: The poem is a performance, not a confession. And not just a performance for the object of the poet's affection, but a performance for the many readers the poet hopes for, yet probably will never meet.


There are plenty of ways that a poet can signal to us that such a performance is happening. He can engage in elaborate formal maneuvers (as William Meredith does in "The Illiterate"), develop surprising conceits (Paul Muldoon's "Quoof" ) or throw wrenching metaphors at us (Plath's "Daddy").


But one of my favorite approaches is what you might call twice-removed authorship. In this sort of poem, the poet declares his work to be "after" or "adapted from" another writer, which automatically indicates to us that a performance — in this case, a performance of someone else's work — is in progress. Here is the entirety of Lee Ann Brown's "After Sappho":


So many people
advised me against you.
How glad I am
we could not resist.


It's lovely — and it's Brown's poem just as much as it is Sappho's. Which brings up maybe the best Valentine's Day advice a poet could give you: If you're thinking of adding a poem to the roses, use somebody else's words. That's what they're for, you know.


David Orr writes about poetry for NPR Books. His most recent book is Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry.




Modern Verse for Valentines: A Sampler
"Runaways Cafe II," Marilyn Hacker
"Will Not Come Back," Robert Lowell
"The Shampoo," Elizabeth Bishop
"Having a Coke With You," Frank O'Hara
"Departures," Devin Johnston
"Domestic," Carl Phillips
"Syntax," Maureen McLane
"Gift of the Book," C.D. Wright
"The Rain," Robert Creeley
"Valentine," Tom Pickard
"You and I Saw Hawks Exchanging the Prey," James Wright

In the Desert

In the Desert

by Stephen Crane
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter – bitter", he answered,
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

One Art

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.


Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel.  None of these will bring disaster.


I lost my mother's watch.  And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones.  And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.


--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied.  It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.


Elisabeth Bishop