Try a word
To make a word
That is just what it is
Not divisive
Not so full of juice
As the word juice
Example: mother.
You try to use that word
And have it mean just that.
Mother. Mom. Mum and life.
You need a great swoon
Of letters just to describe
Precicely what or how
Not to mention when
This mother of yours
Means.
So to hell with her.
To hell with you.
I’ll be back tomorrow.

New words may begin here as you might expect
Smelling foul
Misspelled or autocorrected incorrectly
This technology insists that I enable my inconsistencies
Everywhere

You are nobody. Or you are a friend. I shall – no, I will – also shout, because I love
you, because pain in the point of your chest where good meets evil discovers that the two
are not so distant from one another.

That, hell, I don’t even know what I’m saying here. For you. That I was not supposed to say.
That, hell, it is hell. That this hell includes me.
That don’t ever assume that I don’t give a damn – it is exactly a damn that I do give.

Some days, some moments, some times that is all I give. And some days, some moments some times
that will have to be enough.

by Lewis Carroll

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

The Robert Graves poem
, I’ve just listened to
so tempted to touch find and touch
, to hold that string
, the blocks of slate
, the word “slate” seeming
to ring
, I think not only that “there is a man who knows
how to read a poem
aloud, how to pronounce the word
dappled
” , but also, what a wonderful poem
to know
that Robert Graves poem
a warning to children
, one perhaps never heard by children
, one perhaps never listened to
, once tempted, my breath
, I cannot breath.

Link One: Writer’s Almanac
Link Two: Robert Graves

There is nothing black
about the day

about the early darkness
even night

late afternoon
night, after

our star burns
away every speck of light

our dark is not
so black

should we call it black
claim its blackness

after all
night, tonight

shimmers
electric as day

can never utter
as pools of light

have never seen
and when the days are over

all we can be is
frigid,

as always, if you
remember,

your hands
have always been so.

Two recent poetry collections—one playful, one pleasurably eerie—to get us through the 21st century.

by D. H. Tracy
Poetry Foundation Media Services

Feminine Gospels, by Carol Ann Duffy. Faber and Faber. $11.00.

I gather Carol Ann Duffy is the most popular poet in the UK, and the American publication of her seventh (adult) collection may be an opportunity to extend her empire. It could happen: Duffy’s work is so rich that it can’t help but be thoroughly of the place it was written in, but her consistent moxie, her affable rambunctiousness, may well hit some kind of public bull’s-eye here. And Duffy’s poems are getting better and better. In her first couple of books you get the feeling that a claustrophobic talent is squeezing itself into the tight spaces of girlhood and minor monologues, when what she really wants to do is let it rip. She is now doing that; the poems feel simultaneously more playful and more necessary.

Utterly uninterested in wisdom, rhetoric, or meditation, she imagines the poems with systematic vigor, as if they were bathyscaphes she were going to descend in and their soundness depended on the quality of her invention. A poem may start out being about dieting or shopping and, just when it seems about to run into a brick wall of predictability, Duffy skid-turns into a fantastical variation that may be allegorical but is principally just clever. The dieter in “The Diet” shrinks into a mote drifting on the breeze and, accidentally swallowed, finds herself—where else?—”inside the Fat Woman now, /trying to get out.” My favorite romp is “Sub,” in which Duffy beats McEnroe to win Wimbledon in five sets, sets a Formula One speed record, decks Mohammed Ali, rides the winner at Aintree, performs some sort of cricket feat I dimly comprehend (involving—tantalizingly—”googlies, bosies, chinamen, zooters”), walks on the moon, scores the winning goal in the World Cup, and is tapped to play the drums when Ringo has the flu:

           Minus a drummer, the gig was a bummer
      till I stepped in, digits ringed, sticked, skinned,
      in a Beatle skirt, mop-topped, fringed, to wink
      at Paul, quip with John, climb on the drums,
      clever fingered and thumbed, give it four to the bar,
      give it yeah yeah yeah. The screams were lava,
      hot as sea, and every seat in the house was wet.
            —From “Sub”

If her readings are half this good on her next book tour, I’m there.

Burnt Island, by D. Nurkse. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.00.

In J.M. Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace, the protagonist is a professor who has his students meditate on the distinction between, say, “burned” and “burnt” and “burnt up,” the difference being increasing degrees of grammatical perfection. Nurkse’s island is burnt, his past is burnt, for good, and the poet treasures any fragments he finds or retains: a pair of his late father’s shoes in the closet, a blood-fleck in the eye of a dead sparrow on the sidewalk, the name of an intersection where he witnessed a senseless beating. A heavy sense of the unrecoverable, along with short lines, figurative use of landscape, alternations of light and dark, noise and silence, give the book a pleasurably eerie sense of great intimacy and simultaneous impersonality.

The book is divided into three “suites,” which treat, respectively, New York and the events of 9/11, a troubled couple in a few places, including Burnt Island, and a number of curious facts about oceanography and marine biology. While the pervasive dreaminess is narcotic, it is not up to the task of getting around, under, through, or over the events of 9/11, which have an overwhelming prosaic quality in spite of themselves:

      A voice behind me shouted hurry
      and another screamed mercy.
      I braced my shoulders.
      All around me were voices
      pushing, pushing like men,
      and men crying like children,
      and a child calling help
      from behind a pebbled glass door.
            —From “The Evacuation Corridor”

When the related experience is fragmented and unable to account for itself, Nurkse’s style, already possessing these qualities, is not so much particularly apt as doubly confounded. In contrast, it works very well in the second suite, where the draining, incommensurable realities of couplehood lend themselves to floating:

      We made these bike tracks in the sand
      —don’t follow them—and this calcined match head
      is the last statue of our King.
            —From “Separation at Burnt Island”

Nurkse falters again somewhat in the third section, where he is writing out of (as he puts it) “an outsider’s fascination with biological language and the horizons it opens.” The poems here have a recherché quality that discombobulates his delicate, wide-eyed detachment. If you ever wanted to read a monologue by a sand lugworm or Ommastrephes pteropus, here’s your chance. These weaker poems aren’t deal-breakers, but leaving Burnt Island with good impressions requires making some allowance for the nature of Nurkse’s gift, which varies widely in effectiveness depending on its subject. Followed into the reaches of memory, disappointment, and loss, at least, that gift is considerable and entrancing.

D.H. Tracy’s poetry and criticism appear widely. He lives in Illinois.

© 2006 by D. H. Tracy. All rights reserved.

Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

I used to write him
his poems said something I wanted to say

or said something the way they should be said
or said “hello” in a way that sounded like

digging in the earth for earthworms
and finding flint, or candy corn,

or loved ones we don’t speak to anymore.
Do you know what? I love you.

Flinty and full of
skeletal magic.

I’d forgotten, somehow,
that he was the Laureate, that

somewhere there was a man
leading toward you the secrets

that have never been secrets
that you have known all along.

There’s a string around my finger.
But what does it mean?

I once wrote an elegy
for Ray Carver titled
“Say Crazy Sometimes,”

but it is lost now,
and I don’t know how to retrieve it.
Not even from memory.

My own.
Not so very trustworthy
database of the trivial

contains what I want.
Disappeared.
Do you remember?

Will you share?

by Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006The subdivision; it’s all around us. Here Nancy Botkin of Indiana presents a telling picture of life in such a neighborhood, the parents downstairs in their stultifying dailiness, the children enjoying their youth under the eaves before the passing years force them to join the adults.

Geometry

All the roofs sloped at the same angle.The distance between the houses was the same.There were so many feet from each front doorto the curb. My father mowed the lawnstraight up and down and then diagonally.And then he lined up beer bottles on the kitchen table.We knew them only in summer when the airpassed through the screens. The neighbor girlstalked to us across the great divide: attic windowto attic window. We started with our names.Our whispers wobbled along a tightrope,and below was the rest of our lives.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2006 by Nancy Botkin. Reprinted from “Poetry East,” Spring, 2006, by permission of the author, whose full-length book of poems, “Parts That Were Once Whole,” is available from Mayapple Press, 2007. Introduction copyright (c) 2006 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.