Turn on The Writer’s Almanac, Hon!

This morning is tranquil and leafy green here in my friend Catharine’s living room on Providence Street in Baltimore, Maryland.  It’s 5:32 a.m., and I’m wide awake.  Aaron and I arrived back in the States this week for a month long summer stay reconnecting with our friend-family on the East Coast and our extended families in Ohio and Kentucky, and we’re both still jet lagged.  It’s been three years since we’ve been back, three summers since packing up the vintage Harlequin dishes and the hundreds of books and the cats and the corgi and moving to The Netherlands, and I’m realizing my internal pendulum that swings mightily from family ties to individual independence has swung back again towards balance.  I need to respect both my need to be away and foreign with my very real need to be here and rooted in all my lives, not just my new one in Europe.

Aaron is in the opposite denim IKEA armchair clicking away on his Netbook and I am here in the matching armchair thinking about the episode of The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor we listened to yesterday morning.  Coffee mugs steaming, I had jumped when I heard Catharine shout from her bedroom upstairs that The Writer’s Almanac was on, telling me to hit the green button on her Bose radio in the architect-designed kitchen cum living room extension.  While I scuttled over to the machine, Catharine’s voice floated behind me saying, “Whenever I hear The Writer’s Almanac, I think of you…in my mind we’re in your kitchen in Ithaca, New York and we all stop to listen to the poetry.”  There’s a pleasurable wistfulness there in her voice and in my memory of those exact moments in Upstate New York, and I thought to myself that it is a wonderful thing to have good friends and shared poetry to help remind you who you are and where you have been.

As always, June 24th’s broadcast was full of discoveries and directions for reading, while including a rather incongruent bit about Jack Dempsey the boxer, which must have been thrown in for a further dash of Americana.  Catharine agrees that Dempsey was an odd addition to the literary line-up, and now I’m wondering if that kind of willful digression is standard for the program whenever there’s a dearth of writers’ birthdays and I’ve just never noticed before.  Other birthdays included St. John of the Cross, the Spanish mystic and poet from the 1500s, and Ambrose Bierce, the American short story writer who was born in 1842 in Horse Cave Creek, Ohio, our home state, and who at the age of 71, full of heartbreak and cynicism, took off from San Fransisco to Mexico during Pancho Villa’s revolution and was never heard from or seen again.  These names are now humming in my brain, so when we head to Daedalus Books later today with our friend Patrick, after a brunch at Miss Shirley’s Cafe in the nearby Hampden neighborhood, I’ll be hoping for book-synchronicity again with the right book showing up in front of me at the right time.  Maybe this time, though, I’ll be helped out by a Baltimorian bookseller: “What can I getcha, hon?  Some Dark Night of the Soul or The Devil’s Dictionary?”

The Image is All: “This is Just to Say” and “In a Station of the Metro”

This afternoon I was at my desk in the High School Library talking to my great friend, Dutch teacher colleague and writing buddy Katrina about National Poetry Month, and she gushed about one of her favorite poems, “This is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams.  I knew I wanted to dedicate tonight’s post to that poem. I got home, eager to put it all together, poem plus image.  Should be quick.

But it’s never that simple.  I went to Stock.XCHNG, my favorite free stock photo site, and found a luscious shot of plums just about to be eaten to use as an illustration.  But…then I went to Poets.org to find a clean copy of the poem and read a little bit about the poet WCW.  Not being one to simply read a poem and leave it at that, I wanted to know more about WCW.  So I read his bio.  Interesting.  Then I read that he was one of the main poets in the Imagist movement.  Hmmm. I wanted to know more about that.  So I wandered into the page “A Brief Guide to Imagism” and lo and behold, one of my all-time favorite poems, Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is the poem used to describe classic Imagist poetry.  I read that Imagist poets wrote in free verse and concentrated their language so that there was an “absolutely accurate presentation of its subject with no excess verbiage” (A Brief Guide).  I read that they were restless poets sick and tired of the excesses of the poetic traditions, reacting “against the flabby abstract language and ‘careless thinking’ of Georgian Romanticism” (A Brief Guide). Not fans of Wordsworth, then.  Those modernists, so serious, so streamlined.  I myself like a little verbiage, but I do also love the pared-down essence of these two poems.

So a double bill post was clearly in order.  Back to Stock.XCHNG for an appropriate photo for “In a Station of the Metro”.  Nothing striking.  Off to Flickr Commons, searched for “metro”, nothing…then “subway” and I struck free-to-use photography gold!  Now, I know it is not technically a metro station…but it is somewhat a tram/elevated train station, and I can clearly see “Petals on a wet, black bough.”  Pound’s poem might as well be titled “[subway (?)]“, which is all the Library of Congress could come up with for the photo.

And now, a poem for Katrina:

“This is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

And then a poem for me:

“In a Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

A Poem for Theo: Townhouse Interior with Cat by Amy Clampitt

In honor of National Poetry Month and our outdoor beast, Theo, who reminds us daily of the lure of nature and being true to one’s self:

Townhouse Interior with Cat

by Amy Clampitt

Green-gold, the garden leans into the room,
the room leans out into the garden’s
hanging intertwine of willow.  Voluptuous
on canvas, arum lilies’ folded cream
rises on its own green undertone.  The walls
are primrose; needlepoint-upholstered
walnut and, underfoot, a Bokhara heirloom
bring in the woodwind resonance of autumn.
Mirrored among jungle blooms’ curled crimson
and chartreuse, above the mantel, diva-throated
tuberoses, opening all the stops, deliver
Wagnerian arias of perfume.
______________________The kettle
warbles in the kitchen; we take our teacups
downstairs to where the willow harbors,
improbably, a ring of mushrooms.  Tulips
and rhododendrons have almost done blooming;
laced overhead, neighboring locust trees
discard their humid ivory.
_____________________But where’s
the favorite with the green-gold headlamps?
She’s perverse today; declines, called out
of hiding, to recall past tête-à-têtes
of sparring hand-to-paw; claws up a tree;
patrols a wall.  We see her disappear
into her own devices.  Cornered later
under the gateleg table, tail aloof,
she flirts, an eloquence of fur, but won’t
be wooed or flattered.  The look she gives
me, when she looks—the whole green-gold,
outdoor-indoor continuum condensed
to a reproachful pair of jewels—is wild
and scathingly severe.

Clampitt, Amy.  The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.