Poem of the Week: "The Names of the Rapids" by Jonathan Holden

The VPR Poem of the Week is Jonathan Holden’s “The Names of the Rapids,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2000-2001 issue (Volume II, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Jonathan Holden is University Distinguished Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Kansas State University. He is the author of seventeen books, including poetry, criticism, a memoir, and a novel. He has won the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, the Juniper Prize, the AWP Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, as well as several other awards and prizes.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an excellent work by a poet selected from the issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review, except when other posts with news or updates preempt the usual appearance of this item, with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

The Library of America Initiates a Blog

The Library of America has just initiated its own official blog, Reader’s Almanac. Among the first offering of posts are articles concerning Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Wiliam Faulkner, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, and Mark Twain, as well as others.

The Library of America was instituted in 1979 with the aim of preserving classic works of the nation’s literary heritage in “durable and authoritative editions.” Founded with funds from grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, The Library of America has continued as a nonprofit organization throughout the past three decades.

In 2003, The Library of America expanded its catalog by adding a special series of publications focused on American poetry, the American Poets Project. Readers and critics have admired the quality of the volumes produced by The Library of America. In fact, the publisher has been recognized by the National Book Critics Circle with an award for its “distinguished contributions to the enhancement of American literary and critical standards.”

On Edward Hopper's SUMMER EVENING

Edward Hopper was born on this date (July 22) in 1882. Perhaps no American painter’s works have inspired as many poets as Hopper’s have for more than half a century now. The ambiguously evocative nature of scenes and situations depicted in Hopper’s art seems perfectly suited for ekphrastic poetry, ideal for the invention and interpretation available in poetic language.

Many poets also identify with the locales or atmosphere presented in Hopper’s paintings. As Mark Strand has noted in the initial section of Hopper, his book-length commentary on more than thirty artworks by the iconic American painter: “I often feel that the scenes in Edward Hopper paintings are scenes from my own past. It may be because I was a child in the 1940s and the world I saw was pretty much the one I see when I look at Hoppers today. It may be because the adult world that surrounded me seemed as remote as the one that flourishes in his work. The clothes, the houses, the streets and storefronts are the same.”

“Summer Evening: Truro, 1947” represents my contribution to the extended collection of poems inspired by Hopper’s art. This poem responds to Hopper’s Summer Evening and it reflects researched records of Hopper’s attitude toward painting such circumstances.

SUMMER EVENING: TRURO, 1947

. . . . . I have never been able to paint
. . . . . what I set out to paint.
. . . . . . . . . . —Edward Hopper


Sometimes, I never consider putting figures in
. . . . . until I actually start painting:

none ever appears in their preparatory sketches.
. . . . . I’d prefer to leave them out.

As an illustrator, I was always taken by archaic
. . . . . shapes of architecture or remnants

of ancient nature, but the editors wanted fiction—
. . . . . people placed on the page, waving

their arms about. And even today, as late summer
. . . . . rain again blurs these scraps

of landscape that now fill our window—the sprawl
. . . . . of pasture, thickening grassland

spilling toward those low rolling hills beyond
. . . . . a shallow pond—I also think

once more of an earlier August night in Nyack,
. . . . . though not so very long ago,

and how those lovers I thought I saw embracing
. . . . . on a neighbor’s lawn remain,

somewhat vaguely in my faulty recall, shaded
. . . . . beneath wind-shaken limbs

of an old oak, while its serrated silhouette is still
. . . . . traced distinctly in my mind

against an implausible light of stars yet drifting
. . . . . across a moonless sky. If only

truth were so easy to depict with such details;
. . . . . nothing I know, I can assure

you, is really like the scene I remember here.
. . . . . Instead of invented narratives,

I’d hope viewers notice contrast caused by sunlight
. . . . . brightening an empty room,

the bleaching of a beachfront cottage facade
. . . . . under summer’s noonday flare,

or the softening of solid objects during dusk.
. . . . . Thus, I must mix imagination

with any of my memories. I find, in working,
. . . . . always the disturbing intrusion

of elements not a part of my most interested
. . . . . vision. So, I will fill this spare

setting the way I often have before: the couple
. . . . . are now outside a closed door

and caught in another conversation that cannot
. . . . . be heard by anyone else; each

leans back supported by a front porch ledge;
. . . . . the bare floor of this porch

is squared by glare of an overhead light forming
. . . . . corners; the horizontal slats

of stark white siding are sliced by sharp lines edging
. . . . . a window sash or door frame;

twin entrance columns are darkened, wedged
. . . . . in shadow; the walkway approach

to the porch steps is lost in nightfall’s black border.
. . . . . After all is done, some may say

the young woman in this painting appears unhappy
. . . . . or reluctant and the young man

seems to be offering an explanation or attempting
. . . . . persuasion, that these two represent

tension and express discontent we’ve all experienced.
. . . . . But I know none of this is true.

Although others can endlessly speculate about
. . . . . the troubled lives of both figures,

their personal story was not a real concern for me
. . . . . nor what I most wanted to show.

It is an exercise in composition and form: merely light
. . . . . streaming down, the night all around.

. . . . . —Edward Byrne

[“Summer Evening: Truro, 1947” appears in my latest book of poems, Seeded Light (Turning Point Books, 2010).]

Poem of the Week: "The Peach Orchard" by Jon Ballard

The VPR Poem of the Week is Jon Ballard’s “The Peach Orchard,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2007 issue (Volume VIII, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Jon Ballard has had work appear in Boxcar Poetry Review, Poetry Midwest, Riverrun, Soundings, Stone Table Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, and other literary magazines. He is the author of three poetry chapbooks, including Lonesome (Pudding House Press). A native of Michigan and occasional literature instructor for Oakland Community College, he currently lives in Mexico City.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an excellent work by a poet selected from the issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review, except when other posts with news or updates preempt the usual appearance of this item, with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

"Song for One Who Cannot Speak"

My wife Pam has on her blog today a post titled “Speech Therapy,” concerning the difficulties our son Alex has had with development of speech due to his autism, and she relates a few of the ways we tried to obtain professional help for him in his earlier years. Thanks to the therapies we have attempted over time, and especially due to the extraordinary efforts Pam has made to assist Alex, his language skills have improved. Although his inability to fully engage in discussions or to initiate conversations continues to need improvement, particularly when speaking with people he does not know, he has made great strides.

Indeed, last night when we were at a restaurant for dinner, as the waitress approached our table with a glass of Sierra Mist for Alex, we reminded him that he was to thank her when she arrived, something he has been unable to do in the past. However, as she placed the drink in front of Alex, this time he spoke with a firm “Thank you,” a breakthrough for him. In fact, when the waitress responded with “You’re very welcome,” Alex displayed a wide and proud smile that did not leave his face for a while.

Reading Pam’s article, I recalled how we have occasionally remarked upon the irony that one of Alex’s main obstacles has been his lacking in the area of language and communication skills, yet he has parents who both teach language, literature, and communication for a living. On the other hand, we believe perhaps we have been fortunate that our backgrounds have aided somewhat in the understanding and support we are able to give Alex.

Furthermore, Pam’s notes on speech development reminded me how the factual memoirs she offers often are appropriate companion pieces to the poems I have written about Alex in the past, as well as the work I am compiling in my current ongoing project, Autism: A Poem.

Therefore, I thought today I would present “Song for One Who Cannot Speak,” complementary poetry for Pam’s post. This poem about Alex during the language difficulties of his younger days appeared in Tidal Air, my collection of poetry published by Pecan Grove Press in 2002.

SONG FOR ONE WHO CANNOT SPEAK


Another flare of morning light shows
. . . . . over the threshold of low and rolling

hills that lies before us, and even
. . . . . as this early sun, seemingly weightless,

rises into an otherwise empty sky,
. . . . . I wonder why I believe today may

be any different. Last evening
. . . . . as I was writing in my notebook,

I listened to the distant drift of melody
. . . . . lifting from a radio somewhere beyond

this balcony, a song with its music now
. . . . . muffled and lyrics as soft as an intimate

late-night whisper murmured between
. . . . . lovers. Though those words could not

be heard, carried away as easily
. . . . . as autumn leaves in a sea breeze

or those far-off harbor boats
. . . . . that disappear at dusk in a developing

mist, I imagined phrases forming
. . . . . themselves, sentences taking shape—

lots of white space clotted by ink blots
. . . . . of notes and by organized knots of letters,

like lines from lost compositions
. . . . . rediscovered, found inside an old record

album. I pictured these symbols
. . . . . that mimic speech, the way I sometimes

do when I watch your struggle
. . . . . to be heard, mouthing sounds that never

emerge, as instead an absence is further
. . . . . emphasized, only the silence is noted.

Once again, I imagine—if on this day
. . . . . the doctors were proven wrong—how

your voice might imitate that song,
. . . . . and I wonder what you would say.


. . . . . —Edward Byrne

"Anniversary Visit"

As my wife Pam and I celebrate our wedding anniversary on this date, I thought today might be the perfect moment to remind readers of “Anniversary Visit,” a poem that appears in Seeded Light, released this year by Turning Point Books.

Although the exactness of the word ten in the final line obviously becomes more inaccurate with every passing year, I’m pleased to note that the original inspirational passions with which the poem was written, as well as the enduring emotions of affection and understanding the two of us have shared, remain true to this day. Indeed, those feelings have continued to grow over time, as we have become even better companions for one another and discovered much greater purpose through our roles as parents for Alex.

Moreover, like those cottages near the end of the piece, rather than distanced by time, we seem to become so much closer every year of our marriage; for that I count myself blessed, and I am thankful on this special occasion, as well as every other day.

Therefore, on this anniversary I again revisit “Anniversary Visit” and dedicate it to Pam, once more walk that perpetual path of garden blossoms within the poem—those brilliant constellations of intensely colorful flowers, like our love, always appearing in bloom.

ANNIVERSARY VISIT

Tonight, my wife and I will arrive again at that inn
. . . . . we first visited a decade ago. Nestled into a high rise

beside the river, its balconies stretch out, as if gliding
. . . . . over the slow-flowing waters below, and in morning

their shadows will reach across to the other shore
. . . . . like black boxes stacked on an Ad Reinhardt abstract.

We will walk a path that parts the garden flowers,
. . . . . so orderly arranged with constellations of violet

and pink blossoms separated from others of red
. . . . . and yellow. We will speak once more of that week

now long gone and about those late afternoons
. . . . . when we had slept with tangled legs in a hammock

sagging under the twisting limbs of shade trees.
. . . . . We will seek out those same old signposts along

an upper trail, which yet creases the hillside, leads
. . . . . to that distant peak with its white curve of waterfall

jutting just above us. Through our field glasses,
. . . . . the geometry of far-off farmlands will appear near

and take on shapes similar to the puzzle pieces
. . . . . our son loves to fit together when we are at home.

We will look back at that cluster of cottages
. . . . . from another age still filling the village in the valley,

and of course, they’ll also seem so much closer.
. . . . . And then we will pretend we are ten years younger.


—Edward Byrne

"Wake": Poetic Response to the Gulf Oil Spill

. . . spotted with dark clots, each swirl
of oil floats near the beach.

As the flow of oil in the Gulf of Mexico continues to spread, nearly three months after the initial explosion at the Deepwater Horizon rig in late April, the full extent of the disaster still cannot be predicted. Even if current attempts to cap the gusher succeed soon, tragic consequences for the waters and shoreline of coastal states will continue to spread throughout the area. In addition, one can only guess the number of years, perhaps even decades, over which the damaged region will be negatively impacted, environmentally and economically. Finally, nobody will ever be able to measure the detrimental emotional toll and injury to individuals’ spirits that will result from this harmful experience.

Like many writers, nature has constantly remained an integral focus of my work, not only as a poet, but also as a professor teaching environmental literature courses. In fact, having lived by the ocean throughout my years growing up and now residing only a dozen miles from the magnificent dunes along Lake Michigan, my writing has incorporated seascapes and shoreline characteristics throughout my body of publications.

Therefore, as has been the case for a number of other authors, my response to the heartbreaking scenes reported in the news and seen on my television screen has involved seeking expression through lines of poetry. Indeed, the tremendous amount of poems composed as a reaction to this historic event can be observed by readers who choose to visit Poets for Living Waters, a blog site designed by editors Amy King and Heidi Lynn Staples to display on the web examples of poetry being produced in response to the catastrophe.

In recent weeks I have written a few poems inspired by images and circumstances arising since the beginning of this unfortunate situation, and I have contributed one of those pieces, “Wake,” to Poets for Living Waters. The version at Poets for Living Waters is a draft written during the early days of the oil spill, which I have altered slightly and reprint here, including a minor change of title that carries multiple meanings I trust readers will recognize:

WAKE

. . . . . I

The skyline opens under early sunshine.
. . . . . Amid slightest shift of a mild breeze,

slender shafts of marsh grass provide
. . . . . a border for the shoreline. Every blade

wavers above waters hiding its roots.
. . . . . Stains yet remain from the nightly rise

of a high tide, as dawn light brightens
. . . . . a seascape painted with fresh strokes.


. . . . . II

New hues deepen from blue to black.
. . . . . Along the shoal one last boat slowly

passes toward that vast morning sky.
. . . . . Somewhere closer to a shore already

spotted with dark clots, each swirl
. . . . . of oil floats near the beach. A sheen

smears the surface of these shallows,
. . . . . stirring in the littlest waves of a wake.


. . . . . —Edward Byrne

Poem of the Week: "Monsoon Theatre" by Anne C. Bromley

The VPR Poem of the Week is Anne C. Bromley’s “Monsoon Theatre,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2005 issue (Volume VI, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Anne C. Bromley has had two collections of poetry published by Carnegie Mellon University Press: Scenes from the Light Years and Midwinter Transport. She is the co-translator from the Spanish and the Galician of Poems by Rosalía da Castro, published by SUNY Press. In addition, her work has appeared in numerous magazines, including California Quarterly, Carolina Quarterly, Colorado Review, Georgia Review, Indiana Review, Massachusetts Review, New Mexico Humanities Review, Partisan Review, and Prairie Schooner. She is also the author of children’s literature, including The Lunch Thief (Tilbury House Publishers), which has just been released.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an excellent work by a poet selected from the issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review, except when other posts with news or updates preempt the usual appearance of this item, with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

"At the Chapel"

As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently created a separate blog site as an open experiment of poetry composition, perhaps a glimpse at an emerging manuscript as it matures. The contents represent portions of an ongoing personal project with a particularly narrow focus intended to eventually develop toward a book-length poem tentatively and simply titled Autism.

The poem will grow as sections are added. The individual pieces are designed so that they may be viewed as independent items; however, I have consciously carried themes, images, and language through the extended sequence with the hope that connectivity and continuity will be preserved among numerous sections of the long poem.

I have now posted a new section, “At the Chapel.”

Readers are asked to regard Autism as a work in progress, a partial draft rather than a finished product (even if a few selected segments previously may have appeared in print), and I request everyone realize various revisions—edits, emendations, or expansion—may be made to the posts at any time in the future.

Harold Bloom: The Anxiety of Influence

Harold Bloom, one of our foremost contemporary literary critics, was born on this date (July 11) in 1930. Always an intelligent and insightful commentator who creates compelling arguments that also often can be combative, causing controversy, his analyses of literature and its authors—whether in his influential texts, like The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973), or popular books, like The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994)—have initiated valuable ongoing discussions or debates within and outside of academic circles. I know I have frequently found his views interesting and intriguing, even (perhaps, especially) on those occasions when I might disagree with an essay’s premise, its tone, or the critical conclusion drawn.

Since its introduction nearly four decades ago, Bloom’s theory regarding the impact of previous writers on those who follow—the influence of past masters and the accompanying anxiety felt by later authors trying to compete with those predecessors who already have explored all types of human events or emotions—has infiltrated most contemporary conversations about creativity, originality, individuality, imagination, inspiration, imitation, and similarity, especially when judging or comparing works by various figures from different literary periods.

As Bloom explains in The Anxiety of Influence:

Every poem is a misinterpretation of a parent poem. A poem is not an overcoming of anxiety. Poets’ misinterpretations or poems are more drastic than critics’ misinterpretations or criticism, but this is only a difference in degree and not at all in kind. There are no interpretations but only misinterpretations, and so all criticism is prose poetry.

Critics are more or less valuable than other critics only (precisely) as poets are more or less valuable than other poets. For just as a poet must be found by the opening in a precursor poet, so must the critic. The difference is that a critic has more parents. His precursors are poets and critics. But—in truth—so are a poet’s precursors, often and more often as history lengthens.

Poetry is the anxiety of influence, is misprision, is a disciplined perverseness. Poetry is misunderstanding, misinterpretation, misalliance.

Bloom contends that every poem’s composition is the product of “a poet’s melancholy at his lack of priority.” He considers each poem to “arise out of the illusion of freedom, out of a sense of priority being possible.” Therefore, he regards the poem as a result of the mind’s creative process, an invention of the poet's imagination as formed by an accumulation of readings as well as personal experiences. The accomplished poem “is a made thing, and as such is an achieved anxiety.”

Robert Lowell: Cooked Poetry and Raw Poetry

AN ELEGANT EPIGRAPH: ROBERT LOWELL

“Our modern American poetry has a snarl on its hands. Something earth-shaking was started about fifty years ago by the generation of Eliot, Frost, and William Carlos Williams. We have had a run of poetry as inspired, and perhaps as important and sadly brief as that of Baudelaire and his successors, or that of the dying Roman Republic and early Empire. Two poetries are now competing, a cooked and a raw. The cooked, marvelously expert, often seems laboriously concocted to be tasted and digested by a graduate seminar. The raw, huge blood-dripping gobbets of unseasoned experience are dished up for midnight listeners. There is a poetry that can only be studied, and a poetry that can only be declaimed, a poetry of pedantry, and a poetry of scandal. I exaggerate, of course. Randall Jarrell has said that the modern world has destroyed the intelligent poet’s audience and given him students. James Baldwin has said that many of the beat writers are as inarticulate as our statesmen.

“Writing is neither transport nor technique. My own owes everything to a few of our poets who have tried to write directly about what mattered to them, and yet to keep faith with their calling’s tricky, specialized, unpopular possibilities for good workmanship. When I finished Life Studies, I was left hanging on a question mark. I am still hanging there. I don’t know whether it is a death-rope or a life-line.”

—From Robert Lowell’s acceptance speech in 1960 for the National Book Award in Poetry given to Life Studies (1959)


I would like to take this opportunity to remind visitors of my essay, “Life and Language: On the 50th Anniversary of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2009 issue (Volume X, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

In addition, I recommend readers examine the following previous posts at “One Poet’s Notes”: “Robert Lowell’s Voice,” “Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick,” and “Robert Lowell: ‘New Year’s Day.’”

[“An Elegant Epigraph” serves as the recurring title for a continuing series of posts with entries containing brief but engaging, eloquent, and elegant excerpts of prose commentary introducing subjects particularly appropriate to discussion of literature, creative writing, or other relevant matters addressing complementary forms of art and music. These apposite extracts usually concern topics specifically relating to poetry or poetics. Each piece is accompanied by a recommendation that readers seek out the original publication to obtain further information and to become familiar with the complete context in which the chosen quotation appeared as well as other views presented by its author.]

Poem of the Week: "'July, 1935-1943' (from a painting by Charles Burchfield)"

The VPR Poem of the Week is John Ruff’s “‘July, 1935-1943’ (from a painting by Charles Burchfield),” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 1999-2000 issue (Volume I, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

John Ruff is the poetry editor of The Cresset journal. His work has appeared in a variety of literary magazines, including Poetry Northwest, River City, Seattle Review, Seneca Review, and Xavier Review. “‘July, 1935-1943’ (From a Painting by Charles Burchfield)” was also published in an anthology of poems and paintings, A Poetic Vision: Poets’ Responses to the Artwork of Charles Burchfield, released by the Brauer Museum of Art in association with its exhibition of Burchfield’s lifetime of works. John Ruff teaches in the English department at Valparaiso University, and he serves as director of the university general education CORE program.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review, except when other posts with news or updates preempt the usual appearance of this item, with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

"Fourth of July" Road Music

Just the road and its majesty
And I’m lookin’ at you with the world in the rear-view

As the long Fourth of July weekend approaches and many will be traveling on vacation in the days ahead, I suggest some rousing music by Shooter Jennings perfectly designed for the holiday and summertime cross-country driving. I know it is one of my favorites to blare in the car—with the windows open to the warm July air when motoring along highways or county roads—and, as Shooter describes in the song, to just sing along.

Surprisingly, the song even begins with a few somewhat poetic lines: “Alone with the morning burning red / On the canvas in my head / Painting a picture of you and me . . ..” (I usually write about jazz, but I’m fond of all kinds of music, and I confess I often find country lyrics unassumingly poetic or entertaining; therefore, I like the words in the rest of the song as well.) Also, the video appropriately closes with some fireworks. Enjoy the weekend and drive safely!