July 18: Republican Convention, Poet of the Week, Sandra Beasley, "Let Me Count the Waves"

On this, the first day of the Republican convention in Cleveland where a political party is going to nominate an actual caricature for President of the United States, I had to find a Poet of the Week who made me laugh.  I found Sandra Beasley, thanks to Rita Dove who named her as a young poet to watch.

What you will read below is a sestina.  Notice the words repeating in a pattern.  Notice how Beasley stretches the lines and words in places.  Plus, she talks about Pringles.  What more could you want in a poem?

Saint Marty is going to try to avoid political talk this week.  He'll let the idiot in Cleveland speak for himself and offend as many people as possible.

Let Me Count the Waves

by:  Sandra Beasley

We must not look for poetry in poems.
                  —Donald Revell 

You must not skirt the issue wearing skirts.

You must not duck the bullet using ducks.

You must not face the music with your face.

Headbutting, don’t use your head. Or your butt.

You must not use a house to build a home,

and never look for poetry in poems.

In fact, inject giraffes into your poems.

Let loose the circus monkeys in their skirts.

Explain the nest of wood is not a home

at all, but a blind for shooting wild ducks.

Grab the shotgun by its metrical butt;

aim at your Muse’s quacking, Pringled face.

It’s good we’re talking like this, face to face.

There should be more headbutting over poems.

Citing an 80s brand has its cost but

honors the teenage me, always in skirts,

showing my sister how to Be the Duck

with a potato-chip beak. Take me home,

Mr. Revell. Or make yourself at home

in my postbellum, Reconstruction face—

my gray eyes, my rebel ears, all my ducks

in the row of a defeated mouth. Poems

were once civil. But war has torn my skirts

off at the first ruffle, baring my butt

or as termed in verse, my luminous butt.

Whitman once made a hospital his home.

Emily built a prison of her skirts.

Tigers roamed the sad veldt of Stevens’s face.

That was the old landscape. All the new poems

map the two dimensions of cartoon ducks.

We’re young and green. We’re braces of mallards,

not barrels of fish. Shoot if you must but

Donald, we’re with you. Trying to save poems,

we settle and frame their ramshackle homes.

What is form? Turning art to artifice,

trading pelts for a more durable skirt.

Even urban ducklings deserve a home.

Make way. In the modern: Make way, Buttface.

A poem is coming through, lifting her skirt.

Better than anything that's going on in Cleveland

July 11: Messed Up Place, Poet of the Week, Jericho Brown, "Dear Dr. Frankenstein"

The world is kind of a messed up place right now, if you haven't noticed.  Police officers are getting shot in the streets of Dallas.  A reality TV star is going to be the Republican nominee for President of the United States.  Two Broke Girls is still on TV.  Isis.  Terror threats.  Body parts washing up on the beaches in Rio where the Summer Olympics are scheduled to begin in less than a month.

It takes a poet, sometimes, to make sense of senseless situations.  Jericho Brown is my choice for Poet of the Week.  He was also recently Rita Dove's pick as one of the poets under 40 to watch.  Brown writes about race and sexuality and gender.  He's as concerned about our messed up world as I am.

Sometimes, Saint Marty thinks that God just shakes His head at the world and thinks, "I could have done better."  Just ask Jericho Brown.

Dear Dr. Frankenstein

by:  Jericho Brown

I, too, know the science of building men

Out of fragments in little light

Where I'll be damned if lightning don't

Strike as I forget one 

May have a thief's thumb,

Another, a murderer's arm,

And watch the men I've made leave

Like an idea I meant to write down, 

Like a vehicle stuck

In reverse, like the monster

God came to know the moment 

Adam named animals and claimed 

Eve, turning from heaven to her

As if she was his

To run. No word he said could be tamed.

No science. No design. Nothing taken 

Gently into his hand or your hand or mine, 

Nothing we erect is our own.

March 7: Dickens House, God's Love Number Eighteen, Rita Dove, "Old Folk's Home, Jerusalem," New Cartoon

On the afternoon he received the first postcard, [Rameriz] read it to [his wife, Carmen].  In the first postcard Ives and Annie mentioned that London was a revelation, "nothing like Harlem . . . or Brooklyn."  The black men spoke like English lords and everything was storybook tidy.  And they had gone to the Dickens House museum, 48 Doughty Street, to see where Charles Dickens had once lived and worked, and Carmen, coming around momentarily, said "Ay que nice?"  But then she said, perhaps remembering one of the lectures Annie had taken her to, "Ah, Charles Dickens, el gran escritor."

The reason I chose this passage particular passage from Mr. Ives' Christmas is because it's about Charles Dickens and the Dickens House, a place I have always wanted to visit.  Ives and Annie go there on their trip to the British Isles, Annie because she's always loved Dickens and Ives because he loves Annie.  It's a new beginning for them, a rekindling of their passion for each other.  And it's freakin' Charles Dickens' house, where he wrote A Christmas Carol.

It has been a very busy day.  Cleaning.  Shuttling my daughter back and forth to a party.  Going to church.  Making some phones calls I'd put off for a while.  I'm pretty beat.  After I'm done with this post, I plan on putting on my pajamas and maybe working on a new poem.

Charles Dickens always kept himself busy.  I've read Peter Ackroyd's one-thousand-plus-page biography of Dickens, and the one thing that struck me was how Dickens was in a constant state of movement.  He'd write all morning and afternoon, go out to dinner with friends (or go to the theater), and then sometimes walk all night long (twenty or more miles).  A few people have postulated that Dickens may have had bipolar disorder.  Certainly, I had that impression as I was reading Ackroyd's book.  And Dickens, at times, was a very difficult man to live with.  Quicksilver in temper and disposition.

I am lucky when it comes to my wife's bipolar disorder.  My wife takes her medications, goes to her doctor's appointments, and experiences very little of the normal mental illness roller coaster.  That's God's love number eighteen.  My wife controls her mental illness.  Her mental illness doesn't control her.

I have a final Rita Dove poem tonight.  A poem of love and longing and loss.

Pretty much a standard Saturday night for Saint Marty

Old Folk's Home, Jerusalem

by:  Rita Dove

for Harry Timar

Evening, the bees fled, the honeysuckle

in its golden dotage, all the sickrooms ajar.

Law of the Innocents:  What doesn't end, sloshes over . . .

even here, where destiny girds the cucumber.

So you wrote a few poems.  The horned

thumbnail hooked into an ear doesn't care.

The gray underwear wadded over a belt says So what.

The night air is minimalist,

a needlepoint with raw moon as signature.

In this desert the question's not

Can you see? but How far off?

Valley settlements put on their lights

like armor; there's finch chit and my sandal's

inconsequential crunch.

Everyone waiting here was once in love.

Confessions of Saint Marty

March 6: Nursing Home, Rita Dove, "Your Death"

Last night, my sister--early fifties, photographic memory, stubborn as an iceberg--was transferred from the hospital to a nursing home.  She certainly didn't want to go there, but I think she also knows it was the only real alternative that would keep her safe.  That's doesn't make it any easier.

I've been thinking about her all day.  A year ago, she was in charge of an outpatient surgery center, supervising around ten employees.  She knew every aspect of the place, from registering the patients to sterilizing the instruments to circulating the operating room.  She was someone who solved problems, helped people.  Now, she can't even get out of bed by herself.

I'm telling myself this is a temporary situation.  She'll get better and soon be able to come home.  But she will be unemployed.  Probably on disability.  And the surgery center, which she literally built from blueprints to grand opening, will be under another person's direction.

There's no happily ever after in this post. No punchline.  Sorry.

Saint Marty doesn't even have a happy Rita Dove poem tonight.

Your Death

by:  Rita Dove

On the day that will always belong to you,
lunar clockwork had faltered
and I was certain.  Walking
the streets of Manhattan I thought:
Remember this day.  I felt already
like an urn, filling with wine.

To celebrate, your son and I
took a stroll through Bloomingdale's
where he developed a headache
among the copper skillets and
tiers of collapsible baskets.
Pain tracked us through
the china, driving us
finally to the subway
and home,

where the phone was ringing
with bad news.  Even now,
my new daughter
asleep in the crib, I can't shake
the moment his headache stopped
and the day changed ownership.
I felt robbed.  Even the first
bite of the tuna fish sandwich
I had bought at the corner
became yours.

Not tonight, anyway

March 4: Short Poem, Rita Dove, "In the Museum"

My daughter wants to use my laptop right now, so, out of necessity, I have to choose a short poem from Rita Dove to share tonight.

But a short poem doesn't necessarily mean frivolous or trivial.  There's nothing trivial about anything that Dove writes.  She can take an ordinary experience, like a trip to a museum, and transform it into something sublime.

Saint Marty invites you to enjoy...

In the Museum

by:  Rita Dove

a boy, at most
sixteen.

Besieged by the drums
and flags of youth,
brilliant gravity
and cornucopian stone

retreat.
The Discus Thrower
(reproduction)
stares as he crosses the lobby
and enters
the XIVth century.

I follow him as far
as the room with the blue Madonnas.

Sublime

March 3: Son's Timeline, Rita Dove, "Fifth Grade Autobiography"

My son is in first grade, and we have to help him create a timeline of his life, replete with milestones and pictures of said milestones.  Things like first birthday, first Halloween costume, first tooth, first time he punched somebody on the playground and got detention.  We did the same assignment with my daughter when she was in second grade, I believe.

I remember my daughter's timeline making me a little melancholy.  Just looking back, thinking of how much she'd already grown.  Time goes by so fast.  It seems like yesterday that we brought my son home from the hospital, had that first of many sleepless nights with him.

Rita Dove has a poem that sort of captures this nostalgic sorrow.  Most poets do.  It goes with the territory.

Saint Marty can attest to that.

Fifth Grade Autobiography

by:  Rita Dove

I was four in this photograph fishing
with my grandparents at a lake in Michigan.
My brother squats in poison ivy.
His Davy Crockett cap
sits squared on his head so the raccoon tail
flounces down the back of his sailor suit.

My grandfather sits to the far right
in a folding chair,
and I know his left hand is on
the tobacco in his pants pocket
because I used to wrap it for him
every Christmas.  Grandmother's hips
bulge from the brush, she's leaning
into the ice chest, sun through the trees
printing her dress with soft
luminous paws.

I am staring jealously at my brother;
the day before he rode his first horse, alone.
I was strapped in a basket
behind my grandfather.
He smelled of lemons.  He's died--

but I remember his hands.

Yup, I remember that

March 2: Poet of the Week, Rita Dove, "Saints"

DISCLAIMER:  This post was supposed to be published last night.

Rita Dove was the youngest person, and first African American, to be named United States Poet Laureate.  She has won the Pulitzer Prize and has received over 25 honorary doctorates.  In 2011, President Obama awarded her the National Medal of Arts.  And now her crowning achievement:

Rita Dove is Saint Marty's Poet of the Week.

Saints

by:  Rita Dove

She used to pull them
from herself and count:
Have mercy, have mercy--
black-eyed peas flicked into a pot.

Why go out into the sunshine
and blustery azaleas, why leave
this overcrowded bed?
She's fat now, she stinks in warm weather.
She'll pin on a hat, groan into a pew,
spend the hour watching stained glass
swirl through Michael's boat
like holy water.

Between her knees, each had been
a neat hunger,
each one a freedom.
So many now, perishing under the rafters!
They are like the tin replicas of eyes and limbs
hung up in small churches,
meticulous
cages, medallions
swinging in the dazed air.

I'm a sucker for a poet who writes about saints

March 22: Rita Dove and "Your Death," Poem

Today, I have a poem for you by Rita Dove.  Dove was the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.  She was also the first African American to hold the position of U. S. Poet Laureate, from 1993 to 1995.  She did that at the age of 40.  Her vita reads like a history lesson of firsts for African Americans and women.

Saint Marty hopes you enjoy the following poem from Dove's 1989 collection Grace Notes.

Your Death

On the day that will always belong to you,
lunar clockwork had faltered
and I was certain.  Walking
the streets of Manhattan I thought:
Remember this day.  I felt already
like an urn, filling with wine.

To celebrate, your son and I
took a stroll through Bloomingdale's
where he developed a headache
among the copper skillets and
tiers of collapsible baskets.
Pain tracked us through
the china, driving us
finally to the subway
and home,

where the phone was ringing
with bad news.  Even now,
my new daughter
asleep in the crib, I can't shake
the moment his headache stopped
and the day changed ownership.
I felt robbed.  Even the first
bite of the tuna fish sandwich
I had bought at the corner
became yours.

Rita Dove and some other guy