May 13, 2025: "The Pope's Penis," Fearless, "Ornithology"

I admire Sharon Olds as an artist because she's fearless.  She tackles topics that upset people--from sexuality to violence to discrimination to corruption.  As I said in previous posts, that's one of jobs of a poet:  to speak truth, no matter what.

One of my favorite poems by Olds is below.  The first time I encountered it back in the early 1990s, I was blown away.  My reaction can be summed up like this:  "Wait!  You can write about THAT?"  This little poem convinced me to become a poet, because it was so . . . out there and wonderful at the same time.

Sharon Olds give readers an encounter with . . . 

The Pope's Penis

by: Sharon Olds

It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate

clapper at the center of a bell.

It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a

halo of silver seaweed, the hair

swaying in the dimness and the heat--and at night,

while his eyes sleep, it stands up

in praise of God.

You may be offended by this poem.  That's okay.  If you don't like it, don't read it.  It's that simple.  You don't have to burn any books or go to some kind of meeting where you're crusading to rid the world of pornography.  Just politely close the book or log off this page and don't return to it.  Period.

Olds certainly is being humorous with her words here.  However, she's also providing commentary on how women have been subjugated by certain Christian denominations (including Catholicism).  And she's celebrating the sacredness of the body, in all of its uncontrollable splendor.  Even popes aren't immune to the physical cravings of the flesh.  Sharon Olds finds nothing shameful in sexuality.  In fact, I'd argue that she, in her own way, is saying that sexuality is one of God's gifts and should be exalted rather than relegated to the confessional.

That's my poetic sermon for today.  I'm climbing off my soapbox now.

I'm currently in between teaching semesters.  That gives me some time to breathe and relax and catch up on some much-needed sleep.  (In a week, I start teaching again until the end of June, so I'll be back to my neurotic self by Monday.)  I'm attempting to kickstart my writing, as well.  I've gotten lazy about sitting down with my journal and pen.  Not because I have nothing to say about life in the United States.  It's just this inability to know where to start.  

Do I focus on poetry, and ignore politics?  Do I pretend that the President 47 isn't accepting 400-million-dollar airplanes as a bribe from Qatar?  Do I tell cute stories about my puppy and ignore the Ice Agents arresting and deporting innocent people?  Don't get me started on tax cuts for billionaires.  

As a writer, I simply can't choose where to shine my spotlight.  It's exhausting.  When I sit down to work on a new poem, I have to give myself ten minutes to vent and bitch on the page.  Only after I've exorcised my anger and sadness can I begin to think in poetic terms.  Otherwise, all you'd probably be getting from me is one word repeated over and over and over and over.  (The word begins with an "f," ends with a "k," and isn't "folk" or "funk.")

All that being said, I don't have a lot on my mind at the moment.  Went out for drinks and KFC with some friends this evening.  I may have imbibed a little too much, as I can barely keep my eyes open.  

Saint Marty did write a poem for tonight, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:

Sit in a comfy chair (with or without a glass of wine) and listen to jazz or classical music for fifteen to twenty minutes.  Have a notebook to jot down images or ideas that come to mind as you listen to the music.  Write a poem about something you thought of while you listened.  If you like, keep the music on while you write.

Ornithology

by: Martin Achatz

I don't practice poetry the way

I practiced scales on the piano

or parallel parking when I was

learning to drive--no tests to pass

or licenses to carry to prove

I know trochaic tetrameter, no, just

an impossible impulse to chase

words the way my Aussie chases

finches in my backyard, body

a rubber band, snout threshing

the air back, up, forth, down

until she catches something in her

eager jaws--maybe a feather small

as an eyelash--tosses it, shakes

her head, wrings every drop of flight

from its downy barb until death

arrives the way it did for Keats:

too soon, leaving behind flocks

of poems wheeling in the blue

lungs of heaven like hungry gulls.

November 1: "Memorizing 'The Sun Rising' by John Donne," Funny as Hell, Mariah Carey

Yes, there was snow on the ground this morning.  

It is the first day of November, and that means it's the start of Mariah Carey season.  Yes, tonight I heard "All I Want for Christmas Is You" on the radio for the first time this year.  (Now, I know I'm in the minority, but I think Mariah is overrated.  Her song wouldn't be half as popular nowadays if it weren't for the movie Love Actually.)

Worked at home for most of the day, then went into my library office for a couple hours.  I spent a good portion of that time reading and talking about poetry.  That may sound like torture to some of you, but, for me, it was like Christmas--unwrapping one poem after another.

Billy Collins puts his poetic memory to the test . . . 

Memorizing "The Sun Rising" by John Donne

by: Billy Collins

Every reader loves the way he tells off
the sun, shouting busy old fool
into the English skies even though they
were likely cloudy on that seventeenth-century morning.

And it’s a pleasure to spend this sunny day
pacing the carpet and repeating the words,
feeling the syllables lock into rows
until I can stand and declare,
the book held closed by my side,
that hours, days, and months are but the rags of time.

But after a few steps into stanza number two,
wherein the sun is blinded by his mistress’s eyes,
I can feel the first one begin to fade
like the puffs of sky-written letters on a windy day.

And by the time I have taken in the third,
the second is likewise gone, a blown-out candle now,
a wavering line of acrid smoke.

So it’s not until I leave the house
and walk three times around this hidden lake
that the poem begins to show
any interest in walking by my side.

Then, after my circling,
better than the courteous dominion
of her being all states and him all princes,

better than love’s power to shrink
the wide world to the size of a bedchamber,

and better even than the compression
of all that into the rooms of these three stanzas

is how, after hours stepping up and down the poem,
testing the plank of every line,
it goes with me now, contracted into a little spot within.

I don't have many poems memorized.  Sure, I can quote some lines and stanzas of a few of my favorites, but, if my life depended on it, the only poem I could recite in full is Sharon Olds' "The Pope's Penis"--because it's only seven lines long.  And irreverent.  And funny as hell.

I have a friend who is a breathing/walking anthology of poetry:  he can jump from Shakespeare to Frost to Whitman without so much as a hiccup.  Of course, he spent over 30 years of his life teaching high school English and drama, so it's kind of in his blood.

Me?  I can barely remember what I had for dinner.  When I was younger, I used to act in a lot of plays and musicals, so my memorization skills were much sharper.  I can recite a few of my own poems from memory now, but I don't think that really counts.  You will never catch me reciting John Donne or Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman off the top of my head.

However, Saint Marty can sing the hell out of Kelly Clarkson's "Underneath the Tree"--which should be the anthem of Christmas instead of Mariah's little ditty.

June 21: "Song for Autumn," Summer Solstice Sun, Haiku Workshop

Mary Oliver's love song to autumn . . .

Song for Autumn

by:  Mary Oliver

In the deep fall

     don't you imagine the leaves think how

comfortable it will be to touch

     the earth instead of the

nothingness of air and the endless

     freshets of wind?  And don't you think

the trees themselves, especially those with mossy,

     warm caves, begin to think

of the birds that will come--six, a dozen--to sleep

     inside their bodies?  And don't you hear

the goldenrod whispering goodbye,

     the everlasting being crowned with the first

tuffets of snow?  The pond

     vanishes, and the white field over which

the fox runs so quickly brings out

     its blue shadows.  And the wind pumps its

bellows.  And at evening especially,

     the piled firewood shifts a little,

longing to be on its way.

This is why I love Mary Oliver--poems like this.  The world is unpredictable and beautiful, and every time I encounter Mary on the page, I find myself stunned into wonder.  

I took a haiku writing workshop this afternoon.  I've always loved the simplicity of haiku--its concentration on image and surprise.  At the end of a haiku, I feel as if I will never see the world quite the same way.  I am altered.

Now, I'm not going to turn this post into a lecture on poetic form.  Not going to recite my favorite haiku,  (It's "The Pope's Penis" by Sharon Olds, although some may argue with me about its haiku-ness.)  Not going to talk about syllabics or nature imagery.  If you want a poetics lesson, there are plenty of good books out there on the subject, written by people much smarter than me.  

What I will say is that I think Mary Oliver writes extended haiku.  Her poems are firmly grounded in nature and the seasons, and, when I read them, I am transported.  Sometimes stunned and breathless.  She does that at the end of today's poem, making the firewood hungry for flames.  I will never think of autumn in quite the same way, and autumn has been my favorite season all my life.

So, during today's poetry workshop, we were given 40 minutes to go outside to the library's flower gardens and write haiku, as many as we could.  There I sat with a large group of poets, under the summer solstice sun, trying to capture the mystery of creation in three short lines of verse.  

Now, at the end of the longest day of the year, I will confess that, although they are short and fairly simple in imagery and language, haikus are a bitch to write.  I always imagined Mary Oliver sort of living a life of constant wonder, each waking moment a haiku.

Of course, I'm sure that Mary struggled with language and writing, as all writers do.  Her simple, beautiful poems are the result of divine inspiration and many, many hours of poetic blood, sweat, and tears (not always in that order).  Effortless writing requires a lot of effort.

Saint Marty wants to be Mary Oliver when he grows up.

Some haiku from this afternoon . . . 

Summer Solstice Haiku

by:  Martin Achatz

In the blooming violets

     a chipmunk

gorges on purple. 

A small green caterpillar

     on a friend's thumb

          crawls toward butterfly.

A finger of lupine

     points at me.

"Write!" it says.

Church steeple

     against June sky

makes me thirsty for wine.

Blue birdbath 

     in library shadow

washes away words.

Spider on my journal

     page doesn't care

about syllables or lines.

Poets

     in a June garden

          picking poems.

July 10: The Dump, Poetry Dump, Leftovers

Below the apple orchard, at the end of a path, was the dump where Mr. Zuckerman threw all sorts of trash and stuff that nobody wanted any more.  Here, in a small clearing hidden by young alders and wild raspberry bushes, was an astounding pile of old bottles and empty tin cans and dirty rags and bits of metal and broken bottles and broken hinges and broken springs and dead batteries and last month's magazines and old discarded dishmops and tattered overalls and rusty spikes and leaky pails and forgotten stoppers and useless junk of all kinds, including a wrong-size crank for a broken ice-cream freezer.

OK, please try to recover from the shock of this paragraph.  Yes, E. B. White is describing a place where the Zuckerman's simply dump all of their shit in the middle of the woods.  Dead batteries.  Old magazines.  Broken bottles.  It sounds like a setting from Wall-E, not Charlotte's Web.

The reason I chose to start with this passage is because I submitted more poems for publication tonight.  I basically chose poems that I thought no editor would ever dream of publishing.  Stuff that I loved writing but probably belongs in some kind of poetry dump along with all the bad dirty limericks ever found on bathroom walls.  The leftovers.

I love leftovers.  As a kid, I always liked the B-side of records.  I once ate shrimp with lo mein for an entire week.  And I like obscure books and poems.  Offbeat stuff.  "The Pope's Penis" by Sharon Olds--my favorite poem of all time.  It's strange, weird, surprising.  The kind of thing you would find growing under a tree stump in a poetry dump.

I'm glad I took a chance tonight.

Saint Marty's been playing it safe way too long.

I think there's a poem underneath that bottle