Lyric Life

I found this poem while I was seeing my dad through his death. I thought of it a lot during those awful months. I thought about what I needed to apologize for. I thought about what he needed to apologize for. I thought how no fish would ever make it up between us--but how right Ellen Bass was to make it a meal, an apology, a bony fish no one wants but everyone needs.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I explore Ellen Bass's poem "How To Apologize," just recently published in THE NEW YORKER. This work hit me where I live. And its construction is nothing short of genius.

How can something published in 1968 be so 2021?

It can because it's a lyric poem by Bernadette Mayer, a poet whose work may well define what I think is great about lyric poetry.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I take a look at this fabulous and very adult sonnet by one of the best American poets working still today.

Rage? You bet! But in sonnet form.

I'm back from a long hiatus. I didn't mean to go on one. My dad died. Or as I keep saying, he went over a cliff and took me with him.

I wanted to record this podcast episode because it's about a poem I said over and over to myself this summer as I helped him die. It's also one of the last things I ever said to him. I hope you'll find it as moving and lasting as I did. It sustained me. I couldn't ask Dickinson for any more. I couldn't ask lyric poetry for any more.

A warning, first off: this lyric poem has language, imagery, and incidents that are difficult to bear. If you have children with you, you'll want to save this episode for another time.

Hayley Mitchell Haugen's poem, "Would You Please Stop Whistling, Please?" brought me up short the moment I found it. It's an example of control that I cannot imagine. It's also emotionally insightful in ways I wish I were. I hope you'll give it a listen, despite the rough subject matter. This is confessional poetry at its best: it reveals its speaker even more than the speaker believes she's being revealed. I don't know whether this is true confession or not. It doesn't matter. It hits. And that's what the best of lyric poetry does.

It takes a brave writer to lead the charge against Emily Dickinson. Especially in my books! You know how much I love Dickinson. But I may love Caitlin Seida's riff off a famous Dickinson poem just as much.

This poem became something of my mantra when I was recently in Texas for a month, helping my dad die. I had no idea I'd do what I did. I didn't even know he was that sick. He went over a cliff and took me with him. I used lines from this poem over and over again to help me get up off the couch and go give him his next round of pain or nausea meds.

I hope you'll find the audacity in this poem as compelling as I do. And I hope you'll understand that hope lasts, like a sewer rat. It survives in the worst places. Because that's the very nature of hope.

Here's a poem that's deceptively small. It's actually a sonnet, broken into an octet and a sestet. And it does what sonnets do best: it turns the world strange.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I explore Donna Hilbert's short poem "Rosemary" on this episode of the podcast Lyric Life. We'll look at the ways Hilbert encodes loss into imagery--and talk about the ways we can write more effectively about loss and love, following Hilbert's example.

If you want to learn more about Donna Hilbert, check out her website, donnahilbert.com.

Ted Kooser has been called part of the "Midwestern poetry revival" in the U.S., his poems plainsong truth-telling that somehow avoid the pitfalls (and pratfalls?) of academic poetry.

But this poem, "The Old People," is definitely full of classical and poetic allusions. It also has a complicated structure. In other words, all that "plainsong" stuff is sitting over some very heady material.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I take a look at this poem from Kooser's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, DELIGHTS & SHADOWS.

I've just come off teaching Emily Dickinson's poetry in two-hour seminar segments over eight weeks--and her art has done to me what it always does to me: It's broken my brain.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I explore the poem on which I ended those eight weeks. It's a wildly understated statement, wry and winking, that truth might be derived ecologically, geographically, even horticulturally. What if the self is not what it is but mostly where it is? What if you're made up of where you're from, more than what you think? And not where you're front in terms of economics or education. Where you're from in terms of the flowers and birds you've lived with as a child (and maybe as an adult, too).

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I explore this poem from a working poet, Tamara Madison: "What Now Is Like."

It's a gentle exploration of the experience of the "now," the only way it can be experienced, in metaphor--and together. It's a poem that becomes quantum, becomes its own "now," and offers us a way to stop time, the one thing "now" can never offer us.

This is a great poem for the coming end of the pandemic. It's full of hope. Full of linguistic pyrotechnics. And full of now.

If you want to know more about Madison's poetry, check out her website: tamaramadisonpoetry.com.

Dungy's magnificent poem, "Let me," published just this month in The New Yorker (April, 2021) is a terrifying glimpse into the problem of living in the United States: everything's real and everything's a metaphor. And when you're in that spot, the house can only catch on fire.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I slow-walk through this terrific poem that seems so suited for this moment in U. S. history--and seems to explore the very thing so much of us can't comprehend: how can the dream and the reality, the metaphor and the story, exist at the same moment?

The poem is based on a technique as old as Homer: ring structure. It's playing with time to ring the moments and deepen them. But it does more than I could ever do. I'm a writer of narrative. I can make sediments. It takes poets to turn them into granite.