This will be our last article for National Poetry Month. I hope you have enjoyed the series.  I would like to extend my warmest thanks to Kashiana Singh and Nelson Howard Miller, who each contributed three thoughtful, varied articles, and also thank Kashiana for her three podcasts. Nelson helped out despite contracting Covid and being hospitalized, followed by surgery. Kashiana, despite being in the process of a cross-country move.

Today’s poem is a deceptively simple piece by American poet Jane Hirshfield, a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and author of nine books of poetry and two more of essays. Her writing is clear and conversational, even when, like today, the subject is a difficult one for us to put into words. The title of the poem seems simple and descriptive,

(https://poets.org/poem/three-foxes-edge-field-twilight) Three Foxes by the Edge of the Field at Twilight, but as we have hopefully learned, something observed in the world around us can often reflect something else. It starts out with:

One ran,

her nose to the ground,

a rusty shadow

neither hunting nor playing.

One stood; sat; lay down; stood again.

One never moved,

except to turn her head a little as we walked.

In this case, the narrator feels that the foxes’ behavior mirrors something about her own self. Perhaps her own fear, indecision, and wariness. Published when Hirshfield was forty-three, it suggests a changing viewpoint, or a turning inward - a personal transition:

There is more and more I tell no one,

strangers nor loves.

This slips into the heart

without hurry, as if it had never been.

Just as her metaphor, the foxes, disappear into the woods without a trace. The important part of what the poem is telling us is not that there has been a change, but that she, the narrator (the poet) has recognized that change. She ends with,

And yet, among the trees, something has changed.

Something looks back from the trees,

and knows me for who I am.

So I guess you could call this a poem of self-knowledge, of recognition that identity changes, and that we change, sometimes without knowing why.

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Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I have been curating the series with help and contributions this year from Kashiana Singh and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Technically, National Poetry Month is over, but we didn’t quite get to thirty, so I thought I would squeeze a few more in.

Today’s poem is by Yonatan Berg, an Israeli poet I was not familiar with until I ran across an article in Lunch Ticket (https://lunchticket.org/two-poems/ - the second poem on the page) with two of his poems translated from Hebrew to English by Joanna Chen. If you go to the page, I ask you to read the translator’s notes at the bottom. They are brief, and very good. I included this poem purposely after yesterday’s, You Are Your Own State Department, by Naomi Shihab Nye, and while their families hail from different sides of the tracks, so to speak, in the Israeli / Palestinian situation, their views have very much in common.

This is an important thing for Americans in particular to understand, in an era when opportunists are still pitting one half of the country against the other, creating and inflaming tensions, instead of pushing for Unity, which is the title of today’s poem. Nye, with the perspective of a longer life, talks of incremental change - small acts of kindness for those who suffer. Berg is not as concrete, in fact he is entirely mystical. Unlike Nye, he does not offer up any way to change the reality we are in physically. Instead he describes us as common souls, sharing a journey through darkness. And the recognition of that shared experience is his call for unity.

I think that Joanna Chen’s translation is excellent. As a separate point, I would like to say that yesterday’s poem reminds me of my good friend Hani Silwani, originally from Jerusalem. Today’s reminds me of another good friend, one who has lived through many dark journeys, Yair Alon from Holon, Israel, whose ambulance-driving was, in part, inspiration for one of my own stories, Tethered to the Sky.

Berg begins with:

We travel the silk road of evening,

tobacco and desire flickering

between our hands. We are warm travelers,

our eyes unfurled, traveling in psalms,

in Rumi, in the sayings of the man from the Galilee.

I would like you to note the phrase “our eyes unfurled,” suggesting they open, uncovered and uncloaked, to see and experience everything. There are religious and cultural references of all types, open and agnostic, following the metaphor of the open eyes. Later in the poem:

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Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year with help and contributions from Kashiana Singh and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Technically, National Poetry Month is over, but we didn’t quite get to thirty, so I thought I would squeeze a few more in.

Today’s poem, You Are Your Own State Department, was written by Naomi Shihab Nye, a woman who is, in many respects, much like her poem.

A common process in poetry is to describe something by talking about its pieces to give you a better picture of the whole. This poem is a first-person viewpoint, commentaries from her wanderings in life, and why she tries always (as we all should) to improve the things that we see wrong in the world. Even if it is only little things. That mirrors the idea of a thing being made of its smaller parts. And this too is a common process - that the form of a poem is chosen sometimes to mirror the thought process or the subject.

First, just a few comments about the poet. Born in 1952 in Saint Louis, Missouri, to Palestinian and Swiss/German parents, she has written poetry, novels, essays, and songs, authoring or contributing to thirty books, and editing several collections. She recently served as the Young People’s Poet Laureate for the Poetry Foundation. She is known for finding novel but clear perspectives on people, things, places, and circumstances. You will hear those things very clearly in today’s poem. It starts out:

Each day I miss Japanese precision. Trying to arrange things

the way they would. I miss the call to prayer

at Sharjah, the large collective pause. Or

the shy strawberry vendor with rickety wooden cart,

single small lightbulb pointed at a mound of berries.

In one of China’s great cities, before dawn.

Nye has commented that her poetry comes from a combination of: “local life, random characters met on the streets, [and] our own ancestry sifting down to us through small essential daily tasks.” The poem continues,

Forever I miss my Arab father’s way with mint leaves

floating in a cup of sugared tea—his delicate hands

arranging rinsed figs on a plate. What have we here?

said the wolf in the children’s story

stumbling upon people doing kind, small things.

Is this small monster one of us?

And she talks about those people - sometimes people who are displaced or themselves living under fear or hatred of one kind or another, and those small things they contribute:

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Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Kashiana Singh, (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Today’s article is by Poet and Contributing Editor Kashiana Singh, and unfortunately, as she is slightly under the weather today, it’s me you’ll be listening to on the podcast, instead of her soothingly thoughtful voice. My apologies. To quote Theo Metro, “It can’t be helped.”

There is a reason Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) is considered one of the twentieth century’s most influential poets.

Born in Prague, he published his first book of poems, Leben und Lieber, at age 19. In 1897 he met Lou Andreas-Salomé, the talented and spirited daughter of a Russian army officer, who influenced him deeply. Rainer is best known for such collections as Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien) and Sonnets to Orpheus (Die Sonette an Orpheus), but also the semi-autobiographical novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge). Then, there’s also Letters to a Young Poet (Briefe an einen jungen Dichter), published after his passing.

His words are touchstones that other artists, from authors to poets to sculptors to filmmakers - often reference - words that are still relevant today. And could there be a message more relevant than love enabling humanity and love also being about setting free. Jojo Rabbit (https://youtu.be/tL4McUzXfFI), was a movie that was also a poem that touched souls with its poignancy. It was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

The central character of the movie is a fatherless 10-year-old boy coming of age in WWII. I do think the central character of the movie is also the poem itself  “Going to the limits of your longing” (https://onbeing.org/poetry/go-to-the-limits-of-your-longing/)

Go to the limits of your longing

Rainer Maria Rilke

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,

go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like a flame

and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

(text space limited)

You can find the fill text of Kashiana Singh's article on The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh, and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

I mentioned a few days ago that we have not spent enough time focusing on Poet Laureates. The current U.S. Poet Laureate is Joy Harjo. Article # 16 focused on Ted Kooser. Today we’re going to focus on Rita Dove, who was U.S. Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995. By the way. Prior to 1986, we just referred to them as Consultants in Poetry. Why? I don’t know. SInce you’ve probably all heard of Amanda Gorman by now, unless you are living in a cave in the desert, you’re also probably aware that we now have a position called National Youth Poet Laureate. Amanda Gorman was the first of those, chosen in 2017.

While Poet Laureate sounds like an impressive title, it only comes with a stipend of $35,000, which only works out to a little over $16 an hour before taxes. That means that even the Poet Laureate better have a day job.

Rita Dove was born in 1952 in Akron, Ohio. Her father was a chemist. She was a brilliant student, and studied in Germany on a Fulbright Scholarship. She was only forty years old when she was named Poet Laureate - the youngest in American history. In addition to authoring eleven books of poetry, she is an essayist, editor, activist, novelist, and playwright, and, paired with her husband, an avid ballroom dancer. Her awards are too many to list. There are extensive collections of her poems online at the Poetry Foundation (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/rita-dove) and at poets.org (https://poets.org/poet/rita-dove#poet__works)

I will say that, in general, Dove’s poetry is very readable, in Ted Kooser’s phrasing, very accessible. More than any other Poet Laureate before her,  she saw it as her mission to expand the role, as a teacher and essentially an evangelist of the art. She made an effort to be very accessible.

Today’s poem, Dusting (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/35004/dusting), has a simple premise, and an elegantly simple, well-matched metaphor. It starts out:

Every day a wilderness—no

shade in sight. Beulah

patient among knicknacks,

the solarium a rage

of light, a grainstorm

as her gray cloth brings

dark wood to life.

The speaker is watching Beaulah dusting around all of the things, and polishing the wooden furniture in a sunroom, a “solarium.” It may be bright and sunny, a “rage of light” but her gray cloth (like a gray rain cloud) produces a “grainstorm” bringing the hidden details in the dark wood to light.

(You can find the full text of the article at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr)

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh, and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

I’m going to talk about two things today, Imagery and enumeration. Both are very common in poetry, as a vehicle for conveying ideas, emotions, memories, and metaphors. As a way to give emphasis, and to define, in example bits and pieces, those things that are often difficult to describe in their entirety.

And let's add a third topic - repetition. Poets, like songwriters, often return to the same words or phrasing repeatedly for emphasis. Sometimes they do this with rhyme or rhythm, and sometimes by repeating the same or similar words again and again.

As the basis for this discussion, I’ve chosen the poem Bedtime Reading for the Unborn Child by Libyan-American poet and translator Khaled Mattawa. He was Born in Benghazi and came to the U.S. as a teen in 1979. He studied and taught at several universities, receiving his PhD from Duke, and currently teaches at the University of Michigan.

The text of the poem is online at the Poetry Foundation (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54258/bedtime-reading-for-the-unborn-child) and Mattawa does all of these things I mentioned above, and does them beautifully. He begins by setting the scene, and the mood, and then introducing us to the title character, or maybe to his dreams for her:

Long after the sun falls into the sea

and twilight slips off the horizon like a velvet sheet

and the air gets soaked in blackness;

long after clouds hover above like boulders

and stars crawl up and stud the sky;

long after bodies tangle, dance, and falter

and fatigue blows in and bends them

and sleep unloads its dreams and kneads them

and sleepers dive into the rivers inside them,

a girl unlatches a window,

walks shoeless into a forest,

her dark hair a flag rippling in darkness.

So of course your first reaction should be an appreciative Wow at the use of language, at the velvet sheet of the horizon and clouds like boulders and crawling stars and dark hair like a rippling flag. Like I said, Wow.

(The full text of this article is available at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.)

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh, and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Today I want to focus on two poems by American poet Michael Torres (https://www.michaeltorreswriter.com/). He is a current professor in the Minnesota State University system, and a former graffiti artist, originally from Pomona California. His first collection, titled An Incomplete List of Names, was published in 2020. I’m going to read from two pieces, the first is titled “Because My Brother Knows Why They Call Them “County Blues,” but Won’t Tell Me Why,” and the second one is “My Brother Is Asking for Stamps.” The complete text for both poems is available online at the Poetry Foundation.

Yesterday, I commented on Fred Marchant’s poem that bad things happen. In today’s two poems, a sibling is dealing with a brother’s incarceration in sort of a “. . . and then what happens . . . “ progression.”

In the first poem the speaker feels left behind, Sadness. Loss. Struggling to understand. He tries to come up with some kind of metaphor to help him understand. He says,

When my brother left, I painted our room

blue to make a more manageable sky. But

the room couldn’t mean anything besides

an offering of endless daylight for the parade

of shadows and the solitude shadows purchase

by virtue of their existence.

And then, he turns from color to noise, he continues, later in the poem:

Ultimatums were set,

sides chosen; each faction manufactured bigger

and bigger speakers. Volume knobs turned to 10.

Then, walls of roar. I don’t care who won. Really.

Finally, he admits,

I’m not a good liar. I’ve been looking for the perfect

metaphor for sadness. All along. I apologize

for nothing. I sit with my sadness, desperate

to relieve its weight. It’s not as easy as everyone

makes it seem.

It isn’t easy, obviously, for anyone, but adults often hide the emotions that a child or adolescent cannot.

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Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh, and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Bad things happen. They happen everywhere. Sometimes you try to disconnect from the world, but when you reconnect, they are there again, facing us, challenging us to figure out how we are going to respond. We’ve all had that experience, at one point, or at many points. You can become paranoid, or you can grow numb. Perhaps that is what Fred Marchant  (https://fredmarchant.com/) is giving us a picture of, that numbness, in his poem Here Is What the Mind Does (https://poets.org/poem/here-what-mind-does).  I had the good fortune to be able to watch and listen (thanks to Zoom) to Fred Marchant as he read several pieces as part of Amherst College’s annual Emily Dickinson reading series. He is the author of four poetry collections, and is a professor emeritus at Suffolk University.  The poem begins with:

when my laptop opens to a small red car

a tight street in Jenin gray-yellow dust

an electric window half-open and five

lean-to cards where on each a number

denotes a round spent or the place where

it began to travel at the speed of its idea

You’ve all seen this scene, on the news, in police procedural dramas on television, in movies. This one happens to be in Jenin, a West Bank city. Note that the person narrating this is not talking about the how or the why or the who - questions that perhaps no one can answer. It is absorbed in the small details - the yellow dust, the half-open car window, the ubiquitous  numbered tent-cards. Why? Because, Marchant is telling us, that “is what the mind does” when faced with violence on such a persistent basis.

(You can read the full article text at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.)

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh, and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Today is celebrated as Earth Day, a day to be introspective and consider the state of the world we live in, and the world we leave to our children, and our children’s children. At the risk of being a little self-serving I’m going to  take a detour into The Republic of Dreams and talk about a character from Final Orbit, my seventh novel, and one which focuses heavily on environmental themes. That character is named Kashiana, in deference to one of my co-hosts, and she is a future astronaut and poet, looking down from an orbiting space station at the earth below, and commenting, in her own voice, on what she is seeing.

Only the first stanza appears in the book. The rest I added for the current theme of Wednesday Night Poetry (https://www.facebook.com/WednesdayNightPoetry) , Kai Coggin’s long-running invited guest and open mic series. If you have not had a chance to listen in, I recommend it highly.

The View from Above

I see tendrils of time creeping into reality,

Tongues of flame erasing the living things from the landscape

As a rampant red pen with searing strokes of deletion,

Or cruel fluid fingers drowning homes and habitats,

Removing a patina of life from the estuaries of the world,

As if our mother planet no longer desired her emerald adornments.

The brilliant snow capped mountains, and floating icefields

Have melted away to nothing, leaving lonely patterns

Of naked gray rock, and turbid gray waters,

Where no life lingers. Where nothing grows.

I am returning soon, to the great grayness below.

And as we humans cope as best we can,

With a world where wasteland replaces watershed,

Where wonders disappear daily,

We can only wonder why they did nothing for all those years,

Letting waste and greed rule their lives,

Letting opportunity slide through their fingers

Like the sands of the worlds beaches, now buried

Beneath the unstoppable onslaught

Of the gray waters that obey no laws,

Recognize no borders, and bow to no authority.

This is from Final Orbit, Not All Ghosts are Human, The Autobiography of Mario Ng

Available on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08R2FW42K).

Thank you for Listening. If you’re enjoying these commentaries, and the poem selections, please share them - either the text versions or the podcasts - on social media. You can find more at theotherpages.org, The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr, or at The Republic of Dreams (https://www.facebook.com/therepublicofdreams/)

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh, and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Today’s selection once again focuses on a poet I should have known about, but did not. Irish poet Voana Groarke was born in Mostrim (population 2,072) in the middle of the country. She received her degrees from Irish universities including Trinity College, Dublin, before coming to the U.S. to teach at Villanova and Wake Forest. She currently teaches at the University of Manchester in the UK. She has published six volumes of poetry, won several prizes and awards for her writing, and is also currently editor of the Poetry Ireland Review.

Today’s poem is simple, and yet not so simple. It’s a character study, perhaps in the vein of Longfellow’s famous blacksmith, about an Italian stone carver, who works on headstones for the local cemetery. It is a more thoughtful portrait however, far from one-dimensional, with an interplay of thought between the perfect figures he carves, intricate but lifeless, frozen in time, and life’s simple, but transient realities.

She begins with,

The day is hot. So far this morning

his hand has held true, not a stipple,

not a glitch unwarranted. Some days

his right hand contradicts what his left

(his holding, placid, steadfast left) requires.

He works in shade. A man of means has died

and the dying must be marked in marble

carved to trap not grief but its dramatized affect:

a mantilla so fine it weeps its lace; a boot so certain,

it folds the fact of death in every crease.

As he carves exactingly detailed portraits of others in stone, he thinks about his own family, and his own life. The observed details of life are simple, but very sensory in nature: The curl of his wife’s hair, the tilt of his daughter’s chin when singing, rabbit and peaches for dinner. His mind goes back and forth, methodically, between the two worlds he inhabits:

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