Shout-out to a Famous Friend

 I meant to do this during my April PAD posts, but I'm doing it now. I just want to bring to your attention Jane Hirshfield's splendid career retrospective collection of poems published last September, The Asking, from Knopf Press. Here's my Amazon review:

I have been a fan of Jane Hirshfield ever since hearing her read her poem "For What Binds Us" at the Dodge Poetry Festival twenty-some years ago. Until now she has resisted a "collected poems" volume, but finally decided it was time, and we are all the richer for it. This is a wonderful collection that spans a fifty-year career in poetry, from some of her very early work to thirty new pieces, with a generous sampling in-between of her eight previous books of poetry. Throughout these poems, her voice is clear: a passionate love for both humanity and nature, centered by her Zen training, a body of work that is stunningly beautiful with lyrical language and metaphor. In recent years she has become an even more impassioned advocate for Mother Earth, and the newer poems convey both a sense of alarm but also of hope, that things can still be all right if we only pay attention, listen, and act. Jane is truly a citizen of the world, an important voice, and one of our very best contemporary poets. Brava!

I have been friends with Jane since taking her workshop at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival in 2011. We've kept up email correspondence over the years, and I've seen her occasionally at poetry events. She has been a source of inspiration, encourgement and advice, and she is a patient, centered and compassionate person, a "good soul," as they say, not to mention a brilliant poet, translator and essayist. I'm blessed to know her. Here is one of the new poems from her collection:

TO BE A PERSON
by Jane Hirshfield

To be a person is an untenable proposition.

Odd of proportion,
upright,
unbalanced of body, feeling, and mind.

Two predator’s eyes
face forward,
yet seem always to be trying to look back.

Unhooved, untaloned fingers
seem to grasp mostly grief and pain.
To create, too often, mostly grief and pain.

Some take,
in witnessed suffering, pleasure.
Some make, of witnessed suffering, beauty.

On the other side —
a creature capable of blushing,
who chooses to spin until dizzy,
likes what is shiny,
demands to stay awake even when sleepy.

Learns what is basic, what acid,
what are stomata, nuclei, jokes,
which birds are flightless.
Learns to play four-handed piano.
To play, when it is needed, one-handed piano.

Hums. Feeds strays.
Says, “All together now, on three.”

To be a person may be possible then, after all.

Or the question may be considered still at least open —
an unused drawer, a pair of waiting workboots.

(From The Asking: New and Selected Poems, by Jane Hirshfield, Knopf Press, 2023. Used with permission of the author.)

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/715681/the-asking-by-jane-hirshfield/

PAD 2024: The Month in Review

 So another Poem-a-day Challenge is in the books, and it was quite a challenge this year because April was a pretty busy month for me personally. At times I lagged a little behind, but in the end I came up with 45 new poems. About half of them were free verse, but I also wrote two prose poems, three  sonnets (including an "American sonnet"), a hay(na)ku string, a limerick, a rhymed quatrain poem, a shadorma, a triolet, a "four-twenty" (a short form I created), a sijo, a tanka, a double senryu, and nine haiku (including a poem that was a series of ten one-line haiku, and an invented form called "area code haiku.")  Thanks again to Robert Lee Brewer and Maureen Thorson for their daily prompts, and to Rick Lupert for sharing prompts he solicited from other poets, including me. It was sometimes daunting to try to meld all three into one poem for the day, but that just meant writing more than one poem a day, which isn't a bad thing.

Here are ten of what I consider my best poems of the month:

Day 5:

Tell Us What You Thought of the Earthquake
 
A six-year old: It felt like I was dancing but my feet weren’t moving.
A science teacher: Cool!
A Californian: You call that an earthquake?
A cat: Who knocked those dishes off the shelves? That’s my job!

A dish: Owwww….
A bird: I think I saw some shivering below.
A worm: Wheeeeee!

A dog: WHAT'S HAPPENING? WHAT'S HAPPENING?
A high-rise building: I waved to the rest of the city.
A train: Ha-ha, they thought it was me.
A bridge: Uh-oh.
The earth: It was only a 4.8. You people better get off my plates
before I really get pissed off!

Day 12:

Mr. Larger-than-Life

Mr. Larger-than-Life caught a train 

with his bare hands
to return to his home town.
He watched the trees whiz by his window,
and grabbed a few,
like toilet brushes in his hands.
He thought about how kind he had been
to all the little people,
how he kept them in a shoebox
and fed and watered them regularly.
 
When he arrived at the station,
and put the train down,
he received a hero’s welcome.
They had a huge reception at the civic auditorium,
just big enough to accommodate his head.
Everyone wore red hats that said,
“I Want to Be Larger-than-Life.”
They gave him the key to the city
which he slipped into his pocket
next to his key to success
and several of the Florida Keys.
He gave a speech about how he built this city
with Legos when he was four,
and how the only way to be as big as him
was to be him.
 
Everyone swooned in his presence or fainted
or shouted until their throats were sore,
until that court case began,
the first of many to cut him down to size.

[Slightly revised since origibal post]

Day 13:

Petrichor

We’ve suffered for so many months under
This drought, the wracked ground cracked as from a quake,
Our crops unsprouted. So we welcome thunder,
Threat and promise, rolling in to shake
Our house. The lightning forking through the sky
Is frightening but welcome too. The rain,
A scatter of big drops, bombards the dry
And kicks up dust at first, but then our plain
Sends up a scent, a mix of salt and earth
And ozone from the air, a sign we’re freed
From thirst and famine. Soon we’ll see rebirth
Of plants and trees, of rivers, even weed.
This thunderstorm, no harbinger of doom,
quenched us instead and brought us sweet perfume.

Day 14:

Anaphoric One-Line Haiku on Mary Cassatt’s The Boating Party
 
blue as the river, choppy on a bright spring day—mind your hat, Madam
 
blue as the wide sash on the waist of the rower—father and husband?
 
blue as his beret, navy and like a sailor’s, as he pulls the oars
 
blue-gray as the dress of the mother awkwardly holding her baby
 
blue as the long socks with brown shoes on the baby who wants to get down
 
blue-white as the sail tacked into the western wind on the brisk river
 
blue as the bright sky on the far opposite bank, dotted with houses
 
blue not as the boat—bright yellow, freshly painted—with its matching oars
 
blue not as the pink suit on the child who gazes fondly at the man
 
blue not as Mom’s hat—white with yellow flowers which still has not blown off

Day 16:

To the First Emperor Penguin Chick to Jump off the Ice Cliff
 
These
legions of

fuzzy little butlers
 
march
resolutely to
the iceberg’s edge,
 
stand
and contemplate
whether to jump.
 
You,
brave leader,
slide right off
 
and
belly-flop
into the sea
 
from
fifty feet
above the surface.
 
Soon
dozens are

leaping, following suit,
 
happily
swimming off
into frigid ocean.
 
I
am afraid
of nearly everything.

Day 20:

The Birds and Bees Are Better Than Us: Three Haiku

praise the grizzly bear

with no tackle he swipes

salmon with one paw

collarless cat

rambles through our neighborhood

on no one's schedule

radar-eared deer

have a flair for vigilance

and hear what we don't

Day 22:

[poem removed] 

Day 24:

A Note from the Ph.D. You Never Got
 
[I]t’s a miracle to have a life. Any life at all.
                                                                —Ellen Bass, Indigo
 
Just wanted you to know I am alive and well,
mounted on the wall of a Rutgers professor
who heads the Psychology Department,
is widely published, and just went Emeritus.
 
I know sometimes you have regrets,
having dropped out after a year of grad school,
but it looks like you have done okay—
your writing, your government service,
a happy marriage, kids and grandkids.
 
Getting me would have taken maximum effort,
but maybe not for maximum return.
You should also know that if you went
down that path, you would have had
an affair in your 40s with a pretty young student
that would have ended your marriage, two sons
who never speak to you, and an accident
on Boylston Street in Boston that would have
left you walking with a cane.
 
And don’t think the Rutgers prof has no regrets—
but I’m not at liberty to discuss them.
 
So you don’t have me on your wall. Big deal.
Instead, there are pictures of your family
and your wife of fifty years.

Day 27:

To the Two Men Who Destroyed Ancient Rocks at Lake Mead
 
Bros, what made you think it was cool
to “trundle” those huge red sandstone rocks
that began to form in dinosaur times
one-hundred-forty million years ago?
You watch with glee as a young girl screams
and they explode to sand on the ground,
ancient marvels, reduced in seconds to dust.
What an example for your daughter,
watching you ruin nature’s antiquities.
Would you dynamite a glacier,
smash stalactites in a cavern with a hammer?
These are Mother Nature’s works of art,
chiseled and polished over eons,
long before you, allegedly, evolved.

Day 30:

The End of Argos’s Google Photo Gallery

The last name is Panoptes, which means “all-seeing,”
which applied to my one hundred eyes,
and my camera as well.
 
Here is Marvel’s The Hulk made entirely of Legos
appearing to push a toddler in a stroller.
 
Here are zookeepers tossing fish to harbor seals
for rolling over, waving their fins, and kissing.
 
Here, blowing bubbles with my grandson.
 
Here are huge flowers of blown glass,
and here is a car door growing from a garden.
 
Here are some Christmas trees.
 
Here is a fishing boat shaped like a shark,
and here is a shark shaped like a school bus.
 
Here is sunset on the Gulf of Mexico.
 
Here is an opossum on my son’s head.
 
Here is a bowl of Italian wedding soup.
 
Here is a white heifer, really a mistress of Zeus,
whom Hera asked me to guard.
 
And here is a shepherd who looks suspiciously
like Hermes, probably sent by Zeus.
His words are making me sleepy,
and he is the last thing my many eyes see.
 
Here is a selfie of Hermes with my head.